Ra'ed al-Banna loved America. During his nearly two years in the U.S., al-Banna, a lawyer by training, made a living as a factory worker, a shuttle-bus driver and a pizza tosser. He went to the World Trade Center and the Golden Gate Bridge, grew his hair long and listened to Nirvana. He told his family back in Jordan about the honesty and kindness of Americans. "They respect anybody who is sincere," he told his father. He said he had planned to marry an American woman until her parents demanded that the wedding take place in a Christian church. After a visit home in 2003, he set off again for the U.S., hoping to find a wife, have a family, settle down. "He was hoping for a job that earns a lot of money," says Talal Naser, 25, who is engaged to one of Ra'ed's sisters. "He loved life in America, compared to Arab countries. He wanted to stay there."

He never got the chance. After he was denied entry at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport for apparently falsifying details on his visa application, al-Banna's life took a turn that led him down the path of radical Islam and ultimately to join the insurgency against the U.S. in Iraq. His odyssey ended on March 3 when al-Banna's brother Ahmed received a call on his cell phone from a man identifying himself as "one of your brothers from the Arab peninsula"--the term radical Islamists use to signify the core of the Muslim world, centered on the holy city of Mecca. Al-Banna's family says that as far as they knew, Ra'ed was in Saudi Arabia working at a new job. But the voice on the other end sounded Iraqi, Ahmed says. "Congratulations," the caller told him. "Your brother has fallen a martyr."...

In some respects, the Bannas resemble the many other families around the Arab world whose sons have gone to fight and die in Iraq. But the Bannas also express astonishment that Ra'ed joined the insurgency, insisting that he had never shown signs of Islamic extremism or hatred for the West.

No one ever does, apparently. Just once I'd like to see one of these stories quote a neighbor or friend saying, "Yes, he hated America. He was always taking about getting his chance to die a shahid."

On the basis of accounts given by his family, friends and neighbors, Ra'ed apparently led a double life, professing affection for America while secretly preparing to join the holy war against the U.S. in Iraq. "Something went wrong with Ra'ed, and it is a deep mystery," says his father Mansour, 56. "What happened to my son?"

Eleven people, including six Americans working for a North Carolina private security firm, were killed Thursday when a commercial helicopter was shot down by missile fire from insurgents north of the Iraqi capital, officials said.

Bulgaria's Defense Ministry said the Russian-made helicopter was downed by missile fire and the victims included a three-member Bulgarian crew. Two Fijian helicopter security guards were also on board the flight.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said the six Americans were employees of Blackwater Security Consulting - a subsidiary of Moyock, N.C.-based Blackwater USA - and were assisting the Bureau of Diplomatic Security in protecting American diplomats in Iraq.

"They played a critical role in our effort to bring a better way of life to the people of a country who have not experienced freedom and opportunity for many years," Ereli said.

The message that accompanied the video said the American was murdered in retaliation for Muslims who were killed in Fallujah.

It does no good here for me to say this is in clear violation of the Geneva Convention. Obviously the jihadis do not care about the Geneva Convention.

The video begins with an unseen cameraman breathing heavily and running with the camera toward burning wreckage. Two bodies are visible, one of them severely charred, nearly all its clothes burned away.

“Look at that filth,” someone says in Arabic at the sight of the body. There are brief glimpses of a man carrying an assault rifle along with the cameraman.

The scene moves to tall grass, where a man with thinning, gray hair and wearing a blue flight suit is lying on his back, the right side of his head bloody.

“Stand up! Stand up!” the cameraman shouts to him in English.

“I can’t, it’s broken. Give me a hand,” the survivor says in accented English, raising his hands for help. “Give me your hand,” he repeats.

It appears the militants help pull him to his feet. “Weapons?” the gunmen shout at him in Arabic.

The cameraman tells the crewman, whose face is visible, to step back.

“Go! Go!” he shouts.

The survivor then tries to walk, limping with his back to the insurgents, who then say something to him that makes him turn around. He raises his hands to somebody off camera as if gesturing to them to stop what they are about to do.

The militants open fire, continuing to shoot him after he fell to the ground as someone shouts “Allahu Akbar.”

THESE F[**]KERS ARE NOT NICE PEOPLE. I have a hard time feeling sorry for their families. I have known a few of these wives and if they are in the marriage they are so high on Prozac and Xanax they will barely know he’s gone…If one of their mommas is crying I’m somewhat sorry but I really want to ask that woman why she never got any help for her son, who was obviously a potential serial killer! I lay some of what that man became on her and his father’s doorstep. I have almost no tears for these people. I can barely squeeze one out.

I too have met the wife of a contractor and she was completely nice but paranoid. Why was she paranoid? Read my post and find out. It has nothing to do with where her husband is stationed.

In a situation recalling the recent death of Terri Schiavo in Florida, an 81-year-old widow, denied nourishment and fluids for nearly two weeks, is clinging to life in a hospice in LaGrange, Ga., while her immediate family fights desperately to save her life before she dies of starvation and dehydration.

Mae Magouirk was neither terminally ill, comatose nor in a "vegetative state," when Hospice-LaGrange accepted her as a patient about two weeks ago upon the request of her granddaughter, Beth Gaddy, 36, an elementary school teacher.

Leftist psychologists have, since the 1950 work of Theodor Adorno and his collaborators, been enthusiastic in claiming that conservatives are "authoritarian" -- despite much contrary evidence. But Engels had a very different view of the matter -- a much more straightforward one:

"Revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon" (Friedrich Engels -- from his controversy with the Anarchists).

This rather obvious insight from Karl Marx's collaborator -- which associates authoritarianism with Leftism -- seems to have been totally overlooked by psychologists. This is rather surprising when we realize that the tradition of research into psychological authoritarianism traces back to The Authoritarian Personality by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford (1950). And the leading author (Adorno) of the study concerned was a prominent Marxist theoretician! One might have thought that a Marxist would have made the quotation mentioned central to his discussion of authoritarianism.

This overlooking of the obvious by the Adorno team was however symptomatic of their whole approach. Apparently, as committed Leftists, they wanted to explain Nazism and Fascism in a way that discredited Rightists rather than Leftists. But the theoretical convolutions required for that were from the outset truly heroic -- considering that Hitler was a socialist rather than a conservative, considering that Mussolini was a prominent Marxist theoretician, considering that Stalin had been a willing ally of Hitler as long as Hitler wanted him and considering that Hitler's most unrelenting enemy was no Leftist but the arch-Conservative Winston Churchill.

But facts never trouble Leftists.

"I have just been visited by the president of the Israelites here, who has asked me for a petition for the Jews to the Provincial Assembly, and I am willing to do it. Given how repellent the Israelite faith is to me, Bauer's view seems to me too abstract. It is still however worthwhile to knock as many breaches as possible into the Christian state and to smuggle in as much good sense as we can. At least, it must be attempted--and the embitterment grows with every petition that is rejected with protestations".

"On March 6th, the Drudge Report noted the fact that newsstand sales for the magazine Vanity Fair had plummeted by 22.5 percent during the last half of 2004, attributed by the editor to three successive covers that showed pictures of . . . men. What Drudge did not cite is the parallel fact that this slide tracks exactly with the mutation of the magazine from a great escape read of the guilty-pleasure variety, the place to go for fatuous film stars, Princess Diana, and society murders, into a Bush-bashing rag of the fiercest variety, one that at times last year seemed almost possessed.......

The new Vanity Fair is a story the old one might have wanted to cover, as it points up an interesting trend: The really fierce strains of anti-Bush feeling come less from established political sources than from what might be called the "glitz-based community"--people connected to Hollywood, fashion, or celebrity media, who produce diversions and lifestyle advice. At the shallower end of the pool of arts and intellect, they tend to produce the facile and transient; they make TV shows, or write them; make clothes, or write about them; try to become, or failing that tend to the needs of, celebrities.

A surprising number are media critics, who live at a twofold remove from engagement, as they comment on work that is less than important itself. Joining Vanity Fair in these up-market trenches are numerous glossies, the style and arts sections of the major papers, the New Yorker, known mainly for fiction and cultural coverage (and for ads for things costing zillions of dollars), and New York, known and read mainly for tips about shopping and real estate, restaurant ratings, and stories on murder and stock market crime. After the election, when the American Prospect and the New Republic were engaged in solemn bouts of soul-searching, the glossies indulged in new bouts of hysteria. "There will be a draft," imagined New York's James Atlas: "The polar ice caps will melt. . . . The Patriot Act will be used to stifle dissent in the media. . . . Jews will be rounded up." "Rounding up Jews" might not seem to compute with Bush's being a captive of neocons, but logic is not the strong suit of this faction. What Bush seems to be facing is less the normal opposition of a traditional part of the political class than a visceral uprising among fashionistas, a vast metrosexual spasm on behalf of a self-image based on cultural preening. "Do you mean there's still going to be civilization?" Atlas wrote on the grim morning of November 3: "Classical music, summaries of the week's New York Times Book Review, murmurous programs on the 'Treasures of Ancient China' exhibit at the Met?" Was the Met on the ballot? I seem to have missed it.

What makes all this more than mildly funny is the fact that glitzkrieg--political war as carried on by the glossies--has become in a sense the core of the Democrats, their chief source of lucre, and most prominent face. "Look at Kerry's chief supporters and you see a new kind of elite," says Joel Kotkin, "a veritable 'hip-ocracy' of high-tech tycoons, Hollywood moguls and celebrities, and a bevy of Wall Street financiers." This describes the table of contents in most of the glossies, most of their subjects, and sometimes their writers and editors, one of whom pulled down a cool $100,000 for pitching a movie idea. An Axis of Edginess, they make up the Miramax wing of the party (named after the Hollywood studio that branched into publishing, and whose head is an ardent and tireless Democratic fundraiser). Last year, John Kerry cleared almost $50 million in Hollywood, and was seldom without a phalanx of film stars, who dominated his convention in Boston and stumped with him throughout the campaign......

The Democrats who used to produce things--cars, steel, and foodstuffs--are being replaced by those who produce fads and fashion, things people enjoy but don't need. Societies need teachers, soldiers, engineers, and mechanics; they need people who drill for oil and fix cars; people who understand war and politics. No one needs sitcoms, movie reviews, handbag designers, gossip columnists, or professors of gender construction, but this superfluous cadre is becoming the core of the party of Truman and Roosevelt, an alliance of the superficial and trivial, along with the hopelessly poor. Call it the FDR coalition, minus the South, minus the farmers, minus a large part of labor, which has been weakening, and seeing the nonpublic sector part of its membership go over to voting Republican. This is not a national coalition, but it does know the best stores and best restaurants, and knows where to go for good hair.....

Botox aside, Kerry was the ideal candidate for this troop of trendies, who never fail to get major things wrong. He had more money even than they did, come by with even less merit and work. His playgrounds--Nantucket and the chalet in Idaho--looked like ads for Ralph Lauren. His resume looked terrific: Back Bay, private island, Swiss boarding school, Ivy League, interminable terms in the Senate, vacations with cousins in France. Even more than Martin Sheen, he looked like Hollywood's dream of a president; tall, almost emaciated, face long and solemn, brow furrowed with what could be mistaken for deep thought. Except that no one can remember an idea that he ever put forward, or a sentence he has said (in French or in English) that expressed anything novel or interesting. This of course made him ideal for the glitter-based wing of his party. "Kerry's Democratic allies view him as someone who is categorically superior to Bush in preparation, intellectual ability and knowledge of the world," Tom Curry wrote on MSNBC's website in September, quoting Teresa as dismissing as "idiots" those who demurred on Kerry's health insurance proposal. An intellectual without ideas, for trendies who think they are intellects. A perfect match.

"The Terri Schiavo tragedy has been seized on by long-time critics of the "religious right" to launch attack after attack on the legitimacy of political action on the basis of religious belief. This attack has ignored the inconvenient participation in the debate--on the side of resuming water and nutrition for Terri Schiavo--of the spectacularly not-the-religious-rightne ss of Tom Harkin, Nat Hentoff, Jesse Jackson, and a coalition of disability advocacy groups. The attack has also been hysterical. After Congress acted--ineffectively, it turned out--Maureen Dowd proclaimed that "theocracy" had arrived in the land. Paul Krugman warned that assassination of liberals by extremists was not far off. And the Internet frenzy on the left was even more extreme.

Into the fray came former Missouri Republican Senator John Danforth, an ordained priest, and much admired man of integrity. In yesterday's New York Times, Senator Danforth blasted the control that he asserts is now held over the Republican party by religious conservatives. Danforth specifically criticized the congressional action on behalf of Schiavo, a proposed Missouri bill that would halt stem cell research, and concerns over gay marriage.

All of these charges--from the most incoherent to the most measured--arrive without definition as to what "the religious right" is, and without argument as to why the agenda of this ill-defined group is less legitimate than the pro-gay marriage, pro-cloning, pro-partial-birth abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda of other political actors. Danforth's position is, apparently, that the agenda of the left on these matters ought not to be resisted, which means that it will be enacted. "For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group," Danforth intones, "is often to oppose the cause of another." That is inescapably true. To come to the defense of the unborn, as Senator Danforth correctly notes he always did during his legislative career, is to oppose abortion on demand. To come to the aid of the Christians in Sudan is to oppose the wishes of the Muslims who sought their destruction. Every political conflict is a choice between competing moral codes.

So Danforth's essay is really a poorly-camouflaged complaint that his positions on stem-cell research, gay marriage, and Terri Schiavo are not the positions of the Republican party. It is fair for him to try and persuade people to endorse his positions but it is wrong and demagogic to attempt to question the right of people of faith to participate in politics. That is certainly what Dowd, Krugman, and others want to accomplish, and although Danforth asserts that "I do not fault religious people for political action," the intention of his essay is to encourage the Republican party to reject the efforts of religious people to influence the party's agenda.

There is little chance that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Bill Frist or Dennis Hastert are going to heed Danforth's advice. But a strain of thought is developing that the political objectives of people of faith have second-class status when compared to those of, say, religiously secular elites. Of course, not only would such a position have surprised all of the Founding Fathers, it would have shocked Lincoln and Reagan, too".

"President Woodrow Wilson signed New Jersey's sterilization law, and one of his deputies descended to greater fame as a Nazi collaborator at Buchenwald. Pennsylvania's legislature passed an 'Act for the Prevention of Idiocy,' but the governor vetoed it .... Other states, however, joined the crusade. ... Eventually, the eugenicist virus found a hospitable host in Germany. There... it led to the death chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Thanks to the Nazis, highly praised by eugenicists here, the movement eventually collapsed. But not before nearly 50,000 Americans were sterilized."

Under the banner of "national regeneration," tens of thousands, mostly poor women, were subjected to involuntary sterilization in the United States between 1907 and 1940. And untold thousands of women were sterilized without their informed consent after World War II. Under California's 1909 sterilization law, at least 20,000 Californians in state hospitals and prisons had been involuntarily sterilized by 1964. California, according to a recent study, "consistently outdistanced every other state" in terms of the number of eugenic sterilizations....

California not only led the nation in forced sterilizations, but also in providing scientific and educational support for Hitler's regime. In 1935, Sacramento's Charles M. Goethe praised the Human Betterment Foundation for effectively "shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler…." In 1936, Goethe acknowledged the United States and Germany as leaders in eugenics ("two stupendous forward movements"), but complained that "even California's quarter century record has, in two years, been outdistanced by Germany." In 1936, California eugenicist Paul Popenoe was asking one of his Nazi counterparts for information about sterilization policies in Germany in order to make sure that "conditions in Germany are not misunderstood or misrepresented." .....

California's eugenicists could not claim ignorance that Germany's sterilization program was motivated primarily by racial politics. For example, in 1935, the Los Angeles Times published a long defense of Germany's sterilization policies, in which the author noted that the Nazis "had to resort to the teachings of eugenic science" because Germany had been "deprived of her colonies, blessed with many hundreds of defective racial hybrids as a lasting memory of the colored army of occupation, and dismembered all around." Not only did California eugenicists know about Nazi efforts to use sterilization as a method of "race hygiene" -- targeted primarily at Jews -- but they also approved efforts to stop "race-mixing" and increase the birth rate of the "Northern European type of family." The chilling words of Progressive reformer John Randolph Haynes anticipated the Nazi regime's murder of 100,000 mentally ill patients: "There are thousands of hopelessly insane in California, the condition of those minds is such that death would be a merciful release. How long will it be before society will see the criminality of using its efforts to keep alive these idiots, hopelessly insane, and murderous degenerates. … Of course the passing of these people should be painless and without warning. They should go to sleep at night without any intimation of what was coming and never awake."

During the Nazi era in Germany, eugenics prompted the sterilization of several hundred thousand people then helped lead to anti-Semitic programs of euthanasia and ultimately, of course, to the death camps. The association of eugenics with the Nazis is so strong that many people were surprised at the news several years ago that Sweden had sterilized around 60 000 people (mostly women) between the 1930s and 1970s. The intention was to reduce the number of children born with genetic diseases and disorders. After the turn of the century, eugenics movements -- including demands for sterilization of people considered unfit -- had, in fact, blossomed in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Scandinavia, not to mention elsewhere in Europe and in parts of Latin America and Asia. Eugenics was not therefore unique to the Nazis.

In the 1920's, the eugenics movement was ... popular. So popular in fact, that mandatory sterilization laws were passed in 34 states from the mid-1920's to mid-30's. Basically, these laws stated that sterilization was mandatory for socially undesirable persons. "The socially inadequate classes, regardless of etiology or prognosis, are the following: (1) Feeble-minded; (2) Insane, (including psychopathic); (3) Criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward); (4) Epileptic; (5) Inebriate (including drug habitues)..." [etc]. So basically, if you were hyperactive, promiscuous, an alcoholic or drug addict, had cerebral palsy or Down's syndrome, were epileptic, (etc., ad nauseum), or exhibited ANY socially undesirable behavior at all, you were eligible for mandatory sterilization. And not you, nor your parents (if you were a minor) had any right to say "No."

In the mid 1920's, Carrie Buck, at the ripe old age of 17, fought the state of Virginia's mandatory sterilization statute. She was classified as a socially inferior woman, having born a child out of wedlock and her foster parents stated that she was "a handful". Carrie's mother had also been incarcerated in a state institution as a 'promiscuous woman'. And at the age of 7 months, Carrie's child, Vivian, was 'certified' as being 'deficient,' based on the 'history' of Carrie and her mother.

Carrie lost her case at the state court level, and it wound up in front of the Supreme Court in 1927. The prominent Supreme Court jurist, Oliver Wendel Holmes, wrote the opinion in Buck v. Bell. The decision was 8-1, Justice Butler dissenting. Here's what the majority opinion boiled down to:

"In order to prevent our being swamped with incompetents... society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes." ...

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles are enough." — Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (Buck v. Bell, 1927)

Five months after this decision, Carrie was forcibly sterilized. It later came out that her promiscuity was nothing of the sort. She'd been raped by the nephew of her foster parents, himself a violent (unsterilized) little scumbag. And her daughter's school records show that Vivian was a B student, receiving an A in deportment (behavior), and she was on the honor roll. Genetic tests later showed that neither Carrie nor her daughter had any genetic defects.