Oh no, not again!  Today marks thirty years since this Shi'a cleric mysteriously vanished.  Maybe he's also hiding in the bottom of a well?  Maybe he's in a library somewhere working furiously, trying to work out the proper spelling of Mohammar Qadafi?   From AP:

 BEIRUT, Lebanon - For the rest of the world, the disappearance of the imam Moussa al-Sadr is probably at most a footnote in the checkered history of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. In 1978, the Lebanese Shiite Muslim religious leader flew to Tripoli for a week of talks with Libyan officials. He was never seen or heard from again.

But in Lebanon, the mystery of the missing imam remains a burning issue for Shiites, including leaders of the powerful Hezbollah movement — an indication of al-Sadr's potency as a symbol for a community that in 40 years has gone from a downtrodden, impoverished sect to a major political player.

Al-Sadr is one of the pioneers of Shiite empowerment that has become a force across the Middle East, spurred by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Shiite Iran and more recently by the rise to leadership of Iraq's majority Shiites after U.S. forces ousted Saddam Hussein and his Sunni Muslim-dominated regime.

Framed photos of al-Sadr adorn the shops and homes of Lebanese Shiites, and the day he was last seen, on Aug. 31, 1978, is marked annually in Lebanon, with this year's major ceremony planned in the southern town of Nabatiyeh.

On Wednesday, Lebanese judicial officials said prosecutors had just charged Gadhafi and six other Libyan officials with "incitement to kidnap and withhold the freedom" of al-Sadr. The charge could carry the death penalty, but the officials, insisting on anonymity since they were not authorized to speak to the media, conceded it was unlikely Gadhafi would ever be tried.

Most Lebanese presume al-Sadr is dead — he would be 80 if alive — but some cling to the belief he remains in a Libyan jail. It's an appealing idea for Shiites; a major tenet of the faith is that a revered 9th century imam has been hidden by God and will return as mankind's savior.

[...]

Brotherly love and mutual respect between fellow Muslims alert:

Most of al-Sadr's followers are convinced Gadhafi ordered al-Sadr killed in a dispute over Libyan payments to Lebanese militias, but the imam's family argues he could still be alive in a Libyan jail.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKzinbXgIxo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMICsgaQeS0&feature=related

From The Telegraph
A Muslim man has been jailed for eight years after stabbing to death a BNP activist neighbour who had racially abused him.
Habib Khan, 50, was cleared of murder but found guilty of manslaughter after a jury heard he had been tormented for years by his neighbour over a planning dispute.
Stafford Crown Court heard that Khan, described as a "mild and calm-mannered family man", had intended to use the knife to threaten Mr Brown, who had hold of one of his sons.
Judge Simon Tonking said Khan had acted "in the honest belief that he needed to protect his son" but in doing so had killed his next door neighbour Mr Brown.  He added: "It is beyond question that, by acting in the way that he did, Mr Khan killed Mr Brown unlawfully and, whatever their differences, the fact is that Mr Brown lost his life. "That is a consequence for which Mr Khan must be punished with a significant custodial sentence."
The court heard that the families' feud began when Khan put in a planning application to build a new house on his land a few years prior to the incident.  Mr Brown objected and when permission was granted and building work began, he "took steps to obstruct it". The situation escalated over the years, with one incident leaving Khan in hospital.
Judge Tonking ordered that Khan serve consecutively six-and-a-half years for manslaughter and 18 months for wounding Mr Brown's son.
Mr Brown and his son had been leafleting for the BNP a year earlier, the court heard, and the party's leader, Nick Griffin, had attended Mr Brown's funeral. Speaking outside the court, Stoke-on-Trent BNP members slammed the sentence, which they said did not reflect the severity of the crime.
BNP Councillor Michael Coleman said the court case was an example of "liberal politics going on".  He criticised Staffordshire Police for "going softly on ethnic minorities" and being hard with "the indigenous population of this island."
A very unpleasant affair.

MEMRI: According to a report on Islamonline.net, the Al-Azhar Fatwa Committee has issued a fatwa permitting the hacking of American and Israeli websites that harm Islam and Muslims, and also permitting damaging them, as part of "electronic jihad."

On this date, August 29th, in 1981, two people were killed and 23 wounded when the Stadttempel Synagogue in Vienna was attacked by Muslims using machine guns and grenades.

This attack was part of a campaign in the early 1980's to attack synagogues across Europe.

On October 3, 1980, the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris, France was attacked by "Palestinians" using bombs.  Four people were killed and twelve injured.

On October 20, 1981, a synagogue in Antwerp, Belgium was attacked with a truck bomb; three people were killed, 106 injured.

On September 18, 1982, a synagogue in Brussels, Belgium was attacked by a gunman from the Abu Nidal Organization using a machine gun.

On October 9, 1982, the central synagogue in Rome, Italy was attacked by a men using grenades and machine guns.  A 2-year-old boy was killed, and 37 people injured.

Over time, jihadis may change their tactics and techniques, but their goals remain the same.  Past jihad fads include plane hijackings, car bombs, timebombs on airliners, bomb-vests on buses, mortars, and rockets.

Previous Days in the "Religion of Peace™":

Aug 28: Poet Laureate Baraka
Aug 27: Bombardment of Algiers
Aug 26: Sistani vs. Sadr
Aug 25: Cape Town Jihad
Aug 24: Hebron Massacre

On July 7, 2008 I began a posting of advice to McCain thus:

"A woman as his running mate is for McCain a good idea, but not just any woman, and definitely not Carly Fiorina. "

I went on to discuss  as a plausible not-just-any-woman candidate the memorably-named Olympia Snowe, noting she came from Maine, the state that is farthest north, and thus a nice complement to the southwest of McCain, a stately  way of raising Arizona. 

I made a mistake. I overlooked Sarah Palin, whose bone structure holds up even better than that of Katrina vanden Heuvel.

But the mistake I made was understandable. Because, before I made that one, I had made a larger one..No one, you see, had ever bothered to tell me that Alaska, some years ago, had finally achieved statehood.

Now I know.

I have been waiting all day for a report about this to appear on line from a source that was a bit more reliable than Middle East on-line. From The Telegraph A large mosque in the German city of Cologne, famous for the soaring spires of its Gothic cathedral, is to be built after the city council finally gave it the go-ahead.The mosque, which will hold up to 2,000 people, will be one of the largest in Europe and is to feature minarets 180 feet high, a third as tall as the nearby cathedral.
Building work was due to get underway last autumn despite a vigorous protest movement, which has featured both Jewish intellectuals and the political far-right.
Some reports suggested the city's council only agreed to the project after designers agreed to trim down the size of the mosque's minarets.
But Miriam Berndt, from the architect's cabinet behind the project said that nothing had changed. "The minarets will remain as tall as planned, and this will be one of Germany's biggest mosques," she said. "We will start building work this winter and will be finished in a year or two."
Next month, the far-right group Pro-Köln, which has led protests against the mosque in the city, is to host an "anti-Islamisation conference" in Cologne, with far-right politicians from across Europe, including France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, to attend.
Meanwhile in the UK, apart from the secrecy surrounding the application for the megamosque quite a few other mosques are not getting what they asked for from the local councils.
Pendle Today- PLANS to extend a Nelson mosque are being recommended for refusal by Pendle Council officers.
Express and Star Controversial plans to build a new mosque in Walsall have been thrown out by planning bosses. But that was an Ahmadiyya mosque opposed by other Muslims as well as non Muslims.
OldhamAdvertiser PLANS for a mosque and multi-purpose community centre on Manchester Road in Werneth have been rejected.
Swindon Advertiser MUSLIMS have been told ‘no’ for now to their hopes of building a purpose-built mosque in Swindon.
Only in Huddersfield are the Mosque builders, Ahmadiyyas again,  having a modicum of success.
The Huddersfield Examiner. CONTROVERSIAL plans to turn an historic sports club site into a mosque have been given the green light by councillors.
Hundreds of people objected to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Association’s plan to transform The Pavilion at Fartown into a mosque and community centre. 

Even China is now described as "restive".  From AP:

BEIJING (AFP) - Two policemen were killed and five others injured in China's restive Xinjiang region, authorities said Friday, bringing the reported death toll from a wave of unrest there this month to 33.

Assailants stabbed the police officers late on Wednesday night in a town close to Kashgar, a city in the far west of Xinjiang where the deadliest of this month's attacks took place, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

"Suddenly, many criminal suspects that had been hiding in a cornfield came out from behind and attacked using knives," Xinhua said, citing local police.

Xinhua gave few other details but US-funded Radio Free Asia reported the police were ambushed while searching the cornfield following a tip that a woman suspected of helping assailants in an earlier attack was hiding there.

"We didn't expect to come under attack in that cornfield," Radio Free Asia quoted a local policeman named Omerjan as saying.

Analysts have said Xinjiang is enduring its worst violence in years, partly triggered by separatists wanting to raise publicity while the world spotlight was focused on China for the Beijing Olympics, which ended on Sunday.

Xinjiang is a vast area bordering central Asia with about 8.3 million ethnic Muslim Uighurs, many of whom say they have suffered decades of repression under communist Chinese rule.

China has blamed Uighur "terrorists" for much of the previous unrest this month.

In the first of the reported incidents, Chinese authorities said two assailants murdered 16 policemen on August 4 in Kashgar.

The attackers, who were later captured, drove a truck at a group of policemen, then attacked the officers with machetes and explosives, according to the official account.

Also near Kashgar, three security officers were killed on August 12 when assailants jumped off a vehicle passing through a checkpoint and stabbed them, according to Xinhua. A handful of suspects had been arrested for the attack, Xinhua reported late Friday, quoting a police spokesman.

Eleven attackers and one security guard were reported killed in bombings and a shoot-out with police on August 10 in the remote city of Kuqa.

Exiled Uighur organisations and rights groups have reported that a massive security crackdown in Xinjiang in the months leading up the Olympics has remained in place after the Games.

Mus'ab Hassan Yousef, son of a West Bank Hamas Leader, gives an interview on Arab television on early life as a Muslim and his conversion to Christianity. 

Rumor has it McCain may pick Governor Palin as his VP.

Wiki: Sarah Heath Palin (born February 11, 1964) is the current Governor of Alaska, and a member of the Republican Party. She is the first female governor of Alaska, its youngest, and is the first governor born after Alaska achieved statehood. Brought to statewide attention because of her whistleblowing on ethical violations by state Republican Party leaders,^[1] she won election in 2006 by first defeating the incumbent governor in the Republican primary, then a former Democratic Alaskan governor in the general election.

(...)

In 2006, Palin, running on a clean-government campaign, executed an upset victory over then-Gov. Murkowski in the Republican gubernatorial primary.^[3] Despite the lack of support from party leaders and being outspent by her Democratic opponent, she went on to win the general election in November 2006, defeating former Governor Tony Knowles.^[3] Palin said in 2006 that education, public safety, and transportation would be three cornerstones of her administration.^[8]

When elected, Palin became the youngest governor in Alaskan history (42 years old upon taking office), and the first woman to be Alaska's governor. Palin was also the first Alaskan governor born after Alaska achieved U.S. statehood. She was also the first Alaskan governor not to be inaugurated in Juneau, instead choosing to hold her inauguration ceremony in Fairbanks. She took office on December 4, 2006.

Highlights of Governor Palin's tenure include a successful push for an ethics bill, and also shelving pork-barrel projects supported by fellow Republicans. Palin successfully killed the Bridge to Nowhere project that had become a nationwide symbol of wasteful earmark spending.^[13][17] "Alaska needs to be self-sufficient, she says, instead of relying heavily on 'federal dollars,' as the state does today."^[6]

She has challenged the state's Republican leaders, helping to launch a campaign by Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell to unseat U.S. Congressman Don Young^[18] and publicly challenging Senator Ted Stevens to come clean about the federal investigation into his financial dealings.^[13] Palin supports holding occasional legislative sessions outside the state capital, and municipal revenue sharing to help local governments.^{[citation needed]}

Palin's tenure is noted for her independence from big oil companies, while still promoting resource development.^[6][13] Palin has also announced plans to create a new sub-cabinet group of advisors, to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions within Alaska. ^[19]

Shortly after taking office, Palin rescinded an appointment by Murkowski of his former chief of staff Jim Clark to the Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority, one of thirty-five appointments made by Murkowski in the last hour of his administration that she reversed. ^[20][21] Clark later pled guilty to conspiring with a defunct oil-field-services company to channel money into Frank Murkowski's re-election campaign. ^[22]

In March 2007, Palin presented the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA) as the new legal vehicle for building a natural gas pipeline from the state's North Slope.^[23] Only one legislator, Representative Ralph Samuels, voted against the measure,^[24] and in June Palin signed it into law.^[25][26] On January 5, 2008, Palin announced that a Canadian company, Transcanada, was the sole AGIA-compliant applicant.^[27][28]

In response to high oil and gas prices, and in response to the resulting state government budget surplus, Palin proposed giving Alaskans $100-a-month energy debit cards. She also proposed providing grants to electrical utilities so that they would reduce customers' rates.^[29] She subsequently dropped the debit card proposal, and in its place she proposed to send Alaskans $1,200 directly and eliminate the gas tax.^[30][31]

Palin is strongly pro-life and belongs to Feminists for Life.^[8] She opposes same-sex marriage; but, she has stated that she has gay friends, and is receptive to gay and lesbian concerns about discrimination.^[8] While the previous administration did not implement same-sex benefits, Palin complied with a state Supreme Court order and signed them into law. ^[32]

She supported a democratic advisory vote from the public on whether there should be a constitutional amendment on the matter.^[33] Alaska was one of the first U.S. states to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage, in 1998, along with Hawaii.^[34]

Palin's first veto was used to block legislation that would have barred the state from granting benefits to gay state employees and their partners. In effect, her veto granted State of Alaska benefits to same-sex couples. The veto occurred after Palin consulted with Alaska's attorney general on the constitutionality of the legislation.^[35]

What's not to like?

Here's my Proust Quiz from yesterday. Reactionry has come up a partial answer that may - or may not - be correct:

Answer in the fullness of lost time.

On Tuesday I deplored the pseudery of the latest marketing slogan for the Orange mobile phone company. "The future is no longer Orange," I wrote. "It's no longer bright. It's trite." This was the slogan that assailed my pseud-sense:

I am who I am because of everyone.

Reader Paul commented:

I agree: this new series of Orange ads are totally vomit-making with their  bogus sincerity and ultra-nice characters. 

Like the Boots the Chemists' ads of a few years back:  (paraphrastically) You are marvelous, you're unique  - your heart beats 70 times a minute every minute of your life and pumps 10,000 litres of blood every 24 hours.  Your lungs expand and contract  26,000 times a day. Your kidneys filter 180 litres of water every day...&c &c.  And that is why we are here - so that you can stay marvellous and unique - Boots supply everything that keeps you  marvellous and unique.  We care.

And don't get me started on L'Oreal, with their natural liposomes that "reduce the appearance of" wrinkles. Why? "Because you're worth it." And isn't Andie MacDowell the most irritating woman alive? For the "Andie" alone, she deserves to be locked up, preferably sharing a cell with a "Toni" or two.

In this week's Spectator, Theodore Dalrymple takes up the curmudgeon's cudgel, in a column that begins: "I think I should abandon the world: I am too easily irritated by it."

I come across an advertisement for a telephone company that funds a literary prize. It features the most recent prize-winner, ending with a slogan that makes the death of Little Nell seem like a detached clinical report. ‘I am who I am because of everyone’, it says.

This suggests such grandiosity and self-congratulation masquerading as humility that I feel as though I am wallowing in treacle laced with nitric acid.

Read the whole column. Dalrymple's dander is up and his displeasure is our pleasure.

Dalrymplian grumpiness is a goal I aspire to, and have not yet attained. I suspect a world without irritations would irritate him. It would irritate me, and perhaps Paul, too. We should be obliged to be cheery - a chilling thought.

The Herald (h/t GMBDR): ARABIC news network al Jazeera is considering setting up a Scottish bureau.

The proposal for a Scottish office was made at a meeting between the network's director general Wadah Khanfar and Deputy First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon in Glasgow.

Al Jazeera is the largest news channel in the Middle East and was launched in 1996 as an Arabic news and current affairs satellite TV channel. Since then it has expanded into a network with several outlets.

Mr Khanfar was in Scotland to deliver a speech at the International TV Festival in Edinburgh when he attended the meeting arranged by the Scottish-Islamic Foundation...

An excellent article from Theodore Dalrymple in The Times.
The idea that giant institutions are efficient is a primitive superstition that daily experience disproves, so is just the kind of thing that British governments are inclined to believe.
I do not often agree with the Prison Reform Trust, but on the proposed construction of giant prisons - the criminal justice system's answer to giant casinos, I suppose - I do wholeheartedly.
The dangers of gigantism in prison are very great. Running a prison without resort to brutality requires a delicate balancing act. The necessary co-operation of prisoners cannot be obtained by brute force alone, but staff need to maintain the upper hand. As every prisoner knows, most brutality in prison comes from prisoners, not staff. When the staff lose control, brutality increases.
I've seen this for myself in extreme form when I visited Lurigancho prison in Lima, Peru, years ago. It had 7,000 inmates. I visited the comparatively salubrious part, el jardín, the garden, so-called because there was a tree somewhere in it. Brutal as it was, it was like a garden party compared with the part reserved for the worst prisoners, where the staff never ventured. I observed it from a roof, and within a few minutes saw one prisoner try to kill another with a huge shark hook. Food was thrown over the wall to the prisoners.
. . . and although the Government will claim that it will never cut corners to produce the same conditions in Britain, who will believe it? The temptation to park large numbers of prisoners together and leave them to get on with it will be great, especially in times of economic stringency. And most times are times of economic stringency.
Of course, some might think that more unpleasantness is just what prisoners need, that our prisons are much too soft.
The main purpose of prison is to keep wrongdoers off the streets for as long as necessary, which is usually much longer than our courts acknowledge. It is not to brutalise or humiliate prisoners, which vast and impersonal prisons are more likely to do.
As one prison officer said, not to me, I read this but cannot remember where, “Men (I expect he included women) don’t go to prison to be punished within, their punishment is the curtailment of their freedom by going to prison”.
My experience of prisons as an official of the Lord Chancellor's Department was wider than most of my colleagues though as nothing compared with Dr Dalrymple who spent many years as a prison doctor. And my post for the 8 years prior to my retirement did not involve any prison visits at all. However I recall the concern among Prison officers at the money saving closure of workshops, prison farms, constructive classes (literacy, woodwork, printing) and suchlike and the increase in “banging up” in cells for 22 hours a day. The phrase “Satan makes work for idle hands” is a bit old fashioned (though true) and I am not calling for the chain gang or labour camps. But it has proved to be a false economy to cut down on the greater level of supervision needed to engage prisoners in constructive dignified work.
That is where money should be spent, not on cumbersome Titan prisons. 

Listen to this – rotten recording though it is:

The usual trouble with the hijab, this time in Malawi. From the Nyasa Times
Muslims in the country who constitute about 35% of the country's 12 million population have threatened to boycott the on-going registration exercise for the May 19 General Elections if registration clerks continue forcing Muslim women to remove headscarfs during the registration.
The threat follows reports from across the country that Muslim women are being forced to remove the headscarfs, if they are to register.
In several centers, according to officials at the electoral body, some Muslim women have on their own boycotted the exercise, after being forced to remove the headscarfs, commonly known as "hijab" within the Muslim community.
Islamic Information Bureau National Coordinator, Sheikh Dinala Chabulika confirmed the development, saying in most centres several women who have refused to remove the "hijab", have been returned.
Chabulika said the organization has since taken up the matter with the Malawi Electoral Commission.
Meanwhile, MEC has said the matter has been discussed and all clerks have been asked to let all Muslim women register “as long as they only remove the headscarf from the face."
A lot of the comments are not in English, or only in part. There are comments from some outraged Muslims. There are comments from Malawi citizens who dispute that the Muslim population of Malawi is as high as 35%. They say less than 20%. There is also a great deal of concern that the concealment of hijab has been used before, and will be used again, to enable Muslims to register multiple votes.

On this date, August 28th, in 2002, Amiri Baraka was named the poet laureate for New Jersey.

Amiri Baraka was born Everette LeRoi Jones, but changed his name in 1967 when he converted to Islam.  He has been associated with such luminaries of the Beat Poets as Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg.  He has appeared with Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, and also works with hip-hop musicians.

This is a welcome respite from the usual "...and another 12 victims were found beheaded on the island of so-and-so..." tabulation of Islamic atrocities.  The convergence of a love of the written word and an interest in Islamic jihad comes about only rarely, and so it is with some excitement that selected works from the oeuvre of Baraka will be presented forthwith.  But, after reading some of Baraka's poems, that ardor may dim, and you may decide to "just be friends" with the written word.  You may decide that you need "some space" between you and the written word, until you're a little more confident you know where this relationship is headed.  And now, without further ado:

Selection from a 1965 essay:

Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank. … The average ofay [white person] thinks of the black man as potentially raping every white lady in sight. Which is true, in the sense that the black man should want to rob the white man of everything he has. But for most whites the guilt of the robbery is the guilt of rape. That is, they know in their deepest hearts that they should be robbed, and the white woman understands that only in the rape sequence is she likely to get cleanly, viciously popped.

Selections from "Somebody Blew Up America", a poem written about 9/11:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
[...]
Who do Tom Ass Clarence work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly [sic] to be a wooden negro
[...]
Who know why five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion

Note the clever reworking of "Thomas" Clarence as "Tom Ass."  Say it quickly.  Get it?  And "Colin" Powell becomes "Colon,"  like a part of the body.  A posterior part.  Get it?  After the publishing of this poem, New Jersey's Governor abolished the position of poet laureate.  And successfully defended that decision up to the Supreme Court.

In accordance with the Sixth Pillar of Islam (extreme anti-Semitism) Baraka had written many unabashedly anti-Semitic pieces in his career, but later decided that he was "anti-Zionist", not anti-Semitic.  That subtlety comes through when he writes  "4000 Israeli workers", not "4000 Jew workers"; and it is "five Israelis was filming", not "five bloodsucking Jews was filming."   It really works. 

"Babylon Revisited"

The gaunt thing
with no organs
creeps along the streets
of Europe, she will
commute, in her feathered bat stomach-gown
with no organs
with sores on her insides
even her head
a vast puschamber
of pus(sy) memories
with no organs
nothing to make babies
she will be the great witch of euro-american legend
who sucked the life
from some unknown nigger
whose name will be known
but whose substance will not ever
not even by him
who is dead in a pile of dopeskin

This bitch killed a friend of mine named Bob Thompson
a black painter, a giant, once, she reduced
to a pitiful imitation faggot
full of American holes and a monkey on his back
slapped airplanes
from the empire state building

May this bitch and her sisters, all of them,
receive my words
in all their orifices like lye mixed
cocola and alaga syrup

feel this shit, bitches, feel it, now laugh your
hysterectic laughs
while your flesh burns
and your eyes peel to red mud

Are you feeling this shit, bitches?  Yes, that's right, New Jersey poet laureate Baraka is not only anti-Semit--, uh, I mean anti-Zionist, he is also misogynistic.  And homophobic.  But not to worry: prejudice without power is not prejudice.

"Fresh Zombies"

OK Shuffles. Stink in neon
Lie in lights. Betray before millions
Assassinate w/ slogans. Not old toms
but New Toms, Double Toms
A Tom Tom Macoute. Fresh Zombies.
House Nigger maniacs. Oreo serial killers
That thumping, that horrible sound,
is not music, not drums, but shuffling
Not old toms, New Toms, Double Toms
A Tom Tom Macoute. Fresh Zombies.

The reference to "Oreo" (cookies) is meant to illustrate an analogy to a person who is black on the surface, but who is actually white on the inside.  Wait, did I mention he was appointed poet laureate of New Jersey?

"For Crow Jane"

Mama Death.
For dawn, wind
off the river. Wind
and light, from

to be continued when I have time...

Suck on the insouciance, ofay [white person], cuz he don't finish it if he don't wants.  Your tyrannical insistence on "making sense" or "finishing a thought" ain't no chains on this brotha.

Previous Days in the "Religion of Peace™":

Aug 27: Bombardment of Algiers
Aug 26: Sistani vs. Sadr
Aug 25: Cape Town Jihad
Aug 24: Hebron Massacre
Aug 23: Libya Awards Farrakhan

Posted at NRO.

"As a son of Kansas and of Kenya, raised by a single mother, and loving grandparents, mostly in Hawaii, and who then, after study in New York and then further study in Massachusetts, chose to ignore a beckoning Wall Street and decided that the main streets of this country, and even the gritty mean streets of southside Chicago, were the place for me to be. And when I had done community organizing, and seen the magnitude of the problems, I turned, as so many Americans have turned, to govenment, to politics, and I entered the fray, and here I am, right here, with you...today.

Yes, my story may seem improbable, but it is no more improbable, if you think about it, than any of us gathered here together, or than any of those who are not here with us tonight, but whose lives will be affected by what we do and say here. In fact, is my life any more 'improbable' than the story of America itself -- it was ours before we were the land's, as Robert Frost once said, and then he described it, and because we are in Denver, in the heart of the great West, I think it's a phrase to remember, 'vaguely realizing westward, ' in the improbable tale of this improbable land."

"The angels of our better nature" -- it's quite a phrase, isn't it? Lincoln of course. A great president, but also a great man. He's one of my very few heroes, one of my lodestars. And I suppose he is for so many of us. He abides with us still. Would that those who claim to be the Party of Lincoln remembered what Lincoln was about. Magnanimity, in the Second Inaugural. "With malice toward none, with charity toward all." Isn't that really what a political campaign in our America, the land we all love, should be about? Isn't that what this campaign, whatever issues it focusses on, should also be about? Haven't we tried so far to be about, to appeal to, the "angels of our better nature"? For wouldn't Lincoln tell us it is only thus that we may come together to solve the problems that assail us, and that some, in the other party, persist in treating in a self-defeating partisan fashion, when political battles, struggles over visions of the future, become instead the ocassion for slanderous falsehoods, faked biographies, and for some, swift-boating remains the indoor sport of choice." 

_________________________________

That took  about two minutes. Now you do your two minutes, and we should have at least a good deal of his speech written in no time. But please hurry, because it is now almost nine, and I gather he's about to come on, and he needs that speech ready for delivery.

Doesn't he? 

The Obama people don't like it and Stanley Kurtz is still digging.

What has Proust got in common with a female Guardian columnist referred to at this site as a demented loon?

Can Proust change your life? If so, what has that to do with a disproportionate number of frivolous items posted today?

What is the connection between Proust and Bolton?

Answers tomorrow. No time Toulouse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-EboIxqbbQ&feature=related

Stop The Islamization Of Europe (SIOE) reports on their demonstration against the mistreatment of Danish Greenlanders here.

SIOE Sweden representative holds a banner explaining what SIOE is about

“Racism is the lowest form of stupidity! Islamophobia is the height of common sense!”

The Autonomers in the counter demonstration could not grasp the simple truth that islam is not a race. They were left speechless when Anders Gravers pointed this out...

From The London Evening Standard and (h/t Alan) Sky News
It’s them damned trios again.
Three men questioned about an alleged plot to assassinate Gordon Brown have been charged with terror offences, Lancashire Police said.
The men were arrested at Manchester Airport and Accrington, Lancashire, on August 14.
Ishaq Kanmi, 22, of Cromwell Street, Blackburn, is charged with soliciting murder, belonging or professing to belong to al Qaida, inviting support for al Qaida, and dissemination of terrorist publications.
Brothers Abbas Iqbal, 23, and Ilyas Iqbal, 21, both of Percival Street, Blackburn, are both charged with possession of an article in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that possession is for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism.
Police sources indicated the charge of soliciting murder referred to an alleged plot to murder the Prime Minister. The men will appear at Westminster Magistrates Court on Friday.
A fourth man, a 24-year-old white Muslim convert, was arrested in Blackburn on Tuesday.  A fifth man, a 29-year-old thought to be Eastern European, was held in Derby early on Wednesday.  Lancashire Police and Greater Manchester Police's Counter Terrorism Unit have been granted an additional seven days to question them.