Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs writes

“The one true constant of the left’s war on America is that they accuse the individual of what they are guilty of. Projection. They project, accuse their target of their tactic. Such it is with StoptheWitchHunt.org. They are on a witch hunt, calling every voice that doesn’t stomp in goosestep with them a white supremacist, a Nazi, a racist, a hater, blech blech blech.”

She’s talking about StopTheWitchHunt.org, via a story on NewsBusters, who have a witch hunt Press Release that says:

This Halloween, take action against the lies and hate speech that Glen [sic] Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Paul Brown, and Pat Buchanan have been spewing in a nationwide witch hunt.

Echo Justice, a coalition of national and local organizations launched a multi-media counter to the right-wing’s echo chamber. StopTheWitchHunt.org is a newly formed multimedia watch dog portal that will use social media and mobile communications to take a grassroots stand and “call out” the mischaracterizations and hate speech that has been going on for too long.

The sic on Glenn Beck’s name was added by NewBusters, but what I was trying to figure out is, “Who is Paul Brown?” Is it some deservedly obscure figure that they’re trying to add to this lineup in order to make other conservatives look bad? Then I figured it out: they mean Congressman Paul Broun. Broun is a congressional critic of Obama, who is said to have compared Obama to Hitler. He didn’t exactly say that, and he’s apologized for what he did say, but he’s the target for today. (You can see the pictures of the targets in this Halloween PDF, and a close look at one of the labels says that it does say Broun.) So here’s a left wing organization aiming wild charges at conservatives, trying to silence their voices in the media, and they can’t even spell their names right.

As for the accusation of witch hunting, yes, it is tiresome to hear accusations of witch hunting from witch hunters. Did you know that there hasn’t been a witch burning in the United States, ever. (The Salem “witches” were hanged.) Later accusations of witch-hunting were leveled against Joe McCarthy, who was fighting real, not imaginary Communists, and Ken Starr, who got Clinton impeached, if not removed.

But for real witch burning, (not of real witches, there’s no such thing) you have to got to the less civilized  parts of the world, like  Kenya.

From the NYT:

Good Dog, Smart Dog
Sarah Kershaw

Life as a Labradoodle may sound free and easy, but if you’re Jet, who lives in New Jersey, there is a lot of work to be done.

He is both a seizure alert dog and a psychiatric service dog whose owner has epilepsy, severe anxiety, depression, various phobias and hypoglycemia. Jet has been trained to anticipate seizures, panic attacks and plunging blood sugar and will alert his owner to these things by staring intently at her until she does something about the problem. He will drop a toy in her lap to snap her out of a dissociative state. If she has a seizure, he will position himself so that his body is under her head to cushion a fall.

Jet seems like a genius, but is he really so smart? In fact, is any of it in his brain, or is it mostly in his sniff?

The matter of what exactly goes on in the mind of a dog is a tricky one, and until recently much of the research on canine intelligence has been met with large doses of skepticism. But over the last several years a growing body of evidence, culled from small scientific studies of dogs’ abilities to do things like detect cancer or seizures, solve complex problems (complex for a dog, anyway), and learn language suggests that they may know more than we thought they did.

Something I’ve noticed over the years in this kind of article or television documentary about all the new tasks to which dogs are being applied is that they seldom mention what would have immediately occurred to a pre-20th Century reader. Contemporary readers are interested in the selection process for finding dogs with the best propensities for the job and the subsequent training process. But a 19th Century reader would have immediately thought of taking the dogs who are best at a particular skill and breeding them together.

Consider the Newfoundland, a giant water dog with webbed feet who doesn’t dog paddle like the average dog, but uses a more powerful technique rather like the breast stroke. Moreover, Newfoundlands desperately want to rescue people from drowning. On shorelines all over the world, there are statues of heroic Newfoundlands who rescued humans from watery graves. Unfortunately, you can’t really take a Newfoundland for a walk along a public beach because he might immediately splash into the water and start hauling protesting swimmers out.

Presumably, it took a lot of generations of selective breeding to come up with a great beast with these characteristics. Presumably, you could breed together dogs that are best at each new job and eventually come up with new breeds where a much higher percentage of the dogs would pass the selection process and would require less training. But modern readers don’t want to hear about that because that would be eugenics. For example, here’s Jonah Goldberg’s 2002 National Review Online column:

Westminster Eugenics Show
Repugnant thinking that’s died out for humans is thriving at the Westminster Kennel Club.

This is not to say that foresighted individuals aren’t developing new breeds, just that the entire concept is usually left out of mainstream discussions.

For example, I’ve seen it claimed that a few dogs can sniff out cancer in people, at least melanomas on the skin. I don’t know how accurate that is, but say you could develop over a few decades a breed of dog that could detect a variety of cancers by sniffing people. Think of what a boon that would be to the world’s poor — instead of expensive scans, doctors in poor places could do cancer screenings for the price of dog food!

But this kind of thinking is unpopular today because the conventional wisdom is that eugenics is a “pseudoscience” – i.e., it’s not just morally wrong, it’s impossible.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by hostile Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri because he perceived the artist’s message was anti-Islam. What fueled the killer’s fury was how the film Submission showed Islam’s inherent brutality toward women. (Watch Part 1 of Submission on YouTube.)

The anniversary of the attack prompted foreign journalists to check on the multicultural tensions and Muslim radicalisation in the Dutch capital. The Netherlands’ immigration issues have remained high on the agenda, fuelled by populist politician Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV). But no attacks, home grown or from outside, have taken place since November 2, 2004.

That was the morning Mohammed B. followed Theo van Gogh on his bicycle before he shot him eight times with a handgun. The 47-year-old filmmaker fell to the ground, where his assassin slit his throat and pinned a note to his body with a knife. The note was a death threat to Ayaan Hirsi Ali with whom Van Gogh had made the short film Submission, about the abuse of women under Islam, and called for jihad.

B., son of Moroccan immigrants, was born and raised in Amsterdam. “The turnaround in his behaviour happened in this building”, Achmed Marcouch told reporters on a tour of the Amsterdam immigrant neighbourhood Slotervaart last week. Marcouch has been Slotervaart’s borough chairman since 2006 and the building he showed the journalists was the community centre Eigenwijks, where B. was a volunteer. He is now serving a life sentence for the murder. [Immigrant tensions remain five years after Van Gogh killing 11/02/09]

(It’s kind of bizarre that this Dutch news site [NRC Handelsblad] doesn’t use the killer’s name, since he is in the slammer and is not entitled to any deference.)

At a time when Lou Dobbs reports a shot fired at his home, the physical security of people who insist that immigration be legal remains a matter for concern.

The Dutch Defence League put up this video remembering Van Gogh a couple days ago.

Mount Airy, NC, is the site of what may be the latest Immigrant Mass Murder. It was the inspiration for the town of Mayberry on the Andy Griffith Show. You’ll note that my headline doesn’t say “Hispanic Gunman Kills Four”–all that is “alleged.” But he was convicted of some form of kidnapping, served two years, and was released. What I’d like to know is if he’s an immigrant, and if so, why he wasn’t deported.

Man charged with killing 4 in Mayberry model town

AP – An undated photo released Monday Nov. 2, 2009, by the Mount Airy, N.C., Police of Marcos Chavez Gonzalez. …

By ALYSIA PATTERSON, Associated Press Writer Alysia Patterson, Associated Press Writer – 8 mins ago

MOUNT AIRY, N.C. – Police arrested a convicted kidnapper early Monday in the fatal shooting of four men in the town that inspired the idyllic community of Mayberry on the 1960s TV series “The Andy Griffith Show.”

Marcos Chavez Gonzalez was charged with four counts of murder in the slayings late Sunday outside Woods TV in Mount Airy, about 100 miles north of Charlotte, police said.

The town, population 8,700, is the hometown of Andy Griffith and has built a tourist trade on nostalgia for the show that continues to thrive in syndication.

The four were shot in the shadow of a water tower that says “Welcome to Mount Airy” and has a picture of Griffith and Opie, his son on the show.

“This is Mayberry … Andy Griffith’s house is in spitting distance here,” said Michael Wood, one of the owners of Woods TV.[More]

A local is quoted as saying “My biggest question is why in this parking lot at all. Why Woods TV parking lot?” My biggest question is “Why in America?”

With Dede Scozzafava’s coming out of the closet and endorsing the Democratic candidate in the NY-23rd special election, the humiliation of the RNC’s Michael Steele and much of the Establishment Right is now complete. The Wall Street Journal, usually part of the problem, editorializes:

The voter revolt ought to be a lesson to the GOP’s backroom boys…Beltway bigs misjudged public dismay against the Democratic agenda in Washington. Nominating a candidate who “can win” in the Northeast does not have to mean someone whose voting record is more liberal on taxes and unions than that of most Blue Dog Democrats.

Revolt in New York, November 1, 2009.

Sounds good — for a second. Then the WSJ Edit Page goes on:

But that lesson will be for naught if conservatives conclude that their victory is reason to challenge any candidate who doesn’t agree with them on every issue. The truth is that some conservatives are as bloody-minded and intolerant of all dissent as the hard left is at the Daily Kos. A majority political party requires a far more diverse coalition than the audience for your average right-wing blogger or talk show host….If conservatives now revolt against every GOP candidate who disagrees with them on trade, immigration or abortion, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will keep their majorities for a very long time.

In other words, it’s OK for peasants to revolt on “taxes and unions” but not on trade, immigration or abortion. Is the WSJ Edit Page trying to appear a mouthpiece for Big Business?

VDARE.COM does not take a position on trade or abortion. And as far as we can see, the Conservative Party challenger in NY-23 is wrong on immigration (although he certainly has all the right enemies and Minuteman PAC endorsed him, saying he opposes amnesty).

But the WSJ Edit Page is right to be worried. The Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg does interesting work - for example, he identified Affirmative Action as a key issue in the 1980s, something that both Democratic and Republican Establishments absolutely did not wish to hear. His recent report Why Republican Leaders will have Trouble Speaking to the Rest of America got some publicity because he found that “the self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party” and who drive current unrest are not “racist“.

In a little-noted passage, Greenberg wrote:

Asked about the issues of greatest importance to them in choosing a candidate for Congress, health care ranked sixth among the Republicans, below issues such as tax cuts, immigration, and a candidate’s personal values and faith

(VDARE.COM Emphasis added).

Greenberg went on:

And yet remarkably, these voters had virtually nothing positive to say about the Republican Party. They see their own party as weak, old, and out of touch. They feel it has lost sight of conservative values and conservative voters and is in desperate need of new leadership.

Of course, it’s not remarkable — the GOP leadership (which for practical purposes includes the WSJ Edit Page) is out of touch. That’s why it so stubbornly and savagely resists patriotic immigration reform.

You can complain to the WSJ Edit Page (scroll to end) and many readers already have. It won’t listen but, who knows, Rupert Murdoch might decide to end the Bob Bartley Edit Page hangover, as he has so much else since buying Dow Jones.