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The U.S. attorney's office argued yesterday in D.C. Superior Court that the District's ban on handguns should be upheld, brushing aside the Bush administration's new directive that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to bear firearms.
In the first of at least three cases that challenge the District's prohibition on handguns as unconstitutional, assistant U.S. attorneys filed motions defending the broad statute, citing a 15-year-old D.C. Court of Appeals decision as binding local precedent.
It's becoming more obvious by the day that when examining the beliefs of the Bush administration - whether on the war on terror, on terror itself, on Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Iran, Saudi Arabia, tariffs, and now the Second Amendment, the important thing to pay attention to is not what the administration says. It's what the administration does. Do they think nobody is paying attention, or is it just that they assume their poll numbers are so high they can get away with anything they want to? Which of course raises the question: Why would they want to? (Courtesy Instapundit.com).
Asked today about President Bush's proposal, Mary D. Nichols, California's secretary for resources, said Gov. Gray Davis and his administration were frustrated because they had long sought to find a way of canceling the leases. But she said the president would pay a political price.
Really? And what might that price be? That you wouldn't support Bush for President in 2004? As you didn't in 2000, or the Republican candidates in 1996 or 1992? So what are you saying, Ms. Nichols? That if Bush offers a similar buyout in California, you will vote for him? As Bob Dylan once put it, "When you ain't got nothin, you got nothin to lose."
One day after Gov. Gray Davis forced out Vin Patel as his director of e-government, a source told the Mercury News that the technology aide had put pressure on a Silicon Valley company that was trying to win a government contract.
Patel, according to the source, approached a salesman with BEA Systems at a conference last December and questioned him about a donation the company founder had made to a Republican candidate looking to unseat Davis. Patel has admitted that he mentioned the contribution.
But the source said Patel then went on to talk about BEA's bid on a state contract.
``I think he said words to the effect: It doesn't look like we'll be doing business with BEA,'' said the source.
Business as usual in the Insolvent Republic of Grayout Davis. Say, has anybody seen any recent polls on how Governer Burnout is doing against Bill Simon? Since I haven't noticed any screaming headlines about Grayout being in the lead, (and those heds would be screaming), I'm guessing the numbers aren't running very heavily in his direction.
Shrill voices, brute force and intimidation have put Islam in a straitjacket of rigid rules. Not only for outsiders, but for devout Muslims too, Islam has become illiberal, alien, dangerous and bewildering. Islam dominates and stifles the Muslim world, and it has failed to create a free society anywhere on earth. So long as Muslims turn their backs to rational thinking, and blindly follow the literal prescriptions in the Quran for guidance in the 21st century, they are in for more perplexity and turmoil.
This penetrating analysis from a practicing Muslim will no doubt result in him being smeared as a "traitor to his faith." That's the usual response from those whose failings are too sharply exposed. "Kill the messenger" has long been a tradition among the totalitarians of history, whether secular or religious.
As we gather around F.B.I. headquarters sharpening our machetes and watching the buzzards circle overhead, let's be frank: There's a whiff of hypocrisy in the air.
One reason aggressive agents were restrained as they tried to go after Zacarias Moussaoui is that liberals like myself ? and the news media caldron in which I toil and trouble ? have regularly excoriated law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial profiling. As long as we're pointing fingers, we should peer into the mirror.
Nicholas Kristoff offers a welcome blast of even-handed reality in the pages of NYT. Very good.
Officials said the intelligence reports followed the discovery earlier this month of an empty SA-7 launcher near a desert base used by U.S. air forces in Saudi Arabia. The launcher was found by Saudi security police near Prince Sultan Air Base, near Riyadh, the Saudi capital.
The Saudis could not determine whether the launcher had fired a missile, and they destroyed it before U.S. military or intelligence officials could examine it. [emphasis added -ed].
This is the real outrage about this tale. The Saudis have done everything they possibly can to obscure and impede our efforts in the war on terrorism. "Could not determine?" My bet is they determined all to well whether the launcher had fired, and that was why they destroyed it.
But others, including some powerful Democrats, forecast a return of FBI abuses such as past spying on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders in the 1960s, and leftist groups opposed to U.S. policies in Central America in the 1980s.
Yeah, well, if that's what "abuses" are defined as today, bring them on. Groups opposed to US policies, or just groups opposed to the US, whether religious or not - and does it seem idiotic to anybody to exempt religious groups from surveillance when our enemies in this war are religious groups? - are precisely who we need to keep an eye on. If this were the Ku Klux Klan we were talking about, or the Christian Right, I very much doubt if any of the "powerful Democrats" would so much as utter a peep about the matter.
Here is a delightful note from an informed and French- speaking Ldotter: I'm shocked that, so far, no "multi-lingual media star" has stepped forward to correct the bad French used by David Gregory in his now famous question to M. Chirac.How embarrassed would he be to learn (and "learn" he should) that, despite obvious planning and rehearsal, his question was grammatically incorrect? Gregory asked, "M. le Pre'sident, pourriez-vous ajouter vos sentiments de cette question?" The French verb "ajouter" (to add) takes the preposition "a'" not "de." To the non-French speaker this may seem a small error. But, I assure you that it is, in fact, a huge error and one that no native speaker or student of French could possibly make. Seems to me that if you're a journalist bent on showing up our president in another language in another country, you ought to do your homework. Please, let's tell the English-speaking public the truth about the "Gregory Gaffe." The French already know!
There's an old Usenet rule about the "grammar-spelling flame," to wit: whenever you try to show up your opponent with claims of ignorance, you will generally make a mistake that will reveal the same about yourself. Sort of an instant karma situation.
Gentle Readers, today sometime DailyPundit will vanish for a short while and then reappear, an ugly duckling transformed into a beautiful swan by Sekimori's resident goddess, Stacy Tabb. Posting and even access may be sporadic for a time, but fear not: Once the gods of DNS have spread their balm unto all corners of the blogosphere and even beyond, DailyPundit will once again provide the tasty blogging goodness you have every right to expect. (Cue: Battle Hymn of the Republic...)
At a dinner last year at the Russian Embassy, a senior Russian official expressed deep dismay that the Bush administration was preparing to eliminate large numbers of nuclear missiles without any coordination with Russia. I was astonished. "Mr. Minister," I said, "I never thought I would live to see the day when a representative of Moscow would complain that Washington is reducing its nuclear arsenal."
I normally like Krauthammer's views, but in this case I think he may be diminishing the importance of nuclear weapons - and the means to deliver them in intercontinental situations - a bit too much. Russia is still the only nation in the world with the capability to deliver large numbers of nuclear devices within the borders of the United States. Pretending that this has no significance whatsoever seems a bit naive to me.
WASHINGTON - A powerful D.C. lobbying house has been shaken by its controversial contract with Saudi Arabia and its link to hard-hitting anti-Israel ads, sources told The Post.
The incestuous nest in Gucci Gulch finds its denizens treading on each others's tails. What fun!
American Airlines chief executive Donald Carty said Friday another terrorist attack against commercial airlines was unlikely and urged some security measures added at airports be dropped.
``It will be a hollow victory indeed if the system we end up with is so onerous and so difficult that air travel, while obviously more secure, becomes more trouble for the average person than it is worth,'' Carty said in a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in Tokyo.
If I were a paranoid conspiracy freak, I'd think the airlines had planned this from day one: to make airport security as onerous as possible, in order to create public revulsion at any sort of security at all.
What is needed here is not to so much to drop security (although the concept and philosophy of airport security checks needs to be drastically revamped), but to add effective security, which would include putting armed pilots behind impenetrable cockpit doors (instead of unarmed pilots behind flimsy doors they have to exit to take a leak, as now), using intelligent, Israeli-style profiling that searches for terrorists instead of weapons, and finally, workable, efficient, and expensive scanners to examine checked baggage, which we still don't have in most airports. All of this would cost money, of course, but it would go much further toward protecting the flying public - and at much less inconvenience to that flying public - than the situation we have today.
inspissate \in-SPIH-sayt or IN-spuh-sayt\ (verb)
: to make thick or thicker
Example sentence:
"Letting citizens sue polluters or the E.P.A. would only inspissate the logjam of litigation." (_The New York Times_,
August 5, 1985)
Did you know?
"Inspissate" is ultimately derived from Latin "spissus" ("slow, dense") and additionally is related to Greek "spidnos" ("compact") and Lithuanian "spisti" ("to form a swarm"). "Inspissate" suggests a thickening that can be either literal (it was first used in 1626 in the sentence "the sugar doth inspissate the spirits of the wine") or metaphorical ("inspissate the fog of confusion"). There is also an adjective "inspissate," meaning "thickened in consistency" or "made thick, heavy, or intense," but that word is even more infrequently used than the somewhat rare verb.
Editor -- While uninformed Americans engage in flag-waving hysteria, our intelligence agencies have their heads buried in the Arabian sand. Recent revelations by an FBI whistle-blower, Special Agent Coleen Rowley, FBI general counsel in Minneapolis, expose thwarted investigations and ignored warnings of terrorists participating in flight training, previous to Sept. 11.
Is it possible that this administration has put oil profits above public safety? Put down your flags, get your heads out of the sand and demand full disclosure from your president.
PAUL FINDLAY
Round Mountain
Ah, yes, Paul Findlay, one of my favorite bunch of lunatics, the leftist oil cranks. That group of grease-obsessed ninnies who are sure that, in their irrational and hysterical fear and rage at corporations in general, and oil companies in particular, there must be evil oil barons lurking behind everything they disapprove of. Pointing out to them that the supposed UnoCal pipeline "conspiracy" (fed by noted commie nutjob Ted Rall) - on which they like to blame any US attention to Afghanistan - has been thoroughly debunked does no good. Their obsessive hatred of capitalism, corporations, and non-leftists (which most definitely includes their arch enemy, George Bush) blinds them to the possibility that their own heads, wrapped in tinfoil hairnets, may be up their butts instead of their favorite bit of lunacy, "buried in the Arabian sands." Are you really such a nuthatch, Mr. Findlay, that you believe George Bush planned 9/11 as an excuse to invade Afghanistan and secure a pipeline for UnoCal? Or that he somehow otherwise knew 9/11 was about to occur, and let it happen for some similar oil-drenched reason, thus consciously murdering thousands of innocent Americans? If these aren't your nutzoid konspiracies of the day, what is your explanation for the notion that the "administration has put oil profits above public safety?"
As I said, a crank. And a stupid and pathetic one at that.
Craig Schamp points out how California Governor Grayout Davis's problems are getting worse by the day. But I have to admit I enjoy the notion that all state employees have to work for a federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour until a budget is passed and signed. And the court ruling that the state can't spend any money without a budget is even better. Don't sign it, Grayout! Don't sign!
Two lawyer-blogs, one the extremely fine The Volokh Conspiracy, the other a blog specializing in appellate litigation from Howard Bashman, How Appealing. Both are well worth your time, and both are now in my permalinks.
Bob Kerrey has changed his recollection of a deadly raid in a Vietnamese village that put the former senator at the center of a national discussion last year about U.S. conduct during the war.
....After Kerrey went public last year, a member of his Navy SEAL unit and a Vietnamese woman who said she witnessed the raid alleged the soldiers herded together the women and children and massacred them -- a charge that Kerrey and five other members of the Navy SEAL team deny.
It's hard to know what to make of this, and I doubt that anybody will ever be able to say they are entirely certain what happened unless they were there - and maybe not even then. On the one hand, all but one member of the unit deny a massacre took place. On the other hand, they would.
I don't think any of this will help to advance Kerry's presidential aspirations.
In the next two months, Greenpeace plans to post on the Internet a color map showing how a terrorist attack on the Kuehne Chemical Co. bleach plant here could unleash a lethal cloud of chlorine vapor over New York City.
Not long ago the environmental group's move would have marked just another round in almost two decades of dispute over how much the public should know about companies using hazardous materials. Then Sept. 11 transformed the debate.
While I don't think Greenpeace's motives are pure as the driven snow here, neither do I trust the true-red-white-and-blue pose taken up by the chemical company.
The fact is that worries about keeping these things secret from terrorists are about as practical as the notion that strip-searching eighty year old grannies will make flying any safer. This is feel-good stuff designed to make a gullible public think that something is being done, when in fact, nothing meaningful is occurring. There are literally thousands of ways the US can be attacked, and any terrorist with an IQ warmer than a left-over baked potato can come up with dozens of them. The idea that a chemical company should be permitted to obscure its dangerous practices in a shroud of governmental "anti-terror" secrecy ought to be a non-starter, as far as I'm concerned.
Attorneys for two men accused of violating the District's ban on handguns are arguing that the law is unconstitutional, citing the Bush administration's position that the Second Amendment gives private citizens the right to bear arms.
Hmm. I'm no lawyer, but I wonder if this one isn't designed to go straight to the Supreme Court? The issues seem much more clear-cut than with Emerson. And D.C.'s draconian (and ineffective) ban on handguns seems an obvious violation of the Second Amendment, if that amendment is interpreted correctly as protecting an individual right.
Some professor at a no-name college in Pennsylvania wants to pick a fight with "smarmy" Jonah Goldberg and Victor Davis Hanson over the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and their friends. Should be good fun down the road, if Goldberg, et al. bother to take notice.
He accused the Bush administration of backing a tax cut that favors the rich, failing to extend health coverage to the uninsured, and driving the federal budget into deficit.
Hmm. I wonder how big the deficit would be if Lieberman was able to "extend health coverage to the uninsured," which would be a multi-trillion dollar government boondoggle at the very least.
In fact, Dem pollster Mark Mellman claims the proof that Democrats are acting on principle in asking "what did Bush know" is precisely that it's dumb politics for them for this fall's congressional election.
"From a political point of view, does it make sense to fight an election about terrorism? No," Mellman says. "It's not politics."
Really? Then if the Donkey attacks are based on principle alone, why did the Dems back away from them as quickly as possible once it became obvious that the political damage was being done to them, and not to Bush? I'd think that if "principle" was the only motivation, they'd still be out there, digging their political hole ever deeper - sort of like the Republicans did with Clinton.
TODAY IS DAILYPUNDIT'S BIRTHDAY. Posting may be sporadic, light, or just goofy. Depends on how I feel. For one thing, there seems to be a couple bottles of decent wine involved.
A federal judge in New Jersey dealt a significant blow yesterday to the government's efforts to hold terrorism suspects in secret, ruling unconstitutional a directive closing immigration hearings deemed of "special interest" to the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks.
This is one mitigating factor to worries about government overreach in the name of security. The courts have already overturned or limited recently instituted policies that trod too threateningly close to constitutional limits on government power. I presume they will continue to do so.
Some of the gay men and lesbians who were partners of Sept. 11 victims are poised to collect substantial awards from the federal fund set up to compensate bereaved families, according to Kenneth R. Feinberg, special master of the fund, and lawyers familiar with the process.
And why shouldn't they? Are their loss, pain and grief any less?
Pakistan has threatened to use nuclear weapons even if India stuck to conventional arms in any conflict, asserting that it has never subscribed to "no-first-use" of atomic weapons and that ruling out their use would give New Delhi a "license to kill."
"India should not have the license to kill with conventional weapons while Pakistan's hands are tied regarding other means to defend itself," said its new ambassador to the United Nations Munir Akram.
The highly bellicose and provocative statements by Akram on the second day on the job yesterday surprised diplomats and officials at the United Nations who declined to make an immediate comment.
Pakistan, he said, has to rely on the "means it possessed to deter Indian aggression" and would not "neutralise" that deterrence by any doctrine of "no-first-use."
Of course. What would anybody expect? Nukes are, after all, weapons, and weapons don't care whether they are used offensively or defensively. It's nice to think of them as "deterrents," which was the concept peddled during the Cold War, but the idea they'd only be used as deterrents to first use of nukes by an enemy was always more wishful thinking than anything based on military strategy. If you say you won't use them in certain situations - like a conventional attack by a much larger country - then they do nothing to deter such an attack, and may even encourage it.
George Bush the Senior recently made the remarkably stupid admission that, while he had threatened Saddam Hussein with the use of US nukes if Saddam resorted to WMDs during the Gulf War, he had no intention of doing so, which I'm sure was a relief for Hussein to hear today. Much popular and press thinking about nukes is clouded by a kind of natural horror that prevents examining situations involving their possible use as, at bottom, military situations, which must be evaluated in those terms in order to understand what is actually going on.
"These new guidelines say to the American people that you no longer have to be doing something wrong in order to get that F.B.I. knock at your door," Laura W. Murphy, director of the national office of the A.C.L.U., said. "The government is rewarding failure. It seems when the F.B.I. fails, the response by the Bush administration is to give the bureau new powers, as opposed to seriously look at why the intelligence and law enforcement failures occurred."
I'm not sure. The civil libertarian part of me bridles at any increase in the powers of the state along these lines. But another part of me is aware that possibly, just possibly, those intelligence and law enforcement failures - and the deaths of three thousand Americans - occurred precisely because the FBI didn't have those powers.
Editor -- Your coverage leads me to conclude that the two major candidates for governor lack more than one of the following qualifications: ethics, competence, experience and policies in accord with the law and with voters' beliefs.
I can't stomach either Gov. Gray Davis or Bill Simon. Please give us some coverage of minor party and independent alternative candidates. An independent candidate may be our only hope. Where is Upton Sinclair, now that we need him?
DAVID BROWNELL
San Francisco
Sinclair is dead, but I'm sure you can find any number of rabid socialists with politics identical to his. San Francisco, in fact, would be a good place to look for them.
The latest post office statistics show that the typical Priority Mail shipment now takes more than half a day longer to reach its destination than first-class deliveries that cost as little as 34 cents. That compares to $3.50 for the cheapest Priority Mail shipment.
I'd never had proof of this, but an extended bout with e-bay some months back taught me not to use Priority Mail, since first class stuff seemed to get where it was supposed to go a lot faster and more reliably. Government efficiency, man. Nothing like it. (Courtesy Mickey Kaus
However, the pilots of El Al, Israel's airline, are not armed, and the airline has not had a hijacking in 34 years. The three pilots consider this evidence for the argument that the deterrence effect of armed pilots is not essential.
George Will is usually sound, but here he indulges in a bit of what I can only characterize as disingenuity (he has to know better). It is true that El Al pilots aren't armed, but that doesn't mean there aren't armed men aboard El Al flights. To the contrary, no El Al plane ever takes off with less than two, and sometimes as many as five, armed undercover marshals. Further, cabin crew on El Al planes are all ex-military trained in combat. If the US could put at least two armed air marshals on every one of the 50,000 daily flights in the US, I might see some logic to keeping the pilots unarmed. Until that time, though, letting properly trained pilots carry firearms is the quickest and easiest way to make sure there is a final line of effective resistance between the cockpit door (still flimsy, by the way) and control of the plane.
David Hogberg at Cornfield Commentaries posts a reply to criticisms from myself and others of Ryan Lizza's TNRcolumn that proposes issues on which the Dems may be able to "get traction" on President Bush in the partisan wars. David privately writes, inviting me and others to "rip him a new one." Well, not this time. I'm still not entirely convinced - I think the revulsion on the part of the voting public to naked partisanship is still strong following 9/11 (and any new attack will only make it stronger) but David makes excellent points. Well worth a read.
Chemistry
1990 Elias James Corey
1999 - Ahmed Zewail
Medicine
1960 Peter Brian Medawar
1998 Ferid Mourad
JEWISH NOBEL WINNERS
0.2% OF WORLD'S POPULATION
14.1 Million Jews
Literature
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
World Peace
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin
Chemistry
1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1972 - William Howard Stein
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1989 - Sidney Altman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
2000 - Alan J. Heeger
Economics
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 Rober Fogel
Medicine
1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 - David Baltimore
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1991 - Erwin Neher
1991 - Bert Sakmann
1993 - Richard J. Roberts
1993 - Phillip Sharp
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1995 - Edward B. Lewis
Physics
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Bohr
1958 - Igor Tamm
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1995 - Martin Perl
(Population Info: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago,
Ill.,
Britannica Book of the Year, 1999)
Heh. Has anybody noticed that Britain's The Times seems to have done away with its policy of no overseas online viewers without a sixty buck subscription?
I wonder how many actually subscribed in the few days this policy was in effect?
Senior U.S. officials are now involved in what William Safire politely terms "covering their posteriors." That exercise is so irresponsible as to defy belief. People will put consideration of their careers above the national-security interests of this country, including the lives and well-being of American citizens.
Despite the fact that more than three thousand US citizens were brutally murdered less than nine months ago, the US government has apparently sunk (I use the term deliberately) back into business as usual mode - that is to say, concentrating on re-election campaigns and campaign contributions instead of concentrating on what should be Job One - defending America against attack.
I shudder to imagine what it will take to break this mindset. If the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon won't do it, what will? I fear that maybe nothing will, that only a tsunami of votes from the employers of this greedy, power-sucking rabble will ever turn their attention away from boodle for themselves, boodle for their constituents, boodle for the corporate welfarists, boodle for the ethnic and classist special interests - and then only because they've been swept from office, Republicans and Democrats alike, and replaced by representatives of the Get Serious About Defending America From Terror Party.
Memo to George Bush and Tom Daschle: this party doesn't exist, though any politician from either major party is free to join it. How about you two, for starters?
While heated debate over the morality and effectiveness of the U.S. embargo on Cuba continues, scant attention has been paid to the practical, business dimension of the issue -- namely, that even if the embargo on doing business with Cuba were lifted tomorrow, the country would remain a highly unattractive place in which to do business.
More support for the notion that restoring full relations with Cuba is anything but a panacea for that slave nation's problems.
FBI Director Robert Mueller uses charts to explain the bureau's reorganization.
Ah. The old MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) defense tactic. Can anybody imagine the boredom coefficient of the FBI director using charts to explain why the FBI screwed up?
Common sense from the real experts on anti-terrorist security. My favorite excerpt from the article:
Israeli specialists have a low regard for American security searches. They say they tend to cause unnecessary discomfort for travelers, while being prone to missing potential assailants. "The United States does not have a security system, it has a system for bothering people," Dror says.
"The difference between the Israeli and American systems is that we are looking for the terrorist, while the Americans look for the weapons," he adds.
Solly Ezekiel of GedakenPundit got a reply from a spokesman for USAID to his emailed protest against USAID funding Palestinian groups that supported or practiced terrorism. The reply is a real eye-opener.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist and his fellow conservatives have made no secret of their desire to alter the balance of federalism, shifting power from Washington to the states. Yesterday the Supreme Court took another step in that direction, ruling 5 to 4 that federal agencies may not hear complaints by private parties against states. The decision finds little support in the Constitution's text...
Really? What about:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
NYT evidently regards the Ninth and Tenth Amendments as being as "irrelevant" as it holds the Second.
Legislation that would make California the first state to ban Native American team mascots from public schools was defeated in the Assembly Tuesday amid strong opposition from Republicans and some Democrats who called it an example of excessive political correctness.
But AB 2115 encountered firm opposition on the Assembly floor from most Republicans, who ridiculed the measure and wondered aloud where government would draw the line. Some Democratic lawmakers also questioned whether the bill was warranted, and why more of the state's Native American tribes were not involved.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe because a majority of Native Americans think this notion is idiotic:
However, a recent Sports Illustrated poll revealed that a majority of Indians support Indian-themed names and mascots. Asked whether high school and college teams should stop using Indian nicknames, 81 percent of Indian respondents said no. With regard to professional sports, 83 percent of them said teams should not stop using Indian nicknames, mascots, characters and symbols.
Those numbers are higher than President Bush's popularity scores. But Donkey ideologues like Goldberg never let reality get in the way of telling the serfs on the Democratic ethnic plantations what's good for them.
The new Democratic "attack meme" is accountability. Somehow the evil Enrons, the evil Catholic pedophiles, and the evil "Bush Knew" are all to be pasted together into a tidal wave of support for Democrats in the fall elections. (These memes rarely last more than one election cycle).
If nothing else, it will be mildly amusing to keep a rough count of how many times Donkey talking heads use the term over the next month. Anybody with Lexis-Nexis want to volunteer to do the searches?
Nearly 50 members of a Chinese delegation visiting Japan to celebrate the 30th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries have been reported missing.
Some of them went missing after checking into the hotels while others simply disappeared after landing at the airport.
As the Japanese media gave the incident prominent coverage on May 17, a watcher of Sino-Japanese ties told the Global Times that Japan might be using it to embarrass China as a tit-for-tat over the Shenyang incident earlier this month.
Which wouldn't surprise me at all. The Japanese and the Chinese have had little use for each other ever since the Mongols failed in their attempts to conquer Japan in the thirteenth century. As instability due to the internal stresses endemic to Communism grows in the People's Republic, Japan will continue to be a valuable US ally and counterbalance in the region.
India said yesterday that al Qaeda terrorists and remnants of Afghanistan's Taliban have moved into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, and it said American forces in the region would not deter military action against Pakistan.
Remember when we really got underway in Afghanistan, and there was a lot of speculation as to Osama bin Laden's fate? Some observers half-jokingly commented that even if he was dead, it would be in US interests to conceal it, and use his supposed presence as a justification for sending US power elsewhere - "Hey, Osama's just been spotted in Baghdad - in Tehran - in Saudi Arabia!" Like that.
I wonder if this isn't a Indian variation on the same theme: "Hey, Osama's in Kashmir. We gotta go get him!"
Editor -- I guess eating caviar and foie gras on a boat cruise is too much for our president. Instead of a world leader, we get a frat-brat ("Bush tired and testy in Paris," May 27). I was amazed at his remarks to French President Jacques Chirac and the group of reporters.
While Sept. 11 has propelled Bush into popularity back home, he truly can't hide his spots out of the neighborhood. He's a disgrace as an informed leader and is sorely lacking in stewardship of environmental sustainability and global peace.
CARLA SARVIS
San Francisco
Yep, Carla Sarvis, if George Bush would just sign that wonderful Kyoto Treaty and take up pacifism, things like World Trade Center 1, WTC-9/11, Khobar Towers, The USS Cole, and the Embassy bombings would never have occurred. Why didn't anybody but you and a handful of other nutjobs think of that?
"It's like a Third World country here," she says. "Think about the family with the babies, who are living two or three families in a small apartment, or in a car. Is there no shame? I was never an activist, but I cannot stand to see this thing."
This is the real truth of San Francisco: Thanks to a socialist-style rent control and frenzied activists who place snail darters, obscure plants, and public transit far above the needs of average human beings, San Francisco has become a horrible place for average human beings to try to live. But now some are beginning to fight back. For my hometown, this is a story of hope.
RiShawn Biddle points out a few inconsistencies in Mike Signorile's recent broadside against Matt Drudge. The fun part is watching him use a blowtorch to do it with.
An influential Chechen militant Adam Saltamirzayev, better known by his alias Black Adam, was killed in Chechnya's Shali district in the course of a special operation conducted by federal forces.
Seems like there's been a pretty steady drumbeat of this sort of thing since shortly after 9/11. Evidently being a big-cheese "militant" has become a considerably more dangerous occupation than it used to be.
The U.S. Supreme Court said on Tuesday it would review a ruling that struck down a Virginia law that banned cross burning because the state's top court said it violated constitutional free-speech guarantees.
As long as crosses aren't burned on public or private property without permission, I can't see why prohibiting such acts would be constitutional. Prohibiting the burning of a cross for no other reason than to prohibit the message implicit in the burning would seem to violate the First Amendment. And I'd feel the same way about the right to burn a stuffed Ku Klux Klan effigy.
ONCE AGAIN, the Bush administration is belatedly realizing that slavishly serving the interests of major corporate buddies is both bad policy and dumb politics.
You know, I've wondered for a long time: How come it's bad policy and dumb politics for a Republican administration to champion the business world, which provides the goods and services used and enjoyed by tens of millions of people, not to mention the livelihood of the majority of Americans and their families, not to mention the stock-portfolio nest eggs for millions more? And yet it is presumably good policy for the Democrats to champion the unions, the educrats, and the ethnic special interests that actually represent far fewer people, and contribute much less to the common weal? Just asking.
I'd intended to blog this article about a huge budget shortfall in Iowa, but I should have guessed: David Hogberg of the Iowa-centric Cornfield Commentary is already all over it.
Can there be any more convincing evidence of the sea change in attitudes toward the Second Amendment and gun control that the very liberal Boston Globe recently printed a column in favor of a right to armed self-defense? The experience of England is instructive, though I do wish articles of this ilk, which always emphasize the large percentage of increase in the rate of gun violence would print the numbers as well. in the interest of fairness if nothing else. The crime situation in unarmed England is already bad enough. No need to gloss over some statistics for the sake of argument. (Link courtesy Gregory Hlatky [and congrats to Diva, Mr. H!])
At Microcontent News, John Hiler offers an important analysis of a new perspective on how the blogosphere functions. This is a sometimes surprising, always insig
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