Horrible and gripping story of extreme child neglect, leavened by a bit of optimism, as a generous and brave couple adopts the "feral child" and, hopefully, restores her to humanity.

I'll quote the whole beginning as a teaser for the rest of it.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:06 PM | Comments (50)
Post contains 865 words, total size 5 kb.

He seems to be ok. The car, not so much.

It's a thin line sometimes. Glad he walked away from that one.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 12:11 PM | Comments (11)
Post contains 36 words, total size 1 kb.

The media was right, this guy is the greatest strategic thinker of our age.

BAGHDAD -- Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr -- long a thorn in the side of the U.S. military and Iraqi government -- intends to disarm his once-dominant Mahdi Army militia and remake it as a social-services organization.

The transformation would represent a significant turnabout for a group that, as recently as earlier this year, was seen as one of the most destabilizing anti-American forces in Iraq. For much of the past several years, the Mahdi Army, headed by Mr. Sadr, a Shiite cleric, controlled sizable chunks of Baghdad and other cities. Its brand of pro-Shiite activism had the side effect of pitting Iraqis against each other, helping to stir worries of civil war.

...The Mahdi Army's makeover is at least partly a reaction to the loss of popular support. Previously, many Iraqis blamed the U.S. and the Iraqi government for fighting that erupted with the militia, but in the most recent battles that began in March, many residents turned against the militia because they were fed up with its criminal and violent activities, including kidnapping and smuggling.

As the saying goes, read the whole thing.

Yes Sadr has played possum before but always after getting his ass kicked and always from an increasingly weakened position than he started from.

And yes there's concern about 5,000 diehards training in Iran to come back and wreak havoc or that his 'social service' projects could lead to a Hezbollah like group but these are problems that may or may not materialize in the future. Whether or not they do depends largely on the ability of the central government to deliver on its basic responsibilities. If it does, the likelihood of Sadr being anything but a political figure will be greatly reduced.

This has always been a chicken or the egg type problem, the militias won't go away until the central government takes over but it couldn't take over until the militias were dealt with. Well, Sadr went first and now al-Maliki has his chance.

It seems to me this is exactly what we've been working towards.

Posted by: DrewM at 11:55 AM | Comments (17)
Post contains 370 words, total size 2 kb.

Obama and his partisans seem to be determined to lose the race.

Obama has consistently played the race card when it suited his current political needs. As is often the case, a spurious claim of racism is made to stop all debate on a legitimate issue or to halt a legitimate inquiry. The tactic has a long and bad pedigree. O.J. Simpson's lawyers postulated a 50+ man conspiracy by the White Man, hatched within minutes of the discovery of a murder, to frame the innocent Simpson because he was black. Al Sharpton responded to a delinquent tax charge -- he owed $1.5 million in unpaid taxes, interest, and penalties -- by suggesting the White Man just wanted to keep him down:

"Whatever retaliation they do on me, we never stop," [Sharpton] told the AP. "I think that that is why they try to intimidate us."

And of course Obama attempted, mostly successfully, to stop further debate about his close association with the incorrigible racist and paranoid Jeremiah Wright by wrapping himself in the flag of racial grievance. His supposed call for a Great National Dialogue on Race was of course nothing of the sort. He wanted to end the Great National Dialogue that was just beginning -- and hurting him politically -- by claiming, essentially, that "everyone (who's black) does it" and the White Man had no business asking questions about such matters.

He further maligned the Clintons by claiming, almost always through his political surrogates and media allies, that just about every attack on him was rooted in racism. Hillary's 3 am ad? A stealth appeal to racist sentiment by featuring a little white girl in bed (and you know what that means). Hillary's charge that Obama hadn't done anything in his political career except give a 2002 speech? A racist claim playing on... not really sure, but definitely racist. Somehow. Hillary's claim that Obama was inexperienced? Of course she was pulling a page from the old book of racial stereotypes that when black men mount very successful campaigns for the office of President of the United States, they do so too early in their careers.

The KKK is always on about that last one. Why, it's like reading a Faulkner novel. I can almost smell the scent of magnolias and miscegenation in the sweaty air. It's so classic.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:49 PM | Comments (159)
Post contains 1290 words, total size 8 kb.

Ed Morrissey jokes that San Francisco residents might soon have to beware the garbage police.

Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residentsÂ’ trash to make sure pizza crusts arenÂ’t mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

And if residents or businesses donÂ’t separate the coffee grounds from the newspapers, they would face fines of up to $1,000 and eventually could have their garbage service stopped.

The plan to require proper sorting of refuse would be the nationÂ’s first mandatory recycling and composting law. It would direct garbage collectors to inspect the trash to make sure it is put into the right blue, black or green bin, according to a draft of the legislation prepared by the cityÂ’s Department of the Environment.

The proposal could be voted on by the city supervisors in the next month. Official enforcement will be by means of escalating fines for improperly sorted trash. Landlords concerned that they will be fined for the trash habits of their tenants were given this unhelpful response from San Francisco's Environment Department Director: "We won't enforce against owners of apartment buildings if their tenants don't do this." Very responsive, wasn't it.

This reminds me of the drama involved in garbage collection in Japan:

Enter the garbage guardians, the army of hawk-eyed volunteers across Japan who comb offending bags for, say, a telltale gas bill, then nudge the owner onto the right path.

One of the most tenacious around here is Mitsuharu Taniyama, 60, the owner of a small insurance business who drives around his ward every morning and evening, looking for missorted trash. He leaves notices at collection sites: "Mr. So-and-so, your practice of sorting out garbage is wrong. Please correct it."

"I checked inside bags and took especially lousy ones back to the owners' front doors," Mr. Taniyama said.

He stopped in front of one messy location where five bags were scattered about, and crows had picked out orange peels from one.

"This is a typical example of bad garbage," Mr. Taniyama said, with disgust. "The problem at this location is that there is no community leader. If there is no strong leader, there is chaos."

Go read the whole thing to really get the flavor of how crazy about garbage people can get. I imagine clear garbage bags will quickly be made mandatory in San Francisco, just as they were following Japan's green conversion.

More: Doubleplusundead writes that the UK is having similar trash issues.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:22 AM | Comments (44)
Post contains 435 words, total size 3 kb.

Actually pretty funny for once, but then again, look at the monster premise the Democrats served him up.

Via Hot Air, also linking Slate's assertion that "skinny" (as in "Obama is skinny") is also now a racial code word for "black."

Posted by: Ace at 11:16 AM | Comments (17)
Post contains 53 words, total size 1 kb.

From the "dog trainer" (h/t to Patterico for the nickname)

The most interesting part of the article? When this woman, who's smart enough to, REALLY TRULY ACTUALLY, "split atoms...WITH HER MIND!", wanted to get more involved in global jihad, the bigwigs in the organization told her to get barefoot & pregnant so that she could start squeezing out little jihadists.

Am I the only one getting a mental picture of Ms. "I Wanna Kill Infidels" sitting down for a meeting with Osama bin Lumbergh and the al-Bobs?

"Uhmmmmm, yeahhhhhh. Ms. Siddiqui? Uhmmmmm, we're gonna need you to get pregnant as soon as you can, ummmmmkay? Would Saturday work for you? And uhmmmmm yeahhhh, we're also gonna need you to stop going to MIT. That's Man-Work, woman."

What's the word I'm looking for here: an over-educated woman uses her education to help a seventh-century religious movement where the male partners despise her because of that education, and the word that best describes this would be........oh, I don't know....IRONY?

Say what you will about the "decadent West", but at least we can harness the abilities of our womenfolk. When a celeb like Jessica Alba wants to go entertain the troops, does our military tell her to "start having kids so that we'll have some new recruits for the 2026 incoming class? Does our political system tell entertainers like Carrie Underwood and Shania Twain to get back under their burkhas? Do we tell adult industry stars like Jenna Haze or Jenna Jameson to stop doing DVDAs that do so much to entertain the troops & get right with God so that they can start preaching the gospel?

No sir, we look those lovely ladies right in the eye and say "Gimme your best shot, baby." That's why we're winning the war. Because we refuse to keep our lights under a bushel basket.

That, and the fact that we're fighting seventh-century douchebags who think that riding donkeys makes them "mechanized infantry".

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 10:04 AM | Comments (23)
Post contains 339 words, total size 2 kb.

My mother never actually told me if you can't say anything nice about a person, don't say anything but I gather a lot of moms gave that advice, so I'll follow it in this case.

Am I the only one who is amazed that the Republican party has nominated someone who is proud to say things like "We're worse off than we were 4 years ago" and boasts of having "taken on big tobacco, drug companies" while promising to "reform Wall Street and battle big oil"?

If I had read those parts of the script to you, would you have guessed it was the Democratic or Republican nominee? But hey, I guess independents and Democrats will eat it up and that's where he thinks he's going to win. Again, it just makes it easier to laugh as I throw out McCain 08 and RNC fundraising solicitations.

I understand Republicans aren't popular this year and there was going to be some distancing from the last few years, I just wish the distancing had been in a conservative direction. As for McCain, I give him the honor of not ascribing political expediency to these positions, I think no matter the political climate he believes these things. That's the problem.

As I mentioned in a comment thread yesterday, I really hate Obama. The more he talks and the more McCain talks about him, the more I support McCain. Unfortunately, the more McCain talks about himself, the more I can't stand the guy.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:06 AM | Comments (95)
Post contains 259 words, total size 2 kb.

You live by the sword, you die by the sword:

“I am not a racist,” Clinton said Monday in a testy interview with ABC News in Monrovia, Liberia, in response to a question that wasn’t quite related to that subject. "I've never made a racist comment, and I never attacked [Obama] personally." [...]

But regardless of the real meaning of Clinton’s words, and of Clinton’s long relationship with African-Americans, this is the rift between the Clinton and Obama camps that still cuts the deepest, and the one that may have the severest consequences for Obama’s White House bid. When John McCain’s campaign manager last week accused Obama of playing the “race card,” the Clintons or their supporters could have provided a powerful rebuttal. Instead they were silent, and in private, some even quietly cheered.

The depth of the anger in ClintonÂ’s circle became clear Friday, when McCainÂ’s chief strategist compared his candidate to Bill Clinton, and the Clintons seemed to accept the analogy.

"Say whatever you want about Bill Clinton, but it's deeply unfair to suggest his criticism of Obama was race-based,” McCain adviser Steve Schmidt told Politico, after his campaign blasted Obama for suggesting the McCain campaign would use his race against him. “We knew it was coming in our direction because they did it against a president of the United States of their own party.”

I don't believe for a minute that the Clinton campaign and especially Clinton surrogates and supporters didn't have Obama's skin color foremost in their thoughts when her numbers started slipping after Iowa. Democrats, especially Clinton supporters, would like to pretend that both candidates ran a clean primary, but there's no way the phrases "shuck and jive" and "do the spadework" would have come up in a contest between two white candidates. That's not accidental.

So Obama can be forgiven, a little, for anticipating racist attacks. When he said "TheyÂ’re going to try to make you afraid. TheyÂ’re going to try to make you afraid of me. HeÂ’s young and inexperienced and heÂ’s got a funny name. And did I mention heÂ’s black?" he should have been talking about the Clinton campaign. That's exactly what she did.

If Obama loses in November, many Democrats are going to blame racism. They need to blame that primary, because Obama and Clinton are still fighting it.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:00 AM | Comments (19)
Post contains 399 words, total size 3 kb.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:02 AM | Comments (16)
Post contains 8 words, total size 1 kb.