I was giving a briefing on Islamic radicalization and current domestic terror threats at a military conference earlier this year when I was approached afterward by an Army colonel who asked exactly what could be done to counter such threats. He was taken aback when I replied, “The military can’t and won’t do what it needs to about jihadism, and we are going to see body bags coming out of our recruiting centers and military bases for the foreseeable future.”

The article is a sobering look at DOD failures to protect military facilities at home under the pressure of political correctness.

No doubt there are critics, like CAIR, who warn that any attempt to address the internal and external jihadist threat to military personnel will put every Muslim in the military and American Islam itself under the microscope…

For these critics to say that you can’t target jihadist ideology without targeting the whole of Islam is an acknowledgment on their part that the two are inseparable — a point I doubt they are ready to concede. Regardless, they can’t have it both ways: either jihadist ideology has nothing to do with Islam, as Islamic groups constantly represent, and thus it can be addressed without infringing on their freedom of religion; or they must admit, along with the “Islamophobes,” that jihadist ideology and the violence it promotes are part and parcel with Islam. The question for these critics is unavoidable: which is it?

Which is it indeed.

Mr. Poole points out the the military already has in place screening programs to weed out violent elements like white supremacists and neo-Nazis, groups that often clothe themselves in religion. But no one is seriously arguing that to target these groups and their ideology is to put every Christian (yes, I’m saying these groups often claim to be Christian) in the military under a microscope.

It’s absurd. But it means the military will have to start turning away men and women that claim to be Muslim because of possible radical ties. Will the Muslim community in the United States be okay with this? Groups like CAIR have made their position known. However, like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, CAIR doesn’t speak for an entire community.

The military is hesitant to change and under the current President change is even less likely to occur without a groundswell of support from the Muslim community to institute the necessary changes needed to save the lives of more American soldiers at home.

I’d love to see this support come. But I’m not optimistic. If a so-called “fringe minority” can organize Tea Parties, if they can march on Washington, why can’t America-loving Muslims from coast to coast do the same in support of sensible policies to protect the lives of the men and women that defend our liberty?

Well, it seems there’s trouble in socialized paradise:

With trade falling and debt stacking up, President Raul Castro has warned Cubans that the island’s socialist system must change.

And he’s asking them for something they are not used to giving in public: criticism.

[D]iscussions are being held across the island, as communist authorities urge Cubans to work harder, expect less and speak freely about the country’s nagging problems.

Aurelio Alonso, deputy editor of Cuba’s Casa de las Americas journal, says he thinks Cuba’s economy must face major changes. Like many Cubans who say they support the government but want it to change, he believes the state should allow for more small businesses and cooperatives.

Here’s my favorite bit:

One of Castro’s top officials recently likened some Cubans to “baby birds,” waiting to be fed by their “Daddy state,” a remark that upset many who say it’s the government’s fault for creating a culture of paternalism.

But here’s someone that sees the future… and they don’t like it:

As a committed socialist, Dacal [a social worker] worries that if the economy is liberalized but little else changes, Cuba will follow a Chinese or Vietnamese model that eventually leads to capitalism.

Even committed socialists realize that if you want an economy that works it necessarily means embracing tenants of capitalism!

If only Moore and Penn talked to these Cubans.

Happy birthday to the most professional, most dedicated, and most feared fighting force the world has ever seen.

Ooh-rah!

UPDATE: Hot Air has a video from the Commandant of the Corps in celebration of this event. Check it out.

And a quick joke, if I may:

MAN: I heard the Marines are a department of the Navy. Is this true?
MARINE: Yes, sir, it is.
MAN: What department?
MARINE: The men’s department.

Here’s the point: prior to this study, the IPCC was 99% certain that the radiative forcing from methane was between about 0.4 and 0.6. But this new study is now 99% certain that it is between 0.7 and 1.3 … which means that the uncertainty ranges of the earlier studies, or this study, or both, are way too small. They claim a certainty about their calculations that we simply do not have.

This is a recurring problem with the IPCC, and with climate science in general. They are very, very certain that they have the answers, certain enough that people say “the science is settled”. They are certain enough that people say we should spend billions and billions of dollars based on their conclusions.

But as you can see above, this certainty is false. Their claims are not valid, and their uncertainty ranges are … well … let me call them “incredibly optimistic” and let it go at that.

I’ll go further and say they are a deliberate lie. It’s beyond obvious that you can’t keep throwing out “90% certain” scenarios that keep being wrong.   No real scientist would pretend otherwise.

Meanwhile, McIntyre and Lindzen destroy the AGW argument on Finnish TV.  Bristlecones, Yamal, the upside-down Korttajärvi graph, ERBE… it’s all there.

Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. “The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment,” he writes. “Let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind.”

Why is this happening? Well, you’ll have to click the link to find out.

I’ve been doing this since 2003. I’m not stopping anytime soon. I must be doing something right, though. Thats two threats against me in just one week!

(stay tuned to Talk Islam for more about Anwar al Awlaki, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, and the Fort Hood attacks).

What exactly is [President Obama] supposed to do to create all these jobs? Use the book proceeds to buy a Dairy Queen franchise?

I am not a fan of President Obama. I didn’t vote for him, I don’t intend to vote for his reelection, and I oppose most of his major policy proposals. But Megan’s right: blaming him for unemployment levels less than a year into his administration is unfair. Government policies can create a more favorable or less favorable long-term environment for economic growth, but the only jobs that the government can actually create are jobs on the government payroll, paid for with money taken out of the pockets of taxpayers (or borrowed against future tax revenue, or printed at the cost of increased inflation).

So critcize Obama for unwise or unjust policies, for adding trillions of dollars to the national debt, for his ill-advised health care reform proposals, for his unwillingness to let mismanged companies fail. But don’t blame him for failing to create jobs, because that is not within the President’s power.

Nancy Pelosi may have been all smiles on Saturday, but the difficulties encountered in her full-court press on the ObamaCare bill will only get worse, the AP reports this morning. The AP declares the public option dead, thanks to skeptical Democrats, and Joe Lieberman pledges to stop the bill from coming to the floor with one included…

What can’t pass the House is the only option to pass the Senate, and vice versa.

Some in the GOP have said that if Obama couldn’t pass his health care bill this year it would be his Waterloo. I’m not so sure. He’s got 3 more years yet and opposition to his agenda my well suffer from fatigue before the end. Though, I think the elections in 2010 will be a good indicator either way what is in store for the remainder of this President’s first term

now claiming that such blogging is illegal. According to Jenzabar, a blog post nominating Jenzabar for the “Trademark Abusers Hall of Shame” will “create controversy” and “cause prejudice to Jenzabar,” and any lawyer who engages in such blogging is in violation of Massachusetts court rules.

Jenzabar has sued the Long Bow Group for placing Jenzabar’s name in the keyword meta tags for a web page about Jenzabar, which, Jenzabar claims, has unfairly placed this web page among the top search results when Internet users do a search for “Jenzabar.” This placement, Jenzabar protests, allows university IT personnel who are trying to decide whether to buy Jenzabar’s software and services to learn adverse facts about Jenzabar which might, in turn, lead them to decide not to do business with Jenzabar.

Jenzabar is particularly exercised that my blog post cited a statement by Google back in September announcing that its search rankings have not employed keyword meta tags for many years. This information, Jenzabar insists, is not admissible in court because Matt Cutts’ statements on the subject on the Google’s blog for webmasters, which Google calls “Official News,” is not an “official statement by Google.” It appears to be Jenzabar’s position that blog posts about a lawsuit must comply with the rules of evidence.

Or something. In fact, Jenzabar’s argument is a tad cleverer than Paul (wearing his advocacy hat, after all) is letting on — and, as we will see, more than a tad dumber.

For one thing, Janzabar’s kvetch is incorporated into a submission urging the court to “exercise its discretion” not to permit Paul to appear in the case pro hace vice, i.e., to appear before a court to which he is not admitted “for this case.”   So there is no tort claim based on blog defamation nor, for that matter, is it necessarily the case that the First Amendment trumps any old thing or is involved hardly at all.

When courts are given “discretion” to make decisions about case management, they are given a lot of leeway before they are considered to have “abused” that discretion.

The second clever thing is that Jenzabar is saying that the reason Levy should not be admitted in the case is that he’s been blogging about it, in violation of Massachusetts Rule of Professional Conduct 3.6, which prohibits extrajudicial statements, which are defined as, more or less, “inadmissible stuff.” In other words:   Counselor, if you couldn’t get that into evidence, it shouldn’t go into the papers.

Most judges like rules such as these very much. Hence, the cleverness.

The not-so-clever, however, comes in two parts, too. First — and this is what Levy picked right up, naturally — the best they could do in terms of “inadmissible” was a fairly technical argument, and not necessarily a correct one, regarding what is actually an assertion so uncontroversial at this point that judges ought to (though seldom do) just take judicial notice of it already and move on in life — namely, the following:

Metatags are ignored by search engines, or are so severely discounted as to put their use firmly in the category of de minimis non curat lex. (That axiom’s not always applicable to trademark law, but bear with me.)

(Read more>>)

(Originally posted on LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®.  I adapted it a little for civilian use here).