From Power Line: 

In Afghanistan … yesterday, classes had to be canceled at a girls’ school after Taliban members on motorcycles accosted a group of students and teachers walking to school in Kandahar, and threw acid on their faces:

"They don’t want us go to school. They don’t like education," said Susan Ibrahimi, who started teaching at Mirwais Mena four months ago. She and her mother, also a teacher at the school, were wearing burqas on their walk to work when the motorbike stopped next to them.

"They didn’t say anything. They just stopped the motorbike and one of the guys threw acid on us and they went away," Ibrahimi said in a telephone interview. …

Fifteen people were hit with acid in all, including four teachers, Qaderi said.

This young girl was burned especially severely and has not yet been able to open her eyes:

 From DailyTech:

Rapid Rebound Brings Ice Back to Levels from the 1980s.

An abnormally cool Arctic is seeing dramatic changes to ice levels.  In sharp contrast to the rapid melting seen last year, the amount of global sea ice has rebounded sharply and is now growing rapidly. The total amount of ice, which set a record low value last year, grew in October at the fastest pace since record-keeping began in 1979.

 From Power Line:

In Afghanistan … yesterday, classes had to be canceled at a girls’ school after Taliban members on motorcycles accosted a group of students and teachers walking to school in Kandahar, and threw acid on their faces:

"They don’t want us go to school. They don’t like education," said Susan Ibrahimi, who started teaching at Mirwais Mena four months ago. She and her mother, also a teacher at the school, were wearing burqas on their walk to work when the motorbike stopped next to them.

"They didn’t say anything. They just stopped the motorbike and one of the guys threw acid on us and they went away," Ibrahimi said in a telephone interview. …

Fifteen people were hit with acid in all, including four teachers, Qaderi said.

 

This young girl was burned especially severely and has not yet been able to open her eyes:

 

 From Power Line:

More than any other cartoonist now working, I think, Michael Ramirez makes incisive points with his drawings. Like this one; click to enlarge:

It’s an excellent point: the real Bill Ayres scandal is not that he is pals with a guy who turned out to be President; it’s that he has had, over a period of years, a considerable influence on how children in Chicago have been educated. And that influence has been entirely pernicious. Ayers’ radical, racially separatist curriculum has been studied and has been found to be educationally worthless. In today’s liberal world, of course, that doesn’t put him out of business. On the contrary.

Bill Ayers happens to be famous, by virtue of his relationship with Barack Obama and the fact that some years ago, he bombed the United States Capitol and other landmarks. But how many other "educators" share Ayers’ perspective and values, but have never bombed anything and don’t happen to be friends with the President-elect? That number is huge. No one is tracking their influence on our youth, but isn’t it obvious that the influence of leftists in our public and private schools is both vast and malign?

 Here are some extracts from an article by Burt Prelutsky. Please read it all.

When I realized that Sen. Obama would soon be President Obama that the nightmare began. I truly felt overcome with grief, the kind you feel when a loved one dies. In this case, the loved one was America…

Looking back, I think the left-wing cancer took root in the 1960s and the funeral took place on November 4th. That’s why I’m having a really hard time putting up with people who are so darn jubilant about Obama’s victory. To me, it’s as if they’re dancing on America’s grave.

I know that a lot of people will regard me as a racist for being so depressed over the election result. I am probably the least racist person in America. As I’ve always said, people who hate others because of their race, religion or national origin, are just plain lazy. After all, once you get to really know people, there are always better reasons than that for despising them… 

Besides, it does no good to deny being a racist. Once you have to deny it, you’ve already been labeled. But I have to ask, if Hillary Clinton had been elected president and I had been upset about it, would I be branded a misogynist? The fact is, I would have been less upset if she had been elected. But that’s only because I only object to her politics and her voice. Her circle does not include the likes of Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Father Pfleger, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Louis Farrakhan and Rashid Khalidi. Aside from Hillary Clinton’s colleagues in the Senate, her only questionable associate is Bill…

One of my friends wondered how it could be that I wasn’t thrilled to see millions of black people, including Jesse Jackson and all of Kenya, in rapture over Obama’s victory. I told him it’s one thing for Obama to garner 96% of the black vote when he’s running against a Republican such as John McCain, but quite another when he got 91% of the vote in the primaries when he was running against a liberal such as Sen. Clinton. That, to me, reeks of racism, and I see no reason to celebrate it.

I went on to say that it often seems to me that it’s only conservatives who ever took to heart Martin Luther King’s fervent wish that we all learn to judge our fellow men by their character and not by the color of their skin.

I concluded by telling him that he had every reason to be ecstatic that a man who shared his politics was elected, but that Obama’s color shouldn’t enter into it, and that if I and many like me were disgruntled about the election, it had nothing to do with Obama’s pigmentation, everything to do with his character and his leftist agenda. We elected a president, after all, the leader of the free world, not a prom king.

If there is one bright spot in all this, it’s that I won’t have to spend the next four years listening to John McCain begin every sentence with “My friends.” The sad truth is, I pick my friends far more wisely than we pick our candidates or, for that matter, our presidents.

 Michelle Malkin writes that Paulson ‘doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing’. Here’s part of her article (read the whole thing): 

Members of Congress who let themselves be bullied into switching their votes on the bailout should be experiencing the biggest case of buyers’ remorse in U.S. history. They fell for what Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek called "the fatal conceit" – the disastrous idea that a federal bureaucrat has the knowledge to do a better job than the private market in organizing and directing an economy. They gave unchecked power to a single government official without a clue…

Wielding his enormous authority, Paulson is desperately throwing our money at banks in a futile attempt to convince them to lend. Instead, those banks are either hoarding the cash or acquiring more assets. In other words: Paulson is helping the banks that were "too big to fail" grow even bigger with taxpayer backing. Swell.

The White House says: "We’ll just trust our treasury secretary to implement the program." President Bush insists "government’s role will be limited and temporary." Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Barney Frank is shrugging off the lack of bailout disclosure by both the Federal Reserve and Treasury. But as I reminded readers before this latest bait-and-switch admission, Hank Paulson is not to be trusted. I repeat:

This is the man who proclaimed the subprime crisis "largely contained" in April 2007; "near the bottom" in May 2007; and "largely contained" again in August 2007. This is the man who pledged that he had "no interest in bailing out lenders or property speculators" in October 2007 and couldn’t "think of any situation where the backdrop of the global economy was as healthy as it is today."

This is the man who patted himself on the back for refusing to "put taxpayer money on the line" to rescue Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15 – and then turned around the next day and engineered the $85 billion taxpayer-funded bailout of AIG. This is the man who vowed he had "no plans to insert money" into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – and then turned around and committed $200 billion in capital and credit lines to those corrupt, bloated, crumbling institutions.

This is the man who declared that "the worst is likely to be behind us" in May 2008.

Emperor Paulson’s bipartisan courtiers in Congress berated anyone who dared challenge his wisdom. Minority Leader John Boehner sniffed: "This is no time for ideological purity." Well, ideological pollution begat this mess. It’s time for a fiscal-conservative counterinsurgency to disrobe and disarm the charlatans before they do more harm.

 Reuters Canada reports:

 The United States views Russian threats to place tactical missiles in the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad as provocative and misguided, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Thursday.

Russia made the move in response to U.S. plans for a missile defense system in Europe, which Moscow sees as a threat to its security. Washington says the system is needed against missile strikes from what it terms rogue states, notably Iran.

Gates, speaking after a NATO meeting with Ukraine, said the Russian threats were "hardly the welcome a new American administration deserved," referring to the fact they were made immediately after Barack Obama won the presidential election.

"Such provocative remarks are unnecessary and misguided," Gates told a news conference in the Estonian capital Tallinn.

At the same time, Washington would continue to seek a constructive and positive relationship with Russia, he said.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told French daily newspaper Le Figaro, in an interview published on Thursday, that Moscow could cancel its deployment of the Iskander missiles if Obama scrapped plans for the missile defense system.

"I don’t think that is a credible offer," Gates said, adding that Washington had put forward detailed proposals to Russia for partnering in missile defense.

"Quite frankly I am not clear what the missiles would be for in Kaliningrad. After all the only real emerging threat on Russia’s periphery is Iran and I don’t think the Iskander missile has the range to get there from Kaliningrad," he said.

"So, this is an issue apparently between ourselves and the Russians. Why they would threaten to point missiles at European nations seems quite puzzling to me," he added.

Could it possibly have something to do with these considerations?:

The actual ruler of Russia now is not President Medvedev, nor an elected parliament, but KGB man Vladimir Putin.

Putin longs to restore a Russian empire by bringing former Soviet territories back into Russian control.   

He therefore regards America, which under the presidency of George Bush planned to extend the protection of NATO to some of those territories, as the enemy of Russia.

He sees ignorance, naivete, conflict-phobia, indecisiveness and – in a word – weakness in President-Elect Obama, and plans to exploit that weakness.

 Footnote: We find it interesting that the Russians are calling their missile ‘Iskander’. It is the Arabic version of Alexander.

 Original as always, P.J.O’Rourke excoriates conservatives who failed conservatism. Here’s part of what he writes.  Read it all here.

In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people’s business: abortion. Democracy–be it howsoever conservative–is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it’s rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don’t know if I’m one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we’re in favor of living. We consider people–with a few obvious exceptions–to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal–and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so–then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public’s blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers’ money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.

Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It’s called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven’t done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

When the Monica Lewinsky news broke, my wife set me straight about the issue. "Here," she said, "is the most powerful man in the world. And everyone hates his wife. What’s the matter with Sharon Stone? Instead, he’s hitting on an emotionally disturbed intern barely out of her teens." But our horn rims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton that we couldn’t see how really detestable he was. If we had stayed our hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning or calls for interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased him out of the White House. (Although this probably would have required a U.S. news media from a parallel universe.)

Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.

… and how would it serve Hamas to lie?

David Hornik writes at PajamasMedia: 

In an interview published Tuesday in the London-based Al-Hayat, Dr. Ahmad Yousef, political adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, said senior Hamas figures had held a secret meeting with advisers to Barack Obama in Gaza before the U.S. elections.

Throughout his campaign Obama’s official line was that he would “only talk with Hamas if it renounces terrorism, recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and agrees to abide by past agreements.”

Yet Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal responded to Obama’s win on an optimistic note, telling Australia’s Sky News on Saturday that his organization was “ready for dialogue with President Obama and with the new American administration with an open mind.”

On Saturday night, though, Obama’s senior foreign policy coordinator Denis McDonough seemed to hold the fort, deflecting Mashaal’s amiability by reiterating Obama’s three-part formula for making Hamas acceptable.

For those who don’t want America to have dealings with an Islamist terror organization like Hamas, that may have sounded reassuring. But now it seems it may be too soon to feel reassured.

According to Yousef in the Al-Hayat interview, the Obama-Hamas talks were already ongoing during the U.S. election campaign: “We were in contact with a number of Obama’s aides through the Internet, and later met with some of them in Gaza, but they advised us not to reveal this information as it may influence the elections or become manipulated by McCain’s campaign.”

Yousef also claimed he personally had friendly relations with some of Obama’s advisers and that “Haniyeh will draft a congratulatory letter to Obama for his victory.”

Yousef added: “The policy Obama will instate in the Middle East will differ from that of his predecessor George W. Bush, although it is clear that the region and the Palestinian issue will not be at the top of his agenda. [Obama] will focus more on the economic crisis, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”

A clash between Obama’s public, anodyne, mainstream statements and behind-the-scenes activities of a different nature would confirm the fears of those concerned about Obama’s history of association with radical people and ideologies.

 Jonathan Weil writes at  Bloomberg-com:

It’s hard to believe Barack Obama would even think of calling this change.

Take a good look at some of the 17 people our nation’s president-elect chose last week for his Transition Economic Advisory Board. And then try saying with a straight face that these are the leaders who should be advising him on how to navigate through the worst financial crisis in modern history.

First, there’s former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Not only was he chairman of Citigroup Inc.’s executive committee when the bank pushed bogus analyst research, helped Enron Corp. cook its books, and got caught baking its own. He was a director from 2000 to 2006 at Ford Motor Co., which also committed accounting fouls and now is begging Uncle Sam for Citigroup- style bailout cash.

Two other Citigroup directors received spots on the Obama board: Xerox Corp. Chief Executive Officer Anne Mulcahy and Time Warner Inc. ChairmanRichard Parsons. Xerox and Time Warner got pinched years ago by the Securities and Exchange Commission for accounting frauds that occurred while Mulcahy and Parsons held lesser executive posts at their respective companies.

Mulcahy and Parsons also once were directors at Fannie Mae when that company was breaking accounting rules. So was another member of Obama’s new economic board, former Commerce Secretary William Daley. He’s now a member of the executive committee at JPMorgan Chase & Co., which, like Citigroup, is among the nine large banks that just got $125 billion of Treasury’s bailout budget.

There’s More

Obama’s economic crew might as well be called the Bailout Bunch. Another slot went to former White House economic adviser Laura Tyson. She’s been a director for about a decade at Morgan Stanley, which in 2004 got slapped foraccounting violations by the SEC and a month ago got $10 billion from Treasury.

That’s not all. There’s Penny Pritzker, the Obama campaign’s national finance chairwoman. She was on the board of the holding company for subprime lender Superior Bank FSB. The Chicago-area thrift, in which her family held a 50 percent stake, was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in 2001. The thrift’s owners agreed to pay the government $460 million over 15 years to help cover the FDIC’s losses.

Even some of the brighter lights on Obama’s board, like Warren Buffett and former SEC Chairman William Donaldson, come with asterisks. Buffett was on the audit committee of Coca-Cola Co.’s board when the SEC found the soft-drink maker had misled investors about its earnings. Donaldson was on the audit committee from 1998 to 2001 at a provider of free e-mail services called Mail.com Inc. Just before he left the SEC, in 2005, the agency disciplined the company over accounting violations that had occurred on his watch.

So, by my tally, almost half the people on Obama’s economic advisory board have held fiduciary positions at companies that, to one degree or another, either fried their financial statements, helped send the world into an economic tailspin, or both.

There’s still more. We recommend that you read the whole thing.