Bush & Bin Ladin

With the Dems chances of impeaching president Bush dwindling away, one of the things suggested as a failure of the administration is the capture or killing of Osama Bin Ladin. I maintain that Bin Ladin was killed in the Tora Bora mountains sometime in 2003, which would allow Bush to take credit.

What he should have said in his farewell speech was that this is what happened, and thus dare Al-Quida to produce Bin Laden with an intact metabolism. So far, all we get is Zawahari nagging his followers to get off their lazy duffs and kill some Jews, or Americans, or somebody.

In the Jawa Report, Rusty Shackleford has done a statistical study based on Freedom hous's listing of the degree of freedom for most of the worlds countries, vs the percentage Muslim the population is.

A few years back a friend and I had a back and forth about this. In the end we decided to do a simple regression analysis with "freedom" being the dependent variable (as operationalized by Freedom House) and % of a nation that is Muslim (as reported by the CIA Factbook) as the predictive (independent) variable. The result? The higher the % of Muslims in a country, the less free it is. Even when controlling for things like poverty, the results hold up.

RTWT. More links and info there, most of which should come as no surprise.