Yesterday a Brooklyn man was arrested on charges of conspiring to support a terrorist group. Javed Iqbal allegedly provided Hezbollah’s sattelite channel, al-Manar, in the U.S. via his sattelite company.

The U.S. Treasury Department in March designated al-Manar a “global terrorist entity” and a media arm of the Hezbollah terrorist network. The designation froze al-Manar’s assets in the United States and prohibited any transactions between Americans and al-Manar.

...

Mark Dubowitz of the Coalition Against Terrorist Media (CATM), which is composed of Jewish, Christian, Muslim and secular organizations, said yesterday he is “saddened” that a U.S. resident was allegedly facilitating the transmission of al-Manar “but pleased that the U.S. is taking the necessary steps to ensure al-Manar’s incitement to violence is stopped.”

Mr. Iqbal, who owns and operates the sattelite company from his home, has been arraigned in federal court, and bail set at $250,000.

Two news items have popped up in the last day or so, and both involve our (largely ignored) problems on the Mexico/U.S. border.

First, the Mexican government announced yesterday that it would be distributing over 70,000 maps to potential illegal immigrants gathering near the U.S. border. The maps illustrate where, for example, highways and water stations exist in Arizona. They also warn Mexicans where not to go in Arizona.

But don’t worry—none of this will promote illegal immigration into the U.S.!

The National Human Rights Commission, a government-funded agency with independent powers, denied that the maps—similar to a comic-style guide booklet Mexico distributed last year—would encourage illegal immigration.

``We are not trying in any way to encourage or promote migration,’’ said Mauricio Farah, one of the commission’s national inspectors. ``The only thing we are trying to do is warn them of the risks they face and where to get water, so they don’t die.’‘

I like what Mark Krikorian—executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies—had to say:

``What’s next? Are they going to buy them bus tickets to Chicago?’‘

In another slightly-related incident, a standoff in Texas between the U.S. border patrol and Mexican smugglers has drawn a fair amount of attention despite the national media’s virtual cover-up of the story.

A West Texas standoff along the Rio Grande between U.S. law enforcement officers and heavily armed Mexican drug smugglers in military-style clothing prompted congressional demands Tuesday for an international investigation and a call for deployment of U.S. troops to the border.

The incident, which occurred Monday on U.S. soil at an isolated river crossing about 50 miles east of El Paso, is the latest involving armed incursions along the U.S. border with Mexico.

And it comes less than a week after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called a California newspaper’s account of such border incursions “overblown.”

The incident Monday involved an encounter between two Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Department deputies and three Department of Public Safety troopers and 10 heavily armed drug smugglers at an area about 50 miles down the river from El Paso.

Let’s see if President Bush will actually do something about the border now.

La Shawn Barber and Michelle Malkin both have done quite a bit of blogging about the subject.

A new Pentagon report says that the U.S. Army has become a “thin green line” that is in danger of breaking if no help comes soon.

How thin, how dangerous, and how soon?

It is likely, the study says, that the army literally won’t be able to outlast the insurgency in Iraq:

Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who wrote the report under a Pentagon contract, concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency. He also suggested that the Pentagon’s decision, announced in December, to begin reducing the force in Iraq this year was driven in part by a realization that the Army was overextended.

Interestingly enough, on Monday Army Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno asserted that U.S. forces must prepare for a long war spanning a minimum of two decades:

“This generation of servicemembers will be in what we’re calling the Long War,” the general said. “Our estimate is that for at least the next 20 years, part of our focus will be on how do we deal with the extremist networks that will continue to threaten the United States and its allies.”

The next time you drive around your neighborhood looking at Christmas lights displays, keep Carson Williams of Mason, Ohio in mind.

For three years, Carson has hooked up roughly 25,000 Christmas lights around his home and programed them to . . . well, dance.

To Christmas music.

Playing on FM radio.

Not only has Mr. Williams attracted hundreds if not thousands of people who drive by to view the amazing display, he has also attracted the attention of national media, including NBC’s Today Show and the Associated Press:

This is the third year Williams has assembled the display, which grows every year. He said he merely built on a suggestion from his wife, Sherry.

“She wanted some lights on the house, and I work with computers, so I said, ‘There’s got to be a way to control it with computers,’” Williams said.

He explored the Web and found examples of other synchronized displays. It takes him about an hour to program each minute of the display, which flashes to music by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

That doesn’t mean neighbors have to listen to the sound track repeat itself all night.

“The sound, we actually broadcast on a low FM transmitter, so there’s actually no sound in the neighborhood,” said Williams, an electrical engineer with Cincinnati Bell Technology Solutions.

A sign tells passers-by where to tune to listen, and Williams often stays outside for hours at a time chatting with visitors and directing traffic.

Williams hasn’t had any problems with neighbors so far, and he has said that if anyone complains about the display he will shut it down. You can read the entire article about him and his house here.

Make sure you check out this incredible three minute video showing how the whole thing works! Remember to turn on your speakers, so you experience the whole thing with the music! (The ending is especially fantastic.)
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Saddam defiant as ever. Sick.

What happened in New Orleans is certainly a tragedy, but at least there are some heartwarming stories like this:

Day after day, for more than two weeks, the 76-year-old man sat trapped and alone in his attic, sipping from a dwindling supply of water until it ran out. No food. No way out of a house ringed by foul floodwaters.

Without ever leaving home, Gerald Martin lived out one of the most remarkable survival stories of Hurricane Katrina. Rescuers who found him Friday, as they searched his neighborhood by boat, were astounded at his good spirits and resiliency after 18 days without food or human contact.

. . . .

They found Martin sitting in a chair in the sludge-covered kitchen, partially undressed in an effort to keep cool. After 16 days in his attic, he had descended to the ground floor two days earlier when the floodwaters — once up to the ceiling — finally drained, even though the house remained surrounded by several feet of water.

Incredibly, Martin — who ran out of his gallon-and-a-half water supply on Thursday — was able to walk out of the house with just a bit of assistance.

Pat Buchanan has written another top notch column this week, as usual.

Buchanan rightly defends President Bush against the charges of racism, but notes that Bush is “approaching the greatest crisis of his presidency,” and that in this crises, the president has already “signaled weakness”:

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a splendid conservative jurist and public man, had not even been laid to rest at Arlington before Bush held a press conference to announce his successor: John Roberts.

The unseemly haste in elevating Roberts suggests Bush is desperate to divert attention from the New Orleans disaster. And where Roberts had originally been named to replace a social liberal, Sandra Day O’Connor, thus strengthening the conservative bloc, he is now to replace his mentor, thus simply maintaining the existing balance on the court the president is committed to change.

When Roberts is confirmed – Democrats now intend to cut him up – the constitutionalist bloc will still consist of, at best, only three justices: Scalia, Thomas and Roberts. And while Roberts is a man of brilliance, integrity, judicial temperament and wit, and showed nerve and grit as a young aide to Attorney General William French Smith and President Ronald Reagan, he is unscarred in public battle.

Unlike the man who should have been Bush’s choice.

Antonin Scalia, a generation older than Roberts, with near 20 years experience on the high court, has scar tissue aplenty, all of it acquired in battle for the philosophy and beliefs Bush claims to hold dear. He is the veteran warrior for constitutionalism and intellectual heavyweight of the court. To pass over Scalia for Roberts is like passing over George Patton and giving command of the 3rd Army to a brilliant young staff officer from the Pentagon.

This could just be one of those slips of the tongue that occasionally happens to everybody, and maybe Laura Bush can be excused if this took place early on or was misinformed or misunderstood someone, but the fact that our President’s wife (and our first lady) does not seem to know the name of “Hurricane Katrina” is a bit unsettling, to say the least.

As the link says, perhaps she’s been on vacation too long. Either way, this is the type of thing that doesn’t make you look so good. I’m surprised Democrats haven’t jumped on this already.

From yahoo.com:

NEW YORK - America mourned the victims of Sept. 11 on Sunday as the siblings of the deceased read their loved ones’ names and offered messages of remembrance to a weeping crowd at the site where the World Trade Center once stood. One by one, the names of the dead echoed across the site where the twin towers collapsed four years ago in a nightmarish cloud of dust and debris.

Hard to believe it’s been four years already.

I earlier reported on a bill the California legislature passed essentially approving gay marriage.

Today I found out via the World Magazine blog that Governor Schwarzeneggar, besides vetoing that particular bill as promised, also vetoed two other, less trumpeted bills:

In California, Schwarzenegger on Wednesday also vetoed two other bills backed by homosexual activists. One, AB 866, sponsored by San Francisco Democrat Leland Yee, would have urged candidates to sign a “code of fair campaign practices” that would ban any speech critical of homosexuality or transgenderism. Although signatures would be voluntary, the bill was designed to single out pro-family candidates and, in effect, silence them on sexual morality issues.

The other bill, AB 738, sponsored by Democrat Joe Nation (Marin and Sonoma counties, near San Francisco), would have required petition signature gatherers to wear buttons saying that they are paid workers. The latter bill was obviously designed to hinder efforts to get the 1.2 million signatures currently being collected toward placing two pro-marriage amendments on the ballot. CWA is part of a coalition, ProtectMarriage.com that supports The California Constitutional Marriage Amendment, which has this language:

A marriage between a man and a woman is the only legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.

Good for Arnold! And since we’re on the subject of “transgenderism,” World Blog also had a recent post on a new constitutional right that the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has created out of thin air—I mean, discovered—for prisoners:

Marc Levin sent an email note reporting that “Several weeks ago the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that prisoners in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi generally have a constitutional right to taxpayer-funded sex change treatment.” The case is Praylor v. Texas Dep’t of Criminal Justice (5th Cir. 08/26/2005). The court did not award the inmate the particular treatment he wanted, but opined that a “prison facility must afford the transsexual inmate some form of treatment based upon the specific circumstances of each case.”

I guess denying prisoners sex-change treatments must fall under the realm of “cruel and unusual punishment.” Don’t forget who ends up paying for these treatments, either!