The Goat Pen

The outraged thousands who descended on Madison in March have fulfilled a promise, triggering recall elections for nearly a third of the state's senators.

With recalls certified for nine senators (six Republican; three Democratic), the impatient Republican majority has called a rare "extraordinary session" to punch through the collective bargaining prohibitions of the budget bill. But just as the session started, the state's highest court ruled, speedily, in favor of the bill's passage. The most surprising part of the court's ruling was the dissenting opinion, in which the Chief Justice, in no uncertain terms, accused the majority of disinformation: that the ruling "set forth their own version of facts without evidence."

That may sound tame by the screaming hyena standard of cable news political discourse, but in the legal world, it's a bona fide scandal and finally confirms that everything in Wisconsin, from the highest court in the land to the dirt, has become rabidly partisaned.

eCat wrote:If this doesn't show that Pakistan is clearly anti-American, I don't know what does.

name one of those fucking countries that actually likes us

Zawahiri decided to look for money in the world center of venture capitalism—Silicon Valley. He had been to America once before, in 1989, when he paid a recruiting visit to the mujahideen’s Services Bureau branch office in Brooklyn. According to the F.B.I., he returned in the spring of 1993, this time to Santa Clara, California, where he was greeted by Ali Mohamed, the double agent. Mohamed introduced him to Dr. Ali Zaki, a gynecologist and a prominent civic leader in San Jose. Zaki disputes the F.B.I.’s date of the visit...people at the F.B.I., however, told me that Zawahiri arrived in America shortly after the first bombing of the World Trade Center.

In any event, Zaki claims not to remember much about Zawahiri. “He came as a representative of the Red Crescent of Kuwait,” Zaki said. “I was also a physician, so they asked me to accompany him while he was here.” He met Zawahiri at the Al-Nur Mosque in Santa Clara after evening prayers, and he escorted him to mosques in Sacramento and Stockton. “We talked about the children and the farmers who were injured and were missing limbs because of all the Russian mines,” Zaki recalled. “He was a well-balanced, highly educated physician.” But financially the trip was not a success. Zaki says that, at most, the donations produced by these visits to the California mosques amounted to several hundred dollars.


Islamic Jihad began its assault on Egypt with an attempt on the life of the Interior Minister, who was leading the crackdown on Islamic militants. In August of 1993, a bomb-laden motorcycle exploded next to the minister’s car, killing the bomber and his accomplice. “The minister escaped death, but his arm was broken,” Zawahiri writes in his memoir. The following November, Zawahiri’s men tried to kill Egypt’s Prime Minister with a car bomb as he was being driven past a girls’ school in Cairo. The bomb missed its target, but the explosion injured twenty-one people and killed a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, Shayma Abdel-Halim, who was crushed by a door blown loose in the blast. Her death outraged Egyptians, who had seen more than two hundred and forty people killed by terrorists in the previous two years. As Shayma’s coffin was borne through the streets of Cairo people cried, “Terrorism is the enemy of God!”

Zawahiri was shaken by the popular outrage. “The unintended death of this innocent child pained us all, but we were helpless and we had to fight the government, which was against God’s Sharia and supported God’s enemies,” he notes in his memoir. He offered what amounted to blood money to the girl’s family. The Egyptian government arrested two hundred and eighty of his followers; six were eventually given a sentence of death. Zawahiri writes, “This meant that they wanted my daughter, who was two at the time, and the daughters of other colleagues, to be orphans. Who cried or cared for our daughters?”

Jungle Rat wrote:Amen. Does that mean I can take a quarter to Hilton Head next month? Or will I have to hide it?