Following the bombing outside the Danish embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan’s ambassador to Denmark says to the people of Denmark, “Now are you satisfied?”

Fauzia Mufti Abbas, Pakistan’s ambassador to Denmark, agreed that the Mohammed cartoons, first published in Jyllands-Posten newspaper in October 2005, had incited Muslim anger and were possibly the motivation for the attack, which killed eight and wounded as many as 30.

‘It isn’t just the people of Pakistan that feel they have been harassed by what your newspaper has begun,’ she said. ‘I’d like to know if your newspaper is satisfied with what it has done and what it has unleashed?’

Sheer evil surfaces in Norway—but to Reuters it might be just a “rite of passage.”

After all, who are we to judge?

OSLO (Reuters) - Police in Norway have arrested a Gambian-born man and charged him and his wife with subjecting five of their six daughters to genital mutilation, officials said on Friday.

The practice, also known as female circumcision, is outlawed in Norway and arouses horror among many people in the West but is a rite of passage for young women in many countries, predominantly in Africa.

The youngest of the five mutilated girls, all born in Norway, is five years old, police officials said. The others are aged seven, 10, 13 and 14 and live in Gambia, national broadcaster NRK reported.

Police officer Hanne Kristin Rohde, head of the violent crime and vice section of the Oslo police, said on Norwegian commercial television TV 2 that the father — a naturalized Norwegian citizen along with his wife — was taken into custody on Friday.

“Norwegian police have charged this couple of Gambian background for breaking the Norwegian law on genital mutilation — five of their six daughters are circumcised,” Rohde said.

The mother is pregnant with a seventh child and was deemed unfit to be held in jail. …

U.N. agencies say an estimated 100 to 140 million women and girls worldwide have undergone genital mutilation, whose proponents say it promotes chastity before marriage and fidelity afterwards by reducing female sexual desire. Around 3 million a year are believed to be subjected to it.

The Salt Lake City Deseret News, whose reporters viciously attacked LGF for pointing out that they deliberately concealed information about the Bosnian Muslim who committed mass murder in the Trolley Square shopping mall, is in serious trouble today: Deseret News to cut 35 staff positions; revamp operations.

In the wake of falling subscriptions and advertising revenue, the Deseret News is shedding 35 staffers by mid-July.

“There is no question it is a huge punch in the gut to everyone’s morale,” said Editor Joe Cannon on Thursday afternoon following a staff meeting.

The newspaper, owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, will rethink its operation from top to bottom, Cannon said.

“We will become more local, more online, and more Mormon,” he said.

The paper’s revenues declined 32 percent since January, according to the Deseret News, as advertisers sought out other media, including the Internet.

The Daily Kos Kids show their class once again: Daily Kos: John McCain’s Roots in American Slavery.

There is no smear too low for them.

UPDATE at 6/6/08 7:52:22 pm:

And by the way: Obama’s slave-owning forebears revealed.

THE maternal ancestors of Barack Obama, the Democrat who hopes to become America’s first black president, once owned slaves, genealogists have revealed.

As the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, the background of Obama, who went to a school in Indonesia, was already considered exotic.

According to the genealogists, George Washington Overall, Obama’s great-great-great-great grandfather, owned two slaves, a 15-year-old girl and 25-year-old man, who were listed in the 1850 Kentucky census. Another maternal ancestor owned two older slaves.

(Hat tip: Killgore.)

Once again, one of the childish creeps who dominate the political category at Digg.com has posted an article from LGF with a nasty, deceptive description: Digg - LGF are hypocrites in declaring leftist bloggers hypocrites.

And the administrators at Digg.com let them get away with it, time after time.

Finally, a court ruling in a terrorism trial that isn’t completely brain dead: Court upholds conviction in Bush al Qaeda plot.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Friday upheld the conviction of an American citizen for plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush and conspiring with al Qaeda, rejecting his claims that he had been tortured into confessing by the Saudi police.

As part of its ruling, the appeals court based in Richmond, Virginia, overturned Ahmed Abu Ali’s 30-year prison sentence on the grounds it was unreasonably lenient and sent the case back for resentencing.

“In this case, we are satisfied that Abu Ali received a fair trial, though not a perfect one, and that the criminal justice system performed those functions which the Constitution envisioned for it,” the three-judge panel concluded.

A side note: Reuters is now using some Javascript at their site that apparently attempts to prevent copying and pasting sections of articles. It’s clearly aimed at stopping blogs from quoting their articles.

Good luck with that, guys. This is the kind of foolish, self-defeating idea that gets foisted on companies who don’t know any better, because they don’t understand the internet.

UPDATE at 6/6/08 5:59:38 pm:

Not only is this new Reuters code foolish, in the Mac version of Firefox 3 it throws serious errors, then goes into an endless loop that stops the page from loading. Good work!

Get a load of this, as Crooks and Liars (the most aptly named leftist blog) thinks it’s really cool that Barack Obama waved around a wooden walking stick and said Congress better pass his health care bill and not mess with him, or he’d “whoop ’em.”

Of course, if John McCain did something like this, they’d be screaming their empty heads off and demanding apologies. But when the Obamessiah does it, it’s a carefree “lighthearted moment.”

A great song by John Hiatt with a pretty good video: Cry Love, from Walk On.

A moment of steel
A dry-eyed house
Did he say goodbye to you
Or did you kick him out
I know you’re not afraid
To go alone
But this was a marriage of spirit, flesh, and bone

Now whatcha gonna do
When the planet shifts
Whatcha gonna do
Gonna slit your wrists
Bleed all over the milky way
The stars in your eyes look red today

Chorus:
Cry love, cry love
The tears of an angel
The tears of a dove
Spilling all over, your heart from above
Cry love, cry love

The trust of a woman in his hand
But he was a little boy, not a man
You loved him stronger than he could feel
Yeah he was wrapped up in himself like an orange peel
Now whatcha gonna do
With the booze and the blush
Whatcha gonna do
When there’s no rush
Cop a little misery
At the corner store
Well one day that train of pain won’t stop no more

Chorus

Throwing up ashes on the floor
If this is a lesson in love
Well what’s it for?
The heart will remember
The burning fire
The next time you feel the flame
Of desire

Chorus
Chorus

Cry love, cry love, cry love

Rather than try to come up with a clever intro for this open thread, I think I’ll just say, “Rather than try to come up with a clever intro for this open thread…”

It’s about time; the United States is finally walking away from the corrupt, hateful group of dictators’ toadies calling itself the UN Human Rights Council.

GENEVA, June 6 (Reuters) - The United States has quietly informed Western allies of its intention to walk away from the U.N. Human Rights Council, diplomatic sources said on Friday.

The U.S. delegation has observer status, with the right to speak, in the 47-member state forum, which meets in Geneva, and has never stood for election to the Council since it was set up two years ago.

Diplomatic sources and rights activists said that U.S. officials had informed the European Union on Friday morning of its intention to halt its involvement in the Council.

“They said they were going to disengage totally,” said one representative of a rights watchdog group.

In a Council debate on Friday on the situation in Myanmar, the United States failed to take the floor on a topic on which until now it has always been vocal, a possible sign that it had little further interest in the body. The Council replaced the widely discredited U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

But it is seen by critics as having fallen under control of a bloc of Islamic and African countries, which have a majority when backed by their frequent allies Russia, China and Cuba.

An absolutely on-target parody of mainstream media, imagining how they might have covered the invasion of Normandy with today’s enhanced technology—and today’s relentless negativity.

(Hat tip: Thanos.)

By now, most of the blogosphere knows that Mark Morford is one of the most venomous, hateful moonbats currently writing for a major US newspaper. But today he’s got a column you’re not going to believe, about the transcendent being we unenlightened ones know simply as “Barack Obama:” Is Obama an enlightened being? / Spiritual wise ones say: This sure ain’t no ordinary politician. You buying it?

To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?

No, it’s not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn’t have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.

Dismiss it all you like, but I’ve heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who’ve been intuitively blown away by Obama’s presence - not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence - to say it’s just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.

Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

Are you rolling your eyes and scoffing? Fine by me.

Oh, good grief.

At Reason Online, David Weigel begins to figure out that Larry Johnson (the source of the scurrilous and apparently false “Michelle Obama whitey tape” rumor) has zero credibility—something I’ve known for several years, which is why I didn’t write a single word about his claim (despite many emails, some of which probably came from Johnson himself): Reason Magazine - Hit & Run - Everything’s Gonna Be All White.

On Monday I blogged about the rumors of a video that shows Michelle Obama making hateful comments about “whitey.” I’m now convinced that Larry Johnson, the blogger who’s done the most to make the rumors public, is spreading misinformation.

Ya think?

The Kos Kidz are really getting comfortable lately with letting their antisemitism hang out in full view of the world. Today a diary asks the question: Daily Kos: Why Isn’t the U.S. Threatening to ‘Obliterate’ Israel?

The U.S Government and every NeoCon Zionist Lobbying firm on K-Street expressed outrage when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made implied threats towards Israel and its safety. Largely empty threats were blown into an “Iranian Threat” that had to be combated even if that meant another war in the Persian Gulf. Even Democrats got in on the shtick. Former Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton went as far to say she would “Obliterate Iran” if it ever attacked Israel.

So, since we’ve obviously appointed ourselves Policeman of the Mideast, when another Rogue-Nation state threatens an unprovoked attack on Iran we’ll obliterate them as well, right?

Not when that Rogue-State is named Israel.

From MSNBC by way of Reuters, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, threatened that an unprovoked Israeli Attack on Iranian nuclear sites was inevitable:

An Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites looks “unavoidable” given the apparent failure of sanctions to deny Tehran technology with bomb-making potential, one of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s deputies said Friday.

“If Iran continues with its program for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective,” Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz told the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

“Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable,” said the former army chief who has also been defense minister.

Keep in mind the United States’ own National Intelligence Estimate said that Iran has suspended its nuclear weapons program. So Ehud Olmert is threatening an unprovoked attack on Iran based on bad intelligence, probably in good measure to distract from Olmert’s own domestic scandals (wow does that sound familiar?) , and the United States response is … Meh. In public at least, in private one can wager that George Bush, Jr. is egging on the Israeli government as he sprawl out on the carpet of the Oval Office, sipping a juice box and mapping out strategy with his G.I. Joe collection.

Given this Wednesday’s speeches at AIPAC by both John McCain and Barack Obama, the U.S. Foreign policy of ‘Meh’ towards Israeli attacks of war will most likely continue, because neither candidate dare to speak the truth …

The truth being that our lopsided coddling of Israel gives birth to Arab and Persian resentment of the U.S. and helps spread radical Islam throughout the world. How can the United States tell young Arab and Persian men to resist the sirens’ call of the Extremist Clerics when all they see from the United States is a supposed democracy that enables Israel to engage in the Nazi-like Ghettoization of the Palestinian people and to attack any country it pleases, unprovoked, without consequences?

If we really are fair brokers of peace in the Middle East the United States needs to take the stand that any unprovoked attack on one Nation-State by another Nation-State (regardless of the Jewish Vote in New York and Florida, or the Persian vote in Beverly Hills) is unacceptable.

(Hat tip: BFSkinner.)

UPDATE at 6/6/08 9:32:37 am:

And please note that one of the most vile antisemitic diaries ever posted at that hate hole (full of blood libels, conspiracy theories, and sheer insanity) is still online: Daily Kos: Eulogy before the Inevitability of Self-Destruction: The Decline and Death of Israel.

It’s the anniversary of D-Day, the invasion of Normandy that began the liberation of Europe from the Nazi nightmare.

So what does Google celebrate today?

The birthday of Spanish painter Diego Velasquez, which as we all know is much more important than some silly war to save civilization: Google.

When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.

— Niccolo Machiavelli