Via the omnipresent Instapundit, it's International Kissing Day.

To quote my sister: "Oh, No!" It's also her husband's birthday.

Click here to see the grand finale (17.8 MB .avi file, be patient!) of the Broadland, SD fireworks extravaganza, presented by Medary.com, our friends and family.

No fingers were blown off or eyes put out in the making of this video.

Teenagers charged with stabbing boy, 15, to death for iPod

Two New York teenagers were charged yesterday with murdering a 15-year-old boy for an iPod, the first fatality in a rising tide of similar attacks.

Wonderful. Maybe I can disguise it as a clunky, bulky old Walkman cassette player or something.

A Frenchman, Georges Malbrunot, who was a hostage of the Islamicists but was released in December 2004, comments on who the "us" is in "why they hate us":

"Little by little, we came to discover we were really on planet bin Laden," he wrote in Le Figaro. "For them [the terrorists], France is the West, it's a global vision, it's the infidel West against the Muslim world."

Via OpinionJournal.

Strategy Page uncovers some interesting statistics:

The death rate of American troops in Iraq has, so far, been about 188 per 100,000 troops. The murder rate in Washington DC is 88 per 100,000. While that’s lower than the death rate for American troops, it’s higher than it is for Iraqi civilians (about 35).

When oh when will the President realize that going into DC was a serious mistake. We're stuck in a quagmire, and he has no plan to get us out.

US Out Of DC!

Anyone who thinks that an analogy between President Bush and Wichita's BTK Killer is in any way appropriate needs some serious therapy.

Link

There was something about Bush that reminded me of another president, a man I’d seen on the news the previous evening. It was the former president of his church, the BTK terrorist, justifying *his* project. Of course, to my knowledge, Bush hasn’t *personally* bound, tortured and killed anybody. Rather, his destiny was determined by that which he was trained for in college. He is our Cheerleader-in-Chief.

Thought #1: This would be as good a reason as any to avoid "The Huffington Post" like the plague it appears to be.

Thought #2: If you read the above excerpt and found any, ANY area of agreement, seek professional help immediately. You have serious issues which you appear to be projecting onto others. Again, seek professional help IMMEDIATELY.

Previously on Medary.com I joined voices from left and right in decrying the Supreme Court's decision that government can take your house and give it to Pfizer Corp. on the sole basis that Pfizer claims that the government will earn more tax revenue that way.

Well, here we go:

A startup media company in New Hampshire has submitted an application to build a hotel on the site of Justice David Souter's home. They say that that this is a serious proposal, not just a prank.

We'll see if Souter and the Five Who Killed Property Rights can sleep in the bed that they have made.

This has been floating around for a while. I debated whether or not to post it, but decided to go for it.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time or effort commenting on this one way or another, except to observe in passing that the author does not seem to know that Harvard and Yale are actually in the Ivy League now. Judgments of the accuracy of the rest of the assertions are left to the research, rumormongering, tribal mythology, or prejudicial bias of you, the gentle readers.

(click on the message title or "Read More" to continue . . . )

Shocking expose' or lunatic speculation?

I can't tell.

From OpinionJournal: A Cartel and Its Snakeoil.

Matthew R. Simmons, a Texas investment banker with a Harvard Business School degree and 20 years' experience in oil, has his doubts. In "Twilight in the Desert," Mr. Simmons argues that the Saudis may be deceiving the world and themselves. If only half of his claims prove to be true, we could be in for some nasty surprises.

We've all heard about the "Downing Street Memo" but in my opinion, not enough has been made of the al-Qaida Training Manual (i.e. members are instructed to lie about torture and abuse should they be captured.)

Whether you oppose or support the effort to install democracy in Iraq, you owe it to yourself to read this--it is the manifesto of "our enemy." (Unless you've fallen so deep into paranoia that you really think this is a fake, too.) Here it is. Read for yourself.

The al-Qaida Training Manual.

Excerpts:

The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates . . . , Platonic ideals . . . nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun.

Islamic governments have never and will never be established through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils. They are established as they [always] have been:

By pen and gun, by word and bullet, by tongue and teeth.