Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Look, here's what you need to know about the JFK Four (one suspect is still at large.) They were yet another band of ne'er-do-wells with a homegrown hatred for the U.S. They had no terror training or know-how, no links to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, or the big-bucks funding mechanisms of the kind that carried out real terror on 9/11. Their driving force in this plot of "unthinkable devastation" was a government informant, a twice-convicted drug dealer eager to win a lighter sentence. Aside from the most important aspect that their plan was not feasible, they also had no explosives to carry it out.

People who think that violence and bloodshed are an answer to anything are indeed a danger to a civil society, so unless the facts are radically different than what's been reported so far, we should have praise for law enforcement, including the NYPD and the FBI, for not letting this kind of nonsense get very far. It shows yet again that the law-enforcement approach to fighting this type of threat -- so ridiculed when John Kerry dared even mention it in 2004 -- remains the one that in most cases works best.

-- WILL BUNCH

The Bush administration has rightly scotched the idea of a revival for a particularly inane Jimmy Carter policy -- the Olympic boycott. Both the White House and the USOC have immediately rejected a suggestion by Governor Bill Richardson that the US boycott the Beijing Olympics for its indifference to the genocide in Darfur.

-- CAPTAIN ED MORRISSEY

I’m confused. According to the many media reports, the UCU, successor to the AUT and NATFE and the main trade union representing British academics, has voted to reinstitute the boycott of Israeli universities that the AUT finally rejected last year. But in fact, as far as I can tell , the UCU Congress has done no such thing. Rather it has passed some rather wooly pro-Palestinian resolutions and has ordered its executive to promote discussion of the boycott at branches over the next year or so. The practical effect of this in the world is at best close to zero. In fact it is almost certainly negative: no-one actually gets boycotted but the worst elements of the Israeli right (and the likes of Alan Dershowitz) get a renewed opportunity to portray themselves as victims.

-- CHRIS BERTRAM

Rude change of subject, but maybe one of the reasons that crime is increasing is because opportunities to improve one's lot in life are decreasing. Setting new minimum jail sentences isn't going to prevent crime, it will just fill the already overcrowded prisons to overflowing. Why is it, according to their own statistics, that crime goes up after a few years of a Republican administration and down during a Democratic one? Is it because people find it more difficult to feed and clothe their families, send their children to schools that actually teach them something valuable and to plan for the future? Or is it because when you cut taxes, you have to cut services which include fire and police? Or maybe a combination? Just wondering.

-- DEB

A perfume priding itself as “The World’s First Spiritual Perfume," apparently takes the scents from the Bible and puts them in a bottle of the oh-so-holy “Virtue.” Because spending the $80 per bottle will make you a true Christian woman!

-- VANESSA

The great fraud being perpetrated in our political discourse is the concerted attempt by movement conservatives, now that the Bush presidency lay irreversibly in ruins, to repudiate George Bush by claiming that he is not, and never has been, a "real conservative." This con game is being perpetrated by the very same conservatives who -- when his presidency looked to be an epic success -- glorified George W. Bush, ensured both of his election victories, depicted him as the heroic Second Coming of Ronald Reagan, and celebrated him as the embodiment of True Conservatism.

This fraud is as transparent as it is dishonest, yet there are signs that the media is nonetheless beginning to adopt this theme that there is some sort of epic and long-standing "Bush-conservative schism." But very little effort is required to see what a fraud that storyline is.

-- GLENN GREENWALD

The Bush administration’s attempt to create an alternative justice system for terrorism suspects, in the works for more than five years, has yet to complete a single trial.

After an earlier version of the system was rejected by the Supreme Court last year, the administration and Congress went back to the drawing board. The result was the Military Commissions Act, which was meant to settle a host of difficult questions once and for all.

But the system took two more blows yesterday, when, in separate proceedings, military judges dismissed charges against prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on the ground that the administration had not managed to comply with the new law it pushed through Congress just last fall.

-- ADAM LIPTAK

The Congressional Budget Office says the illegal alien legalization bill now before Congress will cut illegal border crossing by 25 percent. Which means as many as 750,000 still pouring in or overstaying illegally. That’s after the three-year (charitably) delay in implementing enforecement and border security. If those things ever actually are done.

Which means, effectively, that this is an amnesty bill.

-- JULES CRITTENDEN

Here is a vision of a future world. Three tribes share a verdant land of fields and windfarms, watched over by police on every corner.

The decision-makers reside in a palatial white resort behind a fence of steel and barbed wire. The scribes - identified by yellow tags around their necks - faithfully report every word from their Legoland-style homes just outside the barricades. A third, scruffy and colourful clan of ordinary people are herded by police into tent cities, where they bang drums, ride bicycles and march against the decision-makers who they say have no legitimacy.

-- PATRICK BARNHAM

Cartoon by Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate