† The Swiss Are Not Neutral About Minarets (second item): Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum makes the case that when Swiss voters rejected the construction of minarets with a Constitutional ban, they were not reacting to Muslim extremism in their country – it does not exist (not yet, anyway). Rather, contemplating “court cases and scandals concerning forced marriage, female circumcision and honor killings” in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Sweden – as well as “terrorist incidents [such as] the London Tube bombings, the Spanish train bombs, the murder of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh” – the Swiss are being proactive:

No European government has found a way to deal with this phenomenon. Those that have tried often find themselves running up against their own civil rights and legal traditions. The Danes, determined to limit the number of foreign spouses entering Denmark through arranged marriages, decided that they had no choice but to make it more difficult for all Danes to marry foreigners. The French, realizing that the headscarf had become a symbol of political affiliation in some French schools, found themselves limiting the rights of all students to wear religious clothing, including yarmulkes, to school. …

As grotesquely unfair as a referendum to ban minarets may have been to hundreds of thousands of ordinary, well-integrated Muslims, I have no doubt that the Swiss voted in favor primarily because they don't have much Islamic extremism - and they don't want any.

† The Nobel Peace Prize? Really?: New York Times political correspondent Jeff Zeleny wonders just how (perhaps even whether) President Barack Hussein Obama can B.S., er, finesse, his way out of being “a wartime leader, accepting a medal that is a commendation to peace”:

There is, of course, no escaping the paradox of this moment for Mr. Obama as he delivers an acceptance speech for his Nobel Peace Prize only nine days after announcing that he would escalate the war in Afghanistan by sending in 30,000 more American troops. …

If the trajectory of the president’s political career can be measured, at least in part, through his speeches, the remarks he will give on Thursday about the United States’ place in the world provide one of the most pronounced tests of his rhetoric.

† TSA: We Have Lost Our Stinking Badges: Bad enough front-line Transportation Security Administration screeners lose parts or all of their uniforms and their badges, but now even the back office employees are screwing up. A 93-page TSA operating manual on airport screening procedures – including, “technical settings used by X-ray machines and explosives detectors” and “pictures of credentials used by members of Congress, CIA employees and federal air marshals” – was posted online for vendors to review so they could bid on a contract, reports The Washington Post [contextual link added by The Stiletto]:

TSA officials said that the manual was posted online in a redacted form on a federal procurement Web site, but … computer users [could] recover blacked-out passages by copying and pasting them into a new document or an e-mail. …

Seth Miller, 32, an information technology consultant in Manhattan, first publicized the manual's ineffectual redactions Sunday on his travel blog, WanderingAramean.com. He said he learned about the document while chatting with other fliers on an Internet bulletin board. Miller said it made him question TSA secrecy rules, saying the agency has withheld even mundane operational rules from public view rather than clarify its practices.

"After getting over the initial shock of how stupid it seemed they were for putting out a document like that," Miller said in a phone interview, "I think the most significant risk is that when … you see some of the things that are marked as security sensitive information, you have to sort of smack your hand on your forehead and say, 'What are they thinking?' " …

The original version of the manual is still available online, preserved by Web sites that monitor government secrecy and computer security.  

The TSA insists that the manual was “outdated” and “never implemented,” yet five employees have been put on administrative leave while the security lapse is being investigated by the agency. The Associated Press reports that Assistant Homeland Security secretary David Heyman the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee that his department “has also stopped posting documents with security information either in full or in part on the Internet until the TSA review is complete.”

† Can The Nutrition Police Lay Off Coffee, Already?: Data from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study of the nearly 50,000 men whose health and lifestyle habits were followed from 1986 to 2006 show an association between drinking six or more cups of coffee a day and a reduced risk of prostate cancer (19 percent), particularly of a life-threatening, aggressive form (41 percent). Kathryn M. Wilson, a research fellow in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, tells HealthDay News that it’s not the caffeine in coffee that has the protective effect, because decaffeinated coffee also seemed to be beneficial. "It has something to do with insulin and glucose metabolism. A number of studies have found that coffee is associated with a reduced risk of diabetes."

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race): Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson has a more subtle take on the Tiger Woods’ taste in hoochi-koochi women. Being multiracial, Woods could theoretically be attracted to white, Asian or black women, but he seems attracted only to white women - and a specific type of white woman at that. Robinson speculates why this is so:

What's with the whole Barbie thing?

No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who've been linked to Woods resemble one another. I'm talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement.

This may be the most interesting aspect of the whole Tiger Woods story - and one of the most disappointing. He seems to have been bent on proving to himself that he could have any woman he wanted. But from the evidence, his aim wasn't variety but some kind of validation. …

If adultery is really about the power and satisfaction of conquest, Woods's self-esteem was apparently only boosted by bedding the kind of woman he thought other men lusted after - the "Playmate of the Month" type that Hugh Hefner turned into the American gold standard. …

His taste in mistresses leaves the impression of a man who is, deep down, both insecure and image-conscious - a control freak even when he's committing "transgressions."

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II): After a 2½-year legal battle, Jamie Cap finally got to do something he hasn’t done since becoming paralyzed from a neck injury in a high school football game in November 1979: Go hunting. He used a specially-equipped wheelchair, a 12-gauge shotgun that is fired by an attached battery-powered breathing tube, reports The Associated Press:

"I don't know if there are words," he said. "I'm so happy. When you find you can do something again after 30 years, you can't put a price on that. Some people think it's nothing, but try being paralyzed for 30 years and then come talk to me."

Disabled hunters are far from uncommon in the U.S., but quadriplegic hunters still are relatively rare, experts say. That may be mostly due to a lack of awareness of technological advancements, since no states prohibit the disabled from owning firearms or from hunting, according to Vanessa Warner, director of disabled shooting services for the National Rifle Association.

Warner said she gets a few inquiries each week from people seeking information on licenses and equipment for quadriplegics. The NRA, she said, does not track the number of quadriplegic hunters. …

For a quadriplegic, firing a shotgun requires help from a companion. In Cap's case, a friend sets up the contraption, safety on, on Cap's wheelchair and Cap aims the shotgun by moving the toggle switch with his mouth. Once his partner releases the safety, Cap fires by sipping on the breathing tube.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Is Armenian Genocide Denial Good For The Jews?): Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy - who previously wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times arguing that since the AKP took power in 2002, Turkey has been turning away from secularism – writes another commentary for the paper that takes Turkey to task for its “ill-conceived foreign policy” that “bash[es] the West and support[s] anti-Western regimes, even when the latter hurts Muslims”:

Since coming to power in 2002, the AKP has dramatically changed Turkey's foreign policy. The party has let Ankara's ties with pro-Western Azerbaijan, Georgia and Israel deteriorate and has started to ignore Europe. Meanwhile, the AKP has built ties with anti-Western states such as Sudan while making friends with Ankara's erstwhile adversaries, including Russia, Iran and Syria, and positioning itself as Hamas' patron. …

A comparison of the AKP's Israel and Sudan policies helps define Turkey's Islamist foreign policy. Since coming to power, the AKP has not only built a close political and economic relationship with Khartoum but also defended Sudanese leader Omar Hassan Bashir's atrocities in Darfur.

Last month, Erdogan said: "I know that Bashir is not committing genocide in Darfur, because Bashir is a Muslim and a Muslim can never commit genocide" [emphais, The Stiletto]. What? The International Criminal Court indicted Bashir and has called for his arrest for war crimes in the Darfur conflict, in which 300,000 Sudanese -- mostly Muslims -- have died.

The AKP's Sudan policy stands in stark contrast to its Israel policy. At a World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Erdogan chided Israeli President Shimon Peres, Jews and Israelis about the Gaza war, for "knowing well how to kill people." Erdogan then walked off the panel. Days later, he hosted the Sudanese vice president in Ankara. …

Far from helping the West, the AKP's foreign policy is challenging its regional interests, and this is also bad for Muslims. When Iranian demonstrators took to the streets in June to contest the election outcome, the AKP rushed to the defense of Ahmadinejad's regime, congratulating him on his "electoral success" while pro-Ahmadinejad forces were beating peaceful protesters.

Instead of supporting Western values, the AKP and its Islamist foreign policy undermine such values and the West, which in turn hurts ordinary Muslims from Darfur to Chechnya to Iran.

Editorial Note: Erdogan is obviously a product of Turkish public schools, which do not teach students about the Armenian Genocide (last item), else he could not have made a statement as patently ridiculous as Sen. Harry Reid’s claim that Republicans dragged their feet when it came to abolishing slavery in the U.S. and granting blacks full civil rights.

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Global Warming Is In The Eye Of The Beholder): Former Republican Vice Presidential candidate and AK governor Sarah Palin weighs in on "Climategate" and the Copenhagen climate change conference in this Washington Post op-ed:

With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.

"Climate-gate," as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle - the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse. …

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to "restore science to its rightful place." But instead of staying home from Copenhagen and sending a message that the United States will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices, the president has upped the ante. He plans to fly in at the climax of the conference in hopes of sealing a "deal." Whatever deal he gets, it will be no deal for the American people.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Take The Veil Off, Or Go Home): In a commentary published by Le Monde newspaper, French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised his “Muslim countrymen” that he “will do everything” to ensure that they “feel they are citizens like any other, enjoying the same rights as all the others to live their faith and practice their religion with the same liberty and dignity" – but also warned that “in our country, where Christian civilization has left such a deep trace, where republican values are an integral part of our national identity, everything that could be taken as a challenge to this heritage and its values would condemn to failure the necessary inauguration of a French Islam." Sarkozy also had a thing or two to say about the minaret ban in neighboring Switzerland, reports The Washington Post.