Kudos to John M’s piece below.

It is simply tragic. By allowing the Patriot Act to expire, we have, at least temporarily, restored a legal wall between American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. It was this resulting lack of information sharing and organizational coordination that partly precipitated the attacks of 9-11. Many of the 9-11 hijackers had encounters with law enforcement before the attacks. However, the absence of inter-agency intelligence sharing allowed them to go free - time and time again (See Richard Perle’s book “An End To Evil” for some particularly telling examples). The Patriot Act’s most important accomplishment - by far - was to remove this legal impediment in conducting domestic counterterrorism operations. Indeed, the Patriot Act’s many successes in disrupting terrorist operations speak for themselves. But you can forget about effective homeland security now. We are back to the pre-9/11 system, where each “hand” of government is totally blind and cut-off from the other. In the words of Wisconsin’s finest senator, Russ Feingold, I get a “chill down my spine” thinking of the potential consequences. We can only hope the Republicans will come to their senses.

John is right. The “civil rights” objections to the Patriot Act are either based on pure ignorace or deliberate deceitfulness. The Patriot Act simply allows the government to apply long-established criminal investigative methods to domestic counterterrorism operations. Any possible “civil rights” argument against the Patriot Act can be answered on the Department of Justice’s website. I know these are government “talking points,” but facts are facts.

Needless to say, there are so many myths regarding the Patriot Act that it would take several posts to refute all of them .

I have a great deal of respect for Senator John Sununu (who oppossed the Patriot Act). Still, if you are a conservative Republican (which he is), and you find yourself on the same podium and in agreement with liberals like Pat Leahy, Russ Feingold and Ted Kennedy . . . it is time to rethink your position. The fact that these leftist politicians oppose the Patriot Act only strengthens my belief that this legislation will make America safer and help prevent the realization of another 9-11 style attack.

So, the motion for cloture on the Patriot Act did not reach the 60 votes needed to move for a full vote today. One cannot help but think that this article in the NY Times about wiretapping foreign-domestic phone calls without a warrant was strategically released today to damage the effort to renew the Patriot Act.

One of the first questions is who are the former and current “senior government officials” mentioned in this article? Powell? Ashcroft?

Tapping phone calls without a warrant looks pretty bad on the surface, but Mark Levin at NRO has cut through all the BS here. He notes that the “Foreign Intelligence Security Act [of 1978] permits the government to monitor foreign communications, even if they are with U.S. citizens — 50 USC 1801, et seq. A FISA warrant is only needed if the subject communications are wholly contained in the United States and involve a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.”

Many who are trying to deny the renewal of the Patriot Act have badly misconstrued what the Patriot Act actually does regarding warrants and so-called “secret evidence.” Anytime I talk with someone who is opposed to the Patriot Act, it is almost invariably true that they have never actually read the Patriot Act or the arguments of its supporters. A lot of what they oppose in the Patriot Act is nothing new, but rather laws like FISA that were enacted almost 30-years ago by a Democratic Congress.

At any rate, it is a travesty that the renewal of the Patriot Act has been thwarted. As Andy McCarthy keenly noted: “If a Democrat was president, this thing would be about to pass 80-20. This opposition is politics plain and simple — it is about trying to damage Bush by showing he can’t get his priorities enacted even with a 55-45 majority. ”

Good news! On Thursday, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, who recently called for Israel to be wiped off the map, moderated his position. In a spirit of statesmanlike compromise, he now wants Israel wiped off the map of the Middle East and wiped on to the map of Europe.

Ya gotta love Mahmoud, what a character. The title for Steyn’s piece, But seriously folks, this clown is dangerous, says it all.

Hat-tip: Chicago Boyz

Via Dawn’s Early Light: What is the true nature of China’s growing influence and investments in Latin America and how should the US respond to this shift in power in its own backyard? Good questions, the answers:

Plan A: be friends and get along

Plan B: be prepared to win a fight with them.

Simple right?

Via MeiZhongTai: They (The Chinese) just don’t get it. Here is the People’s Daily explaining why the “West” has a problem with China and Zimbawe being such close friends:

When westerners speak of Zimbabwe they do so with some tone of jealousy. In contrast to the deteriorating relationship between western countries and Zimbabwe, China has kept traditional friendly relations with African countries including Zimbabwe.

The People’s Onion they should call it. [I should copyright that.]

From the simply freakin’ awesome American Thinker (now with RSS praise the gods!): So if I read the IHT (New York Times abroad) I get this tried and true baloney:

To some industry experts, the report is more evidence that China has made progress in its long-term plan to upgrade the capacity of its manufacturing as it strives to become a major economic power. “It confirms that the Chinese economy is really moving up the value chain from simple manufactured goods like textiles, shoes and plastics to very sophisticated electronics,” said Arthur Kobler, a business consultant in Hong Kong and former president of AT&T in China. The most spectacular demonstration of China’s ambition to become a consumer electronics heavyweight came this May when the Chinese computer maker Lenovo Group, bought IBM’s personal computer unit for $1.75 billion.

But when I read the American Thinker I get this nugget of pure unfiltered wisdom:

China suffers from a serious shortage of skilled business managers and researchers with international experience. While the number of MBA programs in China has greatly increased, demand for talent greatly outstrips supply. To understand the depth of this problem, consider the figures in the current issue of Newsweek International:

China faces a critical shortage: experienced, highly skilled managers. The numbers are astounding. The country has some 25,000 state companies, 4.3 million private firms and massive industrial overcapacity. But it has too few experienced managers for even the elite firms. The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that even the relatively small number of Chinese companies trying to expand abroad will need up to 75,000 internationally experienced leaders if they want to continue to grow over the next 10 to 15 years. Currently, McKinsey estimates, there are only 3,000 to 5,000 such men and women in China.

Remember kids, the liberal media isn’t just liberal it is also often wrong.

For those of us who have been watching the latest round of WTO negotiations in Hong Kong this last week, Stephen Spruiell who runs NRO’s Media Blog has been an invaluable source of common sense analysis. I highly recommend that you go back at read each of his day by day updates on the progress or lack thereof that is just stunning when you consider that this administration has sold itself to conservatives as “free market”. This is from Day Three:

I thought this was supposed to be a meeting of the World Trade Organization. Apparently, I showed up instead at a free money sweepstakes.

Here’s the problem. The U.S. and the EU can’t agree on agriculture. The key to understanding why is knowing that each uses different programs to subsidize its farmers. The EU uses a lot of export subsidies to make its overpriced farm goods more competitive in the global market. The U.S. has a growing reliance on other forms of direct aid that are disguised as non-trade-distorting support (like our counter-cyclical payments), but really do distort trade.

So what happens is, the U.S. puts forward a proposal calling for the elimination of export subsidies, but including a loophole for counter-cyclical payments. Of course, the EU objects and puts forward a counter-proposal that removes the loophole and calls for the U.S. to reduce its food-aid program, which it rightly calls a farm subsidy disguised as an aid program. Of course, the U.S. objects and…

You get the idea.

Meanwhile, the poorer countries, many of them dependent on their agricultural sectors and trying to become competitive food exporters, are furious. So the rich countries are trying to buy them off. Yesterday, I wrote about how “aid-for-trade” had become the name of the game. Essentially, the rich countries want to give the poor countries a lot of aid money in order to bribe them into looking the other way on agriculture and opening their markets in areas where the rich countries are most competitive, like industrial goods and services.

Now, the U.S. has refined that art and applied it to a specific problem area: cotton. The West African cotton producers are demanding that the U.S. stop subsidizing its cotton farmers so heavily ($2-3 billion per year). How do you think the U.S. responded?

A) They agreed that U.S. cotton subsidies are egregiously high and offered to make substantial reductions, leading to a zeroing out in the near future.

B) They offered to subsidize West African cotton farmers also.

If you guessed B, you’ve been paying attention. Here’s what U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns said about the issue today:

About a month ago, [U.S. Trade Representative Rob] Portman and I went to Burkina Faso where we launched a West Africa Cotton Improvement Program. This program will strengthen Western African private sector organizations, link United States and West African agricultural research, reduce soil erosion, establish a ginning school, and improve the quality of cotton through better technology.

But fundamentally what will best meet the needs of the West African countries, in the end, is an ambitious outcome in these agricultural negotiations, such as what we proposed in October. I believe that we all recognize this and I have to tell you that the world has applauded our proposal. We have proposed to end all export subsidies and implement new disciplines on export credit programs.

As I mentioned at the top of this post, the U.S. has no export subsidies to eliminate. Also, its export credit programs have already been reformed — the WTO made us reform them after we lost a dispute with Brazil.

So, in sum: We propose to eliminate two subsidy programs we don’t have, leave our current subsidies pretty much intact and add a new subsidy program for West African farmers.

Welcome to the WTO — the Why not? It’s on the Taxpayers! Organization.