Petrified Truth

Too much information

Decoding the 39 ingredients in a Twinkie:

[I]t can be unsettling to learn just how closely the basic ingredients in processed foods resemble industrial materials.... In the end, you may learn more than you really wanted to about the Twinkie-Industrial Complex.

Critical skills

Will the "Tom Sawyer" effect keep Morse code alive? If not, how will we coordinate a worldwide counter-attack against invading alien spaceships?

Weak governor reaching too far

Here's a wrap-up of Rick Perry's often wrong-headed attempts to aggrandize power in the traditionally weak Texas governor's office.

Since he became governor in 2000, Perry has issued 65 executive orders. Most are the usual gubernatorial mix of disaster declarations, study task forces and flags flying at half-staff to honor the dead.

However, more than either of the previous two governors, Perry also has used executive orders to expand the power of his office, and his executive order mandating vaccinations against the human papillomavirus is not the first that over-stepped the Legislature.

At least four times, Perry has issued executive orders for state agencies to adopt policies that failed to pass in the Legislature....

[State Sen. Rodney] Ellis said Perry has been able to take a certain amount of additional power without asking because Republicans control the Legislature, hold every statewide office and Perry is the "titular" head of the Texas Republican Party.

"He hasn't had to work with the Legislature in the way that Ann Richards had to or even George W. Bush had to," Ellis said. "He probably figured he could just keep playing on that field and nobody would ask any questions."

Ellis said Perry's six years in office and his past successes created an aura of power, despite having won re-election with just 39 percent of the vote.

"In the case of Gov. Perry, perhaps he has some delusions of grandeur," Ellis said. "Regardless of the percentage you won by, you've been there so long you begin to get comfortable and think that you can just steamroll your way through the process."

We're still waiting for someone with standing to file a legal challenge to Perry's foolish 65-percent executive order that will damage our school districts in the name of "reform."

Meanwhile, former lieutenant governor Bill Hobby offers both a Texas hisory lesson about the fate of over-reaching governors and a simple conclusion.

Gov. Perry is pretty confused about the powers of the governor and the powers of the Legislature. In power struggles between the governor and the Legislature, the Legislature wins.

Posted by Alan at 10:31 AM

The Marines

How to build a "warrior culture" -- PBS showed us how tonight, via The Marines. Great stuff: informative, sobering, and inspiring, including the USMC martial arts instructor who lost both hands and returned to duty as a trainer. Check it out on your local PBS station.

"How the Warrior Culture is engrained and how it sets the Marines apart from other armed services branches are critical aspects of Marine development and understanding," said producer/writer/director John Grant. "This program offers an in-depth and unvarnished look at the rigorous physical and psychological training employed to create this tenaciously loyal, highly skilled breed of combatant ready to defend country and comrade at any cost."

Of note: the film is dedicated to Jason Dunham, recently honored with the Medal of Honor, posthumously.

Fireball

Driving home from a tasty seafood dinner at Jimmy Wilson's on Westheimer, we noticed a huge fireball over the northern horizon. It looked much closer than it turned out to be: according to KPRC-TV, it's a natural gas explosion near Cy-Springs High School way up in NW Harris County, almost 15 miles away. Amazing.

UPDATE: the Houston Chronicle has more: it involves a 31-inch pipeline. No reported injuries.

Sgt. James Rodney Tijerina, RIP

Several hundred residents of Katy gathered today at a funeral mass to pay last respects to Marine Sgt. James Rodney Tijerina, who was killed in Iraq by enemy fire while flying as crew chief on a medical evacuation helicopter.

• Katy Times - Iraqi war claims sixth native son

UPDATE:
• Houston Chronicle - Katy community says goodbye to a Marine

Targets

One of the consequences of not achieving victory in Iraq is that those who do accept our friendship can find themselves targets, like seven notable men who were special guests in Houston.

In spring 2004, seven Iraqis who had been brutalized by Saddam Hussein's regime came to Houston, where they got their amputated hands replaced with prosthetic devices. The men quickly became a local and national symbol of hope and healing in the early stages of the war.

In fact, after an Oval Office meeting with President Bush, during which the men so impressed the president that they became a triumphal note in his speeches on the war, they returned to Iraq to share their country's new future.

But since they were warmly embraced by Houston, their lives have become a harrowing, capsule version of the collapse of their homeland into danger, death and despair.

Some of the men are trying to get out of Iraq and possibly return to the United States. But they are finding little success in the bewildering process of escaping Iraq as political refugees.

"At this time I'm confined to my home. I cannot leave it as I fear for my life. Even the children are suffering to be enclosed all the time," one of the men, Nazar Joudi, said in a recent letter to an American friend.

Andy Garcia's Lost City

We watched a soulful, even poetic movie on DVD this weekend: Andy Garcia's labor of love, The Lost City. Garcia painstakingly recreates life in Havana, Cuba in the late 1950s, first under the punishing dictator Batista and then under the Communist tyrant Fidel Castro and his brutal henchman, Che Guevara.

• NPR - 'Lost City,' Andy Garcia's Homage to Havana
• National Review - Don’t Let This Movie Get Lost - Andy Garcia’s ode to Cuba y libertad.

Faith in Feith?

It was good to hear former Pentagon official Douglas Feith give a spirited defense of his office's pre-war intelligence analysis work today, in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.

WALLACE: Mr. Feith, the Pentagon inspector general says some of your intelligence was not supported by the evidence that came from the intelligence community. The 9/11 commission said a number of your conclusions were wrong. And the Senate Intelligence Committee also said it was wrong.

FEITH: Nobody ever claimed that what the 9/11 commission said was — the case was wrong. In other words, we didn't dispute the — the 9/11 commission report said there was no...

WALLACE: But they disputed you, sir.

FEITH: No, they didn't. Nobody in my office ever said there was an operational relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. It's just not correct. I mean, words matter. And people are throwing around loose allegations, vague allegations, based on not reading the words carefully.

WALLACE: Mr. Feith, I'm just taking comments from your PowerPoint. You said some indications of possible Iraqi coordination with Al Qaeda specifically related to 9/11. You said that the Atta-Ani meeting in Prague in 2001 was a known contact.

FEITH: The people who did that briefing were taking the position that the intelligence community took originally. The CIA later changed its views on that meeting after the time relevant here.

There's an enormous amount of misinformation about this subject. Your quote from the 9/11 commission report is significant. That did not contradict my office. Nobody in my office ever claimed there was an operational relationship.

There was a relationship. That relationship was summarized on October 7th, 2002, by George Tenet in a letter that he sent, unclassified, to the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, and it basically brought together what the CIA had been saying, what my people had been criticizing, and it summarized the Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship.

And we stood on that, and I think that that was the best information that the government had.

Andrew McCarthy says the Pentagon IG report shows we’re not serious about reform.

The [Inspector General] report is part big “so what” and part perfect illustration that Congress loves to talk about intelligence reform but cares little about reformed intelligence.

As for “so what”: The IG’s report concludes that a Pentagon unit which scrubbed existing intelligence about Iraq’s terror ties under the leadership of Doug Feith, then-Undersecretary for Policy, did not mislead Congress. It further finds that neither Feith nor any other Defense officials engaged in wrong-doing. Nevertheless, acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble huffs and puffs and contends that Feith’s unit still behaved “inappropriately.”

Why? Because it dared to question that which we now know for a fact was wrong: the Intelligence Community’s assessments about Iraq, and, in particular, the conventional wisdom that secular Saddam and his Baathists would never collude with Islamic fundamentalists....

[W]hat was so “inappropriate”? The people who actually had to fight the war had the audacity to conduct their own independent assessment of what we now know beyond cavil was the Intelligence Community’s appallingly sparse and shoddy work. Feith and his unit engaged in critical thinking (can’t have that!), and allegedly failed to register their disagreements in a fashion consistent with Intelligence Community protocols (i.e., the governing standards under which, in just the last two decades, the IC has missed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of India as a nuclear power, etc.).

Debates: real and unreal

Charles Krauthammer notes the despicable fakery that is baked into the so-called "debates" in Washington about the Iraq war and the President's new plan.

What is striking is how much of the debate in Washington about Iraq has to do not with the war but with the words. Who owns them, who deploys them, who uses them as a bludgeon.... The debates were not about real fighting in a real place. They were about how the various senators would position themselves in relation to that real fighting in that real place. At issue? With what tone and nuance and addenda to express disapproval of a troop surge that the president was going to order anyway.

When it came to doing something serious about the surge, the Senate ducked. It unanimously (81-0) approved sending Gen. David H. Petraeus to Baghdad to do the surge -- precisely what a majority of the senators said they did not want done.

If you really oppose the surge, how can you not oppose the appointment of the man whose very mission is to carry it out? Yet not one senator did so. Instead, they spent days fine-tuning the wording of a nonbinding -- i.e., entirely toothless -- expression of disapproval.

A serious legislative body would not be arguing over degrees of disapproval anyway, but about the elements of three or four alternative plans that might actually change our course in Iraq, something they all say they desire. But instead of making a contribution to thinking through how the war should be either prosecuted or liquidated, they negotiate language that provides precisely the amount of distancing a senator might need as political insulation should the surge either succeed or fail.

Meanwhile, the reality of the war proceeds on its own hard-edged pace. Our small community of Katy, Texas has experienced another military fatality.

A Marine from Katy died in a helicopter crash in Iraq on Wednesday. Sgt. James Rodney Tijerina, 26, crew chief on a medical evacuation helicopter, died when his CH-46 Sea Knight caught fire, spun out of control and crashed. The fire was caused by a mechanical failure, military officials told his father, Peter Tijerina, when they came to his home to deliver the news of his son's death on Wednesday.

James Tijerina was scheduled to return home to his station at Camp Pendleton in San Diego on March 20.

"He had no fear at all," said Peter Tijerina as he described his last conversation with his son in mid-January. "But he was tired and homesick."

James Tijerina decided to join the Marines in 2002 before the war in Iraq began. "He told me, 'That's what I want to do, Dad,' " Peter Tijerina said. " 'I want to go and fight.' "

His father said Tijerina was very proud to be a Marine. As a crew chief, he helped pick up wounded troops and take them to safety. "He was always expressing that he felt good about doing something good for all those people," he said.

Fake, nuanced "debates" in Washington do nothing to help Sgt. Tijerina's comrades who are still very much in the fight, and want to win, not retreat.

They are like Sgt. Eddie Jeffers, whose letter home ought to be finding its way into the real debate: what are the best ways to utterly defeat our enemies, or at least achieve the best possible outcome if outright victory is beyond our means for now?

Terrorists cut the heads off of American citizens on the internet...and there is no outrage, but an American soldier kills an Iraqi in the midst of battle, and there are investigations, and sometimes soldiers are even jailed...for doing their job.

It is absolutely sickening to me to think our country has come to this. Why are we so obsessed with the bad news? Why will people stop at nothing to be against this war, no matter how much evidence of the good we've done is thrown in their face? When is the last time CNN or MSNBC or CBS reported the opening of schools and hospitals in Iraq? Or the leaders of terror cells being detained or killed? It's all happening, but people will not let up their hatred of President Bush. They will ignore the good news, because it just might show people that Bush was right.

America has lost its will to fight. It has lost its will to defend what is right and just in the world. The crazy thing of it all is that the American people have not even been asked to sacrifice a single thing. It’s not like World War II, where people rationed food and turned in cars to be made into metal for tanks. The American people have not been asked to sacrifice anything. Unless you are in the military or the family member of a servicemember, its life as usual...the war doesn't affect you.

But it affects us. And when it is over and the troops come home and they try to piece together what's left of them after their service...where will the detractors be then? Where will the Cindy Sheehans be to comfort and talk to soldiers and help them sort out the last couple years of their lives, most of which have been spent dodging death and wading through the deaths of their friends? They will be where they always are, somewhere far away, where the horrors of the world can't touch them. Somewhere where they can complain about things they will never experience in their lifetime; things that the young men and women of America have willingly taken upon their shoulders.

We are the hope of the Iraqi people. They want what everyone else wants in life: safety, security, somewhere to call home. They want a country that is safe to raise their children in. Not a place where their children will be abducted, raped and murdered if they do not comply with the terrorists demands. They want to live on, rebuild and prosper. And America has given them the opportunity, but only if we stay true to the cause and see it to its end. But the country must unite in this endeavor...we cannot place the burden on our military alone. We must all stand up and fight, whether in uniform or not. And supporting us is more than sticking yellow ribbon stickers on your cars. It's supporting our President, our troops and our cause.

Right now, the burden is all on the American soldiers. Right now, hope rides alone. But it can change, it must change. Because there is only failure and darkness ahead for us as a country, as a people, if it doesn't.

Let's stop all the political nonsense, let's stop all the bickering, let's stop all the bad news and let's stand and fight!

Isn't that what America is about anyway?

Remembrance of things past

Critic A.N. Wilson considers the way J.R.R. Tolkien's writings are suffused with a profound sense of memory.

That there was an old world that has now passed away, a heroic world, snatches of which we hear only in half-comprehended song, is an ever-present awareness in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. He is the only modern writer of what might be termed fantasy-literature who conveys this sense – which we find in Virgil and is also present in the Beowulf poet — of a heroic past that is slipping out of memory.

[H]e made it his pastime to learn the older languages of northern Europe — Irish, Welsh, Norse, Old English, Gothic. The fragmentary nature of these language survivals, especially Gothic, is itself something that, if meditated on intelligently, could only produce a Tolkienian world perspective. You feel all the time that something has been lost — it has been lost partly through the passage of time, partly through human malice and wickedness. Language and poetry alone keep its half-memory echoing.

It's one of the key characteristics (and far more than a mere technique) of Tolkien's thought and works, yielding for the reader a deep feeling of authenticity and history, as opposed to mere fantasy.

Geography test

Here's your chance to prove you have the geography chops to be promoted to 4th grade. Go.

HPV worries

So, our blow-dried governor issued his aggressive executive order mandating HPV vaccinations for all Texas schoolgirls (aka "young women" who happen to be ages 11-12).

Now Texas physicians have weighed in, clearly sceptical about whether the time is right.

Gov. Rick Perry's order requiring schoolgirls to get inoculated against a sexually transmitted virus linked to cervical cancer may be unpopular with social conservatives, but another important group also is lining up against it: doctors.

From, among others, the Texas Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, many doctors are saying it's too early to mandate the vaccine, which was approved for use last June. It protects against four strains of the human papillomavirus that cause 70 percent of cervical cancers.

"We support physicians being able to provide the vaccine, but we don't support a state mandate at this time," said Dr. Bill Hinchey, a San Antonio pathologist and president-elect of the TMA, which represents 41,000 physicians. "There are issues, such as liability and cost, that need to be vetted first."

Other reasons cited by doctors in Texas and across the country include the vaccine's newness; supply and distribution considerations; the possibility opposition could snowball and lead to a reduction in other immunizations; the possibility it could lull women into not going for still-necessary cervical cancer screenings; gender-equity issues; and the tradition of vaccines starting as voluntary and becoming mandatory after a need is demonstrated....

[E]ducation needs to come first," said Dr. Joseph Bocchini, chairman of the AAP's committee on infectious disease. "Much of the public doesn't know about HPV and its link to cervical cancer and other diseases. You can't put a mandate ahead of that."

These are valid issues, as are concerns about executive vs. legislative power.

An STD shouldn't carry the death penalty, period.

Not so Super

Watch and vote for your favorite 2007 Super Bowl commercial, in a bracket format. There were a few bright spots this year, not all of which are listed on the MSNBC vote site, but generally it was a race to either oblivion or ignonimy.

UPDATE: AOL has an additional, but still not complete, set of the ad videos.

Ulster to Baghdad

Here's a report from London's Sunday Telegraph on an up-to-now secret success in Iraq, via our British allies.

Deep inside the heart of the "Green Zone", the heavily fortified administrative compound in Baghdad, lies one of the most carefully guarded secrets of the war in Iraq. It is a cell from a small and anonymous British Army unit that goes by the deliberately meaningless name of the Joint Support Group (JSG), and it has proved to be one of the Coalition's most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror.

Its members - servicemen and women of all ranks recruited from all three of the Armed Forces - are trained to turn hardened terrorists into coalition spies using methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles, when the Army managed to infiltrate the IRA at almost every level. Since war broke out in Iraq in 2003, they have been responsible for running dozens of Iraqi double agents.

Working alongside the Special Air Service and the American Delta Force as part of the Baghdad-based counter-terrorist unit known as Task Force Black, they have supplied intelligence that has saved hundreds of lives and resulted in some of the most notable successes against the myriad terror groups fighting in Iraq. Only last week, intelligence from the JSG is understood to have led to a series of successful operations against Sunni militia groups in southern Baghdad.

Iran caught in the act

Here's more evidence of trouble-making by Iran, the root of many, many problems in the Middle East.

Seven Iranian weapons experts were seized yesterday in a raid by Fatah-affiliated security forces on the Islamic University, a Hamas stronghold in Gaza City.

Amid an escalation in the confrontation between Hamas and Fatah Palestinian factions, an eighth Iranian was reported to have committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner.

Sources close to President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah said the Iranians included intelligence and chemical experts and a senior military officer.

The Israeli news site Y-Net quoted a Palestinian source as saying the officer was a general.