Hewitt on Metrics for Journalists
Hewitt on Metrics for Journalists
| * OUTSIDER. Bush is an alien inside the Beltway. His election was the equivalent of getting a green card to work in Washington. He's not part of the social whirl. Nor has he made many close friends on Capitol Hill or around town. What separates him from the Washington crowd? More than anything else, it's religion... It's not a part-time, Sunday-only thing. Leave Washington and you frequently encounter people who say of the president, "He's one of us." You don't hear that in Washington. A Texas friend recently sent the president a copy of Natan Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy. Bush read most of it and asked Sharansky to meet with him at the White House. Bush praised Sharansky for his years as a dissident in the Soviet Union. To which Sharansky replied, "Now you are the chief dissident of the world."
* PRESS-BASHER. Bush has not made peace with the press, far from it. He views most reporters as political opponents eager to pepper him with gotcha questions. In Colombia last month, he appeared before reporters with President Alvaro Uribe. Bush didn't like the first question about a scuffle two days earlier involving the Secret Service. "This is a question?" he said, and gave a curt answer. Uribe said, "Do you want to get in one more [question]?" Bush said, "That's plenty. No. Thank you," ending the press conference prematurely... |
| 7/24/2004
Warmup: 30 minutes biking 1) Three sets of Hindu pushups 2) Three sets of diamond (close-grip) pushups - super-set by moving to knees when exhausted 3) Three sets of pullups 4) Five sets of curls using chin-up bar - basically, a very short form a of a chin concentrating only on biceps |
| 12/06/2004
Warmup: 20 minutes biking 1) 125 Hindu squats 2) Set of 16-18 dive-bomber pushups, then set of 10-12 3) Set of 20-24 elevated pushups (feet on exerball, hands on floor with 1-second pause at bottom), then set of 15-18 4) Four sets of Michigan dips (brief pause at bottom and top) 5) Three sets of lat pulldowns 6) Four sets of hammer curls |
That small detail is the Iranian purchase of "huge amounts" of a metal used in the construction of nuclear weapons: Watchdog ‘bowed to pressure from Iran’ on bomb materials.
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When the history of the Republic is written, it is my opinion that Donald Rumsfeld will have his name listed with the greatest cabinet members ever involved with coordinating our national defense; in a list including Henry L. Stimson and Elihu Root.
| BILL O'REILLY: ...I think the American people are very worried about Iran, don't you?
DONALD RUMSFELD: I do, I ... BILL O'REILLY: I think the American people are very worried about Iran. They're harboring Al Qaeda, as you've pointed out. They're developing nuclear as you pointed out. Now we find out they got long-range missiles, I mean, the Israelis can't like that. DONALD RUMSFELD: That's true. BILL O'REILLY: So, what are the odds of us having to confront these people militarily? DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, [SIGHS] I guess that's, those are calls for the President to, or for the, or for other leaders of other countries to make. BILL O'REILLY: But we can't let a North Korea develop in Iran, can we? DONALD RUMSFELD: Uh ... BILL O'REILLY: Where they got nuclear weapons, we can't let that happen. DONALD RUMSFELD: The um, the Iranians are making a lot of mistakes, let me just put it that way. BILL O'REILLY: All right. DONALD RUMSFELD: And they're notably unhelpful in Afghanistan and they're notably unhelpful in Iraq. BILL O'REILLY: I'm going to take that as a, we can't let another North Korea develop in Iran. DONALD RUMSFELD: I generally say roughly what I think. And I said they are being unhelpful... |
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| Slavery... is alive and well in the Islamic world. This report comes from Sandro Magister in Chiesa:
"Sudan’s first saint, Iosephina Bakhita, was canonized by John Paul II in the year 2000. From an early age she was made a slave, sold and resold at the El Obeid and Khartoum markets. She was fortunate to have ended up in Italy. It was in 1890 that she was finally freed and baptized. "Yet today, more than a century later, there are still slaves found between the Sahara and the Nile. What’s more, it is slavery having its basis in Islam, inheritor of the trade which for centuries has forcibly sent 11-14 million Africans from the sub-Sahara region to Arab and Muslim countries. "Little is studied or said about the trade, the opposite being true of slave trade directed toward the Americas. The last general assembly of the African Catholic bishops conferences took place in Dakar in October 2003, where a session was dedicated to the issue, being introduced by statements such as the following: "'Analyses of this issue have been prohibited at length. One cause of the paralysis of this historical conscience has been the attitude of many intellectuals and Muslim rulers regarding the trans-Saharan trade. For reasons of religious sensitivity they don’t want to properly admit to Arab and Islamic responsibility in this drama, whose evil effects still continue. Today in the Arab world the word ‘black’ simply means ‘slave.’ The tracks of the trans-Saharan trade have formed geographic roads leading to Maghreb and the Middle East.' ... |
| To kill a girl because she has sex is quite sickening, especially when the guy is deemed as only giving into the girl’s "seductions."
It’s even worse when the person who chooses to kill the girl is her father, brother or uncle. I guess it reminds me of the passage in the Bible where Jesus rescues the woman who is about to be stoned and says "he who is without sin cast the first stone." When a family learns that the girl has threatened their "honor" in the community, they discuss this without the girl’s presence, even with the mother, and they just "know" that the girl has to be killed in order to regain their standing in the community—even though the community may not know about the relationship. It’s not even a choice, but a duty. The mother knows this is the fate for her daughter, and even agrees to it, sometimes choosing the manner in which she will die…perhaps being burned alive, her throat cut, stoned or clubbed to death. The family leaves the house, and the person who is chosen to kill her comes in and does it as the family is away so there are no witnesses. The whole community knows of the killing and accepts the family into the community with open arms because they have wiped their slate clean with the blood of their child. Today I was visiting the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and my roommate, we’ll call here Sally, went with me because she had to meet with the same professor as I. She started crying in the taxi on the way back home telling me about her experience the other night with her Jordanian boyfriend, we’ll call him Malik... |
Yossef Bodansky told the Jerusalem Post yesterday that a massive WMD attack is 'inevitable.' (Hat tip: PDM.)
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It is these ambitions that reveal the mullahs' intentions. Iran is not simply another democratic state like Britain, France or Israel. Iran is a sponsor of terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Hezbollah, and it does not govern with the consent of the people. The Iranian mullahs' claim to legitimacy is simply raw power. A nuclear weapon would give them even greater power, but not any more moral legitimacy. It is therefore reasonable to wonder what they would do with this new power. The simple answer is that they would feel protected behind a nuclear umbrella even as they shelter and support terrorist networks. But to what end? Either from the outset or somewhere down the road, Iranian mullahs will find that their nuclear-backed state has some global influence. The authoritarian regime inside Iran will come to see itself as a power capable of checking moderate influences in the Middle East. Indeed, there is already ample evidence that Iran sees itself as a check on America. From taking Americans hostage in 1979 through trying to destabilize the interim Iraqi government today, Iran has sought to displace the U.S. from the Middle East. In the coming year, it is likely that Iran will emerge as the nation-state antagonist in the war on terror. That much more than offering shelter, Iran will provide terrorists with a symbol of a successful Islamicist check on the West. And from Osama bin Laden on down, terrorists fighters will attribute that success to nuclear weapons... |
| The staggering defeat of the Democratic Party and its ever-accelerating death spiral weren't obvious from the election results. Two factors masked the extent of the party's trouble. Without the innovation of Internet-driven small-donor fund-raising and a corresponding surge in support from the youngest voters, John Kerry would have suffered a dramatically larger defeat. And the true magnitude of the Democrats' abject failure at the polls in 2004 would have been more clearly revealed.
Mr. Kerry raised nearly half of his war chest over the Internet. He was so successful at this that he actually outspent the Bush campaign. But it was the outsider campaign of Howard Dean, reviled by most of the Democratic establishment, that pioneered the use of the Internet to raise millions in small contributions; Mr. Kerry was just the beneficiary as the party nominee. And it was the risk-taking Dean campaign that forced the risk-averse Kerry campaign to opt out of the public financing system. Had that decision not been forced on Mr. Kerry, he would have been badly outspent by George Bush; he would not have been competitive at all throughout the long summer of 2004... |
This is the heritage of Yasser Arafat. When Europe, the United Nations and the Clinton administration legitimized Arafat, they legitimized the fantasy that the Israelis can be exterminated and their country turned over to the Palestinians. This is, and always has been, the goal of Hamas, Fatah, the PLO, and so on. Today a new generation of Palestinian "leaders" are following in the terrorist footsteps of Arafat and his henchmen, preferring the fantasy of genocide to the hard work of dealing with the Palestinians' dysfunctional society, corrupt government, and primitive economy... |