Saturday, March 11, 2006

Reading up on Islam

Marvin Olasky wrote in Townhall Since 9-11, I've received numerous letters like this recent one: "What can be done to help educate people on the dangers that radical Islam poses to Western civilization? I don't think this ideological conflict will go away."

No, it won't. It is likely to be for the first half of the 21st century what the Cold War was for the last half of the 20th -- a long, subtle struggle with occasional days of fire.
There were no planes flown into buildings, or suicide bombers, or any of the other such stuff going on during the cold war, so I don't know what you mean about "occasional days of fire".
How to educate folks? Use of all media will be needed, but here's a list of books I've read and found useful. There are many more that I haven't read.

First, to understand radical Islam, some sense of basic Islam is essential, and that starts with the Quran. Muslims insist that unless you've read it in Arabic, you haven't read it.
That is foolishness. I dont need to know Greek and Latin, much less Ancient Hebrew and Arameic to read the Bible.
Maybe so, but in theology as well as in horseshoes, leaners are better than nothing, so I'd recommend either reading a translation on the Internet
Such as this site that has three different translations (Yusufali, Pickthal, and Shakir)
or buying the new Quran translation by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem that came out last year in paperback from Oxford University Press. Some scholars now ask tough questions about the Quran's historicity. As I type with one hand, I'm holding in the other John Wainsbrough's "Quranic Studies" (2004) and Ibn Warraq's "The Origins of the Koran" (1998). Warraq left Islam after coming to believe the Muhammad story was a sham, and his books include "Why I Am Not a Muslim" (1995), "The Quest for the Historical Muhammad" (2000) and "Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out" (2003).
I don't know whether Muhammad is a sham or not, but certainly the twisted version of Islam the Islamofascists are pushing is totally unrelated to true Islam.
Second in importance within Islam after the Quran are the Hadith, massive works delineating how Muhammad supposedly dressed, ate, ingested and excreted food
That is really more than I want to know.
and drink, and so forth.

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Clerics demand cartoon apology

The Daily Telegraph Only an official apology by the Danish government to all Muslims for offence caused by the prophet Mohammad cartoons would prompt the lifting of the boycott of Danish goods, Muslim preachers said.
Why should the government apologize; they did not print the cartoons. And if they do apologize, are the clerics going to apologize for burning down embassies, and are they going to raise the funds to rebuild those embassies.
An official apology “is absolutely necessary ... because your government has not dealt with them (Muslims) respectfully,”
If you want respect, you need to show respect.
Islamic scholar Tareq al-Suweidan told a conference hosted by the Government in an attempt to ease tension over the drawings.

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President Bush on the Straw Ballot

MSNBC reported It's early on at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference down here, but already we've learned some big news. Sources tell me that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., plans to shock his supporters tonight by asking them to NOT vote for him in the presidential straw poll that will be conducted by The Hotline on Saturday. Instead, McCain will urge his followers to write in President Bush's name. McCain will tell his supporters that this is not about 2008, but rather about 2006 and supporting the president.
I have mixed emotions as to whether or not McCain can be trusted, but this is an absolutely brilliant thing for him to do. I doubt that Bush will get involved in 2008 before a candidate is selected, and he probably would have campaigned for McCain if he was the candidate just to thank him for his support in 2004, but this should guarantee that.
According to McCain's supporters, he'll say: "I think we have bigger things to worry about. So if any friends here are thinking about voting for me, please don't. Just write in President Bush's name."

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Muslim Says Violence Destroys Islam

NYT reported Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims. Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some,

The intelligent, moderate Muslims
and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.
The stupid Islamofascists
In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.
She is absolutely right.
She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.
I would be interested to know exactly what she thinks of the Jews. We are all "People of the Book" (or ahl al Kitâb) Surat Al 'Imran, 64 (Qur'an 3:64) says "O People of the Book! Let us rally to a common formula to be binding on both us and you: That we worship none but God; that we associate no partners with Him; that we erect not, from among ourselves, Lords and patrons other than God." Surat al-Baqara, 136 (Qur'an 2:136) says Say ye: "We believe in Allah, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Isma'il, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that given to (all) prophets from their Lord: We make no difference between one and another of them.
Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.
But unfortunately a lot of good people may lose their lives first.
In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.

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Thursday, March 09, 2006

Church fires started as 'joke'

CNN reported Three Birmingham college students were arrested and charged Wednesday in connection with a string of Alabama church fires that is described in court papers as a joke that 'got out of hand,' authorities said.

A joke? What is funny about a burning church? Maybe you should draw us a cartoon so we will understand.

"We don't think that there is any type of conspiracy against organized religion or against the Baptists or against religious beliefs in particular," Riley said. "I think that, today, Alabama and all of the faith-based community in this state can rest a little easier."

That might be believable if they had burned down one or two churches, plus a number of secular buildings, but nine or 10 churches, and it wasn't related to religion?

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Negative Perception Of Islam Increasing

WaPo reports As the war in Iraq grinds into its fourth year,

What does that have to do with it?
a growing proportion of Americans are expressing unfavorable views of Islam,
What favorable views of Islam have we been presented with?
and a majority now say that Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence,
I wonder if the riots, killings, and burning of embassies (and KFC Chicken stores) because of a few cartoons being printed in Europe had anything to do with that.
according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The poll found that nearly half of Americans -- 46 percent -- have a negative view of Islam,
And the other half have not been paying attention.
seven percentage points higher than in the tense months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Muslims were often targeted for violence.
But when there were many of us counseling caution, because we knew that all Muslims were not like the ones that flew the planes. And had the moderate ones stood up to the extremists a few more times in the past four or five years, more would be on their side.

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Pot calling kettle black

NYT reported China today criticized the human rights record of the United States, arguing that racial discrimination remained pervasive

There may be some racism, but it is localized and not sanctioned by law, as it once was.
and that the American military abused prisoners held at detention centers abroad.
America treats terrorists prisoners better than China treats its own citizens.
In a sharply worded response to the annual State Department report on human rights conditions globally, which was released in Washington on Wednesday, China's State Council, or Cabinet, said the American government should concentrate on improving its own rights record.

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Wednesday, March 08, 2006

The teachers unions are mad at me

John Stossel wrote in Townhall "Teachers unions are mad at me. The New York State United Teachers demands I apologize for my 'gutter level' journalism, 'an irresponsible assault on public school students and teachers.' This is because I hosted an ABC News TV special titled 'Stupid in America,' which pointed out:

-- American fourth graders do well on international tests, but by high school, Americans have fallen behind kids in most other countries.

That is because No Child Left Behind, from Bush's first administration, focused on the lower grade levels. He planned to carry it to high school this term, but could not get the support he needed.
The constant refrain that 'public schools need more money' is nonsense.
The more they have, the more they can waste.
Many countries that spend significantly less on education do better than we do. School spending in America (adjusted for inflation) has more than tripled over the past 30 years, but national test scores are flat. The average per-pupil cost today is an astonishing $10,000 per student -- $200,000 per classroom! Think about how many teachers you could hire, and how much better you could do with that amount of money."
Give every child a $10,000 voucher, and let him spend it on the school that could teach him the best with it.
It doesn't have to be that way. We know what works: choice. That's what's brought Americans better computers, phones, movies, music, supermarkets -- most everything we have. Schoolchildren deserve the joyous benefits of market competition too.

Unions say, "education of the children is too important to be left to the vagaries of the market." The opposite is true. Education is too important to be left to the calcified union/government monopoly.
That is absolutely true.

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Congress Votes to Renew Patriot Act, With Changes

WaPo reported Congress voted yesterday to renew a four-year-old anti-terrorism law that makes it easier for federal agents to secretly obtain Americans' records and communications, even as some lawmakers warned that voters are growing increasingly concerned about protecting civil liberties during the fight against terrorism. The reauthorization would make permanent all but two of the Patriot Act's provisions. The Senate, in which four Republicans joined most Democrats in pushing for greater safeguards, insisted on four-year sunsets of the FBI's authority to conduct "roving wiretaps" of targets with multiple phones or e-mail devices,

That is foolish. Roving wiretaps, where a court order to tap one phone extends to all other phones the person may have, including throw-away cellular phones, makes good sense, and it should be made permanent.
and of the government's powers to seize business records with the FISA court's approval.

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Tuesday, March 07, 2006

MSN adCenter: Customers With Firefox Might Not Get Tracked

Search Engine Watch reported It annoyed me a few weeks ago when I signed up for the MSN adCenter pilot that Firefox wasn't supported. That was still the case with the open adCenter sign-up today and annoyed one of my readers Paul Holstein, as well. Firefox users also get treated to a warning that Firefox is "unable to verify the identity of adcenter.msn.com as a trusted site"

Who really "trusts" anything Microsoft does?
if they try to enter adCenter. Paul came across a similar but more serious warning that could alienate Firefox users, one that may appear if advertisers make use of adCenter's conversion tracking script on their own pages.

Here's what Paul emailed me:
Did you know that MSN ad center is not Firefox compliant? This should come as no surprise but the kicker is that the conversion tracking is not compliant either. Therefore, any merchant using the conversion tracking script will run into problems with their Firefox customers.

When they purchase something, they will be told that the merchant is pretending to be r.microsoft.com. Needless to say, this will be a problem for at least 10% of a merchant's customers.

We called MSN and spoke to them. Their official solution is that we should switch all our customer service reps to IE6 and alert our customers that they should only use IE6 to purchase from us.
Why on earth should someone revert back to an outdated browser that does not have many of the features that have caused so many customers to abandon it and go to Firefox instead. I believe the proper solution is the vendor should dump MSN adCenter.
Hmm, that doesn't sound like a practical solution to me.
It is not, but it is typical Microsoft. Back when they were threatened by people switching to Netscape they made the FrontPage publishing software screw up websites if they were viewed from Netscape, but work fine with IE, hoping web site owners would encourage people to only use IE when visiting their site. In my opinion the solution was to dump Front Page, and find a web publishing program that worked regardless of what browser the viewer wanted to use.

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Critics attack Academy for Brokeback snub

Times Online reports Leading US critics have questioned whether Hollywood is yet ready to give its biggest prize to a gay love story after the race drama Crash grabbed the Best Picture Oscar at the 78th Academy Awards last night.
Maybe the Academy voters voted for what they thought was the best movie, rather than making a political statement that some wish had been made.
Brokeback Mountain, the story of unfulfilled love between two gay cowboys that was nominated in eight categories, had been the runaway favourite for the award after cleaning up in the Golden Globes and Baftas.
I believe one of those is the result of votes by International Press. Maybe that is why it is the UK site Times Online is so shocked that the American Academy voters picked a different movie as being the best.
But although it won three Oscars, including the Best Director award for the Taiwanese Ang Lee, the year's most talked-about film ended up losing on the final prize of the night.

"Perhaps the truth really is, Americans don’t want cowboys to be gay," said Larry McMurtry, the veteran Western writer who shared the award for best adapted screenplay.
Maybe it goes even further than that. Maybe we dont want to see homosexuality shoved in our faces at the movies or anywhere else.

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Bush Proposes Law to Give the President Line-Item Veto Power

WaPo reported Seeking to reassert his party's scuffed reputation for fiscal conservatism, President Bush yesterday proposed a law giving him authority to veto individual items in legislation as a way to curb fast-growing federal spending.
I support giving the president the same power most governors have, especially considering how earmarks have been abused, but I would prefer the Constitutional Ammendment approach.
Bush, who has never exercised his veto power in more than five years as president, said the line-item veto would give him authority to clamp down on special-interest items, known on Capitol Hill as earmarks, increasingly slipped into legislation to benefit the home districts of lawmakers. Congress passed legislation authorizing the line-item veto in 1996, but the Supreme Court struck it down as an unconstitutional abridgement of the separation of powers shortly after it was enacted by President Bill Clinton. By requiring that the cuts made by the president be approved by Congress, the White House believes it will avoid any constitutional problems with the new legislation.
If a bunch of legislators have slipped in earmarks for their states or region, what makes you think they are going to vote to sustain a veto. That is why I prefer the Constitutional Ammendment approach.

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Monday, March 06, 2006

Moonbats Lose

Michelle Malkin blogged Good news just in via Breitbart/Reuters:
A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that universities that get federal funds must allow military recruiters on campus, even if their law schools oppose the Pentagon's policy prohibiting openly gays and lesbians from serving. The high court upheld as constitutional a federal law dating back to 1994 that allows the government to withhold money from universities that deny military recruiters the same access to campuses given to other employers.
Via How Appealing: "Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. delivered the opinion of the Court. You can access the syllabus here; the Chief Justice's opinion here; and the oral argument transcript here."

Reader Paula D. writes:
The Chief Justice shows some brilliant and biting wit, shredding the argument of the law schools in this excerpt from the opinion: "…Nothing about recruiting suggests that law schools agree with any speech by recruiters, and nothing in the Solomon Amendment restricts what the law schools may say about the military’s policies. We have held that high school students can appreciate the difference between speech a school sponsors and speech the school permits because legally required to do so, pursuant to an equal access policy… …Surely students have not lost that ability by the time they get to law school."

ZING!!
I bet it really chaps the left wing law schools that the decision was unanimous.

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Track a package via Google Maps

TechBlog Isnoop has come up with a very slick combination of Google Maps, package tracking and RSS. Input a tracking number from UPS, FedEx, USPS, or Airborne/DHL here and it will generate both a Google map showing the package's location and an RSS feed so you can continue watching. The input page is incredibly simple: A few lines of instruction and a blank field. Then again, what more do you need?

This looks like a very useful service.

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The realities of social strata hit Houston

Danny Carlton blogged From Newsweek...

...as devastating as Katrina has been for the administration, its impact has been far more visceral in those communities that received tens of thousands of evacuees overnight. In cities stretching from Atlanta to San Antonio, good will has often given way to the crude reality of absorbing a traumatized and sometimes destitute population. In Baton Rouge, which added 100,000 people to a pre-Katrina population of 225,000, residents bemoan the loss of the city's small-town feel and worry that trailer-park settlements will become permanent fixtures of blight. In Dallas, the city housing authority began offering rent vouchers to some of its 20,000 evacuees, only to become quickly overwhelmed and fail to pay landlords, prompting a number of eviction notices. But perhaps no city has been as convulsed as Houston, which took in the greatest number of survivors. As some see it, the city is suffering from "compassion fatigue." Public services are overwhelmed, city finances are strained and violent crime is on the rise.
Is that surprising? New Orleans was known for its crime problem relative to its size, and when criminals move to a new area they don't become good citizens.
When city leaders in New Orleans made comments two weeks ago suggesting that they wanted only hardworking evacuees to return,
The mayor certainly wants hard working blacks to return, because the "Chocolate" nature of New Orleans has become a lot whiter than it used to be, and he fears he will not be reeleted. If he is defeated, will that be because he is black, or because he did such a bad job as mayor.
some Houston city-council members erupted in protest—fearing that politicians in the Big Easy were trying to stick Houston with their undesirables.
It was not just Houston; they wanted to stick any other city with its undesirables. I have a good friend who did a lot to help the Katrina Evacuees that came to Tulsa, and she told me that of the 100 she has helped find housing , clothes, and furniture, only one has even looked for a job. The rest are content to mooch on food stamps and welfare. And I don't even know what color the 100 are. I know my friend, who is working so hard to help them, is black, but there were poor whites as well as poor blacks that left New Orleans after Katrina.
As unpleasant as the thought may be to many people, the truth remains that there will always be a segment of the population that drag on the rest. They'll demand much more than they'll ever be willing to give to society, and the rest of us will have to carry them. Unfortunately, politics being the nasty animal that it is, race has played a major role in our denial of that fact since the "victim mentality" the Civil Right Industry has perpetuated on Blacks in American has caused so many more of them to assume the world owes them a good time. While worshipping Martin Luther King, jr almost as a deity,
But ignoring what he said.
the Civil Rights Industry and their followers ignore his admonition that people should be judged by the content of the character, not the color of their skin. So when any group designated as socially undesirable contains a higher than desired number of Black people, it's assumed that the designation of the group is racist, in spite of the fact that it is the very content of character that creates the designation, not the color of skin.
Precisely. The black woman that I spoke of, who is helping 100 Katrina families, knows how much she is being taken advantage of, yet she continues to do everything she can to help them: taking them to doctor's appointments, etc. I judge her not by the color of her skin, but by her character, and in my opinion she is an Earth Angel; a human whose heart is so filled with God's love, that he can send them to do a job that he would otherwise have to send a Celestial Angel to do.
What's not being voice overly loud is the fact that those Black Americans who exemplify the best of America, have already risen above the tragedy of Katrina by their own ingenuity and hard work. They get little attention, and most have already returned to New Orleans.
And those that have found a better opportunity in another city and who have decided to stay there, will be an asset to that city.
It's sad that they should get so little attention because they not only are a credit to their race (oh, how I hate using that phrase, because it sounds so belittling) but they are a credit to all races, and America in general. Instead our attention is focused on those that remain under the care of other cities, stubbornly sitting and waiting until someone else comes along and does for them what they are more than capable of doing for themselves.

It's sad that what used to exist to help Black people has become the very thing that hurts them the most. It used to be that you could address the problem of those that demanded more from society than they were wiling to give, and eventually convince some to join the rest of us, making their lives better. But anymore to do so puts one at risk of being called a racist. The key to unlock the chains has been melted down and made into more chains.
The lazy poor are not limited to blacks; there are many lazy whites as well. But the lazy blacks can call you names when you point out they are lazy.

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Kabuki Congress

NYT Imagine being stopped for speeding and having the local legislature raise the limit so you won't have to pay the fine. It sounds absurd, but it's just what is happening to the 28-year-old law that prohibits the president from spying on Americans without getting a warrant from a judge.

Or at least that is what the traitors at the NYT, that exposed the secret program would hope you are stupid enough to believe. I hope that the reporters and editors are prosecuted for what they did.
It's a familiar pattern. President Bush ignores the Constitution and the laws of the land, and the cowardly, rigidly partisan majority in Congress helps him out by rewriting the laws he's broken.

In 2004, to take one particularly disturbing example, Congress learned that American troops were abusing, torturing and killing prisoners, and that the administration was illegally detaining hundreds of people at camps around the world. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, huffed and puffed about the abuse, but did nothing. And when the courts said the detention camps do fall under the laws of the land, compliant lawmakers simply changed them.
Are you referring to the McCain bill that not only forbid torturing, but also embarrasing or ofending their prisoners?
Now the response of Congress to Mr. Bush's domestic wiretapping scheme is following the same pattern, only worse.

At first, lawmakers expressed outrage at the warrantless domestic spying, and some Democrats and a few Republicans still want a full investigation. But the Republican leadership has already reverted to form. Senator Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has held one investigative hearing, notable primarily for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's refusal to answer questions.
The AG testified to that committee. Some of his testamony may have been in closed session, which ticks the NYT off, because it can't use that testamony to expose any more of America's secrets.
Mr. Specter then loyally produced a bill that actually grants legal cover, retroactively, to the one spying program Mr. Bush has acknowledged. It also covers any other illegal wiretapping we don't know about — including, it appears, entire "programs" that could cover hundreds, thousands or millions of unknowing people.
Mr. Specter's bill at least offers the veneer of judicial oversight from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Actually Specter's bill is the noxious one, because it would require everything to go through court, and the AG has already testified they cannot get the necessary paperwork, with the details required by the FISA court, prepared in 72 hours.
A far more noxious proposal being floated by Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, would entirely remove intelligence gathering related to terrorism from the law on spying, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
That is what is needed, or if they want to keep the FISA court in the loop, they need to reduce the amount of proof that needs to be provided in the 72 our period.
Let's call this what it is: a shell game. The question is whether the Bush administration broke the law by allowing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans and others in the United States without obtaining the required warrant. The White House wants Americans to believe that the spying is restricted only to conversations between agents of Al Qaeda and people in the United States. But even if that were true, which it evidently is not, the administration has not offered the slightest evidence that it could not have efficiently monitored those Qaeda-related phone calls and e-mail messages while following the existing rules.
The NYT is not telling the truth.
In other words, there is not a shred of proof that the illegal program produced information that could not have been obtained legally, had the administration wanted to bother to stay within the law.
No there has been testamony as to why they could not follow the FISA requirements, but the NYT refuses to consider it.

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For Democrats, Many Verses, but No Chorus

NYT From Arizona to Pennsylvania, from Colorado to Connecticut, Democratic candidates for Congress are reading from a stack of different scripts these days.

They know the National party does not have any new ideas, other than hatred for Bush, so the grass roots hope they can grow something in 2006 that might give them a chance in 2008

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Sunday, March 05, 2006

AOL hanging up on dial-up customers?

CNET News AOL recently informed customers that beginning next month, AOL will charge dial-up subscribers $25.90 per month. The price won't be that much of a shock, since it's $2 more than those dial-up customers are paying now.
And anyone stupid enough to pay AoL $23.95 is probably stupid enough to pay them $25.95, even though AoL is using it as a cash cow to enable it to offer Dial Up for $10 through it's Netscape brand name.
More important, it's equal to what high-speed DSL (digital subscriber line) or cable subscribers pay to get AOL services such as e-mail and customer support along with high-speed Internet access.
It is certainly what AoL DSL customers pay for the faster than dialup, but clearly slower than real cable service gets.
The price jump shows just how important it is to the Internet giant to get more of its customers onto broadband. It has led to an obvious question for longtime AOL customers: Who wouldn't move to broadband when it costs the same price? "Given their overall strategy in the Web portal business, (AOL) wants fewer, if any, dial-up customers," said Allen Weiner, an analyst at Gartner. "I think it is part of a strategy to basically shake out of its base the people who are likely high-speed subscribers." AOL makes no bones about the fact that it is trying to encourage people to upgrade to faster service so they can better view the bandwidth-intensive content on the AOL site. "The hope is that we'll be encouraging users to upgrade to broadband because a majority of them will be able to get high-speed connections," said AOL spokeswoman Anne Bentley. But the move could anger some price-sensitive, casual Internet users who will resent paying more for a slower service, Weiner said. "Disincentives are a tragically bad way to go about things," he added. Of course, that may not be a serious concern to the planners at AOL. It has been losing dial-up subscribers for several years as prices for high-speed access have dropped, from 26 million U.S. subscribers in 2002 to 19.5 million in 2005. DSL is priced between $15 and $40 or higher per month, compared with dial-up prices of $4 to $10 a month. About 5 million people in the U.S. pay $15 per month for an AOL subscription and then pay a different Internet service provider for high-speed Internet access under AOL's Bring Your Own Access plan, Bentley said.
People that pay $15 a month for AoL without a connection are really fools. Most AoL services are available to anyone with their own connetion for free, and for those that are restricted (like email), their broadband provider probably has a better service as a part of its connection.
By bundling high-speed access and AOL service for $25.90 a month, AOL is offering a package alternative to members who are now paying for their AOL service and high-speed access separately.

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White House Trains Efforts on Media Leaks

WaPo reports The Bush administration, seeking to limit leaks of classified information, has launched initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources.
It's about time
The efforts include several FBI probes, a polygraph investigation inside the CIA and a warning from the Justice Department that reporters could be prosecuted under espionage laws.
I hope that some are. Also they should see about going after congressional staffers or even legislators that leak secret information.
In recent weeks, dozens of employees at the CIA, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have been interviewed by agents from the FBI's Washington field office, who are investigating possible leaks that led to reports about secret CIA prisons and the NSA's warrantless domestic surveillance program, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with the two cases.

The Jawa Report blogged Crackdown On Leakers Has MSM Panties All Bunched Up
Of coures. they are lazy, and would prefer people to leak them infiromation so they dont have to work for it.
Excellent news! It's past time for such a crackdown, as recent leaks of classified material to the New York Times amply demonstrate. And no doubt we can count on the Patriots of the Press to fully engage and help the government root out the traitors who disclose secret tactics and strategies to our enemies. Well, perhaps in an alternate universe
Perhaps if a few editors and reporters were in jail, they might change their tune
The unauthorized release of classified materials to the press is treason. And treason has never been an American value, except that is, among certain elements of the mainstream press, who value circulation and book sales over the security of their countrymen.

Kevin Drum blogged This is why I think we need a federal shield law for reporters. Unfortunately, it's also why we're not likely to get one.
One wonders whether Kevin would be equally in favor of a federal shield law if the Democrats held the White House and both houses of Congress.
Let me say this flatly: Leaks are good. They are the way we hold paranoid and secretive governments accountable.
And the way that "Hate America" Democrats can endanger American Security.
Historically, leaks have virtually never harmed national security in even a minor way, despite plenty of shrill commentary to the contrary. Reporters should be allowed to print them without fear of being tossed in jail.
I don't know about historically, but the NYT leak about the NSA listening in on interenational calls involving Al Qaeda certainly did hurt our security.
If the Bush administration succeeds in changing this tradition — and tradition is all it is at the moment — we will all have lost a very great deal.

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