Line o' the Day
Title of Joel Achenbach's latest post:
Indeed. Achenbach goes on to ask, "The deeper philosophical question: Can a person sing so badly as to ruin the original? Or has "You Really Got Me Now" been slimed forever?" Affirmative.








































![]() Iran's President Ahmadinejad inspects a UFO shot down by his country's state-of-the-art air defense system. He later called the UFO, "some sort of 'March Madness' inspired by American imperialists." |



| There was another big anti-war rally today in Washington DC, and an anarchist website tipped its hand by announcing that they intended to vandalize the Vietnam War Memorial as part of the action, as they did earlier with the Capitol building. Free Republic responded by organizing a massive counter-protest of Vietnam vets and other patriotic volunteers in order to protect the memorial... |


| ...an assertion by White House officials to reporters that she had sent her husband on the trip, Plame said one of her colleagues broached the idea after a call in early 2002 from Vice President Cheney's office seeking information about Iraqi activity in Niger. Plame said she "wasn't overjoyed" at the suggestion because a trip would leave her alone with their 2-year-old twins. Still, she said, at the direction of her supervisor, she asked her husband whether he would come to CIA headquarters at suburban Langley, Va., to discuss the possible trip and sent a quick e-mail about the prospect to the chief of the agency's counterproliferation division, where she worked... "I did not suggest him," she said. "There was no nepotism involved. I didn't have the authority." |

| WAXMAN: I am stunned, Ms. Toensing, that you would come here with absolute conclusions that she was not a covert agent; the White House did not leak it; no one seemed to know in advance that she was a CIA agent. Do you know those facts for your own firsthand knowledge? TOENSING: Well, lets just take those one by one. As I said, I was there. I was the chief drafter for chairman -- WAXMAN: I'm not asking for your credentials. I'm asking how you reached those conclusions. Do you -- TOENSING: That's part of my credentials is because I know what the intent of the act was. WAXMAN: I'm not asking what the intent of the act was. TOENSING: Well that’s the question. WAXMAN: Do you know that she was not a covert agent? TOENSING: She is not a covert agent under the act. WAXMAN: Okay, so -- TOENSING: You can call anybody anything you want to in the halls of the CIA. WAXMAN: General Hayden! General Hayden, head of the CIA, told me personally that she was. If I said that she was a covert agent, it wouldn't be an incorrect statement? TOENSING: Does he want to swear that she was a covert agent under the act? WAXMAN: I'm trying to say as carefully as I can. He reviewed my statement, and my statement was that she was a covert agent. TOENSING: Well, he didn't say it was under the act. WAXMAN: Okay, so you're trying to define it exactly under the act. TOENSING: That's important. WAXMAN: No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not giving you -- I'm not yielding my time to you. |

| ...The self-proclaimed secularists represent only a small minority of Muslims. The views among religious Muslims from CAIR more closely reflect the views of the majority... |

| ...The secular Muslim agenda is promoted because these ideas reflect a Western vision for the future of Islam... |
| ...Since the Sept. 11 attacks, everyone from high-ranking officials in the Bush administration to the author Salman Rushdie has prescribed a preferred remedy for Islam: Reform the faith so it is imbued with Western values -- the privatization of religion, the flourishing of Western-style democracy -- and rulers who are secular, not religious, Muslims. The problem with this prescription is that it is divorced from reality... |

| ...I traveled to Florida to serve as the keynote speaker at an annual convention hosted by CAIR. On my way to the event, I spoke with Imam Siraj Wahaj, a charismatic intellectual... who has thousands of followers here and abroad... |

| ...the political future of the Arab world is likely to consist of Islamic parties that are far less tolerant of what has historically been the U.S. foreign policy agenda in the region and that domestically are far more committed to implementing sharia law in varying degrees... |

| ...the future of the Islamic world will be much more Islamic than Western... ...Instead of championing the loud voices of the secular minority who are capturing media attention with their conferences, manifestos and memoirs, the United States would be wise instead to pay more attention to the far less loquacious majority... |
| ...A government that turns its force against its own citizens, especially to impose an ideological doctrine on them, subordinates the rights of individuals to the demands of the State. This is statism—the elevation of the State over the individual, and the inversion of the very purpose of government. Statism is the greatest killer in history—dwarfing all attacks by criminals—precisely because it is motivated by some form of mystical political ideology. Because statists claim an authority that is above the rights of man—whether the Fuehrer’s master race, the communists’ dialectic, or the theocrat’s God—they do not recognize the principle of individual rights or the self-ownership of men on earth; rather, they claim the right to rule men, and to kill with impunity anyone who disobeys the ideology or regime. ...The Islamic Totalitarian movement has a... fire burning at its core—an authoritarian, state-centered religion, replete with state-funded educational indoctrination, a massive suicide cult on behalf of the deity and state, and hope for a final battle over the Americans. The key to extinguishing this fire, I submit—the sine qua non required to end the spiral of indoctrination, jihad, and suicidal attacks on the West—is to do what was done against Japan: to break the political power of the state religion. State Islam—Totalitarian Islam—rule by Islamic Law—must be obliterated... Bringing long-term peace to the world, said FDR, "involves the simple formula of placing the objective of this war in terms of an unconditional surrender. . . . Unconditional surrender means not the destruction of the . . . [enemy] populace, but does mean the destruction of a philosophy . . . which is based on the conquest and subjugation of other peoples." |
| From 2001-2002, Ms. Abdo was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. That year, Ms. Abdo also received a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. Ms. Abdo has also earned research grants from the Ford Foundation and the U.S. Institute of Peace. |