Links and Minifeatures 06 03 Saturday (late)

Woohoo! After several months of ups and downs but staying about where it was, traffic really took off set a new site record for visitors in May. 63,982 visits completely destroys the old record of about 48,500! 170,712 page views. I also had my single busiest day ever in May, with 3178 visits. Running totals: 383,153 visits, 1,217,295 page views since I started this thing last June 19th.



Thank you all for stopping by.

**********



Via TuCents comes this story about the California Supreme Court ruling that police can enter a residence without warrant to arrest a DUI. I'm a big advocate of transparency, but here I draw the line. This is too permissive of fishing expeditions. Let's say I come home from work on Friday afternoon and walk into my home. A police officer waiting sees me get out of my car and says he suspects I was driving under the influence. As some readers may be aware, I don't drink alcoholic beverages but that is irrelevant and unknown to said officer. I walk into my home, they having made absolutely no attempt to detain me prior to doing so, and now the whole property is fair game for a search. They also have the opportunity to plant whatever they want, evidencewise, although they can also do so on a search warrant. They have the opportunity to do so, and never mind that the original charge never worked out. Even if no criminal charges come out of it, what happens to your reputation in the community when the information is "accidentally" released that they discovered fifty or a hundred weapons, several gig of porn with a particular kink on your hard drive, drug paraphernalia, or any number of other legal things that are nonetheless less than savory by the standards of the community, tolerated when nobody knows or has their face rubbed in it, but grounds for ostracism from many people when the community finds out about it? When there is something going on outside the home, or reaching out to touch the rest of the world (as phone calls do), that much is fair game. Something within the home that touches no one else is not. The California Supreme Court has just handed law enforcement yet another ticket to attack normal citizens at will.



I have two words for our state Supreme Court: Rose Bird



**********



Well the Donkeys have told voters where they stand in no uncertain terms. Should they take office in November, all of their prospective committee chairs are from the liberal wing of the party. Admittedly, it's hard to find moderates in the House, but they had to work to find people this "progressive". To quote, "Only two of 20 earned grades of less than 90 percent on last year's voting records from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action interest group. Half had perfect scores of 100 from the ADA - or would have had it not been for missed votes." Dingell for Energy and Commerce. Rangel, or all the possible alternatives, who fought every rational step to get the budget under control, for Ways and Means, of all places. Miller (prospective Education and Workforce) I don't know much about despite him bieng a Californian, but the fact that he is a Californian, as socialist as our politics have become, is not a good omen. Conyers, a congenital idiot, who will believe anything any member of Greeenpeace, the ACLU, or the communist party tell him, for Judiciary. Yeah, sure the Donkeys don't intend to impeach the President as soon as the house is in session if they win. Now pull the other one. Conyers has been trying already, and they tag him with Judiciary. Alcee Hastings (prospective chair of intelligence) was convicted in 1989 and removed from a judgeship for fabricating evidence that secured his acquittal on other charges.



Not to mention Pelosi.



Actually, the Donkeys are neither progressive nor liberal in the classic sense. Their leadership has not modified their politics in forty years, no matter how convincing the evidence is to the rest of the world.



Okay, they've given any rational person all the evidence they should need to vote Elephant in the fall, however lacking the current crop is. (the representative for the district I live in, Filner, is a Donkey, and so is Feinstein, our senator whose term expires this year, so I get to both vote Elephant and turn the rascals out.)



Captain's Quarters has more committee assignments, including ******* Henry "Numbskull" Waxman, who coincidentally, I talked about just his morning as the idiot behind stopping the Partnerships for Long Term Care (second to last paragraph here, for a quick easy lesson in how to do something stupidly destructive through class warfare, and they want to give this clown the Government Reform Committee?)



**********



via Strata-Sphere, a four part Thomas Sowell column on mythology of liberals versus reality. Part I Part II Part III Part IV



**********



via Boxing Alcibiades, the best sign I've seen that the war on Islamism is winnable.



**********



Looks like a low life publisher has infringed Michael Yon's copyright.



**********



In case you missed it, Canada has arrested seventeen allged would-be terrorists. They planned a bomb using three tonnes of ammonium nitrate



Via Wizbang, they planned to target the Canadian CSIS Toronto office, among other targets.



LGF notes that the whining has already begun about how they were framed because of their ethnicity, are being abused, etcetera.



**********



Mudville Gazette has caught the press exaggerating what the military has said about the Haditha incident.



I have no idea and no qualifications to judge. For all the studying of military history I've done, I've never been in combat, never learned the rules of engagement that our military operates under, and have no experience to judge whether a violation has occurred. I will have to accept the verdict of whatever military investigations and trials there are. But it does seem plain to me that this has little in common with My Lai, or any number of other atrocities that have happened in war. At most, the response was beyond what such response should have been given the provocation, for which the commanders who failed to control the troops should quite properly be hit with the heaviest consequences in the book, if guilty. But it's not like it was planned, orchestrated, or even specifically ordered. People get a little emotional in a combat zone when their lives are on the line and their friends are killed. I understand this, even though I agree with the necessity for punishing it.



It also bears examining that the Iraqi relatives alleging the slaughter are refusing to allow the corpses to be disinterred for examination. Were this the United States, they would not be offered the opportunity of refusing. They are accusing these Marines of a felony level action, and refusing to cooperate in the gathering of evidence? Doesn't look good for the prosecution, whether it's downtown Houston or Haditha, the defense should make a strong point that it is his clients contention that this evidence which has been refused would clear them of wrongdoing.



Except, of course, that what those promoting the story are after trial by bad publicity of our civilian leadership, and those Marines are completely unimportant to them, excepting as how they are likely Bush supporters.



Two last questions: 1) Why are the same suspects whining about the treatment of the alleged terrorists not also whining about how these Marines are being treated? 2) Why are not the perpetrators of any number of atrocities on the other side not being brought to the same sort of justice?



LATER: Michelle Malkin notes some similarities between a photo the UK Times claims is of Haditha and a Newsweek photo that accompanied a report of terrorist executions. I'm still waiting upon the final resolution of the investigations and/or court martials, but this is starting to smell. Both badly and strongly.