Now it's the City of San Diego vs. Wal-Mart...

...from an article on the San Diego Union-Tribune site:

In a move that pits the city squarely against the nation's largest retailer, San Diego yesterday joined a growing list of cities nationwide to place restrictions on large retail developments. The City Council voted 5-3 to ban stores with more than 90,000 square feet that use 10 percent of their space to sell groceries and other merchandise not subject to sales tax. The ban excludes membership stores, such as Costco and Sam's Club, which sell grocery items in bulk...

Although the council is nonpartisan, the vote was along party lines. Those supporting the ban are Democrats; those opposed are Republicans...A group of labor leaders and grocers proposed the ban three years ago, while pro-business organizations, including the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, fought it.

Kevin McCall, a Wal-Mart spokesman, said each Supercenter would potentially create 350 jobs and sell groceries at prices up to 20 percent below what traditional supermarkets offer. “Why would this council turn away a company that is seeking to bring full-service grocery stores to communities with limited shopping options?” he asked...

Former City Councilwoman Valerie Stallings said she reluctantly supported the construction of a Wal-Mart in Serra Mesa while in office because she was convinced it would not hurt local businesses. After watching a number of businesses fold in Wal-Mart's wake, she said that she made the wrong decision. “It's true that the big boxes may be less expensive and they do offer affordable prices to many families, but they do not provide the kind of friendly and individual service that a smaller business can,” she said.

Some excerpts from The Crisis of Islam...

...by Princeton's Bernard Lewis, who The Wall Street Journal called "the world's foremost Islamic scholar." In one passage that enlightened me, Lewis gives some historical backdrop to the ongoing alliance of sorts between the United States and Israel. Apparently, this alliance first gelled in the mid-1950s, after the Soviet Union and Egypt announced an agreement to supply Cairo with Russian arms:

The spread of Soviet influence in the Middle East and the enthusiastic response to it encouraged the United States to look more favorably on Israel, now seen as a reliable and potentially useful ally in a largely hostile region. Today, it is often forgotten that the strategic relationship between the United States and Israel was a consequence, not a cause, of Soviet penetration.

In another excerpt, Lewis summarizes our current leadership's overall approach to the Middle East, in a manner that - at least judging by the WSJ accolade - appears to be acceptable to that leadership:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new American policy has emerged in the Middle East, concerned with different objectives. Its main aim is to prevent the emergence of a regional hegemony – of a single regional power that could dominate the area and thus establish monopolistic control of Middle Eastern oil. This has been the basic concern underlying successive American policies toward Iran, Iraq, or to any other perceived future threat within the region.

Importantly, Lewis is careful to note that both suicide bombers and any perpetrators of attacks on civilians are in blatant defiance of Islam principles:

Two features mark the attacks of September 11 and other similar actions: the willingness of the perpetrators to commit suicide and the ruthlessness of those who send them, concerning both their own emissaries and their numerous victims. Can these in any sense be justified in terms of Islam? The answer must be a clear no. [Both suicide and the killing of non-combatants are strictly prohibited in Islamic teachings like the Qur'an.]

Here's a link to Amazon's page on The Crisis of Islam, a superb - and easy to read - briefing on the history of Islam and on Islam's role in today's world.

I'm at Houston Bush Airport at 5:30am...

...and at Terminal E's Fox News store, the top story - projecting from 9 different HD displays - is Rupert Murdoch's decision to drop the O.J. Simpson's If I Did It. Weird.

Amid the celebration...

...we wave a well-deserved farewell to the W.A....
...but also shudder at a new estimate of Iraq's civilian death toll, from an AP article:

Health Minister Ali al-Shemari gave his new estimate of 150,000 to reporters during a visit to Vienna, Austria. He later told The Associated Press that he based the figure on an estimate of 100 bodies per day brought to morgues and hospitals - though such a calculation would come out closer to 130,000 in total.

"It is an estimate," al-Shemari said. He blamed Sunni insurgents, Wahhabis - Sunni religious extremists - and criminal gangs for the deaths...

"Since three and a half years, since the change of the Saddam regime, some people say we have 600,000 are killed. This is an exaggerated number. I think 150 is OK," he said.

Accurate figures on the number of people who have died in the Iraq conflict have long been the subject of debate. Police and hospitals often give widely conflicting figures of those killed in major bombings. In addition, death figures are reported through multiple channels by government agencies that function with varying efficiency.

As al-Shemari issued the startling new estimate, the head of the Baghdad central morgue said Thursday he was receiving as many as 60 violent death victims each day at his facility alone. Dr. Abdul-Razzaq al-Obaidi said those deaths did not include victims of violence whose bodies were taken to the city's many hospital morgues or those who were removed from attack scenes by relatives and quickly buried according to Muslim custom.

Al-Obaidi said the morgue had received 1,600 violent death victims in October, one of the bloodiest months of the conflict. U.S. forces suffered 105 deaths last month, the fourth highest monthly toll.

Is it me or is it big karma...

...haunting the GOP like a wailing ghost lately? Today's gaffe is a national security stumble: turns out detailed, atomic bomb-related documents were posted to the public on a government website - a site created by Republicans who attempted to apply a free market approach to the search for Saddam's WMDs. The problem with free markets, of course, is that they sometime go in nasty directions...from a head-slapper in tonight's New York Times:

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation’s spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents — most of them in Arabic — would reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American search teams never found such evidence.

The director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, had resisted setting up the Web site, which some intelligence officials felt implicitly raised questions about the competence and judgment of government analysts. But President Bush approved the site’s creation after Congressional Republicans proposed legislation to force the documents’ release...

The Web site, “Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal,” was a constantly expanding portrait of prewar Iraq. Its many thousands of documents included everything from a collection of religious and nationalistic poetry to instructions for the repair of parachutes to handwritten notes from Mr. Hussein’s intelligence service. It became a popular quarry for a legion of bloggers, translators and amateur historians...

On Sept. 20, the site posted a much larger document, “Summary of technical achievements of Iraq’s former nuclear program.” It runs to 51 pages, 18 focusing on the development of Iraq’s bomb design. Topics included physical theory, the atomic core and high-explosive experiments. By early October, diplomats and officials said, United Nations arms inspectors in New York and their counterparts in Vienna were alarmed and discussing what to do.

Last week in Vienna, Olli J. Heinonen, head of safeguards at the international atomic agency, expressed concern about the documents to the American ambassador, Gregory L. Schulte, diplomats said.

Calls to Mr. Schulte’s spokesman yesterday were not returned.