One of the personal trainers at the fitness center where I work out is a very hard-working and personable young man by the name of Mario Lowe.  By all rights, he should be in Beijing right now with the US Olympic Team, for he is a world-class triple jump athlete.  But he injured his foot earlier this year, and instead he is staying at home with his one year-old daughter, Jasmine, while his wife, high jump champion Chaunte Howard, competes for an Olympic medal for them both.

For those of you here so inclined, please keep Chaunte, and Mario and Jasmine, in your thoughts and prayers.  The high jump competition is early Saturday morning.  I cannot think of two nicer, more deserving people than this couple.

Friday, December 07, 2007 Just 18% of American voters believe that Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 66% disagree and say Iran has not stopped its nuclear weapons program. Twenty-one percent (21%) of men believe Iran has stopped the weapons development along with 16% of women (see crosstabs).

The survey was conducted following release of a government report saying that Iran halted its nuclear weapons development program in 2003.

The Rasmussen Reports survey also found that 67% of American voters believe that Iran remains a threat to the national security of the United States. Only 19% disagree while 14% are not sure.

Fifty-nine percent (59%) believe that the United States should continue sanctions against Iran. Twenty percent (20%) disagree and 21% are not sure.

So what would happen if the House sent the Senate back a tax bill with offsets? Lott says, "They’re going to have to eat this. Get over it. Now, Nancy can dictate to all the Democrats she wants to. She ain’t dictating this. If they want the AMT, there ain’t going to be no offsets. Write that in granite. I can guaran-damn-double-dog, you know, guarantee you that."

"Offsets" is just another word for taxes…

Too few are willing to block a bad idea. It is a very bad idea indeed to raise new taxes to offset the application of the AMT to tens of millions of Americans who were never intended to be subject to it…

As Trent Lott once said about another bad tax bill, “The time to kill a snake is before it comes out of the hole.” In Lott’s last weeks as a Senator, he is blocking new AMT taxes, the excessively large S-CHIP bill, billions in energy taxes and a proposal to raise taxes on capital gains by 135%. The sad news is that no one seems ready or able to take up his whack-a-mole duties next year.

A US F-16 fighter used an air-to-air missile to destroy a sounding rocket in its boost phase for the first time this week in a test of a new missile defense concept, US spokesmen said Tuesday.

The system—named the Net-Centric Airborne Defense Element (NCDE)—breaks new ground in that it would arm fighter aircraft or drones with missiles fast enough to intercept a ballistic missile as it lifts into space.

The aircraft would have to get to within a 100 miles of the launch site to catch the ascending missile in the first two to three minutes after launch.
But it could be very useful in a short range combat situation against short and medium range missiles, said Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the US Missile Defense Agency.
The Pentagon has two other better known boost phase intercept systems under development—the Airborne Laser and the Kinetic Energy Interceptor—but those are still years away from being ready, he said.
“So it does give us an initial boost phase capability even though it is a much shorter range missile, and you have to be in the area of the missile launch to be effective,” Lehner said.

Once again, Ronald Reagan is proven right.  Thankfully, his vision for America survives him.

Global media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspapers seized with glee Thursday on an interior designer’s faux pas that put their boss’s smiling image in a rival group’s state-of-the-art newsroom.

Some 50 floor-to-ceiling glass pillars installed in Fairfax Media’s brand new offices in Sydney were found to feature the face of News Corp. press mogul Murdoch, startling Fairfax staff when they got in to work, sources said.

“Some employees must have wondered whether there had been an overnight takeover,” a source at Fairfax who requested anonymity said.

At first glance the pillars appeared to be decorated simply with “artful lines topped with crazy lettering to mark each section of the office,” according to Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper.

A German research published in New England Journal of Medicine and Weekly World News said that men staring at women’s breasts in fact prolong their lives with years.

Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female such as Baywatch actress Pamela Lee is equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics work-out,” said author Dr. Karen Weatherby, a gerontologist.

The team led by Weatherby was made up of researchers at three hospitals in Frankfurt, Germany, and found this results after monitoring for 5 years the health of 200 male subjects, half of whom were asked to look at busty females daily, while the other half had to abstain from doing so.

For five years, the boob oglers presented a lower blood pressure, slower resting pulse rates and decreased risk of coronary artery disease.

“Sexual excitement gets the heart pumping and improves blood circulation. There’s no question: Gazing at large breasts makes men healthier. Our study indicates that engaging in this activity a few minutes daily cuts the risk of stroke and heart attack in half.” said Weatherby, who even recommended that men aged over 40 should spend at least 10 minutes daily admiring breasts sized “D-cup” or larger.

She said that this was as healthy as going to the gym for 30 minutes daily and prolonged a man’s life by five years.

“We believe that by doing so consistently, the average man can extend his life four to five years.” said Weatherby.

The Wall Street Journal has noticed the same thing:

As recently as 2005, the consensus estimate of our spooks was that “Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons” and do so “despite its international obligations and international pressure.” This was a “high confidence” judgment. The new NIE says Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 “in response to increasing international scrutiny.” This too is a “high confidence” conclusion. One of the two conclusions is wrong, and casts considerable doubt on the entire process by which these “estimates”—the consensus of 16 intelligence bureaucracies—are conducted and accorded gospel status.

Our own “confidence” is not heightened by the fact that the NIE’s main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as “hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials,” according to an intelligence source. They are Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)…

No less odd is the NIE’s conclusion that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to “international pressure.” The only serious pressure we can recall from that year was the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At the time, an Iranian opposition group revealed the existence of a covert Iranian nuclear program to mill and enrich uranium and produce heavy water at sites previously unknown to U.S. intelligence. The Bush Administration’s response was to punt the issue to the Europeans, who in 2003 were just beginning years of fruitless diplomacy before the matter was turned over to the U.N. Security Council…

In any case, the real issue is not Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but its nuclear program, period. As the NIE acknowledges, Iran continues to enrich uranium on an industrial scale—that is, build the capability to make the fuel for a potential bomb. And it is doing so in open defiance of binding U.N. resolutions. No less a source than the IAEA recently confirmed that Iran already has blueprints to cast uranium in the shape of an atomic bomb core.

The U.S. also knows that Iran has extensive technical information on how to fit a warhead atop a ballistic missile. And there is considerable evidence that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps has been developing the detonation devices needed to set off a nuclear explosion at the weapons testing facility in Parchin. Even assuming that Iran is not seeking a bomb right now, it is hardly reassuring that they are developing technologies that could bring them within a screw’s twist of one.

Mr. Bush’s efforts to further sanction Iran at the U.N. were stalled even before the NIE’s release. Those efforts will now be on life support. The NIE’s judgments also complicate Treasury’s efforts to persuade foreign companies to divest from Iran. Why should they lose out on lucrative business opportunities when even U.S. intelligence absolves the Iranians of evil intent? Calls by Democrats and their media friends to negotiate with Tehran “without preconditions” will surely grow louder.
The larger worry here is how little we seem to have learned from our previous intelligence failures. Over the course of a decade, our intelligence services badly underestimated Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, then overestimated them. Now they have done a 180-degree turn on Iran, and in such a way that will contribute to a complacency that will make it easier for Iran to build a weapon. Our intelligence services are supposed to inform the policies of elected officials, but increasingly their judgments seem to be setting policy. This is dangerous.

What’s missing in all the hoopla over the “new and improved NIE is any sort of specific explanation for what prompted the change, and why this newer version should be taken any more seriously than the last such assessment… or the earlier NIE on pre-war Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, which was apparently written by many of the same people who authored this new Iran report.

Its hardly a great national secret that both CIA and the State Department have been in all but open rebellion against the policies of the president, almost since his first inauguration.  That fact alone, never mind the dire implications, should give any serious individual pause when considering this report.

Ms. Whitney’s analysis is seriously flawed from what I can tell from the article, and her conclusion mistaken.  But for those with a long memory of the “dearly departed” the vindication, this time from a division of Dow-Jones, is still sweet.
 

BOSTON (MarketWatch)—Lenders trying to get a handle on risk in their mortgage portfolios will be better served by examining loan-to-value ratios, rather than individuals’ credit scores which they have traditionally relied upon, CIBC World Markets warned Wednesday.

“The modern foundation of the lending market is about to be uprooted as FICO scores, the long trusted gauge for lenders in determining risk and price, will prove virtually meaningless in this credit cycle,” wrote analyst Meredith Whitney in a research note.

FICO, short for Fair Isaac Credit Organization, measures individuals’ creditworthiness by examining such factors as payment histories and debt levels.

Ah, yes!  FICO!

… the idea of choosing the Leader of the Free World based on the advice of someone who lives in the cloistered world of stardom seems a bit loony to me…

I suppose anything that gets people engaged in the political process is a good thing, but the idea that a gold record, a top-ten TV show or an Oscar translates into some sort of political wisdom doesn’t make much sense to me. Trust me, one’s view of the world isn’t any clearer from the back seat of a limo.

Sajak is obviously a very wise man (his IQ was once reported to be in the lower 140s, I believe).  Read the whole thing.

With the eyes of the world focused on the Middle East peace talks in Annapolis, Md., President Bush’s war tsar, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, quietly announced that the American and Iraqi governments will start talks early next year to bring about an end to the allied occupation by the close of Mr. Bush’s presidency.

The negotiations will bring to a formal conclusion the U.N. Chapter 7 Security Council involvement in the occupation and administration of Iraq, and are expected to reduce the number of American troops to about 50,000 troops permanently stationed there but largely confined to barracks, from the current 164,000 forces on active duty.

“The basic message here should be clear. Iraq is increasingly able to stand on its own. That’s very good news. But it won’t have to stand alone,” General Lute yesterday told reporters in the White House.

Bringing the war to a close by the end of 2008 will ensure that the next president will face a fait accompli in Iraq, a fact that will further remove from the presidential election the Iraq war as an issue of contention.

Democrats will, of course, try to claim that they forced the troops withdrawals on an obstinately reluctant administration.  But as Ed Morrissey notes,

Given the Democrats’ inability to affect the war strategy, their argument will be rather weak, and they still will have to explain the rush to surrender in the spring of 2007, led by Harry Reid’s declaration of defeat on the Senate floor.

Not to mention the inane ranting of House Democrat leader and supposed military “expert” Jack Murtha, or the similar blather of Senate doofus, Dick Durbin.

If this comes off anywhere near as planned, the flip-flopping by congressional Democrats will be like the floor of the Naha, Okinawa fish market at 5:00 A.M.

Republicans will rightly claim that they remained steadfast in their commitment to victory, that they were the ones who put their faith in General David Petraeus’ strategic “surge” plan and the men and women of the United States military, and that Democrats’ earlier calls for surrender in Iraq only shows that the Dems simply cannot be trusted to effectively guide the country’s defense policies.

Incidentally, Bill Clinton’s latest, attempt at triangulation, stating that he has always been opposed to US actions in Iraq, is hardly likely to help his wife’s candidacy come next November, when close to 2/3 of the US combat forces will be drawn down in Iraq.  The Clintons’ alignment with the hard left radicals won’t sit well with the more rational middle of the electorate.