JunkYardBlog

VIRUS ATTACKS MAY NOT BE OVER

Machines infected with the Sobig virus may be awaiting further instructions from the virus' author. And there may be a Windows DirectX strike on the way.

Keep your virus shield up and up to date.

ANOTHER SNIPER?

We may have another serial sniper on our hands, this time in West Virginia:

Gary Carrier, 44, of South Charleston, was killed Aug. 10 while making a telephone call outside a Charleston convenience store.

Four days later, Jeanie Patton, 31, and Okey Meadows, 26, both of Campbells Creek, W. Va., were killed within 90 minutes of each other at rural convenience stores about 16 kilometres apart and about 30 kilometres east of Charleston.

Police confirmed today that all three were killed with the same gun, and have released a sketch that shows a heavy-set white man with sideburns and a goatee.

MORE: A long-time JYB reader offers the following clue. The description--heavy-set white man with sideburns and a goatee--probably covers three-fourths of all men living West Virginia. But take a look at the sketch (linked above). No mullet. The shooter must be from out of state. Marylander or Pennsylvanian, most likely.

SLATE'S SUMMER OF SMEARS CONTINUES

I like reading Slate, especially Kausfiles, but lately it has become slander central. First, it went into convulsions on the 16 words. Then its Tim Noah tried to smear Arnold Schwarzenegger with Nazi charges (while ignoring Cruz Bustamante's MEChA past). Now, it's held a mini-symposium titled "Does the GOP Subvert Democracy?"

Oh. Come. On. They can't be serious? Oh yes, they can.

Tim Noah chairs the event, which should be a gigantic red flag. He's Mike Kinsley without the greasy charm. Tim, done any research on Bustamante lately? How about the Kennedys? If you're looking for racists with dangerous agendas or for prominent Americans with Nazi ties, you really ought to look into those two. Not interested? M'kay, I'll just go ahead and trash your straw symposium then.

To begin with, the question is biased. Why not ask about the Democrats' practice of subverting the law, in Florida and Missouri in 2000, in New Jersey and Minnesota in 2002? To recap, in Florida the Gore campaign tried to change the rules in the middle of an election--that's what the whole thing was about. In Missouri a Democrat dead guy ran for the Senate, and won, which is clearly illegal, and the Dems kept the seat when the governnor arbitrarily assigned it to the dead guy's wife. Show me a law that allows the dead to stand for elections. In 2002, the deadline for replacing a candidate had passed when incumbent Sen. Robert Torricelli dropped out in the face of an ethics problem, but the Dems went ahead and replaced him anyway--clearly illegal. And in Minnesota, again the replacement deadline had passed when the incumbent Senator Paul Wellstone passed, yet again the Dems stuck a candidate on the ballot anyway. Their record in these cases amounts to nearly changing federal election law in the midst of an actual election, and retaining two of three seats in the Senate that they would likely have lost otherwise. They repeatedly broke the law, and in so doing changed the composition of the US Senate.

I digress, verbosely. Noah asks whether the GOP subverts Democracy because that's what Bill Clinton has Gray Davis saying, hand-puppet style, to save himself from recall. Never mind the recall is in itself an instrument of democracy, put on the books via democracy, as a last line of defense for democracy to rid itself of bad government. The question is a clever Clinton canard, and Noah just takes it up as is. For help, he enlists a bipartisan panel to sort out the question--Josh Marshall and David Tell--and looks at four issues to determine the answer. It's highly selective, in that nowhere does Noah mention the raft of lefty things pushed through the courts rather than taken up democratically over the years. Prayer in school, abortion, gay marriage (thus far) and on down the line, our society has been transformed by lefties pushing their agenda on the public via undemocratic means. They know they won't win at the ballot box so they take it to the courts. Noah's not interested in that, partly because some of it is ancient history but also partly because it disturbs his path toward proving the point he wants proven, which is that the GOP is anti-democratic. The four issues he chooses are the California recall, the Clinton impeachment, the Florida recount and the Texas and Colorado redistricting battles.

I'll take up the last first. I don't know much about the Colorado redistricting fight, but I'm very familiar with the Texas fight. I wrote about it for National Review Online, detailing the sordid history that led up to the current fight. In a nutshell, in the late 80s and early 90s the Texas Democrats saw that the state was trending GOP. Texas is a big state, and its loss would be a disaster for the Dems. In an effort to preserve its majority in the US House as well as shore up its political position in state government, the Democrats redrew Texas' districting to maintain its advantage as long as possible. It was an effective strategy, as it has allowed the Democrats to maintain a 17-15 edge in the state's House delegation in spite of getting outvoted in raw numbers statewide. All statewide offices belong to the GOP, both the state house and senate are in GOP hands, and both US Senators are Republicans, yet the Dems still have more Texas seats in the House. And in manipulating the Texas House delegation, the Democrats are effecting the composition of the House as a whole. If it reflected state voting patterns, the US House would lean further to the right that it currently does. As noted above, apart from repeatedly breaking election law, so would the Senate. Who is subervting democracy here?

The fact is, the Texas redistricting fight is about righting a wrong that the Democrats committed a decade ago. Nothing more, and nothing less. Noah stacks the deck by taking Josh Marshall's word on the issue without criticism. Marshall has indeed written extensively on the issue, but from a narrow perspective that ignores events leading up to the current crisis, at least in Texas. Marshall's redistricting writings have been largely fact-free. Noah ends up arguing that the redistricting makes things overly democratic, which is ludicrous. Redistricting Texas would enable its voting patterns to be reflected in its House delegation. How is that too democratic?

Noah next takes on impeachment. Here he has a point, sort of. It is true that certain forces in the GOP wanted to impeach Clinton prior to the Lewinsky outbreak. But that was a fringe view, an entertaining sideshow led by frustrated Republicans who just couldn't understand why no one else saw the lies that Clinton told so well and so often. Their impeachment charges were many and varied, but focused on what really was a huge and scarry scandal--the 1996 campaign finance shenanigans. To recap, Rep. Bob Barr charged (mostly correctly) that the Clinton campaign knowingly took campaign cash from foreign sources, some of which had ties to China's People's Liberation Army. If proven true, such actions clearly violated campaign law and would have been grounds for impeaching the president. The problem was, that particular Clinton scandal never got investigated properly. So to this day we don't know whether Clinton deserved impeachment on the campaign finance scandal or not, and we'll probably never learn. For some odd reason, Noah fails to mention anything about China or Johnny Chung or Buddhist temples or any of the stew that made up that scandal. I wonder why. As for the 1998 drive that finally led to impeachment, reasonable minds can disagree on the punishment but we did have a president commit perjury and then suborn the perjury of others to cover up his own perjury. That's a serious crime, followed by a series of more serious crimes, especially when committed by the land's chief executive officer. To many, including myself, impeachment was justice paid to someone who was himself subverting the rule of law.

The Florida recount--I've already touched on that. Suffice it to say that it's unconstitutional to change election law in the midst of an election. Redefining what ballots should and shouldn't count amounts to changing law. It's illegal to do so while counting actual ballots cast that will determine an election's outcome. Only one court--the Florida Supreme Court--agreed that such a change was warranted and should be allowed to proceed. Its own chief justice penned a stinging rebuke to his fellow justices in dissent, and all courts below and above it disagreed with its decision, arguing that the recount as asked for (cherry-picked counties based on the Gore camp's ideas of which ones would help it the most) was outside the bounds of law. That's why Bush ultimately won, a win that was eventually backed up by numerous ballot studies by a wide range of organizations. Noah ends the recount discussion with a call to disband the electoral college. That's just more partisan petulance of the type that Noah is fast becoming famous for. It would also greatly help a party famous for getting a huge majority of the corpse vote in the Old South, in Maryland, in Chicago and elsewhere. With no electoral college in the way, it would be very easy to target a few corrupt precincts in large cities, wag around a few dollars and scour death records and grab yourself a presidency.

Which brings us to the recall. I've touced on it above, and it's the one area where I agree with Noah to an extent. It is democracy on steroids, so it's hard to argue that in principle the GOP subverts democracy given that the recall was ginned up by a Republican. It also wasn't a product of the entire party's efforts, and in fact many Republicans oppose the recall on pure principle, so it's hard to indict the party as a whole here. In fact, sizable chunks of the GOP disagreed with impeachment too--if they hadn't, Clinton would have gotten his walking papers in 1999. The Florida recount is the one area that nearly all Republicans agree on, and it only gets a maybe vote from Noah.

Front load the question with bias (by parroting Clinton, who's hardly a disinterested bystander), then make it look like you're being fair while actually you're just rigging the whole thing, and you can charge anybody with anything. In concluding that the GOP does subvert democracy, Noah has effectively Dowdified American politics. It's the things he leaves out that matter most.

MADELINE ALBRIGHT, IDIOTARIAN

A.M. Siriano lays out the evidence.

BLACKOUT

Here's what it looked like from above. Maybe:

UPDATE: Walk away for lunch, find your photo debunked. Honestly, I'm not sure whether it's real or not now. My source is tracable to people who should know these things, and they all seem to think it's real. Unless a whole lot of knowledgeable people within NASA are suckers, I'm going with them and therefore still lean toward its being real. But I'm open to fakery too--it's pretty easy to fake these things nowadays.

Here's another photo, from another satellite. As the commentor notes, it's less dramatic. Several things could account for the differences between the two, including differing wavelength sensitivity between the cameras used, and the obviously different scale (single buildings on generator power wouldn't show up from space in the wider shot, but may in the close-up). But the lights showing up in Canada are bothersome.

FINAL UPDATE: I asked someone who knows for sure, and it's definitely a fake. Call me a sucker.

Here's the real thing:

SARINDAR

According to the highest ranking Soviet intelligence official ever to defect to the West, Russia helped Saddam hide or destroy his WMDs on the eve of war.

As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction — in Romanian it was codenamed "Sarindar, meaning "emergency exit."Iimplemented it in Libya. It was for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with.

Read the whole thing. He names some useful Western idiots and explains that weird Russian delegation that entered Iraq near the start of the war and eventually came under American fire on its way out. He says it was there to enact "Sarindar" for Saddam, under Putin's orders.

GEORGIE ANN DOWD

A la Jeff Foxworthy, Georgie Ann Geyer's motto should be "If you favor deregulation, you must be a terrorist." That, basically, is the thrust of this idiotic column written evidently in the darkness of her blacked out brain. She's evidently gone the Dowd route, preferring a dash of style over substance, creating an empty-headed work of utter nonsense.

Writing about the blackout waaaay too soon after the fact, Geyer begins with a awful, Fiskworthy headline:

POLICY-MAKERS SABOTAGED POWER SYSTEM FROM WITHIN

Generally, when one thinks of sabotage, one thinks immediately of intent, as in the intent to wreck or destroy something. Is that what Geyer is saying--that US policy makers intentionally wrecked the power system? Let's see.

WASHINGTON -- Our first thoughts on Thursday were of terrorists: They had sabotaged our electricity and sent large parts of the country into ominous darkness. The World War II notion of "when the lights go on again all over the world" was suddenly back in the shadows.

But from the information we have in the first 24 hours, the blackouts along the Eastern Coast and into Canada and the Midwest had nothing to do with the foreign terrorists who dominate our thinking. We even tried to blame poor Canada, which never does anything wrong, but that was false, too.

Who tried to "blame Canada?" Oh, and by the way, Canada royally screwed us on the terror war and is planning to ram gay marriage down the throats of its unwilling people. And, Canada has become so authoritarian that writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper can cost you your job. And they sent us Peter Jennings, for God's sake. Other than that, those poor widdle Canadians never do anything wrong.

But I digress. Who tried to "blame Canada?" I heard lots of Bush-blaming and suspect Geyer will provide more, but precious little "blame Canada."

Oh, and Georgie, don't try to write a column within 24 hours of an event. You're obviously not up to it. If you'd waited long enough to do a little research, you'd never have written this column. More on that later.

Instead, the vast power outage, the largest since 1965, was the clear responsibility of silent and secretive "terrorists within" -- in effect, the fault of the American political classes who pushed through an ideologically far-right deregulation of electric power in the late 1990s and left us open to exactly this form of power breakdown.

As New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, energy secretary in the Clinton administration, put it: "We are a major superpower with a Third World electrical grid."

"Terrorists within?" Policy makers who sought to deregulate power are full-blown terrorists? That's a breathtakingly stupid thing to say. Oh, and since she brought up Bill Richardson, what in the world did he do about the "Third World electrical grid" during his tenure as Energy Secretary. Nada, that's what. Georgie, if you're going to hit the "far right" for deregulation, why not hit Richardson for dereliction of duty? And where's the evidence that anyone in the political classes intended to wreck the power grid?

Or as Dr. James Lewis, technology specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here, stated less emotionally: "No, it's not near a Third World situation, because power breaks down there all the time. But our electrical grids have not kept up as people have added appliances to the burden. What we need is research, what is probably a doubling of the investment we have now and the study of other ways to prevent gridlock."

Not only Dr. Lewis, but many of the other faces you saw on TV and quoted in newspapers after the blackout were not the ones you usually see -- none of the Iraq/Afghanistan/New American Empire cheerleaders.

Aha! There's Georgie's real problem--she doesn't support the war. War support seems to be a binary thing--supporters almost all love Bush, while non-supporters can find a million reasons to hate him to his marrow. There's precious little in between. That's why in Georgie's eyes Canada never does anything wrong, and that's why Bush must be to blame for the blackout. He's too busy out cheerleading for Empire...except, the word "empire" probably hasn't crossed his lips since the last time he watched the Star Wars Episode V, and the "cheerleaders" have no interest in building one. We just want the real terrorists--not Georgie's deregulating variety--to quit trying to kill us. Capiche? Oh, and still waiting for the sabotage evidence.

She then proceeds to play up some Democrat energy bill without mentioning that the Democrats have in fact held up President Bush's energy bill--which was based on predictions that an actual blackout was coming--for about two years. And then, there's this:

Some time in the last decade, the Republican Party, which used to be the sober, serious custodians of our economic and civic investment, became instead a party taken over by reckless foreign adventurers with little or no concern for the internal health of the country.

And some time in the past 30 years, the party of Roosevelt and Truman and Jack Kennedy became the party of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean--the party of weakness in international affairs. Georgie's one of them now, and thus thinks self-defense amounts to foreign adventure. Idiot.

Blah blah blah, and then this:

Critics of the war against Iraq have said since the beginning of the conflict that Americans, still strangely complacent about overseas wars being waged by a minority in their name, will inevitably come to a point where they will see they have to have a government that provides services at home or one that seeks "empire" across the globe. In fact, that moment may now have come.

In the name of a minority? Huh? Didn't more than 60 percent favor the war, and don't most Americans still favor it? What in the world is she talking about? Or, is this a veiled anti-Jew slap? It jibes with all the "neocon" nonsense, which is another veiled slap at Jewish conservatives who support the war. Who else could be the "minority" that we're waging a war for, if not the Jews in Israel and elsewhere that Islamists often single out for brutal murder? And what's this either/or bit on the war versus infrastructure? Is she saying that if given the reins the Democrats would immediately stop the war so they could work solely on roads and power lines? That would be a pretty stupid thing to do, given the fact that a dangerous terrorist army with nuclear ambitions still stalks us around the world and here at home.

In sum total, Georgie Ann Geyer's blackout column is a steaming pile of bile. She never proffers evidence of sabotage. Had she done a teeny, tiny bit of homework, she would have run across the name David Cook. He works for the North American Electric Reliability Council, and predicted a blackout during Congressional testimony two years ago. Or she might have included some venom for environmentalists and others who fight upgrading the nation's power grid at every turn, from new oil and gas drilling to building new nuclear power plants. Or she might have actually looked at the Bush energy plan, which discusses our aging energy infrastructure and actually predicted a degradation in reliability (i.e., blackouts) if it wasn't addressed. But nooo...Georgie had to get all panicky and go hunting for neocon boogeymen under her bed, tripping over moral relativism (and anti-Semitism?) in the darkness.

(thanks to Kevin for the link)

VOUCHERS LOSING SUPPORT?

Here's the headline:

Most Americans Oppose Vouchers, Poll Says

Which, in a strictly Q & A sense seems to be true:

[S]upport for programs that allow students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense dropped to 38 percent from 46 percent last year, the survey found.

But...

[P]oll respondents divided equally on whether a voucher program would improve student achievement in their community, with 48 percent saying it would and 48 percent saying it wouldn't.

So many of those who oppose the program think it will work? What would they do if vouchers became available?

Some 62 percent of respondents said that if they were given a full-tuition voucher they would send their child to a private or religious school. With a half-tuition voucher, that number dropped to 51 percent.

So though only 38 percent of those polled support vouchers, another ten percent actually think they'll have some beneficial effects and a whopping 24 percent more would actually use the vouchers if they could. So which should count more, lip service or voting with feet? Considering the fact that 51 percent would send their kids to private or religious schools with only half-tuition vouchers (meaning presumably that they would have to pony up the other half out of pocket), I'd say foot voting should win.

But it is odd that so many would claim to be against something they clearly wish was available. Let's look at the actual data.

Interestingly, 61% think the local school board should have more say over what schools teach than either the state or the feds. Having been around the top end of the educational system here and there, I concur. Loudly.

Sixty-nine percent claim not to know squat about President Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation. They clearly need to work on their PR effort a bit. Only 7% are "very unfavorable" towards it. I think most of that 7% are in the upper echelons of the federal educational establishment.

But back to vouchers, the question asked is somewhat slanted: "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?" Had the wording been something like "Do you favor or oppose being allowed to use your own tax money to cover the cost of education at a private school?" you'd probably see a very different result. To most people, the phrase "public expense" connotes "other people's money", while the phrase "your own tax money" (which is literally true) makes it more personal. I'd like to see a survey that used some variant of that phrase, just for comparison. But as asked, 38 percent favored and 60 percent opposed. This year. Looking back through to '96, the favor number is 46, 34, 39, 41, 44, 44, 36. Take the mean of that, and you get somewhere around 40 or 41. The drop from last year to this year, 8 points, ties for the sharpest drop overall. It's probably an anomaly--in all likelihood last year's result was statistically too high by a point or two, and this year's too low by about the same margin. I'd say that support has held pretty steady at around 40 percent. That still leaves a majority opposed, but it doesn't seem to reflect a drop in support. Pro-voucher people, we still have our work cut our for us.

Or maybe not. As the survey says, 62% would use full-tuition vouchers if they could, and a narrow majority of 51% would use half-tuition vouchers. And as many think they'll be beneficial as not. Those numbers say more to me about the American attitude toward vouchers than any generic favor/oppose question can.

SOBIG CAME FROM SPAMMERS

Two lousy tastes that taste horrible together--spammers may have created the Sobig virus to make a buck. That thing attacked me at work, and seems to have been the fastest spreading virus ever. It even brought down the CSX train lines on the Eastern seaboard for a few hours this morning, screwing up commutes until the train managers figured out a workaround. On the heels of the Blaster worm, which attacked me at home for a couple days last week and managed to shut down the Maryland Vehicle Administration for nearly two days, one might suspect that we're under some sort of general cyber attack. Blaster and Sobig attacked in different ways, but both were highly effective and tough to control. Their appearance coinciding with last week's blackout make we wonder if there isn't a relationship in there somewhere, either planned or accidental.

TIRED. BUSY. NOT FEELING WELL.

Those are the reasons I've been an absent blogger lately. Besides, what's to say? The UN bombing--we told 'em so and they didn't listen. It's not the first time the UN has brushed us off, and won't be the last. Disband it. It's useless when it's not counterproductive.

The Israel bombing--call me cynical, but I'm not surprised about that anymore. Saddened, but not shocked. The fact is, the first second of peace will mark the last second of relevance for Hamas et al. Men who see themselves as romantic figures in some historic struggle against great odds today will have to get real jobs and lead ordinary lives if peace ever breaks out. They'll have to put down the bomb belts and get married, drive mini-vans and get along with the Jews, and it's that latter that's the biggest stumbling block. There won't be peace until the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world wises up and ditches the "Palestinian cause." And that ain't gonna happen any time soon. This war is a long-haul affair, and we'll only win it when we blow away the Arab death cult mentality. That's going to take time.

Anyhow, I'll probably get back to blogging semi-normally eventually. Truth is, I'm a bit burned out right now. Blue funk. The blahs. Whatever.

IF YOU'RE WHITE, YOU WON'T GET AN INVITE

A group of prominent black Baltimore ministers recently held a couple of political forums for mayoral candidates, and only invited candidates from one party. Leave aside the fact that if a bunch of white ministers did this, the ACLU would scream "separation of church and state!!!" and the ministers might find themselves under IRS tax-exempt scrutiny. Leave that aside, true though it may be. But, if you're going to have a forum for mayoral candidates, isn't it a good idea to invite the current mayor? It would be, except he's the wrong color:

The Rev. Russell Johnson, president of the Baptist Ministers' Conference and pastor of Browns Memorial Baptist Church, said his group's July 14 forum "was only for black candidates."

Mayor Martin O'Malley, who currently enjoys a 60+ approval rating, is white. As is rival A. Robert Kaufman. Both were left off the invitation lists. The Rev. Johnson's naked racism put the ministers on the defensive, sending them into spin mode. The excuse defense that the alleged men of the cloth ended up offering is laughable:

The Rev. Gregory Perkins, president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and pastor of Saint Paul Community Baptist Church, said all of the candidates were notified of his group's July 31 forum. "Those who had e-mail were invited," he said. "Why we did it that way was because we did not have time to put them in the mail."

So...the mayor of Baltimore doesn't have email? In about ten seconds of Googling I found O'Malley's email address on this page. So much for that story. It's not the crime, gentleman, which was bad enough--it's the coverup that'll get you. And the email excuse is a poor attempt at a coverup. It already has at least one black candidate on the defensive for attending the get-togethers.

Meanwhile O'Malley, ever mindful that the city is 63% black, can't raise much of a fuss about this. And with the primary (which in this heavily-Democrat city is in fact the election) on September 9th it may not matter much. And had he been invited, he had the incumbent's advantage of not having to show, and he probably wouldn't have. But it's obvious to me that the "ministers" are playing skin games here. O'Malley may have reduced crime and drug dependency during his tenure, and may have helped make Baltimore a marginally better place to live, but that doesn't matter. He's white. That does. In fact, to these "ministers" it seems that his skin color is all that matters. Fortunately, most residents don't seem to see things their way.

SHIELDS UP

Am I the only one getting pelted with the W32/Sobig-F virus today? It's been jamming my inbox all day. Thankfully, Norton has proven itself more than a match for it.

MORE: Nope, I'm not the only one. At least I'm in good company. So far, one account has slacked off but my Hotmail account is now under attack. Or rather, it looks like the virus is using my Hotmail account to attack others. If you get errant email headlined "my details" or some such and it includes an attachment, my apologies. The virus is making me do it.

AL QAEDA CLAIMS IT CAUSED THE BLACKOUT

So says a communique that the Middle East Media Research Institute has found. Call me skeptical:

"A communiqué attributed to Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the power blackout that happened in the U.S. last Thursday, saying that the brigades of Abu Fahes Al Masri had hit two main power plants supplying the East of the U.S., as well as major industrial cities in the U.S. and Canada, 'its ally in the war against Islam (New York and Toronto) and their neighbors.'

What took them so long? The blackout was last week, an eternity by today's standards. Anyway, as I said I'm skeptical. The communique shows multiple signs that there's less than meets the eye here. The first sign that they're full of it is they actually think Canada has been our ally in the war. Here's the second: They think the blackout caused "chaos:"

They lived a day of terror and fear… a state of chaos and confusion where looting and pillaging rampaged the cities, just like the capital of the caliphate Baghdad, and Afghanistan and Palestine were. Let the American people take a sip from the same glass.

Um, yeah, whatever--except none of that happened. There was no looting, especially on the order of anything that happened in Baghdad. That might be because there aren't any Baathists in these parts... Sign #3 that they're full of it:

"The authors of the communiqué said that the strikes aimed at 'hitting the major pillar of the U.S. economy (the Stock Exchange)… [and] the UN, which is opposed to Islam, and is based in New York. It is a message to all the investors that the U.S. is no longer a safe country for their money, knowing that the U.S. economy greatly relies on the trust of the investor…' (emphasis mine)

They think the UN is opposed to Islam? Based on what, exactly? Talk about a persecution complex. If this pathetic claim is the best Osama's boys can come up with, I'd say it's a safe bet that al Qaeda has experienced a massive brain drain in the past couple of years.