This deserves the widest possible audience:

From NRO:

The British are feeling the pinch in relation to recent bombings and have raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved." Soon though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross." Londoners have not been "A Bit Cross" since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorised from "Tiresome" to a "Bloody Nuisance." The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance" warning level was during the great fire of 1666.

Also, the French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from "Run" to "Hide". The only two higher levels in France are "Surrender" and "Collaborate." The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France's white flag factory, effectively paralysing the country's military capability.

It's not only the English and French that are on a heightened level of alert. Italy has increased the alert level from "shout loudly and excitedly" to "elaborate military posturing". Two more levels remain, "ineffective combat operations" and "change sides".

The Germans also increased their alert state from "disdainful arrogance" to "dress in uniform and sing marching songs". They also have two higher levels: "invade a neighbour" and "lose".

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual and the only threat they worry about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.

Crude Oil futures fall again:

From Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - OPEC's own oil price fell below $50 a barrel for the first time since the start of June on Thursday, touching a level that may trigger calls from some producers for the cartel to cut output.

The value of OPEC's basket of crudes fell to $49.73 a barrel on Wednesday, the group said on Thursday, down from $50.01 the previous day.

A mild northern hemisphere autumn has wiped a fifth off the cost of oil since late August when hurricane damage to the U.S. industry sent prices to record highs.

Look for this to continue to depress crude future at the Merc.

Iraq torture:

St. Andrew the Sactimonious scolds his lessors about virtue:

"The alleged mistreatment of detainees and the inhumane conditions at an Iraqi Ministry of Interior detention facility is very serious, and totally unacceptable," - from the U.S. commanders who have uncovered torture by the Iraqi army. We led by example, didn't we?

We lead by example? Why on earth are you holding the Iraqi army to the same standards as the US Army? It's their country that's being overrun with villains from Iran and Syria. Moreover, how is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld responsiblity for this? Is he the commander of the Iraqi Army? How does that chain of command work?

What bothers me the most about "advocacy journalist" like Andrew and his ilk is that they come off of secular high priests. They're always scolding public officials and demanding that they adhere to a higher moral standard than is practicable in the real world. But like the priestly caste in the Middle Ages, they are not really responsible for anything. They don't have to deal with "the insurgency". Or garbage collection. Or school reconstruction. Or anything else. It is almost as if they believe their job description is "moral conscience" of humanity.

The reality of warfare is simple: shoot the bad guys before they shoot you. And if you "capture" a non-uniformed "insurgent", then the Geneva Convention allows you to summarily execute them. That's what we did with non-uniformed German nationals acting as sabateurs in The Second German War. That what the Iraqis can see fit to do now, Andrew's priestly mewing not withstanding.

Crude Oil Futures fall again

From Bloomberg:

Crude oil for December fell 28 cents, or 0.5 percent, to $56.70 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 12:31 p.m. London time, the lowest price since July 21. Brent crude for January fell 19 cents, or 0.3 percent, to $54.99 on London's ICE Futures exchange.

I may revise my target prices down if they continue to fall at this rate. When I do, you'll be the second to know.

Jordan explodes: the resignations

How come this didn't happen after 9/11:

Eleven top Jordanian officials, including the kingdom's national security adviser, resigned Tuesday in the wake of last week's triple hotel bombings, state-run TV announced. Also, a fourth American died from wounds suffered in the attacks, a U.S. Embassy official said.

Jordan also introduced strict security measures aimed at foreigners and said it was drafting the country's first anti-terror specific legislation to prevent more such attacks.

King Abdullah II appointed Marouf al-Bakhit, Amman's ambassador to Israel, to replace outgoing security chief Saad Kheir, a former head of Jordan's intelligence department.

No details were given for the resignation of Kheir and 10 others, including prominent religious advisers to Abdullah, but a limited shake-up had been expected.

The moves came as more details emerged about the 35-year-old Iraqi woman who failed in her bid to blow herself up in an Amman hotel, with friends saying she had three brothers killed by U.S. forces.

George Tenet should have been shit canned right then, along with about half the CIA management.

Oil prices: supply,demand and price gouging

For those new to this space, I'm a capitalist. I run a small consultancy / boutique software shop that caters to retailers. This is what I essentially do: I buy and sell money.

That's it. Nothing fancy. Arcane, perhaps. But not complicated.

Merchants want instant payment for what they sell. Instead of having a credit plan that they would have to administer, they hire me. I buy their accounts receivable at a discount. I then sell it to VISA or Mastercard. I keep what's left over. If my rates are too high, the merchant goes bye-bye.

And somebody else does the same, only for less money.

And that's the way supply and demand works.

Which brings me to the recent spate of "pricing gouging" by the big oil companies. Sure they posted record profits, but that is to be expected given abnomral circumstances. For my money, the most eloquent bard of supply and demand is Dr. Thomas Sowell. Dig this beautifully concise riff on socialist Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and her ilk:

When hurricanes knocked out both oil drilling sites and refineries around the Gulf of Mexico, there was suddenly less supply of oil. That meant higher prices and higher profits.

What do higher prices do? Force people to restrain their own purchases more so than usual. What do higher profits do? Cause more money to be invested in producing whatever is earning higher profits, and this in turn expands output. Isn't a larger supply of oil and a reduced consumption of it what we want?

Whenever there have been sharp rises in gasoline prices, whether nationwide or locally in California, Senator Barbara Boxer has loudly demanded an investigation of the oil companies. These repeated investigations over the years have repeatedly failed to turn up anything other than supply and demand.

The real irony is that it has been precisely liberals like Barbara Boxer who have been the chief obstacles to increasing the supply of oil because they are dead set against drilling for oil in more places and against building more refineries.

When you refuse to let supply rise to meet rising demand, why should you be surprised -- much less outraged -- when prices rise?

Yet there was Senator Boxer on nationwide TV, decrying the high salaries of oil company executives, who are making perhaps half of what a number of baseball players make or a tenth of what movie stars make. The insinuation is that their salaries and oil company profits are what drive up gasoline prices. But there were no hard facts to back up either insinuation.

Given the enormous sums of money involved in the production of oil, even if all the oil company CEOs worked for nothing, there is no hard evidence that this would be enough to reduce the price of gasoline by even one cent per gallon. As for oil company profits -- representing "greed," as the Barbara Boxers call it -- these profits per gallon of gas are much less than federal taxes per gallon of gas. But the government is never called "greedy" by liberals.

Dig that last line: but the government is never called "greedy" by liberals. Classic.

John Edwards in a Gooberhead

A thorough Fisking by Tod Lindberg of the Washington Times:

"I was wrong," wrote John Edwards in The Washington Post Sunday, repudiating his vote to authorize military action against the Saddam Hussein regime in September 2002. Well, yes, he was wrong. Then, a prudent political calculation for a Democrat with national political aspirations was to support the Bush administration's effort to get Saddam to disarm or take his regime down by force. Now, the prudent calculation to maintain your viability within the late-2005 Democratic Party is to run as far away from your unfortunate 2002 vote as possible -- by presenting yourself as yet another victim of the supposed deception foisted on the American people.

"Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told -- and what many of us believed and argued [!] -- was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003... The argument for going to war with Iraq was based on intelligence that we now know was inaccurate."

OK, Mr. Edwards, let's pursue your argument: How do we know this? We know this for one reason and one reason only, the only way it was knowable: because we invaded Iraq. We took down the Saddam government, arrested and detained as many senior Iraqi officials and weapons scientists as we could find, questioned them thoroughly, scoured the country for biological and chemical weapons supplies, and found evidence of programs variously abandoned or discontinued or on hold.

While I enjoy Edwards the Goober getting hammered in public by somebody who clearly knows how to do it, I'm still not ready to concede the "no WMD" argument. I mean really, what do you call two tonnes of enriched uranium in the hands of genocidal megalomaniac like Saddam Hussein? I call it a weapon of mass destruction on the hoof. All one needs to do is build a bomb around it. If you already have the uranium, the rest is relatively easy. One could probably buy uranium-less bomb casing off-the-shelf from our good ole buddy A.Q. Khan, your home town nuclear bomb dealer over Pakistan.

G-d, I can't wait to see Saddam toe-tagged. That will end a lot of our troubles there.

Crude Oil Futures under $58.00

From Bloomberg:

Crude oil for December delivery fell 9 cents to $57.60 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 2:31 p.m. London time, after falling as low as $57.18. Last week it dropped to $56.93, the lowest since July 21. Brent crude for December earlier today tumbled as much as 73 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $54 on the ICE Futures exchange, the lowest price since June 15.

Zarqawi backs GOP call to unveil war-ending plan

Scott Ott at Scrappleface has all the details.

Jordan explodes: nice bookends

These grafs, lifted from Dennis Prager and Khaled Duzdar serve as near perfect bookends to the aftermath of the Amman, Jordan bombings. First, Mr. Duzdar, speaking from a position of authority as the Palestinian co-director of the strategic affairs unit at the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information in Jerusalem, begins to rally Muslims against these killers:

Last week's suicide attacks against innocent civilians in Amman shocked us all. It is unclear what message the suicide bombers were conveying and there is no logical cause justifying such insane acts. What could the aim of such attacks be, and what were the mad executioners aiming to achieve? For some time, they have claimed they are defenders and combatants of Islam and the Muslim world. However, Islam has no use for such people and their acts and ideologies - if we believe they have any ideology at all. They promote nothing more than killing and aim only to bring about a state of lawlessness and instability in the Middle East.

The targets are no longer just the West, its ideologies and other foreign cultures; no longer only imperialism and American global domination. The targets are now Muslims themselves, Arabs and Palestinians - not to mention Iraqis. These actions represent killing for the sake of killing and destruction for the sake of destruction.

When actions target innocent civilians - regular people celebrating the wedding of their children and friends - what are the aims and targets of such suicide actions? It is now more obvious than ever that whoever was responsible for the attacks against civilians in other parts of the Arab world, let's say a few months ago the hotels at Sharm al-Sheikh, was also responsible for the attacks in Amman. All these attacks serve only one purpose: to undermine security and stability in the region.

Muslims, the countries and Arab states now face a crucial challenge. There should be no excuse for neglecting and denying the dangerous reach of the carriers of a new and mad disease of violence. For that, serious actions should be undertaken to exterminate this spreading disease from our Muslim societies and from Islam itself. Muslims and Arabs should not only have better condemned the terrorist acts carried out everywhere around the world, but also should move to isolate the destructive, invented beliefs promoted by a group of insane people and carried out in the name of defending Islam.

Now is the time for us Muslims and Arabs to take over this responsibility. All Muslim and Arabs should unify in one mission, which is to fight the mad ideologies defended by those who have separated themselves from what Islam has really brought to the world and what Islam really wants to promote. Their acts only cause severe damage to Islam and Muslims. The false messages they are presenting in the name of Islam have resulted in a global misunderstanding about real Islamic belief. The evil belief of these mad people has sentenced Islam and Muslims to be tainted as evildoers, terrorists, savages and people with no mercy.

As a Palestinian, I also accuse such bombers of damaging our cause and destroying our struggle for freedom. They can't be allowed to take our cause as an excuse for their evil and insane beliefs. No matter where they are acting - in Baghdad or New York, in Istanbul or Paris, in Madrid or Amman, in Cairo or London, in Beirut or Jerusalem - their acts only do us harm; especially at a time when we Palestinians are searching for international support to bring to life to a Palestinian state.

Our condolences are not just for the four senior Palestinians killed in the last suicide attack in Amman; not just for the people we knew or for the families of the innocents whose only crime was attending the weddings of loved ones. Our condolences are for Islam and for what Islam should really represent. Our condolences are for ourselves, who have fallen into the mud of madness.

Second, Mr. Prager posits that it is only after Islamic fascists attack Arab Muslim civilians that the Arab world is outraged. These same killers are always given a pass when they attack Jews, Americans or practically anybody else. And while the recognition is welcome, it is also way overdue and point to what is at best a double standard, but at worst overt bigotry on the part of Muslim and Arab countries and culture.

Jordanians are shocked that Islamic terrorists would blow up families, including families celebrating a wedding. They are so shocked that for the first time in history, Muslims have taken to publicly demonstrating against Islamic terror.

And why are they shocked? Because the terrorists blew up Jordanians. As long as Islamic terrorists blew up men, women and children who are Jewish, Christian, Hindu, American, Australian and black Sudanese, the Arab and larger Muslim worlds were not particularly disturbed. In fact, Palestinians, who comprise the majority of Jordan's population, celebrated when Jews were blown up at Passover seders and at weddings. And they took to the streets and cheered in the Palestinian fashion, handing out candy, when Americans were incinerated in office buildings.

For some reason, Palestinians, most other Arabs and many Muslims around the world thought that the credulity-straining evil of targeting the most innocent for death, paralysis, blindness and brain damage would be confined to non-Arabs and non-Muslims. In fact, the idea that this Palestinian-made cancer would target Arab Muslims is so inconceivable to most Arabs that many now believe the terror attack in Amman was orchestrated by Jews (the Israeli Mossad)....

Now there is widespread condemnation of Zarqawi's terror in Jordan. There is even a fear that the name of Islam will suffer. Unfortunately, however, it is only because Zarqawi was foolish enough to massacre Jordanian civilians, and not confine his massacres to Iraqis and non-Arabs. What has aroused Arab voices against Zarqawi has nothing to do with the immorality of blowing up people celebrating at a wedding -- it has to do with the immorality of blowing up Muslims celebrating at a wedding.

Mark Steyn is a genius: Part 2

From today's Telegraph:

Three years ago -December 2002 - I was asked to take part in a symposium on Europe and began with the observation: "I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark."

At the time, this was taken as confirmation of my descent into insanity. I can't see why. Compare, for example, the Iraqi and the European constitutions: which would you say reflected a shrewder grasp of the realities on the ground?

Or take last week's attacks in Jordan by a quartet of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's finest suicide bombers. The day after the carnage, Jordanians took to the streets in their thousands to shout "Death to Zarqawi!" and "Burn in hell, Zarqawi!" King Abdullah denounced terrorism as "sick" and called for a "global fight" against it. "These people are insane," he said of the husband-and-wife couple dispatched to blow up a wedding reception.

For purposes of comparison, consider the Madrid bombing from March last year. The day after that, Spaniards also took to the streets, for their feebly tasteful vigil. Instead of righteous anger, they were "united in sorrow" - i.e. enervated in passivity. Instead of wishing death on the perpetrators, the preferred slogan was "Basta!" - "Enough!" - which was directed less at the killers than at Aznar and Bush. Instead of a leader who calls for a "global fight", they elected a government pledged to withdraw from any meaningful role in the global fight.

My point in that symposium was a simple one: whatever their problems, most Islamic countries have the advantage of beginning any evolution into free states from the starting point of relative societal cohesion. By contrast, most European nations face the trickier task of trying to hold on to their freedom at a time of increasing societal incoherence.

Bush Lied: the meme dies

From Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit:

I think the "Bush lied us into war" meme is in trouble, and the GOP pushback seems to be a general effort, not a one-off. And I also think that the reason that so many antiwar people want to move from discussion of whether specific behavior is unpatriotic, to the strawman question of whether any criticism of the war is unpatriotic (note Schieffer's question -- "Do you believe it is unpatriotic to criticize the Iraq policy?" -- and how it differs from what Bush actually said) is because they know they're on weak ground on the specifics.

The evidence he sites if Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) riffing on Bob Scheiffer on CBS's Face the Nation:

SCHIEFFER: President Bush accused his critics of rewriting history last week.

Sen. McCAIN: Yeah.

SCHIEFFER: And in--he said in doing so, the criticisms they were making of his war policy was endangering our troops in Iraq. Do you believe it is unpatriotic to criticize the Iraq policy?

Sen. McCAIN: No, I think it's a very legitimate aspect of American life to criticize and to disagree and to debate. But I want to say I think it's a lie to say that the president lied to the American people. I sat on the Robb-Silverman Commission. I saw many, many analysts that came before that committee. I asked every one of them--I said, `Did--were you ever pressured politically or any other way to change your analysis of the situation as you saw?' Every one of them said no.

What interesting here is that we are starting to fight back and we are start to win the day. And while Mr. McCain's response to the question may be construed as political posturing (he is running for president after all), I think he sick of the nearly mechanical drumbeat of "Bush Lied". The White House, which can be so brilliant at times, has been completely AWOL in this fight. Look for others to take up the slack as they see it in their interest to do so. A wounded White House does no good to a Republican running for President.

Bush Lied: the meme dies

The Wall Street Journal published a lo-o-o-ong piece by Norman Podhoretz essentially dismantling the Bush Lied argument. The lead:

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Prediction. The meme dies except amongst those on the wacky Left who live in a thermos bottle of their own making.

Jordan explodes: Suspect caught -- waterboarding to follow

B. Austin Higgins over at A Certain Slant of Light hammers Andrew Sullivan and his ilk over the treatment of "detainees"

Now then, and lest the delicate sensibilities of Andrew Sullivan be ruffled, we must pray that this woman is not "waterboarded" or subjected to any other interrogation techniques that might elicit from her important information on al-Qaida and its plans for additional suicide bombings. Better that civilian non-combatants at wedding receptions be blown to smithereens than that the CIA or U.S. military resort to any form of interrogation technique other than booking her into a posh lakeside resort suite, giving her three squares a day via the room service menu, and asking her kindly that she tell all, while assuring her that if she does she'll get an 8 1/2 x 11 inch autographed glossy of Martha Stewart.

Personally, if they are unlawful enemy combatants -- as terrorists certainly are -- then treat them the way FDR did the eight Nazi spies caught during the Second German War: hang 'em.

Iraq and WMDs: John Edwards lies like a lawyer

It comes as no surprise to regular Davespeakers that I really don't like former Sen. John Edwards (D-xNC). He's plaintive's attorney and exactly the wrong sort of person to send either to the Senate or to The White House. But get this from today's Washington Post:

Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told -- and what many of us believed and argued -- was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.

Iraq did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction? As has been show in this space, he most certainly did -- 2 tonnes of enriched uranium counts as a WMD.

He's either a willfully ignorant goober or a lying trial lawyer. Take your pick.

And thank G-d he's not the president.

Iraq and WMDs: what prominent Democrats said

Here's a handy list. Some Winners:

"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years."
— Floor statement of Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Oct. 10, 2002.

"I consider the prospect of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein who can threaten not only his neighbors, but the stability of the region and the world, a very serious threat to the United States."
— Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York at a Jan. 22, 2003, press conference.

"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."
— From an address by Al Gore to the Commonwealth Club of California, Sept. 23, 2002.

Jordan explodes: the lady sings

Apparently, the story of the husband and wife homicide bomber team was true. And she has spoken to Jordanian television. From the AP:

An Iraqi woman confessed on state television Sunday to trying to detonate explosives strapped around her waist while she was in one of three Amman hotels bombed by al-Qaida in Iraq.

"My husband wore an (explosives-packed) belt and put one on me. He taught me how to use it," said Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, 35, who appeared on television wearing a white head scarf, black gown and the disabled bomb belt tied around her waist.

Jordanian security forces on Sunday arrested the woman, whose husband is suspected of blowing up the Radisson SAS hotel, after being tipped off by an al-Qaida claim that a husband-and-wife team participated in Wednesday's attacks at three hotels that killed 57 other people.

Looking nervous and wringing her hands, al-Rishawi described the attack on the Radisson. The Grand Hyatt and Days Inn hotels also were bombed.

"My husband detonated (his bomb) and I tried to explode my belt but it wouldn't," she said. "People fled running and I left running with them."

Her husband, Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari, 35, was identified Sunday as one of three Iraqi men who carried out the bombings.

Jordan explodes: the fourth bomber in custody

There were various reports yesterday that the homicide bombings in Jordan featured a husband and wife team. Al Jazeera reports:

[Marwan] Moasher [of the Jordanian Government] identified the woman as Sajida Mubarak al-Rishai and said she was the sister of a key aide to al-Qaida's Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a fugitive Jordanian who is Iraq's most wanted man.

He said she failed to blow up her explosives charge in the hotel ballroom where a wedding reception was in full swing.

"Her husband asked her to leave the wedding party. Once she did he detonated himself successfully," Moasher added.

He showed pictures of the explosives belt worn by the woman, which he said show "the metal balls that were also attached to the belt so that they can inflict the largest number of casualties".

He said she was the sister of al-Zarqawi's "amir" in the western Iraqi province of al-Anbar who was killed in Falluja.

Even Debka is reporting essentially the same thing:

A woman who failed to blow herself up in Wednesday's triple suicide bombing in Amman is now in custody, Jordan's King Abdullah said on Sunday.

"I just heard from our intelligence services that there is a fourth bomber, a woman, who failed to blow herself up and she's in custody," he told a group of media editors attending a forum in Amman.

Deputy Prime Minister Marwan al-Muasher said the woman, who failed to blow herself up, was the wife of one of the attackers and the sister of a lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Muasher named the three dead men as 23-year-olds Safar Mohammed Ali and Rawad Jasim Mohammed Abid and Ali Hussein al-Shimeri, who was born in 1970 and so probably aged 25. Shimeri's wife is the same age, he said, naming her as Sajida al-Rishawi, the sister of Samir Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi. Rishawi, he said, was one of Zarqawi's lieutenants and was killed at Falluja, in western Iraq.

Al Qaida and the Queen

Okay, now that they're sounding like Lyndon LaRouche, will the American Left start taking al Qaida seriously. From the Times of London:

AL-QAEDA has threatened the Queen by naming her as “one of the severest enemies of Islam” in a video message to justify the July bombings in London.

The warning has been passed by MI5 to the Queen’s protection team after it obtained the unexpurgated version of a video issued by Al-Qaeda after the 7/7 attacks. Parts of it were broadcast on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite channel.

In the video, Ayman al- Zawahiri, second-in-command to Osama Bin Laden, targets the Queen as ultimately responsible for Britain’s “crusader laws” and denounces her as an enemy of Muslims.