The word for today is "sociopath", and Susanna Cornett puts it into an international context.

And just in case you missed the point:

[applause]

Dean Esmay reports that in the last half of the 20th century conservatism ceased to be the red-headed stepchild of American political thought — and then found itself at the dawn of the 21st to be the dominant strain.

Part of this, of course, is the fluidity of definition, especially political definition: the stance which was called "liberal" during the formative years of the Republic scarcely resembles late-20th century liberalism. Conservatives were old mossbacks or worse; conservatism wasn't stupid, in and of itself, exactly, but John Stuart Mill argued that "most stupid people [were] conservatives."

What happened in the interim isn't exactly clear, but Mr Esmay cites one particular factor that hadn't occurred to me: the decline of the purely-intellectual Left. Once upon a time, almost all of our philosopher types came from the left side of the spectrum; today, most of the left-wing voices we hear are spouting the same bunch of platitudes over and over. "Aside from a few rare exceptions," says Mr Esmay, "most 'liberal' argumentation seems to come from one of three places:"

This is the state of what once was the American intelligentsia: outflanked, then outnumbered, reduced to ad hominem arguments constructed for maximum cliché value.

I'm not about to argue that we've reached some sort of classical-liberal (let's call it "libertarian") Nirvana, or even that we're on the way. For one thing, there is still a substantial authoritarian component on the Right, and it has enough blind spots of its own to support the entire Western beam industry, let alone the odd mote. But with the American left in at least slightly self-inflicted decline, some benefits will clearly accrue. For one thing, there will be a lot less of that "Marx was right, but the Soviet/Chinese/whatever implementation was wrong" claptrap. And the leftist assumption that any conflict can be solved with an application of some sort of logic, especially their sort of logic, came crashing to the ground with the World Trade Center. "Increasingly," says Mr Esmay, "people associate 'liberal' with being just plain dumb." And with good reason, sometimes.

Radley Balko has observed that governmental accountability is in the toilet, and that one way to force Washington to face the music is to get rid of income-tax withholding:

Not all of us get paid twice a month, but the point stands. I would hate, of course, to write one huge check in the spring, but if the government can be forced into fiscal discipline, well, so can I. Now, while we're on the subject, can we throw FICA into the mix?

(Muchas gracias: Hanah Metchis at Quare.)

In Arguendo has weighed the merits, such as they are, and has decided to vote for the reelection of Gray Davis to the office of Governor of California, on the basis of the following:

Mr Davis being staggeringly unpopular in Golden State blogdom, it should be no surprise that In Arguendo is getting critical comments posted to this statement, but I have to admire the sheer efficiency of this argument. Not everyone, of course, supports the notion of voting for the lesser of two evils, but as Jim Hightower used to say, if the gods had meant us to vote, they would have given us candidates.

To hear some people talk, you'd think George W. Bush, all by his lonesome, was sabotaging the entire array of worldwide environmental activities, just by thumbing his nose at the Kyoto Protocol.

Now the Russians may balk at Kyoto, having done the math and having figured out that they're not going to make any money on the deal. If the Russians bail, Kyoto is dead; the U.S. and Russia combined are responsible, per Kyoto documents, for about 53 percent of Punishable Emissions, leaving a mere 47 percent for the rest of the world, and Kyoto cannot take effect unless countries with 55 percent of said emissions sign on.

Conspiracy theorists should have a ball with this. Expect charges that Washington and Moscow have been putting together a deal all along in an effort to kill Kyoto. Frankly, I rather hope they have.

In The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes says that those weird ACLU types and those pesky libertarians have stalled enough; it's time for a national ID card, in the name of, you guessed it, "national security".

There are plenty of reasons to take issue with this premise. We've already lost a measure of privacy, what with various licenses, credit records, medical records and whatnot, so what's a little more? Besides, says Barnes blithely, "the Constitution has never recognized a right to anonymity." If it's not stated in bald type, it does not exist? Has Mr Barnes read the 10th Amendment lately?

Meanwhile, Quana Jones has further complaints:

And still further:

Mr Barnes calls objections of this sort "essentially frivolous". Of course he does. If he didn't, he'd have to take them seriously, and then all he'd have left of his argument would be "The government will protect us." How very, very September 10th of him.

A few months ago, FARK.com made an addition to its usual categories like "weird", "dumbass" and "Wheaton": there is now a category called "Florida". And the Sunshine State, true to form, is delivering all manner of farkable news items.

Consider the case of Patrick Feheley, running for the 13th District House seat currently held by Rep. Dan Miller, who is retiring. Feheley filed suit against another Democratic rival, Candice Brown McElyea, claiming she'd inserted a hyphen into her name when she filed to run for the office; as "Brown-McElyea, Candice", she'd appear on the ballot ahead of "Feheley, Patrick". (Two other Democrats are running, but their names fall farther down in the alphabet.) Says Feheley, this is a deceptive manipulation of the election process. (Deceptive manipulation? In Florida? Sheesh. Now we've heard everything.)

The judge designated to hear the case set a routine procedural hearing for the 5th of September, five days before the primary election, too late for the ballots to be reprinted should Feheley prevail. Upset, but knowing there wasn't much he could do about it, Feheley dropped his suit.

Of course, this is only the primary. Should Feheley win, he'd still have to beat out a Republican to be determined, and an independent candidate. Who might that Republican be? The front-runner right now is Katherine Harris. Yes, that Katherine Harris. Then again, her candidacy is being challenged by rival John Hill (no relation).

It's times like these I almost feel sorry for Jeb Bush.

There are times when you just have to let the text speak for itself:

Of course, far more water is used for agricultural purposes than for our piddling (sorry) little homes, but what I want to know is this: How many of these high-dollar diplomatic types attending the Summit, moved (so to speak) by this speech, went out and took a dump in their hotel parking lots?

Yeah, I thought so.

(Muchas gracias: Andrea Harris.)

You and I probably already knew this, but Wylie wants to make sure the Usual Suspects, just departed from the Earth Summit, get the point:

The Usual Suspects, including First World greenozoids, the International Monetary Fund, and a collection of Third World "We aren't sure what we need, but we sure want money" types, probably won't take heed this time either, but not to worry: eventually they'll be looking for real jobs, just like the Central Planners.

Hmmm....

So speculates William Hughes in Counterpunch. Of course, punishing the guilty would be out of the question, since they've already transformed themselves into noxious swirling gases, which are then condensed, reduced, and published as articles in places like, well, Counterpunch.

As for Dr King, I seriously doubt any part of his dream called for people to wrap themselves in plastique.

In 1945, the heads of the three major Allied powers — Harry Truman from the US, Winston Churchill (subsequently replaced by Clement Attlee, an election having intervened) from Britain, and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union — met in Potsdam, near occupied Berlin, and signed an agreement among themselves regarding just how to handle the "conquered countries," by which they meant Germany and whatever lands the Reich had been occupying by force during the preceding years. Other matters were discussed at Potsdam, including the drafting of an ultimatum to be dispatched to Japan.

The Potsdam terms imposed upon Germany, says Frank Martin at Techno-Merc, can be applied with only minor modifications to Iraq, once that war draws to a close, and he offers a revised version of the pertinent parts of the Potsdam declaration to illustrate. Is this necessary? Mr Martin responds, "[D]o Iraqis not deserve the same level of justice meted out to Germans at the end of WWII?"

Today's spam comes from Trent Franks, a "principled, pro-family conservative Republican" running for Arizona's Second District House seat, up for grabs now that incumbent Bob Stump is retiring after 26 years. Franks has five opponents in tomorrow's GOP primary, none of whom have (1) spammed me (2) from a Korean mail drop. Not that the Koreans know I don't live anywhere near the district.

Spam, of course, is to principle what Cocoa Puffs are to Ghirardelli chocolate, and I hope it sinks Trent Franks as badly as it did California gubernatorial wannabe Bill Jones. And let this be a warning to any actual Oklahoma politicians with the same cheesy idea.

Somebody — was it P. J. O'Rourke? — once opined that the single most useful word in defending US interests was the simple word so, framed as a question in as accusatory a manner as possible. Used in this way, it becomes possible to refute all sorts of criticisms leveled from the Other Side. Example:

And its usefulness extends beyond foreign policy:

Alternate forms include "Your point being?" and "And this is a problem because...?"

This is actually less flippant than it seems; today, when sloganeering is the primary form of political discourse, giving someone else's shibboleth the rhetorical back of your hand is every bit as effective as trying to explain things to the nudnik, and it saves time and/or bandwidth. A no-lose proposition all around, if you ask me.

Were you impressed with the way President Bush stuck it to the United Nations? James Lileks was:

Exactly so. Watching the Global Goofs trying to argue their way out of it will be most amusing, and while they're so engaged, Mr Bush can proceed with the plan.

And otherwise-intelligent people called this man "dumb"?

College football, writes Patrick Ruffini, testifies to the strength of American society:

Anyone who's ever been stuck in a traffic jam in Norman, Oklahoma on game day might argue that we need a bit more proportion and/or scale, but Mr Ruffini's point is clear: if we have the resources to spare to pour into what is, by and large, a trivial pursuit, well, just imagine what we can do with truly important tasks. For example:

There's your morning line. The only real question is by how much we will beat the spread.

"Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President", says the headline in Scotland's Sunday Herald.

Well, sort of. The think tank Project for the New American Century actually drew up, in September 2000, a list of foreign-policy desiderata, one of which was to increase American power and influence in the Persian Gulf area. Sunday Herald writer Neil Mackay quotes from the PNAC report as follows:

This would seem, at the very least, to contradict the Sunday Herald's headline, which suggests that the Bush team was already, before the election, looking to score Saddam's head on a platter.

The really amusing aspect of the article, though, is the querulous quote from Labour MP Tam Dalyell, who just isn't happy about anything those darn Americans do:

There is no word on whether Mr Dalyell is contemplating switching to the Tories.

President Bush would like to fill a vacancy on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals with Michael McConnell, Presidental Professor of Law at the University of Utah. McConnell is acclaimed by legal scholars on both sides of the political fence; though distinctly conservative, he does not come across as an ideologue.

Just the same, McConnell faces an uphill battle. The Senate Judiciary Committee is jam-packed with Democrats who are persuaded that, for instance, any suggestion that access to abortion might be regulated by the states is an instant slide down the slippery slope to coat-hangers in Tijuana. People for the American Way, a group assembled to counter religious conservatives, now increasingly shrill in its defense of indefensible liberal shibboleths, doesn't like anything about McConnell; they even complain about his membership in the (gasp!) Federalist Society.

The Senate Judiciary Committee gets first crack at McConnell this morning. I wish him luck.

Joshua Claybourn weighs in on that think-tank piece that so spooked the Europeans:

Exactly so. Some of the PNAC brain trust indeed wound up on the Bush team, but in 2000, when this report appeared, they had no official status whatsoever. Do the Europeans not have think tanks of their own? Or are they just emotionally wedded to the notion of Bush fils as the Avenging Son, bound and determined to pay back the enemies of Bush père?

"No war for oil!" say the signs along the President's motorcade routes. Bryan Preston at JunkYardBlog points out that there are lots of places with oil reserves besides Iraq, and suggests, tongue presumably in cheek:

Being, um, somewhat less bellicose, I propose a deal with the Mexicans: for every illegal immigrant we accept from Mexico, they have to send us 5000 barrels of crude — reducible to zero if the immigrant accepts relocation in some place that might actually benefit from increased population, such as the Dakotas.

That's the title of Mike's latest rant at Cold Fury, and it's so good it's all I can do to keep from pasting the whole thing over here.

The bottom line, though, is this:

Now quit fooling around here and go read the whole thing.

Rob McGee takes apart that America-Is-A-Bully codswallop that has been oozing through the European Union and elsewhere of late:

Buffy the Jihad Slayer! Now there's a concept. (Shut up, Cordelia.)

How can anyone possibly oppose paid family leave? Dodd Harris can, and he has darn good reasons:

And, of course, that's only the half of it:

(Internal link added by me.)

Somehow this reminds me of what happened with California's electric "deregulation": it seems that Governor Davis and his minions huddled together, considered all the available options, and discarded any that might have actually worked.

In his guise as Dinah Dienstag, Professor of Idiotarian Thought at the University of North-South-West Rhode Island Red, Cinderella Bloggerfeller (bless you, Abi and Esther) explains the Higher Morality that comes with poverty:

And, of course, wrenching poverty presents all the graphic evidence you could want that these poor souls aren't doing something evil and heinous like producing consumer goods to be sold to nasty, selfish, immoral First Worlders through despoilers of culture such as Le Mart du Wal.

Mr Bloggerfeller suggests that this particular piece is one in a series. An infinite series. The mind reels.

After yesterday's, um, performance by Jim McDermott and David Bonior, live from Beautiful Downtown Baghdad, there's only one real question left:

Which one does the exercise video, and which one marries Ted Turner?

I figured Senator Robert Torricelli would be out on his keister this fall; what I didn't figure was that he'd drop out of the race.

Welcome to the Wide, Wide World of Turmoil. Legally, the New Jersey Democratic Party can't replace Torricelli on the ballot — it's about two weeks past the deadline — and while the senator could theoretically resign his seat and let Governor Jim McGreevey pick someone to fill it, it may be difficult to find someone to serve as sacrificial lamb against Republican Doug Forrester, who has piled up double-digit leads in recent polls.

This race, of course, doesn't affect me much, except to the extent that I am still a member of the Democratic Party and feel compelled to keep track of such things. But Torricelli, once his highly-dubious business dealings became known, became an obvious liability to the party, so he had to go, one way or another. And besides, what do we have here in Oklahoma that's even halfway as interesting? Incumbent Republican Jim Inhofe, who is basically Strom Thurmond with a circulatory system, is being challenged, sort of, by an underfunded Democrat — David Walters — who left the governor's mansion years ago under a cloud of his own. Control of the Senate is likely to pass to the GOP this fall anyway, so about all I can do at this point is watch and smirk. Besides, I haven't seen Susanna Cornett this happy since I drove out of Jersey this summer.

As usual, the most sensible commentary on the mess in New Jersey comes from Minnesota. Behold the words of Lileks:

And those are the kindest words he has for the Torch. Why would Lileks care about a Senate race in Jersey, anyway?

Yep.

With the finding of the New Jersey Supreme Court that there are more important things to an election than mere laws, y'know, you have to wonder what precedents are being set.

Greg Hlatky points out the immediate results; IMAO's Frank (no relation to TV's Frank, so far as I know) takes the longer view.

The Greens sent me an informational packet of sorts today, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Then again, I'm not quite sure what to make of them. I'm hardly the "progressive" soul they'd like to have on their rolls and on their donor list. On the other hand, if it is true, as some insist, that the Greens cost Al Gore the 2000 Presidential election, then perhaps I ought to send them some money out of sheer gratitude.

Well, maybe not. They did include a clipping from USA Today, dated 22 July, which tells me something I hadn't heard or had forgotten: someone with connections to the New Mexico Republican party (though not the state GOP itself, apparently) offered the Greens big bucks to run candidates for the House of Representatives, which presumably would draw votes away from Democrats. No dice, said the Greens.

Do the Greens have a future? The United States has always been pretty much a two-party country, but nothing gives either of the current major parties an eternal lease on life. In fact, if one were to judge by present-day bloggage, the Democrats are about this close to imploding; in four years or so, they could join the Whigs on the Former Major Parties roster. I can't say I'd be happy to see them go, but it seems fairly clear that the wounds are largely self-inflicted. And anyway, the Greens have no candidates running for anything in Oklahoma, largely due to the fact that getting a third party recognized in this state is a task worthy of Heracles — lest we forget, Oklahoma politics resemble the Augean stables in all the obvious ways.

A few days back, I brought in a few bits from the estimable Dinah Dienstag on the subject of poverty and its correlation to morality. Once again, Cinderella Bloggerfeller (may his tribe increase) has given us more of the Wisdom of Dienstag, this time explaining that strange affinity some people seem to have for really rotten regimes:

And yet, we are told, they're not truly anti-American; they merely yearn for a more perfect world.

Yeah, right. You can wash two, maybe three hogs with that business.

Once again, a handful of Democrats who can't deal with perfectly simple election laws are trying to obtain by legal wrangling what they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Cynthia McKinney had managed to stay out of the limelight for almost a whole week, and for that we are grateful. But nothing lasts forever, with the possible exception of temporary taxes, and this week McKinney supporters have filed a lawsuit claiming that crossover voting by Georgia Republicans, permitted under the Peach State's open-primary law, was "malicious" and unconstitutional. "Black Democratic voters," said attorney J. M. Raffauf, who represents the plaintiffs, "had their voting rights interfered with and violated."

The ever-watchful Susanna Cornett boils this down to the crucial stuff:

And, I suggest, it also highlights the apparent belief of the post-2000 Democratic Party, not only in Georgia, but also in New Jersey, that state election laws are just another tool, to be used when they are needed, to be disregarded when they aren't. Any candidate who actually believes this sort of thing, I contend, deserves to lose. Were I a Republican strategist, I'd be pointing fingers at every Democratic candidate from Bangor to Bakersfield: "If So-and-so loses, is he going to sue to overturn the election?"

Yesterday I muttered something about how the GOP ought to make this New Jersey election debacle into a campaign issue.

John Rosenberg, now in his new Sekimori-designed digs, points out that it's already a campaign issue for Doug Forrester, should he be sensible enough to pick up on it, and offers a speech fragment that's right on the money:

When something doesn't work, I am the first person in line to say "Get rid of it," but no one, I believe, can argue with a straight face that the New Jersey election laws pertinent to this case had in any way failed.

(Oh, and "Sekimori", in case you were wondering, is an ancient Malayan word that means "We can draw this better than you ever could, so don't even think about it." Terse folks, those Malayans.)

Yes, it's time for Cinderella Bloggerfeller (with a new, or at least different, template!) and the latest installment from Dr Dinah Dienstag, on the dodgy subject of equating Israel with the Third Reich:

That's one theory. But there are others:

Dr Dienstag means it, too. But there's more:

"The house is pretty ugly and a little big for its lot." Or something like that.

This level of erudition is far beyond my own, which probably explains why I quoted so much of it: maybe some of it will rub off. I admit to having affected a level of world-weariness for most of the time I've spent in this world, which is either an admission that I don't have the stuff to be a proper nihilist, or a practice session for the actual physical weariness that has set in.

And give Dinah and, um, Cindy due credit: they did all this without once having to trot out Godwin's Law.

It's not hard to imagine someone surfing over to Dean's World, reading the blurb ("Defending the liberal tradition in history, politics, science and philosophy"), reading the bloggage, and then wondering out loud: "This guy calls himself a liberal?"

The explanation, of course, is that when American leftists aren't chafing under the term "liberal", they're trying their best to redefine it. Michael at Two Blowhards explains the concept:

The "liberal tradition", as understood by Dean Esmay and others, has little or nothing to do with today's putative "liberals". Michael again:

"Libertarian", of course, carries its own baggage these days, hung on it by defenders of the Big Huge State who mock the very idea of smaller government. Political language is nothing if not mutable. Back to Michael:

These days in America, bloggers label this viewpoint "idiotarianism". And Michael cuts it no slack:

The left, curiously, is unsympathetic to Christian fundamentalism; I am inclined to believe that this is because Christian fundamentalism is primarily an American phenomenon, and the American left reflexively opposes anything that reminds them of the United States. Jerry Falwell is denounced, not so much because he comes up with the occasional weird pronouncement, but because he comes from the same culture that gave us Mickey Mouse and McDonald's; if Falwell's pulpit were in Luxembourg rather than Lynchburg, I suspect he'd catch a lot less flak.

I am, I tend to argue, a centrist, not so much because my beliefs tend to cluster around the center of the political spectrum, but because I really don't want to encourage the edges. The left might embrace me for being something of a First Amendment absolutist, but they would certainly spurn me for being just as adamant about the Second. And while on economic issues I tend to the Republican side, I'm not particularly inclined to throw in my lot with the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Lacking a more appropriate term, I have settled on "centrist", and given it, well, a liberal sort of definition — in the classical sense, to be sure.

If you doubted for a moment that Saddam Hussein is Evil Incarnate, consider this:

His campaign theme song for the current coronation — er, election — is Whitney Houston's caterwauling rendition of "I Will Always Love You".

Q.E.D.

Dr Dinah Dienstag makes it four for four with another look inside the mind (for lack of a better word) of the Idiotarian, courtesy of the endlessly-redecorating Cinderella Bloggerfeller.

God forbid anyone should be goofy enough to try to channel me.

And suspicion of those who have putative communications with the supernatural, quite understandably, goes back many centuries, or at least as far back as Henry IV, Part One:

I do hope that no one is calling for terrorists, and that none come if called.

Mr Preston at JunkYardBlog, observing that the North Koreans now admit to having nukes, seeks the reason why the Clinton administration would have allowed such a thing in the first place, and comes up with this:

I lean towards #2, myself, since it explains so many other weirdnesses of the Clinton administration. The argument for #3 is contingent on #1; no one this side of Saddam gets out of bed in the morning and thinks "How can I make the world a more dangerous place today?" Of course, if Bill had been truly inept, he might stand a better chance of winning the Nobel Prize for Peace somewhere down the line.

Jamil Sayah, writing in Le Monde, finds that more-militant Muslims are arrogating to themselves the right to speak for all Islam: "[a] ventriloquist Islam which speaks through our mouth so that they make it say [both] one thing and its contrary," he asserts. Most of the proffered excuses for terrorism simply don't wash:

Cinderella Bloggerfeller, who posted the original English translation (and whose title I swiped), points out that this is further evidence that "there are some voices in the Islamic world calling for a long, hard look at what really causes Muslim fundamentalist terror." It's no longer enough to point at the Americans or at the Jews or at McDonald's. The militants will get the bulk of the news coverage because that's part of what militants are trained to do. But in a war on Islamic extremism, we can ask for no better allies than non-extremist Muslims, who care enough about their religion to oppose those who would make it into a weapon. There don't seem to be a lot of them at the moment, but I believe that as we keep the pressure on, their numbers will inevitably grow.

Apparently The New York Times believes that the National Rifle Association, by no small margin, is the mightiest lobbying group of them all. John Rosenberg of Discriminations demonstrates:

Does this suggest that all the NGOs that serve in, um, an advisory capacity to the Democratic Party would be better served by combining themselves into one humongous National Leftist Association? I imagine it would probably simplify things for writers at The New York Times.

(Note: This was almost called Foyer amusement, but I came to my senses at the last moment.)

For the fifth consecutive week, Dr Dinah Dienstag, coming to you through the good offices of Cinderella Bloggerfeller, scores big. It's almost a shame to excerpt bits and pieces, but this one is a must:

No need for me to read Rolling Stone anymore. But Dinah has bigger fish to shoot:

Had we both the omniscience and the omnipotence — never mind the malevolence — with which we are credited, surely by now we would have stretched forth a mighty hand (it shouldn't take more than one) and reduced the squabbling "majority" in the Levant to a tapestry of protein traces on the sand. The fact that this hasn't happened doesn't seem to impress anyone.

(Or maybe it did happen and the Zionists who control the media didn't tell us about it. Damn.)

Let me see if I understand this:

A right-wing group that spends money to affect the outcome of an election is a special-interest group that must be regulated for the good of the country. A left-wing group that spends money to affect the outcome of an election is a professional organization that is only looking out for the good of the country.

If this sounds fatuous to you, get a load of this:

Washington is an "agency shop" state: it is not mandatory to belong to the union to hold a position represented by the union, but nonmembers must pay an agency fee in lieu of dues. The laws provide that money from agency fees may not be used for political purposes without the specific permission of the nonmembers whose fees are being spent. The National Education Association in Washington, pushing initiatives to reduce class size and increase teacher salaries, apparently blew off those restrictions. The state's Public Disclosure Commission evaluated the situation and advised the Attorney General to take action against the NEA, an action endorsed by The Seattle Times.

The Times editorial drew a response from Charles Haase, president of the Washington Education Association, the state's NEA affiliate, who took up five paragraphs to attack the Public Disclosure Commission, complaining that the PDC is being used as a tool for "eliminating the participation of organized labor in the political process."

None of this would have happened, in other words, if those baddies on the PDC hadn't insisted that the agency-shop law means what it says it means. Our man at Horologium finds the NEA's position hypocritical:

And apparently it hasn't occurred to the union that the reason it has agency-shop money in lieu of dues in the first place might be because there are teachers unwilling to support the union's political agenda.

He was, Mother Jones once said, "the first Sixties radical elected to the U.S. Senate."

Maybe he was. Certainly he was unabashedly liberal, in an era where the very word is spoken as a pejorative.

But Paul Wellstone, in two terms in the Senate, was determined to make a difference, and to the extent that one man among a hundred can make a difference, I believe he did.

He will be missed, on both sides of the aisle.

A pertinent quote:

Or how about this one:

And to wrap it up, this one:

All these things were said by Gore Vidal in the June 1969 Playboy Interview; I mention them here in case anyone is actually surprised by his The Enemy Within screed.

And, since it's from Lileks, it's also the best word.

A couple of years ago, I said some unkind (and, in retrospect, quite justifiable) things about the Clinton administration's War on Guns, and somewhere therein I came up with this:

Whether it made sense or not, it seemed to appeal to Michael Moore, who tossed off this snarky comment at his own Web site (let him get his own damn linkage):

If one follows this pattern, is there a next step? Rachel Lucas shows where this train of thought might stop next:

It's certainly a logical progression. And look at all that jet fuel — why, it's flammable! How could they put something like that aboard a plane full of people?

Identifying the correct villain is apparently too much for some people. I expect, in the near future, someone will file suit against Satan for...oops, too late.

Someone once cornered Will Rogers and demanded to know his political affiliation. "I'm not a member of any organized political party," he said. "I am a Democrat."

And I have a feeling he'd be less than thrilled with what's happened to the party since then. For all its vaunted populism, today's Democratic Party values individual voters the way Scrooge McDuck values individual dollars: they're useful only to the extent that they make the numbers look impressive. Groups wield the power, the party believes, and they want to be the power behind the groups.

Unfortunately, the United States of America isn't constituted as a collection of groups. Apart from "We The People," the Constitution recognizes scarcely any groups at all. This hasn't stopped the Democrats from trying to organize existing groups, or when that fails, creating new groups, with the intent of giving them special status under the law in exchange for blocs of votes. Sometimes I think that if I were, oh, a transgendered African-American who writes antiwar tracts for The Nation and runs an abortion clinic on the side, I could probably get DNC chair Terry McAuliffe to drive me to work every day.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, people seem less likely to identify themselves first as group members these days, and that's one of the reasons why they're going to lose, and lose big, in the 2002 elections. Groupthink is, well, oldthink; today's voter wants to know, first and foremost, "What's in it for me?" And who can blame her? The Democrats don't think we're capable of managing our own retirement funds, or of defending ourselves against marauding thugs, or of making any sort of decisions below the federal level. The Democrats worry that if in one state, a sixteen-year-old girl can't have her uterus vacuumed out as easily as she can have an ankle bracelet fitted, the streets will be flooded with coat hangers in all states. And an awful lot of Democrats apparently believe that anything, anything at all, is better than taking a shot at someone who is sworn to kill us.

Odds are, the Democratic organization, such as it is, will spend December licking its wounds and complaining about the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Maybe, just maybe, they'll devote some small fraction of that time trying to figure out just how it is that they veered to the left at the same time the rest of the country started listening to the right. Or they won't, and by 2004 they may be every bit as dead as Will Rogers. And without the amusing anecdotes, either.

It should have been obvious that something was going to be terribly wrong with the funeral for Senator Wellstone when Dick Cheney — the Vice-President of the United States, fercrissake! — was disinvited. And when it was all over, Stephen Green said exactly what needed to be said:

If there is any justice in this world, the GOP will pick up this seat in the Senate. And if there is any kindness, Norm Coleman will smile and politely refuse to talk about this incident ever again.

The Turkish Republic these days is caught between Iraq and two hard places: the Caucasus and the Balkans. This isn't exactly news, but Sunday the Turks go to the polls, and the pundits are expecting the big winners to be the AKP, the Justice and Development Party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been positioning himself as moderately conservative and not at all the militant Islamist that the AKP usually produces. Some observers have their doubts.

And Turkey, at some point, would like to become part of the European Union, and the United States would like to help, but not everyone in the EU is anxious to extend membership to a Muslim nation, even though Turkey has been somewhat secularized for decades. But Ataturk is long gone, and there are real fears that an AKP victory will push Turkey a couple of notches closer to the sort of Islamic fundamentalism that prevails in other powder kegs.

I have a certain fondness for Turkey. I was stationed at a NATO base for about a year in the Seventies, and one of the things I found most interesting about the place was its seeming ability to straddle West and East, to make the rigid framework of Islam flourish in a relatively free-wheeling Western-oriented society. Obviously I wasn't in a position to dig deep enough to see the tensions running through the Republic — I was just one of the troops and was expected to shut up about such things — but I always wondered just how long this tenuous equilibrium could last. And I still wonder today.

(Muchas gracias: Jesus Gil.)

The irrepressible James Lileks (well, I certainly haven't repressed him, and I wouldn't encourage anyone to try) discloses Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Walter F. Mondale*.

*but the Democratic Party prefers you didn't ask

Today Susanna Cornett unveils another of her considerable talents: the ability to take the ossified prose of the Arab News and turn it into actual, comprehensible English. How valid is her translation? The editors most certainly would not be pleased with the results, testimonial enough to its accuracy.

Eric McErlain lived near Bloomington's old Metropolitan Stadium for six months, which you'd think (if you were a New Yorker of a certain political bent, anyway) would be enough to qualify him to be a Senator himself. But Mr. McErlain has no such lofty ambitions. Instead, he's offering to Governor Ventura a list of Minnesotans who might serve as the state's junior Senator while the Mondale/Coleman race is being fought over in the courts. Who's on the list?

• Prince Rogers Nelson
  
• Ex-Replacements front man, Paul Westerberg
  
• A rotating troika consisting of the founding members of Husker Du
  
• Kent Hrbek (Kirby Puckett being compromised at the moment)
  
• Jerry Lundegaard (as played by William H. Macy in Fargo)
  
• John Madden
  
• Winona Ryder
  
• Kevin Sorbo (of Hercules TV fame)
  
• Bob Dylan
  

You know, this could work.

Prime Minister Bulent Eçevit, seventy-seven years old and in failing health, probably never thought he'd lose this badly. But his party got fewer than 10 percent of the votes in the Turkish election, meaning they will get no seats in Parliament. Meanwhile, as projected here earlier, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) under Recep Tayyip Erdogan swept to 34.2 percent of the vote, enough under Turkish law to form a government without having to seek a coalition partner.

Erdogan himself cannot become Prime Minister — in 1998, he was convicted of inciting religious hatred and was barred from seeking office for five years — which has prompted worries that the next occupant of the post will be a mere figurehead. Quickly, though, Erdogan moved to answer some of the more obvious questions which arose from the AKP victory: no, Turkey will not abandon its uniquely-secular position in the Muslim world, and no, Turkey is not backing away from its hopes of becoming part of the European Union.

The Turkish military, Cato the Youngest notes, "has historically been willing to throw out any government that threatened the secular order established by Ataturk." And indeed, the AKP victory is generally attributed more to dislike of the Eçevit regime than to any deep-seated desire among the Turkish electorate to follow the lead of the Islamic fundamentalists on Turkey's flanks.

It will be an interesting time, to say the least.

Keith Olbermann asserts:

I must have missed Warren G. Harding's Nobel Prize presentation somewhere along the way, but Olbermann insists that it's all perfectly obvious. Of course, Olbermann also thinks voting should be mandatory, a premise that is at the very least arguable.

If today's politicians seem to lack a philosophical bent, it's because so many of them think the basic issues are settled, and they're content to take their turns at the reins of the Nanny State. And as I get older and more contrarian, I become increasingly vexed with a political establishment which can argue with a straight face that one of the most important issues facing America today is how the government will help me buy drugs.

Tom Brokaw, I have to assume, was having a bad night. Fairly early on, Rush Limbaugh, invited to NBC's talking-heads party, explained that 2002 was only the beginning, and pointed out that when the Democrats were scratching around for Senatorial candidates in New Jersey and Minnesota, there were no up-and-coming youngsters, no potential Presidential candidates down the road: the best the party could do was to trot out elderly museum pieces. Faced with this less-than-startling revelation, Brokaw managed to give off an expression somewhere between disturbed and dyspeptic.

Meanwhile, life goes on for the rest of us, with the possible exception of Terry McAuliffe, who likely will be drubbed out of the Democrats' front office. I rather think he won't be missed.

Apparently Los Angeles isn't going to be split down Mulholland after all. While a slight majority of residents of the San Fernando Valley voted to secede and form their own city, the measure was rejected by the rest of L.A. by a two-to-one margin. Pollsters speculate that the western portion of the Valley, more affluent, was far more willing to say goodbye to L.A. than the east. Still, things will be different in the City of Angels, if only because the Valley has made it quite clear that business as usual is not acceptable on the far side of the Santa Monica Mountains. Will Los Angeles grant more autonomy to the Valley, or to Hollywood, which also lost a secession vote? The structure of city government, I think, is likely to change substantially over the next few years.

What's the relevance to Oklahoma? Consider its capital. Oklahoma City has 510,000 people spread over 604 square miles. The North Canadian River runs south of downtown, effectively dividing the city in two, and each half scorns the other. (In the early days of the 20th century, these were, in fact, two separate cities.) City services have yet to be extended to areas annexed decades ago. "It can't happen here," we are assured. I'm not so sure.

The Fed has cut interest rates yet again, by half a point, and the market has responded with yawns. Mark Byron points out that with the federal funds rate down to 1.25 percent, there isn't a whole lot of maneuvering room left for the Fed. The real shot in the arm, says Dr Byron, will come with the neutralization of Iraq, which will take some of the uncertainty out of both oil prices and global trade. Bottom line?

The balance of power in the Senate is settled, but there's one seat still in doubt: in Louisiana, where Democrat Mary Landrieu led the pack but failed to win a majority. Under the Tabasco State's laws, this means a runoff, in which Landrieu will face Republican front-runner Susan Terrell. And it means that Landrieu also faces a dilemma; she took so much trouble to separate herself from the goofiness of the national Democratic organization that, from a distance, she was almost indistinguishable from a Republican. The electorate, she perhaps fears, will reason that the choice is between an ersatz Republican and a real one, and will vote accordingly.

What to do? John Rosenberg suggests Landrieu ought to take a three-pronged approach: make Bush-like utterances on the war, come off as a traditional quasi-populist Democrat on most domestic issues, and adopt the following possibly-controversial position:

I have some doubts about this — by most accounts, black voters are nearly as conservative as white voters, and far more conservative than black leaders — but I'd like to see her try that myself, just to see what difference, if any, it makes in the African-American vote. I have had for some time a gut feeling that the only remaining proponents of racial preferences are the people who are making a living as advocates for such; the rest of us, regardless of color, are likely sick of the whole concept and wish it would go away already.

What happened to the Democratic Party on Tuesday? A thirty-year member (that would be, um, me) points a finger (no credit for guessing which one) in today's edition of The Vent.

Steven Den Beste reminds us that with the Republicans controlling the Senate, Fritz Hollings (D-Disney), ousted as Chair of the Commerce Committee, is no longer in a position to give much of a push to his miserable "Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act", a bill with five co-sponsors, four of them Democrats. The Captain had previously derided this measure as the "MPAA/RIAA Wet-Dream Act of 2002", and he was being generous.

Is the CBDTPA well and truly dead? Not necessarily, but Den Beste looks at it this way:

And, lest we forget, Hollywood's tendency to pour money into Democratic campaign coffers.

You wanna know why all the bloggers hated the Democrats, Bunkie? It's because all the bloggers have computers.

The Baseball Crank explained it all over at Dr. Weevil's place:

That's me: the unexcited (and unexciting) moderate.

Is that Nancy Pelosi I hear shrieking down the corridor?

John Chuckman's latest for Yellow Times, titled A toxin in the blood, contains the expected high level of blither, but what's most frustrating about it is — well, read this for yourself:

Mr Chuckman, having fled the premises during a previous war, probably won't buy "Those sons of bitches are trying to kill us, you nitwit" as a "sound reason," despite the fact that the aforementioned SOBs took out a couple of thousand of us last year. (It was in all the papers, so I'm sure he heard about it.)

"Corruption"? We had that before. "Poor appointments"? We had those before, too. A "huge and wasteful increase in military spending"? Huge, yes; but if we are now able to thumb our noses at the rest of the world's sensibilities, it seems to me that we got our money's worth.

What would Mr Chuckman consider a "worthy humanitarian initiative"? Finding homes for Palestinian militants before they wrap themselves in Semtex and mail themselves to Israelis for Chanukah? Sending food to Zimbabwe so Robert Mugabe can complain about its potential genetic background?

And enough of Bush's nonexistent desire to emulate Hitler already. So far as I know, the only time W. has ever said anything even slightly positive about anyone named Adolph was that one day at the ranch when they were trying out a new meat tenderizer at the grill.

(Muchas gracias: Silflay Hraka.)

Over at Rottweiler HQ, Exhibit A in the Free Speech Museum, Flag-Burners' Annex:

Still, if you're thinking about burning a US flag in front of Misha, I suggest you think again. He quite properly supports your right to do so, but he also quite properly supports his right to respond. And you will probably not like his response.

A service for journalists, wannabe journalists, J-school dropouts, and the occasional blogger: Vicky at Liquid Courage, noting that no Federal holiday is complete without a speech by the President, is offering a handy, only-minor-assembly-required kit to produce your opening line. And what's more, it's easily updatable, making it usable through the terms of the next ten or twelve Presidents.

Michael McConnell is Presidential Professor of Law at the University of Utah. His thinking is conservative, his reputation is sterling; even his opponents joined in a letter supporting his nomination to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, as mentioned in this very space a couple of months ago.

Well, evidently not all his opponents; a group called Alliance for Justice has found a fair number of leftish jurists to sign their names to a letter opposing McConnell's nomination. [Link to Adobe Acrobat file.]

John Rosenberg has this to say:

It's of a piece, I think, with some of the other life-as-we-know-it-is-over screeds that have been multiplying in the wake of Republican electoral successes. Sometimes I think they really want the sort of comic-book pseudo-fascism they imagine, just so they can taunt the rest of us: "We told you so!"

Al Gore just can't get it through his head that he lost.

But being the inventive type that he is — after all, he strung up with his bare hands that very first T1 line between MIT and the Pentagon back in '69 — it was inevitable that Gore would resurface with a new, more efficient way to count votes.

And it was also inevitable that the plans for the system would be leaked, and Marc Lundberg, proprietor of Quit That, has the details. I have to admit, it's disarming in its simplicity.

Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, working for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law, have an ongoing project to document Internet filtering in various forms and fashions. One of the subprojects this fall is the determination of sites blocked by the government of the People's Republic of China. Described as "an experiment in open research," Zittrain and Edelman have worked up a system whereby any URL can be entered and then tested in real-time (within two minutes) to see if it is accessible to Chinese Internet users.

Needless to say, I had to try this out for myself, and by gum, according to this testing regime, this site is blocked. Presumably no one from the Chinese mainland is authorized to view any of my stuff. This explains one phenomenon: an earlier version of the Music Room here was once duplicated, from first byte to last, and pasted onto some Chinese Web site. They even copied my counter code, which is how I found out about it in the first place. The hits (never more than one or two a day, but what the hell) dried up this summer, and perhaps now I know why.

(Muchas gracias: John Little, The Blogs of War. He's blocked too.)

As noted previously in this space, Justice and Development (AKP) party head Recep Tayyip Erdogan, barred from Parliament, will not be able to serve as Prime Minister despite winning more than enough votes in the Turkish general election. Erdogan has now submitted three names for consideration to Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, and Sezer has chosen Abdullah Gul, 52, once Minister of State in a 1997 coalition government formed by the now-outlawed Islamist Welfare Party. There is still speculation that Erdogan will be pulling Gul's strings.

Columnist and "liberal iconoclast" Harley Sorensen asks the following "rhetorical question with no response required":

Sorensen, as it happens, was using this opening as a wedge to take a potshot or three at the nascent Department of Homeland Security, but there is an answer to his question. Gregory Hlatky takes up the query:

He shoots, he scores.

Contrary to popular belief, reports Radley Balko, corporations funnel far more money to the left than to the right.

How can this be? Balko points to a couple of contributing factors:

Does money from the Ford Foundation count the same as money from Bill Ford's personal checking account? The Feds may disagree, but I figure it probably does. Balko continues:

The GOP hasn't asked me for anything, since I'm not a member, but I don't know anyone who's received a Republican fund-raising letter that boiled down to "If you don't give us money, you must be some kind of liberal."

Balko doesn't dig into the psychology of the matter, but I have to wonder if maybe some of the corporate types who write checks to groups which actively oppose their interests do so in the vain hope of buying, or at least renting, their silence: "Here's fifty grand. Please shut the hell up." I can't recall any instance in history when this actually worked, though I'm certainly amenable to an empirical experiment, price available on written request.

Cambodia is thought of as primarily a Buddhist nation, despite the best efforts of the communists to eradicate Buddhism from the country. There exists a small Muslim minority, known as the Chams, descended from what was once an Indo-Chinese empire that was destroyed by Vietnamese in the fifteenth century. The Chams' version of Islam is far removed from that of the bloodthirsty Wahhabi; Arabs, therefore, have taken it upon themselves to "purify" the beliefs of the Chams, and you can probably predict the results should they succeed.

Chrui Changvar has written up the details in Le Monde; Cinderella Bloggerfeller has translated the Le Monde article into English.

Rookwood Exchange, they call it, and when it's done, it will be a major commercial development along I-71 in suburban Cincinnati, valued at $125 million. And all they have to do is, um, get rid of the people who actually own the property. This might be a problem, since some of them don't want to leave.

Today, the Norwood City Council will consider whether to conduct an "urban renewal study," widely viewed as the first step towards seizing the homes under eminent domain. One problem: the neighborhood doesn't come close to meeting the city's definition of "blighted," which would seem to make the study superfluous — unless, of course, you're the developer and you'd like to force the issue.

The eminent Gregory Hlatky delivers some condemnation of his own:

In response, they will probably enact a feather tax and an import quota on tar.

As a footnote to my sub-Strykerian contribution to Joe Zarro's fifteen minutes of fame, I said something to the effect that "he presents a compelling case for reinstating the draft."

Now if you really want a compelling case for reinstating the draft, I suggest this rant by Kim du Toit. And this bit I want to emphasize:

No argument from me. About a third of our BCT company, back in 1972, had come in through the draft, and for about the first week they pissed and moaned about the horribleness of it all. By week 7 they were practically indistinguishable from the volunteers.

The small-l libertarian side of me applauds the all-volunteer army on a purely philosophical basis, and I have no plans to pester my Congressman to reactivate Selective Service, but I refuse to believe that somehow we are a Better Place because we don't currently have a draft.

I don't have all my DA Forms 3686 from those days, but apparently once I made the lofty grade of E-2 I was pulling down the princely sum of $320.70 a month. Then again, it wasn't like I had a whole lot of expenses, and in the thirty years intervening, I have rediscovered the lost art of complaining about trivial BS.

Louisville, Kentucky presently ranks sixty-sixth among the nation's cities. About five weeks from now, it will be sixteenth.

What's the deal? In a word: consolidation. In 2000, voters in Louisville and surrounding Jefferson County passed a measure which would merge the functions of city and county. On the fifth of January, the merger goes into effect.

This isn't the first time a city and a county have merged in the US; it isn't even the first time it's happened in Kentucky. (Lexington and Fayette County tied the knot back in the Seventies.) But it's an uncommon event, and in fact the Louisville/Jefferson merger had been proposed, and voted down, three times before.

The merger won't be as painful as it looks. Louisville and Jefferson County have shared some services — schools, transit, purchasing — for years. On the other hand, there are some divisive issues lurking. For one, the new Greater Louisville will have a population of just under 700,000, and with the inclusion of previously-unincorporated suburbs, that population will be distinctly whiter, which means there will likely be complaints that African-Americans are being disenfranchised, or at least having their political power diminished. And there are fears in the dozens of smaller municipalities in Jefferson County that the merger will eventually lead to their disappearance.

And what's the point of all this, anyway? It's the same old Louisville, isn't it? Well, yes and no. For most people in the combined city/county, life will likely go on much as it has. But there's a sensation that the newly-expanded Louisville will be able to "play in the big leagues", to come up for consideration when national businesses look to expand. The examples of Jacksonville, Florida and Indianapolis, fairly sleepy medium-sized metropolises before consolidation and now bustling big cities, indicate that there may be something to it after all. And it occurs to me that the city that might most benefit from it — St. Louis, Missouri — is probably the least likely to get it, since it's wholly separate from St. Louis County, and there is no indication that either city or county is even contemplating such a notion, or would want to.

I am reasonably certain that this sort of thing would never work in Oklahoma City (population 510,000). For one thing, the city already covers over 600 square miles; almost all the developed land (and most of the undeveloped land) in Oklahoma County has already been annexed, either by Oklahoma City or by another municipality. To further complicate matters, Oklahoma City extends into two other counties, Canadian and Cleveland, neither of which is likely to be receptive to any such ideas.

Kim du Toit finds one way to salvage the Department of Homeland Security:

Sounds logical to me.

The occasion of Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday has opened the door to a closet where a lot of our less-savory history has been stashed. Thurmond, you'll remember, ran for President in 1948 on the so-called "Dixiecrat" ticket, a campaign remembered fondly by, among others, Trent Lott. Not that Lott would actually have voted for Thurmond, inasmuch as he was seven years old at the time, but no matter.

As a useful reminder of just what the Dixiecrats stood for, beyond the vague generalities of "states' rights", Atrios has posted a shot of the 1948 sample ballot for Mississippi's breakaway Democrats, which, you should pardon the expression, calls a spade a spade.

And Thurmond's Dixiecrats gradually returned to the Democratic Party in the early Fifties; the Southern transition to Republican stronghold would not begin for another decade or so. (Thurmond joined the GOP in 1964.) The horrendous racism of the Dixiecrat days is mostly behind us — Strom Thurmond himself seems to have outgrown it — but I have to wonder just what's going through Trent Lott's head when he defends it.

So just what is the Republican Party supposed to do with Trent "Out to Lynch" Lott?

Christopher Johnson has come up with a solution:

It has a certain visceral appeal to it, and it retains the Southern connection so vital to the GOP these days. And if Miller won't budge? Mr. Johnson has a Plan B:

Oh, how I would love to hear the shrieks in Terry McAuliffe's office if that comes off.

Jesus Gil analyzes the apologies of Trent Lott and other sorry individuals, and his criteria are strict indeed. Better brush up on your Act of Contrition.

Actually, it's not so thin; it's about a foot and a half wide, and due to get wider. The city of Bethany, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City, stung by declining sales-tax revenues, has decided to remind its 21,000 residents just where they live by drawing lines across the pavement at the city limits. (Why blue? They match the street signs.)

Bethany's tax base has been eroding for some time, since there is little or no space for new industry or greatly-expanded retail facilities; it's mostly a sleepy college town, anchored by the somnolent Southern Nazarene University. And matters are not helped by the fact that Bethany is completely surrounded, by Oklahoma City on three sides and on the fourth by Warr Acres, which is happy to wave its 6.5 percent combined sales-tax rate in Bethany's face. (It's 8 percent in Bethany, and 8.375 in Oklahoma City.)

Not that Bethany is doomed. With airline travel stagnating, more people are hitting the road, and one of the roads they like to hit is historic Route 66, two miles of which pass through the center of Bethany. The main thing Bethany has to do is make sure those two miles look less squalid than the segment to the immediate east, which runs through Warr Acres. Somehow this doesn't strike me as particularly difficult.

John Rosenberg is taking a proactive approach to the Trent Lott question, by writing his two Senators:

I don't think I'll have to go to this much trouble with my two Senators, since one of them (Ditzy Don Nickles) is probably even now angling for Lott's position.

Cinderella Bloggerfeller, with the Scornograph cranked up to 11 — well, it was a Guardian piece that provoked him — on the phenomenon of history repeating itself, even when it doesn't:

As a practical matter, Iraq is about as mystical as Minot, North Dakota, but that doesn't seem to discourage radical dudes like Jeff Spicoli from seeking great enlightenment therein.

Yeah, Bueller, I mean you too. For the 85th anniversary of Forbes (What is an appropriate gift for 85 years, anyway? Batteries?), Ben Stein has put together the top 12 ways to ruin American enterprise, and while it's no doubt all over blogdom this morning, I want to make darn sure that the two or three of you who come by here daily actually read it.

Assume it will be on the test.

The first hour of today's Diane Rehm Show was spent asking "What will happen to Trent Lott?"

Of course, instead of listening for 54 minutes, I could have simply read The Blog from the Core, which fills in the story of Lott's — sorry, Mfume's — ongoing penance and ultimate redemption.

George W. Bush's notion of an Axis of Evil didn't sit well with some folks, and they had their reasons, but one reason they hardly ever mentioned was the most obvious one: "Well, it's not really, y'know, an axis, is it?"

Perhaps not in the WWII-era sense of an alliance, no; whatever Iran and Iraq may share, North Korea probably doesn't have it. But in the mathematical sense? Can you actually place these nations on a straight line that divides a geometric figure?

Yes, you can.

Like any number of pundits, George Monbiot predicted that US involvement in Afghanistan would result in Vietnam: The Sequel. Unlike any number of pundits, Monbiot has at least partially recanted:

Said recantation, reports Tim Blair, was sent in a letter to the editor of the Spectator, though for some reason it does not appear in the letters column on the Spectator's Web site.

Get outta here, ya knucklehead.

And take a look at this while you're out.

The folks at MoveOn.org, having come to the end of their original mission — fighting the impeachment of Bill Clinton — have diversified into other areas of interest to the American left, and while it's too early to say whether they'll be any more successful this time out, this particular Flash animation they've worked up is pretty darn clever, if I say so myself. Liberals will no doubt embrace its message; conservatives, maybe, can appreciate the craftsmanship.

(Thanks, Nova. Where do you find this stuff?)

This week in The Vent: color-blindness as a destination, and some problems encountered along the journey.

One of the points I attempted to make, largely by borrowing the words of other bloggers, is that while the Democrats are generally the ones playing the race card, the Republicans have played less and accomplished more.

Rosemary Esmay, to illustrate this point, has put up a time line, and Dean Esmay has chimed in with the following comment:

Obviously we're not out of the woods yet — "You can spend eternity listing all the places where things could have and should have been done better," says Dean — but if the GOP can continue to press for actual equality of opportunity, as opposed to the bizarre handicapping schemes called for in recent Democratic dogma, we'll get there, and we'll get there in one piece. Remember that number: one. Last time I looked at the Constitution, I didn't see any references to the Multicultural States of America.

Christmas itself is no big deal in Muslim countries, except where it's actively prosecuted, but Muslim students in the United States get the same holiday break period as everyone else, and some of them are uneasy about flying home: what if, because of increased attention from the Department of Making American Borders As Efficient As Airport Security, or whatever the hell it's called, they can't get back into the States?

The simple answer is "Screw 'em", usually accompanied by a bitter reference to the 9/11 hijackers, a number of whom had held student visas. And indeed, it's probably only prudent to be keeping a closer watch on foreign students, inasmuch as few of them are likely to be wearing "Future Terrorist" sweatshirts as they pass through Customs. At the very least, it's a hint that ridding the world of the stench of Islamofascist terror should be done as quickly as possible, so that legitimate students from Arab lands can get back to the business of learning things that will help transform their societies and themselves.

Over at Tightly Wound, the legendary Big Arm Woman explains what's wrong with the Democratic Party:

Lots of those in Oklahoma; they're not particularly "liberal", at least by current definitions, but this sums up their attitude toward the GOP fairly well.

Some would suggest that their head position is, um, somewhere else.

But B.A.W.'s dad has it spot on: there is almost constant fear at the DNC of rubbing a constituent group the wrong way. It's like having to deal with the People's Front of Judea.

They'll learn — once they lose a few more elections.

Listeners to Today on the BBC's Radio 4 have nominated five persons "most deserving of honourary status as a British citizen," and one of the five is Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein.

Are the British thumbing their nose at the States? Not necessarily. The popup window for nominee profiles suggests the reason for selecting Saddam: "He will cause less problems over here where we can keep an eye on him."

Voting continues through New Year's Eve. I shudder to imagine what Stephen Chapman thinks of this.

Jesse Taylor, after taking nominations from the field, has issued his list of Twenty Most Annoying Conservatives of 2002, presumably as a response to John Hawkins' list of Annoying Liberals.

Mr Taylor's list includes some people who annoy me a great deal (like Cal Thomas, #20), some people who don't annoy me all that much (like George W. Bush, #7), and at least one person who doesn't annoy me at all (Charles Johnson, #17). And really, if we're gonna have a tie between Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter, the least they can do is put Hannity in a dress — and, in the name of Christian charity, blindfold Alan Colmes when they do.

North Korea's born-again Stalinists have been making trouble lately, and the Bush administration hasn't come up with much beyond "You break your end of the nuclear agreement and you expect us to pay you for it?" A reasonable response — blackmail is not something to be encouraged, after all — but probably not enough to banish Kim Jong Il to the back burner.

Even the Democratic Leadership Council thinks this is a reasonable response, but they balk at the notion that the US can go it alone:

I have some qualms about this. Were I to recommend free-enterprise role models, I think China would be fairly low on the list; while there are plenty of proper money-grubbing capitalist dogs making actual money, Beijing still seems be obsessed with the glory days of being the Protector of Albania and other counterproductive Maoist memories. Still, if anyone can get Kim's attention, it's the Chinese. Which makes me wonder: why drag Japan and Russia into this?

The air abounds in snickers, and no, not the candy bar; I'm talking about Al Sharpton's Presidental ambitions, and the reactions thereto. To my knowledge, the first full-fledged blog endorsement of the Sharpton candidacy came from Kevin McGehee's blogoSFERICS. And it's not because Mr McGehee desires to see him elected, particularly:

Actually, I think you could open the debate with (or, more interestingly, force the debate upon) any of the current Democratic field; apart from melanin levels and not having spent a lifetime on the public payroll, what's the difference between Sharpton and the competition?

Of course, I don't expect many to follow Mr McGehee's lead. A more typical response is this one from Acidman:

And that was one of the nicer things he said.

"My passions lie here in the Senate." And with that observation, Tom Daschle opts out of the 2004 Presidential race.

Jeebus. If the herd thins any faster, the Democrats may wind up having to drag Al Gore, kicking and screaming, back into the fray — and oh, the fireworks you'll see.

Kevin McGehee waxes so lyrical today about former Representative J. C. Watts (R-OK) that shortages of lyric wax are breaking out all across the nation.

Having watched Watts ascend (and occasionally slide sideways) for these many years, I can't say I really miss the guy, but then I figure most Oklahoma politicians are a few years past their sell-by dates anyway. Watts, at least, went out on top. Had he run for another term, he'd have won, no matter how they redrew the district lines, and forget about that "safe minority district" crapola; the Fourth District that elected (and re-elected) Watts was two-thirds white. You can point out that, well, J. C. was a football hero, and therefore, if not on par with Jesus Christ, certainly on the level of John the (Southern) Baptist, but if pigskin prowess were that overwhelming a criterion, Steve "This is BS" Largent would be Governor today.

Kevin McGehee speculates further that Don Nickles, having given up his shot at being Majority Leader, might step aside to make room for Watts in the Senate. This talk was a lot more common inside the D.C. Beltway than it ever was along I-35, I assure you, and it's diminishing further now that Oklahoma has a Democrat in the Governor's mansion. But I have no doubt that if Julius Caesar Watts really wanted another term in Congress — in either house — he'd have no trouble getting it.

"I don't get it," says your friendly neighborhood doofus. "Iraq may or may not have nukes, and they're about to get incinerated. North Korea definitely has nukes, and we're tiptoeing around them."

Your point being?

"Well, if we're not going to fight Pyongyang, why are we going to fight Baghdad? Did they suddenly find oil in North Korea?"

Ah, yes, the oil thing again. Well, actually, no, they haven't found oil in North Korea; if they had, there might be an outside chance of averting mass starvation north of the 38th — assuming the government didn't suck up all the revenues for itself, which, Stalinist bunch that they are, they most likely would.

But why aren't we drawing the same line with North Korea that we are with Iraq? It all boils down to Who's In Your Neighborhood. Iraq is surrounded by a ragtag collection of emirates and such which could be Saddam's for the taking, should he so desire. (In the case of Kuwait, circa 1991, he did so desire, and there's no reason to think he's mellowed.) North Korea, should it try to extend its influence beyond its borders, will run smack dab into South Korea and Japan, which are backed by the US, and China, which isn't, but which also isn't likely to take crap from Koreans.

The Timekeeper has more thoughts on this at Horologium, including excerpts from a Newsday op-ed by Michael Mandelbaum of the CFR that makes this and other points.

Inexpensive, yet irrepressible. What more could you want?

(Muchas gracias: Rachel Lucas.)

Sometimes the simplest questions stir the greatest passions.

"Which is worse?" asks Joshua Claybourn. "Communism or terrorism?"

The comments are instructive. (My own contribution, at #3: "You can have terrorism without communism, but the historical record suggests that you can't have communism without terrorism.") And another question comes to mind: does the ongoing war on terrorism constitute Cold War II?

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) is persuaded that we ought to find $7 billion in the budget to pay for outfitting commercial jets with anti-missile systems. "We can't stop everything bad from happening," says Boxer, "but we can take prudent measures."

This, of course, runs counter to standard leftist dogma, which states that you can stop everything bad from happening, if your government is big enough and sufficiently staffed with people with the Correct Mindset.

Taken all by itself, this might look like a sign of sanity in the Senator. But one question remains unanswered: do missiles pose a threat to commercial jets? Paul Musgrave at Hoosier Review isn't so sure:

And why would Boxer be proposing such a thing, anyway? The only thing I can figure is that she's scared of being shot out of the sky, and she's willing to make the airline industry spend a million bucks per plane for some form of reassurance. In this case, she would be better served — and less expensively, to be sure — by driving. You can get a whole lot of SUVs for that kind of money.

Kevin Holtsberry is disturbed by what he saw on Dr. King's commemorative day:

Wrathful souls, those race mongers.

But he's right, of course: forty years after "I Have a Dream", the dream has been defiled by a pack of opportunists, seeking privilege where Dr. King sought only equality, while the rest of us, black and white alike, are busy trying to get some work done.

From the Department of "Geez, I wish I'd said that":

Who did say it? Aurora Leigh at Memento Mori.

By now everyone has seen that noxious little bumper sticker that spells "Islam" with a swastika. It's noxious, not so much because it suggests that there is some similarity between Islam and Hitler's National Socialism — you can get the same suggestions seven days a week in Arab News — but because damn near everything these days is compared to the Third Reich; the next step in political benchmarking, no doubt, is to set up a scale and rate each and every incident from 35 to 98 Reichspoints.

And what's wrong with that, you ask? Jennie Taliaferro nails it down:

And in fifty years World War II will be remembered as some vague border skirmish, and Kristallnacht as some minor incident therein.

I'd just as soon not be party to the wholesale rewriting of history for the sake of a few ephemeral political points.

If there's one twentieth-century historical figure whose name is bandied about with a frequency approaching Hitler's, it's Joseph McCarthy. It's been more than fifty years since the Wisconsin senator first stood in a room and announced the existence of a list; and ever since then, it seems like everyone who's ever seen himself as being singled out for verbal abuse, however trivial, has shuffled the Deck of Delusion and played the McCarthyism card.

This might be a useful metaphor had Joe McCarthy been a silly-but-cute character like Ko-Ko from The Mikado, who had a little list of his own. He wasn't. McCarthy meant business. And while there actually were, as he had charged, some real-life Communists and fellow travelers uncomfortably close to the seats of power, McCarthy was ultimately censured by the Senate for his wholesale destruction of reputations.

This weekend on Usenet, some person with an exaggerated sense of his own importance (no need to identify him here; if you need to, you can Google the thread later), slapped down in a discussion, played the McCarthyism card and further likened himself to one of the Hollywood Ten. This, of course, was a serious anachronism — the House Un-American Activities Committee first took steps against the Ten in 1947, and McCarthy didn't open his mouth until 1950 — but the complainant apparently presumed that the rest of the world, or at least the rest of the newsgroup, would pick up on the historical references and smile.

He was wrong. Enter Al Moore, whose father was on the receiving end of a McCarthy-inspired witch hunt. And Moore was in no mood to listen to this guy's whining:

And that goes for the rest of you poor souls who think that because no one is buying your argument, it's because you're being suppressed. Actually, it's more likely because you're being idiotic.

Are you, like Sherlock Holmes, suspicious when the dog does not bark? Diane L. at Everything Must Go seems to be:

Assuming that no one in the Greater Islamic Co-Terrorism Sphere is going to send us condolences, or even set aside a moment of silence, there's something vaguely offputting about this seeming lack of response. And its implications are clear enough:

Could be. Are their lips moving?

David "Clubbeaux" Sims (that just looks so cool) isn't too impressed with Greece these days:

So they're, um, obstreperous. Do they stand behind us when we need them?

Gad. What a bunch of Cretans.

Charleston, South Carolina, 333 years old and still a charmer, has a memory nearly as long as its history, and downtown, parallel-parked Volvos aside, is not all that different from the way it was when Rhett Butler supposedly wandered around its streets. King Street is the main north-south street, and it was a wild mix of modern-day commerce and antebellum gentility when I lived in the Holy City in the 60s; it still is today.

In 2000, reconstruction began on the William Aiken House at 456 King Street, about a third of a mile north of Marion Square, a world away from the presumed haughtiness of the SOB (South Of Broad) district — but only a few steps from the present-day Charleston Visitor Center. The new owners have turned it into a small-scale (about 20,000 square feet) convention center, a place for small gatherings with a taste of history.

This afternoon, Senator John Edwards (D-NC) is at the Aiken House, doing some of the obligatory legwork for his Presidential campaign. None of this matters, except that Edwards is supposed to be paying lip service to the NAACP's South Carolina boycott, and yes, it is true, William Aiken actually once owned slaves. Rather a lot of them, in fact. If you wanted to find a place in Charleston that had no discernible ties to anything that even remotely resembled the old Confederacy, you'd have to have your meetings at the Burger King on Dorchester Road near I-526. The NAACP Web site hasn't put up a complaint yet; I'm hoping this means that they're not going to pitch a fit about the Edwards appearance, but it could be simply that their Webmaster has the weekend off.

(Via Drudge, aided and abetted by C. Dodd Harris IV.)

Update, 6:15 pm: Christopher Johnson reports that the fix is in:

Let's see what happens if a Republican tries to hold a pep rally at the Aiken House any time in the next few hundred years.

Yeah, I know, but this is funny.

"...if you see no contradiction between your Socialist Party card and your new BMW."

John at Inside Europe: Iberian Notes has literally dozens of these.

(Muchas gracias: Cinderella Bloggerfeller, who, as a European himself, will not be able to vote for Dodd for President.)

(Please note that I am not actually from New Jersey; nobody there calls it "Joisey".)

Last night, Glenn Reynolds posted an item about the "American street" and its willingness to support a boycott against recalcitrant ex-allies like France and Germany. I read that, shook my head, and decided that it would never happen; our band of happy consumers is simply too apolitical to worry about such things.

Later, it's another session in my usual chat haunt, and one of our regulars is expounding upon what appears to be a sudden shift in tastes. "I can no longer buy from the French," she explains. "They refuse to support us."

I made some jest about giving up French fries, but there it was. Your basic (Jewish, but whatever) soccer mom archetype, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat but utterly disconnected from politics except right around election time, is telling the French to blow it out l'aperture.

"I suspect a lot of people are starting to think this way," Reynolds had said. I suspect he's right.

Susanna Cornett responds to the heightened level of alert:

Good advice. Under circumstances like this, the best thing you can do is to prepare yourself and make sure those around you follow your lead. Fretting over every piece of news that comes down the wire will eventually drive you mad. Unfortunately, purveyors of news, with few exceptions, want to make sure you get that opportunity to fret.

Something is dreadfully wrong in Cincinnati, and this is the opening of a SpicedSass report:

Read the rest of it. I figure it's just a matter of time before Al Sharpton saunters in and tries to capitalize on the, um, incident; it wouldn't be the first time.

Can this, will this, make you think?
Will you, won't you, click this link?

("If the permalinks are fried,
Scroll to the 14th!" he cried.)

On Thursday, Mohammed Allawi, who had been covering the UN for the Iraqi News Agency, got a letter from the Deputy United States Ambassador to the UN, which told him bluntly that he had 15 days to pack his bags, gather his family, and get out of Dodge. According to the Bush administration, Allawi had "engaged in activities considered to be harmful to the security of the United States and those activities constitute an abuse of privilege of residence in this country."

The Iraqi government's response was to announce the expulsion of four Fox News staffers, to be gone by Monday, although it appears now that only reporter Greg Palkot will be forced out. With the remainder of their team still apparently allowed on site, Fox hopes to persuade Baghdad to allow a replacement.

The question naturally arises: why Fox? Could it be that Baghdad considers Fox News a greater threat than any of the other American news agencies?

It occurred to me after the fact that various groups hither and yon might have objected to yesterday's exercise of the hunter/gatherer function. Of course, your standard Wahhabist nitwit objects to my very existence on general principle, and he (it's almost always a he) certainly wouldn't look fondly upon pork loin piled high. (At least, he's not allowed to.) Representatives of the Nanny State would also complain, but from a different point of view (hey, my cholesterol is fine), and your local Vegan (and how are things on Vega these days?) might offer yet another. And the Daughters of Arianna, or whatever they're calling themselves these days, might object to the fact that I drove across a town and a half to procure this stuff, using up an incredible amount of fuel in the process. (I figure seventy-five cents' worth at the outside, but I suspect they're loath to trust my math.)

Still, this is Presidents' Day, and I'd like to thank the forty-three fellows who have filled that slot, from George to, well, George, for helping to make it possible for me to ignore all of the preceding.

Did you ever see one of those "Free Mumia!" posters? Did you ever read the tiny little type at the very bottom?

Me either. But this is what it should say under "Free Mumia":

(Obviously neither Frank J. nor Scott Ott have anything to worry about.)

(Update, 11 pm: For the last hour, I've been deleting and reinstating this piece, on the semi-questionable premise that while I know I've heard this jape before, or some variation thereof, or its application to some other jailbird — um, Incarcero-American — I can't place it to save my life, and I don't want to grab up somebody else's credit if I can help it. So I decided, finally, to leave it up and hope that someone will read it and identify the source.)

A correction from Bleeding Brain:

Well, Clinton certainly rubbed me the wrong way, and I am reasonably certain that I am not alone in this, um, frictional state.

Excerpting Lileks is rather like fixating on Marilyn Monroe a square inch at a time, but some things simply demand to be repeated, and this is one of them:

'Nuff said.

Reason Magazine's weekly newsletter takes the FBI to task for its recent bobblings of the terrorism ball, and part of the problem, apparently, is that the Bureau is actually listening to persons in custody:

A recommendation that all such claimants be polygraphed doesn't strike me as particularly useful — the limitations of the polygraph are fairly well established by now — but what is needed, it appears, is not so much the ability to verify a terrorist's claims as the ability to see why those claims are being made:

Meanwhile, enjoy your Orange.

Procter & Gamble, perhaps hoping to win some Brownie points from African Americans, announced that it would side with the University of Michigan in its battle to retain race-based affirmative-action programs in the face of White House opposition.

That was too much for one resident of P&G's home town of Cincinnati, who dispatched the following to the company:

I don't think Mr Bush has exactly put his Presidency on the line with his position in the Michigan affair, and it's not likely that he will view it as a slap, but P&G is basically trying to buy its way out of an unpleasant situation — and they have no idea how bad this bargain is going to be.

CBS Television has announced that they won't be pulling the plug if someone on stage at the Grammy Awards, as expected, launches into some sort of antiwar speech.

Set the Wayback machine to 3 April 1978 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles for the 50th Academy Awards. Vanessa Redgrave has just been handed the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Julia. She thanked the people you'd expect her to thank, and then suddenly launched into this:

Producer (and Academy president) Howard W. Koch groaned. Protesters burned Redgrave in effigy outside the theatre. The last word, though, was had by Paddy Chayefsky, who would present the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay to the (as always) absent Woody Allen for Annie Hall. (Cowriter Marshall Brickman would accept the statue.) But first, Chayefsky said this:

The applause was deafening.

This Sunday, with CBS taking a hands-off approach, it seems almost certain there will be a rehash of Redgrave-ish rhetoric. The only question is whether there will also be someone as mad as hell who's not going to take this anymore.

Besides you or me, I mean.

Legal Bean Dennis Rogers seeks a return to pre-postmodernism.

Uh, say what?

Whence these fragments?

Gotcha. I think. Although I think it might be simpler — or at least more simplistic, which is not quite the same thing — than that: the Left posits that there are the oppressed, and there are the oppressors, and your personal membership depends upon whether you can be identified as a member of an Officially Oppressed Group. As a practical matter, this means almost anyone other than a white male of European descent. (Exceptions are made for political purposes; for instance, Condoleezza Rice, PhD, currently the National Security Advisor to the President, is grouped with the Oppressors despite being unwhite, unmale and unEuropean, because she doesn't accept the definitions imposed by the Left.)

Of course, in real life, what they seek is not equality: it is equivalence. If the Oppressors make, say, $40,000 a year per capita, then the government must impose a means of providing $40,000 a year per capita for the Oppressed.

No one with any knowledge of history denies that once there was a horrible creature named Jim Crow whose intentions were not at all egalitarian. There is, I think, a place for adjustments here and tweaking there, to compensate for those times when the laws themselves were biased. But the spirit of true equality demands that there be some limit on those adjustments. Should they become permanent, become part of the law, they revive Jim Crow; they merely tilt his beak toward a different set of targets.

I believe the Bean would agree on this point.

This one ought to be good for a sneer or two:

The only "startling" thing about this statement is that some people, including Ted Rall, actually think it is a fact. It's not. And whether you think the Kyoto protocols are a good thing or not — I don't — horsepuckey like this does not advance the cause of the Greens, unless that cause is defined as "increasing population density by making the population dense."

Then again, I don't need to rail against Rall. That's Michele's job.

Dean Esmay neatly disposes of those "No War For Oil" drones:

I need hardly point out that neither of these things has been done.

Even if you don't buy the Administration's insistence that Iraqi oil belongs to the Iraqi people, you still have to deal with the law of supply and demand: if we were to seize the oil fields on behalf of the US, the sudden increase in supply would send crude prices plummeting — hardly a desirable outcome for your stereotypical Texas petrobarons.

It's called, yes, "The United White Persons College Fund," and Texas Tech senior Matthew Coday wants to draw a lawsuit — or at the very least, draw attention. And he sounds like he means business:

And what about the obvious model, the United Negro College Fund?

John Rosenberg comments:

Well, we shall see how "serious" Coday is. Given the current flap over the University of Michigan's affirmative-action policy, Coday's announcement might end up sliding under the radar for a while, which would run counter to his apparent desire to jump-start a debate. Besides, a lawsuit is a terrible thing to waste.

(Originally from The Chronicle of Higher Education [requires subscription])

The reaction to the news that a Chicago venture-capitalist group will front the bucks for a liberal radio network has been mostly yawns, with occasional remarks along the lines of "So what's NPR, chopped liver?" Certainly nothing in recent radio history would suggest that this venture could possibly make enough money to stay out of the red, let alone raise Rush Limbaugh's blood pressure, but hey, it's diversity, right?

Mark W. Anderson, writing as The American Sentimentalist, has some thoughts on this from a present-day liberal point of view, and they go like this:

Some of these concerns make a certain amount of sense, and some of them bug me. The preservation of the "socio-economic make-up of urban neighborhoods", for one, strikes me as folly: if these neighborhoods were so wonderful, it seems to me that the property values would be sufficiently high that no one would be all that anxious to tear them down and start over in the name of gentrification. And the biggest improvement that could be made in the incarceration rate of African-Americans, I suggest, would be getting fewer of them to commit crimes in the first place.

Still, Anderson is right about the crux of the biscuit: things aren't hunky-dory for everyone, and if a bevy of AM-band leftists can actually contribute something to the debate, more power to them. They'll have to give up their Thou Shalt Not Offend Anyone posture, though; commercial talk radio is no place for mild-mannered Cory Flintoff types.

According to David Pearce, a state representative from Warrensburg, Missouri, the Show-Me State is not doing enough to limit the size of the state's deer herd, and he has introduced a bill (HB 386) to make the Department of Conservation liable for the first $250 of damage caused by deer/motor vehicle collisions.

Pearce himself has run into this situation; last year he hit a deer on Missouri 13 not far from home. Total damages came to $2400, of which Pearce's out-of-pocket expense was, um, $250. The Missouri Highway Patrol reported 5482 collisions with animals during 2001.

Conservation objects to the bill, saying that it would distract them from their primary function, to manage the herd; Pearce counters that if they'd managed the herd better, there'd be no need for the bill.

Tomorrow, HB 386 gets its first committee hearing.

TeeVee's Ben Boychuk disposes of this New Blacklist horsepuckey with due dispatch:

Boychuk titled this piece Joe McCarthy is Back, And This Time, He's Pissed. Trademark infringment, I'd bet.

Jeff Lawson is persuaded that it's time to get down to business:

Let me amplify: "War sucks."

This does not now, did not ever, equate to "War must be avoided at any cost."

And the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein will not magically result in Iraqi democracy. As Mark W. Anderson points out:

Still, if the blinding flash alone likely can't do the job, the lack of the blinding flash certainly won't — at least in this case.

I don't think of myself as being a particularly enthusiastic warmonger. On the other hand, I don't believe in procrastination either — though I probably should have posted this yesterday.

Fritz Schranck has come up with a plan for getting Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to talk, a plan which involves, among other things, essence of spirit duplicator, algebra, and Ben-Gay^®.

Of course, I would just as soon not know where Fritz picked up this particular area of expertise, but if his recommendations are half as mind-warping as they appear to be, the problem won't be getting our captive to talk — it will be getting him to shut up.

American assets owned by President Robert Mugabe and about seventy other officials of the government of Zimbabwe have been frozen by the Bush administration.

President Bush took the action, according to the official order, because of ongoing political violence and a breakdown in the rule of law, for which Mugabe must take responsibility. The freeze follows a similar order imposed by the European Union in February. For the crumbling Zimbabwean government, this could be the last straw.

What would you say to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man behind September 11th?

Jeff Jarvis has thought it over. (He's also vlogged it, for which you'll need broadband.)

Ever been to Farwell, Texas?

Neither have I. And I can't think of any particular reason to go there, unless I were driving to, say, Clovis, New Mexico, where Norman Petty and Buddy Holly created a unique rock-and-roll sound, in which case Farwell is the last town in Texas before crossing the border.

And that's actually an issue. According to the 1859 survey defining the border between Texas and New Mexico, the dividing line is supposed to be right on top of the 103rd meridian. The New Mexico/Oklahoma line is along the 103rd. But the Texas border, as drawn, was about three miles west of it, which makes for a weird-looking jog in the state map, and towns like Farwell, Texas are supposed to be in New Mexico.

At least, that's the argument being made in Santa Fe, where a bill has been introduced into the legislature to seek return to New Mexico of this narrow strip of land. Three miles doesn't sound like a lot, but we're talking Texas here, and the strip, which covers the western edges of ten Texas counties, includes 603,000 acres of land, more than 900 square miles. New Mexico's draft constitution in 1910 claimed the border should be on the 103rd meridian as intended; a Congressional investigation was convened, to which New Mexico, not yet a state, was not invited, and Congress opted to leave the border in place. Apparently dark hints from Austin suggested that if New Mexico really wanted to become a state, they would shut up about the border; they did, and they did.

That was 1912. Ninety-one years later, why pursue this? A clue might be found in the wording of the bill:

I suspect the Texans are chuckling, but if I know Texans like I think I do, they won't take this lying down. Especially in Farwell.

Justice and Development (AK) Party leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, barred from running for office last fall, easily won a seat in the Turkish Parliament in Sunday's elections, which assures him the position of Prime Minister and puts the question of support for the US war on Iraq back on the table. One newspaper reports that Erdogan plans to dismiss four Cabinet members opposed to the US plan to attack Iraq from across the Turkish border.

Wednesday, Prime Minister Abdullah Gul is expected to resign in favor of Erdogan. While polls indicate Turks generally oppose the US deployment, Erdogan has supported it, and has already hinted that he'll call for a new parliamentary vote to try to get it approved — and as Prime Minister, he'll be in a far better position to push for it.

The Palestinian Authority, the government (except it isn't) of a nation (except it isn't) in the Middle East (well, it is that), has decided that it needs a prime minister.

Their next move, logically, should be the naming of an ambassador to the Sovereign Apartment Nation of Travistan.

In light (if "light" makes sense in this context, an arguable premise) of recent world developments, The Skeptician offers an updated United Nations logo, approved 14-0 by the Security Council. (France, of course, abstained.)

(Muchas gracias: Emperor Misha I, who notes, "We hope to see it proudly displayed at the new UN headquarters in Harare.")

I hold this truth, spoken by Susanna Cornett, to be self-evident:

This is the idea behind The Home Front. Why? Mike Hendrix, who created the site with Ms Cornett, explains:

That's why. Most of you, I suspect, didn't really need the explanation.

Many have tried, many have failed, to draw plausible parallels between Vietnam and Iraq.

Andrea Harris has succeeded:

Not to mention those who depend on pimps for their livelihood or for their moral guidance.

Next on the to-do list is determining whether we've improved our handling of hot rocks.

Matt at Overtaken by Events has had it up to here with politicians who proclaim their lame little legislation to be a "Bill of Rights For [insert name of group]." While the specific target of his wrath is Charles Schumer's godawful cell-phone proposal, a measure so clueless you'd think it had originated with the junior senator from New York, it's not just Schumer who cheeses off Matt:

Which it is, though I'd suggest that it's even more annoying when the legislation in question seeks to extend government power, as does the Schumer proposal, rather than to limit it, as did the original Bill of Rights.

C. D. "Dodd" Harris IV is persuaded that this new abortion bill, hailed as a victory by abortion foes, is actually anything but:

The President will certainly sign it, and it will almost immediately be challenged in the courts. Dodd thinks if it gets to the Supreme Court, it will be struck down, perhaps for the very reasons he cites. I'm not so sure you can get five of the Supremes to reject it, but the point is this: whether you consider D&X a routine medical procedure or a heinous violation of the Hippocratic Oath, the Congress does not have the Constitutional authority to regulate it. (Which is why, of course, that lame bit about "in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce" was thrown into the bill to begin with.) If they're going to ban these procedures, and I have no doubt that they are — it's damnably hard to defend something that gruesome — they need to do it on a basis that will pass Constitutional muster: state by state, county by county if necessary, until one of those jurisdictions comes up with a ban that stands up to any challenges. It can be done. Eventually it will be. In the meantime, the current bill may be useful for rallying the troops on either side of the issue, but otherwise it's just window-dressing, and not particularly attractive window-dressing at that.

Julie Peterson, speaking for the University of Michigan on the value of their (and presumably other) affirmative-action programs, as quoted in the Michigan Daily:

John Rosenberg boils this down to the essentials:

"We're not letting you guys in because you need a break; we're letting you guys in because we, personally, are devoid of soul. Uh, Microsoft Word to your mother."

And the Law of Unintended Consequences (a cousin of Murphy's, no doubt) proves itself supreme once more.

There has been much handwringing in the past few weeks over the very idea that the United States might actually seek to remove a dictator without the consent of the international community. I've thought this over, and the more I think about it, the more I think that it's not a community at all.

Seriously. Each of the nations in the United Nations, as you might reasonably expect, is basically looking out for its own interests. If there's any sense of "community" at all, it's found in the temporary alliances among nations who seek to curry favor with, or extort money from, larger nations. The archetype for the leader of this type of community is Tony Soprano. At best, we're in an International Trailer Park: we're stuck next to one another and those damn people around the corner won't pick up their yard and someone else is trying to tap into our utilities. Under the circumstances, it's hard to blame the Bush administration for making noises about packing up and moving out.

"But they're our neighbors!" I hear you cry. Fine. Let them act like it for once.

The countdown has begun.

"The tyrant will soon be gone," said the President.

One down, too many still to go — but it's a start.

Right on the heels of the President's address last night, ABC-TV ran a special called The Failure of Diplomacy. Chris Anderson at Queen City Soapbox takes issue with the very title:

Diplomacy, according to Will Rogers, is "the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock." Rocks are now in position.

I took a look into alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.1950s this afternoon, and some yobo had hung a recording out on the line with the notation "Someone Make G. W. Bush Listen to this".

The song? Jackson Browne's "Lives in the Balance".

Not what I'd call a 1950s title by any stretch of the imagination. I was going to chide the individual posting the item, but someone beat me to it, opening with the following:

Only in Usenet (and ASCII sort routines, I suppose) would "off topic" come before "offensive".

The rest of the response:

Landing at Baghdad may be rather tricky toward the end of the week, but hey, no one said this was going to be easy.

Just in case the events of the week have left you wondering:

You've just read the smooth, well-modulated words of National Public Radio ombudsman Godfrey Dvorak.

Well, okay, maybe you haven't.

According to the Rocky Mountain News, two new firearms measures have been signed into law by Colorado Governor Bill Owens.

Senate Bill 24 mandates that carry permits be issued to residents who pass a background check and a gun-safety course. Senate Bill 25 requires that individual cities and counties comply with state gun laws: they can no longer pass more restrictive measures on their own. SB 25 also bans local gun registries.

(Muchas gracias: Kim du Toit, who objects to the News'  headline writer's characterization of the measures as a "gun rights expansion". Says du Toit: "[T]hese laws don't expand gun rights, they've restored them, you journalistic morons.")

The following was dispatched to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and to the President (pro tempore) of the Senate:

It's on.

Fasten your seat belts.

I think Ken Layne's called this one on the nose:

Of course, the pursuit of irrelevance has been a favored pastime among French intellectuals for decades; how surprised should we be that the government has nationalized it?

The definitive editorial cartoon for today, by Jeff Koterba in the Omaha World-Herald.

Thanks to Geitner Simmons, who saw it first.

Is it true that government spending for education in this country is actually declining? This didn't sound right to John Hudock, who duly dug up the pertinent figures. His findings:

It's a phenomenon we've seen before. How is it that spending more money less quickly can be equated to spending less money? If it takes me eleven seconds to get from zero to sixty and twenty seconds to get from sixty to ninety, at what point during those 31 seconds did I actually slow down?

You'd expect this from advocates of Really Big Government, who see commitment to be directly proportional to dollars. Curiously, you can also expect it from investors and fund managers, who start to bail out when growth rates start to flatten; it is, after all, their fiduciary responsibility to go for the highest growth rates possible, even if they have to spend their last dime in trade commissions to get them.

Actually, they probably do. The Buckeye Institute, which bills itself as "Ohio's Only Free Market Think Tank", has gathered data from the Tax Foundation and assembled a list of tax burdens as a percentage of personal income. Considering state and local taxes only, Oklahoma, at 9.9 percent, ranks 33rd; factoring in Federal taxes, we pay 29 percent, next to the bottom.

Maine residents pay the highest state and local taxes: 12.8 percent, about twice that of the 6.3 percent paid by Alaskans. Alaska, at 27 percent, also occupies the bottom position when you include Federal taxes; the hardest-hit of the states is Connecticut, at 36.7.

The District of Columbia, be it noted, pays higher local and Federal taxes than any state.

(Via Hit & Run)

Ernie Chambers found this on a listserv:

Mr Chambers answers this way:

This is not, apparently, the definition being used by the tender-hearted soul on the listserv.

While I'm inclined to accept this description as accurate on the face of it, I have one question:

Can I really get a Federal subsidy for a bag of Wavy Lay's?

And as to the question of spam, this entry from The BradLands says it all:

Not my lifetime, I hope.

Somewhere at an angle to his Presidential aspirations, Gary Hart is pushing a "primary of ideas", a discussion of the issues without any of that tedious political-campaign stuff. I don't know how well this will work, but I have to give the man credit for having the temerity to take on the Blogosphere™ on its own turf.

That's right, folks. Gary Hart has a blog. Unsurprisingly, his blogroll tilts a tad to the left, and there's already talk of an Official Comments Policy, but you gotta start somewhere. Make a note on your Trend-O-Meter and see if anyone else with his hat in the ring follows suit.

(Via The Professor)

John Lennon, says Yoko Ono, would have opposed the war in Iraq had he lived.

The SurlyPundit isn't so sure:

One thing is for sure: Lennon in high dudgeon (not to be confused with Gus Dudgeon, who produced Elton John's early hits) was almost scary to behold, whether the object of his wrath was the Maharishi ("Sexy Sadie"), McCartney ("How Do You Sleep?"), or us effing peasants ("Working Class Hero"). I suspect he still would have had little use for the sort of antiwar type that in earlier years would have been carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.

Having given sort of a plug to the Gary Hart blog, I figured the very least I could do was to check out the competition, and so I Googled up the Howard Dean campaign, which at least is an official campaign at this point, to see the comparative offerings.

And there are a couple of good Dean-related blogs, one by Rick Klau, the other a collective including, among others, the reliable Aziz Poonwalla. The Dean campaign itself has a Call to Action blog, but it's your basic minimal-effort Blogspot template (although it links a banner off the main Dean campaign site) and not especially interesting unless you're working on the Dean campaign yourself.

I'm going to have to watch that phrase "Googled up". It's capitalized good, like a trademark should, but verbing nouns (such as, um, "verb") has problems of its own:

Of course, I'd probably have the same issues with those yahoos at Yahoo!

As we all know, teenage girls fill up their sites with boys, music, complaints about the parental units, boys, school happenings, angst, blissful innocence, and boys.

Well, sometimes. I offer the following item (no discernible permalinks, scroll to 20 March) from Jillian, almost sixteen, in some small Indiana town:

Apart from the obvious question — there are standard antiwar types even in small Indiana towns? — there's a definite sense of "I am so tired of having to explain this to you over and over and over." It's not a feeling you have to be almost sixteen to understand or appreciate, either.

When NPR Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr started his All Things Considered commentary on Peter Arnett today, I just knew he was going to take Arnett's side.

And I was wrong. Schorr castigated Arnett for "serving as an instrument of Iraqi propaganda."

I expect this will go up on Schorr's War Essays page later this week.

(Update, 9:20 pm: It's up now in RealAudio. Scroll to "Arnett's Disservice".)

Pearl Jam played Oklahoma City's Ford Center last night, and if anyone had been upset with the band for Eddie Vedder's Dixie Chicks impression the night before in Denver, it really wasn't in evidence. Before the concert, the band issued the following statement:

The determination of the exact quantity of spin contained therein, specified in degrees, is left as an exercise for the student.

And after a brief exposition, Vedder pointed to his close-cropped scalp and said, "How could we not be for the military? I mean, look at this effing haircut!"

Okay, he didn't say "effing". But that was the end of that. There was music to be played.

Okay, Iraq is getting "regime change" as specified. But to what is the regime being changed?

Lynn Sislo has been thinking about this:

A tyrant with a mandate is still a tyrant.

Here in the Big PX, we're still fine-tuning our republic, though we've been at it longer than damned near anyone; still, we've got the basics down. And we should be pushing, not for some generic "democracy" that serves as somebody's personal fiefdom (yes, Mr Mugabe, I'm talking to you), but for a system that has a chance of making everyone's life better. Of necessity, it's going to look a lot like our system, and the time to get used to it starts right about now.

Margaret Atwood's "A Letter to America", which started out as an op-ed in Toronto's The Globe and Mail, tries very hard not to sound accusative or bitter, and for the most part it succeeds, but some of its points deserve a response.

What's being done to Iraq, she says, pales in comparison to what we're doing to ourselves. For instance:

The latter question is easily answered: 11 September 2001. However, it's no particular secret that some of our law-enforcement types have always had a wish list of things they would love to do if only that damn Constitution didn't keep getting in the way; the war merely provides an excuse.

We're definitely back in an advanced stage of Deficit Inattention Disorder, though the fact that the number of balanced budgets we've had in half a century can be counted on one's fingers without having to take off more than one mitten makes me worry just a bit less about the sheer volume of red ink. I doubt, however, that "most", or even much, of the national water supply has been rendered unusuable, and I can't bring myself to blame drought, which your standard insurance weasels consider an Act of God, on the Bush administration.

King Midas, as I recall, was just as capable of damaging his position as of enhancing it; there's a self-correction cycle built into the process. And for a "torched" economy, we seem to be doing pretty well: the war has business expansion largely on hold, but that's obviously a temporary anomaly, and some businesses are truly in trouble, but much of that trouble is due to failure to respond to public demand (the airlines) or attempting to keep a dead business model on life support (the record industry) or believing despite an utter lack of evidence that economies of scale can be derived from operations that really have nothing in common (AOL Time Warner).

The world is a glass house — let's watch it with those flying pellets.

There's no doubt that we could be doing a better job of upholding our own traditions. And one of those traditions is to blow off criticism from the postmodernist and premedieval sectors, neither of whom have anything to contribute to anything resembling a world dialogue. If we claim to have the moral high ground, it's not because we claim to have video of [insert name of deity here] saying so; it's because we have the track record to back it up.

Dear Ms. Atwood: Your concerns are noted, but don't worry about us. We'll muddle through this somehow. And thanks for writing.

If you didn't know Grover Norquist, you might let his name trip over your tongue and then you'd decide he's the sort of guy whose Hollywood-ized life story would be played by Wally Cox. But Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, is no milquetoast — P. J. O'Rourke once characterized him as "Tom Paine crossed with Lee Atwater plus just a soupçon of Madame Defarge" — and when the ACLU invited some prominent conservatives to join a panel this week on civil liberties in general and the USA PATRIOT act in particular, Norquist was in rare form.

According to a Jake Tapper report in Salon, Norquist, citing the tendency toward mission creep in law enforcement, something the PATRIOT act accelerates, quipped that few complain about it because most people think, "Do whatever you want to guys named Guido — that doesn't affect me." But sauce levels between geese and ganders can be equalized in a flash: "Someday Hillary Clinton's going to be attorney general and I hope conservatives keep that in mind."

Ouch! Barbara Comstock at DOJ complained, "You can't pass laws based on the fact that you think there are going to be corrupt people who misuse the system some day." But at the very core of conservatism is the belief that people are flawed and some of them will mess up: sooner or later, there are going to be corrupt people who misuse the system. All the better, then, not to provide them the opportunity in the first place.

And Norquist wasn't through. "I would support legislation that would sunset all legislation passed during a time of war," he said. "And I would vote against any legislation somebody felt they had to name 'PATRIOT'," a cumbersome acronym he said was chosen because "it looks bad on a 30-second commercial to have voted against it."

No wonder this guy isn't in Congress.

Jeff Jarvis draws the map:

I like that: "the PBS left". They vote with their dollars for their particular news slant, and they bewail the fact that others vote with their remotes for some other brand. (And without getting any tchotchkes in return, even.)

Fark captioned this Yahoo! News (by way of Reuters) story truly spectacularly:

As they say south and/or east of here, "Dayum."

Mark Steyn, in The Daily Telegraph, has isolated the discontinuity:

Steyn's being overly generous. It's a farging travesty.

What to do with Saddam's stragglers, partisans and malingerers? Jesse White's Tax Day 2004 letter to Iraqi taxpayers posits one possible solution:

Some things never change. [sigh]

I dunno. I could afford to buy in, I suppose, but I suspect the upkeep would kill me.

(Muchas gracias: Nova H.)

Courtesy of Phil at The Third Kind, where you can get the bigger, longer, uncut version.

Jeff A. Taylor, on Reason's Hit & Run:

On the other hand, in the unlikely event that he should actually introduce legislation to convene Bedroom Police, he will slide over from Dumb to Evil without the slightest bit of, um, friction.

(I beat dead horses; I don't sleep with them.)

I liked this Kevin Holtsberry observation:

Just so. It would be nice for the Supremes to decide once and for all whether these things should be regulated; it would be even nicer if Texans (and residents of other states with similar provisions) would look at their law and ask "Do we really need this?"

If I don't seem particularly blue, it's because I'm not holding my breath waiting for either of these to happen.

Dr. Weevil predicts:

I tend to lean toward "none", for basically the same reason as Weevil: "Double or nothing is a dangerous tactic." And the mullahs, I think, simply don't have the capacity to inflict themselves on New Baghdad while simultaneously quieting the Tehran street: they can take on the Sunnis, or they can take on their own citizenry, but not both.

This is probably not the time to bring out a "If You Ain't Muslim, You Ain't Shiite" bumper sticker, either.

Some of the critics of the war in Iraq have contended that the coalition has failed to demonstrate convincingly the existence of a link between Baghdad and al-Qaeda. Does this mean that they will change their tune, now that a link has apparently been verified?

I have my doubts, really — not about the link, but about the ability of said critics to admit that they might have been wrong about something. Still, I'm willing to be shown.

Tom Ridge put down his color chips today to announce that Mohammed Al-Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer who assisted in the rescue of PFC Jessica Lynch, has been granted asylum in the US under the rules of "humanitarian parole".

Al-Rehaief, his wife and their five-year-old daughter arrived in this country on the 10th of April. They will be allowed to remain indefinitely, and in one year they can apply for permanent residency.

No meeting has yet been scheduled with Lynch, who is at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, still recovering from her injuries.

We're getting pretty good at this doing-the-right-thing stuff, I think.

The William Morris Agency, which represents a broad spectrum of entertainment-industry types, also employs a battery of lawyers, and they turned those lawyers loose on the Boycott Hollywood site, demanding it be shut down and the domain terminated. The registrar (Dotster's NamesDirect, may they rot in purgatory) capitulated; for the last day or two, the letter from WMA will be posted on the site.

The Professor calls this one exactly what it is:

I moved to Los Angeles in 1988, hoping to work for some of these people. This is, I think, the first time I'm glad I failed.

As everyone now knows, Funny Cide is the first gelding to win the Kentucky Derby in over seventy years.

You can't tell me that at least some of the two or three dozen Democrats running for President in 2004 don't find this auspicious, even heartening; the Democrats haven't sent a gelding to the White House since [insert date here].

The Man from F.U.N.K.L.E. has an idea what's going through Tim Robbins' head right about now:

Anyone up to marching for SARS? (No, Sars, not you.)

Diane L. reports on yet another effort to insulate our innocent youth:

Jet? I thought she was a little lady suffragette.

Can you imagine what these people might think about Oklahoma's Midwest City Bombers?

Andrea Harris sees the Great Political Divide, not between the left and the right, or between the liberal and the conservative, but between the ideological and the practical.

I think. This is what she said:

W. really isn't what you'd call non-ideological, but he's clearly more interested in ends than in means, and if that means that ideology has to take a back seat for the time being, so be it. No wonder there's so much background rumbling amid the Republican base. And the left continues to be upset with W.'s general unwillingness to take its advice. Given the quality of that advice in recent years, it's hard to blame him for blowing them off.

The new URL is boycott-hollywood.net, and is expected to go live some time next week. (Allow the usual delays for DNS propagation.)

In case you're just coming up to speed on this matter, here's the last paragraph of the site's mission statement:

I might add that the opinions of said Celebrity Pundits might carry more weight if there was something to back them up besides "Well, I just feel that way." Too often, there isn't.

The touch-screen voting machine is coolly high-tech, but it invites suspicion — how do you double-check a bunch of electrons?

Election Systems & Software is beta-testing a touch-screen machine that produces a paper ballot for each vote; they hope to have the device ready to ship this summer.

Well, okay. I still like Oklahoma's paper-ballot/electronic-reader system, which strikes me as both pretty efficient and highly verifiable, but I'd like to see this new contraption up close.

General Tommy Franks has announced flatly: "The Iraqi Baath Socialist Party is dissolved." It's more a formality than anything else — most Baath leaders have fled or are in, um, "stable condition" — but it opened the door for Franks' next statement, which calls for the surrender of Baath Party or other Iraqi goverment documents to the coalition government.

One step at a time, as they say.

The Democratic National Committee has actually put up something they call a Supreme Court Countdown, with the ominous warning: "Act Now! America's Values at Risk With Supreme Court Vacancy"!

Um, last I looked, there wasn't a Supreme Court vacancy. Did David Souter get run over by a truck last night or something?

John Rosenberg explains this phenomenon:

The nerve of that guy Bush, actually following the procedures in the Constitution. Sheesh.

Lesley at Plum Crazy seemed awfully impressed with the Buck Floomberg item from this weekend, and frankly I was puzzled by her reaction, until I read this, addressed to Hizzoner Hizself:

Migod, I do believe the woman is serious. No one moves to New Jersey without a damned good reason.

Bleeding Brain (if permalinks are Blogspotty, go to 12 May) has a thoughtful essay on a question that has occasionally occurred to me as well:

Given the general unpleasantness that prevailed under the Tsars, it's probably no wonder that this new movement seemed appealing, or at least no worse. And BB admits that the official abolition of classes (never mind how well it worked in actual practice, which is not at all) might have scored points with him. But then there's this:

People who didn't have anything probably didn't see anything wrong with this; if anything, they might have seen it as a leveling of the playing field. But for property owners, and children of property owners, this could have been — perhaps should have been — a red flag.

It's a good piece, and even if we fear that our 1906 selves might have been complicit in this revolution, at least our 2003 selves know better.

Steven Chapman reports that it is now against the law to insult the French national anthem; uttering an audible "boo" during the Marseillaise will now cost you 7500 euros and/or six months in le pokey.

In France, anyway. If you do it in Oklahoma, the half-dozen people who actually recognize the tune will probably break into a cheer.

Boycotts, as the phrase goes, are as American as apple pie, though it strains the term to stretch it far enough to the fifty-odd Texas Democratic legislators playing hooky on Lake Texoma so as to stall a redistricting vote pushed by state Republicans.

Yes, I'm enough of a child of the Sixties to appreciate a conscientious refusal to take part in something big and institutional and possibly damaging.

But dammit, these guys are getting paid to take part in something big and institutional and possibly damaging. At the very least, they ought to be docked for their absences, and if Texas House rules permit, they should be disciplined. I have no problem with following one's conscience, but sometimes there's a price tag attached.

Nearly two dozen containers of imported fireworks for pyrotechnic displays are sitting at West Coast ports for lack of inland transportation; the Washington Times reports that new security rules for hauling explosives, enacted this past February, have made the nation's railroads unwilling to mess with the stuff without some assurances from DOT that they won't be held liable if, for instance, they miss one background check somewhere along the way.

Photon Courier (16 May) points out that eventually, these containers will likely be moved by truck, which will enhance neither the national economy nor national security:

We'll still be able to buy sparklers and bottle rockets, I presume, but the big displays on the Glorious Fourth could be jeopardized.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer has never been one of my favorite people, but surely he deserves a kinder fate than this.

George Will, speculating on how the Supreme Court will rule on the University of Michigan affirmative action case, as reported by James Joyner at Outside the Beltway:

Brennan a pragmatist? Who knew?

(And with this, OTB goes onto the blogroll, using my standard criterion, which is "I can't believe you haven't linked this guy yet, considering how many times you've read his blog.")

Last we heard from her, she was giving the commencement speech at the Department of African Studies at the University of California, in which, among other things, she:

• Manages to name-check Patrice Lumumba, Mario Savio, and Tupac Shakur's mother;
  
• Repeats the discredited BBC story about how the Jessica Lynch rescue was "staged";
  
• Tosses off a line about how "in spite of Florida, important provisions of the Voting Rights Act expire in 2007," hinting that black disenfranchisement is just around the corner (which it isn't);
  
• Describes UC Berkeley as "America's campus".
  

How did Georgia ever put a moonbat like that into the House? Anyone? McGehee? Acidman? Bueller?

(Muchas gracias: Erin O'Connor.)

Fusilier Pundit (17:09, 21 May) has taken a look at the so-called Justice Enhancement and Domestic Security Act of 2003 (link requires Adobe Acrobat Reader), and he is impressed with its bulk (486 pages), if nothing else:

Another Department of Justice wish list? Maybe. Almost all such bills, historically, expand the list of Federal crimes, about which Fuze reminds us:

And somehow I doubt that had the Founding Fathers somehow been faced with telemarketers, they would have worked them into Article III.

Jan O. Karlsson, Sweden's Minister for Migration, may have jeopardized his position in Prime Minister Göran Persson's government by referring to George W. Bush as "that fucking Texas geezer."

"Geezer"? Dubya is only 56. I suppose that means...uh, never mind. It will probably be a year or two before I get used to having a "5" as the first digit of my age.

(Muchas gracias: Jesus Gil.)

California's Proposition 209, passed by popular vote in 1996, is a relatively simple measure as such things go. What it says is this:

Mere approval by the electorate, of course, means little to the University of California, as explained by Dustin Frelich (27 May):

Does this actually work?

Apparently quacking like a duck in California is no indication of birdhood.

James Joyner notes that regional variations mean nothing to the tax code:

Of course, "progressive" isn't all that wonderful anyway, no matter how forward-looking and optimistic it sounds. And besides, Podunk is (or should be) in Iowa.

Now this is choice. From The New York Times:

Deb the Insomnomaniac finds this utterly risible:

The sudden flurry of press attention to next Monday's Federal Communications Commission announcement mystifies me; I mean, it's not like FCC chair Michael Powell has been keeping things under wraps for the benefit of Big Media all this time. I tend to look askance at the expected changes, but I'm not about to claim that it's all a plot by the Axis of Greedy either.

Sean Penn's Kilroy's Still Here piece drew a blistering response from Michele:

"Open markets?" they cry. "Why, 48 percent of Americans own no stocks at all! And 'democratic elections' — have we forgotten Florida in 2000?"

Thus speaks the celebrity pundit, in solidarity with the mythical Average American. Of course, he's not really an Average American; he just plays one on TV. (Apologies to Joe Goodwin.)

It's a tricky balance. They must distance themselves from American culture, to which they feel unutterably superior — but not too much distance, or the checks will stop rolling in.

I said this back in February of '02:

And not a few in Hollywood, it appears.

John Hudock at Common Sense and Wonder looks at the 2004 Federal budget, and sees places to economize (30 May, 8:48 am). A sampling:

Even HHS and Defense, which occasionally do useful things, could use some trimming.

Of course, hardly anyone believes the Republicans in power will shrink government by this much. (And no one believes the Democrats would shrink government under any circumstances.) Still, it's a good set of talking points, and those Congresspersons suffering from Deficit Inattention Disorder would do well to take them under advisement.

"So what about those Weapons of Mass Destruction, huh?" Kathleen Parker at Town Hall ponders the question, and thinks perhaps our expectations were too high:

Still, that's what it would have taken to persuade some of the more agitated antiwar crowd:

Change "astride" to "inside" and "5,000 drums" to "a drum", and I'll happily vouch for its loveliness.

(Via The Baseball Crank, who observes: "The conservative/pro-war side of the commentariat and the blogosphere has been disappointingly silent in dealing with the absence of findings of weapons of mass destruction.")

Andrea Harris looks over the political landscape and wonders: "Would you buy a used car from these men?"

Well, not just men, and technically, not just cars either. As the phrase goes, read the whole thing; it will give you something to remember this time next year when the candidates open up fresh bottles of snake oil.

Condi Rice was on Face the Nation this morning, and Bob Schieffer, almost apologetically it seemed, brought up the question of "So where are Saddam's weapons of mass destruction?" Dr Rice was calm and collected as always, and she recited basically the same answer she'd given on Meet the Press an hour before, but you could read it in her face: "Oh, Christ, not this again."

Mark Steyn has an answer in the Telegraph:

Which explains much about the objections to the war: why, we didn't give them the chance to build up their arsenals! It wasn't a level playing field at all! We didn't play fair!

Sheesh. Put a cork in it, fercryingoutloud. And not one of Sammy Sosa's, either.

A chap identified as "billder" at Indymedia warns us about the evils of weather control:

The government, of course, asserts that HAARP is perfectly harmless. And what happens when these segments of the atmosphere are moved out of position, anyway? Here's what "billder" says:

Well, lakes can and do dry up, but we're talking a long-term process here; it's not like we're moving the earth a couple million miles closer to the sun. Although I suppose that's next on the agenda of the Evil Empire.

Oh, well. I only mentioned this for the Second Amendment reference, which is, shall we say, not exactly representative of the present-day left. Anyway, if you assemble enough local towers and tune them properly, you supposedly get a Broadcast Canopy, and what are they for?

My advice: buy aluminum stocks. Foil for hat linings is apparently in greater demand than I imagined.

(Via Fark, which tabs this story UNLIKELY.)

The Lone Dissenter, a high-school student within shrieking distance of the San Francisco Bay, steps through the SAT II Writing exams and finds something stuck to her shoes:

What should be changed? Why, the person who wrote that part of the test should be replaced, and for the most obvious of reasons:

To the College Board: Boilerplate. Look into it.

Wylie is not entirely happy with the way the Bush administration is handling That Other Middle East Issue:

The President is trying, I suppose, to avoid the appearance of taking sides, and while this is the sort of thing that buys Brownie points at the UN, it's not the most useful approach to this particular situation. Things are a lot more cut and dried than that:

Evidently it's not obvious enough, if it still has to be explained in stark terms like this, but does anyone seriously believe the Israelis and the Palestinians can live side by side in semiperfect harmony? I'd give better odds to the Arsonist Arms apartments opening up next door to the refinery.

SurlyPundit offers an insight into why Canada seems so darn, um, Canadian:

And this .667 average, she says, contributes to the stability of the nation:

Well, it makes sense to me.

Iraqi oil reserves, the Administration has always insisted, belong to the people of Iraq, and it appears that they meant it.

Ron Bailey approves:

Never happen. Too many people in this country are persuaded that pain and suffering are actually good for you. (Not good for them, of course.)

The Baseball Crank is pretty certain about it:

No one can beat Bush but Bush himself. At this point in time, it seems a fair assessment. Is anyone out there on the Democratic horizon?

Which leads to the next question: since some consider said candidate a Republican "in name only", is it conceivable that he might switch parties between now and the beginning of the primary season? And if so, would he be embraced — or shunned — by the Democrats?

Yeah, yeah, I know: are the Democrats in a position to shun anyone at this point?

Joe Lieberman showed up in town yesterday, partly to announce the opening of his state campaign office, but mostly to get a jump on the 6,312 other Democratic Presidential candidates. (And with the move of the state primary to the third of February, time is presumably of the essence.)

And, oh yes, he had things to say, but they boiled down to a Juan Gato-esque "Zeeble bop fickle fackle bush Bush BUSH!" At this point in the campaign, you really can't expect much else.

Bruce at This Is Class Warfare has made the rounds of the Oklahoma bloggers, and he seems to be somewhat disturbed by what he's found:

I'm fairly skeptical of government, I think, and I don't believe I've become any less so in recent months. I do have a tendency to back off from complaining in times of war, which I attribute to proper indoctrination during my Army days. :)

Still, I don't believe anyone's definition of consistency demands that if you oppose the Administration on this, you must also oppose the Administration on that; with Bush, as with Clinton, as with Bush the Elder, there have been actions I've applauded and actions I've deplored. And in my experience, the President isn't getting a free pass from conservative bloggers; they will quite willingly bash Bush if he does something that sufficiently annoys them.

I've staked out my own position pretty close to the middle. (That Political Compass thing considers me slightly left of center and distinctly anti-authoritarian.) It's not the most comfortable spot on the spectrum, but it fits. And so far, no one seems compelled to accuse me of being a Democrat.

Which I am.

Eric Scheie looks at this Philadelphia Inquirer story about the horror of children being shot to death, and discovers that most of them aren't children at all. He quotes this statement by the group Philadelphia Safe and Sound:

Note the use of the term "youth", and the age range quoted: 7 to 24. You'd think that people on the high end of that scale wouldn't qualify as children. And a graph published by the group, helpfully reproduced by Scheie, reveals that the 18-to-24 crowd — legally adults — makes up 75 to 90 percent of those "youth" deaths. If you read the Inquirer story in a hurry over morning coffee, you might think that hundreds of Philadelphia grade-schoolers are being mowed down in a hail of gunfire on a routine basis, and it simply isn't true.

All this number-juggling, as you might surmise, is being done to justify tighter gun controls. What they really want, of course, is a button on the Mayor's desk which, once pushed, will make every firearm in southeastern Pennsylvania disappear into thin air. Needless to say, if this actually worked, it would incapacitate gangsters and thugs only long enough to head across the river and pick up fresh heat in Jersey, while leaving J. Upstanding Citizen royally screwed.

For the purpose of argument, let's not mention anything about the Second Amendment here. Let's just assume that the city of Philadelphia is actually able to ban guns, and every law-abiding citizen from the Main Line inward turns in his/her weapons. Are all the guns gone? Of course not. The criminals aren't giving up their guns. What happens to the crime rate? Nothing good. And you know what? I bet Philadelphia grade-schoolers can probably understand this better than the hysterical adults screaming about gun control.

Norma McCorvey, the Roe in Roe v. Wade, will not be granted a reconsideration of the Supreme Court's 1973 verdict which legalized abortion; a federal district court has dismissed her request.

"Whether or not the Supreme Court was infallible, its Roe decision was certainly final in this litigation," Judge David Godbey wrote in the ruling.

A reasonable case can be made that the Supreme Court was quite fallible indeed, I think, but "it is simply too late now, thirty years after the fact," said Judge Godbey, "for McCorvey to revisit that judgment."

The Texas Justice Foundation, which represented McCorvey, issued no immediate statement.

From his perch Outside the Beltway, James Joyner offers a rundown of the major conservative talk-show hosts, and counters with a list of liberals who might be able to keep up.

Joyner's top pick on the left: Bill Clinton. "His presidency was an eight year audition, right?" The man does love the spotlight, and he has a knack for patter at least on par with Limbaugh's.

The rest of the list includes, among others, syndicated black DJ Tom Joyner, misidentified as "Ken" because, well, heck, how do you keep track of all those Joyners? And there are enough names on there to make the notion of a liberal network (as distinguished from, say, PBS or NPR) at least plausible, if not necessarily financially feasible.

(Update, 8:00 am, 22 June: Tom has his name back.)

How did Ravenwood spend the first day of summer?

He started up his "gas-guzzling, econobox-crushing SUV," kept the pedal to the metal lest precious fuelstuffs be burned too slowly, and slogged 60 miles to a gun show, where he bought a Romanian-built SAR-1, the sort of artifact that strikes fear into the hearts of the sort of people who worry about gas-guzzling, econobox-crushing SUVs and gun shows.

Then, of course, he slogged the 60 miles back home. Sounds like he had a whale of a good time, and said whale will presumably be rendered for oil at a later date. An auspicious beginning to the official Season of Fun, for sure.

What is the spiritual thread that connects the Sonicare to Sonic the Hedgehog? The Palace of Reason's Francis W. Porretto finds the link:

The fruits of a consumerist society, of course, have proven to be a bumper crop of totem objects for present-day green radicals; I suspect most of them have a list of a dozen or more Truly Hated Things, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that they actually own a couple of them just the same. And this further supports Mr Porretto's point that green, today, is not so much a political movement as a religion. For further illustration, see, for instance, the Horologium examination of the US Green Party platform, a collection of policies from wacky to woeful, about one-fourth policy-wonk jargon and three-fourths exhortations to the faithful. Their scriptures are already generally available; once they figure out how to insure the damnation of infidels, the transition will be complete.

No screen is perfect, which may explain why the estimable Robert Prather has been busily swatting some Eurofly. The bug in question, modestly identified as nobody, is evidently persuaded that the European Union will displace the United States in the Undisputed Superpower class, but so far his arguments have been unpersuasive.

Were I faced with this creature, I'd snap off a couple of one-liners and be done with him. Prather prefers to eviscerate his arguments, statistic by dubious statistic, until there's nothing left but bluster and whining — which, you have to admit, is just about all there is to the EU these days.

The preeminence of the US isn't something that's been handed to us on a silver platter by the deity of the moment, nor is it an accident of history. It exists because we've done a decent job (not a perfect job, but not too shabby either) of sticking to the high-flown notions we adopted in the 18th century, and in the process demonstrating that those notions actually do work. If the Europeans want to play in this league, they're going to have to shed an incredible amount of political and cultural baggage that does nothing but weigh them down. I'm not holding my breath.

My first reaction was "Well, we're not going to get a color-blind society this year."

And while Dr Coleman in Ann Arbor is apparently satisfied with the Supreme Court's rulings today, and poor John Rosenberg, house-sitting in Baghdad by the Bay, is probably fuming, I'm going to try to find something positive in all this.

There is still going to be the occasional student who is turned away despite having higher test scores. But this is inevitable unless test scores are the only criterion used for selection, and I know of no university that follows this practice. Should a school want a student body that, as the cliché goes, "looks like America," they ought to be able to tailor their admissions policies accordingly. On the other hand, the ethnicity-equals-so-many-points formula used at Michigan was clearly arbitrary, and its banning is long overdue; as the Court pointed out, the point schedule, so heavily weighted by race, was the decisive factor for many otherwise minimally-qualified candidates.

No, we're not substantially nearer the color-blind society I think of as ideal. But at least we're taking a baby step away from race as a basis for entitlements — maybe. It's a start.

Rust at Conservatives Suck has some thoughts on the Supreme Court's affirmative-action rulings, based on his days at a small Midwestern college:

Emphasis in the original. This seems plausible enough, I think, though one possible subtext here — you don't get real diversity without variations in skin color — would be pretty close to indefensible.

He's right on this point, though:

Still, there's one nagging problem with the whole affirmative-action scheme, and John Rosenberg nails it:

Zymurgy's Law of Evolving System Dynamics, which can't be appealed to the Supreme Court, now kicks in:

Is there a can big enough for all of this?

Robert Prather blames it all — well, okay, not all, but surely a lot of it — on AARP:

If it's any consolation, I came out in favor of privatization of the Social Security system five years ago, when I was a mere child of, um, forty-five.

Now if the government wants to buy me drugs — well, does it have to be limited to the stuff for which I have prescriptions?

In the Sixties, when I lived in South Carolina, he was still cited in the papers as "J. Strom Thurmond," rather like J. Random User or J. Skulking Bushwhack, but in popular parlance he was always just Strom; like Cher or Madonna or Sting, he was easily identifiable without resorting to a surname.

And in the first half of that decade, he was still a Democrat — he jumped the aisle and joined the GOP in 1964 — and still young enough (50s) to make you think he was capable of another 24-hour filibuster to match the one he'd done in '57. I wasn't sure what to make of Strom. The headmistress at the Academy for the Smug, when she wasn't swinging the pickaxe she'd borrowed from Lester Maddox, was quick to assure us that Strom was a man of conviction and strength, standing tall against the sea of darkies that threatened to inundate us all. Perhaps it was that very assurance that made me doubtful: even then I was given to question authority, and I didn't see any evidence that we were about to be overrun by anyone or anything, with the possible exception of Beatlemania.

Then came desegregation, and it came hard. I'd moved to a Catholic school, which officially took no position on the matter but which quietly closed its "separate-but-equal" facilities during one long, hot summer, and which contributed, again unofficially, staffers to the occasional civil-rights march. The world was changing, and people called out to Strom to make it stop.

He didn't.

It's said by some that Strom's eventual retreat from racism was purely opportunistic, motivated by nothing more than a glimpse at the handwriting on the wall. And maybe it was at first, but I don't think so. I left the South for the prairie after high school, and the lines were drawn no less starkly in Oklahoma than in Orangeburg; desegregation came hard everywhere. It was at about this point that I figured out that while the South's "peculiar institution" had been indeed truly evil and it was a Good Thing that a war was fought to rid the nation of it, the South had done a better job over the next century of getting over it. Maybe there were guys like Trent Lott who still yearned for those days of separation, but I didn't remember any guys like that.

So Strom was flawed, as are we all. His awakening, if that's what it was, came rather late, long after the damage was done. Others in a similar position could have done a blatantly public one-eighty, could have sought the approbation of media settled into somnolence, could have tried to hook up with Beyoncé. Strom shrugged. "You know where I stand," he'd say, and well, we knew where he stood, way back when, but we also knew he didn't have to stay there. In the South, you learn, and you go on. And Strom, first and foremost, was a man of the South.

Steven Chapman: pundit or psychologist? You make the call:

I think he's called this one spot-on; it would certainly explain why Janeane Garofalo seems to be positioning herself somewhere between Betsy Ross and Ida Tarbell.

The very word "conservative" implies that something is to be conserved, to be kept "in a safe or sound state" (Webster's New Collegiate, 8th edition, 1981). Which begs the question: what, precisely, do conservatives conserve?

Craig Ceely doesn't know for sure, but he knows this much: it sure as hell isn't the Bill of Rights.

Susanna Cornett, on the sort of diversity we actually need:

I really don't think that anyone's motivation for diversity is to provide role models for minorities; if anything, it's to provide minority role models for majority (read "white") students. John Rosenberg has written extensively on this phenomenon.

But beyond this quibble, she's absolutely right: the university needs as many viewpoints, left, right and center, as it can possibly get, and weeding out some of them because they might be politically unpopular, or "uncomfortable" for a segment of the student body, or for whatever reasons are invented next week, is counterproductive at best.

In this month's The Ethical Spectacle, Jay Verkuilen has an interesting essay called Electoral Arithmetic: Why The Way We Count Votes Makes a Big Difference and Why Third Parties Won’t Go Anywhere in the USA.

It is generally accepted that our current electoral system tends to reinforce the two-party system and to push both of those parties closer to the center while marginalizing groups on the fringe. Verkuilen doesn't challenge these assumptions, but he does offer a thought experiment: What if the US went to proportional representation? His answer:

What Verkuilen sees, under these conditions, is a collection of four parties, much like the four which exist in present-day Germany. I'm not so sure. Both of our major parties are indeed marriages of convenience; but while there may be good reasons for Wall Street and social conservatives to part company, they're not likely to do so as long as they see that the Democratic coalition is united, not for what they believe, but by what they don't believe: a Democratic candidate's major selling point today is "I am not a Republican." The six or seven hundred Democrats running for President in 2004 can be reliably counted upon to issue statements that say no more than that on a regular basis.

And proportional representation, while it may get more Greens and Libertarians and whatnot into the House of Representatives, isn't some kind of panacea for all our electoral ills. (A reminder here: when a state has more than one Representative, as do most of them, a switch to proportional representation will inevitably also mean a switch to at-large voting. No more districts, no more redistricting every ten years, no more gerrymandering.) Verkuilen again:

Up to now, there has not been much of a groundswell of popular support for proportional representation, and I don't see it building any time soon, but it does have its enthusiasts. And the Constitution, it should be remembered, specifies how many Congressmen a state can have, not the means by which they are elected; an individual state is presumably free to experiment with proportional representation should its residents so desire.

I am not, however, prepared to argue that proportional representation is some sort of great leap ahead. For one thing, some of the third-party groups which are effectively marginalized by our current system, in my opinion, deserve to be marginalized; further, the prices they will want to exact for participation in a coalition government may well be too high.

And there's one further consideration: if you're persuaded, as I am, that one of the biggest problems with government is that we have too much of it, changing the way we put people in office is window-dressing at best.

It started when three ranchers from South Dakota ranchers and the Livestock Marketing Association — other plaintiffs would come on board — filed suit against the USDA and the Cattlemen's Beef Promotion and Research Board, complaining that the $1-per-head assessment for beef promotion, which started in 1985, amounted to coercion in violation of the First Amendment: the money was used for promotional campaigns, most notably the "Beef: It's What's For Dinner" campaign swathed in music from Aaron Copland's Rodeo, and you'd think there wouldn't be anything wrong with that, but the plaintiffs contended that such a vague campaign supported beef imports just as much as it did domestic beef, and they felt they shouldn't have to contribute to a program that could undercut their market.

In June of last year, a district judge found for the plaintiffs and ruled the mandatory assessment was unconstitutional; yesterday, his ruling was upheld by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

What happens next is unclear. The present beef promotion has been successful enough to halt a long slide in beef consumption in the US. Did the plaintiffs cut off their horns to spite their faces? I'm thinking they did.

Deb's 5 July Pride post got lots of plaudits, and a catcall or two from your friendly neighborhood multiculturalist. You know the type: it's the person who has been complaining for years that "we think we're better than everyone else." It's not so much that we're better, necessarily; it's just that everyone else is worse.

And it's not even slightly worse, either. From the very first comment, posted by visiting curmudgeon Francis W. Porretto:

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to nuke the entire Muslim Middle East — we have friends in Turkey and a blossoming freedom movement in Iran, and I'd hate to see them turned into collateral damage when Allah's useless idiots get the fiery death they deserve — but dammit, Peoples of the World, if you're tired of being treated like second-rate nations, you should first quit acting like third-rate nations.

(Thanks, Deb. You too, FWP.)

In the wake of their appearance before Congress yesterday, Susanna Cornett sees a political future for the Dixie Chicks:

Maybe they can get Viacom to name a network after them.

While Tony Blair attempts to sell world leaders on his concept of the Third Way, Wild at Bleeding Brain explains just what that Third Way really is:

Bill Clinton spoke at the Blair summit, warning of a "fourth way", which came across (to me, anyway) as the Bleeding Brain definition, verbatim, except with "right" and "left" swapped.

Now I'm fond of glinting middles, generally, but the rebranding of "liberal" as "progressive", declaring its opposite an instant pejorative, strikes me as a triumph of style over substance — rather like the Third Way itself, come to think of it.

A proposal from Hooblog to take care of all that "gun violence":

I'm not sure some of the bad guys can even think once, and I wasn't so great with an M-16 the last time they gave me one to use, but otherwise, this seems fairly sane, if a tad expensive. (Then again, for a government program, "a tad expensive" is probably a comparative bargain.)

"An armed society," said Robert A. Heinlein, "is a polite society." And we definitely could use an extra dollop of civility these days.

Vincent Ferrari of Insignificant Thoughts links to this Massachusetts story about a seventyish woman who plowed her Benz into a grocery store, and comments:

Hmmm. Now this suggests a plan.

Both the Democrats and the Republicans, anxious to rack up votes from the AARP crowd, are pushing hard for some sort of prescription drug entitlement for seniors; the only argument seems to be the extent to which means testing is mandated.

So: why not make this entitlement contingent upon driver's-license retesting? You want us to pay for your Synthroid, we're entitled to know whether you're likely to go sliding a Buick LeSabre into the side of a circus tent. Of course, if you realize that you have no farging business behind the wheel and voluntarily give up your license, you won't be subject to this cruel and heartless piece of legislation.

Mr Ferrari once said, in effect, "I'll take my security over their independence any day." To put it slightly less bluntly: if I'm endangering other drivers on a regular basis, the state has a compelling reason — perhaps even a moral obligation — to get my ass off the road. And it doesn't matter how old I am, either.

The California conference of the NAACP has announced that it will file a lawsuit to delay the state's gubernatorial-recall election at least 30 days.

Alice Huffman, president of the conference, says the 7 October date "does not leave enough time to educate minority voters about election issues or encourage them to vote." Two other ballot measures are scheduled, one of which is Proposition 54, Ward Connerly's "Racial Privacy Initiative", which if passed would bar the state from collecting racial and national-origin data. And that's apparently the real issue; Rob Howard, president of the north San Diego County branch of the NAACP, has said, "It is extremely difficult to educate people on Prop. 54 because of the time."

So, if I understand this correctly, the vote to recall Gray Davis must be postponed because it will take more than 60 days to energize opposition to Ward Connerly. This makes even less sense than the usual noises from California, and Andy at The World Wide Rant is properly scornful:

There are times when I regret leaving California in the late Eighties. This isn't one of them.

Matt Deatherage objects to the standard description of the Democratic Leadership Council as "moderate" or "centrist":

For "anyone who is not hewing the conservative line," read "Howard Dean," who has indeed been getting flak from the DLC.

The John Birch reference isn't a cheap shot, either. For example: thirty years ago, the Birchers were just about the only group urging that the US back away from the United Nations, an idea now being bounced around the mainstream.

Still, something sounds odd here. Do the vast majority of Americans really support "progressive" ideas? And if so, why is it that Naderites and Greens and their friends do so poorly in actual elections? Surely it isn't just the buckets full of GOP cash. And if it is the buckets full of GOP cash, doesn't that suggest that the voters' "support" for leftish causes is awfully tenuous at best?

This may be ultimately a matter of semantics. The DLC is clearly to the right of the Democratic base. Does this make them "conservative"? If you think the Democratic base is somewhere in the middle, perhaps it does. I've got my doubts.

Someone called Cam Edwards on his radio show this morning with the following question:

The caller objected to this sort of thing, and Cam says he's not too fond of it either, but:

The alternative, of course, is some sort of governmental court that would pass judgment on every employment application, and I can't imagine anyone wanting that — though it could be argued that we already have it.

My Index of Sphericity is on the high side, and I work in the back of 42nd and Treadmill; I doubt they'd care at this point if the customers saw me, but I don't think they ever would have hired me as a receptionist.

A between-segments filler item on NPR's Morning Edition today reported the renaming of the Daniel Boone Parkway in Kentucky, which will now be the Hal Rogers Parkway. Susanna Cornett is just appalled:

I rather doubt the new name will catch on with the residents. I've never driven the Daniel Boone, but I have driven the Cumberland, and truth be told, nothing about it reminded me even slightly about Louie B. Nunn. Kevin McGehee suggested that this practice should be restricted to dead politicians, which has a certain appeal, but it would definitely throw a spanner (lower-primate variety) into the efforts of some GOP Congressional types who would like to paste Ronald Reagan's name on everything between Bethesda and Alexandria, and frankly, I'm glad my uncle, who devoted his life to parks and recreation in Austin, Texas, got to see a new park with his name on it before he died in 2001.

Memo to Al Sharpton: The news media aren't ignoring your candidacy because you're black; the news media are ignoring your candidacy because you're a national punchline. They'd do the same for Johnny Knoxville if he were running for governor of Tennessee.

One of the traditions at Frosty Troy's Oklahoma Observer is the Christmastime doll list, consisting of a series of oneliners along the lines of "The Carroll Fisher doll: wind it up and it carries drinks across town." Easy to do, harder to do funny.

JunkYardBlog has revisited this tradition with generally amusing results. The Al Gore doll? "[It] would probably be slightly more lifelike than he is, but would take five minutes to say a single sentence." Remind me not to buy batteries.

The envelope was eleven inches long, almost that high, and when I see something like that, I always wonder why someone needs to shriek "Mine's bigger!"

But I opened this one anyway, and well, looky here: a letter from Nancy Pelosi, identified as "House Democratic Leader" under her name. She is indeed that, but considering that this is basically a fundraising letter, and that anyone likely to send her a check presumably already knows this, it strikes me as just a hair superfluous. You don't think so? Fair enough. Maybe just the second iteration is superfluous.

Most of what's left is one of those surveys wherein calling the questions "leading" is rather like calling Monica Bellucci "sorta cute". Here's the second question from Part VII: "How concerned are you that the Roe v. Wade ruling could be overturned with the addition of one more anti-choice Justice to the Supreme Court?"

Suggested donation, incidentally, is $35. The last page is a sheet of preprinted, precut address labels with a nice US flag and my street address; even using every abbreviation in the postal manual, the last character of the address is sliced in two by the die-cutting process. Evidently, when they ran these through the machine, they cut them too far to the left.

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), in an effort to nail down some point or other on global warming, offered a quote from science writer (and blogger) David Appell. By the now-nefarious process of Dowdification, he managed to totally misrepresent Appell's point.

What Appell had said was this:

Inhofe, or more likely his handlers, eliminated the qualification "near the top of this range" and substituted the term "global warming", which served his putative purpose of making scientific types like Appell look like alarmists. For those of us who tend toward the skeptical side on this issue, Inhofe's action actually weakens the skeptical position: it creates the impression that we can't be trusted with the data.

Back at home, Bruce puts the screws to Inhofe:

For "sponsors", read "fossil-fuel promoters".

Basically a Dick Armey with lower pesticide residues, Jim Inhofe's major concern, first and foremost, is the care and feeding of Jim Inhofe. This isn't exactly atypical in the Senate, and his record of nonaccomplishment is better than some Senators' record of antiaccomplishment, but every time he opens his mouth, I think, "Can't we do better than this?"

Five thousand people turned out at Gallagher-Iba Arena in Stillwater to hear six of the nine Democratic presidential candidates (no-shows: Graham, Kerry, Sharpton) attempt to explain why it's necessary to replace George W. Bush with one of them.

On the hot-button issues, Edwards and Lieberman weren't willing to support same-sex marriages, and Braun said they were essentially identical to interracial marriages. Lieberman ventured the view that some of his colleagues wouldn't know a just war if it bit them. Kucinich wants the US to admit that it was a bad idea to invade Iraq. Dean said that he's actually balanced budgets before. But the Quote of the Day came from Gephardt:

The Democratic primary is 3 February. Expect more of the same over the next six months.

The Golden State's list of gubernatorial wannabes carries, at most, one surprise, and it was no surprise to me:

Gallagher's first name.

I need hardly point out that tossing Gray Davis out of Sacramento, while certainly a boon, is only the tiniest of steps toward putting the Golden State's affairs in order. And if that last phrase sounds like California is on its deathbed, lacking only a few formalities before ringing down the curtain and joining the Choir Invisible, well, maybe it is. With half again as many people as any other state, a level of political and cultural fractiousness that would embarrass a middle-school class, and a tendency to regulate not only the things it can but also the things it can't — the timing belt in my car is supposed to be changed at 60,000 miles, unless I'm in California, in which case the Assembly has decreed that it will last until 105,000 — it may be time to put the California Republic out of its, and our, misery, by splitting it in two.

Or, suggests UPI's James C. Bennett, in three:

I don't really think we're going to see the states of Lodi, Moonbat and La Raza in my lifetime, but weirder things have happened, and there's already a Constitutional provision for the division of existing states, in Article IV, Section 3:

The Congress, I think, will look more kindly upon the idea of three states in place of California than they do upon the idea of one state in place of the District of Columbia, which admittedly isn't saying much. Selling it to the California Assembly will be much harder; just getting them to agree on the new borders will be a major accomplishment. Still, the state is almost forty billion dollars in the hole; what's the alternative? Foreclosure?

(Muchas gracias: Geitner Simmons.)

Quite apart from the obvious geographical reference, it's hard to imagine any other state with a political group called "Californians Against the Costly Recall of the Governor"; only in California would you find someone who insists on reminding people that elections — or de-elections — cost money. I am frankly surprised that there isn't some committee somewhere in the Golden State billing itself as "Californians Against Things That Suck".

Fortunately for Web surfers, CATCROTG (don't say it out loud) is accessible at a reasonably-memorable URL: No-Recall.com. One of the items I found there is what purports to be a blog by Mrs Gray Davis, and it's pretty much what you'd expect. One quote I simply must pass on:

In aggregate, this probably isn't enough votes to elect a county commissioner in Oklahoma.

It's not every day I get to quote the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, but here's an opinion piece by Anke Bryson that provokes no small amount of thought. Apparently at least some Germans are wearying of waiting in the welfare line:

And maybe they are. German socialism is extremely expensive, and not just in Deutsche marks (or, lately, euros). But don't expect the electorate to lurch rightward anytime soon:

The East, of course, spent all those years under the Soviet yoke. Still, if there's a substantial number of Germans chafing under their system of government, there's a chance that it will eventually be modified for the better.

(Muchas gracias: Hans Ze Beeman of Cum Grano Salis, who comments: "Well, 51 percent seem to approach the Clue™, that is more than I expected.")

"If you believe this, how can you believe that?" If you're thinking that maybe some of us out here in the blogeoisie are not entirely consistent in our worldviews, well, aldahlia is one step ahead of you, and has compiled some blatant examples, none of which (thank heaven) appear to be mine.

Not that I can make any claim to consistency, mind you.

Pertinent observation from Steven Chapman:

He wasn't talking about John Ashcroft's dog-and-pony show, but he could have been.

Chris Lawrence at Signifying Nothing sees a couple of patterns shaping up in the California circus. For instance:

I'm still wrestling with the concept of "worse governor than Davis" — it leaves a strange, Huffington-shaped hole in the back of my mind — but this scenario makes a certain amount of sense. And if the Gray/Bustamante dynamic seems a lot like Clinton/Gore, well, Chris has thought that one through also:

Jerry Brown once said something about "moving left and right at the same time," perhaps a useful tool in California politics, but one which Gray Davis has been unable to wield lately; I have no reason to think that Cruz Bustamante has any facility for it either. So Bustamante is basically playing to the Democratic base here, with almost the same moves Davis would have employed, which tells me that Bustamante isn't about to separate himself from Davis; with Davis arguing that all these horrible things aren't his fault, I expect Bustamante to argue that continuity — i.e. returning a Democrat to the office — is the most reasonable alternative to keeping the existing one.

There are those who think the whole idea of a recall is horrid, but as Chris says:

Think of it as flexible term limits.

George Packer, in the September/October Mother Jones, on the decaying of the Democrats:

The operative word here, I suspect, is "landslide."

What are the Democrats to do? Can they do anything at this point? Splintered as they are, reduced to a collection of, in Packer's phrase, "small-minded, turf-conscious groups," it's hard to imagine how they can even nominate a Presidential candidate next year, let alone beat the Bush machine. Part of this, I think, is Dubya's willingness to borrow occasionally from the Slick Willie playbook: espouse one set of platitudes for public consumption, embrace another when the votes come down. (What? You thought W's enthusiasm for cutting taxes made him some sort of fiscal conservative? Have you seen the budget lately? Bush suffers Deficit Attention Disorder as acutely as any Seventies Democrat.)

But even if Bush proves, as expected, to be unbeatable, the Democrats are not excused from the obligation to come up with a candidate who is actually credible, and if that means cheesing off substantial portions of the party's base, so be it. As Packer explains:

Stevenson, I remind you, is to Democrats what Barry Goldwater is to Republicans; while he never won the Presidency, his particular set of ideas eventually did get to the White House. I'd like to think there's a JFK-like figure (well, in some respects, anyway) in the Democratic Party's future — even if that future doesn't start until 2008.

2012, even.

Al Franken, interviewed by Salon.com:

Al's evidently never seen Indymedia.

A question that has me wondering, from JessicaHarbour.com:

I haven't lived overseas, except as a functionary of the US military, so I can't really address this question from personal experience, but I rather suspect the following:

• Nobody, not even your average Californian, wants his personal tax bite increased, no matter what may be said for public consumption;
  
• In semi-socialist Europe, they are perhaps more likely to shrug and say, "Well, what can you do?" and pay the bill without complaint.
  

At least, that's how it looks to me.

An editorial by Robert A. Martin in The Montgomery Independent hints that Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore might be removed from office, not for violating a direct order, but for being "mentally unable to perform his duties".

Susanna Cornett is annoyed with this notion:

Nice shot. If she'd left it at that, it would have rated Zinger status. Then she played the anti-religion card:

I read the passage in question, and I didn't see that at all. I concede that she is more practiced than I at the art of ferreting out these things, but I think the average reader of the Montgomery paper, or of most papers, can distinguish between someone on some sort of quixotic crusade (such as Mr. Justice Moore) and someone who has actually gone off the deep end thinking he was doing the will of God. Mr Martin can be faulted here, I think, for relying too much on the opinions of "some court officials," but I'm not convinced he's equating (or even conflating) religion and insanity. If anything, I think he's managed to persuade himself that Roy Moore is an otherwise-okay sort of guy who happens to need treatment, an argument you'd hear more often in a courtroom where one of those fellows who has gone off the deep end is being tried — which indicates that Susanna Cornett's Insanity defense? title, at least, is precisely correct.

Up at Better Living Through Blogging, Dave presents the Top One reason why he wouldn't vote for General Clark.

Interestingly — and not all that surprisingly — it's the same reason cited by Bill Quick.

Bruce thinks we're being taken for fools:

Well, yes, I suppose they are. On the other hand, I'd rather I had it than they had it; I am (ever so slightly) less irresponsible with my money than they are. And I need hardly point out that if they didn't take so much in the first place, they wouldn't feel compelled to issue a rebate.

Besides, MasterCard will balk if I try to write too many of those convenience checks; Congress merely votes for an increase in the debt ceiling.

The ever-generous Michele has made it possible for you to set free your inner Tom Ridge.

Without surgery, yet.

If there's anything to that "governing best = governing least" stuff, Governor Henry may already be on his way into the history books. Cam Edwards has already twitted the Guv for his extensive vacation schedule, and now the OkiePundit has uncovered yet another bowlful of junket:

Actually, one can hear the Palestinian viewpoint pretty well while in Oklahoma City. Basically, if you've seen one suicide bomber (and if you've watched the news for more than twenty minutes this year, you have), you've seen them all, and with them you've seen the Palestinian viewpoint in its entirety: anything else they may say is just window-dressing, and not good window-dressing at that.

Not that you should expect any other reaction from someone who was physically rattled by the Oklahoma City bombing, and who was utterly disgusted by the spectacle of Palestinians cheering in the streets after 9/11.

Justin Katz found this letter in the Providence Journal:

Says Katz:

Moonbat Central in California has opened a branch office, maybe?

The amazing Bill Whittle sums up the state of the nation:

(In case you missed it, here's my take on where we were and where we should be going.)

The ever-inventive Greg Hlatky takes a look at the situation on December 7, 1943. Among other things, Kwajalein and Nauru are under assault by the Navy's Task Force 50, a Canadian soldier is killed in fighting near the Moro River in Italy, and FDR, Churchill and Turkish President Ismet Inonu are meeting in Cairo. Two years into that war, and Hlatky notes:

As punchlines go, that's the punchiest one of the day.

Bruce suggests a new drinking game: take a shot every time the President "uses 9-11 to justify his policy du jour."

I wonder if all these booze bottles are recyclable....

By most accounts, men outnumber women in the talk-radio audience, and according to Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at USC's Annenberg School of Communications, there's a reason for it:

(Found by John Rosenberg, who comments: "I wonder what Kaplan would say if he weren't such a non-partisan, objective scholar.")

Or at least once more, anyway.

On 17 April 2004, more than a century after the end of the Civil War Between The States For Southern Independence, or whatever you want to call it, the last Confederate war dead will be laid to rest in Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, S.C.

The crew of the submarine CSS Hunley, lost when the sub sank in February 1864 — the vessel was pulled off the ocean floor in 2000 — will be buried with full military honors, and both submarine buffs and members of reenactment societies are likely to turn out in full force.

And maybe some picketers, too; there's an online petition to ask the Hunley Commission, which has arranged for the ceremony, to bar the appearance of the US flag on the premises, and there are hints of local protests as well. Why? Well, of course, this was the Union flag (albeit with a different number of stars), and the Union, for those sailors, was the enemy.

Hunley Commission chair Glenn McConnell finds this incomprehensible. He's a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and "at the beginning of every meeting, we pledge allegiance to the US flag."

I'm not quite sure what I think of this just yet.

Rumor has it that General Wesley Clark may be ready to enter the Presidential race.

What's the quickest way to torpedo any prospective Clark support among bloggers?

You got it: an endorsement from Michael Moore.

When, exactly, did Yasser Arafat, derided by blogdom as "The World's Oldest Terrorist", ascend to the status of a Head of State? The more I think about this, the more baffling I find it; it's like Al Capone being given an honorary governorship.

Early in his Presidency, George W. Bush made it clear that he wasn't keen on dealing with Arafat, but for some inscrutable reason the State Department seems to want to keep Arafat, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, in business long enough to make their vaunted "roadmap" work. Well, the map is folded and then some — it's ragged and dog-eared and barely even recognizable anymore — and yet State still seems to want to keep Arafat around.

The Israelis, for their part, are still talking about sending Arafat into exile, and more than one minister has suggested that they might as well kill him. I'm not sure either of these is such a great idea: exile will merely give Arafat an opportunity to regroup his forces elsewhere, and killing him — well, the Arab world loves its martyrs, and loves to avenge their deaths. The solution, I think, is going to have to be a Latin American-style "disappearance", after which which no one will know for sure whether he's alive or dead. It might be worth it to hire some al-Jazeera technicians to fake up some regular TV appearances by Arafat during his, um, absence — hey, they do a bang-up job of keeping Osama bin Laden "alive" — and preserve the mystique. Under this plan, everybody wins: the Israelis get plausible deniability, the Palestinians get the leadership they deserve (and they say nature hates a vacuum), and Colin Powell gets someone to clean out his garage once a week.

And anyway, if we have to have a World's Oldest Terrorist, Fidel Castro is three years older than Yasser Arafat, and never mind how he got to be a Head of State.

...why can't we exile Gray Davis?

"In assessing the public interest," said the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, "the balance falls heavily in favor of postponing the election for a few months." And when the six offending counties fail to get their new voting systems in place on time?

Now here's a particularly sickening scenario: the Supreme Court agrees to hear an appeal of this decision, but not until the beginning of the Court's regular session.

Which begins on the 6th of October, one day before the scheduled recall election.

What is it going to take to rid ourselves of Gray Davis? Are we going to have to call in Israeli security?

Cinderella Bloggerfeller turns up a Le Figaro piece about the ostensible American empire, and why if it did not exist it would be necessary to invent it. Guy Sorman writes:

And this was published in France, mind you. Admittedly, Le Figaro isn't the biggest name in French publishing — think of it as the Gallic version of The Washington Times without the Korean cash flow — but you can be certain that a copy of this landed on Jacques Chirac's desk.

Usually when I see tidy young people clustered at an intersection, I assume they're conducting a charity car wash. This made no sense at the northwest corner of Pennsylvania and the Northwest Distressway today, since (1) there's already a car wash there, on the southwest corner, and (2) even slowing down through this intersection is a good way to get killed.

Fortunately, I can read fairly quickly, and the signs this bunch was carrying didn't offer to scrub the crud off my car; they were trying to drum up support for Democratic Presidential candidate Howard Dean. Inasmuch as the 2004 primary in this state is fairly early — 3 February, the week after New Hampshire — I suppose that it's not too early for this sort of thing, but I question their location: just east of this intersection are the two swankiest (by Oklahoma City standards, anyway) enclosed retail compounds in town, the sort of place where you'd think there'd be little support for a rustic Vermonter, especially a leftish rustic Vermonter. Then again, the Democratic party tends to rely more on high-dollar donors than does the GOP.

Somewhere in a comment last night, I made the following observation:

Andrea Harris extends the notion and amplifies it, with the sarcasm control turned up to the max:

But of course. It's right there on the screen; it must therefore be true. This is precisely how the late Osama bin Laden gets away with continuing to make videos.

This, however, is the money quote:

I would say something here about "the average housewife in Iowa works more than 35 hours a week and has air conditioning," but that would be piling on, don't you think?

Yesterday Senator John Edwards dropped into McAlester on a campaign trip, which is noteworthy mostly because McAlester, while the largest city in southeast Oklahoma, is still pretty much a small town wrapped around a prison. Still, the southeastern quarter is one of the few places in the state where Democrats still dominate, so there's good reason for Edwards to be here.

He didn't say much he hadn't said before; he reiterated his opposition to the wholesale closing of military bases — which plays well in McAlester, home of the Army Ammunition Depot — and played up his blue-collar origins: "I believe in an America where the son of a mill worker can beat the son of a president."

I really haven't given a whole lot of thought to the John Birch Society (not to be confused with the Birch John Society, dedicated to the restoration of wooden toilet seats to their original well-varnished glory) lately; at best, it's seemed to me to be nothing more than a punchline waiting for a desperate Fox network to launch That 50s Show.

Then I turned a corner off 62 today, and there was an actual Bircher billboard, with the classic Bircher slogan: Get US out! of the United Nations! Of course, now it refers you, not to the nearest American Opinion bookstore, but to a Web site. And given the generally low regard in which the UN is held in some circles these days, it's probably as good a time as any for the Birchers to jump-start their organization. There are, to be sure, a lot fewer card-carrying Communists these days, and they tend to hang out, conveniently, in countries starting with C (China, Cuba, the northern half of Corea), but it's not like we're running short of people who are threatening, in the classic Khrushchev style, to bury us.

And besides, if there's room in the twenty-first century for the Flat Earth Society, there simply has to be a place for the followers of John Birch.

What Ann Coulter thinks of Wesley Clark:

The scary part? I think she's being generous.

"We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

Reportedly, this was the rationale given by an American officer for torching a Vietnamese village to keep it from becoming a Vietcong sanctuary.

Rather unexpectedly, I was reminded of this today, in a wholly-different context. In a piece on law.com, Douglas Laycock, writing on the University of Michigan affirmative-action cases, declares:

John Rosenberg translates:

Where's my old "Kill for Peace" button?

Hardly anyone has actually come out in favor of telemarketing this week, which should surprise no one.

Just the same, The Oklahoman this morning had a piece about one of the plaintiffs in the suit that alleged the FTC had no authority to administer the national do-not-call list. Rick Ratliff, who runs a local security-systems company, stands by his position:

I've driven down I-40 rather more often than I'd like, and I don't remember ever having to interrupt that driving to look at a billboard, but maybe that's just me.

And standard (formerly "third-class") mail (the Postal Service gets livid when you call it "junk") in effect subsidizes the classes that you actually want, so perhaps the solution is for telemarketers to pay my phone bill.

R. Scott Moxley, writing in the leftish Orange County Weekly, says that liberals should embrace the candidacy of Tom McClintock:

Issues of character aside, the biggest issue facing California isn't an item in McClintock's litany of standard social-conservative gripes; it's the financial bungling of Davis & Co. Precisely why, says Moxley, it's the perfect time for McClintock:

For those of us for whom it's more important to stop the patient's bleeding than to arrange for his facelift, this makes a fair amount of sense. And a successful McClintock term might actually sweep some of the moonbats in Sacramento out of their Assembly seats next time around.

(Via Matt Welch)

The Democratic Party of South Carolina has been experiencing financial problems of late, and party chairman Joe Erwin, a marketroid by trade, proposes to take up the slack by selling corporate sponsorships.

By imprinting campaign materials — even primary-election ballots — with corporate logos, Erwin hopes to cover the half-million-dollar cost of the Presidential primary next February. (In South Carolina, the parties pay for their own primaries; the state kicks in no funding.)

And it might even work. It seems to me that if, say, Charmin has no trouble showing a bear using its product in the woods, they shouldn't shy away from buying ad space on a reprint of the party platform.

Just when you thought there couldn't possibly be any more last-minute revelations about the Running Man, Xrlq (pronounced "Xrlq") delivers the goods.

Charles Austin may not be feeling well, but he can still squeeze off a barb with the best of them.

The polls close at 8 pm California time. What happens after that?

Count on it.

Jonah Goldberg reports:

It could be worse. Given CNN's tendency to come up with hopelessly mangled captions, they might just as easily have tarred Arnold as a "Hitler Groping Serial Lover".

It is, of course, a foregone conclusion that should the Democrats not like the election results — and they won't — there will be delaying tactics not seen since the introduction of the shot clock. (Or, as McGehee puts it, the "flying monkeys have already descended on The Fugue State to try to keep Gray Davis in office as Governor for an additional three or four minutes.")

In anticipation of this event, Cold Fury has already ginned up a suitable poster, which you will undoubtedly see on sites full of FOG (Friends of Gray).

And probably uncredited, too.

One of our language mavens — probably Edwin Newman, author of Strictly Speaking — once commented on the tendency of American news media to refer to Salvador Allende as the Marxist president of Chile: "You would almost think that 'Marxist President' had been the name of the office to which Allende had been elected."

Similar notions went through my head during NPR's Morning Edition today, about the third time Bob Edwards and friends described Arnold Schwarzenegger's new job as "Republican Governor of California."

From her perch in Toronto, Debbye's sized up the California results very well:

Of course, there are those who remain convinced that it was all part of an Evil GOP Scheme. For example:

If the Republicans had had any sense, they would have come up with someone other than Bill Simon, a right-wing Walter Mondale minus the charisma, to run against the Gray Eminence in 2002; they would never, ever have turned to the likes of the Terminator. The initial recall push was indeed the brainchild of an actual Republican, but nobody is arguing with a straight face that there weren't Democrats anxious to see Davis given the boot, and considering the sheer number of wicked plots attributed to the Republicans in recent years, it's amazing how few of them have actually worked: were the GOP truly in thrall to Satan, I'd be forced to conclude that the Prince of Darkness was way past his prime and should probably be replaced. Or recalled, even.

Now when you see recall movements catching fire in other places that have been run as badly as California — say, Zimbabwe — then you can start to think of it as a trend.

Marc Levin's You might be a leftist if... has gotten lots of play in blogdom, where the center often seems right of center.

The best comedy premises, of course, work just as well when you give them a quick 180-degree spin, and Aldahlia proves that she's very much up to the task.

And in the tradition of the fence-straddling centrist, I must report that there are items on both lists that sound something like me.

"I have never seen the middle class so stretched," said Senator Joseph Lieberman at a gathering at Fairview Baptist Church this morning. Unsurprisingly, he wants to jigger the tax brackets, preferably in a way that de-jiggers the Bush administration's changes over the past couple of years. I suspect the Senator's definition of "middle class" might be slightly different from yours or mine.

Dennis Kucinich is due in later today, and he too will probably say something about the beleaguered middle class.

Ah, the joys of an early primary.

(Update, 8:25 pm: Kucinich's pitch to us Average Folk involves dropping out of NAFTA and the WTO.)

If you thought that Diversity Seminar you attended in college was intended to touch people's hearts and change their minds, Surlypundit has ascertained otherwise:

Given the tendency of those "new rules" to extend the definition of "racism" as far as possible, it's hard to take these gatherings at all seriously; while racism clearly exists, and takes some truly heinous forms sometimes, the committee approach isn't, and likely never will be, anything resembling a solution. As wiser folk than I have said, the change has to come from within. For many, it has. For others, it will take longer.

Not to be confused with that other UPN, which is a standard capitalist outlet that is losing money faster than the Treasury can print it.

But the planned "liberal network" envisioned by the Left is widely expected to lose money just as fast, and without the benefit of Jake 2.0 or WWE Smackdown! either. UMLGuy, though, says that it really doesn't matter:

Well, at least it isn't Homeboys in Outer Space.

"The far right's dream judge."

That's what Ralph Neas of People for the American Way says about California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, nominated by President Bush to fill one of three vacancies on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. And being an African-American woman won't get Justice Brown a pass from the Congressional Black Caucus, either; DC House delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton complains that Brown is "cut from the same cloth as Clarence Thomas," and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) claims that Brown suggested that "affirmative action resembled segregationist laws from the Jim Crow era."

Which, of course, is patently false. Under Jim Crow, the majority was empowered to make foolish decisions at the expense of minorities; under affirmative action, minorities are empowered to make foolish decisions at the expense of the majority. No resemblance whatsoever.

(With thanks to Jerry Scharf and John Rosenberg.)

Chris Lawrence sees the center, and finds it somewhere between wanting and nonexistent:

(Links added by me.) I suppose I qualify as None of the Above, but that qualifies me as, well, nothing:

Give me two out of three; I'm definitely for liberty and equality, and violently opposed to hard work. :)

I'm usually good for a couple of incoherent pieces a day myself, though I don't have anywhere near the audience of The New York Times.

Still, I have to admit that Chris has me dead to rights. Not that I've ever claimed to have a consistent, ideological belief system extending beyond "This really sucks, you know?"

Stuart Buck has been watching the Janice Rogers Brown confirmation hearings, and he's got a question:

And I suspect they'll keep repeating this theme so long as their strategy, such as it is, depends on painting as many Republicans as "extremist" as they possibly can.

From the official statement of John Mellencamp (and his lovely wife Elaine) on the way things are allegedly crumblin' down:

Well, I'd certainly be upset if someone were manipulating my overalls.

Actually, the last paragraph would be quite wonderful were it not for the one preceding it, which merely recites the standard anti-Bush litany to eye-glazing effect. Unlike the Dixie Chicks before him, Mellencamp doesn't come off here as opportunistic, and I don't expect him to have to perform acts of damage control as a result of this broadside, but I am surprised to see him hewing so closely to a line he neither invented nor improved upon.

I'm not one of those people who believe that celebrity-type persons have nothing to say about the human condition or political situations. On the other hand, I don't cut them any slack for being famous, either. And if Mellencamp gets fisked over this piece, well, ain't that America?

Providian Financial, the ninth-largest credit-card issuer in the US, will offer an affinity card to supporters of the Democratic Party. Cardholders will earn rebates on their purchases which they can designate for donation to the Democratic National Committee, and can earn rewards by donating directly to the DNC.

Given the Democrats' desire to don the mantle of the Party of Fiscal Responsibility, what with Bush administration budget deficits running into the bazillions these days, I find it amusing that they'd strike a deal with a credit-card company that built its business on customers with lousy credit ratings.

The GOP? They already have a card.

You could always take that tedious test at The Christian Science Monitor, or you can try the ideology on for size with Bruce's Neocon Simulator.

(If anyone cares, the Monitor thinks I'm a realist. The results are, as they say, "not scientific".)

This is, you should pardon the expression, rich.

Johnson County, Kansas, one of the wealthiest counties in the country, last year passed a three-year, 0.25-cent sales tax increase to raise money for the six county school districts.

Wyandotte County, just to the north (it includes the city of Kansas City, Kansas), has now sued those districts and the commissioners of Johnson County for violating Kansas' equal-opportunity education laws; apparently the $200 extra per pupil now available to Johnson County students puts them at an unfair advantage.

"We want everyone to have the same opportunities, and we want those opportunities to be few and far between." They're not saying so with their words, but they're certainly saying so with their actions.

From Irreconcilable Musings:

In the meantime, what's to stop Wyandotte County from enacting some form of supplemental funding in their schools? Naw. Too much like taxation. If we can't keep up with the Johnsons, let's just drag the Johnsons down.

Dr Michael Newdow, physician and atheist, the man who will argue before the Supreme Court next year that the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment, has let it be known that he has more legal challenges coming up.

The Court — minus Justice Scalia, who has recused himself — is expected to hear Newdow's argument next spring. The "In God We Trust" motto on US currency is just one of Newdow's proposed future targets.

(Via Tongue Tied)

As the saying goes, the American system of health care is the second worst in the world, with all the others tied for first; both left and right find it a suitable target, though the right tends to be somewhat more forgiving because, after all, it's making money.

James Joyner has the gumption to utter the S-phrase:

Government as gatekeeper — well, you know how effective they are.

The insurance industry as gatekeeper — well, you know how effective they are.

So, if we're stuck between a rock and a hard place, which way do we steer? Before we answer, Bruce would like an answer to this:

Of course, you don't buy your car insurance through your employer, either. At least, you shouldn't.

But it's a valid point. There are vendors of individual health-care policies, but the prices would make your nose bleed, and the bleeding is probably not covered. The usual arguments for group policies — economies of scale and such — make some sort of sense; still, there's something a trifle disconcerting about ten or a hundred or fifty thousand people all having the same coverage, when no two of them have exactly the same needs.

So would I be better off if I could persuade the powers that be at 42nd and Treadmill to leave me out of the group policy and pay me the $3500 (I'm guessing) a year directly? Maybe. In only one of the last five years did my actual medical expenses exceed three grand. Of course, this doesn't mean that they will continue to remain relatively low. But it seems like a reasonable argument for a policy that kicks in only at very high levels — $10,000 deductible? — backed up by some form of savings, perhaps the Medical Savings Account that Democrats, by and large, have resisted.

This sort of scheme would work for me; it would probably not work for someone making $6.25 an hour. I think Bruce would agree that we would be better off if each of us had more individual say in the shape of our health-care coverage, though he seems to be thinking more along the lines of a co-op:

Still, it's a market-based solution he's proposing, which a single-payer system isn't. I am concerned that whatever collective he envisions, be it a general cooperative or an affinity group, will be faced with some of the same issues facing employer-benefit systems, though it's generally a lot less common to be tossed out of an affinity group than to be thrown out of work.

One thing seems certain: we're not going to have the patchwork system we have now forever. Either health care will become less of an obstacle, or the government will come up with some fairly godawful proposal to take it over, just to shut us up. Let's hope that the system is amenable to improvements while it's still alive.

Dean Esmay sums up his feelings (which are not so far from my own) about Howard Dean:

Dewey? You bet we do. And if enough of us do, perhaps we can embarrass the Chicago Tribune again.

According to P. J. O'Rourke, it's a tenet of liberal faith that there are, in fact, people too poor to pick up their lawn.

Now I grew up reading P. J. in National Lampoon, so I have a tendency to assume that there's some undefined but discernible hyperbole in anything he says, but a comment from Bruce, affixed to this item, makes me wonder:

And right after I read that, up pops (courtesy of Kimberly Swygert) this:

An enormous barrier?

People who take so little responsibility for themselves that they can't follow directions this simple deserve to have someone telling them how to live.

And to clean up their damn yard while they're at it.

The Catalogue for Philanthopy has issued its annual Generosity Index — tax years being the indeterminate things they are, the 2003 Index is based on complete 2001 tax figures — and it's chock full of numbers.

The Index is determined by comparing the Having Rank of a state (how much money its taxpayers have) to the Giving Rank (what percentage they actually contribute to charity). A state that has little money but which manages to make bigger donations will therefore rank higher on the Index than a wealthier state with a greater proportion of skinflints. And indeed, Mississippians, seemingly always near the bottom of the per-capita charts, have the lowest income but the sixth-highest donation ratio, enough of a divergence to put them at the top of the Index. Oklahoma, 43rd in income and 10th in giving, ranks fourth.

Here's where it gets interesting. OpinionJournal's Taste section looks at the figures and notes the following:

How did this happen?

File this under "Things that make you go Hmmmm...."

(Muchas gracias: Wylie in Norman.)

Dean Esmay makes the case for privatizing Social Security, a case you've heard before and are likely to hear again and again, at least until the Washington scaremongers catch on.

Just for the sake of argument, here are the points likely to be raised by opponents, as described by me five and a half years ago in Vent #94:

It's possible to make money when the market is down, although it does require some knowledge of how markets work. Still, it's nothing you can't figure out by reading the financial pages in the Daily Doorstop. And if you want to complain that people shouldn't have to know anything to have a retirement income, well, fine, but if you insist on a right to be uninformed, you also must accept the consequences that come from exercising that right.

(Disclosure: We've had two years of a down market; I've lost essentially nothing, and I'm a semi-talented amateur at best.)

The objection that Wall Street might profit is also bogus, unless you have the time to monitor your investments yourself 24/7 and swap them around as needed — in which case you probably don't have time for an actual job in the first place.

And one more thing I'd like to mention while I'm at it: should I drop dead at work, I will get basically zip from everything I've put into the Social Security system. That's zero. Nada. Bupkes. If I owned these funds, at least the kids would get something for my trouble.

The ABC News political column The Note lists 18 essential truths about Howard Dean, and some of them are choice:

Hmmm. There may be hope for the guy yet. On the other hand, Bush will carry Oklahoma even if the Democrats nominate Monica Bellucci.

(Muchas gracias: Ara Rubyan.)

Where have we heard this?

Oklahoma 77, Texas A&M zip? Well, yes, but that's not the subject of today's Oklahoman editorial:

Okay, the football metaphor is strained and then some, even by Oklahoma standards. But it fits the situation neatly enough, and besides, we beat the spread.

A desideratum for the campaign trail, courtesy of Lileks:

Where's Mike Godwin when you need him?

And please note that in most American media, George Soros is described as a "philanthropist," a term you'll seldom see attached to, say, Richard Mellon Scaife.

The Left is constantly badmouthing the military, says Baldilocks:

And she offers one word of advice to these naysayers:

Well, okay, two words.

I would add only that one reason the American left objects to the military is that the military is by nature authoritarian — you do what you're told to do — which conflicts with the freewheeling, spree-like existence to which they aspire. Of course, to be admitted to their Society of Sybarites, you must subscribe to the scripture, sell your SUV, support subversion, and otherwise suck up to the subculture. It's exactly as authoritarian as the military, except you're allowed to display unearned awards.

You know, I'm looking at the page as I type, and I still don't quite believe it.

But what the hell. If I'm going to have Unusual Action Figures around the house, I suppose I'd rather have Ann Coulter than, say, the Judge from Pink Floyd The Wall.

(With thanks to the iconic Debbye Stratigacos for the former link, and the laconic Fark.com for the latter.)

I couldn't tell you who started that silly business about William Jefferson Clinton being the "first black President" — might have been the Big He himself, for all I know — but Baldilocks is more than happy to finish it off, once and for all.

Pertinent quote:

And a damned expensive empty suit at that.

Laredd at Today's Shoes is not impressed with the general run of demonstrators in town today:

Nor do they get any Brownie points for their politics:

I have always been somewhat perplexed by the insistence that "Globalization is bad," that people in Third World hellholes are somehow better off starving to death than toiling long hours for not much money for some Evil Capitalist. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to improve conditions for these folks, but as a practical matter, we're not going to turn Indonesia into Indianapolis.

Kevin Drum's Calpundit is running a statement from Barbara Maynard, who represents the two UFCW locals striking Los Angeles-area grocery stores, and she's got a question that deserves an answer:

I've been to one Wal-Mart Supercenter, and while it was fairly sanitary — people are always telling me how grubby Wal-Mart stores are, for some reason — it had the general ambiance of a bus station, and I didn't feel compelled to go back again; well, yeah, I might save a couple of bucks on a basket, but do I really want to put myself through that again?

Maybe this is another case of "maybe it's just me." I've been on Poverty Row before, and it's a genuinely lousy place to live, but the experience did not instill in me a desire to squeeze every last dime until FDR screams in pain; it may be important for some people's sense of self — and, for that matter, for the Wal-Mart business model — to believe that they've paid the absolute lowest possible price for something, but it doesn't do a thing for me. I bought my last car from one of those "no-haggle" dealerships, and while I might have been able to save a couple hundred bucks somewhere else in the state — Oklahoma is not exactly overrun with Mazda stores — what's the point on a $20,000 car? It's like driving 30 miles to save two cents a gallon on gas.

And sometimes there are intangibles involved. For the new house, I'm buying a truckload of appliances, and there was never any question where I was going to get them: I haven't had that many dealings with Sears in recent years, but they've always treated me well, and as a former Reservist, I appreciate what they're doing for present Reservists.

There is little doubt that the arrival of that first Wal-Mart strikes fear into the hearts of local retailers, and not everyone welcomes them with open arms. I rather think the trend will last a while: Wal-Mart will continue to grow, and a substantial number of people, whatever their reasons, will continue to refuse to set foot in the place. Whether that number is substantial enough to keep UFCW grocery personnel from taking what they see as a giant step backwards, I can't say, but I'm rather hoping it is, if only because, well, I'm not the sort of person who roots for Godzilla and Goliath, even if that is the way to bet.

Plymouth, 1620.

Baghdad, 2003.

What could they possibly have in common?

Mark Pierce at Earthly Passions explains it all, and just in time, too.

Ted Rall has endorsed Howard Dean.

Oh, yeah, that'll help him a whole lot.

(Via Little Green Footballs)

(Update, 4:30 pm, 24 November: LGF [same link] reports that the Deanites have backed away considerably from their wholehearted embrace of Rall, perhaps because they're aware that blogdom considers Ted Rall to be the moral equivalent of a flaring hemorrhoid.)

A poll by The Oklahoman estimates support for the various Democratic candidates for President in the Sooner State:

Margin for error is 5.7 percent, but the really telling figure is the 27 percent who were undecided or declined to answer.

Inexplicably, Moseley Braun did not file to enter the Oklahoma primary.

It's not easy being a Democrat sometimes, as Jeff Lawson notes:

Much the same situation prevails north of the Red River; the only question is whether W. will beat the spread. And those of us who are persuaded that Dr. Dean should go back to Montpelier and contemplate the extent of media concentration and metrosexuality in the Soviet Union are not at all heartened by his front-runner status. I mean, if we really wanted someone in the White House who fumbles when he goes off-message — well, we already have that, don't we?

In 2000, I found Al Gore so unpalatable that I marked the box for Harry Browne. (This was obviously before Browne decided that 9/11 was our fault, so save the sneers, Bucky.) I have no idea what I'm going to do in 2004, but, like Jeff, I don't plan to lose much sleep over it.

I think we can now safely say that John Kerry is effing desperate.

Much has been said in blogdom about the January Vanity Fair and its Vicky Ward profile, with pictures, of Joseph C. Wilson and his wife, identified as "C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame," and not much of it has been favorable.

But Wilson and Plame aside, there's plenty to dislike in this issue of V.F., and the most dislikable bit is the opening letter from editor Graydon Carter, which closes with this startling statement:

Hello, Graydon? Did you even see The Producers? However questionable Max and Leo's motivations — well, Max's, anyway — what they created was a hit, a sensation, a work of staggering popularity: "This could run for years!" exults one member of the audience. And yes, they oversold it by about 25,000 percent, for which a price will undoubtedly be exacted some day, but Springtime for Baghdad, so to speak, is clearly an example of the general public being way out in front of the critics and pundits.

Not to mention the occasional editor.

Bruce calls his blog This Is Class Warfare, and this item (8 December), as well as any, explains what he means:

Well, yes, money does enhance one's desirability, but I wouldn't characterize it as a "prejudice"; it's simply a part of the definition of capitalism as we know it. On the other hand, people who manage to work the system well enough to climb a rung or two on the ladder tend to be among the system's most ardent defenders, which would seem to confirm the "sense of legitimacy" statement.

To continue:

I'm pretty good at lip service, myself.

"There is no rich without poor," he says, and mathematically that's certainly true: if some people have above-average incomes, some others will fall below average. And while wealth is no doubt handy, I see it more as a tool for me to do what I want rather than a tool to compel others to do what I want. If I ever acquire any, I'll let you know how it works out.

Finally:

You can say "I am against inequality," but you can just as easily say "I am against tidal waves" with exactly the same results. Inequality clearly exists. Further, I think it always will exist; there's simply no way to eliminate it so long as people are people and not just theoretical constructs. As a nation, we are dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal; what happens after that is anybody's guess.

"I've been picking buckshot out of my rear end in some of these debates," said Howard Dean, as reported by William Saletan in Slate.

John Rosenberg begs to differ:

It's time to send Dr. Dean to one of those NRA Basic Firearm Training Courses — and then, of course, the showers.

I mean, who but Saddam would hide out in a farmhouse with $750,000 in cash?

His babies have already been thrown out with the Baath water, putting the "die" back into "dynasty". And there's nothing quite so enjoyable as finishing the job.

The Professor, in the meantime, has some thoughts on what to do with Saddam, at least one of which involves a plastic-shredding device.

The Cabinet Man, guest-blogging at WeckUpToThees!, recounts his experience with trying to get a concealed-carry permit from the state of Maryland, and there's something seriously wrong with this picture:

This is truly insane. You have to prove you're likely to be attacked to get a carry permit? This makes as much sense as requiring you to have cavities before you can buy dental insurance. Maybe even less.

Packing.org has seen this before:

Then again, Maryland doesn't think much of the right to keep and bear arms, anyway. Here's an opinion from the Attorney General [requires Adobe Acrobat Reader] on one of the state's multitudinous gun-control laws:

Legal cite offered: Onderdonk v. Handgun Permit Review Board, 44 Md. App. 132, 407 A.2d 763 (1979).

Despite that declared irrelevance, Maryland contends:

Given Maryland's crime rate, I suspect that eventually everyone in the state will qualify for concealed-carry — but why should they have to wait that long?

At least if you can get a Maryland permit, it will be honored while you visit Oklahoma.

John Cleese, who wouldn't become a Freemason now if you went down on your lousy stinking knees and begged him, is contemplating running for Mayor of Santa Barbara, California.

It would be worth it just to see him open a Council meeting with "And now for something completely different."

There is, so far as I can tell, no truth to the rumor that Mayor Marty Blum responded to this news with "Well, he's scarcely a bloody replacement, is he?"

(Via Fark)

According to an NPR report, Bill Curry, who lost to John G. Rowland in the 2002 race for governor of Connecticut, says that the Rowland administration's seemingly-endless stream of ethics violations has turned the Nutmeg State into "Louisiana with foliage."

Now there's a visual.

Chris Casteel of The Oklahoman's Washington bureau passes on the rumor that retiring Senators Don Nickles and John Breaux will set up their own lobbying firm after leaving office, a premise that Nickles, for now anyway, is unwilling to confirm.

Amusingly, a small band of unrepentant Trotskyites described Breaux's retirement as "part of a protracted political process, which amounts to the voluntary surrender of power by the Democratic Party." Were I a Democratic operative, I'd want to slap down this notion, but I probably wouldn't be able to because it would involve being unkind to socialists.

Emperor Misha graciously translates the most recent Ridge-O-Gram:

Says it all, or at least all that anyone is willing to say.

So when are California Democrats going to petition the US Geological Survey to rename the tectonic discontinuity that spawned yesterday's earthquake on the Central Coast to "George W. Bush's Fault"?

John Rosenberg explains Howard Dean's sudden embrace of Christianity:

And it's not going to work, either — at least in my neck of the woods. The Bible is thumped as loudly in Oklahoma as it is anywhere in the nation, and the folks making this, um, joyful noise aren't about to be taken in by Dr. Dean's "I'm really one of you" pitch; they will consider it to be part of the same scam he ran when he said he wanted to be the candidate of guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks.

Still, it will be amusing to watch this play out, just to see what quantity of backpedaling Dean winds up doing; I'm guessing that it will be sufficient to get him forever enshrined as the Anti-Lance Armstrong.

The regular reader (you know who you are) will no doubt have spotted what appears to be a certain animus toward Vermont governor (and, of late, Presidential candidate) Howard Dean, who has always struck me as what you'd get if you could teach George McGovern how to clean a rifle.

It's not that I have anything against Dean personally, although some of his supporters drive me up the wall, and the claim that he can actually beat George W. Bush in November will be even more annoying should it by some fluke turn out to be true.

Not everyone is convinced that Dean will be the next President, or will in losing blaze a trail for a Democratic comeback in 2008. Francis W. Porretto predicts:

I rather hope it's the latter, if only because I don't feel up to changing my registration should it be the former. And while people in blue states seem to be enthusiastic, nothing happening in Oklahoma, a state where even the soil is red, would lead me to believe that Howard Dean is going to win the Democratic primary here, let alone pick up our seven electoral votes.

Meanwhile, rival Democratic candidate Michael Cooper has gotten a jump on the competition by revealing the new Dean campaign logo, which, says Cooper, addresses Dean's two favorite activities in a single graphic. Curiously, backpedaling, as suggested by me, is not one of them.

Cam Edwards was talking about BSE and Howard Dean on his radio show this morning, and it was inevitable that the two threads would cross.

"The cow," Dean might say, "has a right to be mad."

Cam was kidding. I think.

This would be Tim Bueler, seventeen, a junior at Rancho Cotate High School in Rohnert Park, California, and the administration has suggested he take a couple of days off from class until the heat dies down.

Bueler, it seems, is the founder of the Conservative Club, a student organization with about 50 members (out of a student body of just over 2000), and after he wrote a piece for the club's newsletter which called for a crackdown on illegal immigration, he started receiving threats from Latino students. (The school is approximately one-seventh Latino.) "Liberals," said Bueler in the presumably-offending article, "welcome every Muhammad, Jamul and Jose who wishes to leave his Third World state and come to America." Which, if nothing else, is consistent with the Conservative Club's motto, which is "Protecting our borders, language and culture."

What did the faculty do about it? Said one teacher, "When you say things like that, you've got to expect that things like this are going to happen." Another dismissed the club as "a bunch of bigots."

Bueler isn't exactly an angel — the club's faculty advisor quit after Bueler refused to submit the article for review before publication, and he subsequently apologized for the tone of that "Muhammad" business — but I think it's a safe bet that had he written something critical of, say, dead white Europeans, he'd probably be getting extra credit instead of involuntary vacation days.

(Via Tongue Tied)

Down in the comments on this item, we seem to be getting into a dust-up over who is, and who isn't, "privileged, pampered and powerful," to borrow Bruce's phrase. (And it's a damned fine phrase at that; I may have to use it for something one of these days.)

Taking these considerations in reverse order:

I don't feel especially powerful, and the gastric ailment that hit me yesterday doesn't help matters. I can get things done, sometimes.

Pampered? Maybe. As the saying goes, I can do without essentials, but I must have my luxuries. It must be noted, though, that both luxuries and essentials are acquired the old-fashioned way: I earned them.

As to the question of privilege: fifteen years ago, I was broke and living out of a thirteen-year-old car. It took some resources — some from friends and relatives, some from government — to put me back on something resembling a firm footing. I feel very much privileged, in that assistance was offered, that I was able to take advantage of what was offered me, and that eventually, I was able to resume a relatively-normal existence. Some people, faced with the same situation, would not feel privileged; they would want to know what the hell happened to their entitlements.

And some of those same people, I expect, would protest that these things were offered to me because I'm that very personification of evil, a white male. Given the fact that my mother was half Mexican and half Syrian, I'm not so white as I look, but that's not going to matter to these people: I am by definition one of the oppressors, and I get no credit for ethnicity because obviously at some point I sold out. There's only one possible response to that: "And I'm damn glad somebody was buying when I did." Indeed, it's a privilege.

Bruce talks about slapping a cap on damage awards in malpractice cases:

(Emphasis added.)

What we always hear about are the truly bizarre cases — Cam Edwards talked about one this week on his radio show, some woman who suffered burns after spilling her coffee and sued Starbucks — but using the man-bites-dog theory, I have to assume that these are the exception rather than the rule.

There are, indeed, too many lawsuits, and many of them are indeed frivolous; but the truly useless suits can be handled with a loser-pays system. And thinning out the docket is, I think, the most important "reform" that needs to take place.

The solution to high malpractice awards is simple: eliminate malpractice. The problem arises when you try to pin a workable definition onto the word, since medicine is at least as much art as it is science, and there's still a lot we don't know about everyday bodily functions. Sometimes all you can do is make an educated guess. I'd hate to think I could be sued for guessing wrong.

On the other hand, outside the medical realm, sometimes it's clear that bungling or malfeasance is at fault. Here's a comment from a page linked by Bruce, posted by Angry Bear, that cuts to the chase:

Actions, conservatives are fond of saying, have consequences, and indeed they do. There's no reason that corporate entities should be exempt from the consequences of their actions, or to have their liability artificially limited, when individual persons are granted no such exemptions. The argument is made that numerous damage awards can destroy a company; I suggest that if a firm has actually done something to justify numerous damage awards, it may well deserve to be destroyed.

Jessie Rosenberg, home from college for what used to be called the Christmas break, explains why it would be a waste of time to hold one of those affirmative-action bake sales at Bryn Mawr:

This is not the situation for which Elvis Costello wrote, "I used to be disgusted / And now I try to be amused." But it fits.

The Dallas Morning News has selected George W. Bush as the Texan of the Year, which probably isn't that much of a surprise.

There was some wailing and gnashing of teeth, to be sure — the paper's blog printed a couple of reader comments that, shall we say, took exception to the selection — but it's hard to argue with the conclusion of the announcement, written by Rod Dreher:

And Keven Ann Willey, editorial-page editor, noted that some of the disagreements stemmed from the fact that, well, Bush wasn't born in Texas. (Before you ask: New Haven, Connecticut.) Not that this matters:

The Oklahoman has yet to announce an Oklahoman of the Year, though KTOK's Cam Edwards ran a phone poll last week, in which General Tommy Franks (who, incidentally, was born in Texas) was rather convincingly beating out OU quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Jason White before the combination of my morning commute and the station's weird directional pattern dropped the program out of earshot.

One bomb burst of the bizarre this morning. NPR's Diane Rehm Show scheduled a program about the economic outlook, and Paul Krugman (Princeton professor and columnist for The New York Times) and Grover Norquist (head of Americans for Tax Reform) were booked;