You are going to see a lot of this leading up to November: a mother refusing to give McCain her baby.

Good. What entitles McCain to take money from you and me to help Iraqis one day murder this child?

If he is so interested in shooting people in Iraq for the rest of this century, he should use his own family and his own family’s money to do it. If he can convince people to volunteer their money and lives? Fine. But stop looting the US public’s purchasing power, savings and retirement in order to fund neo-conservative delusions.

The only thing questionable about the video is the belief that Obama will be any more effective at stopping this war than the inept Democratic congress and senate.

From Nolan Chart:

Paul charges that House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) removed a section from a bill, which would have barred the U.S. government from going to war [with Iran] without a congressional vote, at the behest of the “leadership of Israel” and “AIPAC” (the American Israel Public Affairs committee).

Ron Paul’s words from the same article:

The Democrats finally win the election in 2006,and it was a mandate, the Republicans get thrown out what’s the first act that Pelosi does? There was a supplemental bill that had a bill of ours we had gotten put in, and the bill said you shouldn’t need a bill like this! it said, you can’t go to war with Iran without getting approval from Congress. And she removed it, she removed it deliberately. And then, the astounding thing is, they asked her why, and she said the leadershiip in Israel asked her to. That was in the newspaper, that was in the Washington Post, that she was asked by AIPAC and others not to do that.” (1)

Why is Pelosi listening to foreigners’ interests before the interests of the California mothers and fathers who she represents?

Let us take a moment to consider the true threat that terrorists burning effigies of Bush halfway around the world represent to our country.

Within the Western world, we will assume that terrorism poses the greatest threat to Israel. Israelis must surely face an enormous threat of being blown up by suicide bombers, don’t they?

Wrong. Israelis are almost twice as likely to die in a car accident than from a terrorist attack. For every 100,000 people in Israel, 6.9 people die every year in car accidents. Only 1-6 will die from terrorism. In fact, the 10 year average between 1993 and 2003 was only 1.8.

That means that you are more likely to be murdered by a Swiss in Swizterland (2 murders per year per 100,000 people). Americans are twice as likely to be murdered by a fellow citizen (4 murders per 100,000 people) than an from a terrorist while living in Israel — and our murder rate is trending at 40 year lows.

About the only place where terrorism represents a threat to Americans is in Iraq, whereour presence hands around 300 troops over to terrorists to torture and kill every year.

We should give our troops the best Christmas present they could ever hope for: the chance to come home and live a long, happy life with their families. Let us bring our troops home.

• Murder rate in Switzerland: 2
• Murder rate in the US: 5.
• Terrorism death rate in Israel: ~1-6 (decade average: 1.8).
• Vehicle death rate in Israel: 6.9
• Vehicle death rate in US: 14
• Terrorism death rate in the US: ~0 (1 on some years like 2001)
• Death rate for US troops in Iraq: 324

It is time we Americans brought our heads out from under the covers and realize that there is no monster hiding in the closet. Terrorists are not going to jump out and kill us. We do not need our government to protect us.

Consider all that we have suffered these past years: the lives lost in Iraq, our freedoms surrendered to a unchecked Executive, our economy further in debt than ever as the cost of the war spirals out of control… We have endured all of this for naught. Terrorism is no more dangerous than lightning — or deer:

Fewer than three thousand people died in the attacks of September 11, but about forty thousand people die each year in automobile accidents. Even in 2001, Americans were fifteen times more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident than as a result of a terrorist attack; and seven times more likely to die of alcohol-related causes; and five times more likely to die of HIV; and five times more likely to die as a result of accidental poisoning or exposure to toxic substances. The terrorist attacks of 2001 increased the chance of dying in an air crash from a probability of 0.00000128 to a probability of 0.0000024. Since the 1960s, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism is about the same as the number killed by lightning or by accidents caused by deer. If an attack of the magnitude of September 11 occurred every three months for the next five years–an unlikely event, to say the least–the probability of being killed in such an attack would remain tiny: 0.02 percent, to be precise.

Stop being afraid. Demand the government give us back our lives.

People should follow the customs of the culture they immerse themselves in.  Americans take their shoes off before going inside a house or school in Japan.  Japanese shake our hands when greeting us.  In Bali it is impolite for women to wear pants or shorts inside a Balinese temple.  So courteous westerners dress accordingly and don a sarong.

We should expect Muslims to show the same respect for our culture that we should show theirs.  When we communicate, we look people in the eye and show our faces.  Anyone unwilling to show this level of professional respect for others is rude and unsuitable for working in any capacity that involves interacting with people face to face.

Just as it would be appropriate for someone to fire a teacher who: spat on students; swore continuously; revealed himself to students, there would be nothing wrong with firing a teacher who insisted that she come to work in a full-face veil.

However, our country should not make a habit of criminalizing rude behavior (see: flag burning).  In no way should we criminalize veils.  There are plenty of activities which are not illegal which will nonetheless get you fired for doing them in public (see: downloading pornography).

Criminalizing veils or nose rings goes against every ideal our country aspires to. People should be free to make bad, rude choices, and we should be free to ridicule and punish them socially for it.

Anne Applebaum wrote a great article on this over at Slate.

Muslims are not integrating into European society. Non-muslims are increasingly alarmed: Anti-immigration parties are making big gains in Belgium. British overwhelmingly believe there are too many immigrants. Conservative parties in Austria want to deport the Muslim immigrants. The Dutch have their own solution:

a DVD briefly showing topless women and two men kissing. [...] its target audience is as clear as its message: embrace our culture or leave.

New migrants to the Netherlands must watch this video as a litmus test for entering the country.

Today, secular culture is mixing very poorly with Islam. Polls in Britain show a sizable minority of Muslims support terrorists bombing the country in which they live (a later poll confirmed the results). Almost as many British Muslims want a separate system of law for themselves as do not.

Clearly something needs to be done here. Europe does not have the best track record of handling these affairs.

Related: Australia’s ABC Radio National’s Big Ideas program is in the middle of a two-part series on the history of relations between Iran and the United States. PBS recently ran a show on the Return of the Taliban which you can watch online.

A member of Great Britain’s government — Jack Straw — suggested that women wearing veils covering their full faces consider removing them. He says that face-to-face communication is an important aspect of British society. Britain should discuss whether wearing these veils is ideal behavior. Representatives from the Muslim community interviewed in the piece are not amused; they demand that British society abstain from tolerating the idea and ridicule anyone who suggests such a thing. Muslim communities tend to react violently when westerners address Muslim treatment of women.

Against this backlash, Straw remains resolute.

The Asia Times believes that it is wasteful to define religion and culture by its written doctrines. The meaning of those words, the ones emphasized and de-emphasized, change over time to fit the moods of people following them.

I agree. We should not judge people by their thoughts; we should judge them by their actions.

Gas is now at $1.99 per gallon in Knoxville. I think this is a blip. The longterm outlook for oil prices looks bad. We need to divert all the money we are presently wasting on not making Iraq any better and pour it into developing alternative sources of energy — China has the right idea.

Even if researching these technologies are expensive; even if these new energy technologies cost substantially more per net watt gained than gasoline, America must find a way to supply its own energy needs. Failing to do so will make us beholden to the whims of the theocratic, despotic oil tyrants like Ahmadinejad and Chavez who control the resources we require. Wealth will flow — as it always has — from the nations needing resources to the ones supplying them. This is happening right now.

Even with a weakening dollar discouraging investment, oil exporters now control three to five times the amount of short-term US debt than they did in 2002. China owns nearly half a trillion dollars of long-term US securities, up from 100 billion in 2000. Many emerging countries such as Ireland, South Korea and Mexico; oil exporters like Malaysia, the Netherlands and the Middle East; and developed countries like Japan and Luxemburg have far more excess capital to lend to the United States.

No matter what we do, wealth will not stay centralized in American coffers like we saw for most of the 20th century; the future will see wealth dispersed about the globe. This need not be a bad thing. This can benefit emerging economies like China and Brazil independently of its expense to the United States. But keeping our economy dependant on increasingly expensive, scarce and valuable oil — diverting greater and greater shares of our GDP into autocratic, anti-American regimes — is a recipe for disaster; the surest way emerging economies will siphon off a sizable amount of American wealth.

Tucker Carlson is far more interesting sans bow-tie. He demands that we establish permanent bases in Iraq and challenges the notion that Iraqis deserve to be free. He proposes that the popular notion that promoting (and paying for) free societies make us safer is utopian nonsense.

Sadly, neither of the guests answer this question decisively.

Iraqis — all socieites for that matter — deserve to be free. If our wealth and prosperity relies on the poverty and suffering and the rest of the world, then we are no better than our slave-owning predecessors: we simply outsourced our slavery onto a global scale.

Arianna Huffington wants to create a cult of fearlessness. She believes Americans are paralyzed by fear. We need to free ourselves from these chains. We need to have the courage to demand the hard facts; and the courage to say them.

Marty Peretz seems to be this fearless. His comments on Hamas and the Muslim world in general are very provocative. He suggests that Muslims are generally (and Hamas specifically) murderous thugs who Israel should ignore as Hamas makes no effort to govern.

There is certainly evidence to support this viewpoint, but Ann Althouse makes a good point that we must assert Muslims are peaceful, tolerant and respectful and force reality to indisputably meet this assertion.