There is a website called MEMRI that works full time at presenting translations of Arabic and other news feeds, news stories, and other things. It doesn't get nearly as much attention as it deserves because it's not delivering information people, particularly the mainstream media, want to hear. Such as what Middle Eastern figures and Islamic leaders tell their own people when the Western media isn't looking.

I hear a lot about the failures of the current administration, but you might have noticed that we're not being presented with a lot of realistic alternatives, either. Entire threads have been devoted to "so what's YOUR solution?" Usually the responses I get are the verbal equivalent of Neo dodging bullets.

We have not been attacked successfully since 9/11 in America. People rightly point out that this is not a certain indication of successful anti-terror policies. However, every last one of those same people would, after an attack took place, declare with absolute certainty that it was due to a failure of those policies. So it goes.

Americans demand absolute safety, an impossibility on the face of it, and bitch about the kind of measures absolute safety would require. I listened to people here howling about why the "dots weren't connected" before 9/11. The same people who howl about tracking phone calls, or profiling suspicious characters.

And when terrorists are caught before an attack? Why, then the story is that they weren't really dangerous at all!