American post-secondary schools are storefronts for entry visas
Yes, I know I already wrote about this, but now the mainstream media have discovered it, too.

Yeah, it's such a love-in now. . .
Headline from today's Fox News web site, Cavuto page (page changes daily):

Could President Bush's Middle East peace plan trigger a wave of Arab resentment against the U.S.?

Here is the obligatory link . . .
. . . to Steven den Beste's analyses of Bush's speech on Palestine and Israel, which are the best I've seen. There is more than one posting, so this link is to the latest one, as of my writing.

The triumph of hope over experience . . .
. . . is one way I would describe President Bush's speech today. It has high ideals, but he asks the Palestinians to surrender the only thing that really matters to them: the "right of return" to the places they, or their parents or grandparents, lived before Israel was established in 1948.

I wrote about this on my old Gunner20 blog site:

The PA insists that the Palestinians have the right of return to their 1947 homes. Although the right of return is not actually addressed in UNR 242, it is likely that something like it was envisioned because in 1948 the UN adopted Resolution 194, which said in part,

...that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practible date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

Little Green Footballs supplies the link to a sermon by Arafat's appointed Mufti Dr. Ikrimah Sabri. He says that the right of return cannot be negotiated at all, by anyone, period. The link takes you to the State Department's translation. The sermon was carried live on June 21 by Ramallah Voice of Palestine, official radio station of the Palestinian Authority. Sabri preached at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (three days before Bush's speech).

"O Muslims, O brothers in faith everywhere. We must also affirm that the land of Palestine is an Islamic endowment and that the refugee who does not want to return or cannot return has no right to obtain any compensation for his house or land. His property returns to all Muslims. Therefore, there is no shari'a solution to the refugee issue except by their return to their homes and lands. They will not lose their right no matter how long it takes."

Sabri basically told the Palestinians now living in the Transjordan and Gaza that they are going to emigrate to Israel (or as Sabri puts it, "return" there) whether they want to or not. So much for the will of the people.

That may be one reason Bush called for new leadership for the Palestinians. Arafat et. al. have proven they are in it for themselves, for their own personal self-aggrandizement and privilege.

Arafat and Sabri and other high PA officials know full well that the right of return means the end of Israel as a Jewish state. That is what they want - but maybe not, because they know that the right of return is the one thing that Israel can never accept. Dennis Ross, who personally knows Arafat very well, said that Arafat has no vision for a Palestinian state at all. All he knows how to do is fight. All he wants to do is fight.

For Arafat and his cronies, continuing the war is itself the only objective. The Palestinians are suffering because they will not permit them to choose their own destiny. The sooner the Palestinian people realize this, the better off they will be. It may be that the "belly full of war" Israel has been giving them will prod them to making a new future with new leaders. Let's hope.

Update: The nub of the problem is this: how propagandized are the Palestinians? The evidence suggests, "very." The desire of the ordinary Palestinian man or woman to "return" may well be high; in fact, I think it is. This dream may die a hard and even violent death.

Civil War in Palestine? An out-on-a-limb prediction: I give a greater than 50 percent chance that reactions to Bush's speech in the West Bank will result in an internecine war among the Palestinians. When it sinks in that Arafat is now irrelevant in Western eyes, the stuggle to fill the vaccum will not be peaceful. I think a civil war in the West Bank is a real possibility.

Earning a living . . .
. . . for the rest of the day, so please see my late Sunday posts as well:

Americans are still isolationist at heart . . .

Why looteries, I mean, "lotteries," cause higher taxes

More on the threat of Islamic-Arabism

"Save yo' Confederate money, boys. The South gonna rise again!": What my daughter has to do with General Lee.

Text of "Why We Fight America" by al Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith
MEMRI has the text of this statement, referred to in my earlier posting. He claims the right to kill four million Americans, half to be children, and injure millions more, with any weapon, including chemical and biological.

The Entire Earth Must Be Subjected to Islam

"How can [he, the true Muslim] possibly [accept humiliation and inferiority] when he knows that his nation was created to stand at the center of leadership, at the center of hegemony and rule, at the center of ability and sacrifice? How can [he] possibly [accept humiliation and inferiority] when he knows that the [divine] rule is that the entire earth must be subject to the religion of Allah - not to the East, not to the West - to no ideology and to no path except for the path of Allah?…"

Part III: The Islamic Justification for Al-Qa'ida's Jihad Against the U.S.

"The religious arguments on which we base ourselves in our Jihad against the Americans - the explanations that inspire us with confidence in the triumph of our religion, our belief, and our faith - are many, and this is not the place to enumerate them, as they are included in the books of the sages."

"In this article I will present one explanation that suffices [to wage] Jihad against the Americans, the Jews, and anyone who has gone in their path…"

"Allah said, 'He who attacked you, attack him as he attacked you,' and also, 'The reward of evil is a similar evil,' and also, 'When you are punished, punish as you have been punished.'"

"The words of the sages on these verses are clear.

"Anyone who peruses these sources reaches a single conclusion: The sages have agreed that the reciprocal punishment to which the verses referred is not limited to a specific instance. It is a valid rule for punishments for infidels, for the licentious Muslims, and for the oppressors."

Islamic Law Allows Reciprocation against the U.S.

"If by religious law it is permitted to punish a Muslim [for the crime he committed] - it is all the more permitted to punish a Harbi infidel [i.e. he who belongs to Dar Al-Harb 'the domain of disbelief'] in the same way he treated the Muslim."

"According to the numbers I noted in the previous section of the lives lost from among the Muslims because of the Americans, directly or indirectly, we still are at the beginning of the way. The Americans have still not tasted from our hands what we have tasted from theirs. The [number of] killed in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were no more than fair exchange for the ones killed in the Al-'Amiriya shelter in Iraq, and are but a tiny part of the exchange for those killed in Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, the Philippines, Bosnia, Kashmir, Chechnya, and Afghanistan."

We Have the Right to Kill 4 Million Americans

"We have not reached parity with them. We have the right to kill 4 million Americans - 2 million of them children - and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons, so as to afflict them with the fatal maladies that have afflicted the Muslims because of the [Americans'] chemical and biological weapons."

"America knows only the language of force. This is the only way to stop it and make it take its hands off the Muslims and their affairs. America does not know the language of dialogue!! Or the language of peaceful coexistence!! America is kept at bay by blood alone…"

Why do they hate us? Because we're not Muslim fundamentalists, that's why.
David Horowitz extensively cites an al-Qaeda statement that fully answers the question many Americans (mostly anti-American leftists) asked beginning about 10 a.m. Sept. 11.

This is not a war about land in the Middle East or the structure of a Palestinian state, or a U.S. military presence in the Arabian peninsula. It is a war about redemption. In this it exactly parallels the Communist threat from the past. In the eyes of the Communists, America stood in the way of heaven – a socialist paradise in which racism, sexism, and economic inequality would vanish from the earth. In the eyes of radical Islam, America -- the Great Satan -- stands in the way of Islam’s rule, and thus of human redemption and it is for this reason America must be destroyed.

Thus, the al-Qaeda proclamation:

"America is the head of heresy in our modern world, and it leads an infidel democratic regime that is based upon separation of religion and state and on ruling the people by the people via legislating laws that contradict the way of Allah and permit what Allah has prohibited. This compels the other countries to act in accordance with the same laws in the same ways … and punishes any country [that rebels against these laws] by besieging it, and then by boycotting it. By so doing [America] seeks to impose on the world a religion that is not Allah’s…"

Americans are still isolationist at heart . . .
. . . seems one implication of what Armed and Dangerous (link at left) says in Part Three of his postings about the real nature of the real enemy.

Americans have always had the odd parochial habit of assuming that, down deep underneath, everyone is basically like us -- sharing our historically peculiar mix of pragmatism and idealism; valuing honesty and fair dealing; tolerant, materialistic, freedom-loving, open-minded, tempting to value comfort and success over ideology. We reflexively believe that everyone can be reasoned with essentially in our own terms. Most Americans don't understand fanaticism and violent evil. We have a tendency to be `fair' by assuming that in any dispute there must be some right and some wrong on both sides. It's telling that we use `extreme' as a political pejorative.

Since at least the end of World War II, this parochialism has become so acute that it has almost blinded us to serious threats. While more of the left-liberals who shilled for the Soviets and Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot during the Cold War were closet Communists than is yet publicly admitted, a good many were honest dupes who simply couldn't believe that Communists were actually motivated by the sinister craziness of hard Marxism, and therefore assumed that America must somehow be at fault. Conservatives apologizing for unsavory pro-American strongmen mostly weren't closet fascists, either; a good many of them had obvious trouble seeing caudillos as more than cigar-chomping CEOs running a particularly tough business, and never mind the gold braid and funny hats.

The see-no-evil tendency in American folk psychology created fertile ground for the rather less benign dogmas of multiculturalism ("all cultures present ways of living that are equally morally valid") and postmodernism ("there is no objective truth"). Originally constructed by Marxists (and one ex-Fascist) as part of a program to ideologically disarm the West against the radical evil of Communism, these dogmas have both outlived their original ends and seeped into American pop culture. Their effect is that many of us can no longer bring ourselves to think of any political movement, religion, or culture as radically evil unless it is safely part of history (and, for political correctness, was run by dead white European males when it was alive and kicking).

This was a relatively harmless form of self-delusion between 1992 and 2001, the decade of self-indulgence bracketed by the fall of the Soviet Empire and 9/11. No longer. We are at war. Western civilization is under attack by a foe that revels in the wholesale slaughter of civilians, one that proudly announces its intention to bring a second Holocaust of fire and blood down upon us all.

If our civilization is to survive, we will need to recover the moral judgment needed to recognize radical evil, the language in which to condemn it, and the determination to act.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Why looteries, I mean, "lotteries," cause higher taxes
Michael Heberling, president of the Baker College Center for Graduate Studies in Flint, Michigan, wrote in The Independent Review, Spring, 2002:

The ephemeral infusion of lottery dollars always results in prodigal spending, which, in turn, forces state legislators to raise taxes in order to shore up the budgetary shortfalls that develop when lottery revenue sags.

Legislators keep their fingers crossed and hope that nobody remembers that the lottery was supposed to have made additional taxes unnecessary. Obfuscation about proceeds earmarked "for the children" will also keep people from asking probing and potentially embarrassing questions such as "What happened to all the education money that was in the general fund?"

A study by Money magazine found that from 1990 to 1995 taxes grew three times faster in lottery states than in non-lottery states. In 1971, Governor Thomas Meskill of Connecticut successfully lobbied for a lottery by arguing, "Giving people the choice to raise money purchasing lottery tickets will let your state hold the line on taxes." In 1991, however, Connecticut legislators enacted the state's first income tax even though lottery sales had reached $671 million in the previous year.

More on the threat of Islamic-Arabism
On a blog found via linkmeister Instapundit, Tonecluster has this to say about the topic in his essay, "It's the culture, stupid."

I do not think that arabia can live peacefully or coexist with non-arabs. . . . I am left with the conclusion that the problem is with arab culture. (Recognizing the logical leap that I am making here). I dont really take islam at its word -- history has proven that doing so is foolish. But, again, for the sake of argument. If islam is peaceful what explains the depravity of the arab world? To me, it is arab culture that uses islam (after all, arab culture created it) to achieve power and suppress "non-believers" and to a lesser extent its constituents.

More and more people are coming to realize that the terrorists who attacked America on Sept. 11 and who are attacking Israel today are not aberrations of Islamic-Arabism; they are the logical result of it.

As I wrote in my long essay, Precision Weapons, Abject Defeat, and Reshaping Societies:

Saudi Arabia is a paradigm. According to Prof. Fouad Ajami of The Johns Hopkins University, Islam has been "the handmaiden of the state" since the beginning of the modern Saudi realm, resluting from "an alliance between a desert chieftan, Muhammed bin Saud, and a religious reformer named Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab. This partnership anchored the kingdom. The House of Saud defended the country and struck bargains with world powers, while the descendants of the Wahhab family dominated the judiciary and an educational system suffused with religion.
. . The real enemy of Western civilization today is not Islam. It is arabism: a system of political and social authoritarianism in Arab lands using Islam as a handmaiden, as Prof. Ajami put it. (Remember, most Muslims are not Arabs.)
. . Our task is therefore over the long term to bring home to these nations, at every level of their societies, the fact that Japan had to face: the times, they are a-changing. These nations must come to realize at every level that they cannot successfully continue with business as before. They must transition into democratically based insitutions with free-market systems and individual freedoms. The question is, can these reforms be brought about either non-violently or will this change require profound suffering by their peoples?

Tonecluster continues -

It seems to me that until Western governments become serious about pressuring arab governments in reforming the way arabs view the world (I tend to think that western culture will ultimately achieve this goal -- the problem is whether it happens before a nuke goes off in some western or hindu city), our war against terrorism (really a war against Saudis and Iraqis and Yemenis and Palestinians, etc...) will continue and it is about cultures. The west can, to a large extent, tolerate theirs. But it seems that islamic arabs cannot tolerate anyone else. Until that changes, how can we see islam as practiced and funded by arabs (saudis) as nothing more than a totalitarian code of life that is the ideological center for conquest against our country.

Exactly. See my explanation of what is at stake. It's called freedom.

"Save yo' Confederate money, boys. The South gonna rise again!"
What my daughter has to do with General Lee.
This afternoon my wife, daughter and I went to Rippavilla mansion, an large antebellum home dating from 1851. It was built by the Cheairs family (pronounced, "chairs"). The home is located in Spring Hill, Tennessee, where Confederate General John Bell Hood's army failed to stop Union Maj. Gen. John Schofield's army from slipping away to the north on the night of Nov. 29, 1864. Schofield took up strong defensive positions the next day in Franklin, on the south side of the Harpeth river.

The guide at Rippavilla described what happened the next morning. Hood, furious at Schofield's escape, was hardly able to eat the breakfast Mrs. Cheairs served him and his staff in Rippavilla's dining room. Absorbing Hood's unbridled fury and accusations of dereliction, incompetence and even drunkenness was Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the only American general ever to have a price put in his head by his enemy (by Union Gen. William T. Sherman, who offered a bounty of $10,000 for Forrest).

Also present was a corps commander, Lt. Gen. Stephen D. Lee, no relation to Robert E. Lee. It was S.D. Lee who had ordered South Carolina batteries to open fire on Fort Sumter, the opening shots of the Civil War.

My wife and I gave the name Lee to our daughter as her middle name. It was my grandmother's middle name; she was named after her uncle, whose first name was Lee. He was born during the closing weeks of the Civil War. His father, my great-great-great uncle, had served with Gen. S.D. Lee throughout the war. He named his son Lee in the general's honor.

I explained this lineage to my daughter, and pointed out that she was standing in the room where her distant namesake had received his orders to pursue Schofield's army. Hood's Army of Tennessee attacked the Yankees at Franklin late that afternoon. The Battle of Franklin was a catastrophe for the Confederacy. Hood's army suffered thousands of casualties in just five hours, more than either side had suffered in two days' battle at Shiloh. The Confederate dead was greater than the number of dead Grant had lost at the infamous battle of Cold Harbor. Two weeks later the Army of Tennessee was annihilated at the Battle of Nashville and the Civil War in the west was over.

Gen. Lee was wounded at Franklin. After the war, he was a member of Mississippi legislature and the first president of the Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College. He was an early campaigner for women's rights. He died in 1908.

But for a few moments this afternoon, Lee was right there with us.

A postscript: My wife's maiden name was Stephens. Her great-great-great uncle was Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. My great-great grandfather and his two brothers fought as members of the 11th Tennessee Regiment; one brother was killed at the Battle of Murfreesboro. Another g2-grandfather was a Union officer in the 16th Pennsylvania who had a leg shot off at Chancellorsville, where Union General "Fighting Joe" Hooker didn't live up to his nickname.

Yet another g2-grandfather was a CSA soldier who was captured by the Union and imprisoned in Nashville. He may be the only American POW whose wife busted him out of prison. She, in turn, was sexually assaulted in her own kitchen by a Yankee soldier. A proper Southern lady, she defended her virtue with great vigor by taking a very large, oak rolling pin and slamming him on the head. He dropped like a rock. As he fell, she shoved him out her back door onto the porch. Later, two of his buddies took him away, whether dead or alive Grandma never learned.

My mother still has the rolling pin. Grandma smashed that Yankee so hard the rolling pin cracked from one end to the other. It is a treasured heirloom

Oh, sure, now Arafat wants to make a deal!
Steven den Beste dissects the latest phony gambit by the Palestinian Authority with surgical skill.

Now that the Palestinian Authority has ceased to be important, suddenly it is trying to be reasonable. This report says that the Palestinians have finally give up the "Right of Return", the biggest stumbling block to any peace deal with Israel.

It's a shame they didn't do this about six months ago; then it might have made a difference. In fact, it's a shame they're not doing it now. The reporter is seeing something that isn't there, and hoping that there's more to this than there actually is.

The Palestinians are not giving up the right-of-return. Partly that's because the Palestinian Authority doesn't actually speak for the Palestinians anymore. (No single voice speaks for the Palestinians anymore.) What they actually said is that instead of the right-of-return being non-negotiable, now they're willing to talk about it.

See also my post of April 5 which addresses the right of return, and also explains why this latest gambit is baloney.

Our "friends" the Saudis
Photodude eloquently talks about them. Good stuff.

My email seems to be out. . . .
. . . so if you have emailed me recently, I probably didn't get it. Don't re-send; I should get it when service resumes.

Interesting quote
Reader Brian (no last name given) makes this observation in response to my essay on the comparison between Western law and Islamic law:

"They" just aren't like us ... and it is terribly frustrating and not a little terrifying to appreciate that there are very many in our own country assume that the old axiom "Come, let us reason together" is a useful way to approach Islamists.

How do you get committed people to change their minds (both Islamists and our well meaning but misguided citizens)?

"Once a commitment is made, the nature of thought changes. The committed heart is not so much interested in a careful evaluation of the merits of a course of action, but in proving that he or she is right." (A. Pratkinis (1995) "How to sell a pseudoscience", Skeptical Inquirer, 19:20-25.

Excellent point, Brian. Thank you for reading and for writing!

Muslim scholar warns West of Muslim goals
Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the link to a UPI report of a Muslim professor of political science named Bassam Tibi at Goettingen University, Germany.

"First, both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms these mean different things to each of them. The word 'peace,' for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam -- or 'House of Islam' -- to the entire world," explained Tibi, who is also a research scholar at Harvard University.

"This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates Western thought, a concept developed by (18th-century philosopher) Immanuel Kant."

According to Tibi, the quest of converting the entire world to Islam is an immutable fixture of the Muslim worldview. Only if this task is accomplished -- if the world has become a "Dar al-Islam" -- will it also be a "Dar a-Salam," or a house of peace.

Child killers
This VodkaPundit posting brought back some bitter memories. Here are the guts of it, a quote from PittsburghLIVE.com.

A McKeesport man with a history of child abuse allegations told police he threw his girlfriend's 16-month-old baby into an empty tub and shook him, slamming the child's head, because the baby had soiled his diaper, Allegheny County detectives said Thursday.

James M. Ferree, 41, is now in the county jail on a charge of criminal homicide after little James Walsh Jr. died in UPMC McKeesport hospital from his injuries.

When I was chief of public affairs of US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID), my unpleasant duty every morning was to read the worldwide Army crime report. CID only deals with felony offenses; misdemeanors are handled by the military police.

One morning there was a ROI (Report of Investigation) of a dead baby case. A young soldier had stopped on the way home after getting off duty for a few beers. He got home both late and looped. His wife was also a soldier, on a different duty schedule. Husband's tardiness caused her to be late reporting for duty, a very serious thing in the Army. As soon as husband got home, wife was out the door. She couldn't leave before then because they had a baby son nine months old (or so; the child was still in a crib).

Baby started crying by and by, and drunken father got mad. He picked his baby son up by his ankles and quieted him by slamming his head against the wall several times - which killed him, of course. Then, father took the corpse to the balcony of their third-floor apartment and hurled it to the ground three apartments away.

Then there was the case of three-year-old Andrea McKinney, who was so brutally killed that you wouldn't believe me if I wrote it, and I just don't want to write it anyway. She died at the hands and other organs of a total stranger who kidnaped her from her bedroom about 4 a.m. So even though I wrote earlier that I am skeptical of the reported facts of the Elizabeth Smart case, I also have uneasy feeling that poor Elizabeth is lying dead somewhere after suffering more horribly than any of us would like to know.

VodkaPundit says that the case he cited is basically prima facie justification for capital punishment. I have worked to oppose the death penalty in my state, but honestly, I have a hard time finding mercy in my heart for anyone who murders or abuses a child.

Take the political compass test
Go here and find out where you are on the political graph. Pretty interesting! Thanks to War Now! for the link.

Another suggested name for Palestinian murder-suicide bombers
Andrew Sullivan says that one his readers suggested that the Palestinian murder-suicide bombers be called, "Islamikazes."

I know that people have been searching for a handle for these murderers who take their own lives in the process, and Islamikaze has a catchy ring to it. But for some reason I can't bring myself to adopt it. I find myself reacting, incredibly, that it tarnishes the image of the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World war II.

All of Japan's kamikaze pilots were properly enrolled members of the national armed forces of a legitimate nation-state. They wore regular uniforms. They did not attack by deceit, but openly. They attacked only completely legitimate military targets - American ships - and so all the casualties kamikazes caused were military casualties. When the Japanese surrendered, there were no rogue kamikaze pilots who continued to attack. When ordered to cease, they ceased. They picked up their lives as best as they could, and lived in peace with the American occupiers.

Compared to Palestinian murder-suicide bombers, the Japanese kamikaze pilots now seem positively noble.

So I can't use "Islamikaze." Compared to the Palestinians, the Japanese kamikazes seem like straight-up guys.

-- Andrew also linked to a "gripping piece" in the Toronto Star. He's right. It's a kind of analysis of the bombings I haven't seen in any US media.

Somebody's dirty in the Elizabeth Smart kidnaping
I am skeptical about that Elizabeth Smart was snatched from her home by a guy acting alone, unaided by someone related to her or her family by blood or friendship. Kidnaping of children by strangers is rare, as crimes against children go (between 200-300 kids per year are kidnapped by a non-relative, most in public venues). Dr. Loren Brooks was interviewed by Bill O'Reilly June 10. She is a kidnapping expert with the Leadership Consulting Group, a firm specializing in threatening situations and potential violence. According to Brooks, the motives of such kidnappers are almost always sexual predation or a desire to integrate the child into their own families. Ransom demands are rare.

O'REILLY: OK. How unusual is it for somebody to just to break into somebody's house and snatch a child, particularly a 14-year-old child, you know, and Danielle Van Dam was 7? These kids can put up a fight. They can scream.

BROOKS: Yes, it's quite rare. You know, there are about 800,000 individuals that go missing each year, and of those, about 85 to 90 percent are juveniles. And of those, about 200 to 300 are stranger-abducted, sometimes taken off the street. But the out-of-the-home abduction only occurs about 45 to 65 times a year, so it's a low-frequency event, but it's extremely traumatic, of course, for families and communities.

So a case like Smart's happens, but very rarely. And in this case, something doesn't click in the facts of the case as they have been revealed to the public.

Remember Susan Smith? She was the South Carolina mother who strapped her two small children into the back seat of her Mazda and drove the car into lake. They drowned. She claimed a black man had hijacked her car with the kids in it at a traffic light. She finally confessed to the crime; the car was recovered with the bodies still inside.

As it turned out, the investigators were privately convinced from the first that Smith was complicit in the disappearance of her children because certain details of her story could not be true, and the cops knew it. I was on the staff of US Army Criminal Investigation Command at the time, not as an investigator. I got quite an education from CID's highly trained investigators. An accomplished Army polygrapher never bothered with the Smith case's details. He watched Smith's appearance on The Today Show in my office and said, "She's lying. She killed them. When you have examined as many liars as I have, you can tell."

According to ElizabethSmart.com, the girl was kidnapped by a man with the following description, supplied by Elizabeth's nine-year-old sister: caucasian man, 30 to 40 years old, 5' 8" to 5'10", dark hair, hair on arms, hair on back of hands, light jacket, light golf hat or English driving hat, dark shoes. Another description released by police adds that he held a small gun and was wearing tan pants and dark shoes.

It's the description that bothers me.

The sister saw the man enough, at night, to note such details as hair on his hands and complete details of his clothing, but she says she did not see his face. And yesterday police said that the sister waited two hours before telling her parents, a new revelation.

And the garage door was left unlocked that night, so I recall - by accident, natch.

Sorry, this whole thing smells. It just smells, and when it smells like that, something is almost always rotten.

Yesterday, Salt Lake City Police Chief Rick Dinse said the investigation was "concentrating on the central area around the house and the people associated with that house. . . . We believe that this person may be a trusted person in the neighborhood or in the community. [It] might be someone ... that had reason to be here, that had reason to come across the family."

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound: this strikes me as an arranged disappearance, not a home-invasion kidnapping as we usually think of it. What motive there is I cannot fathom. This wasn't random. Someone close to Elizabeth Smart isn't clean in this. I don't know who.

And I could be wrong.

But it still smells.