I have come not to bury them but to praise them...

Interesting couple of days. It has been a really good month in the shop and I leave again for San Francisco this week for another show. Wanted to offer a few thoughts.

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In the spirit of fair play a few commendations are in order.

To George Bush, who said that America was in danger of becoming a nativist country and who seemed to be speaking counter to many in his party. The article here.  He has been an excellent former president, never taken shots at his successor and has been a voice of reason and tolerance lately.

"My point is, we've been through this kind of period of isolationism, protectionism, nativism," he said. "I'm a little concerned that we may be going through the same period. I hope that these "isms" pass," he said, adding that it would allow the U.S. a more orderly look at immigration policy.Bush said growing up in Texas gave him the opportunity to interact with different cultures."We ought to welcome people from different cultures to America," he said.

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To William Kristol, conservative editor of the Weekly Standard for calling out Glenn Beck for fear mongering.

When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He's marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

It is nice to hear from moderate republicans who are willing to brook the zanies and have the intellectual integrity to take a temperate stance in these matters.

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And across the pond a nasty little skuffle is brewing between the British government, who have had enough of their muslim citizens and guests fomenting terrorist attacks at their doorstop and the typical mamby pamby bleeding heart liberals at Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch who never met a terrorist they didn't love. An interesting article here in the DailyMail.

Apparently an Al Qaeda operative named Abid Naseer who came to Britain as a student and was ruled guilty of being complicit in attack planning of a bombing at the Arndale Centre in Manchester, England  and planned subway attacks in New York is fighting extradition to Pakistan on the grounds that he may be tortured.

Last May, a court ruled Al Qaeda operative Abid Naseer and his accomplice Ahmad Faraz Khan could not be deported because it would infringe their human rights.

The pair were planning a 'mass casualty attack', probably against shoppers at the Arndale Centre in Manchester over the Easter holiday last year.

But judges said Naseer, 24, and 26-year-old Faraz Khan - who came to Britain as students - should not be sent back to Pakistan because of the risk they could be tortured.

Critics branded the judgment by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission was 'outrageous' and Home Secretary Theresa May expressed her disappointment.

European judges have turned Britain into a ‘safe haven’ for foreign terrorists, the independent reviewer of anti-terror laws warned yesterday. Lord Carlile said rulings by the European Court of Human Rights had undermined efforts to deport dangerous individuals intent on causing mayhem. The Liberal Democrat peer and QC attacked the court for refusing to allow the risk of harm to British citizens to be weighed in deportation hearings. Instead, only the human rights of the suspected terrorist can be taken into account.

‘The effect [of the court’s rulings] is to make the UK a safe haven for some individuals whose determination is to damage the UK and its citizens – hardly a satisfactory situation save for the purist,’ he said.

Lord Carlile’s comments angered human rights groups. Kate Allen, UK director at Amnesty International said: ‘The global ban on deporting people to countries where they’re at risk of torture exists for a very good reason – to protect us all from the threat of being tortured.’

God save us from these idiots. A bullet would be much cheaper.

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 Finally a big bronx cheer to the Department of Agriculture for caving to Monsanto and deregulating genetically modified alfalfa (GM) which is resistant to the herbicide Roundup. The Center for Food Safety and other opponents in the scientific community are worried about these strains not being geographically isolated so that they are now free to contaminate all the natural strains. Power of the agribusiness buck trumps common sense once again. This is an accident waiting to happen.

Contamination of organic and traditional crops by recently deregulated, genetically modified alfalfa is inevitable, say experts in the field.

"Some degree of cross-pollination will occur regardless of what mechanism is going to be put in place,"  predicted Jeff Wolt, an agronomist with Iowa State University's Seed Science Center.