From AFP:

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon, in an article published Saturday…

… “It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought,” Ban said in the Washington daily.

Southern California has been suffering a drought for 5 years. Thankfully no genocide has broken out…yet…

From LGF

From UN Watch:

Dictators Fidel Castro of Cuba and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus will be celebrating the UN Human Rights Council’s likely adoption tomorrow of a reform package that will see both regimes dropped from a blacklist, while Israel is placed under permanent indictment.
 
Contrary to all the promises of reform issued last year, the proposal released today by Council President Luis Alfonso de Alba targets Israel for permanent indictment under a special agenda item: “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories,” which includes “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories”; and “Right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.” No other situation in the world is singled out — not genocide in Sudan, not child slavery in China, nor the persecution of democracy dissidents in Egypt and elsewhere. Moreover, the council will entrench its one-sided investigative mandate of “Israeli violations of international law”—the only one not subject to regular review after a set term—by renewing it “until the end of the occupation.”

By Congressman Tim Walberg (D-MI) in today’s Washington Times:

In his budget message to Congress in January 1963, President Kennedy wrote, “Lower rates of taxation will stimulate economic activity and so raise the levels of personal and corporate income as to yield within a few years an increased — not a reduced — flow of revenues to the federal government.”
    Unfortunately new leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives has chosen to ignore Kennedy’s exemplary fiscal insight of years ago.
    Democrats in Congress are discounting advancements made possible by the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts passed by Congress and are trying to slap U.S. taxpayers with a $400 billion tax increase that will slow our economy’s current progress.
    If Democrats follow through on their budget promises, the American people will face the following:
    • A $500 per child tax increase.
    • A 55 percent Death Tax.
    • A 13 percent tax increase for many small businesses.
    • A 33 percent tax increase on capital gains.
    • A 164 percent tax increase on dividends.

Wait, I though Palestinian Arabs hated Israel because the Zionists are so mean to them.  

Palestinians run as they try to cross to the Israel side at the Erez Crossing, in the northern Gaza Strip, Saturday, June 16, 2007. Dozens of Palestinians converged on the Erez crossing with Israel on Saturday, trying to leave the Gaza Strip following Hamas’ takeover. At the same time, hundreds of people looted police positions on the Palestinian side of Erez, and at one point Israeli troops fired in the air to keep the crowd at bay. The looters walked off with furniture and scrap metal. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

Separately, these are pretty funny:

Hamas militants sit as they pose in the passport processing area of the terminal at the Rafah Border Crossing which is now controlled by Hamas militants, near Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, June 15, 2007. On its first day of full rule in Gaza, the Islamic militant Hamas on Friday granted amnesty to Fatah leaders, signaling that it seeks conciliation with the defeated forces of moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. (AP Photo/ Eyad Albaba)

 

A Hamas militant is seen inside of an X-ray machine in front of journalists in the passport processing area of the terminal at the Rafah Border Crossing which is now controlled by Hamas militants, near Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, June 15, 2007. (AP Photo/Hatem Omar, MaanImages)

Freaks!

Maybe if the EU would just stop sending Hamas money these impotent sissy lame-os would just starve to death.

Jimmy Carter has spent most of his adult life trying to advance the cause of marxism. Unfortunately for him, besides the occasional thugs like Castro and Chavez, there are few viable commie movements left for him to support.

Well, he’s found some more commies. And guess what - he wants the US to open a dialog with them.

From AFP:

Former US President Jimmy Carter called on his country’s government Saturday to establish relations with Nepal’s former rebel Maoists, who remain on a list of US terrorist organisations.

“My opinion is that the US should establish some communication with the Maoists. The people of Nepal have accepted them as political players,” Carter told journalists at the end of a four-day visit to Nepal.

It’s incredible he would even imagine calling for communication with a group he himself identifies as “Maoist.” I dont think anyone would call even the Chinese government Maoist anymore. Mao killed 70MM of his own citizens in peacetime - but still good enough for Jimmy?

And I’m not sure in what sense he thinks “the people of Nepal have accepted them…” According to the BBC the communist movement there is basically 10,000-15,000 roving militants. That’s in a country with 27MM people.

And by the way, why should the US ever have formal ties to a militant rebel group representing a tiny minority in a country we otherwise have good relations with? Should have a dialog with FARC militants in Columbia? How about neo-Nazis in Austria?

On a related note, Hillary “shares a laugh” with some facist supporters:

Democratic Presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) shares a laugh with supporters during a town hall meeting at Charles City Elementary School in Charles City, Iowa, May 25, 2007. REUTERS/Joshua Lott (UNITED STATES)

Czech President Vaclav Klaus in today’s FT:

We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.

The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists…

…Due to advances in technology, increases in disposable wealth, the rationality of institutions and the ability of countries to organise themselves, the adaptability of human society has been radically increased. It will continue to increase and will solve any potential consequences of mild climate changes.

I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”.

The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.

According to this Amnesty International graphic, the US is the worst violater of human rights in the world.

The US is cited in 6 categories: Torture, Extrajudicial Executions, Executions, Death Penalty, Discrimination and Violence against Women, and Arbitrary Detention.

Not sure why “Executions” and “Death Penalty” are both counted. Notably, several enthusiastic employeers of the death penalty are not cited for it - eg Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia.

The next worst offenders got cited for 4 each - including, of course, Israel. “Palestine” got 2, along with Iran.

Only 7 other countries, including almost no Muslim ones, are cited for “Discrimination and Violence against Women.” China, with its 150,000 forced abortions per year, apparently doesn’t have a violence against women problem.

Among the EU only Spain and the UK (of course) are cited, each once. North Korea’s record is squeaky clean.

From a National Review article (1994 article reprinted today) on Leftists’ views of the Soviet Union:

Lincoln Steffens laid down the liberal dictum decades ago when he declared: “Treason to the Tsar wasn’t a sin; treason to Communism is.”

Whether or not most American intellectuals would express that credo so openly, they clearly live by it. There was, for example, Professor Paul Samuelson’s confident assertion in 1976 that it was “a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable.” There was Professor Jerry Hough’s argument that Brezhnev’s regime was a modern pluralist state much like our own. Hough is most infamous for insisting in print and on television that the number of victims of Stalin’s purge was really rather low: “A figure in the low hundreds of thousands seems much more probable then one in the high hundreds of thousands, and even tens of thousands is quite conceivable, maybe even probable.”

There was John Kenneth Galbraith, the man of a thousand opinions, who wrote in 1984, just a few months before Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed an economic crisis: “That the Soviet system has made great material progress…is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene…One sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the streets. . . . Partly the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”

For the Princeton Sovietologist Stephen F. Cohen, the critical issue of the 1980s was not the invasion of Afghanistan, or the aiming of SS-18s and SS-2Os at Europe, or the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate, but the necessity of accepting Moscow’s proper place in the world community. He denied the Soviet Union was a “closed” society. In fact, Cohen claimed that the post-Stalin leadership enjoyed a high level of popular support because it had made good on basic promises like comprehensive welfare protection and improved living standards for each succeeding generation.

Such staggering statements continue to be made. In 1992, Sovietologist Robert W. Thurston roundly criticized a brochure that the Library of Congress published about a Soviet exhibit because it “highlighted only the repressive nature of the Soviet regime, ignoring its positive accomplishments.” “Nothing appeared,” he complained, “on the growth of education, upward social mobility, increased availability of medical care, urbanization or anything that might he considered positive.”

And from today’s WSJ:

The numbers are almost beyond reckoning. Mao Zedong was responsible for 70 million peacetime murders, according to his biographer Jung Chang. The middle estimate of Stalin’s victims is 40 million. Pol Pot slaughtered nearly three million fellow Cambodians in only four years. Ethiopia’s Mengistu killed some 1.5 million opponents in the late 1970s, and contributed to the death by starvation of a million others in the 1980s.

Throughout these and other horrors, Communists always managed to find high-profile apologists among the bourgeois intellectuals: Jean-Paul Sartre for Stalin, Noam Chomsky for Pol Pot, and so on. Some, like Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers, repented, but most did not. They may not have been witting accomplices to the butchery, quite. But they are the reason why the West was almost fatally late in recognizing the depth of evil it faced in its communist enemy.

Gore lectures on how Bush (I) lied about Saddam. 

Claims Bush ignored Richard Pearle, Saddam harbored terrorists, Iraq pursued nukes, et cetera, et cetera.