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Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth who've spent years learning our culture and contributing their talents to our economy. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder? [itals mine - ed.] Who are we calling terrorists here? Outsiders can destroy airplanes and buildings, but it is only we, the people, who have the power to demolish our own ideals.
This is the relevant part of the famous op-ed about which Barbara Kingsolver is now threatening to sue NRO, WSJ, and the Weekly Standard because, in changing the question mark that finishes the sentence ending in "shredder," Kingsolver says, "''My detractors have essentially fabricated a reason that people should not listen to me,"
So let's take a look at it: Put a period on the end of the sentence, and it's Kingsolver saying it's what she believes. Leave it as originally written, and it is Kingsolver saying that, in her opinion, it is what all patriots believe. Either way, she's a despicable, America-hating witch, which is a perfectly good reason that "people should not listen to her."
Queen Elizabeth is touring Edinburgh and is being shown the new wing of the Hospital by the Lord Mayor. They enter a ward, shiny and new, and walk past a row of beds in which men are resting peacefully. As they pass the foot of one man's bed, he suddenly sits up and cries out... "Wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie, O what a panic's in thy breastie!" ...and then sinks back down into his bed, asleep. A few beds later another man suddenly rises, bellowing: "And fare thee weel, my only Luve! And fare thee weel awhile!" ... again, lying back, slipping into sleep. Finally, as they exit the door at the other end a voice echos from the far end: "Flow gently, sweet Afton! amang thy green braes!" followed again by silence. In the hall the Queen turns to her host and asks "Those poor men. Is this the insanity ward? "Nay, ma'am" he replies. "Tis the Burns Unit."
No wonder "Vince M." refused to reveal his last name.
Press freedom group Reporters sans Frontiers (RSF) has appealed to Pakistan to help trace a U.S. reporter who went missing while apparently investigating Islamic militants linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Doctors sans Frontiers. Reporters sans Frontiers. What's next? Terrorists sans Frontiers?
Following is the full text of testimony today before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on its investigation of the collapse of the Enron Corporation, as distributed by the Federal News Service.
In case you're really interested. Early reports say that if you are, you're in a very lonely minority.
The e-mails instead carried accusations that her school promotes black separatism and that its students are unpatriotic – because the school posted the so-called Black Pledge of Allegiance on its website.
Here's the Pledge itself:
BLACK PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE We pledge allegiance of the red, black and green Our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle,
"Sketches of My Culture," Mr. West's solo effort, was released in September and floundered, selling around 1,000 copies, according to industry measuring stick Soundscan. But the recent flap has more than tripled sales of the compact disc — to 3,500, according to Mr. West's label, Artemis Records...
A most horrible example of unintended consequences. My god - I hope this doesn't encourage him.
Mention national identity cards, and absolutists on the right and left go into a tizzy. "It'll be like Nazi Germany," say the liberals. "America will be indistinguishable from the Soviet Union," warn the conservatives. This is hysteria.
Nothing like a little ad hominem smear to open up a "reasonable" debate. If you don't want to talk about issues, you can always call your opponents names.
Bob "Mize" Meyer was bleeding from cuts in his brow and hand. But he was a proud and happy man. Moments before, he had circled the floor of the First Union Center, high-fiving his fans.
The real trouble spots are on several domestic issues:
Economy: Only 13% give Bush an "A," 33% give him a "B," and 29% a "C."
Unemployment : One in ten (11%) give him an "A," 28% give him a "B," and 30% a "C."
Creating jobs : Just 10% give Bush an "A," 26% give him a "B," and 31% a "C."
Enron : Only 13% give Bush an "A," 23% give him a "B," and 22% a "C."
Poll results appear in the upcoming issue of TIME, on newsstands Monday, Jan. 28. The TIME/CNN survey was conducted by Harris Interactive by telephone among 1017 adults Jan. 23-24, 2002. The margin of error for the total sample is plus or minus 3.1%.
Drudge's commentary makes this sound worse than it really is. "C" rankings don't drive supporters into the ranks of the opposite party, nor do they mobilize political enemies to take to the streets and the polling booths.
With that understood, Bush is getting good ratings on all of these issues, ranging from a low of 62% on Enron to a high of 75% on the economy. Not bad at all.
"I always thought that the American role is to save the lives of Palestinians and Israelis," Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said.
Post 9/11, America has realized that her role is to save the lives of her own citizens first, and those of her allies next. The lives of fanatical, murderous terrorists finish a distant third. Sorry.
A NEW DAILYPUNDIT FEATURE - LETTERS FROM MY HOMETOWN: 'ENIGMA' OF BUSH
Editor -- Regarding Marc Sandalow's Jan. 20 news analysis, "Popular Bush remains an enigma": The reason President Bush cannot be figured out is because he remains incredibly stupid -- so stupid that he is easily imprinted with whatever impression his handlers choose to make. MADELINE SMITH MOORE Oakland
I'll try to post something every day from the letters page of the San Francisco Chronicle.
"For the first time in the history of political polling, more voters identify themselves as Republicans than Democrats, according to the first bipartisan Battleground Poll of this election year," Cox News Service reported today.
Republicans have speculated ever since their 1994 takeover of the House of Representatives that there is a long-term sea change underway in the body politic. If this poll is accurate, it provides startling evidence of that change.
Two thoughts: An academic system that allows and even encourages professors to become "stars" is a corrupted system; professors who seek "stardom" have ceased to be teachers and have become, in large part, entertainers.
Do any of these "superstars" approach the intellectual stature and influence of Socrates, a mere thinker and teacher who was never too proud to sit down with a few students and teach them how to think?
Now this Enron story is getting interesting. Sounds like this guy -- who had raised a stink about Enron's shoddy practices -- was knocked off. Found in his car at 2:23 a.m. with a bullet in his head.
I'm not so sure there's anything underhanded about this one - it wouldn't be the first suicide to come out of a major business failure. Hell, during the Great Crash that kicked off the Depression, supposedly it wasn't safe to walk down Wall Street because of all the tycoons falling from the sky. But there is another mysterious death that probably isn't what it appears to be: that of Elie Hobeika.
Hobeika was the Phalangist security cheif who led the Christian militia into the Sabra and Shattila Palestinian refugee camps outside Beirut in 1982, in retaliation for the assassination of the Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel. The resulting massacre temporarily derailed Ariel Sharon's career and caused him to lose his post as Defense Minister.
Recently Hobeika announced he would be providing "new evidence" to the Belgian court planning to try Ariel Sharon in absentia for his role in the Shatila massacre. Sharon has already been investigated once, by the Israeli Kahan commission, and found to be "indirectly responsible" for the massacre - neither he nor IDF forces actually entered the camps, but they did permit the Phalangists to do so.
It's hard to simply ignore the Syrian and Lebanese charges that Israel had nothing to do with Hobeika's death. The method of his assassination is familiar to anybody who keeps track of Israel's ongoing campaign of "targeted killing" aimed at PLO terrorists. Hobeika's murder is simply too convenient to accept without any quibble Israel's blanket rejection of Syrian suspicions.
The pro-choice response typically is that genes and DNA are present in every cell of your body, and if you for instance slice off a finger are you then saying that that finger is entitled to the full protection of personhood? That argument is deceptive and misses the point. A finger is and always will be less than a whole person without the capacity to become anything greater...
Actually, this will probably end up not being true. My hunch is that in the near future it will become possible to fully clone a human from any cell taken from anywhere in the original copy - which would indeed mean that the severed finger, the clipped nose hair, the scraped scab, the drop of blood all have human potential. Which will present an interesting conundrum to the right to life folks: If everything contains the potential for a new human life, then it all must be protected. But a world that attempted to do that would make the worst imaginable nanny state look like anarchy. It would, in fact, be impossible. It will be interesting to see what sort of intellectual replies the pro-life movement can devise to meet the challenge.
One of the stars of the Afro-American studies department at Harvard University resigned his professorship yesterday and accepted an offer to join the faculty of rival Princeton University, raising questions about whether other professors from the department would follow.
The professor, K. Anthony Appiah, resigned only weeks after another member of his department, Cornel West, said that he and other professors were considering offers from Princeton because of concerns that Harvard's new president was not fully committed to a strong department and to affirmative action.
Why do I think Larry Summers is managing to contain his disappointment at this development?
Charismatic and cosmopolitan, Gamal Abdel Nasser set Egypt on a course that seemed to suit his country well following the 1952 revolution that brought him to power. In an effort to redress inequities that had arisen during the country's period of colonial subjugation, the state became the engine of development. Companies were nationalized; foreign trade and investment were discouraged. The government guaranteed a job to every graduate of universities, technical schools and high schools. The big-government approach yielded some impressive improvements in social conditions. Enrollment in Egyptian primary schools more than tripled, to well above 90 percent by 1990, and infant mortality plummeted.
WaPo is still unable to admit that runaway socialism, as created and practiced by the "charismatic and cosmopolitan" Nasser, (translation: fits in well at upscale lefty cocktail parties) has destroyed the Egyptian economy.
Parker Terrell of West Des Moines was charged in 1996 with attempted third-degree burglary and possession of burglar tools. He was 16 at the time, and a juvenile court judge declared him a delinquent, ordering him to pay $35.81 in damages for trying to steal stereo equipment from a car.
Polk County officials then seized Terrell's car, a 1994 Chevrolet Cavalier, claiming it was used in the commission of a crime.
Terrell, who is now 22, appealed. He contended that juvenile delinquency couldn't be the basis for such a forfeiture and that the car's value was far above "the severity of his conduct."
The court disagreed with both arguments and rejected his claim that the penalty amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, which would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment.
To hell with the Eighth Amendment. What about the Fifth?
...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Yes, I know that this entire farce is supposed to be "due process," but that process is one I suspect the Founders would have recognized as one of the reasons they rebelled in the first place.
We reached this ridiculous "zero tolerance" position through a process of incrementalism - a bit here, a bit there, a good reason then, a better justification before that, and now we have courts claiming that the confiscation of a $9000 car in a case involving a 35 buck theft is perfectly legitimate. But if you ignore the incrementalism, the long trail of justification, and simply look at the result, it becomes easy to see where the real theft is, and who the real thieves are.
Like investors, many financial reporters rely heavily on stock analysts. But analysts often have an inherent conflict of interest. Companies such as Enron have considerable leverage over them, saying (implicitly, if not explicitly), "We support the analysts who support our stock," meaning they'll give their lucrative investment banking business to those firms whose analysts issue strong "buy" recommendations for their stock.
That's why analysts get paid so much, says Gordon Howald, an energy analyst for Credit Lyonnais. "It's not because they write nice reports with glossy covers. It's because they help generate fees for their firms by taking a very, very optimistic view of a stock, even if they don't necessarily believe it."
Jim Cramer, investor, financial writer, and owner of TheStreet.com, has been railing against this cozy relationship between the broker/analyst/bizjourno complex and the industries it covers for many years. In particular, Cramer points out something this LAT article glosses over: the number of business journalists who own stock in the companies they write about. Just as it would be a conflict of interest for columnists like Paul Krugman, Lawrence Kudlow, William Kristol, Peggy Noonan, Irwin Stelzer and others to take money from companies with one hand and write about them with the other, so is it a conflict for business journos to comment and report on companies whose fortunes affect their own.
There's another reason the article misses: more than a few business columnists just aren't very good at what they do. Competent reporters like Herb Greenberg were floating rumors that things weren't as they seemed at Enron almost a year ago, when he wrote on 4/18/01:
Enron envy: You know what this column says about companies that pick public fights with short-sellers: Hold onto your wallets. Such was the case Tuesday (as I noted on the Columnist Conversation ) when Enron (ENE:NYSE - news - boards) CEO Jeff Skilling called money manager Richard Grubman an "a------" after Grubman pressed Enron's chief accounting officer with detailed questions about the company's balance sheet. Skilling told Reuters, "I don't think it is fair to our shareholders to give someone a platform like that [which] they are using for some personal vested interest related to their stock position." Especially if that someone raises issues Skilling would prefer nobody mentioned.
Reporters like Greenberg knew, and reported, that things weren't as they seemed at Enron months in advance of the collapse: but for any number of reasons, ranging from the "not reported here" syndrome to plain stupidity, the rest of the business press didn't pick up these lobs and run with them.
One of the most interesting facets of what I call the "New Reality" engendered by the terror attacks is the beating big-time journalists and writers have been taking: the wave of exposures of plagiarism, fraud, log rolling, smug hypocricy, arrogance, and simple corruption seems to be swelling, not receding - and those who once meekly accepted any excuses the monarchs of the media offered are now demanding second, and third looks. While this is undoubtedly uncomfortable, even painful, for the grandees finding themselves questioned for the first times in their lives, the ultimate result will be a large improvement in both the body politic and the conduct within the public square.
There's a new specimen blossoming at 1800 Market St. And for our tour, Johnnie Pratt, 42, outreach coordinator for the spiffy new Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center will be our floriculturist and dimpled, hat-adorned guide.
Fun fact: in order to build this publicly-funded boondoggle, a landmark building had to be gutted and rebuilt. This meant the eviction of long-time tenants - the International Society for Individual Liberty, a strongly libertarian organization - almost all of whose workers at that location just happened to be...gay.
Instead of punishing the Palestinians, Abu Rdeneh said Bush should take measures against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and not receive him at the White House. Sharon is to meet with Bush there on Feb. 7.
This story, as well as this one, underline how it becomes clearer every day that Yassar Arafat is doomed - and the use of the word is not intended as a metaphor. Somebody - whether an IDF sniper or a Palestinian shooter (probably one of his own bodyguards) - is going to put a couple of rounds into the old terrorist's skull, and it's going to happen in the not-to-distant future. Because the man has finally run out his string, and all the stale rehashes of things that once worked but no longer do - "It's not us, it's that devil Sharon" - can't disguise that fact.
Arafat's position has always been a dangerous balancing act. Throughout his entire career he's had to deal with four irreconcilable facts: Fact one - the PLO has never been, and never will be, a military match for Israel; Fact two - the Arab nations were never going to make space for the Palestinian refugees; Fact three - the Israelis were never going to consent to their own destruction; Fact four - the Palestinians were never going to accept anything less than Israel's destruction.
In more ways than one, it is amazing that Arafat has lasted as long as he has. Few leaders could have found the combination of wiliness and brazen chutzpah that Arafat has parlayed into a career of more than thirty years as the undisputed leader of the Palestinian refugees. Even today, after generations of failure, he still stands astride the Palestinian world like a colossus - which is the only thing that keeps him alive today. Nobody can imagine what the Arab-Israeli conflict will become after Arafat departs the scene.
But depart he will, and soon, because while his absence may seem unimaginable, the results of his continued presence are all too apparent. Arafat cannot effectively make war, and he can't make peace. All his options, and all the options of the people he represents, are now bad ones. One will never know if he understood it at the time, but in retrospect it has becomes obvious that Arafat signed his own death warrant when he rejected the Barak proposals in favor of a new intafada. The world has changed since the days when Palestinian violence would serve merely as another minor chip on the great balance between the Cold War powers. Those scales are long gone, and the calculus of power in the middle east is now simple: the United States is a hyper-power, and Israel is under its protection. And when Arafat chose war over peace, he alienated the one force capable of restraining Israel besides her own uncertainty about a post-Arafat world.
Even that uncertainty is fading, as Israel faces up to the reality that Arafat can no longer help them. He can only hurt them. But they can kill him. Soon, they will.
So, I've decided on a project to discover where the people are really from, and I started with Stephanie "The Voice of God" Salter. I'm guessing she's maybe from some place like Terre Haute, Indiana.
Now, I'd never accuse a former San Franciscan (don't say Frisco, and for god's sake never say Friscan...) of disingenuousness, but I'm pretty sure he knows good and darned well that La Salter is from the high hoosier grounds of Terre Haute. Tony's smart as a whiplash, but even his supernatural talents don't extend to picking the one correct midwestern college town out of the hundreds that are available. Not by accident, at least.
Now, I'm not sure where Tony is going with this, but I'm also somebody who lives and writes in San Francisco, and happens to be from an Indiana college town - in my case Muncie, home of Ball State University, otherwise known to the local wits as "Testicle Tech." I used to date a girl from Terre Haute, though, and am more familiar than I'd like to be with the city that houses Indiana State University, whose main claim to fame is that Larry Bird played basketball there. (In Indiana backetball isn't a sport - it's a religion. Even I can play a pretty mean game of horse...)
If you a: grow up in Indiana and b: have a brain in your head, most likely your single biggest goal in life is to Get The Hell Out Of There And Go Someplace Civilized. I know that's the way I felt, and felt it strongly enough that I was willing to walk to Denver in order to escape. Salter has opined to similar effect from time to time in her own columns. So if Tony is trying to draw some sort of conclusion from the places where the various leftyloonybirds grew up, I think it's a non-starter. My libertarianism would be as horrifying to Salter (actually, I know from personal experience at a party that it is as horrifying), as her reflexive cardiac gushers are to me. Yet we were both raised in similarly stultifying environments, towns where they are proud of their Babbits, not ashamed of them.
Something happened later, after all those idyllic romps through the cornfields and the drunken deflowerings while parked beside the reservoir on country road nine. My bet is that it was college. At least, if I were looking for "root causes," that's where I'd start digging.
A former Enron Corp. executive who challenged the company’s questionable financial practices and resigned last May was found shot to death in a car Friday, an apparent suicide, authorities said.
Kaus was (almost) right: What WTC attack? It's going to be all Enron, all the time.
By the shores of old Pacific, By the shining big sea water, Lived a brave named Hiawatha (Name was really “Cavanaugh” but Here we’ll call him Hiawatha ‘Cause it fits the meter better.)...
Then one day our Hiawatha Started hearing tales of wonder, Tales of wild and savage wonder, Of a tribe known as the Bloggers, Of a tribe that posted widely, Much more widely than the Ojers, Posted posts of wit and humor, Posts of breaking news reporting, Posts of pointed commentary, Posts of savage icon breaking, Posts of restless erudition, All without a single paycheck.
Go see if you got a mention. DailyPundit did. (Nyah.)
Prince Talal ibn Abdul Aziz has criticized the organizers of last week’s Jeddah Economic Forum for inviting Bill Clinton to address the gathering saying the former US president has lost his influence and could not serve Arab causes now that he is out of office.
"How could he (Clinton) be received in the region while only last month he was in London to raise millions of dollars for a Jewish settlement fund. How could we invite him to get $750,000 from us and for what? This is a strange situation," Prince Talal said in an interview with Al-Jazeera television station.
He said hosting Clinton will not serve any purpose now as he is no longer holding any political office. "What use does Clinton have now? His lecture (in Jeddah) was a carbon copy of what he said in Cairo and Dubai," said the prince.
While serving eight years in the White House, Clinton was not able to read the Arab mind carefully, he said. "He studied in haste our minds, sentiments and the way we act."
In other words, bin Talal was surprised to find that Clinton screwed them, took the money, and ran. Odd, indeed. I knew that parts of the Arabic world were not fully developed, but I wasn't aware that radio, television, newspapers, the Internet, mail, the telegraph, and jungle drums had yet to penetrate Saudi Arabia.
A Columbia University professor who sent out bogus letters to 240 of the city's top restaurants, claiming they'd given him food poisoning, now has a real reason to feel sick - he's getting sued for $100 million.
Evidently the loftier groves of academe have become like that weird little town in Florida, except their caretakers, instead of officially shooing Satan away, have posted signs warning those with any vestige of intelligence not to enter. I've heard of ivory towers, but - ivory dimensions?
Liberal groups, declaring war on President Bush's judicial nominees, took their case to the media Thursday. Their primary target was Charles W. Pickering, President Bush's choice to sit on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but a man liberals say is guilty of pursuing "a far-right conservative agenda."
"Achieving ideological domination of the federal judiciary is the top goal of right-wing activists inside and outside the Bush Administration, and judges like Charles Pickering are the means to that end," Ralph G. Neas, president of People For the American Way, said.
This tactic could very well backfire in a big way on Democrats who use it. Here's why: At least two high profile trials are slated to get underway shortly - Richard Reid, the "Shoebomber," and John Walker Lindh, the "Taliboy." Chances are reasonable that the US legal system will not provide punishments in these cases that large numbers of Americans expect. Every time one of these high-profile disappointments occurs, polls show a backlash against "liberal" judges, and a public lurch toward "law and order." Should these trials result in a similar wide-spread backlash, those pushing to "liberalize" the bench could find their message doing their positions far more harm than good.
When House of Delegates members recite the Salute to the Flag of Virginia each day, Del. Kenneth R. Melvin thinks of its context.
In a somber and moving speech on the House floor yesterday, the Portsmouth Democrat explained why he doesn't join most other delegates and recite the 30-word salute, a flap that's festered since the start of the session."
Let's take a look at the salute, shall we?
"I salute the flag of Virginia, with reverence and patriotic devotion to the ‘Mother of States and Statesmen,’ which it represents—the ‘Old Dominion,’ where liberty and independence were born."
So what is it about those seemingly innocuous thirty words that Melvin doesn't like? Well, nothing, actually.
The little-known salute was written by a founding member of Martinsville's United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter and was adopted by the General Assembly as the state's official flag salute in 1954. It is also the official state flag salute of the Virginia UDC division.
"It's the combination that's the problem for me," Melvin said. "When I think Confederate, I don't think about our brave Southern boys during the war. I think about human bondage and all the attendant degradations that go with it.
In other words, Melvin doesn't like the words, not because of the words themselves, but because of who wrote them. By that standard, Melvin should also disavow the US Constitution -in part written by slaveholders; the Declaration of Independence --same reason; the Emancipation Proclamation - written by a President who said,
"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position..."
I could go on, but the argument is as silly as Melvin's own. Neither the Founders nor Lincoln were Melvin's enemies, and the great political documents they composed have a right to stand on their own, apart from whatever prejudices may have been held by their writers. Nor should the Virginia Salute to the Flag be judged on anything other that the words of which it is made. Melvin may be a principled man. But in this case, he's not acting like an intelligent one.
A judge ruled Thursday that saying grace before dinners at a state-supported military school is unconstitutional. Virginia Military Institute, based in Lexington, has been holding the prayer ceremonies since the 1950s. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the school last May on behalf of two cadets, Neil Mellen and Paul Knick, who had complained about the prayers. In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon called the ceremonies a "state-sponsored religious exercise." "Because the prayers are drafted and recited at the direction of the Institute's Superintendent, the result is that government has become impermissibly entangled with religion," Moon wrote.
The religious right is going to scream bloody murder about this, but it's the correct ruling. If a school wants to push any particular religion, or religion in general, there are perfectly legitimate private ways to go about it. This is not one of them. If you take the state's money, you dance to the state's (in this case, the Constitution's) tune.
Helen and Hamas Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas stands accused of arguing "in support of terrorism." Her accuser: Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary. At yesterday's White House press briefing, Mr. Fleischer was answering a question from CNN's Major Garrett about U.S. efforts for peace in the Middle East. Mr. Fleischer was discussing the recent Israeli seizure of a shipload of Palestinian terrorist weapons when Miss Thomas interrupted to ask, "Where do the Israelis get their arms?" Mr. Fleischer began to answer, "There is a difference, Helen, and that is " Miss Thomas interrupted again: "What is the difference?" Mr. Fleischer said, "The targeting of innocents through the use of terror, which is a common enemy, for Yasser Arafat and for the people of Israel, as well as " Miss Thomas: "When people are fighting for their land " Mr. Fleischer: "I think the killing of innocents is a category entirely different. Justifying killing of innocents for land is an argument in support of terrorism."
I really hate to give this woman pixels - she looks more and more like a guttered-out candle melting on a pile of unwashed laundry - but she is unwittingly the best testimony to the greatness of a system she so obviously dislikes. In what other system (certainly not any in the Islamic world) would she be given the seat of honor, long after the collapse of her career, in the press briefings of the most powerful politician in the land?
Many have suggested that she no longer be allowed her primacy of place, but not me. Every time she opens her mouth in another bout of America-bashing, her very position refutes the words she speaks. What could be more appropriate than that?
It's not a blog-site like AndrewSullivan.com or Kausfiles or any of the other one-man-bands popping up across the web...Here's how it will work, at least in the beginning. Starting tomorrow, we will have a link to something called — you guessed it — "the Corner" on the homepage. Inside, Rich Lowry, Rod Dreher, and myself will be filing observations, arguments, complaints, interesting links, jokes, commentary — perhaps even recipes — throughout the day. If there's news we'll be there offering every half-baked theory and career-destroying spontaneous reaction you can imagine. Others will be joining us too — from within the NR family and without...
I don't care what you think it is, Jonah. If it walks, talks, and quacks like a - wait a minute, that's Bob Fisk. Anyway, welcome to the blogosphere!
On the recent Hezbollah cross-border attack on the IDF, Fred Pruitt at the excellent Rantburg notes:
From the report, it doesn't look like there was any military objective, just a harrassing attack. Hezbollah gunnies haven't been getting their heroism dosage lately.
...Israel and the Palestinians are heading into a full scale, balls out, pants down shooting war for real...
but I think Fred's take is, at least for now, the right one. Recall that Israel has a fully modernized, heavily equipped, well-trained army. Hezbollah are still essentially lightly-armed guerillas, without the supply resources they enjoyed many years ago from the USSR. If the IDF does decide to go "balls out, pants down," (I love that image - I can just see the General yelling "Chaarrrrge!" as butts and balls wink in the wind) Hezbollah won't be able to do much about it.
Forty-three years later, I heard leaders at a Martin Luther King Day event lament post-Sept. 11 budget cuts, even as newspapers reported President Bush's plans for helping rebuild Afghanistan. And they say America won this war.
The normally reliable Peyser blows it with this column, which disingenuously tries to make a zero sum game out of the relationship between aid to Afghanistan and aid to Americans injured by the 9/11 attacks. The fact is, the sums she's talking about wouldn't even make a good minor farm subsidy. We can do both, and she can drop the pose. It's not working.
In a tone of injured innocence that came close to bewilderment, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, spent an hour yesterday defending the Americans' treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and described headlines alleging torture and inhumanity as "utter nonsense".
You can almost hear them grunting in agony at The Guardian's editorial offices, but for them, this is a remarkably even-handed article. I think the anti-Gitmo firestorm is over, over there.
Bellesiles continues to have supporters. Yet their defense sometimes seems more of a left-handed compliment. Paul Finkleman, a law professor at the University of Tulsa, says Bellesiles' book remains an important contribution, despite its critics.
"In the end," Finkleman said, "I don't think it matters if he cooked the data."
And the academic anti-gunners wonder why anybody might think to question their objectivity? No bias there, no sir! (Link courtesy Glenn Reynolds)
UPDATE: InstaPundit is reporting that Professor Finkleman can't remember saying this, and if he did, it was taken out of context and doesn't mean what it sounds like it means.
I'm going to retire Morford from the running for DailyPundit's Fisk Award (for the year's most badly written sentence by a pro scribe). Even Fisk himself couldn't be expected to compete with a steady flow of crap like this:
And I'm up at the Idaho family vacation pad over the recent holidays and like a nagging migraine I cannot escape the fact that this otherwise cute podunk little whitebread town, population a mere 6,000, is saddled with not one but two unabashed titans of orgiastic consumer mediocrity and landfill pathos and far too many Malaysian-made ceramic monkey bookends.
The U.S. military will no longer require servicewomen in Saudi Arabia to wear Muslim-style head-to-toe robes when off base. Instead, wearing the robe, known as an abaya, "is not mandatory but is strongly encouraged," according to an order by Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, e-mailed to commanders in the region Saturday. The Air Force's highest-ranking female fighter pilot has been challenging the mandatory rule in court. Lt. Col. Martha McSally's federal lawsuit calls the policy unconstitutional and says it improperly forces American women to conform to others' religious and social customs. The lawsuit did not inspire the policy change, Central Command spokesman Col. Rick Thomas said yesterday.
AOL Time Warner dampened speculation Tuesday that the media giant might buy local Linux company Red Hat by dismissing last week's Washington Post report that launched the initial scuttlebutt. "AOL is not in negotiations with Red Hat," said AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein. "The Washington Post story is incorrect."
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and the White House are engaged in intensive discussions seeking a deal on patients' rights legislation, and their usual allies are expressing alarm at the terms of a possible compromise.
Assuming a deal can be reached, there is no way the bulk of the credit won't redound to Bush's advantage come the elections this fall. Credit for the passage of major voter-pleasing legislation always benefits the President who's in office at the time of passage. After all, look at the one thing the public - if it pays attention at all - sees: the President, surrounded by what appear to be beaming lackeys, signing the bill into law.
The Republicans passed welfare reform, but it's President Clinton and his flacks who proudly list the achievment on his legacy. Kennedy and Daschle may bleat all they want about "their" Patient's Bill of Rights, but all the voters will notice are clips of George Bush signing that bill, over and over again.
Amdrew Sullivan points to this Weekly Standard article, The Rise and Fall of Enron, in which Irwin Stelzer writes:
Liberals such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman--an M.I.T. professor who once served with me (and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol) on an Enron advisory board assembled by Lay to keep him and his team up to date on general public policy trends...
Sullivan refers to this as "disclosure," but does note that Stelzer doesn't mention the money he, Kristol, and Krugman received for their advisory board "work." In fact, nobody mentions the money - not until dragged kicking and screaming to it, protesting (as Krugman did) every inch of the way that he "did exactly what I was supposed to do."
Okay, look: maybe in Krugman's world, where academics qua journalists Get Money Calls, fifty grand is a pittance of a gratuity, not even worth mentioning. But in the real world, fifty thousand dollars is a hell of a lot of money. You can buy a senator for that. The arrogant stupidity displayed by members of the so-called Fourth Estate in pretending that grease of this volume should not raise suspicions of conflict of interest with their readers is stupendous. And more - it is disingenuous, because they know these payoffs would suggest corruption. They don't show you the money, because they know what you'd think: "bought and paid for lackeys." And other journalists are reluctant to call them on it, because they hope to climb on the gravy train themselves one day.
If a free press is the guardian of the republic, then this stinking mess once again raises Juvenal's 2000 year old question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Indeed, who shall keep watch over the guardians?
Sullivan says, "It seems to me incumbent on every pundit who took money from Enron to disclose it now, in detail." It seems so to me, too. And maybe they could reveal the names of the other entities who have them on the pad as well.
In Justice or revenge?, the Guardian unearths Terry Waite, former Beirut hostage and apparently current delusional psychotic, who says:
I can recognise the conditions that prisoners are being kept in at the US camp at Guantanamo Bay because I have been there. Not to Cuba's Camp X-Ray, but to the darkened cell in Beirut that I occupied for five years. I was chained to a wall by my hands and feet; beaten on the soles of my feet with cable; denied all my human rights, and contact with my family for five years, and given no access to the outside world. Because I was kept in very similar conditions, I am appalled at the way we - countries that call ourselves civilised - are treating these captives. Is this justice or revenge?
Looks like the soles of Terry's feet weren't the only things beaten with cable. Yes, "beaten and chained to the wall by hands and feet in darkened cells for five years exactly describes the conditions in which the Gitmo terrorists are kept. And "Stockholm syndrome-suffering terrorist apologist" describes the condition in which what remains of Terry's mind is kept.
Several governments joined the chorus, saying the prisoners should be granted prisoner of war status under the Geneva Convention. Such status would accord them the highest level of protections. Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, said that despite the Sept. 11 atrocities, "changing our values and our way of life would be terrorism's first victory." The Netherlands also urged Washington to recognize the detainees as prisoners of war, saying, "In the fight, we need to uphold our norms and values."
Okay, let me see if I can parse this bilge correctly: if we don't treat the terrorist prisoners in such a way as to provide them with the maximum opportunity to kill their guards, then the terrorists will have won. Is that about right?
I'd like to stick Javier Solana - properly garbed, of course, in a nice Prada summer wool suit - into one of those cells with a couple of non-manacled, "maximally protected" al-Qaeda prisoners. After several hours, it should be possible to figure out who won - and whoops! - you know what? I bet it's those damned terrorists again!
Courtesy of Rand Simberg comes this tantalizing bit of information: a site calling itself SteynOnline.com "with Mark Steyn," promises that it's "coming soon." Hmm. At this rate, maybe we won't be blogging for an "audience of none" forever.
I have never seen a more irresponsible use of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press than I have witnessed in recent days.
And I rarely see as responsible a reply to that misuse as the rest of Preston's post. The First Amendment permits the press to be an ass; in recompense, it also permits it to be an eagle, and that's as it should be.
In a remarkable Washington Times piece, Allies in sunshine and shadow, Jed Babbin offers an analysis of a little-appreciated aspect of the war on terror:
For those regional governments that do not support terrorism or — like Pakistan, may wish to back away from it — the war presents a great opportunity to help secure their own futures. Whether they do so in sunshine or shadow means very little. But those shadow allies of today can be the basis for a lasting peace in the area. Peace is about winners and losers, not processes. Certainty in our victory is the best foundation for our shadow allies to build their own future.
The current state of the middle east and east asia is an artifact of the dissolution of the British and Ottoman empires, the rise of the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. Nearly everything that occurred in those regions in the past fifty years was an effect, one way or the other, of the grinding conflict between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Nation after nation - no matter how awkwardly or artificially constructed from the rubble of old empires - was built up and pushed forward as a surrogate for one or the other of the two super-powers. But that conflict was decided ten years ago, leaving the old pawns of empire as - what?
For nearly a decade, no one knew. Israel was no longer an outpost of freedom to be supported as a nuclear counterweight to Soviet aspirations in the regions of warm water ports and oil. Afghanistan was no longer an American sword slashing at the Russian soft underbelly. Iraq, Iran, and Syria were no longer willing recipients of Soviet arms and largesse in the Russian joust against American hegemony. Ignored, no longer valued even as pawns, the badly created, badly shaped, and badly sustained parade of Islamic "nations" were left to stew in the juices of their own bitter misery. For them, even the artificial twitches of great-power manipulation that passed for destiny no longer animated; they waited suspended between an ungainly past and an unknowable future, caught in a vacuum not of power but of history itself.
I believe that in his own warped way, Osama bin Laden understood this. That he tried to restart history by dragging it back to the eighth century in no way diminishes the scope of what he thought he was trying to accomplish. And of course he failed, because time's arrow points forward, not back. Even nations, no matter how deep the longing, can't go home again.
Now hyperpower, and all that entails, moves across the face of that part of the world again. Lethargies are sloughed in the crucible of war; change is afoot; Iran shakes and Iraq quakes. The tick of history has restarted for Islam. In the end, this is what bin Laden will be most remembered for; not his pathetic, murderous attempt to bludgeon history into the shape of his own lethal fantasies, but that he brought the beat of the world back to the world of Mohammed. (Link courtesy Iain Murray).
Jeff Jarvis continues his one-note attack on Andrew Sullivan:
Andrew Sullivan, still playing his one-note, keeps going after Krugman but handles Bill Kristol with cashmere-lined kid gloves. Kristol revealed that he was paid by Enron. "Good for Bill," says Andrew. The details? Oh, Andrew's patient. Looks like a case of media bias to me.
Well, let's take a look at Sullivan's "kid glove" handling of Kristol:
Bill Kristol divulged his own Enron-sponsorship on C-SPAN’s Morning Journal on January 13. Good for Bill. Now the hard questions: How much did he get? Will he give the money back to a charity for fleeced Enron retirees? Or is he going to be ethically up-staged by Hillary Clinton?
I don't think that sounds necessarily kid glove. Let's see what Sullivan says if he doesn't get answers to those questions before accusing him of unequal treatment.
Now as for the whole issue of bias itself: there's no question Sullivan is possessed of a conservative/libertarian bias. Everybody knows it, even the NYT, which refers to him as:
Andrew Sullivan, the gay conservative commentator with a knack for unnerving any constituency that might embrace him...
Sullivan makes no attempt to deny this, and the bulk of his commentary is predictably in line with his biases. Is that a problem for me? Nope. When bias does become a problem is when those who have one claim not to, and stubbornly try to peddle the notion they are entirely objective.
Almost all the NYT OpEd stable, and a host of other pundits, commentators, and newswriters, are liberals, and their generally predictable opinions are reliable indicators of their bias. So why not admit it? There's nothing wrong with either a liberal or conservative bias, as long as one doesn't try to pretend that bias doesn't exist. But to offer analysis that claims to be based on purely objective factors, when it is obviously not so, is nothing more than dishonesty. The only question is whether the dishonesty is witting or not. I suspect that, as many others have discussed, the general ideological atmosphere in major American newsrooms causes many liberals honestly to believe themselves middle-of-the-road and completely unbiased. They aren't, and they really need to get out more.
Since I'm coming from a libertarian bias, I shouldn't care. The more liberals try to pretend that opinion-leader pundits and writers like Krugman, Rich, Dowd, Keller, Cohen, Milbank, Dionne and others aren't liberal to the core and don't reflect their bias in their work, the more they tar themselves with what appears to be either dishonesty or naivete, and the more they destroy their own credibility. But I do care, because there is room for every stripe of opinion in this country, and we would all be better off for a debate in which the principals weren't afraid to proudly stand on their beliefs and fight for them. But with honesty, please: To claim a spurious objectivity in order to raise one's opinions above the "biased" muck is not only dishonest, it's destructive to the public's belief in the trustworthiness of the public square. And that's a shame for everybody involved.
Perhaps at the very least the laughably hypocritical Professor could stop lecturing us lessers on the evils of greedy capitalism. Hey, teacher. Leave us kids alone.
The self-same apologists for liberal bias (it doesn't exist; it's a "class thang"; only "weirdos" think it occurs) rally round the perfect poster boy for their inability to notice the water in which they swim. Krugman takes a huge wad of money for doing [what he admits he knows is] nothi
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