Presidential hopeful John Kerry is running around the country talking about renewable energy, like wind and solar power, proposing we get 20% of all our energy from renewable sources by 2020. He calls it "Twenty by '20," or something to that effect. Yeah, I suppose that's something I could get behind. Having seen the big wind farm at South Point on the Big Island of Hawai'i (the southernmost tip of the United States, and quite a windy locale), I think that if there's a suitable windy location, yeah, put up a wind farm. It won't provide all of the energy a population might need, but it would certainly help. But will the Senator bow to the liberal elite on the proposed Camp Wind windmill farm on Horseshoe Shoal, seven miles off Nantucket Island? Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard residents are complaining that the wind farm will ruin their respective views. Awwww, po' wittle ewitists. They whine and complain about getting away from fossil fuel consumption, but when offered the chance to do so in their own backyard, they don't want it because it's not aesthetically pleasing. Seems someone wants to have it both ways. Myron Ebell, of the free-market environmental think tank, Competitive Enterprise Institute: bq. "People think if you live in the right area you don't have to put up with anything. Well, where are they going to get their energy? From little squirrels in wheels?" (Thanks, Rick)

From the Religion-of-Peace department: the leader of Europe's largest mosque stated support for suicide bombings against Israel in a recent sermon, as well as in an interview granted to an Italian daily. It is so refreshing to see Muslim leaders extending the hands of brotherhood and tolerance, when so many around the world have done the same for them. I suppose the difference is that those Muslim hands hold detonators and knives...

D. James Kennedy reports on recent U.S. Department of Education guidelines "that require the Secretary of Education to issue guidance on constitutionally protected prayer in elementary and secondary schools. These guidelines clarify what it is that public school students are allowed to do on campus." He goes on to offer an outstanding layman's overview of the whole "separation of church and state" issue, and why that is a complete fallacy.

Barbra Streisand is suing a fellow environmentalist. Why? Because he took an aerial photograph of her Malibu coastline estate. Along with 12,000 other pictures of the California coastline, all as part of creating an aerial photographic survey of the coastline to document erosion over time. Shhhhhh. Don't anyone tell Barbrat about the Keyhole spy satellites the NSA could retask to sit over Malibu if it wanted...

"Congressman flies U.N. flag" Sam Farr has done more in his six terms (about six too many) to undermine American sovereignty than former General Secretary President Klinton did in his eight years in office.

"If the U.N. didn't exist, we'd be inventing it right now," Farr told the San Francisco Chronicle, calling the U.N. "the only way to build up the infrastructure around the globe for the human rights, labor, environmental conditions that are fair and equitable." Gee, Representative Farr, just like the U.N. is doing in Iraq right now? Like it did so successfully in Vietnam? Somalia? Rwanda? "We've got to do everything in our power to make the U.N. the leadership body it was intended to be. ... This president has no respect for the United Nations." Nor should he. Representative Farr, name one conflict the United Nations has successfully mediated to a resolution that benefited all of the people involved. You have until the next election, and if you need more time, I'm sure we can give you all you need. After toppling Saddam Hussein with the assistance of about 40 other countries who formed a "coalition of the willing," the U.S. returned to the Security Council this month to resume international diplomacy over the issue of sanctions. On Thursday, the 15-member council appeared to smooth the rift over Iraq by passing a resolution that approved the U.S.-led administration of the country. Yes, after the U.S. and its allies did all the dirty work, the U.N. decides it wants to play ball. "Reform of the U.N. is impossible. The U.N. and its agencies are fatally flawed," maintains Phyllis Kaminsky, a U.S. delegate to the Human Rights Commission and a Reagan administration official. Indeed. The U.N. has demonstrated its ineptitude in handling the Iraq situation, including its mismanagement of the entire oil-for-food program, which did little to put food on the table of a majority of Iraqis, while continuing to line Hussein's pockets. Oh, and regarding your income-tax payments this year: "Americans should take notice when pro-U.N. forces in Washington recently spent $600,000 of taxpayers' money to renovate the kitchen of the ambassador's Waldorf-Astoria apartment," Snyder said. "I bet Julia Child's kitchen didn't cost 600 grand."

Colonel David Hackworth (USA-Retired) reports on the sissifying of the elite Army Rangers.

While the rest of the U.S. Army has lowered its standards to the point where seasoned war vets find today's combat training a joke and the crusty salts who fought at Anzio, Osan and Dak To refer to what passes for most training as "an invitation to get killed," Rangers have fought lowering the training bar and have consistently turned out hardened studs whom commanders in the field would fight to get.

That is until Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, the guy who runs Fort Benning today, was told by a few recent Ranger graduates that they were turned off by Ranger School because some of their RIs were meanies and actually yelled and cursed at them and even made them do pushups when they goofed up. Others complained in writing that they'd been sleep-deprived and that the training was too difficult.

For the record, the RIs--hardened vets who know what it takes to win and walk away alive--were merely following the battle-tested Darby practices of creating maximum stress, teaching attention to detail and passing on the proven tactics and techniques that have worked so splendidly for our Rangers in a bunch of bad scraps. Just for the record, applying for and attending Ranger School is strictly a volunteer activity, just like joining the Army itself. If you're not being physically abused or racially slandered, what are you complaining about? The old rumination on heat and the kitchen comes to mind. One can only hope that Eaton is retired--er, retires, soon, before he gets any of our boys killed due to ill preparation and training.

Too often during Memorial Day ceremonies, we tend to overlook those who survive the men and women who sacrificed their all for our nation. Michelle Malkin takes a look at some of the different organizations that assist military survivors, along with contact information, should you wish to lend financial or other support.

On this Memorial Day, please take some time out to remember those who have sacrificed all on behalf of our nation, as well as those they have left behind. Freedom is not free.

Despite ABC's upcoming fall show of the same name, the real Threat Matrix is a document the President reads each morning.

The crux of their briefings is the document formally titled "Terrorist Threats to U.S. Interests Worldwide," or more informally, the "Daily Threat Matrix."

[...]

The document is "a list of every threat directed at the United States in the past 24 hours," Mueller said.

Government officials familiar with the Matrix, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described it as a daily compendium of a few pages to 30 or more. Each threat is entered in tabular format, with those considered the most severe listed first.

Yet again, in light of all the whining coming from the Demobrats over the just-passed federal tax cut: * unconstitutional spending causes deficits * unconstitutional spending causes deficits * unconstitutional spending causes deficits Did I happen to mention that unconstitutional spending causes deficits? Putting money back in to the pockets of those actually paying taxes, i.e., the top 50% of all those collecting a paycheck, does not constitute a deficit problem. Speaking of those actually paying taxes, yes, these tax cuts favor "the rich," if you consider a dual-income married couple with two kids bringing in around $125,00 a year "rich." Those are the people actually paying taxes; a single-income married couple with two kids bringing in only $18,000 a year is paying very little, if any, income tax. Stop your whining, your leftist sociocrats, and work toward cutting out those programs and departments that the federal government is unconstitutionally funding. And this goes for several members of the Republican party as well. Cut the pork, and the deficit will go down. Speaking of bringing down the deficit, riddle me this: what was the Clinton administration doing to lead the country to better fiscal management? Clinton supporters have long pointed to how, during the Clinton administration, our federal government ran a "surplus." Government should never have a surplus--it says either the government doesn't have its fiscal priorities in order, or the citizenry is over-taxed, or both. Why wasn't this surplus going toward paying down the national debt? That would have shown good financial sense.

So many blasting the New York Times, so little time... Ann Coulter:

The Times has now willingly abandoned its mantle as the "newspaper of record," leapfrogging its impending technological obsolescence. It was already up against the Internet and Lexis-Nexis as a research tool. All the Times had left was its reputation for accuracy.

As this episode shows, the Times is not even attempting to preserve a reliable record of events. Instead of being a record of history, the Times is merely a "record" of what liberals would like history to be--the Pentagon in crisis, the war going badly, global warming melting the North Pole, and protests roiling Augusta National Golf Club. Publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger has turned the paper into a sort of bulletin board for Manhattan liberals. Jonah Goldberg: The Times says that this episode marks a "a low-point in the 152-year history of the newspaper." For Times worshippers, this was an admirable admission of wrongdoing. But we skeptics want to know if this blow to the Times' reputation outranked, say, the newspaper's deliberate downplaying of the Holocaust?

Did this "journalistic fraud" exceed the Pulitzer-winning deception of Walter Duranty, the Times correspondent who explicitly lied about Stalin's purges and forced famines? How about correspondent Herbert Matthews, who promised the world that the rebel-leader Fidel Castro wasn't a communist, even as Castro slaughtered innocents and struck deals with the Soviets?

There's nothing wrong with admitting that this Blair fiasco is a big deal, but no one died because of anything Blair wrote. It seems the egos of a few execs are on par with the deaths of millions. Marvin Olasky: Venerable Times columnist William Safire defended his employer and suggested that the Blair affair is allowing conservative critics to practice schadenfreude, what Germans call "the guilty pleasure one secretly takes in another's suffering." That's clever and it might be true, except that the influence of the Times is such that when it fails, millions of innocent people suffer.

In the early 1930s, for example, Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty helped Joseph Stalin cover up a Soviet extermination campaign that claimed millions of lives, mostly in the Ukraine--and when other reporters told the truth, Duranty libeled them. In the late 1960s, the Times beat the pro-abortion drum so loudly that the Supreme Court began to listen, and the cost was many more millions of lives.

Blair's misconduct was spectacular, but no one died because of it, so the Times has certainly had many lower points in the 152 years since Henry Raymond, a conservative Christian, founded it. (Raymond would be turning over in his grave, as the saying goes.) Thomas Sowell: That is why this was not just an isolated scandal but a sign of moral dry rot in the leadership of the New York Times.

Again, the paper's own account is the most damning. Far from not knowing what was going on, the Times acknowledges that "various editors and reporters expressed misgivings about Mr. Blair's reporting skills, maturity and behavior during his five-year journey from raw intern to reporter on national news events. Their warnings centered mostly on errors in his articles."

More than a year ago, one of the Times's own editors wrote a memo that said plainly: "We have got to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right Now." Instead, Blair was promoted to national news coverage. And on it goes...

Jon Dougherty has an outstanding piece on the Supreme Court's recent unconstitutional ruling of the Ten Commandments display case in Kentucky.

Retired USAF Major Brian Shul delivered an address at March AFB on Veteran's Day 2001. Powerful stuff:

Yes, I believe God has blessed this nation in many ways, although sometimes we forget just how fortunate we really are...and now, after a horrific attack on our homeland, we find ourselves embattled in a war once again. And yet, there are many who seem unsure of the response we should take. Today, we honor so many who have given their lives, in defense of this country...row upon row of tombstones, silent vigils to their ultimate sacrifice. If the dead could speak today, they would tell you that all it takes for evil to succeed in the world if for good people to stand by and do nothing. They would emphatically declare to you that you negotiate with the enemy with your knee in his chest and your knife at his throat. And they would remind you that those who forget their history, are condemned to repeat it. We are a nation guilty of forgetting these lessons. Had we learned them better, our cemeteries would be less full. We fought a Cold War for so long, that perhaps we became weary and complacent, and when we won that war, we became soft. We indulged ourselves in the notion that the world was all-safe, and we thought a booming economy was ample substitute for a strong military. Did we really think electing self-serving politicians would make us stronger as a nation? Somehow we came to accept the notion that freedom was free. It never has been. The price of freedom has always been eternal vigilance. We need to understand that there are those in the world who would destroy us because our way of life threatens their quest for world domination.

Brian pointed me to this political quiz, established in 1994 by Democratic consultant Victor Kamber and his Republican counterpart, Bradley S. O'Leary. I'm a Bob Dole conservative, with a score of 35 out of 40. Big surprise. Take the test and leave your score in the comments.

Ann skewers the leftists once again over the U.S. victory in Iraq:

They said chemical weapons would be used against our troops. That didn't happen. They predicted huge civilian casualties. That didn't happen. They said Americans would turn against the war as our troops came home in body bags. That didn't happen. They warned of a mammoth terrorist attack in America if we invaded Iraq. That didn't happen. Just two weeks ago, they claimed American troops were caught in another Vietnam quagmire. That didn't happen. Now the biggest mishap liberals can seize on is that some figurines from an Iraqi museum were broken--a relief to college students everywhere who have ever been forced to gaze upon Mesopotamian pottery. We're not talking about Rodins here. So the Iraqis looted. Oh well. Wars are messy. Liberalism is part of a religious disorder that demands a belief that life is controllable.