(A little early, but I'm taking off the rest of the year. See you in 2004!)
LIFE IMITATES THE FIRST VELVET UNDERGROUND ALBUM COVER: Roger Kimball looks at Europe's fruit police.
2003 WAS AN ASTONISHING YEAR FOR FREEDOM: Saddam Hussein was toppled, Khaddafi is allowing nuclear inspections, and Al-Qaida is on the run. The stock market, a forward-looking economic indicator, and a pretty reasonable benchmark for the privately owned wealth of the nation's citizens, had its first positive year since 1999. And most Americans have had their eyes opened to the dangers of terrorism and its appeasement. So what does AP have to say about all this?
"World Rings in 2004 Amid Grim Backdrop"
But of course.
THOMAS SOWELL LOOKS AT TWO RECENT EARTHQUAKES and their results under two different social systems.
MORE BUSH BENEFITING STAGECRAFT by the evil Karl Rove.
WHAT HE SAID! Glenn Reynolds doesn't mince words when it comes to the Palestinians' war against Israel.
Or as Charles Johnson frequently quips, "Lovely people. Let’s give them a state, right away!"
Why do I get the feeling that a big chunk of the Blogosphere won't be attending Peter Jennings' new year's eve party--or Willie Nelson's?
JOHN GREGORY DUNNE, novelist, screenwriter and husband of fellow author Joan Didion, died Tuesday of a heart attack at age 71. Newsday reports:
The grandson of an Irish immigrant, he often focused on the Irish-American experience--particularly in his million-selling novel "True Confessions." The 1977 breakthrough book involved a Los Angeles murder and its effect on two Irish-Catholic brothers, one a police detective and the other a priest.Dunne and Didion were also championed by Tom Wolfe in his classic New Journalism anthology of the mid-1970s.Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall starred in the movie, which Dunne adapted with Didion.
"'True Confessions' was a major novel, one of the best books ever written about politics," said Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam, a friend and fellow writer. "He was a very important writer, and a wonderful friend--talented, edgy, combative."
Dunne's book "The Studio" provided an unflinching look behind the machinations at Twentieth Century Fox, a major motion picture studio. It was hailed for its insider's take on Hollywood.
Dunne eventually became part of the movie industry, working with Didion on several screenplays. Their first, "Panic in Needle Park," starred Al Pacino and captured an award at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.
BRASS COJONES: FrontPage magazine.com names Col. Allen B. West their Man of the Year.
KENNETH SILBER of Tech Central Station has seven "Things to Look For in 2004".
MORNING IN AMERICA UPDATE: AP reports that "Late sales give retailers best holiday in four years".
UPDATE: Larry Kudlow has some thoughts on the coming election year's economy.
MICHELLE MALKIN rounds up the whiners of the year.
DID THE AIR FORCE INTERCEPT an Air France flight headed towards LAX earlier tonight?
SE7EN: Bill Callahan's been fired as head coach of the Oakland Raiders.
SO THIS IS WHERE CRUZ BUSTAMANTE sends his kids to high school.
Hey, whatever happened to "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"?
(Link via InstaPundit.Com.)
UPDATE: Kimberly Swygert has some thoughts.
SARAH SMILE: "Every day I wake up and find more things about America that I love," says a woman rescued from Saudi kidnappers.
ANOTHER PERNOD, SMEDLEY: "Armavirumque", the weblog of The New Criterion looks at the year in blog.
Meanwhile, John Hawkins has the top ten list (actually 12!) of top ten lists.
And National Review has fired up its crystal ball, to look at what's to come in 2004.
FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN MORDOR: "50 Reasons Lord of the Rings Sucks".
I think #35 is spot-on. Just ask the people of Springfield.
THE REASON FOR THE SEASON: James Taranto writes that a few of his readers disputed his questioning the sincerity of Howard Dean's assertion that he is a "committed believer in Jesus Christ."
In response, Taranto simply runs Dean's December 25 message to his supporters, and notes, "Dean manages to mention Thomas Jefferson and FDR--admirable men, to be sure--but he says not a word about the man whose birth we celebrated last Thursday. He can't even bring himself to use the word Christmas".
Yeah, that's the spirit that'll woo the red states.
UPDATE: Chris Muir seems to agree.
HOPLOPHOBIA? "Gun-rights group touts new 'word'". Of course, this would require, under the ADA, that the Times hire a certain amount of hoplophobes for their paper.
Oh wait, they already do!
NUMBER SIX: Steve Spurrier, the ol' ball coach, is now the ol' unemployed coach.
UPDATE: Or is he?
ANOTHER UPDATE: He gone.
SKIP BAYLESS writes that Bill Callahan, head coach (for the moment) of the Oakland Raiders, sealed his fate months ago.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS KILLS: "Sky marshals could be placed on British flights to and from the United States this week, but the U.K. pilots' union says its objections to guns on planes could lead its members to refuse to fly".
Meanwhile, perhaps the New York Times is having second thoughts when it comes its hatred of the Second Amendment.
ALMOST FREE: Glenn Reynolds writes:
Already, ownership of fancy goods is less a mark of social status than it used to be. Huge wide-screen TVs are, in my part of the world at least, associated as much with trailer parks as with wealth. ("You never see a double-wide without at least a 50-inch TV," a salesman told me. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but a common view). Fancy watches, now no more accurate than the cheap ones, are a mark of pretension, not status. And services -- scorned as unproductive in the day of Adam Smith -- are now moving up the ladder. Massage therapy and restaurant meals are comparatively high-margin growth businesses, while television sellers are fighting things out in a market where prices are plummeting. Plumbers and cleaning services, meanwhile, are doing well.Me too. As Tom Wolfe wrote a few years ago, we are "fulfilling Saint-Simon's and the other nineteenth-century utopian socialists' dreams of a day when the ordinary workingman would have the political and personal freedom, the free time and the wherewithal to express himself in any way he saw fit and to unleash his full potential".A glimpse of the future? I suspect so.
MY GOD, this could singlehandedly destroy the World Wide Web!
UPDATE: And now..the rest of the story! (Via Stephen Green.)
REDNECK PLANET: In Redneck Nation, Michael Graham wrote that during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the left castigated the South for its obsession with race, and then, rather than moving towards a color-blind society as Martin Luther King had rightly demanded, became race-obsessed itself.
Glenn Reynolds links to merely the latest in a long line of exhibits that prove Graham's thesis.
Doesn't it strike any of the conspiracy mongers that looking endlessly for racism in PC-obsessed Hollywood is more than a little silly?
UPDATE: Speaking of the South...
JEFF JACOBY looks frighteningly like Michael Moore in the photo that accompanies his articles. Fortunately, he doesn't sound like him, as he writes about hate speech from the left.
SADDAM SQUEALS: Reuters reports that Hussein "has given his U.S. captors information on hidden weapons and as much as $40 billion he may have seized while he was Iraq’s president".
Byron York, in a rare Wall Street Journal article, looks at George Soros and declares, "At any given time, there is some small sliver of the American population that believes the president--any president--is a Nazi. Those people are usually thought of as nut cases. Now they can count among their number one of the world's richest and most influential men."
SAY WHAT? "FBI urges police to watch for people carrying almanacs".
UPDATE: Nick Gillespie has more.
CLIFF HARRIS AND CHARLIE WATERS were the Batman and Robin of the NFL during their playing days with the Dallas Cowboys in the 1970s, and I have a review of their new book on Blogcritics.
THE CONTRARIAN: Howard Dean has a lock on being the Democrats' nominee, right? Not so fast, writes Stephen Green, who looks at the Democratic front runners' poll numbers and says, "Not only is this primary race not over, it's hardly even begun".
MORNING IN AMERICA UPDATE: The Nasdaq cracks 2000, for the first time since January of 2002.
And the Dow gained 125 to stand at 10450.
WHO'S GOTTEN THE AXE IN THE NFL? ESPN.com has a running list of NFL coaching changes.
There's four five currently on there. Watch for more, shortly.
(Incidentally, what's with ESPN's new page design that puts all sorts of ads and links above the main story, making it not even be visible on most monitors without scrolling down?)
AS JIM MORA WOULD SAY...PLAYOFFS!! PLAYOFFS!? The playoff picture in the NFL is all firmed up, as Green Bay, Seattle and Baltimore are the last teams to straggle into the postseason.
THE FUN 'N' GUN GETS STUNNED AND DONE: Jim Litke of AP sticks a fork in Steve Spurrier.
ABBEY ROAD IN A BOX, VERSION 3: My review of Cakewalk's Sonar 3.0 Windows-based recording program is online at Blogcritics. My review comes complete with a tune I recorded with the program, playing all the instruments...and singing as well!
UPDATE: Instalanche!
MEET LUCKY THE DINOSAUR: He's the newest creation of Walt Disney's Animatronics department, and the subject of my cover story in Servo magazine. And for a 20 foot high green fellow covered in scales, he's cute as a button, to boot!
Look for Servo on your newsstand today! (Or, wait until a nice civilized hour on Monday. Or subscribe via Amazon.)
QUESTION: Who was the first black American to spend a night as a guest of the White House, and which president made it happen?
Answer: Neither are who you think.
LILEKS ON THE IRANIAN EARTHQUAKE:
I wonder if this disaster might be the Iranian Chernobyl. (Or the 21st century equivalent of the Lisbon earthquake, if you remember your Voltaire.) Just as that catastrophe laid bare the lies and the failures of the Soviet system, so might a horrible earthquake call into question the Mullahs’ claim to rule at the behest of the Almighty. It’s hard to insist that Allah wants Israel destroyed but never gets around to leveling Tel Aviv with natural disasters.Read the rest.Do I think that all Iranians believes the Mullah’s claims? No. Neither do I think that the contributions of America will change public attitudes - because I don’t think they’ll come as a surprise to most, and certainly not to the classes who can change the nature of the government. But the adminstration's aid effort is a surprise to certain domestic elements. I heard a network news feed on the radio say that the US was sending aid despite having branded Iran as a member of the Axis of Evil. Oy. Did the author of that dispatch believe that the administration regarded the Iranian people as a seething mass indistinguishable from the calculated madness of the ruling clerics?
If US aid to Iran comes as a surprise to anyone, then they don’t understand the US.
AN IMPROVED CLIMATE: Ian Murray writes that statist environmentalists will remember 2003 as a very bad year for their credibility.
They're not the only left-leaning group who will have bad memories about this year.
MISSING SURVEY BODES ILL for 2004 Democrats: The missing exit polls for the 2002 mid-term elections have finally been released--and there's some interesting data there.
TIME MAGAZINE'S "PERSON" OF THE YEAR: Mona Charen has some end of year reflections on Time's decision to name the American solider as the man person of the year:
Meaning no disrespect at all to the world's finest fighting force, I have a feeling that the excellence of our men at arms had little to do with this decision.Time needs to work on its judgement, period.No, it seems pretty evident that the editors of Time were desperate to find someone, anyone, to name instead of George W. Bush. The person of the year is supposedly selected for having had the most influence on events of the past year, for good or ill. But this standard is not always strictly applied. Think back to 2001, for example. It is blindingly obvious that the one person who shaped the world the most that year, very much for ill, was Osama bin Laden. But Time's editors could not bring themselves to name him -- not when they were receiving daily warnings from readers threatening to cancel their subscriptions; not when so many continue to see the person of the year as some sort of honor. So they punted and chose Rudolph Giuliani.
But (again let me stress that I bow to no one in my admiration for the U.S. military), the persons of the year Time chose would be sitting in Fort Benning and Camp Pendleton, not in Saddam's palaces today had it not been for George Bush. Not only has Bush shown the courage to take the fight to the terrorists and made this a victory year for American forces and American values, he has begun the process of remaking the Middle East in a more democratic mold, a challenge he created and embraced, and on which he will be judged by history. You may consider it too ambitious, or you may think him a visionary, but either way, it seems to me, George Bush must be acknowledged as a huge actor on the world stage. Time magazine needs to work on its news judgment.
THE VEGGIE VIGILANTE: NewYorkish.com checks in with Bernard Goetz and finds him "Still Crazy After All These Years".
Indeed.
(Found via H.D. Miller.)
A THOUSAND POINTS OF LIGHT: Virginia Postrel, in an all-too-rare these days Reason article, describes how Christmas displays illuminate a strong economy.
"XMAS PRESENT FROM PROGRESSIVES: STARVATION": David Horowitz wants to know "how many poor people have progressives starved since 1917"?
The number is easily in the eight digits. Easily.
HEDGED IN BY THE LAW: Palo Alto is one of the more curious cities in the Bay Area. With its concentration of venture capital firms, it's a very wealthy community. But because of its leftist bent, its beautiful city streets have more than an average share of homeless people.
But rather than try to reduce its problems with transients (as Rudy Giuliani successfully did with Manhattan in the mid-1990s), the Palo Alto police department are arresting middle-aged homeowners whose curbside hedges are more than two feet tall.
Great PR move guys--just brilliant.
YES VIRGINIA, There is a 'United' States of America.
A CHURCHILLIAN CHRISTMAS? Not a bad analogy for this year's "Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name", actually.
AS HEADS IS TAILS: In two recent statements, Howard Dean flip-flops radically on Osama Bin Laden's guilt.
Richard J. Rosendall of FrontPage magazine.com goes "Shopping for Roots". See also this Tony Snow piece from 1999.
Incidentally, I wonder if Kwanzaa and its relatively recent creation was the inspiration for Seinfeld's "Festivus" episode.
GOOD QUESTIONS: Charles Johnson asks, "Has our airport security improved so much that Islamic terrorbots think it’s safer to commandeer a foreign flight? Or are they more afraid of American passengers, filled with fury and visions of Flight 93, who will do whatever it takes to stop the hijackers?"
Yet another reason to get more U.S. pilots armed, as well.
JUST ASK WALT GARRISON: Jacob Sullum writes, "No one claims smokeless tobacco is completely safe, but it is indisputably safer than cigarettes—by a very wide margin. Obscuring this fact, as the public health establishment routinely does, leaves smokers with the impression that they have nothing to gain by switching to snuff, when the truth is that they can dramatically reduce their risks".
STRONG EARTHQUAKE IN IRAN: Quake deaths could reach ten thousand.
UPDATE: Reuters is reporting twenty thousand killed.
ANOTHER UPDATE (Via InstaPundit): Jeff Jarvis has a round-up of additional links. Jarvis writes, "To all my newfound Iranian blogging friends: I hope you and your families are safe and secure".
Amen.
TINFOIL HAT UPDATE: This is just pathetic--but not all that surprising. But hey, the truth is out there!
TINFOIL TURBAN UPDATE: "The Islamic Republic of Iran accepts all kinds of humanitarian aid from all countries and international organizations with the exception of the Zionist regime (Israel)."--Jahanbakhsh Khanjani, Iranian Interior Ministry spokesman.
DOIN' THE CHA-CHA SLIDE: Writing about Howard Dean's use of the Internet in his campaigning, Arnold King of Tech Central Station writes, "Howard Dean is the left's Cha-Cha Slide. He did not create the parties that dance to his tune. He just replaced the Macarena".
King fears the 'Net may turn America into Weimar Germany--I think it's too soon to judge the 'Net's impact on politics to come to such a depressing conclusion, but King's article is well worth reading.
STEVEN DEN BESTE IS NOT HAPPY about how the French authorities handled the suspected terrorists on Air France's Christmas Eve flight to L.A.
And I can't say I blame him.
OH, XENU! Julian Sanchez writes that "Between Christmas, Chanukah, Solstice, and Kwanzaa, Scientologists may feel a bit left out".
But not anymore! There's a new off-Broadway musical "based on the life of schlock sci-fi author cum Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard".
DON'T LET OLIVER STONE see this.
Hope everybody had as nice a Christmas as we did!
GREAT CHRISTMAS CLASSICS: The Digital Bits looks at Christmas movies from the 30s and '40s on DVD. (I realize this is a bit late, but your local video store may be open late).
Or stock-up on Friday (or from Amazon) for next year!
FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN REDMOND, WA: "Researchers Outline Microsoft's Top 10 Challenges For 2004".
KILL BILL: As that phrase all the cool kids are saying these days goes...heh.
Here's Rosie O'Donnell from October, 2001:
Talkshow host and ardent Democratic activist Rosie O'Donnell stunned Los Angeles radio listeners Thursday morning by declaring she's changed her opinion of President Bush.And here's Rosie O'Donnell, December 11, 2003:"I love him now!" O'Donnell told KRLA-AM's Dennis Prager.
O'Donnell said she even got to Yankee Stadium an hour early for a World Series game so that she could videotape Bush!
'I brought a videocamera and my six year old son and no security so that my son could see the president," said O'Donnell.
"We left at 6 o'clock in order to do that. And since September 11, I have had nothing but accolades for the job he has done for this nation... I am in full support of the President."
O'Donnell added: "Honey, I love him now! He is our President. We are at war."
"The country was really taken over. It was a coup. This man was not elected, he sits in the White House and he's declaring war. That's a coup d'etat. America should be in the streets picketing. And our boys and our girls, our teenagers and 20- year-olds, are off there killing people. And war begets war.Rosie, a coup d'etat is a brief and bloodless revolution. Essentially, our government has one every four to eight years, as a new administration replaces the old one, bringing new people and new ideas, without firing a shot.
You're a passionate supporter of gays and lesbians in America--why not share a little sympathy for their counterparts in the Middle East?
Contrast Rosie's "BUSH SUX" cliches to this carefully nuanced essay by Paul Varnell, from Gay City News.com, which I found at the top of a Google search using "Gays, Iraq, Hussein". It's from February, shortly before we began to liberate Iraq:
Saddam Hussein's one-party dictatorship severely oppresses gays and lesbians. As British gay activist Peter Tatchell points out, two years ago Hussein decreed homosexuality a capital crime. Doing so was either a further effort to control the lives of his subjects or one of his many recent efforts to display zealous support for Islam. Eliminating Hussein and installing a more secular, pluralist regime would benefit Iraqi gays.Mr. Varnell gets it. You sounded like you did for a moment in the fall of 2001, Rosie. What changed?* * * To the extent gay progressives vocally oppose the war in order to ensure heterosexual progressive support for gay equality, that sounds like exactly as good a reason for all the rest of us to vocally support the war--to show moderate and conservative Americans that gays share many of their fundamental values and have the general interests of the country at heart. After all, the underlying benefit the Iraqi war will be the pressure on neighboring Arab states to moderate and modernize, reducing their tendency to tolerate, support, or generate fundamentalist terrorism.
SELF-SABOTAGE? Interesting theory about Dean by Roger L. Simon:
It may be that deep down Dean does not want to be elected. I know that sounds like an outrageous comment, especially since he is so obviously ambitious, but some of his behavior would seem to indicate self-sabotage. In this reading, which I am coming to believe, what Dean really wants is to win the nomination (he'll get probably get that) and then go down in flames. This way he gets to feel he's "right" without the terrible responsibility of governing, which I think only part of him wants.Simon believe he's guilty of "cheapjack analysis here", but I think there's a real validity to his hypothesis.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, SADDAM! From the 1-22 Battalion of the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division.
(Bet that photo's driving the folks at Reuters absolutely nuts.)
IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON: Friends don't give friends pan & scan DVDs.
THE PAUL KRUGMAN-JOHN McCAIN CONNECTION, as discovered by Jonah Goldberg.
I think it's a fair analogy, myself.
REMEMBERING THE LOWS OF 2003: Brent Bozell writes:
Fifty years from now, school children may learn that 2003 was the year President Bush liberated Iraq, creating a prosperous powerhouse of democratic capitalism in the Middle East. We don't know how it will turn out, of course. But we know one thing: the first draft of history out of our national media came from the angry left, furious at the exercise of American power and solicitous of the dictator now in the dock.The list is available here.
The worst media eruptions of 2003 are now collected in the Media Research Center’s annual greatest-misses collection known as the Best of Notable Quotables. Forty-six judges selected the ugliest of the ugly, lest we forget how ridiculous our media elite can be.
But remember...there's no media bias!
THE RUNNER STUMBLES: Dean lies about the role of his brother's involvement in Vietnam, and the New York Times picks up on it, meaning there's a slight chance that the rest of the media will as well. (Maybe.)
Either way, this should be interesting to watch.
UPDATE: NRO's "The Corner" has more on Dean and his late brother. Start here and scroll up.
Am I the only one who thinks it's more than a little weird that TIME Magazine names "The American Soldier" as their "Person of the Year," only days after publishing a story by a TIME reporter who's hangin' out with the mujahideen trying to kill that same "Person of the Year?"No, he's not. And be sure to read Johnson's comments section as well. As commenter #4 wrote, "Someone was saying the other day about the Time "WE GOT HIM!" cover that suddenly it's 'we'? How convenient."
Pick a side boys, so the readers know where you stand.
MENTAL THERAPY: Brett Favre's father passed away suddenly on Sunday. So what does Favre do for therapy on Monday?
Pass the daylights out of the Oakland Raiders on Monday Night Football, for a final score of 41 to 7.
As Rich Eisen said on the NFL Channel after the game, when Favre dons his yellow blazer at Canton, they'll be talking about this game.
"SAVOR IT", Mona Charen writes:
Adolf Hitler deprived the Allies of the satisfaction of executing him. Josef Stalin died in his bed. Pol Pot died of natural causes. But Saddam Hussein, that vicious, depraved worm of a man, was plucked from his rathole. Ah the great warrior. The author of the Mother of All Battles. The man who claimed he would drive the "invaders" from Iraq. The man who forced thousands of Iraqis to sacrifice their lives so he could continue his squalid and luxurious spree in his many palaces.Read the whole thing.This modern-day Saladin (another of his conceits) didn't even have the courage to kill himself in the end, but submitted meekly, with an offer to "negotiate."
SISTER CITIES: Dean's World has a modest proposal to help fight terrorism.
I like it, myself.
SOLSTICE SWOON: Dolphins out of playoffs even earlier this year, the first time since 1989 the team missed the postseason in consecutive seasons. Could head coach Dave Wannstedt get the axe?
HEARST CASTLE APPARENTLY UNDAMAGED:
Hearst Castle reported no obvious damage and no injuries, said Roy Stearns, spokesman for the state Department of Parks and Recreation. A crew was to go over its 150 rooms in detail; the only damage found immediately was a blown transformer at a campground, Stearns said.The castle is particularly popular this time of year because it is decorated with the Hearst Christmas ornaments.
"People come from far and wide to see that, because it's pretty spectacular," Stearns said.
At least three dead in the city of Paso Robles, California.
Minor damage to Vanderberg Air Force Base.
Pacific Gas & Electric, said about 40,000 customers were without power after the quake triggered rockslides that brought down power lines near San Luis Obispo, but no damage was reported at PG&E's Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, about 100 miles from the epicenter.
Buildings in San Jose and other parts of Silicon Valley swayed.
In San Francisco, the upper floors of the 20-story federal courthouse swayed for about 30 seconds.
Very Late Update: 10/30/07: This post is from 2003. For those searching for details on today's earthquake in San Jose via Google, click here.
There was an earthquake, 6.5 on the Richter scale, at about 11:15 in San Simeon (home of the Hearst Castle). I typically blog out of my home office in a San Jose suburb 130 miles or so away, and I definitely felt it. My office chair began to feel like it was pivoting on the joint that connects the wheels to the bottom of the chair, and then I noticed the Venetian blinds swaying a bit back and forth.
Here's a map of the epicenter, as well as details of the quake.
UPDATE: Drudge has the police gumball on, and links to this report.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Police gumball off, but he's doing continuous updates. Blogger's being a bit hinkey, but it was like that before the quake, when I uploaded the post below.
A THOUGHT: Hey, this Internet thing seems to be holding up pretty good. Of course, it was designed to handle much bigger bangs than this one.
ANOTHER OTHER UPDATE: Here's a report from the AP wire.
The CIA told the Clinton administration about ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda as early as 1996, according to Stephen F. Hayes of The Weekly Standard, who also includes quotes from a news report run by ABC:
The al Shifa [pharmaceutical plant] in Sudan was largely destroyed after being hit by six Tomahawk missiles. John McWethy, national security correspondent for ABC News, reported the story on August 25, 1998:As Hayes writes, "Democrats who before the war discounted the possibility of any connection between Iraq and al Qaeda have largely fallen silent".Before the pharmaceutical plant was reduced to rubble by American cruise missiles, the CIA was secretly gathering evidence that ended up putting the facility on America's target list. Intelligence sources say their agents clandestinely gathered soil samples outside the plant and found, quote, "strong evidence" of a chemical compound called EMPTA, a compound that has only one known purpose, to make VX nerve gas.Then, the connection:The U.S. had been suspicious for months, partly because of Osama bin Laden's financial ties, but also because of strong connections to Iraq. Sources say the U.S. had intercepted phone calls from the plant to a man in Iraq who runs that country's chemical weapons program.
As well they should.
CAPTURE OF SADDAM BRINGS "CLOSURE" to retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.
MARK STEYN: "A good week, I would say, for cowboy ''unilateralists.' "
THE GHOSTS OF TECHNO-CHRISTMAS PAST, and present, as explored by Ralph Kinney Bennett, of Tech Central Station.
"A MAN OUTSIDE": Scott W. Johnson looks at the Minneapolis Star Tribune's permissive attitude towards, and lax reporting about transients. Johnson asks the tough questions of the Strib that once, a long time ago, newspapermen used to ask of their interview subjects.
UPDATE: Johnson also has a hard-hitting editorial in the Strib today, reminding Walter Mondale that, given the administration he served in, criticizing George Bush's foreign policy might not be such a good idea.
OSAMA BIN BOGUS: "Busted", writes Glenn Reynolds.
CLARK DROPS AN S-BOMB, live on C-SPAN, a couple of weeks after Kerry used the F-word in an interview with Rolling Stone.
Personally, I like to see a much more careful and nuanced use of language amongst would-be presidents. And let's face it: a crude, cowboy-like use of profanity isn't likely to go over well with a crowd that favors a more metrosexual approach to presidential discourse.
TINA BROWN ON WEDNESDAY:
It had been a particularly obnoxious week for a crowd that favors a more metrosexual approach to foreign relations.Steven Den Beste, today:
In the wake of the capture of Saddam Hussein and a very broad roundup of other insurgents, those who have been hoping for American failure have now been blindsided with another hammer blow: Qaddafi announced that Libya would abandon all its secret programs to develop WMDs and would cooperate with international verification efforts.(Emphasis mine.)What makes this even worse is that this is a purely diplomatic achievement, not a military one.
So will Tina and her cocktail party crowd admit that maybe, just maybe, they were wrong about Bush and his team?
ONE YEAR TO THE DAY since Bill Parcells interest in coaching the Dallas Cowboys became public, they're in the playoffs for the first time since 1999, and have a winning record for the first time since 1998. Parcells becomes the only head coach to lead four different teams into the playoffs.
Here are the rest of the NFL playoff scenarios.
INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST RESTORATION: There's an interesting profile on Apple's Website of John D. Lowry, the man who restored the Indiana Jones films for DVD.
Needless to say, he did a helluva job--they look great.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Orrin Judd turns conventional wisdom on its head and writes:
No belief requires greater and more repressive conformity than that every individual is entitled to their own faith. The reasons for this are twofold and rather obvious: first, any manifestation of an organized and popular belief system must be attacked, lest those who differ be made to feel so much as uncomfortable--this is variously referred to as multiculturalism, tolerance, or political correctness; second, because there are no longer any socially imposed shared behavioral standards, the State must step in and dictate and enforce its own standards. So does Ms Hunt's imagined freedom lead inevitably to its opposite. Brits and other Europeans are no less conformist than Americans, they just conform to a belief which is so indivualistic as to make society untenable and to make statism necessary.He's absolutely right: individual liberty requires great personal responsibility. Just ask that sage philosopher, the late Ben Parker.
CHARLES JOHNSON WRITES that the media is criticizing the plan by the Coalition Provisional Authority to transmit news footage from Iraq directly via satellite, for use by local media outlets:
So in other words, they admit the media focus on violence and aren't very interested in the reconstruction of Iraq, but at the same time would also like to reassure us that they're unbiased. They've simply decided what information is appropriate for us to consume. Shh! Relax! Just go back to sleep!And we can't have that, can we?I must have missed the part where the government was planning to force people to watch C-SPAN Baghdad, in Clockwork Orange-style restraint chairs with eyelid clamps. Media elites sure do start to seethe (in their mild-mannered fashion) at the possibility of losing the tiniest bit of control over the information spigot.
It's hard to see anything wrong with another point of view from Iraq, even if it does come from (horror!) the US government. If people aren't interested, they won't watch. What the elites are really worried about is that people will begin making up their own minds.
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE DRISCOLL-IZED, PART II: I have an article on NFL Films in the January issue of Videomaker magazine. Having grown-up literally 15 minutes away (by car) from their offices in Mt. Laurel, this was a treat to write.
I also have a fun rant in defense of cell phones on the back page of the December issue of Electronic House.
And be sure to check out these other Ed-equipped publications, available at your local newsstand!
IS IT TIME FOR THE BBC TO RETIRE? Oh God, yes.
IS IT TIME FOR JERRY RICE TO RETIRE? Skip Bayless thinks so.
HAWKISH DEMOCRATS AND WMDs:
Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process. The responsibility of the United States in this conflict is to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, to minimize the danger to our troops and to diminish the suffering of the Iraqi people.-- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, in a statement in December 1998 supporting President Clinton's four-day bombing of Iraq.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I think your moral compass has gone crazy"--David Welch, US ambassador to Egypt.
Read the whole thing.
"SAD BUT TRUE, defending America has truly become a partisan issue", writes John Hawkins, riffing on a comment that James Taranto made yesterday.
GETTING LOOPY: I have an article on getting started with Acid Loops, titled "Meaningful Arbitrary Collisions of Events" in Blogcritics.
Complete with my own MP3s, for your listening pleasure!
TRANSNATIONALISM AND SADDAM'S TRIAL: Steven Den Beste writes that its the last gasp for the tranzis to be taken seriously.
(If you're unfamiliar with epithets like "tranzis", be sure to read Den Beste's original post on transnational progressivism, which we linked to back in August of last year.)
NEAL O'DONNELL REJOINS TITANS: O'Donnell had been cut before the season because of the salary-cap, but Tennessee needs a QB that's healthy and knows their system:
Getting O'Donnell back became a necessity after Billy Volek suffered a lacerated spleen in the Titans' 28-26 victory over Buffalo on Sunday. Rookie Jason Gesser has been the only healthy quarterback, with Steve McNair nursing a cracked bone spur in his left ankle.Prior to serving as McNair's backup in Tennessee, O'Donnell is best known for his role as the Steelers' QB of the early to mid 1990s, when he led them to four playoff appearances and a Super Bowl appearance.The Titans had been working since Tuesday to reach a deal that would make O'Donnell happy and keep the team under the salary cap.
WHEN DID THE MIDDLE INITIAL IN NFL stand for France? AP reports that the "NFL fines Bengals QB Jon Kitna for wearing cap marked with cross".
BEHIND "ENEMY" LINES: Roger L. Simon blogs about his recent trip to France. Needless to say, things are not pretty there:
A look at this photograph I took of a Jewish school tells you a lot. Despite its almost block-length size there is no sign or name on the building, certainly no Hebrew letters or Jewish words of any kind to identify it as if it were a secret government installation or think tank. You would have no idea what it was except for a simple "College" written by one of the doors. When I stopped to take this picture, a barrel-chested man who looked like an expert in karate or krav maga, obviously a security guard, rushed out the door in seconds to see who I was, demanding to know what I was doing there. I had to repeat for him several times that I was Jew from California before he relaxed and asked me to please put away my camera. On second thought I'm not going to post the picture. Instead I will post this--the graffiti in the sidewalk all over the 13th Arrondisment where this school was located.Read the whole thing.The French Jewish culture, which gave our world, among so many others, Modigliani, Soutine, Chagall, Proust, Bergson and Serge Gainsbourg may soon be gone.
KYOTO: "All is well that ends well", says Hans H.J. Labohm, senior visiting fellow, Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael, in Tech Central Station.
THE MOTHERSHIP LANDS IN NEVERLAND: According to the New York Post, Michael Jackson became a member of the Nation of Islam yesterday. Given the racist epithets that Jackson was quoted as saying last year about Sony's Tommy Mottola, is it really all that surprising?
THE KAMA SUTRA...of Imperial Scout Walkers.
That's it--I've officially seen everything possible on the Internet. Night all! Drive safely!
(Found via Across The Atlantic.)
Speaking of drifting out of the mainstream, This column, by Tina Brown, titled, "Tough Time For Democrats" is ripe for satire. Check out this bit, from the opening paragraph:
I was at a media-heavy Manhattan dinner party that vividly dramatized the pre-spider hole mood. The guests -- mostly Democrats, with a smattering of moderate Republicans -- were unanimously kissing off Bush. It had been a particularly obnoxious week for a crowd that favors a more metrosexual approach to foreign relations..."A more metrosexual approach to foreign relations"?
That's a staggeringly silly sentence--and Brown's attitude throughout this piece (much like Maureen Dowd's tone) is so 1990s in its lack of seriousness. But wait--she's just getting started!
"Good riddance" may not be a particularly eloquent thing for Bush to say about Saddam -- but comic-strip heroes don't have to be eloquent. In his interview with Diane Sawyer, Bush was like a guy in a sports bar, not much inclined to big-think. Dirty Harry doesn't talk much, and always in words of one syllable, but while the police commissioner is still fretting about getting a proper search warrant Harry has already offed the bad guy with his great big pistol.But we didn't "off" Hussein--he's still alive, and no matter what his fate is, it will be more merciful than those that he put--feet first--into the shredder.
And as far as Bush being "a guy in a sports bar, not much inclined to big-think", maybe Brown should read the recent article by Jonathan Rauch, which portrays Bush as nothing less than a latter day FDR.
Brown ends, astonishingly, with Hillary Clinton as staunch cold warrior (and die-hard American ally) Margaret Thatcher:
Planted solidly behind the lectern with only intermittent reference to her notes [Hillary] exuded the sense of a well-filled mind and life. Maybe not yet a credible commander-in-chief but at least a Democratic Major Barbara. Distantly one could hear the voice of Maggie Thatcher during the Gulf War in 1990, commanding Bush 41 not to "go wobbly." She will wait this one out. Self-discipline, not self-doubt.If Hillary had commanded her husband not to go wobbily, Al Gore would be far more likely to be president today, and either way, Bill Clinton would have gotten the glory (not the least of which would have come from Brown herself) that Bush is receiving from the American people--largely by cleaning up the messes in the Middle East that Clinton (Bill, not Hillary) ignored.
Brown, and her cocktail party coterie, "mostly Democrats, with a smattering of moderate Republicans"--in other words, RINOs--favor "a more metrosexual approach to foreign relations".
Unfortunately, out in the real world, Saddam, al Qaida, the PLO and other terrorists rarely reciprocate such niceties. And Bush, (whose campaign slogan against would-be metrosexual Howard Dean could be, as James Lileks recently wrote, "He doesn't moisturize. He doesn't tweeze. And he never had a pedicure"), seems to get that.
Which explains the title of Brown's cri de coeur.
THE OLIVER STONE WING OF THE DNC: The Washington Times has a nice roundup of some of the conspiracy theories blowing through the Democratic Party, as espoused by supposedly serious people, such as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and leading Democratic presidential candidate, Howard Dean. The article quotes Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000, who understands the danger of these wild rumors and innuendo:
[Brazile] said the comments of Mrs. Albright and Mr. Dean and Mr. McDermott have "no place in our dialogue on this very serious issue. I think most Americans have some lingering doubts about what happened on September 11, but until the commission and Congress completes its investigation, I think it best if people hold these views to themselves. But because we don't yet have a nominee, it's all out in the open."And having all these Oliver Stone and X-File conspiracy theories risks, as one unnamed Democrat is quoted as saying, the party drifting out of the "mainstream."
UPDATE: Heh.
OTTO GRAHAM DEAD: The Hall of Fame QB of the Cleveland Browns, back when Paul Brown was their coach, was 82.
JIM FASSEL OUT AS GIANTS COACH: He'll coach the remaing two games (including Sunday's against Dallas, who will be in the playoffs with a win) and then move on.
YOU KNOW WHAT'S REALLY DEPRESSING about the John Rhys-Davis interview that Andrew Sullivan quotes?
That Rhys-Davis has to add, "I'm burying my career so substantially in these interviews that it's painful". The fact that he's merely speaking logical, common sense statements, and that he's worried how it could affect his career, speaks volumes of how out of touch the artists' enclave in Los Angeles is.
ARMING PILOTS: The Bush Administration (and the TSA) continue to drag their feet, according to this report.
BUT WHAT WOULD VIRGIL SOLLOZO THINK? Dick Morris believes that Hillary could become Howard Dean's candidate for vice president.
Of course, given Morris's track record of previous prognostications...
THE GOREFATHER: Daniel Henninger of the Journal looks at the DNC through a Puzoian eye.
NEXT TUESDAY ON BRAVO, it's a special episode of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy...
SHOOT THE PRESIDENT, receive unsupervised visits to your parents. What a smart move, judge.
Willie Horton could not be reached for comment.
UPDATE: Wow--now it makes a little more sense. Check out the judge's track record. (Via Drudge.)
THE BIKE PATH LEFT: Brilliant Mark Steyn piece in The Wall Street Journal:
There was a revealing moment on MSNBC the other night. Chris Matthews asked Dr. Dean whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in an American court or at The Hague. "I don't think it makes a lot of difference," said the governor airily. Mr. Matthews pressed once more. "It doesn't make a lot of difference to me," he said again. Some of us think what's left of Osama is already hard enough to scrape off the cave floor and put in a matchbox, never mind fly to the Netherlands. But, just for the sake of argument, his bloodiest crime was committed on American soil; American courts, unlike the international ones, would have the option of the death penalty. But Gov. Dean couldn't have been less interested. So how about Saddam? The Hague "suits me fine," he said, the very model of ennui. Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude.That's just a taste--read the whole thing.So what does get the Dean juices going? A few days later, the governor was on CNN and Judy Woodruff asked him about his admission that he'd left the Episcopal Church and become a Congregationalist because "I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path." I hasten to add that, in contrast to current Anglican controversies over gay marriage in British Columbia and gay bishops in New Hampshire, this does not appear to have been a gay bike path: its orientation was not an issue; it would seem to be a rare example of a non-gay controversy in the Anglican Communion. But nevertheless it provoked Howard into "a big fight." "I was fighting to have public access to the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens group," he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting.
And that's our pugnacious little Democrat. On Osama bin Laden, he's Mister Insouciant. But he gets mad about bike paths. Destroy the World Trade Center and he's languid and laconic and blasé. Obstruct plans to convert the ravaged site into a memorial bike path and he'll hunt you down wherever you are.
I think a meme was born today.
UPDATE: Charles Johnson is not happy:
Being a cyclist, however, and a member of the Bike-Path Right, I have to say that I'm mortally offended by Steyn's heinous conflation of cycling with the Dean campaign. I hereby declare a fat-tire-wa on Steyn's narrow Canadian tuchis.Actually, I think he'll get over it. Charles has a pretty good handlebar on things.Bike paths aren't just for angry dwarves.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO the great Arthur C. Clarke, who turns 86 today.
A PICTURE SPEAKS A 1000 WORDS, even when CNN doesn't.
OF HOWARD DEAN, Orrin Judd writes, "Here's a guy who was on top of the world last Friday, having won the endorsement of his Party's fallen martyr. Today he has the dean of Iowa journalism asking if his candidacy is viable..."
UPDATE: Charles Johnson adds:
Remember, this is the same Howard Dean (unless he has an equally evil twin) who, a week ago, was using the Bush administration's "failure to catch Saddam or bin Laden" to score political points from the incredibly addled Deaniacs. Suddenly, he's trying to argue that capturing Saddam is no big deal. In all the years I've been following politics I don't believe I have ever seen a more blatant case of the old switcheroo.And Andrew Sullivan fisks the recent speeches by Dean, and Hillary, to boot.
CLASS ACT: Sports Illustrated's Peter King calls Green Bay's Mike Sherman "the coach of the week":
Call me sentimental. But when Sherman brought a wheelchair-bound U.S. soldier -- who had served in Iraq and was in San Diego to watch the Pack's win over the Chargers -- into the locker room after the game ... and then gave him the game ball ... well, on the day Saddam Hussein was captured, no coach made a better call.And that's rather classy of King to write, as well.