Free Frank Warner

Oh, thank heaven, a stand against Hugo Chavez

I admire what 7-Eleven has done in cutting off its contract with Venezuela-owned Citgo as supplier to its convenience store gas stations.

7-Eleven said three days ago it had severed ties with Citgo, after more than 20 years, in part to protest Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his support for dictatorships like the one imprisoning Cuba.

"Certainly Chavez’s position and statements over the past year or so didn't tempt us to stay with Citgo," said 7-Eleven spokeswoman Margaret Chabris.

The benefits. In this case, 7-Eleven probably will benefit from tossing off Citgo. Instead of one contract with one gasoline supplier, 7-Eleven will seek contracts with several distributors, increasing competition to hold down prices.

The divorce from Citgo also is a reminder that, just as the United States refused to buy Iraqi oil during Saddam-era sanctions and refuses to buy Iranian oil today, the U.S. is capable of doing without the oil of all those regimes madly intent on spreading oppression.

Frank Warner

Mexico and the mysterious U.S. Senate

Does anyone understand the U.S. Senate? On May 17 this year, it voted 83-16 to authorize construction of a 700-mile fence on the Mexican border. But then, on July 13, it voted 71-29 against money for the fence.

Then today the Senate finally voted for the fence, $1.2 billion and all. The vote was 80-19. The House already has approved the bill, and President Bush is expected to sign it.

If the final Senate vote was so overwhelmingly in favor of that fence, why the long kabuki dance before the vote? Why did Sen. Hillary Clinton vote to stop a vote on the fence, and then vote in favor of the fence?

I know illegal immigration is a delicate question, but what’s going on here? Can no senator talk straight anymore?

Frank Warner

Dean Esmay rejects Michelle Malkin’s dismissal of Islam

And so do I.

The more non-Muslims who declare in frustration that Islam is incompatible with democracy, the fewer Muslims will step forward to defend their natural human rights.

Michelle Malkin has stopped narrowing her complaints to the extremists, the Islamists, the Muslim fringe, the Islamofascists. To her, the enemy now appears to be all of Islam. It may be that Malkin is daring Muslim moderates to speak up, but Dean Esmay says Malkin is only making enemies of friends.

Major exceptions. Never mind that Turkey and Indonesia are Muslim nations, and democratic. Never mind that Afghanistan is a Muslim nation, and democratic. Never mind that Iraq is trying to lay down democratic roots. Never mind that millions of democratic Americans are Muslims. Malkin would rather insult all Muslims than speak precisely.

History shows that all major religions were organized around at least a few dictatorial rules. But all major religions also include principles that leave the door open to democracy.

Some say Muhammad himself wrote the first constitution, for the city of Medina, adopting relatively liberal ideas for the time. Muhammad is one of several philosophers whose image is engraved on the U.S. Supreme Court building. It’s there because Muhammad insisted on the fairly applied rule of law – and it wasn’t sharia law.

A common love. We shouldn’t be telling Muslims in non-democratic nations that they want and deserve their oppression. We should be reaching out to all Muslims for what most of us have in common -- the love of liberty and the right to be free.

Frank Warner

Hitchens on why Zahawie went to Niger

Christopher Hitchens again pummels David Corn over the claim, “Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa.” Joseph Wilson couldn’t debunk it. Corn won’t either.

Frank Warner

(Hat tip: JJ Mollo.)

Terrell Owens tried to commit suicide, or did he?

Dallas police say Dallas Cowboys receiver Terrell Owens tried to commit suicide last night with an overdose of prescription pain pills.

Owens’ publicist says no, no, Owens accidentally took medicine that had a bad reaction with some “supplements” he ingested. No suicide attempt. No overdose. Nothing to see here. Update: Owens also just told the press he had suffered a bad reaction, and did not attempt suicide.

Police say Owens told them he was attempting to harm himself. He was taken to Baylor University Medical Center, but he went home today.

Ego paradox. If he did what the police say he did, it’s sad evidence that over-inflated egos, like over-inflated balloons, are the most likely to burst.

I sure hope he gets his head together, even if it does help the damn Cowboys.

Frank Warner

Gasoline in Pennsylvania: $2.15 a gallon

I’m closer to winning the $10 bet I made with a friend last year that, within three years, the price of regular gasoline would come down, at least for a day, to less than $2 a gallon.

When the price jumped over $3 a gallon immediately after Hurricane Katrina, my betting adversary said, “It will never drop below $2 a gallon again. Once the oil companies know they can charge $3, they’ll never go back.”

My bet applies to eastern Pennsylvania prices. And actually, they did drop below $2 a gallon early this year at a few area gas stations, but because I didn’t take a picture of the $1.99 sign for proof, I couldn’t collect on the bet.

Falling fast. Well, I might get a second chance.

The price is down to $2.22 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and $2.15 in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. It’s even lower in other parts of the United States. In Missouri, it’s $1.80 a gallon.

Frank Warner

An Iraq pull-out deadline might be helpful, if it could be kept secret

President Bush has said we can’t announce a date to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq for basically two reasons:

(1) We’re still not sure exactly when Iraqi security forces will be ready to defend Iraq’s new democracy on their own.

(2) If we reveal a pull-out date, insurgents would lay low and stockpile arms until the U.S. troops left, and then they’d try a massive attack on the infant Iraqi army.

Bush’s objections make sense. But in principle, so does a proposal by many Democrats to tell the Iraqi government, look, we’re going to start withdrawing by, say, next July 1, so if you want a fairly safe and smooth transition, you’d better organize around that idea.

Do-it-yourself focus. The point is, the Iraqi army is making some progress, but if the Iraqis think we’ll take the risks and make the sacrifices for them indefinitely, they’ll have little incentive to focus on quickly refining the skills of military organization and national self-defense.

But even if the day soon comes that we can set such a timetable, we’d still have at least one major challenge. If we tell the Iraqi government we’re pulling most of our troops out by the end of 2007, that decision has to be kept secret. We don’t want the insurgents to know.

Now, how good are we at keeping a secret?

Frank Warner

ESA photos of ‘Face on Mars’ help clear up mystery

Have you ever seen the Viking I spacecraft pictures of Mars, taken back in 1976?

If you have, you’ve probably seen Viking’s most curious photograph, the “Face on Mars,” a rocky formation that looks remarkably like a human face.

There it was, July 25, 1976, lying in a Martian desert we humans call Cydonia, a giant stylized head with eyes, a nose and a mouth.

Intelligent design? Reports at the time speculated that intelligent beings constructed the Face on Mars. It was a Sphynx among pyramids. NASA’s Viking I picture was reproduced all over the world.

So what was in that picture? How did it look so much like a face?

Fortunately, we now have a better idea of what we were looking at 30 years ago, thanks to new pictures taken by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft.

Red haze. The Mars Express arrived at the Red Planet in December 2003 and has orbited ever since. ESA scientists tried to focus the craft’s cameras on Cydonia in 2004 and 2005, but dust and haze obscured the region. Finally, on July 22 this year, the Mars Express got its first good shot of the area.

There it was again. But this year, the Face on Mars has a different look in a different light. The formation looks more like a sandblown mesa of the U.S. Southwest. Scientists call it a “remnant massif.”

My father used to talk of travel to Mars. He also wondered if someday we might build a telescope so big that we’d finally catch something looking back, “with eyebrows.”

Into the universe. The Face on Mars is the closest thing we’ve had to that vision, but I think we’ll have to look a little farther for the eyebrows.

Frank Warner

How many embedded news reporters are in Iraq?

Eight.

The whole world’s news media claim to be covering the Iraq war, and only eight reporters are out where the action is.

* 3 from Armed Forces’ Stars & Stripes. (T. Boyd, M. Morin and A. Powell)

* 1 from Armed Forces Network. (C. McLaughlin)

* 1 from The Charlotte Observer. (Mike Drummond)

* 1 from The Associated Press. (Tony Castaneda)

* 1 from RAI (Radio Audizioni Italiane). (Norberto Sanna)

* 1 from Polish Radio. (no name given)

Two non-military U.S. reporters. As of Sept. 19, there was an “author,” B. West, embedded in Iraq, too. So perhaps the total number of embedded journalists was nine. Or looking at it another way, there were really just two American reporters not affliated with armed forces media.

The BBC, National Public Radio and Time magazine were about to send in embedded reporters, but weren’t there as of Sept. 19.

It’s tough to cover a war first hand, but that sure does look like a small number of reporters.

Hat tip: Murdoc, citing Pajamas Media.

Frank Warner

Clinton boil-over boils down to this: Fox News can’t talk to Democrats, and CNN can’t talk to Republicans

We had an interesting discussion here yesterday on what Chris Wallace said on “Fox News Sunday” to set former President Clinton off into fits of paranoid apoplexy.

The Democratic partisans tried to put their finger on it. Wallace told “lies” about Somalia, asked questions with “false assumptions” or “a lack of historical knowledge,” called bin Laden’s word “the honest truth,” and asked a “stupid, disingenuous question.”

The Democrats said Fox News is too “biased” to interview Clinton. To me, the perception of bias tells the whole story.

The big question. The Democrats complained most about this one question that Wallace put to Clinton:

When we announced that you were going to be on Fox News Sunday, I got a lot of e-mail from viewers. And I’ve got to say, I was surprised. Most of them wanted me to ask you this question: Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaida out of business when you were president?

There’s a new book out, I suspect you’ve already read, called “The Looming Tower.” And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, bin Laden said, “I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of U.S. troops.” Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the Cole….

And after the attack, the book says that bin Laden separated his leaders, spread them around, because he expected an attack, and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is always 20/20… but the question is, why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?

Quotes in context. This question amounts to quoting a book, quoting bin Laden and asking why Clinton didn’t do more. It is one of those complex questions, commonly heard at press conferences and Sunday news talk shows. Such questions force the interviewee to answer with more than one sentence.

But Wallace’s question was not lies.

“The Looming Tower” really does say what Wallace said. We’re all fairly certain that bin Laden said what “The Looming Tower” said he said. In October 1993, Clinton did order U.S. troops pulled out of Somalia by the end of March 1994. (Some were pulled out in October, some fresh troops were sent in for a while, but all were out by the deadline. And to be fair, yes, the Republicans wanted them all out two months earlier than Clinton.)

Response sought. Bin Laden’s comment, that the pullout showed the “weakness and cowardice of U.S. troops,” apparently is what bin Laden said. But quoting bin Laden doesn’t mean Wallace considers bin Laden’s word “the honest truth.” It means bin Laden played on the Somalia withdrawal, and now we’d like to know what Clinton thinks of that fact.

But hold it.

It really doesn’t matter to the Democratic partisans that Wallace asked a standard, substantive, legitimate question of Clinton. What matters to the Democrats is that a Fox News anchor asked Clinton the standard, substantive, legitimate question.

The CNN test. Had Wolf Blitzer of CNN asked the same question, it wouldn’t have mattered. Clinton wouldn’t have feared a Blitzer follow-up with something truly devastating, like asking whether the Paula Jones suit, the Monica Lewinsky affair and the impeachment distracted him from fighting terrorism. (That question was being asked everywhere just two weeks ago, when ABC aired the flawed and provocative docudrama, “The Path to 9-11.” Wallace had a solid reason to ask about it, but he didn’t.)

Had Blitzer asked Wallace’s question, Clinton wouldn’t have said, out of nowhere, “You did your nice little conservative hit job on me.” “You came here under false pretenses.” “You falsely accuse me of giving aid and comfort to bin Laden because of what happened in Somalia.” “And you’ve got that little smirk on your face and you think you’re so clever.”

Had Blitzer asked the question, Clinton would have answered calmly and waited eagerly for the next question, knowing he was in the CNN safety zone.

Network slants. It’s no secret that, in reporting the news, Fox News generally gives Republicans the benefit of the doubt, and CNN generally gives Democrats the benefit of the doubt. It’s no secret Fox News and CNN each have a less favorite political party, too. (Of course, both networks deny any bias.)

In the end, the Wallace-Clinton interview reveals how deep the Fox News-CNN divide is. There’s a reason the Clintons avoid Fox News interviews, and the Bush team avoids CNN interviews. A Clinton on Fox News is so rare that some Republicans already have adopted the goofy conspiracy theory that Clinton actually planned the embarrassing outburst. (And now some Democrats are comforting themselves with the same theory.)

There are exceptions, but in general, Democratic leaders don’t trust Fox News. They’ve come to see Fox News as the “enemy camp.” They feel dangerously vulnerable talking with “them.” And Republican leaders view CNN the same way.

Politics and panic. Every politician knows at least three questions that would shame them horribly if asked in public. More importantly, they know that news reporters know those questions, too. So there is a perpetual tension between politicians and the press. But eventually, politicians have to talk to the press, and it is natural that they prefer interviews with reporters sympathetic to their politics.

On “Fox News Sunday,” in enemy territory, Clinton heard a few questions on the sensitive subject of 9-11. Alarm bells went off. He panicked at the prospect of a real ambush. Had he known anything about Chris Wallace, he could have relaxed.

Instead, Clinton went down under a psychological avalanche of guilt, hurt, paranoia and prejudice. He fell into a trap of his own making.

Frank Warner

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SEE ALSO: Lynne Cheney to Wolf Blitzer: ‘Do you want us to win?’