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SUNDAY,  JANUARY 3,  2009

WHAT?  REFORM IN ACADEMIA?  NO, TELL ME NO – AT 7:05 P.M. ET:  This story is potentially quite important as Harvard, for better or worse, influences the rest of the academic world.  This reform was long in coming.  From The New York Times:

The owner of two research hospitals affiliated with the Harvard Medical School has imposed restrictions on outside pay for two dozen senior officials who also sit on the boards of pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies. The limits come in the wake of growing criticism of the ties between industry and academia.

Medical experts say they believe the conflict-of-interest rules at the institution, Partners HealthCare, go further than those of any other academic medical center in restricting outside pay from drug companies. The rules, which became effective on Friday, impose limits specifically on outside directors who guide some of the nation’s biggest companies.

Senior officials at the two hospitals, Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals in Boston, must limit their pay for serving as outside directors to what the policy calls “a level befitting an academic role” — no more than $5,000 a day for actual work for the board. Some had been receiving more than $200,000 a year. Also, they may no longer accept stock.

This is just the beginning.  President Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation in 1961, warned about the corrupting effect of federal grants on science - with scientists working more to satisfy grant givers than to pursue discovery.  There is also a corrupting effect of any kind of outside money, and the new Harvard rules begin to address that.

Partners HealthCare is also forbidding speaker’s fees from drug companies for any employee, including nearly 8,000 with Harvard faculty appointments. Some other medical schools have taken similar actions in prohibiting faculty members from being paid by drug companies to speak about their products.

But no other academic medical centers have so restricted participation in boards of directors.

COMMENT:  Now it's time to expand the concern over corruption in the academic world.  What about professorships in Middle East studies that are financed by such noble democracies as Saudi Arabia?  What about restrictions on what students and faculty may or may not say, based on the demands of pressure groups?  There's a long list of reforms that are needed, but this step by Harvard is a very good one.

January 3, 2009   Permalink

DEFENDING RASMUSSEN – AT 6:25 P.M. ET:  Bill Kristol, in the Weekly Standard, comes to the defense of pollster Scott Rasmussen, who's under attack by liberal because his polls tend to show Obama at a lower point than do other surveys:

Generally, because Rasmussen has a likely voter universe and polls so much, he seems to catch trends earlier -- and other polls eventually move toward him. If you assume likely voters pay more attention to politics and tend to move first, paying attention to them will allow you to see trends early. That’s certainly been the case on Obama’s job approval, where Rasmussen saw the downturn before everyone else. Rasmussen still has Obama’s approval about 5 percentage points lower than other surveys, and that’s due to his universe consisting only of likely voters. And while it’s legitimate to say that it’s as useful to know the approval rating of the president among all Americans as among likely voters, if you’re interested in the 2010 results, history would suggest the likely voter numbers are more likely to be helpful.

And that’s why serious people in Washington pay attention to Rasmussen’s polls.

COMMENT:  Eventually liberals may get the message.  But their response, if history informs us, may be irresponsible.  If the issue is "likely voters," they may reason, "we have to turn more of our stay-at-home supporters in to voters."  They may attempt a number of tricks, not all of which may be ethical, as we've seen from ACORN's "work" in large cities.  And remember that Chicago politicians are running the White House.  In Chicago, Democratic voters never die.  They just reside in cemeteries and vote on election day.

January 3, 2009   Permalink

IRAN VETOES KERRY VISIT, WORLD IN FLAMES – AT 5:47 P.M. P.M. ET:  From The Hill:

Iranian legislators on Sunday decided to not allow a visit from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), according to Iranian media.

"Members of the Iranian parliament's Foreign Relations Committee (a subcommittee of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission) voiced opposition to the request after studying the issue," Hassan Ebrahimi, head of the committee, told the semi-official Fars News Agency.

Kerry had been denying, to the American press, that he had plans to visit Iran.  If true, the action by Iran's parliament is preemptive.  However, please note this:

"Members of the Iranian parliament's Foreign Relations Committee (a subcommittee of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission) voiced opposition to the request after studying the issue," Hassan Ebrahimi, head of the committee, told the semi-official Fars News Agency.

The request?  Kerry should come clean and tell us whether he did make a formal request to visit.

The whole thing is embarrassing anyway.  The idea of a former presidential candidate visiting a country that is currently murdering its own citizens in the streets is sickening.  It has echoes of George McGovern saying, during the Vietnam War, that he'd gladly visit North Vietnam and beg for peace.  McGovern, of course, didn't have to beg.  We simply withdrew from Vietnam and, in 1975, cut off aid to our South Vietnamese allies, courtesy of Congress, handing the south to the Communists.

Iran is the first great test for Obama in 2010.  The suggestion, and we can't nail down the facts on this precisely, that he may have permitted a trip to Tehran by Kerry is not encouraging.

January 3,  2009   Permalink

THE DISGRACE – AT 12:17 P.M. ET:  The controversy is building over the decision to treat the airline bomber as an ordinary criminal defendant, rather than a prisoner of war.

One of the first things that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who attempted to blow up the Delta/Northwest flight over Detroit, said upon being apprehended was that there were many more like him in Yemen.  The first instinct of the president of the United States should have been to say, "I want to know all about that.  Get everything you can."

But, no.  This administration is run by left-wing lawyers who think like left-wing lawyers.  And the terrorist, who engaged in an act of war against us, isn't being treated like a prisoner of war, but like a shoplifter.  He's now all lawyered up, and isn't talking.  As a prisoner of war, he would have been subject to constant interrogation.  This man has information critical to the saving of American lives, but we aren't getting it.  His "rights," which aren't his rights at all, since he isn't an American citizen, are more important than our lives.

Senator Kit Bond of Missouri is on Fox News Sunday today, advancing the Republican position on the issue.

Bond strongly disagrees with the President's decision to charge the accused terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant. He believes we should have held him as an enemy combatant and tried him under the military commissions.

"We had the ability in the previous administration to interrogate detainees following the laws and the Constitution, not torturing them, but getting information from them. This man, Abdulmutallab, probably has more insight into possible other recruits that Al Qaeda would be sending into the United States," Bond said.

Bond warned, "This is war and its time we reacted to the war tactics."

COMMENT:  The president has taken to talking toughly in recent days, undoubtedly to make up for the earlier impression that he's a marshmallow, but so far his actions have not matched his words.  Instead, he has his troops out there criticizing the GOP for "partisanship" on this issue.

Partisanship is just fine.  That's why we have a democracy.  The Obamans have a pre 9-11 mentality.  Like most modern liberals (as opposed to traditional liberals) they're reactionaries, wanting to go back to a previous, more comfortable time.  It's entirely proper for Republicans to point this out, and take their case to the people. 

January 3, 2009   Permalink

FINE REPORTING – AT 11:12 A.M. ET:  The Politico does some first-rate sleuthing to uncover the contradictions and hypocrisy in this administration's anti-terror policy.  This is good reading:

"The senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing sensitive security matters, said the government was gaining confidence in Yemen’s willingness to handle returning detainees after months of 'intense' talks under the Obama administration..."

     – The New York Times, 12/20/09

"A senior administration official said Thursday that Mr. Obama’s interagency team had already decided quietly several weeks ago that the security situation in Yemen was too volatile to transfer any more detainees beyond six who were sent home in December..."

      – The New York Times, 1/1/2010

Josh Gerstein, in The Politico, asks:

Hmmm. Is "quietly" a euphemism for "despite telling us more or less the opposite ten days ago"?

Joined with John Brennan's remarks (just below), we feel an even greater loss of confidence than we've felt before.

It's...curious that the fact that no more detainees would be sent to Yemen was being touted to reporters as a finding or result of the post-Christmas bombing intelligence review, if indeed such repatriations were halted "quietly several weeks ago."

A lot of things are curious about this administration. 

January 3, 2009   Permalink

OH, CUT IT OUT ALREADY – AT 10:39 A.M. ET:  It's time for the Obama administration to take some of its ground troops aside and give them some advice on keeping the mouth shut.  From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. intelligence agencies did not miss a ''smoking gun'' that could have prevented an alleged attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day, President Barack Obama's top counterterrorism adviser said Sunday.

White House aide John Brennan cited ''lapses'' and errors in the sharing of intelligence and clues about the Nigerian man accused in the foiled attempt.

''There is no smoking gun,'' Brennan said. ''There was no single piece of intelligence that said, 'this guy is going to get on a plane.'''

Oh, come on, Johnny.  The man's father walked into the US Embassy in Nigeria twice to warn us about his son.  He bought a ticket in cash.  He wasn't carrying luggage.  What more do you need?  Okay, so he wasn't wearing a sign saying, "I am a terrorist.  Stop me before I blow up this plane."  Maybe he didn't have a crayon.

And get this:

Brennan is leading a White House review of the incident.

He is?  Then why is he already drawing conclusions?  Shouldn't that wait until the review is concluded?  Do you get the feeling that the purpose of the "review" is to exonerate the administration?

Brennan cited ''a number of streams of information'' -- the 23-year-old suspect's name was known to intelligence officials, his father had passed along his concern about the son's increasing radicalization -- and ''little snippets'' from intelligence channels. ''But there was nothing that brought it all together.''

Oh dear, what can one say?

''In this one instance, the system didn't work. There were some human errors. There were some lapses. We need to strengthen it. But day in and day out, the successes are there.''

Shut him up.  Right now.

January 3, 2009   Permalink

U.S., BRITAIN, SHUT YEMEN EMBASSIES – AT 10:12 A.M. ET:  From AP:

Both the US and Britain have closed their embassies in Yemen, with American officials citing threats by the al-Qaida group linked to the failed bombing of a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day.

In London, Britain's Foreign Office said the embassy in Yemen was closed Sunday for security reasons. A spokeswoman said officials would decide later whether to reopen it on Monday.

The confrontation with the terrorist group's branch in Yemen has gained new urgency since the 23-year-old Nigerian accused in the attack, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, told US investigators he received training and instructions from al-Qaida operatives in Yemen. President Barack Obama said Saturday that al-Qaida's branch in Yemen was behind the attempt.

A message on the US Embassy Web site read, "The US Embassy in San'a is closed today, January 3, 2010, in response to ongoing threats by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula ... to attack American interests in Yemen."

COMMENT:  Welcome to 2010.  A real improvement over 2009 so far, isn't it?

The closing of the embassy, which may be temporary, raises serious questions:  Why now?  Have the threats escalated, or were we a bit blind to them before the airline incident?  And where, in all this, is the secretary of state, who isn't even mentioned in the story? 

We recall that, after the USS Cole was attacked in a harbor in Yemen in 2000, with the loss of 17 American sailors, the FBI was sent to the country to investigate.  There were reports that the United States ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, was less than cooperative with the probe, trying to protect the US-Yemeni relationship.  Often, diplomats develop what is known as "localitis," a bias toward the country to which they're sent.  Are we seeing that now, in what, on the surface, appears to have been a laxness toward the Al Qaeda threat in Yemen?

When he was secretary of state in the Reagan administration, George Shultz would invite an American diplomat into his office, walk him or her to a map and ask, "Which is your country?"  Inevitably, the envoy would point to the country where he was posted.  "No," said Shultz, himself pointing to the United States on the map, "this is your country."  Sometimes diplomats forget that.

Love George Shultz.

January 3,  2009   Permalink

SATURDAY,  JANUARY 2,  2010

THE BITTER PILL – AT 8:12 P.M. ET:  The latest on the attack in Afghanistan that killed CIA operatives.  From ABC News:

The suicide bomber who killed at least six Central Intelligence Agency officers in a base along the Afghan-Pakistan border on Wednesday was a regular CIA informant who had visited the same base multiple times in the past, according to someone close to the base's security director.

The informant was a Pakistani and a member of the Wazir tribe from the Pakistani tribal area North Waziristan, according to the same source. The base security director, an Afghan named Arghawan, would pick up the informant at the Ghulam Khan border crossing and drive him about two hours into Forward Operating Base Chapman, from where the CIA operates.

Because he was with Arghawan, the informant was not searched, the source says. Arghawan also died in the attack.

This is a very bitter situation.  The senior CIA officer killed was a married woman with three children.

The story seems to corroborate a claim by the Taliban on the Pakistani side of the border that they had turned a CIA asset into a double agent and sent him to kill the officers in the base, located in the eastern Afghan province of Khost.

The infiltration into the heart of the CIA's operation in eastern Afghanistan deals a strong blow to the agency's ability to fight Taliban and al Qaeda, former intelligence officials say, and will make the agency reconsider how it recruits Pakistani and Afghan informants.

COMMENT:  We are again reminded of how hard this is.  The war against Islamic extremism will go on for decades.  As we noted here twice in the last two days, the enemy gets a great deal of help from leftist groups in the West, who are trying to undermine our side in the battle, as they did during Vietnam.

The Bush administration can properly be faulted for letting the situation in Afghanistan drag on without direction for too long, but it is now Obama's war.  It's interesting that Afghanistan is the one area where the president's poll ratings have gone up, something that happened after he announced his decision to send more troops to the conflict.  That doesn't mean Americans are ready to write a blank check, but it does mean that enough of us are willing to give Obama a chance if he starts to show backbone and tries to pursue a winning strategy. 

The end result, though, is far from guaranteed, and I wish the president would finally explain to the American people that they must be prepared for decades of opposition to a hateful ideology.  It would mean opposing the left wing of his party, but that, in my view, doesn't carry much risk.

January 2, 2010   Permalink

IT DOESN'T MATTER – THINK WARM, THINK HOT, DON'T THINK! – AT 7:08 P.M. ET:  The global warming "consensus" can't seem to catch a break.  Will someone please make up some figures and help them?  From London's Telegraph:

Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16 degrees Celsius, forecasters have warned.

Insignificant!  It's a trick.  These people all work for Exxon!

They predicted no let up in the freezing snap until at least mid-January, with snow, ice and severe frosts dominating.

And the likelihood is that the second half of the month will be even colder.

And...

Paul Michaelwaite, forecaster for NetWeather.tv, said: “It is looking like this winter could be in the top 20 cold winters in the last 100 years.

“It’s going to be very cold the for the next 10 days and although there could be a milder spell at some stage the indications are that the second half of the month will be even colder.”

Obviously, a man with investments in coal.

Matt Dobson, forecaster for MeteoGroup, the Press Association's weather division, said last month had been the coldest December for 13 years. "It has been the coldest December on average since 1996," he said. "The second half of the month was very cold indeed but the first half was relatively mild. If it had been colder in the first few weeks we would have seen more records broken."

COMMENT:  It has been reported that Al Gore read this story and was given sedatives.  We wish him well.

Oh, by the way, the headline now running at Drudge is:  COLD, COLD, COLDER.

This wasn't in the script, was it?

January 2, 2010    Permalink

IT HAD TO HAPPEN – AT 6:53 P.M. ET:  Liberals are on the attack against...  Al Qaeda?  The Taliban?  The Iranian mullahs?  Drug dealers?

No, the target is Scott Rasmussen, whose polls are often quoted here.  It seems that the liberal left doesn't like his numbers, which don't reflect the approved line that America has elected a messiah.  From The Politico:

Democrats are turning their fire on Scott Rasmussen, the prolific independent pollster whose surveys on elections, President Obama’s popularity and a host of other issues are surfacing in the media with increasing frequency.

The pointed attacks reflect a hardening conventional wisdom among prominent liberal bloggers and many Democrats that Rasmussen Reports polls are, at best, the result of a flawed polling model and, at worst, designed to undermine Democratic politicians and the party’s national agenda.

On progressive-oriented websites, anti-Rasmussen sentiment is an article of faith. “Rasmussen Caught With Their Thumb on the Scale,” blared the Daily Kos this summer. “Rasmussen Reports, You Decide,” the blog Swing State Project recently headlined in a play on the Fox News motto.

The ranting goes on and on.  At times, we almost feel for these people, in their suffering and disillusionment.

The charge is that Rasmussen rigs his polls by rigging the questions, by manipulating respondents, maybe even by changing the weather.  Rasmussen, in his scholarly gentleness, has a rather convincing answer:

Rasmussen is quick to point out the accuracy of his surveys — noting how close his firm was to predicting the final outcome in this fall’s New Jersey governor’s race. (Rasmussen’s final survey in the race showed Republican Chris Christie edging out Gov. Jon Corzine 46 percent to 43 percent. Christie beat Corzine 48 percent to 45 percent on Election Day.) And he argues that he was among the first pollsters to show Obama narrowing the gap with Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.

Last year, the progressive website FiveThirtyEight.com’s pollster ratings, based on the 2008 presidential primaries, awarded Rasmussen the third-highest mark for its accuracy in predicting the outcome of the contests. And Rasmussen’s final poll of the 2008 general election — showing Obama defeating Arizona Sen. John McCain 52 percent to 46 percent — closely mirrored the election’s outcome.

Take that, lefties!

Rasmussen, for his part, explained that his numbers are trending Republican simply because he is screening for only those voters most likely to head to the polls — a pool of respondents, he argues, that just so happens to bend more conservative this election cycle.

Which is why we quote Scott Rasmussen.  His approach, in our view, is the most solid, and his track record, which is easily determined, backs him up.

January 2, 2010   Permalink

THE BOYS IN TEHRAN ARE GETTING ROUGH – AT 11:57 A.M. ET:  Obama's deadline for Iran to make progress in its nuclear negotiations with the west has passed.  We now get the Iranian response, and it is blunt.  From AFP:

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran on Saturday gave the West a one-month "ultimatum" to accept a uranium swap, warning that if there is no deal it will produce its own nuclear fuel for a Tehran reactor, state television reported.

"The international community has just one month left to decide" whether or not it will accept Iran's conditions, otherwise "Tehran will enrich uranium to a higher level," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was quoted as saying.

"This is an ultimatum," he said.

Pretty direct stuff from a regime that's being threatened in its own streets.

Iran, which rejected a December 31 deadline to accept a UN-brokered deal, said on Tuesday it is ready to swap abroad its low-enriched uranium for nuclear fuel, insisting however that the exchange should happen in stages.

Tehran has rejected a proposal by UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to ship out most of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium for further processing by Russia and France into fuel for a research reactor.

Absurd.  When done in stages, it's a slow-motion process, allowing Iran to replace whatever enriched uranium gets shipped out.

COMMENT:  It's clearly crunch time.  We await the president's return from his seemingly endless vacation to see what he'll actually do.  Not say, but do.

January 2, 2010    Permalink

HE SPEAKS – AND HE TAKES OFF...A GLOVE – AT 11:08 A.M. ET:  President Obama has spoken out about the Christmas day attempt on an airliner over Detroit.  A C+ statement, but at least it's something.  From The New York Times:

HONOLULU, Hawaii — President Obama declared for the first time on Saturday that a branch of Al Qaeda based in Yemen sponsored the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an American passenger jet, and he vowed that those behind the failed attack “will be held to account.”

We knew about the Al Qaeda link a week ago.

"Held to account?"  I want that spelled out.  Does it mean a summons?  A lawsuit?  An air attack?  Being made to stand in a corner?

“We’re learning more about the suspect,” Mr. Obama said in the Saturday address.

I love "suspect."  Okay, Obama probably uses the term for legal reasons.  But just once, only once, I'd like to hear him slip and say "jihadist."  There, was that difficult?

Mr. Abdulmutallab had studied Arabic in Yemen in 2004-05 before going to school in London and becoming increasingly devout in his Muslim views. He returned to Yemen in early August, according to the Yemeni government, and reenrolled in an Arabic school there, remaining in the country until early December. Some officials in the United States and Yemen suspect the school enrollment was a cover to train with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

As we said, jihadist.

Mr. Obama defended his policies as tough but reasonable, and called for an end to the sniping that both parties have engaged in since the Christmas episode. “As we go forward, let us remember this — our adversaries are those who would attack our country, not our fellow Americans, not each other,” Mr. Obama said.

I wish he'd send a note to that effect to some of his supporters, with their merciless attacks on President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

He added: “Instead of succumbing to partisanship and division, let’s summon the unity that this moment demands. Let’s work together, with a seriousness of purpose, to do what must be done to keep our country safe.”

Fine, Mr. President, but a whole branch of your party doesn't believe we're at war, believes terrorism is our fault, and is threatening to try to block funds for your surge in Afghanistan.  It's not your enemies who are a threat to this country, sir, it's your friends.

January 2, 2010    Permalink 

PAYBACK – AT 10:53 A.M. ET:  Has Barack Obama thrown the wrong people under the bus?  Britain's Daily Mail reports on a backlash from officials in the intelligence community:

Barack Obama was accused of double standards yesterday in his treatment of the CIA.
The President paid tribute to secret agents after seven of them were killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.

In a statement, he said the CIA had been ‘tested as never before’ and that agents had ‘served on the front lines in directly confronting the dangers of the 21st century’.
He lauded the victims as ‘part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow citizens and for our way of life’.

Yet the previous day he had blasted ‘systemic failures’ in the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies for failing to prevent the Christmas Day syringe bomb attack.

The president is probably right about the "systemic failures."  But his long history of blaming anybody but himself has prompted a backlash.

‘One day the President is pointing the finger and blaming the intelligence services, saying there is a systemic failure,’ said one agency official. ‘Now we are heroes. The fact is that we are doing everything humanly possible to stay on top of the security situation. The deaths of our operatives shows just how involved we are on the ground.’

And...

The agents – including the chief of the base, a mother-of-three - were collecting information about militants when the suicide bomber struck on Wednesday.
The attack was the deadliest single day for the agency since eight CIA officers were killed in the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut.

And let us not forget that Attorney General Eric Holder, who thinks this is one big law-enforcement problem, wants to investigate the actions of CIA agents under the BUSH (!!) administration.

Do you see chickens coming home to roost?  There's an army of them across the road...and these chickens vote.

January 2, 2010    Permalink

MORE HOLY TERROR – AT 10:14 A.M. ET:  Through careful planning and good luck, a life was saved in Denmark in the midst of a terror attack.  The life belonged to Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, famous for drawing the cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed that caused all that uproar in the Muslim world in 2005.  Our superb contributor, Renee Nielsen, who is visiting Denmark, has alerted us to some of the best reports of the incident.

COPENHAGEN (AP) -- A Somali man was charged Saturday with two counts of attempted murder for an attack on a Danish artist whose 2005 cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad ignited riots and outrage across the Muslim world, authorities said.

The 28-year-old Somali -- who had ties to al-Qaida -- broke into Kurt Westergaard's home in Aarhus on Friday night armed with an ax and a knife, said Jakob Scharf, head of Denmark's PET intelligence agency.

The 75-year-old artist, who has been the target of several death threats since depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban, pressed an alarm and fled with his 5-year-old granddaughter to a specially made safe room.

Officers arrived two minutes later and tried to arrest the assailant, but then shot him in the hand and knee when he threatened them with the ax, said Preben Nielsen of the Aarhus police.

Can you imagine the result if Mr. Westergaard hadn't planned his security?

Another act of terror.  How many have there been recently?  I've lost count.  And how many months has it been since the Obama administration banned the word "terror," replacing it with "man-caused disasters"?  Lost count of that, too.  That change has apparently been reversed.

Britain's Sun reports:

Jakob Scharf, who heads Denmark's intelligence service says the attack was "terror related," adding the suspected assailant has close contacts to the Somali terrorist group, al-Shabaab.

COMMENT:  A life was saved, but how many are now threatened?  And how many authors, journalists and filmmakers will now think twice, or three times, before writing or filming anything that could "offend" certain sensitivities?

Notice the silence of "civil liberties" groups.  Notice the equal silence of the "multiculturalist" crowd.  We quoted a piece just yesterday - see it just below - on the way in which some of these groups aid terror.  We don't take back a word.

January 2,  2010    Permalink