The professor that went over the line with Jeff at PW....

raises the white flag (kinda):

"I wrote some inflammatory comments at a blog by a guy named Jeff Goldstein called protein wisdom that infuriated many bloggers and commenters. Many of these bloggers emailed my boss at the University of Arizona to tell on me.

In hindsight, the things I wrote were over the line of nastiness. I apologize to Mr. Goldstein.
I have resigned from the University of Arizona so there is no need for other enraged people to write to administrators there. I am a temporary worker there and I am in Oregon for the summer.

Some blogs have posted comments that I perceive to be physically threatening. I have contacted the FBI and the Pajamas Media staff to determine how to proceed with this aspect of this unbelievable experience.

My intention in this post is to de-escalate the situation. The comments that started this all were nasty, not threatening. But I feel very threatened by the response.

Jeff - I lost my job. You won. Could you call off the troops?

UPDATE: I have been receiving emails alluding to the fact that I got fired. I was not fired. I resigned. I was not pressured to resign. I just sent my boss an email explaining what was happening and told him I thought it was best for all involved if I resigned.
Protein Wisdom has been down since this all started so it is not possible to see all the comments and everything that led up to this. People are posting snippets of what I posted that have been embellished with references to french kissing and other things I didn't say.

When and if protein wisdom comes on line again, it will be hard to tell what Jeff added or deleted to the transcript.

I have been trying to get in touch with Pajamas Media to discuss some of my concerns about what has been published at Black Five about this issue. I feel threatened by some of the comments there.

If someone at pajamas media or better yet, froggy from Black Five, could email me, that would be great."

Just to remind you of some of her comments to Jeff:

"You aren’t “human” to me."
***
" Ooh. Two year old boy. Sounds hot. You live in Colorado, I see. Hope no one Jon-Benets your baby."

The whole thing is strange and mean. Jeff's site has been attacked an is still offline.

Btw, Jeff would never delete or alter the transcript.

Also, this is all very interesting, but I would appreciate it if you guys would not leave comments at her site or e-mail her or the University. Enough is enough.

via The Cotillion e-mail

An Open Letter To Congressman Murtha

From
Kurt G. Gunnery Sergeant, USMC, Retired

Excellent.

(links are rocking today!)

Good Grief!

I missed the NYT's article while I was gone describing Rumsfeld and Cheney's vacation home and the location of his security cameras. After reading about that and more revelations regarding the NYT's articles on SWIFT and NSA programs, I can say without a doubt in my mind that the powers that be at the NYTs do not want us to win this war and they specifically published information to make winning more difficult and they published information to help terrorist target Rumsfield and Cheney. I know this sounds extreme, but how else can one explain this?

" * Exposed the NSA's warrantless Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP), which secretly scrutinized international telephone conversations in which Islamofascists called into or out of the U.S." "The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission," then-CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 2, referring to the Times's December 16 TSP story. "I use the words 'very severe' intentionally. And I think the evidence will show that." The Times's revelations, Goss testified, left intelligence sources "no longer viable or usable, or less effective by a large degree."

Concerning Swift:

"..the Times cannot hide behind the fact that the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times also published this story on June 23. The Times pursued SWIFT for weeks before any other news outlet had heard about SWIFT. As a lengthy Journal editorial explained last Friday, Treasury officials concluded The Times would spurn their pleas not to publish. So, the day before the story broke, they offered The Times several declassified talking points about SWIFT because, as Assistant Secretary Fratto put it, "They had 80 percent of the story, but they had about 30 percent of it wrong."

Concerning Rumfield and Cheney:

"* While it seemingly involved no classified information, the Times again displayed its contempt for public safety in a recent article on the summer homes of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Both men are obvious terror targets. Nevertheless, this story provided driving directions to these two men's vacation getaways in rural Maryland. The Times identified the relevant highways, streets, and even turning instructions to these properties. Also named were several stores where Mrs. Rumsfeld shops. The article includes a photo of the Rumsfelds' home and, shockingly, pinpoints a well-concealed security camera on the premises.

What did this article accomplish but the endangerment of these two top officials? If the Times did not act with actual malice, it certainly exhibited a reckless disregard for Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their loved ones. To imagine what Islamic extremists could do with this particular Times dispatch, look no further than militant Muslim Mir Aimal Kasi's January 1993 fatal shooting of two intelligence officers at the driveway of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia."

This boggles the mind. It is one thing to have a leftist agenda, but to undermine our national security on a regular basis and target our Vice President and Sec. of Defense in such an obvious way is.....beyond anything anyone can justify as freedom of the press.

Sickening.

That is the only word to describe this. As the article says, if you have subscription to the Times you should cancel it. If you advertise in it, stop doing so. It is time to shut this anti-American monstrosity down. Freedom is one thing, helping the terrorists is something else entirely and cannot be justified.

via Cormac

The Palestinian and Israeli Conflict.

Bridget Johnson, a columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News and blogger at GOP Vixen just hits the nail on the head in this piece.

While it's just so touching that Hamas, Fatah, and various other delinquents have turned their attention from shooting each other in the streets to presenting a unified front against their Zionist aggressors, it's even more heartening to see the terrorist coalition get stared down by a column of tanks. Because enough is enough.

To many, though, Israel setting one tank tread in Gaza is naked aggression worth a thousand mind-numbing U.N. Security Council meetings. And it's not just the usual "die Zionist" protests throughout the Middle East. Try writing a pro-Israel column sometime, and watch the nasty mail pour in from all types, ranging from arrogant intellectuals to housewives on CNN overload to people claiming anti-Semitism is overblown and so is Hamas's terror resume.

To put it differently, way too many people view Israel as satanic oppressors of the Palestinians, and way too few give a damn about the men, women, and children shot into mass graves under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

They're usually the same people who think the murderer Tookie Williams should be canonized for writing kids' books, who would have Mumia Abu-Jamal to their dinner party, and who are protesting an invasion of Iran before it's even a twinkle in a general's eye. They may be the ones who get giddy at news of the Haditha murder investigations or other blows to the U.S. military, who think Hugo Chavez is a misunderstood genius, or who called in sick to work and lay in bed depressed the day Karl Rove didn't get indicted.

A giant chunk of logic is lost on these folks: cause and effect. As in, Palestinians using hostage to try to extort outrageous demands from Israel has the effect of Israel taking the means necessary to get their man back. The Palestinians pulling such a stunt does not cause the Israelis to roll over.

Excellent. Read the whole thing.

h/t-Cormac

America's First War On Terror.

Excellent!

via BigDog

Feed the children or save the planet?

So to speak.

"Two years ago, a Danish environmentalist called Bjorn Lomborg had an idea. We all want to make the world a better place but, given finite resources, we should look for the most cost-effective ways of doing so. He persuaded a bunch of economists, including three Nobel laureates, to draw up a list of priorities. They found that efforts to fight malnutrition and disease would save many lives at modest expense, whereas fighting global warming would cost a colossal amount and yield distant and uncertain rewards."

In June our own John Bolton, America's ambassador to the United Nations, "sat down with UN diplomats from seven other countries, including China and India but no Europeans, to rank 40 ways of tackling ten global crises. The problems addressed were climate change, communicable diseases, war, education, financial instability, governance, malnutrition, migration, clean water and trade barriers.

Given a notional $50 billion, how would the ambassadors spend it to make the world a better place? Their conclusions were strikingly similar to the Copenhagen Consensus. After hearing presentations from experts on each problem, they drew up a list of priorities. The top four were basic health care, better water and sanitation, more schools and better nutrition for children. Averting climate change came last."

In other words, Bolton was not only right, but even the United Nations agreed. Al Gore, as usual, is wrong.

via BigDog

Why Europe Doesn't Get Us.

BigDog sent me some excellent links. This is one of them from The American Thinker.

It lays out in a readable fashion why we are so different from Europe. It focuses on one major difference-The death penalty. I was surprised to learn this:

"Polls in the US reveal that national support for the death penalty remains consistently high at around 70%, a view confirmed by a May Gallup Poll. The poll highlighted cross-party priorities on a number of key moral policy issues with the strongest agreement between the parties coming on the use of the death penalty. Republicans (82%) and Democrats (63%) concur on the "moral acceptability" of its use. Not a finding that Europeans might expect from a nation it often sees as the "fifty-fifty (Left v Right) nation."

I had no idea the majority of Democrats supported the death penalty.

Now, I am against the death penalty, but for purely religious reasons. From a democratic viewpoint I understand why it is legal and why people desire it. The article describes how European countries came to end the death penalty:

"There is barely a country in Europe where the death penalty was abolished in response to public opinion rather than in spite of it."

In other words, we keep the death penalty because "the people" demand that we do. We are a nation that responds to the wants of the people, a representative government. Whereas European leaders have a tendency to ignore the will of the people and pass their own politically correct laws.

But if anything illustrates the difference between us and our European friends, it is this:

"The EU technocrats responsible for drafting the EU Constitution specifically have made a point of obfuscating the formative role of its Judeo-Christian worldview in the development of West civilizationtion and values. But where the EU has chosen the path of historic amnesia and writing off remembrance of its formative Judeo-Christian heritage in its (thus far discredited) constitution, the American founding fathers chose to write the "remembrance" into theirs."

It doesn't get any nastier than this....

Good Grief! (keep in mind, this is a professor writing to Jeff)

I can't get the archive link, so just scroll down to "More from the tolerant left."

You will not believe it.

via Ace

Bush, no surprises.

The Anchoress has this EXCELLENT summary of Bush sticking to what he believes.

Here is an excerpt:

President Bush has never surprised me, and that is probably why I have never felt let down or “betrayed” by him. He is, in essentials, precisely who he has ever been. He did not surprise me when he managed, in August of 2001, to find a morally workable solution in the matter of Embryonic Stem Cells. He did not surprise me when, a month later, he stood on a pile of rubble and lifted a broken city from its knees. When my FDNY friends told me of the enormous consolation and strength he brought to his meetings with grieving families, I was not surprised. When the World Series opened in New York City and the President was invited to throw the first pitch, there was no surprise in his throwing (while wearing body armor) a perfect strike.

He did not surprise me when he spoke eloquently from the National Cathedral, or again before the Joint Houses of Congress, when he laid out the Bush Doctrine. He did not surprise me when he did it again at West Point, or when he went visionary at Whitehall (Lauri points out the video can be found at this link. It’s worth watching!)

There were no surprises in President Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan to battle AlQaeda. There were no surprises when he went after an Iraq which everyone believed had WMD, an Iraq that had tried to assassinate an American President, an Iraq whose NYC consul did not lower its flag to half-mast after 9/11.

Actually, there was one surprise. He did surprise me by going back to the UN, and back to the UN, in that mythical “rush to war” we heard so much about. But then again, the effort in Iraq was never as “unilateral” as it had been painted.

President Bush did not surprise me when, faced with the scorn of “the world community” and those ever-ready A.N.S.W.E.R. marches which sprang up condemning him and Tony Blair, he stood firm. A lesser man, a mere politician, would have folded under such enormous pressure. I was not surprised when Bush did not. (Aside - it’s funny how they just can’t get a good-sized crowd together for those protests these days, innit? Everything about Iraq was “wrong” and everything about Iraq is “failure and quagmire” and yet, somehow, we all breathe a sigh of relief that the job is done, that Saddam is out of power and that Iraq, save a very small piece of troubled land, is - in remarkably short order (and despite the wild pronouncements of John Murtha) - tasting its first morsels of democracy and liberty, and showing promise.)

It never surprised me that Yassar Arafat, formerly the “most welcomed” foreign “Head of State” in the Clinton White House was not welcomed - ever - to the Bush White House.
I wasn’t surprised by the, not one, but two tax cuts he got passed through congress, or the roaring economy - and jobs - those tax cuts created. I wasn’t surprised when he killed the unending farce that is the Kyoto treaty (remember, the thing Al Gore and the Senate unanimously voted down under Clinton?), or when he killed U.S. involvement in the International Criminal Court, or when he told the UN they risked becoming irrelevent, or when he told the Congress and the world, “America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.” Not surprising.

Read the whole thing. Great stuff.

via Iowa Voice

Lieberman vs. Lamont

Hot Air has the video. There is no doubt that Joe is the better man.

Newsweek has an article on it. MSNBC has a reaction from the Kossacks, and an MSNBC article here. This will be an interesting race to watch. We will see if Kos can back a winner EVER. He has put a lot into this one.

via Iowa Voice

The Moronic Tourist.

It doesn't get much more idiotic than this.

The War, Reporting, and Media Bias.

click here to see Pat Dollard, the ex-Hollywood Producer turned independent journalist who went into Iraq at his own expense, on Hannity and Colmes. Dollard spent 7 months shooting video while embedded with our combat troops. He is home and Michael Yon says he is telling the same truth as Michael Yon did being embedded with our troops as well, but Dollard has video.

The more I read from the actual troops via milblogs and the reporters who go into Iraq without an agenda, the more I realize how biased and unAmerican our media in general can be.

via Michael Yon (who truly rocks)

Check out Pundit Review Radio.

One of my favorite bloggers, Patrick Frey at Patterico's Pontifications, is on Pundit Review Radio discussing the New York and Los Angeles Times disclosing successful counter terrorism programs and highly classified national security secrets on their front pages.

Excellent. Check it out here.

Tin Foil Hats...

....for the discriminating lunatic. Heh.

via boing boing

Immigration.

The White House has this:

Today, President Bush Visited A Dunkin' Donuts Store To Highlight The Basic Pilot Program And The Need For Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Dunkin' Brands Inc. recently announced it will require all of its franchise's to participate in the Basic Pilot program, which helps employers verify employment eligibility. Dunkin' Brands voluntarily signed up for the program because of the difficulty employers face when trying to screen the work eligibility of new hires.

The Basic Pilot Program Is Helping Businesses Comply With The Law. Basic Pilot is a voluntary, online verification system that allows employers to confirm the eligibility of new hires by checking the personal information they provide against Federal databases.

Here are the objectives of the White House on immigration reform:

The five objectives of comprehensive immigration reform are securing our borders, creating a temporary worker program, making it easier for employers to verify employment eligibility and continuing to hold them to account for the legal status of workers they hire, dealing with the millions of illegal immigrants who are already here, and honoring the great American tradition of the melting pot.

No matter how much conservatives howl and complain on this one, Bush is right. Attacking the problem, not the Mexican people, is the way to go. I just returned from Mexico and once again I was so deeply impressed with their work ethic. Harder working people you will not find anywhere. I don't know about the beaucratic nightmare it takes to come here legally, but there should be a way to make it easier for Mexicans who just want work.

The objectives laid out by Bush help enforce the laws already on the books and he is starting to look at real solutions to the actual border problem. Many conservatives seem to believe we can just kick these people out. All 12 million of them. That is an impossibility and we just have to accept that. We need to deal with what we have now in a kind and reasonable way. The guest worker program might drive you crazy because they came here illegally, but it is the best solution given the circumstances. We will know who is here and they will be here legally then. This will not work, obviously, if we cannot get control of our borders at the same time though. So as much attention should be given to that.

If you read the White House site you will see the things that Bush has done that hasn't been reported on much, such as a criminal crackdown on those who knowingly hire illegal aliens, a tamper proof identification card, and a increase of 41.7 million for worksite enforcement.

Disagree all you wish with Bush on this, but it won't get our party where we need to be, back in the White House in '08 and still the majority. Turning our backs on people who desperately need work and, frankly, whose work we need, is not what I want from my party.

Bush is right on this and we should all be doing what we can to help him, not hinder him.

Cindy Sheehan goes on a hunger strike.

Check out this interview that actually asks some hard questions of Sheehan.

I'm Back!

Well, we went to Playa Del Carmen Mexico and stayed at a beach resort to celebrate my in-laws 50th wedding anniversary. All 27 of us! I cannot express in words what a wonderful time we all had. The resort was beautiful and made Mimi and Pops feel special all the way. The DVD we made turned out PERFECT. We watched it on a big screen in the bar the first night. It was like watching all our lives in pictures. A big family is a blessed and wonderful thing.

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July! I will be posting some vacation pictures when I get to it.