IT'S STILL HALLOWEEN (At least for the next 15 minutes on the West Coast), so how 'bout a nice seance? Peggy Noonan has a memo "from the other side" (the real other side): Paul Wellstone says he's not too happy about how his funeral went...

LONG AWAITED MICROSOFT DECISION DUE OUT TOMORROW AFTERNOON: U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge overseeing a remedy in the Microsoft Corp. antitrust case will issue her opinion late tomorrow afternoon, the court said on Thursday. Judge Kollar-Kotelly gave no hint during the remedy hearing this spring how she might rule, according to this Computer World article, which adds:

Although tomorrow's decision probably won't be the end of the Microsoft case, it will be one of its more dramatic turning points in a landmark antitrust case that began in the fall of 1998.

Over a period of four months, Judge Kollar-Kotelly heard from a long list of witnesses over what should be done to satisfy the U.S. Court of Appeals decision that Microsoft illegally maintained its operating system monopoly.

Depending on how Kollar-Kotelly rules, either the nonsettling states that refused to go along with a deal between the Department of Justice and Microsoft reached last year, the U.S., or the company itself may appeal tomorrow's ruling.

This remedy phase follows an appeals court decision one year ago this month that rejected a lower court ruling to break up the company but upheld a finding that Microsoft had illegally maintained its monopoly in the operating systems market.

Given that it's a Friday afternoon announcement, which are traditionally designed to reduce media coverage (much like the timing of Emory's recent issuance of its report on Michael Bellesiles), I wonder in which direction this will break.

I'm not holding my breath for a quick resolution however: I wrote an article almost exactly one year ago titled "Microsoft Endgame?" for National Review. Glad there's a question mark in the title!

UPDATE: Reuters has more, including a quote from antitrust attorney Steve Axinn, who says:

"She's got to decide if this settlement meets the (public interest) standard, and if not what it would take to meet the standard."

Whichever way it goes, Friday's ruling could be the end of the line in the long-running case.

"If she approves the settlement, that's it," said Axinn. On the other hand, any modifications the judge makes to the settlement are unlikely to be overturned on appeal, he said.

"She has broad discretion here," Axinn said.

READ LILEKS: The whole thing. It's a particularly awesome piece of writing from the best writer in the Blogosphere.

Happy Halloween!

LOOKING FOR POLITICALLY CORRECT HALLOWEEN COSTUMES at the last minute? Susan & Dave Konig have a parents' guide to making the proper choices.

UPDATE: Here's one to avoid. Err, actually, five to avoid...

JAMES TRAFICANT IS OUT TRICK OR TREATING....Be careful--his toupee is haunted!

THE TOP TEN SCARIEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME, as selected by Dawn Olsen of Blogcritics.

I'm particularly fond of choices #10 and #4, myself.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING OSAMA: James Robbins compares Osama bin Laden’s status to the creature in the horror films whom you know is dead...you're sure he is. He's gotta be. But he's back....Or is he? (Be sure to check out the Halloween cartoon Robbins links to at the end of his essay.)

CBS AND MATH: Glenn Reynolds links to two different AP wire reports on protestors at an NRA rally in Tucson featuring Charlton Heston. The AP feed says "three people protested", but the version on the CBS website, which is otherwise the same, raises that number to "a few dozen."

I have no idea which report is accurate, but I wouldn't be too surprised to see that CBS has problems with numbers, since, after all, these were the folks who thought that George W. Bush was President in 1998.

LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN: Nifty little comment, sung to the tune of the Rocky Horror Picture Show song, buried in this LGF post titled Israel Moves Right.

GOTTA LOVE THE RUSSIANS (I know, I never thought I'd say that, either). Check this post on Little Green Footballs out:

Russian security forces are going to bury the terrorists from the Moscow theater siege wrapped in pigskin. Reader J Lichty, who forwarded the story, comments: “Imagine if Israel did this.”

The Russians understand the mindset of the Islamic terrorist. Far from being a spiteful symbolic gesture, to the Islamozoids this is a deadly serious form of psychological warfare that strikes at the heart of their delusionary belief system.

ANGRY DEM WALKS OUT OF DEBATE: 3-term incumbent "U.S. Rep. Julia Carson, D-Ind., stormed out of a debate Wednesday after refusing to stay on the same stage with her Republican challenger, Brose McVey."

But hey, at least Carson showed up. Senate candidate Douglas Forrester recently debated an empty chair as his Democratic opponent, Frank Lautenberg, declined to appear against him on New Jersey radio.

BEDS OF THE WORLD: Silflay Hraka explains the latest in global Posturepedics. Complete with weltanschauung and weltanschlauung!

THE ANTIDOTE TO AMTRAK: Riding the Napa Valley Wine Train is my latest article on Blogcritics. Hop onboard today!

YOU DON'T SAY: AP headline: "UN Members Oppose Speedy Iraq Action".

Since the U.N. is the global equivalent of watching paint dry (actually it's worse: when the paint dries, usually something good has been accomplished), at what point does Bush say, "see ya in Baghdad, fellas!" and turn his back on them?

RAPPER "JAM MASTER JAY", MEMBER OF RUN DMC, KILLED IN SHOOTING: AP reports "Publicist Tracy Miller confirmed the death of the 37-year-old rapper, whose real name was Jason Mizell.

"A legal source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the rapper was shot in the head at a recording studio in the New York City borough of Queens. A second person was shot in the ankle and the shooter was at large, the source said."

HERE'S A SHOCKER: AP reports "Minn. Dems OK Mondale for Senate Run".

INTERNET2 UPDATE: Forget HDTV--Internet2 just streamed Super High Definition (SHD) full motion digital imagery in real time from a server in Chicago to a projector in Los Angeles. Canada's Canarie System (the Great White North equivalent of Internet2), has more details.

What's SHD? The Canarie press release describes Super High Definition has having "four times the resolution of HDTV, and 24 times the resolution of standard definition video. Transmission of SHD via network requires sustainable high-speed connectivity of 1 gigabit per second over multiple hops without significant packet loss, delay or jitter.

What's Internet2? Read all about it in my Tech Central Station article from earlier this month.

MATT DRUDGE: On top of the breaking issues that effect society and life as we know it!

PA MUST BE ON LSD TO BLAME CIA: Little Green Footballs reports that "The Palestinian Authority’s official daily says the CIA was behind the Moscow terrorists, as part of a complicated and highly illogical plot to enlist Russia’s support for an attack against Iraq."

I LOVE THIS OPENING PARAGRAPH by Zev Chafets in the NY Daily News:

Here's all you need to know about Saturday's "peace" demonstration near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Al Sharpton was the most moderate, pro-American speaker there.

"We are the real patriots," he told the much-smaller-than-expected crowd. "We are the true face of America."

Geez, I don't think so, Al! Incidentally, Chafets makes another good point regarding how toxic the "peace movement" has become near the end of his essay:

As a hawk, this should make me happy, but it doesn't. Wartime democracies need a loyal opposition. A large, pro-American peace movement would be a good tool for keeping the government honest as it pursues its (very justified) war against the Islamic Axis.

Nice idea, but I'm afraid the idea of "pro-American" largely departed the peace movement around 1967.

FANS OF THE CULT TV SERIES UFO (and we count ourselves as one of them--it was a favorite childhood series), should check out the hip gear available fron The SHADO Store, powered by Cafe Press.

"YOU THINK YOU'RE MICKEY SPILLANE? DO YOU THINK YOU'RE SOME KIND OF F***ING WRITER??" The Guardian reports that "The Pentagon is offering to train journalists in the basics of military combat as part of its contingency planning for media coverage of a possible war with Iraq."

No word yet if Lee Ermey will return to active duty as a D.I. to train the reporters.

T-MOBILE EXPANDING 802.11 HOTSPOTS, according to an email I received from FierceWireless.com:

T-Mobile USA today said it would set up wireless hot spots in airport lounges across the United States. T-Mobile agreed to establish hot spots for American Airlines, Delta, and United in around 100 airport clubs and lounges throughout the U.S. No financial details from the deals were released. T-Mobile has already inked hot spots deals with Borders Group and Starbucks, and plans to offer hot spots in about 2,000 locations in the U.S. by the end of the year.

As to what an "802.11 hotspot" is, see our July article in Tech Central Station.

THERE'S AN AIDS CRISIS BREWING IN INDIA, fueled "by an increasingly casual attitude toward sex coupled with a tradition of public silence and reluctance to grasp the issues", according to CNSNews.com.

As probably everybody reading this has already seen, the funeral services for Paul Wellstone ended up as a partisan pep rally yesterday. If you haven't, here's a round up of the coverage.

InstaPundit notes that "The event was too tacky for former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura." (And that's saying something!)

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg writes:

That is what was so offensive about that rally: It shamelessly used Wellstone's death for partisan advantage while its organizers cynically accused their opponents of doing precisely that. Blaming others for something awful you've done is perhaps the defining attribute of Bill Clinton and his legacy on the Democratic party. Wellstone did many good things out of principle — including work with Jesse Helms, a man he grew to befriend, on human rights in China. But he will now be invoked by Democrats everywhere simply to get out the vote, beat up Republicans, and raise millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

In short, so long as they hold onto the Senate, the Clinton Democrats — who often found Wellstone's principles inconvenient — will find him more useful dead than alive. They will rewrite the story of his life to fit any cause they choose — much as they have done with other Democratic martyrs like John and Robert Kennedy (a Cold War anti-Communist and the attorney general who personally authorized the bugging of Martin Luther King, respectively). Wellstone's distinctiveness and honesty will melt in a warm pool of mass-marketed nostalgia. And, if Republicans complain, Democrats will simply charge insensitivity and laugh all the way to the bank.

Andrew Stuttaford reports that "Rick Kahn, the friend of Paul Wellstone who made what has been seen as an excessively partisan speech at the late senator's memorial service was, apparently, unrepentant afterwards". Kahn was quoted as saying:

"Can they not one time, just one time, step forward for Paul and honor that friendship? Why can't they do that? One time, for one week. That's what we're asking. That they go out there and say Paul Wellstone did this wonderful work and we need to keep his legacy alive by sending his successor to his seat. "

Here's the photo that started it all. In retrospect, it was probably wise of the Wellstone family to tell Dick Cheney that he wasn't welcome at the funeral.

Wellstone's death released a remarkable outpouring of sympathy from both parties. Peggy Noonan's warm, admiring essay is representative of the tone from a wide range of columnists and bloggers.

But Wellstone's awesomely tacky funeral has destroyed much of that bipartisan goodwill. Its ill-will has already caused Orrin Judd to write:

Out of respect for the wishes of the Wellstone family and the Democrat Party we too will abjure decency and treat the Senator's death as a purely partisan matter. In that regard, while we regret the manner of his departure, we would note that on the day he died the prospects for human freedom were improved in America and the world.

Expect to see more such writing as the anger from this ill-conceived event festers. Next time, bury Caesar, praise him--and then have the pep rally, the day after.

UPDATE: CNSNews.com is reporting:

The chair of the Minnesota Republican Party is calling on the state's television and radio stations to give the GOP equal time to campaign, given the partisan tone of Tuesday night's memorial for the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, who along with his wife and daughter, perished in a plane crash last week.

UPDATE: Wellstone's campaign manager now says, "It would probably have been best not to have the election mentioned."

Gee, you think?

IN THE CHURCH OF THE POISONED MIND: Speaking to the New York Daily News, Curtis Hanson, the director of Eminem's first movie, 8 Mile, describes how much trouble he went to build an authentic recreation of the hip-hop club where Marshall Mathers (Eminem's real name) got his start as a rapper:

[Hanson] went to the trouble to make sure it signaled the same "religious" atmosphere as the places where Eminem and his rivals originally performed.

"This was their church," he said during a recent visit to New York. "They got from it what people get from church — a sense of community, spirituality, hope. It became the cornerstone of the direction I gave in finding other locations.

Move along, no moral equivalence to see here. You can go about your business. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

I realize I'm about to sound like a boring old fart, but...rap clubs as churches?? I don't claim to any sort of religious scholar. But gee, I don't recall hearing 12 letter words words built around the letters "M" and "F" in my church--or in weekly school chapel services--growing up.

UPDATE: James Bowman also has some thoughts on the man whom the New York Times recently called "the world’s best rapper".

A FEDEX TRUCK HAS EXPLODED ON A ST LOUIS HIGHWAY: This Fox News article has preliminary details, and not much of those.

UPDATE: Since posting this, more details have emerged. The story now is that "the fire was the result of a traffic accident caused when the truck driver apparently fell asleep.

[Missouri Director of Homeland Security Tim Daniel] says the truck's fuel tank struck a light pole, causing the fire."

ARE DEMOCRATS AGAINST MEDICAL SAVINGS ACCOUNTS? Shiloh Bucher says yes, and explains why.

PARIS HONORS JIMI HENDRIX, on what would have been his 60th birthday. Group Captain Lionel Mandrake has the details.

A FEDERAL ALTERNATIVE INTERNET? Information Week says that "The Bush administration is exploring the possibility of creating an “interstate communications expressway,” patterned after the interstate highway system, to quicken the exchange of homeland-security information among federal, state, and local governments.

While its details are sketchy, the article does note that the networks could eventually be opened to the public (much like Darpanet eventually became the Internet):

Kentucky CIO Aldona Valicenti said accepting federally endorsed standards wouldn't bother most state CIOs. Though the idea of the network would be to ease the exchange of homeland security information, there's no reason why other types of information couldn't transverse it, even commercial data, he said. Indeed, employing one type of technology to address a wide range of processes is a leitmotif of Bush administration technology managers.

Planners of the original interstate highway system during the Cold War years a half-century ago weren't concerned about the movement of goods and civilians--today's primary users--but to facilitate the transport of military equipment and personnel. Today, Cooper notes, drivers may occasionally see a convoy of National Guard trucks carrying weekend warriors crawl along.

IT'S THAT 80'S SHOW, where James Lileks takes you back to the future to the past to future to the past (sorry for the Mobius loop, but it's tough to get used to elections for the Senate where the players include a fossilized Walter Mondale and an ossified Frank Lautenberg):

In doing some research for today’s Mondale column, I reread his speech at the 1984 Democratic convention. Here’s a real time-capsule moment for you:

“When we speak of change, the words are Gary Hart's. When we speak of hope, the fire is Jesse Jackson's. When we speak of caring, the spirit is Ted Kennedy's. When we speak of the future, the message is Geraldine Ferraro”

Well, at least one out of four didn’t cheat on his wife. What a snapshot of 1984: a time when Gary Hart was the 845th blurry photocopy of JFK to be handed around, when Jesse Jackson was regarded as a bulwark of righteous enlightenment instead of a self-aggrandizing shakedown artist; when Ted Kennedy was a big pickled Care Bear, and Geraldine Ferraro was the future, not a footnote-to-be. I was a hardcore Democrat at the time, and I remember watching the speech and thinking: we are going to lose. We are going to lose 51 states. Puerto Rico will demand statehood just for the chance not to vote for this guy.

YEAGER'S LAST MILITARY FLIGHT: Chuck Yeager made his last flight on Saturday as the pilot of a military fighter this past weekend, going supersonic in an Air Force F-15. The flight brings the 79 year old Yeager's 60-year career flying military aircraft to a close in front of thousands of fans at the open house and air show at Edwards Air Force Base, where his legendary status as a test pilot was born:

Yeager, with Edwards test pilot Lt. Col. Troy Fontaine in the back seat, opened the event by climbing to just over 30,000 feet and impressed the crowd with his infamous sonic boom. Yeager first broke the sound barrier at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., in October 1947 when he accelerated his rocket-powered Bell X-1 to the speed of Mach 1.06 and shattered the myth of the sound barrier forever.

The crowd hushed as Yeager landed and taxied under an archway of water gushing from two Edwards fire trucks per Air Force tradition. For his final military flight, Yeager was accompanied in the air with longtime friend and colleague retired Maj. Gen. Joe Engle flying his own F-15. The two legendary test pilots have been flying together for decades.

"This is a fun day for us because we get to fly good airplanes and do something we've loved to do for some time," Yeager said.

The general announced earlier this year that 60 years of military flying is long enough.

"Now is a good time," said Yeager. "I've had a heck of good time and very few people get exposed to the things I've been exposed to. I'll keep on flying P-51s and light stuff, but I just feel it's time to quit."

The actual article contains larger versions of the above photo. See if the name painted on the nose of Yeager's F-15 rings a bell.

(Thanks to Orrin Judd for sending us the link to the above article.)

MELISA SECKORA, who was one of the first to break the story on Michael Bellesiles, has an excellent summary of his resignation from Emory University, and the events that lead up to it, complete with numerous links.

Is it just me, or is Walter Cronkite not-so-subtely comparing Bush to Hitler when he complains about the military not allowing reporters in to battle?

“[In past conflicts], you wrote it to be the history,” he said. “We have no history now of the Persian Gulf War. We have only what the military reporters wrote and that’s what their bosses told them. That’s not good enough.”

Cronkite admitted that in some cases, such as the recent congressional report that outlined the country’s homeland security weaknesses, he wonders whether or not reporting all the facts is in the country’s best interest.

“It seems to me that as citizens, we should get this info so we can shout to Washington, ‘Let’s get this game going,’” he said. “But at the same time, there’s a terrorist cell sitting there saying, ‘That’s how we do it.’”

But for a country’s citizens to be truly free and the government to be held accountable, he said people must have a free press that gathers all the facts.

He said an example of the alternative would be a situation like what he witnessed after WWII, after the Nazi concentration camps were freed. The people who lived in nearby towns cried at the sights of the persecuted Jews and told reporters they had no idea of what was going on behind the walls of the camps.

Many were probably telling the truth, he said, but that did not make them any less responsible.

“They applauded as Hitler closed down the independent newspaper and television stations and only gave them his propaganda,” Cronkite said. “When they did not rise up and say, ‘Give us a free press,’ they became just as guilty.”

OK, maybe it's just me. But he is comparing the military to the Nazis--an analogy that's got to be getting a little worn out these days.

UPDATE: ScrappleFace has the inevitable denouement to this story. Of course, Cronkite should have seen it coming from a mile away.

UPDATE: As James Taranto notes, "Ah yes, the Weimar Republic--the Golden Age of Television."

BROADWAY DICK LeBEAU GUARANTEES BENGALS WILL BEAT HOUSTON: No word yet on what Joe Namath thinks about his famous 1969 guarantee of victory being used by the lowly 0-7 Bengals to geek themselves up before playing the 2-5 Texans on Sunday

HEADLINES YOU DON'T SEE EVERYDAY: Rich Lowry asks, "Is milk racist?"

U.S. News & World Report's John Leo writes that the left has lost its moral bearings:

Everywhere you turn these days, someone on the left is denouncing President Bush as Hitler, Satan, a terrorist or a tyrannical emperor. A Yale law professor said Bush is "the most dangerous man on Earth." A famous editor referred to Bush as "a lawn jockey" and "Pinocchio."

Some of the angry rhetoric flirts with the fringe idea that the United States planned the terrorist attacks. A Purdue professor said "there is no ground to be certain" that America and Israel aren't behind the 9/11 attacks. A Columbia law professor compared 9/11 to the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany -- Bush is not responsible for 9/11, he said, but he exploited a national disaster to suspend civil liberties, just like Hitler. A Berkeley professor helpfully pointed out that some Indonesian groups think the U.S. planned the Bali bombing.

The rhetoric accurately reflects the current condition of much of the left -- bitter, stymied, alienated, politically impotent, full of loathing for America and the West, and totally unable to address the crisis wrought by 9/11, except to imply (or say) that the U.S. deserved to be attacked.

Nice essay by Tim Cavanaugh on Daniel Pipes' new organization, Campus Watch, in Reason. I particularly liked this idea:

We may in fact need an update of Mike Godwin's Hitler constant, with a corollary that the first person to use the word "McCarthy" in a debate automatically forfeits the point.

Good plan.

FOUR KILLED IN GUNFIRE AT U. OF ARIZONA: This AP report identifies the suspect, who took his own life, as "Robert S. Flores, a Gulf War veteran who was apparently flunking out of the nursing program. He apparently committed suicide after the attack, Police Chief Richard Miranda said."

Reason recently had a short piece built around the notion that the psycho Gulf War vet is about to replace the psycho Vietnam vet as a stock Hollywood character. I'm beginning to think they're right.

UPDATE: InstaPundit, back online after a half-day's worth of server outages, makes some great points about why a campus such as U of AZ would be such a tempting target.

GLENN FRAZIER LIKES MONKEYS. He really, really likes them.

That is all.

WILL MONDALE GET THE NOD IN MINNESOTA? Ramesh Ponnuru has some thoughts in National Review Online.

Of course, should Mondale be unable to fulfill his duties, the DNC has a pinch hitter on deck, warming up...

US DIPLOMAT KILLED IN JORDAN. Laurence Foley received eight bullets in "the head, chest and abdomen", according to this AP report, which adds:

While Jordan is officially allied with the United States, anti-American sentiment has been rising with public opposition to a threatened U.S. attack on Iraq, Jordan's eastern neighbor and primary trading partner. The kingdom's 1994 peace treaty with Israel also has made it a target for Muslim militants and terrorist groups.

LEGENDARY PRODUCER/ENGINEER IS DEAD: Tom Dowd, who produced or engineered numerous albums by John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, The Allman Brothers, and Eric Clapton, died on Sunday morning at a nursing home in Aventura after fighting a respiratory disease for two years, his daughter, Dana Dowd, said. He was 77.

Eric Olsen of Blogcritics has more details.

CAN'T GET INTO BLOOMBERG.COM LATELY? It's probably because Microsoft's playing hardball...

MICHAEL KINSELY ONCE FAMOUSLY SAID that major gaffes only occur when a politician speaks the impolitic truth.

Michael Meacher, Britain's environment minister, surely spoke the truth about Britain's Labour Party today. Click on this post by Andrew Stuttaford to read it--it's a classic. (Make sure to click on Stuttaford's link to the Samizdata Weblog for their response to Meacher.)

NAQOYQATSI: Roger Ebert reviews the latest film in the "Qatsi" trilogy by director Godfrey Reggio. Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio's first film, was about man and technology and was largely filmed in the US. its sequel, Powaqqatsi was about technology's influence on the third world. Naqoyqatsi, the concluding film in the trilogy, is about man, technology and war.

Ebert writes:

The thinking behind these films is deep but not profound. They're ritualistic grief at what man has done to the planet. "The logical flaw," as I pointed out in my review of "Powaqqatsi," is that "Reggio's images of beauty are always found in a world entirely without man--without even the Hopi Indians. Reggio seems to think that man himself is some kind of virus infecting the planet--that we would enjoy the earth more, in other words, if we weren't here."

Or as I recently wrote about Koyaanisqatsi for Blogcritics:

Running 87 minutes without a stitch of dialogue, Koyaanisqatsi nonetheless carries a powerful emotional message. Of course, what that message is depends on what the viewer wants to take away from the film. I think it's a safe bet that Godfrey Reggio, the director of Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi believes, more or less, in most of the standard shibboleths of the environmental left: man is bad, technology is bad, nature is best left pristine, etc. Kill 'em all: let Gaia sort it out.

As far as this latest film, Ebert writes:

Although "Naqoyqatsi" has been some 10 years in the making, it takes on an especially somber coloration after 9/11. Images of marching troops, missiles, bomb explosions and human misery are intercut with trademarks (the Enron trademark flashes past), politicians and huddled masses, and we understand that war is now our way of life. But hasn't war always been a fact of life for mankind? We are led to the uncomfortable conclusion that to bring peace to the planet, we should leave it.

Of course. The far fringes of the environmental left really would be much happier if the planet was vacated. Of course, so few of them are willing to put their money where their mouths are, and check out early in an effort to speed the process up.

Reggio, with the dramatic music of Philip Glass underscoring them, creates awesome images, and I do plan to see Naqoyqatsi if it makes its way out to San Jose. But to take their underlying message seriously is dangerous--not to mention deadly.

EMMITT SMITH JUST BROKE WALTER PAYTON'S NFL RUSHING RECORD.

The Cowboys will probably have a fairly mediocre season, but it's great to see Smith pull this off.

BACK TO THE FUTURE: AP says that Walter Mondale (yes, that Walter Mondale) has emerged as the front runner to replace Paul Wellstone.

TABLET PCs: In case you haven't noticed already, Microsoft lately is really pushing tablet PCs as The Next Big Thing. David Strom of Internet Week looks at the tablets' pluses and minuses.

I've tested a few tablet PCs--both at CES, and Candlestick Park, when 3Com had the naming rights, and briefly had the stadium running 802.11, and was leasing wireless Hitachi tablet PCs in the luxury suites during 49ers games. Near term, I'm pretty skeptical of tablets achieving real success, but my opinion may be tainted after watching Internet appliances hyped to gills, only to see them quickly fail, a couple of years ago.

DOUBLE YOUR FUN: There were actually two attacks on the Internet on Monday, according to Internet Week.

PAGING DR. ORWELL: Take a gander at the 1984-style propaganda posters the Metropolitan Police are putting up around London.

"YOU GOTTA DO WHAT YOU GOTTA DO", Bill Clinton told Bob Dole when he complained about the demagogic Medicare ads that helped defeat him. Robert Bartley says that the election ethics of Clinton's party are little changed.

Left-wing bigotry is on the rise, according to Andrew Sullivan:

When a black public person like Harry Belafonte calls another African-American a slave to white masters, you see what I mean. When defenders of feminism call someone who files a sexual harassment lawsuit "trailer-trash," you get the picture. When a gay man can write a column asserting that another man is a "nasty faggot," it's hard to think of how much lower the discourse can get. When liberals denigrate the president as a "boy" or as a "sissy," to quote Maureen Dowd, homophobia doesn't lurk far behind.

I remember a brief interaction I had with one Barbra Streisand long, long ago when the Paula Jones suit had just been filed. I asked Ms. Streisand what she thought of the suit. "Oh, she's just a little kurva," she replied, referring to Jones. That's a yiddish expression for "whore." Charming.

Again, the simple test here is the following: If a conservative had used these expressions, would it have been denounced by liberals? The answer, obviously, is yes. Imagine if George Will had called Colin Powell a "house slave." Imagine if Pat Buchanan had called Barney Frank a "nasty faggot." Imagine if Trent Lott had called Hillary Clinton a whore. Do you think they'd be invited on "Larry King Live" to further elaborate on their comments?

When you resort to the examples that Sullivan gives above, it says to me that you're losing the argument; you've relinquished your role as moral leader, and you've got to crank up the noise--and the hate--to compensate.

Winners don't stoop to that kind of language.

WILL IT HAPPEN THIS WEEKEND? Emmitt Smith is closing in on Walter Payton's all-time rushing record.

He'd love to get it this Sunday in Dallas, and the porous Seattle Seahawks defense just might (reluctantly) oblige him.

RUSSIAN FORCES CONTROL THEATER, according to this AP report. The Russians used sleeping gas in their daring pre-dawn raid, but unfortunately, Reuters reports 130 dead, but no word yet on how that breaks down between hostages and terrorists.

Fortunately, the networks were right on top of this story, every step of the way.

NEW PINK FLOYD DVDs COMING NEXT YEAR, according to The Digital Bits Web site, which had these interesting Floydian slips today:

We've got some GOOD news for you Pink Floyd fans. Roger Waters' manager, Mark Fenwick, had confirmed that Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii - The Director's Cut is being prepped for DVD release in March 2003. Not only that, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is going to be released on DVD-Audio on 3/3/03 in honor of its 30th anniversary! We're still waiting for an update on Pulse, so we'll let you know if we hear anything.

Sounds like it should be a good year for Floyd fans in 2003. Now if we could only get Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour reunited, or at least talk Gilmour into getting the rest of the gang back together for a tour...

New evidence has come to light that an ex-US President, at the height of a long protracted war against a totalatarian regime which had killed millions of innocent lives, asked that regime to influence the election of the extremely popular President who had previously defeated him:

Even when he was out of office, Herbert Hoover still tried bitterly to encourage Berlin to do damage to his enemies during an election. As von Ribbontrop recounts, in January 1944 the former president dropped by his residence for a private meeting. Hoover was concerned about Roosevelt's potential for a fourth term, and went on to explain that Berlin would be better off with someone else in the White House. If Roosevelt won, he warned, "There would not be a single agreement on arms control, especially on poison gas, as long as Roosevelt remained in power."

Of course, the above never actually happened (although it would make a great Robert Harris thriller). However, according to an article by Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, something very similar did happen--at least twice--with Jimmy Carter and our Cold War enemies, the Soviet Union:

On repeated occasions, according to numerous Soviet accounts, Carter encouraged Moscow to influence American politics for his benefit or for the detriment of his enemies. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin recounts in his memoirs how, in the waning days of the 1980 campaign, the Carter White House dispatched Armand Hammer to the Soviet embassy. Explaining to the Soviet Ambassador that Carter was "clearly alarmed" at the prospect of losing to Reagan, Hammer asked for help: Could the Kremlin expand Jewish emigration to bolster Carter's standing in the polls? "Carter won't forget that service if he is elected," Hammer told Dobrynin.

According to Georgii Kornienko, first deputy foreign minister at the time, something similar took place in 1976, when Carter sent Averell Harriman to Moscow. Harriman sought to assure the Soviets that Carter would be easier to deal with than Ford, clearly inviting Moscow to do what it could through public diplomacy to help his campaign.

Even when he was out of office, Carter still tried bitterly to encourage Moscow to do damage to his enemies during an election. As Dobrynin recounts, in January 1984 the former president dropped by his residence for a private meeting. Carter was concerned about Reagan's defense build-up and went on to explain that Moscow would be better off with someone else in the White House. If Reagan won, he warned, "There would not be a single agreement on arms control, especially on nuclear arms, as long as Reagan remained in power."

While Carter's commitment to the principles of democracy, peace, and human rights is genuine, he has failed to grasp that good intentions are not enough. A commitment to championing human rights is no substitute for enacting policies that actually secure them — nor should it be an excuse for trying to manipulate an American election.

If the above is true, imagine if Hoover really did go the Nazis--or Nixon to the Soviets, to try to swing an election?

(Link found via Dean Esmay, who also links to a very interesting post by John Weidner on the same subject.)

WILL ALAN PAGE REPLACE PAUL WELLSTONE? Orrin Judd's sources are tracking who will be the next Democratic candidate for senator from Minnesota, and say that Page (a Hall of Fame lineman from the Vikings' glory years with Budd Grant and Fran Tarkenton) and Walter Mondale's son Ted are the frontrunners.

RICHARD HARRIS DIED TODAY AT AGE 72: The 72-year-old actor had been receiving treatment for Hodgkin's Disease at University College Hospital in London, where he was pronounced dead at 7:00 p.m.

PAYING FOR THE WAR: Larry Kudlow says the US economy can afford it.

HERE'S SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO. Jonah Goldberg writes:

If it hasn't happened already, we can expect that someone on the Cynthia McKinney/Nation of Islam fringe will soon be declaring that Johnny Muhammad is a Lee Harvey Oswald-style dupe whom the Bushes set up to further distract the country from the elections and to paint black Muslims in a bad light. After all, the guy does have three names, which is the only essential ingredient for a murky, government-backed assassin, right?

Goldberg also has some thoughts on the upcoming election, especially in light of Paul Wellstone's death in a plane crash today.

SHOULD THE US GO IT ALONE IN IRAQ, under current UN resolutions and without further UN deliberation? the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed piece today authored by former NSC General Counsel Paul Stevens, analyzing United States authority to continue military action against Iraq under current UN resolutions. While it's only available to subscribers of the Journal, earlier this month, the Federalist Society released a white paper on the same topic, also authored by Stevens.

NAME CHANGE: Along with regime change, Sidney Goldberg (Jonah's dad) suggests it could give Iraq (and Iran) a fresh start--and I agree.

MY HOW TIMES CHANGE: Eric Olsen notes "Stupid Celebrity Tricks" in a once patriotic Hollywood.

Check out these paragraphs from the CNN article on Iraq expelling foreign journalists:

Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive, said the planned expulsion is "a draconian measure that will sharply curtail the world's knowledge about what is happening in Iraq." Jordan said CNN stands by Arraf and all of CNN's Iraq reporting as "accurate, fair, and forthright."

If half of the things reported in the New Republic story we linked to last week on how Iraq manipulates its coverage are true, how on earth can Jordan say that with a straight face? (Insert obligatory Orwell reference of your choice here.)

And then there's this one:

Jordan dismissed as "absurd" Iraqi government allegations that CNN is a U.S. government propaganda service. Jordan added that "while CNN remains committed to reporting to the extent possible from Iraq, CNN will not compromise its journalistic principles in exchange for CNN access to any country."

Ted Turner must be laughing his butt off over anyone thinking that CNN is a U.S. government propaganda service.

SADDAM HUSSEIN IS EXPELLING ALL FOREIGN JOURNALISTS: Joanne Jacobs suggests that "this is a great opportunity for CNN and others to stand up for their integrity by leaving Baghdad and refusing to return under Saddam's terms".

Think they'll do it? Me neither.

HERE COMES THE SPIN regarding the muslim sniper angle, says Charles Johnson.

(Incidentally, sorry for the lack of coverage on the sniper, especially after manning the Blogosphere's late shift early this morning. I'm trying to wrap up an article today. InstaPundit and LGF have tons of coverage and links today. But you probably knew that already.)

IS HOCKEY THE KILLER APP FOR BROADBAND? The National Hockey League says that 76 percent of the 12 million monthly visitors to NHL.com log on from a broadband connection.

THE CLEAR WINNER: U.S. Senate candidate Douglas Forrester debated last night against an empty chair on a New Jersey radio station, as his Democratic opponent, Frank Lautenberg, declined to appear.

No word yet if Wilson, that volleyball-cum-thespian from Cast Away will enter the race as a last minute third party candidate.

MORE ON THE SNIPER: AP has a photo of the suspect, and more details, while Stephen Green says that the sniper's situation is the direct opposite of the IRA's in the early 1980s.

UPDATE: AP says that two men were arrested early Thursday in connection with the serial sniper attacks. They were found inside a car at a rest stop off I-70 in Federick County, Md., at 3:19 a.m., according to Larry Scott, an agent for the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Arms.

UPDATE: I just turned Fox News on, before calling it a night. They're saying that a rifle (possibly the rifle) was apparently found in the car.

SADDAM RECALLS CHILDREN OF HIS ENVOYS: Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has ordered all his diplomats posted abroad to send their children back to Iraq, according to a U.S. intelligence report.

It would be nice to see a few of the diplomats defect, rather than let their children serve as human shields and bargaining chips for the hopefully soon-to-be-living-the-rest-of-his-short-a**-life-in-agonizing-pain-tyrant here. (With apologies to Ving Rhames and Quentin Tarantino.)

STIRRED, NOT SHAKEN: VodkaPundit reviews The Thin Man, a film released almost immediately after Prohibition ended, and starring William Powell, Myrna Loy, several half gallons of Tanqueray, and a couple of fifths of Noilly Pratt.

Oh, and Asta, too!

By the way, for more on The Thin Man, and its place in Martini history, be sure to check out Barnaby Conrad's The Martini: An Illustrated History of an American Classic, a terrific look at the great American cocktail, and how to make them.

McZEPPELIN! A 25-foot-high inflatable Ronald McDonald is at Large in South Wales.

Sounds like a whale of a Filet of Fish story to me...

LOUD EXPLOSION HEARD AT MOSCOW THEATER: AP says "It was not clear whether the explosion was inside the theater or outside".

SNIPER WARRANTS ISSUED: Little Green Footballs and InstaPundit have a roundup of the details.

THE NIGHTLY LILEKS LINK: In the middle of a stomach flu of apparently pan-galactic proportions, James Lileks still has the energy to describe what makes the DC sniper so different from 9/11:

We don’t dress up our children in dynamite belts - and they think this makes us weak. We shield our children from death, not marinate them in its bloody juices, and they think this means we lack conviction. Morons. Come after our children, and you don’t know what you’re in for. You heard the part about awakening a sleeping giant? The sleeping giantess is the one you want to look out for, because she’ll tear off your head and lactate down your throat. Do not mess with American moms.

If it is Islamic terrorism, it will be delightful to watch the root-causers explain this one. They could get away with writing off 9/11 as karmic justice, because it was so large, so theatrical, so massively calamitous that it instantly took on symbolic meaning. And symbols are always up for grabs. But shooting a dozen people at random is something the mind grasps and understands at once.

Here's the key difference:

everyone has stood in the open pumping gas, watching the numbers race, hoping we can hold it under twenty bucks, waving to the kid strapped in the backseat, wondering when the gas station started playing oldies through the loudspeaker - jesus, “My Eyes Adored You?” Haven’t heard that one in -

[crack]

[/life]

This even the stupidest root-causer gets. But I doubt they’ll admit it. They’ll have to draw a direct link between American foreign policy and some poor guy getting his head opened up at a 7-11. It will require meta-meta-meta thinking so elaborate, so vaporous, so consumed with the sins of the West that they’ll look like someone pissing off the parapets of the tallest building in Cloud-Cuckoo Land.

I think they’re up to the job.

The sad thing he's right. But it may be sometime before "the root causers" get up enough nerve to actually say it in public.

CLEVELAND BROWNS OWNER DIES: Al Lerner was 69. "Lerner underwent surgery in May 2001, reportedly to remove a brain tumor. In June, he said he had been in and out of the hospital during the past year", according to this AP report.

Lerner was one of the 1998 recipients of the Horatio Alger Award--and I'd say he personified it:

The son of an immigrant candy shop owner, Lerner was a tough-minded kid, whose first job selling furniture paid him $75 a week.

He saved enough to enter a deal to purchase a Cleveland apartment building. His real estate empire grew, and he went on to acquire banking interests in Baltimore.

In 1991, he spun off the MBNA Credit Corp. from debt-ridden MNC Financial in Maryland with a stock offering that raised $995 million. He ended up with a 10 percent stake in MBNA and became its chief executive.

Lerner also was chairman of Town & Country Trust, a Baltimore-based real estate investment trust that owns and manages residential properties.

His friend and business partner, Peter B. Lewis, chairman of Progressive Insurance Corp., once described Lerner as ``the Michael Jordan'' of the investment business.

LINE OF THE DAY (as posted in a music forum): "Chief Moose is expected to emerge from HQ at any moment and make a statement. If he sees his shadow, it means six more weeks of investigating."

CORRUPTION CORRUPTS: Jonah Goldberg dissects Lord Acton's famous aphorism (no, that not a male follicular fashion worn by Don Cornelius), "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men":

Now, it's obviously true that Acton, an eminent 19th-century liberal, had an abiding problem with powerful men who let their power go to their heads — but that's not really what he was talking about. He was talking about the tendency of people to say, "But Hitler built the autobahn," or "Think of all the good things Bill Clinton did," or "Remember that Nixon created the EPA." He wasn't necessarily offering as a rule of thumb that as you get more powerful you get more corrupt. Rather, he was saying that as you get more powerful the standard you are held to by historians must be more, not less, exacting. I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, but that's an argument for another day.

Today, the "power corrupts" syllogism has — like so many other things — been translated into a credo of personal morality. It insists that power makes you a bad person — i.e., self-aggrandizing, cruel, megalomaniacal, blind to all moral distinctions, and so on. And that just isn't true. If it were, history would simply be the story of bad powerful men. And, while there most certainly were plenty of bad powerful men, there was also, for instance, George Washington. He might have become a king if he'd wanted, but he chose not to. He could have stayed president for life, but he chose not to. And, as NR's Richard Brookhiser has chronicled, Washington remained a decent man, courteous to a fault in fact, as he grew in influence and power. Likewise, Abraham Lincoln — at whom certain libertarians love to throw the Acton quote — may have suspended habeas corpus, but the evidence seems fairly lacking that he was a corrupt man or that he grew more corrupt as he grew more powerful. Last I checked, Jimmy Carter didn't become noticeably more praetorian for having had the arsenal of democracy at his disposal.

Interesting essay, and well worth checking out.

THE BIRD OF PREY: No it's not the latest technology from the Romulan Empire--it's the latest aircraft from Boeing--and sleek and stealthy to boot.

NOTE: BLOW DRY BEFORE PLAYING. Check out David Letterman's Record Collection. Of course, these comments by Dave (or his crack team of writers) sum it all up best:

Meow meow creepy meow meow meow cat with partial mastery of the English language meow meow rabies meow demonic possession meow meow meow trolley roadkill meow.

I think once you've said that, you've said it all.

UPDATE: Political (and WWF) wonks take note: there's a surprise appearance by Jesse Ventura in there, singing his 1984 solo classic, "The Body Rules". Perhaps Governor Ventura will resume his singing career, now that his time in politics appears to be winding down.

TERRORISTS SEIZE MOSCOW THEATER, up to 1000 taken hostage, but "children and Muslim members of the audience have been reportedly released", according to this BBC News article. The suspects claim to be Chechen rebels, apparently led by a nephew of Chechen warlord Arbi Barayev.

UPDATE: InstaPundit has more, including how this could alter Russia's opposition to our attacking Iraq.

POSSIBLE SIGN OF AIRLINE SANITY: USA Today says that passengers may soon be able to use their cell phones. At least two companies, AirCell and Verizon Airfone, are developing technology to let passengers use their cell phones without disrupting airplane electronics or ground cellular service.

Of course, "soon" is a relative term: don't expect to see such service until 2004, according to the article.

CUBA LIBRE: The U.S. is quietly working for regime change in Cuba, too, according to The Brothers Judd.

(We'll make a very large pitcher of these when Castro finally falls.)

RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL MAY BE ON AN AEROFLOT PLANE AT JFK, according to this story in the Rocky Mountain News. The FBI "ordered to keep its distance from the passenger terminals", and is only letting passengers off in small groups.

UPDATE: False alarm, fortunately.

IS AGE AN ISSUE IN NJ SENATE RACE? It should be--it's certainly been raised as an issue (JFK--too young? Reagan--too old?) in numerous presidential campaigns.

WEASEL WORDS: MSNBC backs out from calling Little Green Footballs racist and hateful. Or do they? That's the beauty of weasel words, as Mark Steyn illustrates in his letter to MSNBC in support of LGF.

Of course, there's another byproduct of all of this: quite frankly, I had never heard of MSNBC's Weblog coverage before their attempt to slander LGF. Now they're all over InstaPundit, LGF, and other blogs that I read. Of course, with this kind of gutless reporting, I doubt I'll be going back to them very often.

UPDATE: For some background on Charles Johnson, the man behind LGF, check out this post by Eric Olsen on Blogcritics.

ANOTHER UPDATE: ScrappleFace reports that other bloggers have been begging MSNBC, "smear me, too!"

STRONG EARTHQUAKE RATTLES ALASKA: 6.2 is the preliminary magnitude.

MICROSOFT OFFICE 2003: Take a sneak peek.

VIVA ESPANIA: James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web Today section writes:

"The Spanish government has cancelled a state banquet in honour of President Mohammed Khatami of Iran after Tehran insisted that he would not sit down to a meal with wine on the table," London's Daily Telegraph reports. Khatami had said that for religious reasons he would not eat at a table where alcohol was served. A Spanish Foreign Ministry spokesman says Madrid canceled the dinner to ensure that "the Spanish custom of drinking wine with meals was not dishonored."

ATTACK ON INTERNET CALLED LARGEST EVER: The Washington Post says "The heart of the Internet sustained its largest and most sophisticated attack ever, starting late Monday, according to officials at key online backbone organizations". The attack lasted for about an hour. "FBI officials would not speculate on who might have planned or carried out the attack."

WOODY'S MOM WAS RIGHT: "Brooklyn is not expanding!" she said in Annie Hall. Neither is the universe, apparently.

In any case, Dr. Flicker's advice to Woody Allen (or "Alvy Singer" as he was known in Annie Hall) is empirically correct: it's not going to happen "for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we've gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we're here!"

MONTANA SENATOR JUMPS BACK INTO CANDIDACY after homophobic smears from his opponent's campaign. I have no idea what Mike Tayler's chances are, but I think jumping back in is a pretty smart move--he can now through all of the smears back in his opponent's face and use them against him. And using a "I'm standing up for what's right" approach has got to work better than being replaced with a surrogate candidate.

Interesting observation by Patrick Ruffini:

Today's Democratic Party can best be understood as the product of an uneasy marriage between post-modernism and anti-modernism. This is a combination you see frequently in university environments that pride themselves for being on the cutting edge of society — but nonetheless favor medieval juntas in Baghdad, Havana, and Ramallah while finding fault with modern democracies like the United States and Israel. Some of our hippest Americans are liberal Democrats, and yet, if you look closely, the party has spent the last few elections campaigning on a very old Depression-era ideology. It's no coincidence that the two characters in that outrageous DNC Social Security cartoon were, on the one hand, a cool dude clad in jump suit and shades, and on the other hand, a doting grandma.

And speaking of medieval juntas, here's an essay we found via Charles Johnson that begins with the following provocative statement: "the ideas of Benito Mussolini, the founder of Fascism, are remarkably similar to the ideas of modern-day Western Leftists".

THE POLITICIZATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOL: It's the first half of James Lileks' Bleat today. Nina and I don't have kids, but I really pity those parents who have to send their kids to public schools and have to deal with the crap that Lileks describes. What an incredible brainwashing they have to come--and it will probably only get worse.

The worst case of brainwashing I can remember from high school was my senior year history professor who taught us that Eleanor Roosevelt was "if not pretty a handsome looking woman...", FDR single-handedly beat the Depression, and that Harry Truman was one of our smartest presidents.

Can you say...biased?

But that sounds like an episode of Rush Limbaugh compared to what Lileks' daughter will face when she runs headlong into the Minneapolis School System:

I suspect that the educational establishment regards the insertion of these issues at every available opportunity to be part of their mission; far from wondering what the Million Mom March has to do with a class on establishing sleep schedules, they see these issues as indistinguishable from basic parenting skills. A good parent teaches ABCs; a good parent marches for peace; a good parent realizes the importance of five-point restraint carseats; a good parent subscribes to the MMM position on guns. The personal is the political, after all. And oh-so vice versa.

Still, I bit my tongue. In some peculiar way, I felt as if bringing this matter up in the group would be as inappropriate as the materials themselves. Then, looking through the new handouts, I saw a thick sheaf titled EARTH PLEDGE.

“I pledge allegiance to our Earth,
(the planet on which we live).
And to fresh air, pure water, healthy dirt,
life-giving plants and all the animals!
One Earth - four oceans - seven continents -
thousands of lakes and rivers!
And I accept my duty to be an honorable
citizen of this Earth, with respect and
consciousness towards all.”

On the back, a note from author Patricia Hauser:

“This Pledge, written to the rhythm of the Pledge of Allegiance, was originally composed to develop and enhance planetary consciousness in the hearts and minds of the wonderful second and third graders in my class.

“At our daily ‘Morning Meeting,’ the Class ‘President’ of the week reads the Earth Pledge with each line being repeated by the entire class. . . . Whenever global events are brought up in class, someone volunteers to locate the continent and country in which the event is occurring. This begins the expansion process and realization that we, on Mother Earth, are all in this together and what each one of us does makes a difference.”

“Printed on recycled paper.”

Good luck kids (and parents): you'll need it.

US REFINES PLAN FOR WAR IN CITIES: Given that over the past year, the Bush administration has run enough fakes, misdirections and gadget plays to make Tom Landry blush (were he alive), I'd take this article with a grain of salt, but it's an interesting look at how urban combat has developed since World War II.

WHY ON EARTH IS PAUL VOLCKER (one of our heroes for his inflation destroying efforts as head of the Federal Reserve Board in the early 1980s) campaigning on behalf of England joining the Euro??

NFL ROUNDUP:Cris Carter ends retirement, joins Dolphins; Quincy Carter benched as Dallas QB; Rams cornerback Aeneas Williams will miss the rest of the season after surgery; and Packer QB Brett Favre won't need surgery on his sprained left knee, and the Packers are optimistic he won't miss any games. That and more bite-sized NFL nuggets are contained in this AP article.

For more on Carter's benching, check out this Dallas Morning News story.

LAW OF THE LEFT: Let me see if I understand how things work: is it that anything you say that attacks Israel specifically, or Jews in general is fine, and not considered hate speech? But anything you say that points out how dangerous the murderous extremes of radical Islam is, can be labeled hateful?

Just checking. (Incidentally, I think Charles Johnson does one helluva job with his Little Green Footballs site. It's my first stop for Middle Eastern links.)

"THE BUFFALO SIX" were indicted today on charges of supporting terrorism by training at an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan.

No word yet on what this fellow thinks of the verdict.

MAHMAHMAHMY SHARONA! Did you know that Sharona Alperin, the woman who inspired the Knack's monster hit single in the early 1980s, has her own Web site at www.mysharona.com, with a cool Flash intro (guess what the background music is)?

Neither did I, but now I do. And now you do too.

(Spotted on the Internet Movie Database's homepage.)

DAN ROONEY: On air or land, the man whose father built the Pittsburgh Steelers is one of NFL's most prominent owners.

(The Steelers play the Colts tonight on Monday Night Football.)

POWER HOUSES: Wired looks at home automation, both of the rich and famous, and the working man.

For a look at how we used our "smart home" on September 11th, 2001 click here.

"ZEAL FOR JESUS": Virginia Postrel reports on how the Dallas Morning News covers religion:

A lot of reporters would understand American culture better if they read the DMN's religion coverage, which treats religion as a normal part of human affairs, like business, sports, fashion, or politics. The oddities, controversies, and scandals occur in a larger context; they don't define the entire endeavor. Covering American religion as it really exists means quoting sources whose assumptions strike nonbelievers as weird, but the alternative—pretending America is a secular country (or a Catholic one, another media illusion)—is simply inaccurate.

"YOU DO IT BECAUSE YOU CARE": When Mrs. Mariam Sese Seko, widow of late President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire write you to help transfer her husband's 30 million dollars, you swing into action immediately, right?

Well, this fellow did...

GUN CONTROL'S TWISTED OUTCOME: Reason looks how (surprise!) restricting firearms has helped make England more crime-ridden than the U.S.

"DEAR BRITISH IDIOTARIANS", Perry de Havilland requests your presence at Samizdata.net for a news update, followed by a swift kick in the trousers.

(Link found via Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, who also does his bit for reducing the English idiotarian population, by way of intense debate, followed by a soigné soupcon of satire.)

THAT '70s SHOW: Remember the fiscal crisis that rocked Manhattan in the mid-1970s (leading to the classic New York Daily News shock headline, "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD")?

The Daily News says it could happen again: the city is facing a budget gap of as much as $6 billion in the next fiscal year.

ANDREW SULLIVAN HAS ISSUED A BLOG CHALLENGE. But you'll need a strong stomach, and a lot of patience, to participate in it.

"THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING" IN EUROPE, according to libertarian Samizdata.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste also has some initial thoughts.

THE YARDBIRDS: My review of Alan Clayson's new biography of The Yardbirds is online at Blogcritics. "Stroll On" over and check it out!

THE VIRTUE OF AYN RAND: There's a negative review of Ayn Rand's 1975 book, The Romantic Manifesto by James Russell in Blogcritics today. While I haven't read that particular book of Rand's, I've read a bunch of them, and posted the following in the comments section. Since it touches on topics that may be of interest to our regular readers, I figured I'd repost it here as well:

James,

While I'm far from an Objectivist, in college, Ayn Rand was my introduction to any kind of political/philosophic discussion that leaned towards the right of what liberalism evolved into in the 20th century, as it was for many people who eventually came to identify as libertarian, conservative, or a bit of both.

In the essay directly preceding yours on [Blogcritics], Dean Esmay quotes Lionel Trilling in 1950, who wrote:

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism...but [they] do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

That was the environment that Rand wrote in. As Orrin Judd wrote (and he's no Randian, himself, incidentally), in his sympathetic review of Rand's "The Virtue of Selflessness" (which was the first Rand book I read, incidentally),

In considering the philosophy of Ayn Rand, it is always important to keep in mind the prevailing intellectual climate against which she was forced to push. Though her absolutist vision of individualism may appear overly harsh and dogmatic to us now, it may well have been a necessary counterweight to the general acceptance of statism in the West in the wake of the Great Depression. At a time when European nations succumbed, disastrously, to the various allures of fascism, communism, and socialism, and even the United States experimented with the big government programs of the New Deal and Great Society, maybe her rigid espousal of freedom was a required response.

As far as racism, Rand herself wrote:

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage - the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Incidentally, Rand's writing changed considerably over the years. After she completed her magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged", she never wrote fiction again. And several her closest associates claimed she suffered from severe bouts of depression in her last decade. So that may explain some of the extreme harshness of her later stuff. You might want to check out some of her early books, as well as the 1999 documentary film, "A Sense of Life", available on DVD, which serves as a pretty good (if whitewashed) introduction to her life and the environment she wrote in.

That's my take on Rand. Of course, my wife sums her up in a slightly more terse style: "Ayn Rand was a cranky old bitch with some good ideas, but she's her own worst enemy in presenting them."

Ed

GUERILLA POLITICS are the order of the day in New Jersey, as Republican Senate candidate Douglas Forrester challenges Democratic rival Frank Lautenberg to make good on his "any place, any time" debate pledge.

CHILD'S PLAY: My profile of Hollywood screenwriter Don Rhymer, and the home theater that he had installed in his home, largely for his children, is now online on the Audio Video Interiors Website:

In the 1990s, the phrase "do it for the children" became so much of a cliché that even The Simpsons made fun of it. But Don Rhymer and his wife Kate really did build their media room and its attached study for their three kids, ages 11, 14, and 16. "We really wanted our house to be the house, because you never know where your kids are going to be," Rhymer says. "So our attitude has always been, we'll just keep upgrading our systems so that the kids will want to stay here, rather than staying in someone else's basement, and doing God knows what."

Given how expensive and uncivilized many movie theaters have become, there's no doubt that more and more families will chose to install media rooms where they can keep an eye on their kids and what they watch, as well.

Incidentally, if you've never read it, Audio Video Interiors is an extremely handsome, Architectural Digest-style full color publication that was the grandaddy of the home theater movement. The Rhymer profile should be at your local Borders, Barnes and Noble, or speciality store--be sure to pick up a copy!

GEORGE TENANT TAKES RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CIA'S FAILURE TO PREVENT 9/11. But Ronald Bailey of Reason asks:

What does "taking responsibility" mean in today's Federal government? Apparently, it means that when you and your agency fail, you get to demand a bigger budget, more bureaucrats, and more intrusive power over the lives of American citizens. The more you fail, the more you get.

Read the whole thing.

CRIS CARTER TO BECOME A DOLPHIN, assuming he passes the physical. The 36 year old ex-Minnesota Viking wide receiver will apparently leave Dan Marino back in the broadcasting booth at HBO's "Inside the NFL" show to play the rest of the season for the injury-plagued Fins.

THE RELIGIOUS ICONOGRAPHY OF THE APPLE MACINTOSH is explored by Steven Den Beste.

INDONESIA NABS MILITANT CLERIC: AP says that "Defense Minister Matori Abdul Djalil stopped short of directly accusing Abu Bakar Bashir of organizing the bloody nightclub attack last week in Bali, but said it was unlikely that he would not have known about many of the country's bomb attacks."

WASHINGTON D.C. REGULATES THE LAST NAMES OF NEWBORNS: (No, really!) Dan Pink, the father of the newly born Saul Lerner Pink has the list of regulations (and brother, there are a lot of regulations!) on his Weblog, Just One Thing.

(Found via Virginia Postrel.)

HOMOPHOBIA ON THE LEFT, is the subject of this post by Glenn Reynolds. Add it to the list of liberal arguments included in Dean Esmay's fine post in Blogcritics yesterday.

10 GREATEST BRITONS? Some surprising names chosen by the more than 30,000 British citizens who took part in a BBC phone and Internet poll. Group Captain Mandrake has the list, and is understandably worried about who the final choice will be, when it's posted in a few weeks.

C'MON REX, TELL US HOW YOU REALLY FEEL: Gee, is it just me, or is Rex Reed not very fond of Madonna's latest movie, Swept Away:

Trained in the Nautilus School of Dramatic Art, her toned and sinewy muscles don’t do a thing for sleeveless chiffon, and her hard, chiseled jaw lines are a poor substitute for emotional irony. At 44, she’s a scary mix of pecs and peroxide. Spitting out a series of cruel, sarcastic one-liners, she loses sympathy fast, and there is no tempo or timing in the direction, camerawork or editing to make up for what she loses in pacing. Her colorless voice, like a dry and ratchety ambulance siren, is an irritation that cries for medical attention. When the poor sailor who endures her humiliating, condescending tantrums finally whacks her across the chops, the temptation to yell "What took you so long?" is hard to resist.

THE RETURN OF THE BINARS: Some people see things in black and white. Group Captain Mandrake sees things in ones and zeroes. Or at least that's what it seems in this post!

TANGENTS WITHIN A FRAMEWORK: The US will train up to 5000 Iraqi exiles to fight against Saddam. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is weighing an Israel proposal for a joint operation in Iraq's western desert to disarm Iraqi missiles before they could be launched against Israel.

THE LEFT'S WEAPING CLOWN: Speaking of Michael Moore (scroll down to the next post if you missed it), Reason's Brian Doherty has him nailed in a sharp profile.

WHEN DID IT HAPPEN? Dean Esmay writes in Blogcritics, that it's hard not to notice...

...when surveying the American political landscape at the moment, that there are no great Liberal intellectuals anymore. There are a few bright-minded self-described liberals; Robert Reich comes to mind, as does Susan Estrich. Camille Paglia has a truly original and interesting mind. But aside from a few rare exceptions, most "liberal" argumentation seems to come from one of four places:

1) People who disagree with me are racist.
2) People who disagree with me are warmongers who glory in violence.
3) People who disagree with me want the poor to starve and suffer.
4) People who disagree with me are blinded by corporate brainwashing.

I would have added "5) People who disagree with me want to oppress women," but that one seemed to fade away after Clinton's impeachment. (By the way, am I the first one to notice that?) In any case, the shorthand terms for all of the above are "right-winger" or "the radical right."

At times it's sad to watch. The mighty New York Times is now a laughingstock. Even people who share the New York Times worldview roll their eyes at it. Left-wing journals of opionion like The Nation and The New Republic tend to be humorless and, while they may be angry or resentful, are usually just plain boring.

I don't know if I'd lump The New Republic in there myself. While I'm not a regular reader there, the pieces that I've read (usually because they've been linked to by other bloggers), such as yesterday's "Air War" have been pretty impressive. But overall, I tend to agree with Esmay essay: while there are moderate liberals who are quite reasonable, the further left you go, the further you start seeing things like this, in various forms, over and over again. Michael Moore's made a career of such stunts. But, to paraphrase Esmay's point, when did Michael Moore become the model for intellectual discourse on the left?

Or as James Lileks wrote a little while ago:

Who’s more miserable - the far right or the far left? The former is likely to wash its hands of the modern world, lament how things have gone to hell since the Brits stopped shoving civilization down the ululating maws of Wogland, and announce that you’re all welcome to your polyglot mishmash - I’ll be over here getting smashed on port and reading Patrick O’Brien novels. But at least they seem dedicated to enjoying life on their own terms; if they’re cultural conservatives, they retire to their version of Heston’s apartment in “The Omega Man,” surrounded by the remnants of Western glory, keeping to themselves, and venting their spleen now and then by burping off a few rounds at the moaning zombies outside in the darkened park.

The hard left, on the other hand, demonstrates all the symptoms of anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure - there’s a rancid bitterness, a pissy miserablism that makes you feel very, very sorry for them. The world is going to hell, and they’re stuck in the last car with a newspaper they’ve read six times already; the only person they can harangue is sleeping off a skinful of lager, and they’re trying to work up a hot batch of hatred for the woman in the skin-cream ad above the traincar’s window, but she is rather pretty, in a Sloany way. (Bitch.) They’ve given up on convincing the rest of us fools that we’re trampolining with scissors and knives - all they can do is sneer, whine, mope and spit. In high school terms, they’re the skinny spotted unpopular kids who cannot believe the cheerleaders don’t know how wretched their empty lives really are. Sure, they have dates. Sure, they’re going to college. Sure, they’re going to meet big beefy guys with MBAs and end up in a nice house with a big garden, but don’t they know how empty it all is? Don’t they know that their very existence on the planet causes poverty in Peru and kills fish in the Atlantic?

Check out Esmay and Lileks' essays if you haven't read them yet. They're both very good.

BLACK, WHITE, AND BLUES: Suzanne Fields looks at modern day Memphis, and likes what she sees.

TALK IS CHEAP, especially when it's all you've got for a defense policy, says
Jonah Goldberg.

JAMES BOWMAN HAS THE LINE OF THE DAY, in his review of Madonna's latest film, Swept Away, directed by her husband, Guy Ritchie: "It’s the Ritchie bitch as the bitchy rich, as an unkind person might say."

ANDREW SULLIVAN IS ALL OVER the North Korean nuclear fiasco, Bill Clinton, and the New York Times, both then (1994) and now.

Classic Sullivan: "Hey, guys. We have Nexis now."

IRA EINHORN FOUND GUILTY OF MURDER: The ex-hippie guru was convicted for murdering his 30 year old girlfriend in 1977 and stuffing her corpse in a locked steamer trunk in his apartment.

If you're familiar with Philadelphia and her DA, the tough talking, hard-as-nails Lynne Abraham, you'll love this classic line: "Metaphorically speaking, Ira Einhorn and his Virgo moon are toast."

While he won't get the death penalty, (as part of our deal with France to expedite him), it's a safe bet that Einhorn will get life in prison. I guess it's time to give the "Free Mumia" crowd another celebrity convict to rally behind.

Speaking of which, how 'bout this juxtaposition on Yahoo? A search under "Mumia Abu-Jamal" brings up the following categories at the top of the page:

Shopping: buy Mumia Abu-jamal CDs on Yahoo! Shopping Music

Directory Category Matches 1 - 1 of 1
• Death Row Inmates >Mumia Abu-Jamal

Amazing.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CHUCK! Chuck Berry, The great rock and roll pioneer turns 76 today.

WATCH M2: No, it's not instructions for 007's latest case. Larry Kudlow says M2 could indicate "a very bullish development for stocks":

Milton Friedman's M2 — the money measure that takes into account currency, checking accounts, money market funds, and savings accounts — could be signaling a big economic pick-up next year, a very bullish development for stocks. While M2 is certainly not an infallible indicator of economic trends, historically it links to current and future changes in national income. So it is worth watching.

Sir John Templeton (who looked--and sounded--amazing for 90) said last week on CNBC's Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street that the Dow should end the century at 1,000,000, which sounds staggering, but it's simply about seven percent annual growth, compounded.

Let's get rolling!

If you haven't read The New Republic article that Glenn Reynolds links to yet, you owe it to yourself to click on over--it's a staggering look at the hoops that reporters allow themselves to be put through to broadcast from Baghdad, even when they know that what they'll report will be lies and distortions! The New Republic also mentions an upcoming Cinemax show, which sounds very, very interesting:

There are alternatives to mindlessly reciting Baghdad's spin. Instead of desperately trying to keep their Baghdad offices open, the networks could scour Kurdistan and Jordan, where there are many recently arrived Iraqis who can talk freely. "Amman is the place to find out what's really going on in Iraq," says ex-CIA officer Robert Baer, who spent the mid-'90s working in and around Iraq. (To CNN's credit, it has sent reporter Brent Sadler to Kurdistan despite Baghdad's furious objections.) Or they could use their access to depict the harsh realities of life under Saddam--even if it means never returning to Iraq. It's a method used by [French documentary filmmaker Joel] Soler in his documentary Uncle Saddam, to be aired on Cinemax next month. After spending a month ingratiating himself with Saddam's entourage, Soler convinced the Iraqis to grant him camera time with His Excellency's inner circle. His film shows Saddam to be a lunatic, devoid of morality or humanity. It captures images of Saddam's unique style of fishing-hurling grenades into a pond and then sending aides to retrieve the kill. It documents Saddam's megalomania: Iraq's biggest paper features Saddam in a new pose on the cover each day. "I don't need a relationship with Iraq," he explains of his decision to bare all. "It was my one shot. Every day it was how can I push the limits."

To be sure, after screening his documentary for film festivals and Iraqi opposition groups in the U.S., Soler found red paint splattered on his Los Angeles home, his trash can set on fire, and a death threat in his mailbox. But with the film he smuggled out of Iraq via courier, Soler gives more psychological insight into Saddam than ten years of American TV reportage.

In the middle of gathering his footage, Soler recounts this horrifying tidbit to TNR, about how his Iraqi government minder took him to a hospital, ostensibly to examine the effects of sanctions, but then called in a nurse with a long needle:

"He said, 'Now we'll do a series of blood tests.'" Soler jumped on the table screaming: "I said, 'I'm calling my ambassador.' If I'd been American, forget about it."

TNR's article is chockablock full with examples similar to Soler's tale. But Soler had the right idea: gather the truth, and get the hell out. Why Peter Arnett, Christiane Amanpour, and the rest of CNN's faces want to go back there time after time, even know though they know they'll be transmitting lies as news, speaks volumes about their vanity--and of CNN's willingness to compromise news for the sake of a dramatic video feed.

IT WAS 20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Sports Illustrated's Paul Zimmerman compares the NFL QBs of 1982 to the QBs of today, and finds today's often come up wanting.

COMING QUAGMIRES, COMPLACENT MODERNS, AND THE RETURN OF THE TIRANA INDEX. All will be revealed in Jay Nordlinger's latest column.

AN OMINOUS NEW ERA: Regulation-by-litigation began to be the order of the day at the EPA in the late 1990s.

(Excuse while I plant my tongue firmly in cheek.) Thank God that staunch conservative Christie Todd Whitman is riding shotgun over the EPA, preventing such excess from occurring under her watch!

A JOKE: That's what the Kurds call Saddam’s “landslide election victory”

THE COLA WARS GET TOUGH: Forget Coke versus Pepsi--they're just kids in a sandbox compared to Zam Zam versus the west. There's a Cola Jihad in the works!

RANK STUPIDITY (literally!) by Ananova reporters covering the USAF discovered by RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake in his regular column on Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing.

AXIS OF EVIL, SOUTHEAST ASIA CONFERENCE: North Korea has the bomb.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has an idea as to why North Korea has chosen to come clean. And John McCain looks better in light of Pyongyang' announcement, while Al Gore, Jimmy Carter and the Nobel Committee, each looks worse (if that's possible).

THE WASHINGTON POST GETS IT: They have an article headlined "Report: Terror Funds Flow Through Saudi Arabia", with this opening paragraph:

The Bush administration's efforts to cut off funds for international terrorism are destined to fail until it confronts Saudi Arabia, whose leaders have tolerated some of its wealthy citizens raising millions of dollars a year for al Qaeda, according to a new report from an influential foreign policy organization.

Of course, near the end is this paragraph:

The report acknowleged that criticizing Saudi Arabia publicly and demanding a crackdown on Islamic banks, charities and wealthy sponsors of al Qaeda could create a backlash that would jeoprodize the survival of the Saudi government.

And this is a bad thing??

JONAH GOLDBERG FINDS SEVERAL WAYS to link Al-Qaida to the D.C. sniper attacks.

THE SNIPER SEARCH: "Jack Dunphy", National Review Online's cop-in-residence, has some suggestions for Charles Moose, Montgomery County, Maryland's chief of police.

INTO HOME MUSIC RECORDING? This looks like an extremely comprehensive site devoted to professional recording techniques.

JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS, my review of Alan Flusser's latest book, Dressing the Man: The Art of Permanent Fashion is now online at Blogcritics.

(To compensate for how swishy that review makes me sound, I'll be reviewing Black & Decker power tools, and Steven Seagal movies next. But first I need a Cosmopolitan and some quiche.)

"AMERICA'S FIRST CATASTROPHIC EX-PRESIDENT": David Frum asks, "could there be a less deserved Nobel Prize than the one just awarded to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter?", in an excellent essay.

HITLER VERSUS HUSSEIN: Jonah Goldberg takes on the critics of the coming war against Saddam Hussein who seek to compare and contrast him with another mass-murder of 60 years ago:

So who cares if he's "as evil" as Hitler? If Saddam were merely 90 percent as evil as Hitler — to make an almost childish point — would that mean a moral case couldn't be made against him?

And that's the second problem with comparisons between Hitler and Saddam: It defines deviancy down. Something that was once considered a "maximum" — Hitler's evil — now becomes a minimum. The assumption seems to be, "Well, if he's not as evil as Hitler, than there's no point in doing to Saddam what we did to Hitler." Well, that's crazy. Do we really want to live in a world that operates on the rule that so long as you are just a fraction less horrible than Hitler, you aren't horrible enough to be stopped? And, for that matter, do we really want to say that if Hitler had been a fraction less horrible than he was, our efforts would be unjustified? Never mind that the proof of Saddam's iniquity is far more convincing in 2002 than the proof of Hitler's was in, say, 1939.

The Hitler-Hussein argument also fails to take into account another mustachioed madman: Stalin. Which is pretty ironic, because apparently, Stalin was Hussein's role-model.

PETA UPDATE: Lots of good stuff (well, actually very bad stuff--but good content) about the "cuddly" folks at PETA, and their overt endorsements of terrorism at Instapundit.com today.

THE QUOTE OF THE DAY comes from Harry Belafonte, speaking to CNN's Larry King on October 15th:

The public does not come from the same kind of a sophisticated sense of history and all the different things that I've been exposed to.

Found via Matt Drudge.

WE ARE THE REVOLUTIONARY VANGUARD! Well, at least as far as the blogosphere is concerned.

It's about to get pretty crowded soon, as EarthLink Inc. is planning to sell blogging tools to its five million consumer and small-business customers.

(Incidentally, it's pretty cool that Information Week feels like it doesn't need to explain what the heck a blog is to its readers.)

GREAT MOMENTS IN DEMOCRACY: The AP headline reads "Saddam Wins Presidential Referendum". But what really makes the article is the juxtaposition between these two paragraphs:

All 11,445,638 of the eligible voters cast ballots, said Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council that is Iraq's key decision-making body.

"This is a unique manifestation of democracy which is superior to all other forms of democracies even in these countries which are besieging Iraq and trying to suffocate it," Ibrahim said at a news conference in Baghdad, apparently referring to the United States.

Well, it is unique.

And soon to be obsolete, as well.

ROBERT REICH, SUPPLYSIDER: He's proposing exempting the first $15,000 of all income from payroll taxes.

As Stuart Buck says, "Call me surprised"!

NO ONE CAN PREDICT THE FUTURE. But I think there are things to be said for both sides of the argument, especially post 9/11. And while I think the children of this country are our future, especially the children of the people who built this country, and at the end of the day I just want justice, I can safely say that Joe Bob Briggs isn't going to get a talk show anytime soon.

But he should. Or the terrorists will have won.

BEST LAWYER STORY OF THE YEAR, as forwarded to me by my wife (who is a lawyer):

This is the best lawyer story of the year, decade and probably the century.

A Charlotte, NC, lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, then insured them against fire among other things. Within a month having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars and without yet having made even his first premium payment on the policy, the lawyer filed claim against the insurance company.

In his claim, the lawyer stated the cigars were lost "in a series of small fires." The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason: that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion.

The lawyer sued... and won!

In delivering the ruling the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous. The Judge stated nevertheless, that the lawyer held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable fire," and was obligated to pay the claim.

Rather than endure lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000.00 to the lawyer for his loss of the rare cigars lost in the "fires."

NOW FOR THE BEST PART... After the lawyer cashed the check, the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of ARSON!!!! With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000.00 fine.

This is a true story and was the 1st place winner in the recent Criminal Lawyers Award Contest.

UPDATE: I had a very strong feeling this story was apocryphal when my wife forwarded it to me, but it was too good a shaggy-dog story not to post. Here's the Snopes.com article debunking it, as forwarded by a couple of my readers.

CLEAR PROOF THAT RADICAL ISLAM IS EVIL: They've declared war on man's best friend:

A conservative Iranian cleric has denounced the "moral depravity" of owning a dog, and called for the arrest of all dogs and their owners.

Dogs are considered unclean in Islamic law and the spread of dog ownership in Westernised secular circles in Iran is frowned upon by the religious establishment.

"I demand the judiciary arrest all dogs with long, medium or short legs - together with their long-legged owners," Hojatolislam Hassani is quoted as saying in the reformist Etemad newspaper.

I wonder what the WTC rescue dogs--and their owners--think of this.

HOW WOULD REAGAN HAVE HANDLED the war on terrorism? Good essay by Peter Schweizer in National Review Online. And it's still disconcerting and strange to see someone still alive referred to in the past tense. What a tragedy that the man who did more to win the Cold War than anyone else can't enjoy the fruits of his labor.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd has a test to determine if you've accidentally joined The Vast Wing Conspiracy.

WANT LUXURY? TAKE THE BUS! I'm not sure if I'm buying Brock Yates' essay, but mainly because I have terrible flashbacks from leaving NYU to come home to South Jersey for weekends. I'd leave on Friday night, via Manhattan's Port Authority Bus Terminal. The folks who inhabited that Terminal, as well as my bus (a conventional, Greyhound-style bus--probably ex-Greyhound) seemed straight out of Night of the Living Dead.

But I can't argue with this logic:

This is a natural evolution of the travel business. With Amtrak bound up in idiotic government meddling, egregious union work rules, outdated trackage and useless routes and most of the airlines in the tank - despite $5 billion in government aid since 9-11 with more on the way - there had to be other solutions. A luxury bus line like Exec Connect America will hardly solve the problems of the travel industry, but it sure as hell can remove some of the misery for harried business travelers who have borne the brunt of the downward spiral in the air and rail passenger business. And that's a start.

Fair enough.

YOU DON'T SAY! AP Headline: "Saddam Unopposed in Iraq Elections".

Hey, with a theme song like "I Will Always Love You", how can he lose??

UPDATE: The coercion of Saddam's elections is going largely unreported in European news coverage.

GREASY KID STUFF: Some drivers in England have turned to using old cooking oil to power their cars, to avoid Britain's hefty gasoline taxes. Naturally of course, "police in west Wales are actively tracking down anyone who uses cooking oil instead of gasoline or diesel. Offenders are receiving £500 fines, while a special police unit known as the Frying Squad is dedicated to busting greasers", according to the latest edition of Reason Express.

THE LATEST SNIPER VICTIM WORKED FOR THE FBI: It probably wasn't a wise move for the sniper to anger that organization even further.

VANDALS STRUCK U.S. MILITARY RECRUITING CENTER IN SAN JOSE: I've always naively assumed that San Jose was more anti-idiotarian than San Francisco. But events like this make me wonder.

AFTER LAST NIGHT'S IMPROMPTU AUTOGRAPH SESSION on Monday Night Football, ESPN.com's Page2 section looks at what else Terrell Owens might have stashed in his uniform.

THE TIMES' 'RAINES OF ERROR', as examined by Dave Kopel.

TURNING THE TABLES: Nothing like PETA getting a taste of its own medicine.

NELSON MANDELA, SNITCH: Can't get Dubya on the phone? Why not call his old man! That's what Mandela did recently. Happy Fun Pundit has the details (be sure to read the article in the National Post that he links to).

DC SNIPER UPDATE: Another shooting.

BUSH AS NIXON UPDATE: You may remember from last week, when we linked to an essay comparing George W. Bush with Richard M. Nixon. Orrin Judd takes exception to this analogy.

THERE'S A POTENTIAL SUSPECT IN CUSTODY in the DC sniper case.

UPDATE: Police now "say the man is not a suspect in the D.C. sniper attacks", according to CNSNews.com.

AND THEN WHAT? Shiloh Bucher brings the more brainless opponents of the war against terrorism up to speed with what's happened in Afghanistan since America liberated it from the Taliban.

LOOKS LIKE UTHANT IS BITING THE DUST: Clicking on his homepage brings nothing more than a "thank you for reading UThant" message.

Too bad--that was one funny Website while Mr. Thant was cranking out the satire. At the moment, his archieves are still active. Click here and look around--I have no idea how long the site will remain up.

In related news, I just added ScrappleFace to my links page--I think he's a worthy successor to The Artist Formally Known as UThant.

FALLING SUN: Good essay on Japan, taxes, MacArthur, Rising Sun and banking (and a few other things as well!) by Bruce Bartlett.

An timely, but unstated subtext in this essay are several ideas on how we must reform Iraq's economy like we did Japan's. Of course, overtly stated is how stupid many American-bashing pundits were in believing the superiority of that economy in the late 1980s.

CRUISIN' WITH THE TOOZ: Pat Toomay describes what it was like to have John Matuszak as a roommate.

(Hint: picture Animal from the Muppets weighing 300 pounds, and you're in the ballpark.)

THE COWBOYS KNOW THEY'RE LUCKY TO BE 3-3, according to this AP report.

THERE'S "RATHER CURIOUS PHRASING" in the statement regarding al-Qaida and today's attack on US forces in Kuwait issued by Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef, according to Charles Johnson, who takes issue with it.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER: A Mike Bloomberg voter is sorry he voted for him:

I guess I was a fool to believe that Bloomberg—a former Democrat who changed party affiliations to run for office—would become anything but what he is today.

UPDATE: Found on the New York Post's Page Six Column was this tasty item:

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter went head-on with Mayor Bloomberg at Andrew Stein's dinner party last week. The dinner, in a private room at The Four Seasons, was in full bloom when Carter took out a cigarette and lit up right in front of the virulently anti-smoking mayor. As Howard Stringer, Amanda Burden, Mike Wallace and Roger Waters looked on in amusement, Bloomberg bit his tongue while Charlie Rose suggested the two debate the issue on his show. Carter declined but proposed his pal Fran Lebowitz instead.

Good for Carter for showing his displeasure right at the source!

IRAQI COUP FOILED: Stephen Green has the details, and adds, "don't get too excited about any coup in Iraq. The bold ones are either already dead, or waiting for US armor and Special Forces to arrive."

As a great man once said, "let's roll"!

MEET LEONARDO, a "mummified" dinosaur. He's proving to be a treasure-trove of information for scientists.

(Link spotted via Group Captain Mandrake.)

IS THE CIA FIGHTING TERRORISM IN IRELAND? That's what this post from
The Corner on National Review Online says.

Interesting--and logical. Although I hope we're not spreading our resources too thin.

STEVEN DEN BESTE HAS SOME THOUGHTS about the Balinese bombing.

CONGRESS, PRESIDENT, NATION UNITED OVER USE OF FORCE. ScrappleFace has the details.

And I'm firmly behind this measure, as well.

SADDAM HUSSEIN HAS CHOSEN "I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU" as his campaign song. No, really--this comes from Mark Steyn, rather than Scrappleface or the Onion.

Joanne Jacobs has some alternative themes for Saddam.

NICK SCHULZ SAYS that environmental activists, having lost their initial arguments, rather than admitting their position is flawed, are simply "getting shifty".

LORD OF THE RINGS EXTENDED CUT COMING TO DVD: The Digital Bits has the details of this extended version of the LOTR that's coming soon, including this tidbit:

Many of you already know a little about the 30 minutes of material that's been added back in, but here's a list of SOME of the new scenes: an extended opening with Bilbo writing his memoirs, a new introduction to Samwise Gamgee, a scene at the Green Dragon Inn, the Hobbits witnessing the departure of the Elves from Middle Earth on the way to Bree, Aragorn singing the ballad of Beren and Luthien, Aragorn at his mother's grave, new moments during the departure from Rivendale in which we see Arwen's emotional reaction to Aragorn's leaving as well as Elrond seeing the Fellowship off, a scene in the mines of Moria in which we learn how the Dwarves unleashed the fire-demon, Galadriel's complete gift-giving scene at Lothlorien and more footage of the battle at Amon Hen.

The folks at the Bits have more details, so if you're a LOTR fan, click on over and check it out.

AS STEVEN DEN BESTE ONCE SAID, President Bush has made Iraq "an offer they can't accept."

STEPHEN AMBROSE DIED TODAY AT AGE 66.

(I'm back from a weekend trip to Monterey with my wife. Don't look for a lot of posting today, however.)

YOU DON'T SAY: "Yemen Blast Seen as Terror Act".

DID YOU KNOW that Terriam Gilliam (ex-Monty Python member, and director of Brazil) was planning to do a film version of Don Quixote? I didn't. But as Jennie Rose notes on Blogcritics, "all those who try to adapt the Cervantes story to film fail".

However, as Rose also notes, they sometimes get a good documentary out of it...

THE OMINOUS PARALLELS: James Pinkerton of Tech Central Station isn't the first to point out how George W. Bush seems to be following a similar governing style as Richard Nixon.

We probably weren't the first either. But we have been concerned about it since the very early days of this blog.

TREEHUGGER QUESTION: I just noticed this item in the San Jose "Murky News" story about the Earth First protester who died after falling from a tree:

Ward said the man was in his mid-20s and had recently come to Santa Cruz. He was homeless before deciding to join a tree-sit protest against Redwood Empire, Ward said, the San Jose-based firm now logging the approximately 50-acre site.

Does this mean that's he was no longer homeless since he found a tree to sit on?

Since when did a tree, on land you don't own, count as a legal residence?

UPDATE: H.D. Miller says that the Redwood Empire protester is nowhere near the record for a protester falling from a tree, and suggests that this could be a new category in the Darwin Awards. Someone should update the Monty Python "People Falling from Buildings" sketch to reflect this new competitive sport.

"GOODBYE" UPDATE: Orrin Judd weighs in on Ron Rosenbaum's New York Observer essay on how he (sorta, kinda, almost, more or less) quit the vast left-wing conspiracy.

THERE'S A NEW BLOG DEVOTED TO Northern Ireland politics and culture, called Letter to Slugger O'Toole. Click on over and check it out--Black Velvets are optional.

HERE'S AN AP HEADLINE THAT'S GOOD TO SEE: "Bush Wins Key Support of Daschle".

REPORTER INVESTIGATING possible Iraqi ties to the OKC bombing is meeting with Arlen Specter today, according to Stuart Buck.

As Buck notes, considering we're planning to attack Iraq shortly, shouldn't this have happened sooner?

BROADBAND could cause AOL's profits to plunge, according to a Merrill Lynch analyst.

HUH? YOU WANT A SECOND SNIPER? I'm not sure if get this quote by Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan, as found in this AP report on the latest shooting in the Washington DC area:

The shooting occurred about 8:15 p.m. Over 100 law enforcement officials were scouring the area for clues, Deane said. Authorities blocked off several streets around the gas station and interviewed witnesses.

"At this point, we cannot say if this case is related to those shootings," Deane said at a news conference early Thursday.

Maryland investigators went to the scene of the killing because of similarities with the previous shootings, according to Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan.

"Everything is very similar," he said, adding: "Let's hope this is not it."

What does "Let's hope this is not it" mean? Does this mean that Duncan wants there to be a second shooter? Wouldn't that just compound his problems? Or did the reporter mistype his quote--or am I misreading it?

PETER SINGER UPDATE: Yes, everyone's favorite Princeton ethicist is back with more moral equivalence. Singer compares SUV drivers to the 9/11 hijackers:

Consider two aspects of globalization: first, planes exploding as they slam into the World Trade Center, and second, the emission of carbon dioxide from the exhaust of gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles. One brought instant death and left unforgettable images that were watched on television screens all over the world; the other makes a contribution to climate change that can be detected only by scientific instruments. Yet both are indications of the way in which we are now one world, and the more subtle changes to which sport-utility-vehicle owners unintentionally contribute will almost certainly kill far more people than the more visible aspect of globalization.

Of course, it's tough to take seriously someone (unless you have to write your kid's tuition checks) who think it's OK to get frisky (yes--that kind of frisky) with Fido.

(Link found the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web" column)

SADDAM ACQUIRING "SUPER-GUN", according to the Independent News.

This has long been an obsession of Saddam. I remember watching a PBS "Frontline" episode in the early 1990s on his earlier attempts, involving gunsmith Gerald Bull.

THE PENGUIN WAS RIGHT! As he said in Batman Returns, "Forget global warming. Worry about global cooling!

Man, I wish these guys would make up their minds. Global cooling was the hot environmental story in the 1970s. Then came global warming. Now we're back to global cooling.

You'd think that worrying about the environment would too serious a business to leave to fashion.

And you'd be wrong.

THOSE DARN TVLEPS--THEY'RE EVERYWHERE! Joanne Jacobs says "President Bush may have lost support of a key group of Americans."

DROPPING THE BALL: Joel Mowbray details how at least 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers should have been denied visas:

Even to the untrained eye, it is easy to see why many of the visas should have been denied. Consider, for example, the U.S. destinations most of them listed. Only one of the 15 provided an actual address — and that was only because his first application was refused — and the rest listed only general locations — including "California," "New York," "Hotel D.C.," and "Hotel." One terrorist amazingly listed his U.S. destination as simply "No." Even more amazingly, he got a visa.

Hard to believe that such incompetence is possible at a federal agency.

Wait a second--no it's not.

LARRY KUDLOW SUGGESTS that Bush should give a Cincinatti-style talk on the economy, and adds:

President Bush has been Reagan-like in his prosecution of the war on terror. But he has a long way to go on the economy if he is to meet the Gipper's domestic-leadership test.

More than likely, it is the Bush economic team that is not developing the necessary pro-growth formula. There are some bright heads in the group, but they are offset by the meatheads. No good deed goes unpunished in this gang.

But economic victory can still be rescued from the jaws of defeat. Rumors abound that the White House is now engaged in a job search to completely revamp its economic team. Market-savvy New Yorkers like Blackstone's Steve Schwartzman and the New York Stock Exchange's Richard Grasso might be on the list to replace the ineffective Paul O'Neill at Treasury. There are also some welcome plans for the post-Greenspan era at the Fed. With new leadership blood in place, a vigorous effort to bring significant growth back to this economy can begin.

UP IN SMOKE: Good essay by Robert A. Levy on New York's Mayor Bloomberg and smoking and property rights in National Review Online:

To put it bluntly, the owner of the property should be able to determine — for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all — whether to admit smokers, nonsmokers, neither, or both. Customers or employees who object may go elsewhere. They would not be relinquishing any right that they ever possessed. By contrast, when a businessman is forced to effect an unwanted smoking policy on his own property, the government violates his rights.

That's the controlling principle. Private property does not belong to the public. Employing a large staff, or providing services to lots of people, is not sufficient to transform private property into public property. The litmus test for private property is ownership, not the size of the customer base or the workforce.

THE BEST POSSIBLE COMEBACK: "Secretary of State Colin Powell merely smiled when told of singer Harry Belafonte's remarks calling him a slave who lived in the "house of the master," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Wednesday."

UPDATE: Apparently, Bush is taking Belafonte's criticisms to heart.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Powell spoke with Larry King tonight about the incident.

SURPRISE ATTACK: Byron York says another Bush nominee got whacked by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

THE FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLAR MAN: Little Green Footballs reports that Saddam Hussein’s payments to families of suicide bombers and wounded Palestinians have reached $15 million—with the full knowledge of Yasser Arafat.

THE WAY THINGS (DON'T) WORK: Glenn Reynolds (the InstaPundit) is travelling today, but his Tech Central Station column is online, and it's a good one, on poor design features of otherwise good products.

VIRGINIA POSTREL HAS SOME THOUGHTS ON ANN COULTER, and finds that she's doing more harm to her cause than good.

DEFINITIVE PROOF THAT IRAN REALLY WANTS TO RESUME TIES WITH AMERICA: They've barred CNN's Christiane Amanpour from entering the country.

"WHATTYA REBELLIN' AGAINST?" "WHADDYA GOT?!"

Andrew Sullivan files this cartoon under "Right-Wing Envy Watch", and adds, "Methinks Tom Tomorrow is jealous."

Methinks Sullivan is right.

THIS IS NOT YOUR MOTHER'S MOTHER OF ALL WARS: Melana Zyla Vickers looks at how US technology and strategy in the coming war against Iraq will differ from Desert Storm in this Tech Central Station article.

(By the way, if you'd like a good introduction to how miltary technology and strategy have changed since Vietnam, this is a pretty good place to start, as well.)

All of this is a good place to hang a micro-mini-screed I've wanted to get off my chest since early September, when I attended a wedding of two old friends of mine up in California's wine country. The bride's friends, whom we were seated with, were all 35 to 45 year olds with PhDs in science, biochemistry, and other lofty fields of study--and probably each have IQs off the chart. So I was astonished, in the midst of the stereotypical "Bush is such a dummy" talk, to hear something (I forget what) "is a contradiction in terms like"...wait for it--you know it's coming..."military intelligence".

Groan! That line was a cliche when they were kids (I remember hearing Trapper John utter it in an early M*A*S*H episode from about 1972), and yet it's still being hauled out today, like an old, warn-out suit that needs its elbows patched and its lapels narrowed. How many more years of laser-guided weaponry, stealth technology, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other forms of advanced, computerized technology will we need before that old chestnut is retired?

Or is that asking too much?

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT: Ron Rosenbaum of the New York Observer explains "How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee". There are lots of good lines, but this one is particularly tasty:

Recently I saw the strangest documentary, a film with a title that sounds like a Woody Allen joke: Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary. It’s a New York Film Festival pick and well worth seeing, just for the example of willed, obtuse blindness on the part of the secretary when she claims that she was insulated from all the terrible things happening during the war. But even Hitler’s secretary—unlike Heidegger, unlike the knee-jerk anti-American Left—feels the need to make some gesture of dismay at her "blind spot" in retrospect. But not the know-it-alls of the Left, who have never been wrong about anything since they adopted Marxism as their cult in college. What would the harm be in admitting that one didn’t know as much at in college as history has taught us now?

But noooo … (as John Belushi liked to say). Instead, we get evasions and tortuous rationalizations like the Slavoj Ziz^ek zigzag: This extremely fashionable postmodern Marxist academic will concede the tens of millions murdered by Stalin, etc., but it’s "different" from the millions murdered by Hitler, because the Soviet project was built on good intentions, on utopian aspirations; the tens of millions dead were an unfortunate side effect, a kind of unfortunate, accidental departure from the noble Leninist path that still must be pursued.

THE THREE STOOGES: Such is the state of black leadership today that...

1. Louis Farrakhan thinks "our president is a threat to world peace" (which means, evidently, that he thinks Saddam Hussein isn't.)

2. Meanwhile, Harry Belafonte (whom Matt Drudge zings as being "best known for the international hit 'Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)'" thinks that Colin Powell, Bush's Secretary of State, is a plantation slave.

3. And of course, Al Sharpton thinks communist Cuba is Mayberry, RFD revisited:

"To my surprise, the best fried chicken I have ever ate in my life (outside of my mama's) was in Havana. Cuba is very clean, and the only crime you could openly see is prostitution. You don't see a lot of dirt and crime. People even leave their doors unlocked there. It reminded me of the deep, deep South in the 1950s, where everyone greeted each other as they walked by. Even the cars are from the 1950s. ...It was like stepping into Mayberry with Andy Griffith. I expected Aunt Bea and Opie to come running out any minute.

Gee, I guess I missed Barney Fife's torture chambers. Maybe they were cut out when the show went into syndication.

THE USUAL LILEKS LINK:

The more these people whine about the need for UN blessing, the more I wonder whether they wouldn’t vote yes to a UN-levied tax on American paychecks - why, our “go-it-alone” tax policy must be enflaming the world, to say nothing of our “go-it-alone” highway system. And of our “go-it-alone” Apollo program in the 60s, well, the less said the better. Did we get a permission slip to leave earth and plant a unilateral boot on the Moon’s virgin soil? I don’t remember.

He ends on a classic as well:

If you believe that coalitions are always necessary, then the worst thing about the JFK assassination wasn’t the president’s death, but the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone.

The Senators insisting on a coalition above all else are the left’s equivalent of the nutlog right-wing UN conspiracy crowd. The only difference is that Wellstone starts to worry if he doesn’t hear the black helicopters.

WHAT WILL THE SAUDIS SAY? Ananova reports that DaimlerChrysler is planning to offer fuel cell cars next year.

Of course, this concept is nothing new for our regular readers.

AT BEST IT RHYMES: Let's say you're Steven Den Beste. Let's say you can't get to sleep. What do you do at 5:00 in the morning?

You crank out a pretty good essay on why the EU is doomed to collapse over the weight of its own spending.

And you'd be right on the money, too. Say, isn't this the sort of thing that eventually killed the Soviet Union?

(Headline courtesy of that up and coming author, Samuel Clemens.)

THE FINAL CUT: Don't expect a Pink Floyd reunion anytime soon, as Dave Gilmour prepares a solo album and DVD.

JERRY BROWN, HOSS! I Love this bit, from James Lileks:

Later I was passing the TV and saw Jerry Brown debating O’Reilly. Brown’s default facial posture always seems to be android-calm, as if his internal systems are in Sleep mode, waiting for the cursor to move. O’Reilly was quoting a “60 Minutes” story about PLO - Iraq links; Brown responded that since the Saudis fund radical mosques, shouldn’t we invade them?

Thank you! I thought; there’s my column.

“The proper response to this is a big wide grin: capital idea, old chap; why not, indeed? Let’s go! Glad you’re on board. We can liberate those American-born women our craven State department refuses to help; we can take the oil fields, set the pumps on “gush” and flood the world with sweet, cheap crude. We can defund the radical mosques, disband the religious police, and build swingsets in the parks they use for public hand-choppings. As an added bonus, the West will occupy the most holy sites of Islam, so we can photograph, fingerprint, and possibly detain anyone who comes for a pilgrimage. Invade Saudi Arabia? Dude! You are so hard core!”

Of course, Brown would then respond by asking if you're with Lyndon LaRouche.

THE QUICKER PICKERUPPER INTERNET: OK, so Nancy Walker would have sounded silly doing commercials for it, but Internet2 keeps on keeping on, and I have an article about them in today's Tech Central Station.

TIME HAS COME TODAY (Sung to the tune of the Chambers Brothers' old chestnut): Dick Morris dissects the New York Times' bias, while Group Captain Mandrake Fisks the London Times over their disastrous article on the USS Kitty Hawk.

THE ART OF TERROR: An essay by Charles Paul Freund of Reason magazine on the subject of, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the banality of artists who celebrate evil.

For a flashback to our look at one them, click here.

HOW TO REAM OUT AL DAVIS, the owner of the Oakland Raiders, and live.

(Of course, it helps if you're Fred Biletnikoff.)

SITE UPDATE UPDATE: I'm still fixing the odd broken link. If you come across one, please email me. Thanks!

SHILOH BUCHER EXPLAINS WHY SHE IS NO LONGER A DEMOCRAT. (But the jury's still out on whether or not she's still Janeane Garafolo.)

SITE UPDATE: You may have noticed a couple of minor changes to the site. Here's the scoop:

When I first envisioned this site last February, the Weblog was only going to be one part of it. Unfortunately, because it was the home page of the site, it quickly became the site's most dominant feature. In order to place it a bit more in perspective, I had long wanted to add a cover page, ala Virginia Postrel's site (her site, along with Glenn Reynolds', were the two main prototypes for this one). I think it also looks kind of classy, and explains the site to a new visitor. Unfortunately, because HTML is not my greatest skill, creating such a cover page, along with a new banner for the cover, took a backseat while I cranked out a variety of articles this summer.

So over the weekend, I finally put all the pieces together, created a cover, adjusted all the links on the site (I hope!) to account for it, and ftp'ed the whole shebang up tonight. And along the way, I changed the search page from Pico Search, which needed regular manual updating to Google, which gets bonus points because...its Google.

If you're a regular reader of this 'Blog, you might want to update your Favorites folder, or the links on your own Weblog, to http://www.eddriscoll.com/weblog.html. Or leave 'em the same--the Weblog is just a click away from the home page.

GREAT VINTAGE TOM WOLFE PIECE: From 1987, "The Intelligent Coed's Guide to Socialism".

(Link via ParaPundit.)

We'll be doing some changes to the Website tonight--don't be surprised if we hiccup a few times along the way.

FUDGING THE FACTS: Ever hear of an "a high-powered assault hunting-type weapon"? Me neither. But that's just one distortion and mistake contained in information released to the media to encourage public assistance with finding the the gunman who killed six people last week in the Washington, D.C., area.

INSTAPUNDIT DOES TIME TRAVEL, with video footage of Tom Daschle on Iraq in 1998 and now, and tracking down the Independent's coverage of Bush's Iraqi speech, six hours before he makes it!

Where's George Pal these days? I gotta get one of those time machines, too!

HAPPY FEET: "Limping pensioner had £600,000 of cocaine in his shoes"

(Found via VodkaBird, who's busy preparing for "another nipple-hardeningly cold Scottish winter." Funny, winter doesn't sound all that bad when described like that!)

12 ANGRY MEN is Roger Ebert's latest choice for his "Great Movies" series. Ebert's essay is very perceptive, with some interesting stuff about Sidney Lumet's lens and composition choices, and how they build tension in a film photographed entirely (except for the last shot) in one room--the jury room.

HOW THE INTERNET BROKE: Wonder why your surfing was so choppy this past Thursday? Wired explains all.

Fortunately, through it all, the Flash-driven Miniature Golf site held up like a champ.

KEEPING SCORE: What happens when economist Friedrich Hayek goes head to head with movie goddess Salma Hayek?

Let's get reeeeeeaadddddy to rummmmble!!!!

THE GREAT SOUTHPARK MAJORITY: As found on Tech Central Station.

German socialist journalist Thomas von der Osten-Sacken says that since 1979, Saddam Hussein has killed more than a million of his own people.

So why do we keep seeing articles like this?

It's a wonderful city and home, or adopted home of Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, "Da Bears", countless electric blues musicians, Mike Royko, etc., etc. So it was more than a little disquieting to read this:

CHICAGO REQUIRES DISCLOSURE ON SLAVERY
Chicago's City Council voted to require all companies doing business with the city to reveal any past "investment or profits from the slave industry." This is really just the first step from a bunch of devout racists and professional victims from demanding slavery reparations, but if companies admit to past involvement in slavery and are penalized in someway, it would certainly count as extortion. I hope businesses decide to leave Chicago and layoff their Chicago-resident workers instead of participating in this racket.

Amen.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "If life hands you lemons, they make great missiles when studded with nails and frozen solid."

GOOD DAY FOR BAY AREA FOOTBALL: The 'Niners crushed the hapless Rams, and the Raiders blew out the pretty good Bills.

Speaking of hapless, the Steelers are still struggling, as well.

BLOGCRITICS: I just added a list to my essays page of all of my Blogcritics reviews and essays. I'll try to keep it updated regularly, as I do seem to have posted a fair amount of stuff there in the past month.

IF JONAH GOLDBERG EVER WANTS AN ELECTRIC GUITAR...he ought to bid on this little number available now on Ebay.

WELL, NO NEED TO SEE THE NEXT JAMES BOND FILM: 007 has apparently been reduced to nothing more than a mineral water drinker.

I feel so depressed, I feel like making a pitcher of Vespers.

IRRELEVANT IRRITANTS: Robert Bové looks at the antiwar Left in New York. I think this paragraph really nails it:

The antiwar crowd is making the mistake the generals are supposed to make: fighting this year’s war with the last war’s tactics. And the irony is that the current generation of college students apparently pays as much attention to their leftist professoriate as the latter did to their Western Civilization profs thirty years ago. Armed forces, intelligence services and law enforcement recruiting figures rose dramatically right after 9/11 and continue strong.

Bové adds that "The roar of F-16’s over New York Harbor has, for the time being, if not entirely, muffled their voices rendered them squeaky, as if they’d taken one too many hits on nitrous oxide."

I have no problem with careful thought and dissent given to government actions. Indeed, what is conservatism and libertarianism, and even classical liberalism, if not just that. But it's painful to see the same tired cliches dug up from 1968, especially when there's a 16-acre smoldering crater in downtown New York.

U.S. PREPARING POSSIBLE TRIAL OF SADDAM, according to Ha'aretz.

No word yet if Spencer Tracy will be presiding.

NEW YORK VS. DC: There's a debate raging on The Corner on National Review Online about which is the better city, New York, or Washington, DC. Having spent time in both (and worked and gone to school for a while in Manhattan), my money's firmly on New York.

But if DC cabs don't automatically have a tape-recording of Elmo or Michael "LET'S GET READY TO RUMMMMMMBBBBLE" Buffer telling you to buckle-up every time you get in the cab, I'm willing to give them a couple of bonus points.

(I once asked a New York cabbie if the messages rotated, or if they hear the same celebrity safety announcement all day. Apparently, it's the latter--and I really do pity the poor cab driver who has to listen to Elmo all day.)

FUN WITH FIDEL: Joanne Jacobs wants to know if a 12-year-old seventh grader who went to Cuba on a choir trip, write a letter praising Fidel to the San Francisco Chronicle, or is someone cooking the books?

FLY THE FRIENDLY SKIES OF BIGGLES, courtesy of Group Captain Lionel Mandrake.

I don't think dual-use aircraft is such a bad idea, myself. The New York Times five or six years ago, had an interesting article at how easy it was to convert UPS cargo planes to fairly comfortable weekend charter flights by merely rolling the seating in on pallets--which could then be rolled out when the plane goes back to cargo humping during the week.

Oh, and finally, don't forget, coming next week---"Biggles Dictates a Letter"!

PARIS MAYOR STABBING UPDATE: InstaPundit has details about the alleged assailant.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, a French tanker was rammed off the coast of Yemen, ala the USS Cole.

THE HOT DOG THAT MADE TOLEDO FAMOUS: "Family Settles Feud Over Control of Company Whose Hot Dog Was Made Famous on M*A*S*H".

SKIP THE CHIANTI: Flak magazine reviews Red Dragon:

Red Dragon's sins are not of commission but omission; not what it does wrong, but what it just plain fails to do. It's resolutely average and, worse, unambitious, so bloody competent that it is in fact bloodless, cleanly avoiding opportunities to take its scenario someplace interesting, frustrating any attempts to get really caught up in it. But those qualities befit a movie that's both a third sequel and a remake; no doubt its focus-group scores were through the roof.

Gray Davis signs bill allowing Segways on California sidewalks. Two days later, San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly introduced legislation that would ban the two-wheelers in the city.

You have to hand it to those carefree, experimental, progressive San Franciscoans. They always let people do their own thing.

MAYOR OF PARIS STABBED, "but his life was not in danger", according to this Newsday.com report.

A 40-year old man was taken into custody, but no word yet on a motive.

OBSESSED WITH WINONA: That's what the LA Examiner says that LA District Attorney Steve Cooley is. Cooley has put "at least eight attorneys to work full time on this case, with a deputy district attorney having to reschedule a murder prosecution so she can convict Ryder".

The Examiner says that Cooley thinks that busting Winona could "cleanse the DA's office of its failure to put O.J. Simpson behind bars"!

Now mind you, I don't like to see celebrities get away with crimes that ordinary folks would be punished for. But eight attorneys for one shoplifting case? Get real.

THE MAN WHO KNEW: Eric Olsen has an interesting post on John O'Neill, the FBI agent who "may have known more about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda than any other person in America", but died in the World Trade Center on September 11th.

Eric says that PBS's Frontline is doing a documentary on O'Neil that will be shown on TV and available on their Web site this week.

GETTING QATSI WITH IT: I just uploaded a few still shots, and long essay on the recent DVD releases of Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi to the Blogcritics site.

A MOMMIE DEAREST FOR THE 21st Century? The NY Daily News reviews the new CBS telemovie, Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay, starring Shirley MacLaine(!) as the late Mary Kay.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

BAD RECEPTION: A recent lawsuit claiming cell phone use caused brain cancer fell on deaf ears when the judge recognized the claim as junk science.

FACT CHECKING THE TIMES' A**: Andrew Sullivan flashes back to the New York Times' coverage of Israel's destruction of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor in 1981.

GORE ACCIDENTALLY DENIES HOLOCAUST EVER HAPPENED: Glenn Frazier has the details.

Imagine if Bush--or any Republican--made such a verbal gaffe. It would be front page news in a second.

GEORGIA DEMS ASK: "Why should Florida and New Jersey courts have all the fun?", as DeKalb County voters file suit to throw out results of McKinney-Majette primary.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS ON CLINTON:

There probably was not a delegate present who would not have been primed to laugh at a George Dubya "cowboy" joke. Yet Mr Clinton's most notorious foreign policy action was to launch a flight of cruise missiles into the outskirts of the city of Khartoum, destroying the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory on the pretence (now acknowledged to have been false) it was a chemical weapons facility. How could such an atrocity have been committed?

Because Mr Clinton did not even demand an inspection, did not consult the UN or Congress, and over-ruled Joint Chiefs of Staff, CIA and State Department.

As found on The Greatest Jeneration Blog.

THE BUSH/TRUMAN CONNECTION: Good essay in National Review Online.

HUGH: For some reason, when I saw this headline on My Yahoo homepage--"Tearful U.S. Taliban Gets 20 Years--I had a flashback to the episode Star Trek: Next Generation titled "I Borg", with its chief guest character, "Hugh".

Hugh of course, was the name that Geordi La Forge gave the young Borg that the crew of the Enterprise had captured, with the intent of sending back to the Borg Collective essentially carrying a computer virus. Because Picard and the crew eventually felt sorry for Hugh, they didn't carry out the mission, and the Borg eventually reappeared.

On the one hand, I understand that in an ongoing TV series, you need reasons for the show to go on. Batman and Robin couldn't be killed in a cliffhanger, or there'd be no show. Crockett and Tubbs weren't going to be killed by drug dealers, or there'd be no Miami Vice. And Star Trek wasn't about to wipe out everybody's favorite baddies, so they made Picard look like a wimp instead, when he should have been just a bit ruthless. It would have saved tens of millions or so of lives in the galaxy.

That "feeling sorry for a minor representative of the bad guys" headline got me thinking that often feeling sorry for the enemy is a prelude to disaster. Because, let's face it, in a real war, ruthlessness against a totalitarian state isn't a bad thing. Had we not dropped atom bombs on Japan, hundreds of thousands of US and Japanese troops would have perished. The Japanese government was prepared, it said, to sacrifice 20 million civilians to keep the Americans out. Had LBJ been more ruthless in Vietnam, the over three million deaths in Cambodia alone by Pol Pot could have been avoided.

We're going to need big brass balls if we attack Iraq. And God help us, and the enslaved people of the Middle East, if we don't.

THE COLOR OF COMBAT: Mackubin Thomas Owens has some thoughts on minorities and war:

The contention that in America's wars, minorities bear a disproportionate burden of the fighting and dying has long been a staple of Left-wing rhetoric since the Vietnam War. Even as late as the Gulf War in 1991, Jesse Jackson, addressing a largely black audience, claimed that "when that war breaks out, our youth will burn first."

But as Will Rogers once said, "it's not the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't true." The claim of disproportionate minority casualties wasn't true during the Vietnam War, where the record indicates that 86 percent of those who died during the war were white and 12.5 percent were black, from an age group in which blacks comprised 13.1 percent of the population. It is even less true today.

To understand why, it is necessary to look a little beneath the surface. While overall, minorities comprise 30 percent of the Army, one of the two services that would be expected to bear the brunt of close combat in Iraq, they tend to be underrepresented in the combat arms. As the incomparable Tom Ricks observed in a January 1997 article for the Wall Street Journal, the "old stereotype about the Army's front-line units being cannon fodder laden with minorities" is false.

A MODEST PROPOSAL: The Brothers Judd have some suggestions as to how to jumpstart the economy.

WHY DO SUPERHEROES GO BANKRUPT? Good article on Ron Perelman and the up-and-down rollercoaster ride he put Marvel Comics on in the 1990s.

THE FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES: My review of Virginia Postrel's 1999 book is now on Blogcritics.

THE OVER THE HILL GANG, 2002 STYLE: The Oakland Raiders may be old, but they're 3-0:

Jerry Rice, pushing 40, still looks smooth and lithe. Rod Woodson, as hard as Alcatraz looming out in the Bay, is 37. Tim Brown and Rich Gannon, a mere 36, are bristling with vigor. Trace Armstrong and Bill Romanowski, also 36, are looking good, too.

Meanwhile however, Sebastian Janikowski, their kicker, has been charged with DUI. Maybe he can carpool with Randy Moss.

OUTRAGE OF THE DAY: It's a doozy, too. A shipment of pro-Israel newsletters from the Ayn Rand Institute to the University of Toronto has been confiscated at the Canadian border, because, according to Canadian Customs, they “may constitute obscenity or hate propaganda.” The theme of the newsletter: defending Israel’s moral right to exist.

Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds have more. And here's the newsletter that caused all the fuss. As Volokh says, if you're Canadian, click at your own risk.

WEEK FIVE OF THE NFL: Who's hot, who's cold, who's a sleeper? The Sporting News has the answers.

ANTICIPATION--IT'S KEEPING ME WAITING: ScrappleFace says DNC chairman is 'pumped' about potential 2004 pairings.

In other ScrappleFace news, President Bush today announced that Iraq has "nuculer, not nuclear, weapons...there will be no invasion."

20 YEARS: That's the sentence John Philip Walker Lindh, a/k/a "Suleyman al-Faris," a/k/a "Abdul Hamid," got for treason.

Lindh will be a free man when he's 41 years old.

ANDREW SULLIVAN has this item, appropriately titled...

PAGING DR FREUD: "When the Prime Minister spoke yesterday I thought to myself, "I hope I'll be able to give a speech like that when I grow up" - Bill Clinton, at the Labour Party Conference yesterday.

SUMS IT UP PRETTY GOOD: Great Reason cartoon about the Torch.

SOCK IT TO ME, BABY! Ladies and gentlemen, the world’s oldest terrorist, with the world’s oldest lime-green terrorist socks.

SCREED IS GOOD: Especially when it takes Paul Welstone down a peg or two.

THE DICK CHENEY, RUSH LIMBAUGH, BARBRA STREISAND CONNECTION, as discovered by Matt Drudge.

GOOD QUESTION: Joanne Jacobs wants to know why civility on campus is controversial.

NICE GUYS. Here's what's happening in backwaters of the Axis of Evil today:

The Associated Press has a photo of a North Korean propaganda poster, which shows three red missiles heading toward a crumbling U.S. Capitol Building, with a tattered American flag in the foreground. The AP translates the poster's text: ''If someone starts an invasion war, we will crush the U.S. bastards first.''

As found on the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web Today.

THIS TIME, WE MEAN IT! ScrappleFace reports that the U.S. is bombing Iraq--with leaflets.

(Be sure to check out his link to the actual news article, as well.)

HACK ATTACK: Hackers deface State Department Web site.

GARY HART MAKES SENSE: (Wow, I typed that, and my fingers didn't catch on fire!) Good essay in the New York Times:

The Vietnam era divided the nation but not as severely as it divided the Democratic Party. The party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy still seems incapable, more than 25 years after the war's end, of collectively addressing America's defense posture in coherent and creative ways. Instead, once again, Democrats are responding to a Republican president as individual entrepreneurs trying to protect themselves against the traditional conservative charge of being "soft on defense." For proof of Democratic marginalization on these issues, one need look no further than the polls that consistently show Americans trust Republicans more than Democrats to manage foreign policy and conflict.

Though the commitment to national defense should be above partisan advantage, how that commitment is carried out will always divide the parties. If the president is successful in convincing the American people that Iraq is an immediate threat to our security, and the Democrats are simply in opposition, this issue could well decide the Congressional balance of power, propelling Republicans to victory in both the House and the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.

Well worth reading the whole thing.

DC AND U.N. SHOOTINGS: Not surprisingly, InstaPundit is on the case. Start here, then scroll for updates.

WHAT THE INTERNET WAS MADE FOR: As discovered by Jonah Goldberg.

(Requires Macromedia Flash.)

THE CAPTAIN KANGAROO/IWO JIMA CONNECTION: No, really.

It's a great story.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Secret Service 'war driving' around Washington for unsecure wireless LANs.

NO, THIS IS NOT FROM THE ONION, PART II: Recently widowed 50-something actress kisses 20-something actor, who had studied his craft under her husband.

Arrest warrants issued for both actor and actress.

CHANGING PLACES: The Sporting News thinks that when Darrell Green hangs up his cleats after twenty years as a Redskins' cornerback, he should think about becoming an NFL referee:

Think about it. Who would be a better judge of what really is, and isn't, pass interference than Green? Or who could determine holding better than a veteran lineman such as Bruce Smith?

KA-BOOM: Flak magazine looks at Nevada's rejected license plate.

GENTLEMEN, START YOUR WEBLOGS: Matt Drudge says that starting next week, the Washington Times will be serializing excerpts from Fighting Back a new book by Bill Sammon, which looks at the war on terrorism from inside the Bush White House.

STANLEY CROUCH ON AMIRI BARAKA, "New Jersey's "Poet Laureate":

It was simple evolution: All whites - and Jews especially - should be murdered; then all Negroes who did not submit to his agenda; then all homosexuals; then all capitalists; then all who did not agree that the Western world and capitalism should be destroyed.

True, Jones began his career more than 40 years ago as a very talented Greenwich Village poet, essayist, playwright and novelist, a black bohemian with a Jewish wife and two children. But that LeRoi flipped out inthe late '60s, left his wife and children after deciding to become a racist black leader and sold out his talent in the interest of hysterical diatribes that have gotten neither worse nor better in the past 35 years. Consistency is all.

For those who would celebrate his writing, there is only one question. What good book has he written since 1965? What truly good poem? Or does one become a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and poet laureate of New Jersey just by staying alive?

Michelle Malkin also has some thoughts.

REPLICA GUNS NOW, TOY GUNS NEXT? Group Captain Mandrake looks at the latest reduction in England's civil liberties, part of his ongoing series.

THE NJ SUPREME COURT/CALVIN AND HOBBES CONNECTION, as found by Virginia Postrel, on her Dynamist.com Weblog.

Postrel says that following NJ politics, "A person could become cynical." Can't argue with that!

PAYBACK: IT'S A...Bush cuts deal by leaving Daschle out.

VALHALLA, I AM COMING! Upon us all, a little rain must fall, when we each realize that most of Robert Plant's early lyrics with Led Zeppelin, were really, really, really silly.

(But, as a token concession to youth, I still think Jimmy Page was a pretty nifty guitarist in his prime.)

DARE TO DREAM: New Jersey Democrats launch write-in campaign for Joe Piscopo. Move indicates lack of enthusiasm for Lautenberg, insiders say.

Why yes, this is satire. But then, so is what's going on in New Jersey right now.

NO, THIS IS NOT FROM THE ONION: Delegates to the African and African Descendants' World Conference Against Racism voted today to eject all non-blacks from the conference.

THE TIMES SQUARE TIME MACHINE, courtesy of James Lileks, who does a magnificent job of recreating the last hundred years or so of that archetypal American place.

CRACKDOWN: Charles Johnson says that peace groups do not serve Egyptian law.

HERR CLINTON: John Fund says Gerhard Schroeder did what it took to win--but at what cost to Germany?

MY LATEST REVIEW IS NOW ONLINE AT BLOGCRITICS: It's on the new coffee table book, Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures.

(Incidentally, in a nice bit of synchronicity, it's preceded on Blogcritics by an article by Eric Olsen called "Titanium Monolith".)

NJ AS BANANA REPUBLIC: Dems Can Replace Torricelli.

UPDATE: Republicans will challenge.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Orrin Judd has some thoughts.

CBS IDENTIFIED BONIOR AS A REPUBLICAN, on Monday's Early Show. The Media Research Center has the details, and a still shot.

No word yet on what Newt Gingrich thinks of CBS's faux pas.

9/11 PHOTOS: Apparently taken by an amateur photographer from his Brooklyn living room window. When you get to the last one, go back to the first one to see how the view had changed.

BUSH'S IRAQ PLAN GAINS MOMENTUM.

RED DRAGON: You've seen the movie, now see the movie.

Other than to pad Dino De Laurentiis' bank-account, is there any reason why this film was remade?

(If anyone has a link to an article with Michael Mann's take on why Manhunter, his 1986 film (which I loved, by the way), was remade, and what he thinks about the new version, please send it to me, and I'll be happy to post it.)

ALL TORCH, ALL THE TIME: Here's the link to all of the post-Torricelli shenanigans in New Jersey as assembled on InstaPundit.

THE INTERNET: IT'S NOT JUST FOR WEBLOGS ANYMORE! "FedEx Sees A Dot-Com Payoff".

GREAT MARK STEYN COLUMN, which you've probably read already, but what the hell. Great references to Tom Daschle putting the bomp in the bomp-sh-bomp-sh-bomp, and the ram in the ram-a-lama-ding-dong, and Al Gore's political antennae, "still as reliable as a 1948 TV with busted rabbit ears".

Click on over and read it on your DuMont monitor if you haven't seen it already.

MORE OF THE SAME: As a follow-up to his column yesterday, Jonah Goldberg goes through the rest of the list of reasons not to invade Iraq:

it's a checklist, not an on/off switch. And in the end that's the response to all of these alleged silver-bullet antiwar arguments. No one argument is sufficient, pro or con. You need to look at a long list of criteria and make a decision. Some pro-war arguments are very strong, some less so. But you have to add them all up together and look at the final tally.

So: Is Iraq a brutal totalitarian regime? Check! Is it a proven threat to its neighbors? Check! Is it a proven threat to its own people? Check! Is it a proven threat to our allies? Check! Is it willing to export terrorism abroad? Check! Is it likely that if it got weapons of mass destruction, it would use them recklessly? Check! Is it working very hard to get weapons of mass destruction? Check! Would Saddam's people be better off without him? Check! Would we and our allies be better off without him? Check! Do we have the power and capabilities to get rid of him without paying too high a cost? Check! And, would getting rid of him make it less likely that another September 11 would "happen again"? Check.

PORSCHE REALLY KNOWS HOW TO BUILD AN SUV--and Group Captain Mandrake has exclusive photos, on his A letter from the Olde Countrie blog.

PARACHUTES WERE SABOTAGED AT CAMP LEJEUNE in North Carolina, according to the Jacksonville Daily News.

IS IT QUARTERBACK CONTROVERSY TIME IN PITTSBURGH?

UPDATE: Cowher chooses Tommy Maddox to start.

KIDS, DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME: Man breaks record by clipping 153 clothespins to his face.

SOCIALIZED MEDICINE: As bad as it is, at least it's got a silver-bullet shaped vibrator lining to it.

ONE GREAT DRINK: I made my first Brandy Manhattan this weekend--it's yummy.

By the way, don't forget to tip the bartender from time to time!

MOSS IN MO' MESS: Randy Moss charged with possessing small amount of marijuana.

THE ANSWER IS YES, to all of the rhetorical questions about Jesse Jackson that Rod Dreher asks in this post on The Corner on National Review Online.

TEARING THE BOSS A NEW ONE. Al Barger really, really doesn't like The Rising the new, 9/11-influenced album by Bruce Springsteen, and, in perhaps the ultimate put-down, says:

Even Al Gore would likely have come up with more interesting attempts at songwriting than this.

Ouch.

I haven't bought The Rising yet, and I don't know if I will, simply because Bruce basically lost me as a listener right around the time of Tunnel of Love. But all of his 1970s albums are certainly worth checking out (as if you didn't own them already).

THE NEXT TORCH: Dave Kopel examines the Democrats' legal options in New Jersey.

Hey, maybe they could appoint Amiri Baraka as an interim successor!

UPDATE: James Taranto also has some thoughts on replacing the Torch.

CHAOS: That's what John Podhoretz says the Democratic Party is in right now:

There is no other word for it. The Torch's vanishing act was only the latest piece of bad news for a party that ought to be sitting very pretty with only 36 days to go before a midterm election.

Podhoretz adds,

Over the past week, a powerful image of the Democratic Party has begun to be fixed in the American mind. We all watched as Al Gore, Tom Daschle and Ted Kennedy waged a friendly competition about who could be more critical of a popular president when it came to that popular president's foreign policy and handling of the war on terrorism.

This is not where the Democrats should be five weeks before the November elections. They're not all unethical, and they're not anti-war for the most part. But that's politics for you.

It's a great article. Go check it out.

CELEBRITY MELTDOWN ROUND-UP: Chevy Chase's "friends" tore him a new one at the Friars Club over the weekend. Why were they so hard on him? The ever-so-eloquent Al Franken told Chase, "Because you've always been an arrogant bleep," Franken said. "I don't like you Chevy, and none of us ever did."

Maybe Chase should have asked for the roast to have been held in Cuba.

Meanwhile, "former movie star" (as the New York Post dubbed him--ouch!) Alec Baldwin was booed in Minnesota, a prominent dairy state, for his efforts on behalf of PETA to outlaw milk.

And of course, Barbra Streisand's Shakespearean inventions aren't going over too well, either.

RUMSFELD ROLLS THE TAPE: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld showed graphic proof yesterday of Baghdad's long defiance of the U.N. in the form of surveillance video of Iraqi missiles and shells launched at American aircraft. Rumsfeld says that since Iraq issued a letter offering to let U.N. weapons inspectors re-enter the country "without condition," the regime has fired 67 times on allied planes, 14 this past weekend.

SAME OLD SONG AND DANCE: Jonah Goldberg's latest column on National Review Online is about the left's use of arguments left over from 1968 against attacking Iraq. He starts with a great story, one I have to file away for future reference:

I can't remember where I read it or even who said it, but an old story keeps popping into my head. A former leftist-turned-conservative (from the old Partisan Review crowd, I think) encounters an unreconstructed lefty at a party. The lefty starts spouting all kinds of silliness about capitalist robber barons or American imperialism or some such. The conservative responds, "Your arguments are so old, I've forgotten the answer to them."

FRESNO BUS ATTACK: A passenger slashed the throat of a Greyhound bus driver as the bus traveled down a California freeway, causing it to careen out of control, authorities said. The driver survived but two other people died and dozens were injured.

Curiously, according to the AP report:

Almost exactly a year ago, on Oct. 3, 2001, a passenger on a Greyhound bus in Tennessee cut the driver's throat, causing a crash that killed seven.

Two weeks later, passengers on another Greyhound bus were credited with averting disaster in Utah after they helped thwart an alleged hijacker. And in November, a Greyhound passenger angry that he wasn't allowed to smoke scuffled with a driver in Arizona, causing a crash that injured 33.

Given the current environment, I'd have no problem with Greyhound drivers getting very rough with out-of-control passengers.

Armed bus drivers? Makes sense to me.