This morning, the world learned that al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq, Zarqawi’s murderous tenure as “Prince of Iraq” ended at the hands of a precision United States Air Force strike. For a moment, we breathe a sigh of relief that one of the most reviled terrorists our troops have had to face has been stricken from this earth.

However, his death, two hours later, does little to stem the violence.

The painful, familiar beat resumed just two hours after the announcement of Mr. Zarqawi’s death when five young women waiting outside a university were gunned down in a drive-by shooting, a witness said. Four bombs killed as many as 30 people in largely Shiite areas of Baghdad, The Associated Press reported.

Yet now comes the painful reminder, that Zarqawi is only a man. Men live and die, but ideas go on forever. The ideas that Zarqawi and his followers preached, ideas that have brought Iraq to its knees in civil war, devastated by a fierce insurgency that considers all but its followers to be enemies. These ideas live on, despite the death of Zarqawi. He now becomes immortalized and remembered as a martyr, stricken by the devil of America.

I am not saying, that we should not have killed him. I would have loved a chance to capture him, and have him executed before our armed forces in Iraq. However, his death is only the continued rallying cry for increased violence. Now, more than ever, it is important for the United States to consider how we are approaching this war.

For this post, I am going to leave arguments for or against withdraw out, despite one’s feelings on them, we can assume that at least for the time being our troops will continue to be in harms way. It is thus incumbent upon us to decide how America will act to destroy this enemy. For the right, the only way is to insist upon the inherent rightness of America, our superiority as a nation, and our ability to do no wrong. It is this attitude though, which most hampers our efforts battling against jihadism.

There is no question that the principles of democracy and freedom far outshine jihadism. It’s not a question of moral relativity, but of right and wrong. But this is why it is so important for us to behave in the true tradition of freedom and democracy. Only the most foolish think that America can never do any wrong. It is this insistence of such a foolish thought that allows more of our enemies to bring more young people to their side. In Iraq and the Middle East young, angry, impressionable men watch stories of Abu Gharib or the slaughter at Haditha, and they become enraged. Then, our government, instead of stepping forward and truly punishing those responsible in the chain of command dismiss many of the cases.

It is only by demonstrating the true measure of justice that we will be able to prevail in an ongoing war against jihadism. Failure to demonstrate our justice, while maintaining military force where necessary, Iraq not being necessary; will only result in ongoing battles with jihadism.

The death of Zarqawi provides a time for questions as to where America needs to move now in fighting off the insurgency and gaining any semblance of stability in Iraq, if such a thing is possible. Regardless, it also remains a chance to witness first hand the power of an idea created by an ordinary man who now lies dead. And should afford us the rare opportunity to examine how to win this war, a war that can only be one with justice. Inflicting justice upon those who have attacked us, those who would seek to destroy us, and executing justice upon our own who seek to undermine justice abroad.

From the Dear Leader:

But Bush added: “It’s going to take awhile. Sometimes leaders show up who do a great disservice to the traditions and people of a country.”

Christ is he ever right!

California has made the first steps toward improving the shameless quality of electronic voting machines in our country. Currently, touch screen voting provides no written record of the vote cast, allowing for mistakes, lost votes, and other well documented failures.

California in yesterday’s election introduced a printer on the side of machines displaying the vote cast, allowing voters to report any anomalies so they may re-vote. However, the printer is a journal record and does not provide users with a receipt of their vote.

I don’t understand why there is such opposition to providing receipts to voters. Cost effectiveness can’t be it, receipt paper, all paper, is very, very cheap. So why not give people official records of their vote? If I walk into a room with a machine and push a button it should print me a receipt listing what button was pushed, and what was recorded into memory. If there is a problem, it can be reported not only to election officials, but the receipts could serve as evidence if ever voter fraud occurred. Why should people be opposed to this?

It seems to me the only reason to oppose protecting votes, are to protect one’s interest in changing them.

The House is supposed to conduct a floor vote today on Net Neutrality within the passage of telecommunication regulations. Net Neutrality is an important decision facing Congress, bringing even Sergey Birn of Google out to publicly lobby lawmakers for it.

In summation, Net Neutrality is the principle that the internet is to be free and open. But the internet isn’t free, you’d say. Well, that’s not really true, bandwidth isn’t free, and so you are not paying an ISP for the internet really, but instead are paying to as you probably realize for access and bandwidth to surf the free and open internet.

Major websites such as Google, Yahoo, and eBay support maintaining net neutrality and providing for its protection in upcoming telecom legislation. Telco’s like AT&T who insist that “the internet can’t be free”, want to be able to charge website owners to be included on their network. This would mean that Telco’s could force major, minor, any site to pay money in order to be accessible by users on their network. So if you were an AT&T customer for example, AT&T may try to force sites you visit every day, like Google, Yahoo, eBay, the New York Times to pay them a premium so that AT&T users can access these sites. Alternately, the could also charge you to gain access to a higher level of more open internet service.

When AT&T says the internet shouldn’t be free, he’s only half right. I quote the famous explanation of how free software works, it’s not always free like beer, but always free like speech. The internet is to always be free like speech, maintaining that allows us to fully utilize this unique communication system we now have. However, AT&T isn’t trying to collect money for beer being given away, instead they’re trying to make additional profits off of things they don’t even own.

Imagine that you own a small business, on main street, and people want to come in and shop at your store. Of course you pay taxes for your location, you pay rent to your landlord, and you sell your goods for a price. But now imagine that the city wants to add a special tax as well. They say that if you want to let more than so many people in per day, you’ll need to pay more for a special permit to do so. What’s even worse is customers might also have to pay to get access to your store.

The idea that the internet can’t be free is so devoid of reason, it’s insulting. It’s not free, people pay for bandwidth, user fees to the government, and so on and so forth. What these telco’s want is to be able to make money for nothing.

Despite where I stand on immigration, the President today suggested compromise and that his opponents should tone down their rhetoric. I find those suggestions coming from this president to be, well, hypocrisy.

Without going in to great detail, I mostly agree with the President and the Senate bill on this matter despite my above issue.

John Faso just defied the expectations of many Republicans and got 61.2% of of the vote by delegates at the party convention for the New York State Governor’s race. That means that he will be the party’s designee on the Sept. 12 primary ballot. Being the party designee is usually a nominal honor, but it could be consequential this year. This might bring Faso more money, media attention and endorsements, all of which is likely to fracture the Republicans before November. Spitzer had some $19 million dollars to spend as opposed to a combined $3 million by both Weld and Faso in January.

Story on Democratic Convention Story on Republican Convention

Also, later today there will be an interesting battle for the nomination on who will oppose Hiliary.

Great article by Bob Herbert on modern day slavery. I do a lot of work for the <a href=”http://www.polarisproject.org target=”_blank”>Polaris Project, which is a great NGO working on this issue. It is run by two Brown graduates who are very dedicated to this issue. To clear up the most common (and annoying) mistake about Trafficking:

In the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, sex trafficking is defined as: “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.” Also defined in the TVPA, the legal definition of “severe forms of trafficking in persons” is:

• sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age; or
• the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

It is important to note that nowhere in the TVPA requires that victims be from other countries or cross borders. Hence, trafficked persons can be from other countries as well as from the same country where they are trafficked. Domestic sex trafficking (or internal trafficking) definitively involves the actions, means, and purposes that meet both the definition for sex trafficking and “severe forms of trafficking in persons,” including elements of recruiting, transporting, and obtaining; elements of force, fraud, and coercion, as elaborated below; and the inducement of commercial sex acts.

If you don’t know about Human Trafficking or how big a problem it is, I implore you to read Herbert’s column (if you have TimesSelect) and to go through the Polaris Project website.

It appears we might have actually engaged in a multilateral action this comes after Tehran rejected Condi’s conditions for Nuclear Talks. I thought yesterday that it looked like Bush is bringing his foreign policy one step closer to the 21st century. It will be interesting to see how this works for them in the future.