Duane Patterson has a piece about the Washington Post's recent shot at Republicans

Duane Patterson, writing at Radio Blogger, has a good piece dissecting the Washington Post's piece that is taking shots at Tom Delay, in particular:

Karl Rove has slipped through the left's fingers. George Bush and Dick Cheney are only guilty of wrongdoing in the minds of the fever swamp of the left. The 2006 elections are coming up and the Democrats have nothing to run on, except trying to scandalize the Republicans. If Tom Delay walks on the bogus indictment brought by Ronnie Earl, the partisan hack in Texas, that may be too much to take. So the Post has stepped in to weave this very convoluted tale to make sure that Delay is the prime subject this weekend and early next week in Washington.

At least three times in this story, the Post admits that Delay apparently had not done wrong, but his actions and associates sure look suspicious. I'm sure to the Post, anybody that would associate with a Republicans is suspicious.

(Tell me that Patrick Fitzgerald's witchhunt is not somehow politically motivated, although it has hard to figure)

Someone who is doing good things

We had a chance to help Prof. Dunin relatively recently, and it seemed like a good idea to point out her work. This is a link to a page about her career with a photo that must be of her when she was younger. She has an MA in Dance from UCLA in 1966. Notes from the Field has a piece about her, as well, with a more recent picture. There is another page with a Marco Polo connection that is quite interesting.

More Michigan

This is sort of fantasy, but Jennifer Granholm is kind of Michigan's Castro while Kwame Kilpatrick provides the sort of comic relief like Hugo Chavez. As you can see, I think that Michigan has descended to the sort of Banana Republic status achieve by San Francisco. The Michigan economy, while not good, is better than the nadir of the early 1980's, prior to Lee Iacocca and the mini-van. The dominant phrase was "last one out, turn out the lights".

The Democratic People's Republic of Michigan

Henry Payne, the editorial cartoonist with the Detroit News, has a cartoon showing Governor Jennifer Granholm (the moled-wonder) as a goalie, using the veto to stop reform, which is shown as a puck. Jennifer Granholm is another case like Arnold Schwarznegger, in that she is not a native-born US Citizen. She is a Canadian. If circumstances were different, she would be another hot prospect for President for the Democrats. Although, she may have lost a good bit of luster based on her performance as governor (for life?) of the Democratic People's Republic over which she reigns. We might wonder if she is more reactionary than progressive, since she is protecting all the Democratic constituancy group "birds nests on the ground".

I heard about this on the radio last night

These guys who do the "honor killings" are emblematic of the third-world mindset where they are living in the 11th Century. The mindset seems to transcend borders and culture. It easily could have happened in India, rather than Pakistan. Michelle Malkin writes about the latest incident:

Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family's "honor" — a crime that shocked Pakistan.

The 40-year old laborer, speaking to The Associated Press in police detention as he was being shifted to prison, confessed to just one regret — that he didn't murder the stepsister's alleged lover too.

Hundreds of girls and women are murdered by male relatives each year in this conservative Islamic nation, and rights groups said Wednesday such "honor killings" will only stop when authorities get serious about punishing perpetrators.

You can almost imagine our leftist buddies saying: "don't be judgmental".

I understand a little more about the bugs in Firefox

I found out, tonight, that part of what is happening when there are problems copying and pasting from Firefox is that Firefox is confused about which tab is open. I copied and pasted and got text from a page that was hidden, instead of the text in the tab that was exposed.

Michael Crichton on the environment, complexity, and hysteria

Michael Crichton, the novelist, has an essay called "Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century". He sums up the essay by writing:

Is this really the end of the world? Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods?

No, we simply live on an active planet. Earthquakes are continuous, a million and a half of them every year, or three every minute. A Richter 5 quake every six hours, a major quake every 3 weeks. A quake as destructive as the one in Pakistan every 8 months. It’s nothing new, it’s right on schedule.

At any moment there are 1,500 electrical storms on the planet. A tornado touches down every six hours. We have ninety hurricanes a year, or one every four days. Again, right on schedule. Violent, disruptive, chaotic activity is a constant feature of our globe.

Is this the end of the world? No: this is the world. It’s time we knew it. Thank you very much.

(thanks to Clayton Cramer for pointing this out)

Costs and Healthcare

"Winterspeak", writing at Asymmetrical Information, has a good piece commenting on a column by Paul Krugman. The discussion centers on efforts by "activists" to reduce the cost of healthcare. The result is that all incentives to development new treatments evaporates:

An AIDS vaccine would eliminate the value of retroviral therapies. Since those are expensive now, an AIDS vaccine would only be worthwhile to develop if it could be priced high -- say $100,000 a pop.

Some people would pay this. Certainly it is worth far more than $100,000 a pop -- in Africa we are told repeatedly that AIDS is costing these poor countries billions of dollars in healthcare and lost productivity. But Merck, or whichever poor schlub actually invested the damn thing could not charge Africa, or anyone, $100,000 for a dose of AIDS vaccine. Public opinion would force them to give it away for free, or for a very low price. For God's sake -- we're talking about the AIDS vaccine here! (And if anyone got sick from the vaccine they would sue the company for $billions.) Therefore, drug companies will not invest money in developing this vaccine, but they will not say they are not developing a vaccine for the very same reason.

You can see this simple logic play out in this CNN piece, where an NIH expert says the private sector has no incentive to develop a vaccine, and a bunch of pharma execs say "no, we're working on it".

In short, this is what Krugman--and all public-healthcare advocates--advocate. Since expensive new medical technologies increases the price of healthcare, eliminating healthcare development (by taking the profit out of it) will reduce the costs. We can then spend this saved money on... I don't know, the leisure needs of healthy 55 year old ex-government employees.

Paul Graham on "Procrastination"

Paul Graham has a new essay about "Procrastination". The key points he makes are:

If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it. You have to work on small things that could grow into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split the moral load with collaborators. It's not a sign of weakness to depend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way.

When I talk to people who've managed to make themselves work on big things, I find that all blow off errands, and all feel guilty about it. I don't think they should feel guilty. There's more to do than anyone could. So someone doing the best work they can is inevitably going to leave a lot of errands undone. It seems a mistake to feel bad about that.

I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you. Work on an ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to the wind as you can, and you'll leave the right things undone.

Duane Patterson has a post about the Red Cross

Duane Patterson, writing at Radio Blogger, has a post about some bad things happening at the Red Cross. Sadly, anytime a lot of money is involved, this sort of thing could occur:

In Tuesday's front page of the Washington Post, there is a report of fifty Red Cross workers, based just up the road from us in Bakersfield, California, who worked at a claimi center there, who have have been arrested for bilking hundreds of thousands of dollars, supposed to go to Katrina victims. In reality, the people picking up the relief money had nothing to do with Katrina, other than they were family or friends of the workers at the Red Cross in charge of doling out the money.

The Red Cross has to clean house, and they have to clean house in a very public, and very drastic way. I just don't trust them anymore. And I'm not alone. This kind of stuff just can't happen. Every time a major crisis hits, and the pitches for money come, how can we not be concerned that the money is going to be wasted by a corrupted relief agency bureaucracy?

The 2005 Oklahoma bombing

The Wikipedia has a piece that summarizes what is publicly known about the incident where Joel Hinrichs died when a explosive device he had exploded, while he sat outside of the OU stadium. Either through the incompetence of the local FBI or through a successful coverup by the University, we may never know the truth about what happened. The University president was so intent in not implicating Muslims, that it arouses suspicion that there is more there than we know.

Mark Tapscott has a piece about the pension problem

Mark Tapscott, writing at Tapscott's Copy Desk, has a piece about a Glimpse of Coming Public Employee Pension Crises in State, Local Governments. Since the 1970's, the Federal Government had set the standard for over-generous pensions that could not be funded, when the time came for many to retire:

Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project has an excellent discussion of how last week's New York transit strike highlights the excessive pension benefits won by the public employee unions in recent decades.

As the Baby Boomers retire in huge numbers in coming years, the issue will be forced front and center in every major urban area in the country. And it's not simply retirement pensions at stake, as healthcare benefits are typically tied in as well. See Kesler's discussion of that aspect of the coming debate here.

Since there is no way to pay for those benefits - to say nothing of the unfairness of they represent - forcing the unions to accept reasonable cut backs is becoming the central battleground in urban politics and will be for the next several decades.

Clayton Cramer on why no-knock warrants are a bad idea

I consider that the extraordinary measures that have been authorized for drug-law enforcement are terrible abuses of the constitution. Clayton Cramer has a post about "Why No-Knock Warrants Are a Bad Idea". What is even worse is that many of the abuses have been extended to minor, non-drug criminal cases. Michigan (or rather, the Democratic People's Republic of Michigan) has been one of the worst offenders, when it comes to confiscation of property. I don't want to see what are now illegal drugs legalized, if only because of what the worst of them do to people's behavior (such as the incident where John Crowe was shot in the head by drug-crazed robbers), but there needs to be some middle ground. Clayton writes:

When no-knock warrants first became a subject of public debate back when I was young, I thought that they were a very bad idea. The vast majority of no-knock warrants, I suspect, are drug cases. Some gambling and white collar crime cases might require no-knock warrants to prevent loss of critical data. Bookies, for example, use to keep their records on what was called "flashpaper," a nitrocellulose material that went up in a flash when lighted, for this very reason.

There are probably a few instances where no-knock warrants make sense (other than drug cases). For example, if there is reason to believe that criminals are holding a hostage whose safety will be imperiled by knock and announce. I can imagine certain terrorism cases might occasionally fit that profile as well--where you don't want the terrorists to set off a bomb (maybe a very large bomb) while you waiting for them to open the door.

While I am not enthusiastic about repealing all drug laws, like I once was, I consider that the costs of evidence being flushed down the toilet are relatively small compared to the very high costs associated with no-knock warrants. For the very small number of scenarios that justify a no-knock warrant (hostages or terrorists, for example), they should probably exist. But for the rest of these cases, the benefits of no-knock warrants would seem to be exceeded by the costs.

Mort Kondracke, in the Beltway Boys preview

The Radio Blogger has another Hugh Hewitt transcript of the Beltway Boys. Mort Kondracke, who I would peg as Center-Left, says:

MK: Look, Bush wins this argument. Everybody knows that...all he has to do is quote Osama bin Laden, that it's his holy duty to kill as many Americans as possible...millions of men, women and children. It's legitimate for them to do it. And Bush...all he has to do is explain I am trying to protect the country against this. I am not bugging domestic persons. I am trying to prevent terrorism. And I think he wins that hands down. And Democrats have always been seen as weaker on national security, and I think they are digging themselves the deepest hole they can possibly dig.

Old time science fiction thought that the Earth would look green

Many science fiction stories from the past (perhaps into the 1950's) assumed that the Earth would appear green from space ("The Green Hills of Earth", perhaps, and definitely C S Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet). That ignored the fact that the planet is predominated by oceans. In reality, the Earth is blue with white clouds, when viewed from space. Once we had viewed the from space, especially from the Moon, we knew better.

Ann Althouse on President Bush's poll numbers

Ann Althouse comments on President Bush's latest poll numbers:

Bush at 50% approval.

The Rasmussen poll has Bush at a 50% approval rating, up 6 points since last Sunday. (Via Instapundit.) Well, I guess Americans approve of spying on the enemy a lot more than some folks seem to have figured. Or maybe it's just holiday mellowness.

Rob Port at the Say Anything blog writes about Bush's approval rating

Rob Port has a piece about President Bush's approval rating called "Bush Approval Surging". Rob writes, starting with a quote:

Friday December 23, 2005–Fifty percent (50%) of American adults approve of the way George W. Bush is performing his role as President. That’s up six points since the President’s speech on Sunday night.

It’s also the first time since July that the President’s Job Approval has reached the 50% mark. He earns approval from 81% of Republicans, 23% of Democrats, and 42% of those not affiliated with either major political party.

Great news for the President, especially when this upward trend is generally reflected (to varying extents) in other major polls. Clearly, the success in Iraq and the Bush administration’s push back on pre-war intelligence and the war have had a positive effect. But now is no time for him to quit. History has shown that the media is more than willing to use trumped up controversies (see: NSA controversy) and overly negative reporting (see: Iraq War) to keep the Bush administration down. When the President takes a pro-active approach to these issues his poll numbers stay up.

Rob Port, at the Say Anything blog, writes about the prescription drug benefit

Rob Port, writing at the Say Anything blog, says that the new Medicare prescription drug benefit is going to be bad news:

Colleges get away with raising tuition prices year after year because they know that every time prices go up politicians will just make more federal money available to students. The same goes for health care providers. They can charge whatever outlandish prices they want because they know that the consumer isn’t really going to feel the impact. Not directly, anyway. The only part of the bill they’ll be responsible for is the co-pay, if that. The rest will get passed onto the insurance company.

Once drug makers realize that affordability is no longer a problem for many of their medicines prices are going to go through the roof. And once seniors and their doctors consider that their drugs are now “free” they’re going to start using more.

That spells trouble for those of us not covered by this program. Not only will we be footing the bill for increased drug usage we’ll also be paying that bill at an inflated price.

This was a bad, bad idea.

Radio Blogger has a long transcript of Hugh Hewitt arguing with Jonathan Alter

Jonathan Alter is not someone who I choose to read, as he is so biased in ways that I find offensive. Duane Patterson, at Radio Blogger, has a long transcript of Hugh Hewitt's discussion (or perhaps, argument) with Jonathan Alter. One of the features of Hugh Hewitt's show is the caliber of guests that he has. This will give you the flavor of how things went:

HH: Very pleased to welcome Jonathan Alter to the Hugh Hewitt Show for the first time. We've had his colleague, Howard Fineman, on a number of times. But Jonathan Alter is of course a senior writer and reporter for Newsweek. You see him a lot of MSNBC and other cable channels, and yesterday authored a column on the Newsweek website, Bush's Snoopgate, which has become probably the most controversial thing written about the NSA surveillance of al Qaeda communicating with American citizens controversy. Jonathan Alter, welcome to the program.

JA: Thanks very much, Hugh.

HH: Were you on the Crimson at Harvard?

JA: I was indeed.

HH: I thought you might have been around Grover and Nick Lehmann and all those people, so...

JA: Yeah, yeah, and I've known Grover and Nick Lehmann for many years. I was a couple of years behind them.

HH: You were a year behind Grover and me, and three years behind Nick. But I'm not sure we ever crossed paths. I was off doing Institute of Politics stuff. But Jonathan, let's...

JA: I did that too, as a matter of fact. I was a Harvard political review guy as well.

HH: Well, then we may have very well clinked glasses at some point and stared at each other menacingly across...I'm joking. Yesterday, you wrote, "we're seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator. Do you think George Bush is acting like a dictator?

JA: Well, I think that in his own mind, if you had read the rest of that sentence, I think he's acting like Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War, although unlike President Bush, Lincoln actually went and got Congressional authorization for some of the extra-Constitutional things that he did during that war. But I think in his own mind, he's not a dictator. But I think what he did in this particular...and I think to call him flat-out a dictator would be kind of a ridiculous exaggeration. But I think what he did in this case was dictatorial, extra-Constitutional, and I think many conservatives, Senator John Sununu being only one of many, many conservatives agree with me. And they see this as not really just the old kind of partisan mud-slinging, but a real question of separation of powers, and how far presidential power extends.

Rob Port has an interesting piece: Sunnis Declare Truce with Americans

Rob Port, writing at the Say Anything blog, has a piece about Sunni leaders declaring a truce with the Americans. Apparently, we took some steps to facilitate this:

The truce resulted from weeks of negotiations between U.S. officials and insurgents. Sunni religious leader Sheik Abed al-Latif Hemaiym told The Times in an interview in Amman that Sunnis were prepared to work with the United States.

“We now believe we must get on good terms with the Americans,” Hemaiym said. “As Arab Sunnis, we believe that within this hot area of Iraq, facing challenges from neighboring nations who want to swallow us, especially the Iranians, we feel we have no alternative.”

Call me crazy, but I’m still not entirely convinced that the above truce didn’t have something to do with this (which is something I’ve also stated in an update to that post).

John Hinderacker on the Democrats

John Hinderacker, writing at the Power Line blog, has a post that discusses John McIntyre's piece about the Democrat's self-defeating mindset. This is just a small excerpt, and the rest is worth reading. I hope it is true:

Over the weekend, I suggested that Dean, Kerry, Murtha et al. are leading the Democrats off a cliff in the cartoon tradition of Wile E. Coyote. (My apologies to the many readers who pointed out how unfair this comparison is to the coyote.) This morning, John McIntyre of Real Clear Politics sounds the same theme; only he analogizes the current political scene to Charlie Brown and the football:

[T]the Democrats still do not grasp that foreign affairs and national security issues are their vulnerabilities, not their strengths. All of the drumbeat about Iraq, spying, and torture that the left thinks is so damaging to the White House are actually positives for the President and Republicans. Apparently, Democrats still have not fully grasped that the public has profound and long-standing concerns about their ability to defend the nation.

Tom Maguire has some questions about the NYT and the "year"

Tom Maguire, writing at JustOneMinute, has some questions about the New York Times and their supposed waiting for a year to publish the overseas communications surveillance story:

Should we take that literally - was publication originally set for December 2004, appearing just after the election?

Or was this originally slated to be an "October Surprise" hit piece?

And, following the possibility that the story was politically motivated, let's ask about sources, described here as:

"Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program".

Both Richard Clarke and Rand Beers were former Administration officials by the fall of 2004, both were involved with the Kerry campaign, and either or both both may have been in the loop when this eavesdropping program was begun in the fall of 2001.

Movie box office takes

After 5 days, the Chronicles of Narnia had made $74,186,139. At the 5 day mark, King Kong made $66,200,000. Brokeback Mountain is on more screens, as the movie is now on 69 screens. The take is still just $3,325,000 after 10 days. Why someone thought that a movie about homosexual cowboys would do well is hard to understand. Box Office Mojo is the place to go for box office information.

Marc Cooper is aghast

Marc Cooper is aghast (he is "shocked, shocked") at the news that President Bush had authorized surveillance of conversations between the US and overseas. I hate to break the news to Marc, but this was both legal and a good idea (!). Marc writes:

No way to slice this cake other than to say that the just-revealed military spying on domestic soil approved by the President is blatantly illegal and politically chilling.

There can simply be no justification whatsoever for Bush issuing an executive order in 2002 – as we now find out—allowing the National Security Agency to snoop on phone conversations and emails generated by American citizens, residents or anyone else.

Marc takes the knee-jerk reaction without taking time to check the rules.

Ignorance seems to be a requirement for Democrats

Tom Elias, as The New Editor, writes about the case of one Democratic legislator who is seemingly ignorant of basic economics. The main requirement seems to be a natural desire to demagogue, and ignorance of such things as economics:

In a New York Times article on the growth of the US trade deficit, we note this tidbit:

Representative Marcy Kaptur, an Ohio Democrat, stepped up her call for legislation to force the administration to take action against countries that consistently run trade surpluses with the United States of more than $10 billion a year.

The foolishness of this proposal should be apparent to anyone with even a shred of knowledge regarding economics.

Clayton Cramer on Michael Chrichton's book State of Fear (2004)

Clayton Cramer has a long piece about Michael Chrichton's book, State of Fear (2004):

I mentioned last month that Laurie David's attacks on Crichton's novel State of Fear, gave me no choice but to read it. So, my wife bought it for my birthday on December 5, and I started reading it that night. As usual, with a Michael Crichton novel, the writing is so-so, but the story is so compelling that it is hard to put it down. Had I not gotten a late start that evening, I would have read it in one sitting (as I usually do with Crichton's novels).

The key thing Clayton writes is:

Regular readers of my blog will know that I am skeptical of both the extent of global warming, and whether it is wholly or even partially the result of man's actions. Many of the facts cited in the papers that Crichton footnotes I have also seen, and blogged about. One item that he doesn't mention that somewhat startles me is the evidence that at least part of global warming is because solar output has increased. I am also a little surprised that he doesn't mention that Mars is also suffering from global warming--and this isn't so current that he couldn't have included it.

One point that Crichton makes that I have not seen mentioned, is that if this is truly a global phenomenon, it is rather odd that the United States, on average, is showing almost no increase. Yet we have the longest dataset of temperatures for a large area, and we are also the nation supposedly making the biggest contribution to global warming. Is all the carbon dioxide immediately exiting our borders, leaving us alone? It seems unlikely.

Typepad blogs are misbehaving

I just looked at JustOneMinute, and saw the top post as being December 9th. I had also looked at Graham Glass's blog, and the newest post was also missing. Then I was reminded that at least JustOneMinute is a Typepad blog, and Typepad is said to be "Down". Mike Wallster, on his IpsoFacto, the cartoon blog, at his old URL, mentions this issue: "Auuugh".

A Recommendation: Nerdbooks

I live in the Dallas area, so I have an advantage. I can order books from Nerdbooks.com before 5pm and have them by about 3pm, at least when I am working at home. I have found them, so far, to be cheaper than Amazon. I juist bought three books: Apache Derby--Off to the Races, Pro Hibernate 3, and Hibernate Quickly (if you are a Java programmer, you can see what I am currently doing).

Radio Blogger has the Mark Steyn transcript

Duane Patterson, at Radio Blogger, has the transcript from Mark Steyn's last appearance on Hugh Hewitt's show. Mark was talking about the elections in Iraq, and the Democrats. Typical of what Mark was talking about was:

MS: Well, because I think the media are in this insane...the media reinforce the Democratic Party's illusions. So that this guy Murtha thinks he's getting great press, because Newsweek's lionized him, even though if you actually read the story, he sounds like Jim Jeffords. He was piqued because Bush didn't return his e-mails. That's basically what his complaint boils down to. And the media reinforced that, because if you look at, for example, the front page of today's Washington Post, which says nothing about the Iraq election. The mainstream media is more excited about this gay cowboy movie than the Iraq election. You know, I like a gay cowboy movie as much as the next chap, but...as much as the next chap in chaps, in fact. But it's ridiculous not to understand what is happening here. And unfortunately, everybody in Iraq, and the broader Middle East understand. And the only people left who don't understand are these pitiful spokesmen for the Democratic...Joe Biden understands. He's the classic weathervane poltician, and he's actually in Iraq for the election.

Brokeback Mountain is doing abysmally

I wondered why Brokeback Mountain is doing so poorly ($862,728 in 6 days). Part of the answer, besides being an "out of the mainstream story", is that the movie is presently showing on "8" screens. The go-to place for box office information is BoxOfficeMojo.com. That was where Drudge saw that King Kong did not do very well, on its opening yesterday.

Jack Kelly links to a story about a nuclear Iran

I found the article that Jack Kelly, writing at Irish Pennants, linked to quite fascinating. The point is that a nuclear Iran is not all bad:

In Iraq, we want to create a secular, federal democratic system in which the Shia majority is pre-eminent, but not dominant, in which the Kurdish and Sunni minorities have effective vetoes over radical change, a government led by moderate, secular shia's who are not unfriendly to Iran, but who will keep the mullahs at arm's length.

In the broader Middle East, we want to foster among the Saudis and the other Sunni kingdoms and sheikdoms the notion that they need our protection (and maybe that of Israel) more than we need their oil.

The best outcome for us arguably would be a nuclear armed Iran that has had a regime change. John Loftus, a former Justice department prosecutor in national security cases, told Israeli national radio that regime change in Iran is a distinct possibility, certainly a more likely one than a successful raid on Iran's nuclear facilities, which are well dispersed and well protected, and mostly beyond the range of Israel's F-16s.

A democratic, pro-Western Iran, with the bomb, might be the ultimate means of keeping the Saudis in line.

The small point that is also made is that wiping out Israel also permanently "solves" the Palestinian question (in a "final solution" sort of way"). Israel and the Palestinians would be killed by an Iranian strike. Nasty.

The Bear-F in Indian service

The Indians operate a small fleet of TU142 Bears, including the Bear-F, which they use for maritime reconnaissance. James Dunnigan's site mentioned this aircraft and then I found a link to an Indian page with details, using the Google image search. The hot scoop from Dunnigan's site is that Indian Bear-F's were tracking Russian Kilo class submarines being shipped to China. In case you might have thought otherwise, our Chinese buddies are not benign.

Graham Glass still likes Ruby and Rails

I had wondered after his last post if Graham Glass might have lost his admiration for Ruby and Ruby on Rails, but that is not the case. Graham has made significant progress on implementing his application for his latest company, and what he reports is good news:

Admittedly, I had to spend some time up-front learning how to build dynamic frameworks, but the investment has already paid off. Now I can internationalize models and secure controllers with just a few lines of code.

I am going to create more frameworks using the same approach for several other aspects of my education software. The most interesting framework I have planned will support evolution of models; a more sophisticated and general purpose version of the concept supported by wikis.

My experience with Ruby and Rails has been very good so far, and continues to get better. I will blog interesting things I learn over the next few months, especially items related to performance and scalability.

Ed Morrissey thinks that the Iraq war coverage has turned a corner

Ed Morrissey, writing at Captain's Quarters, says that the mainstream media coverate of the war in Iraq has "turned a corner". They might actually be willing to concede that there are good things happening, with the Sunni participation in the elections.

The Sunni participation puts the last of the building blocks in place for the establishment of a consensus democratic republic. The reporting of the Times indicates that the American media might finally start recognizing what will shortly become obvious to all whether they do so or not: that a free Iraq exists, thanks to an administration that steadfastly refused to listen to the Chicken Littles of the opposition and the whiners of the Exempt Media at home. The war may finally have turned the corner in the only place it could be lost -- here in America.

All Things Considered sneers at another small town person

I heard the end of All Things Considered, tonight, and the last interview was by either Michelle Norris or Melissa Block (I cannot tell, right now) with the manager of a Best Western motel in a small New Mexico town "Truth or Consequences". I thought that the town was sneering and almost the first thing that the interviewer asked, in good lefty fashipn, was if the manager was concerned about noise and pollution from Richard Branson's spaceport. I must concede that what sounds like a sneering tone is actually the normal way that many people from the northeast speak.

The Pride of Duluth

Chad the Elder writes at Fraters Liberatas about the mayor of Duluth's little problem. He hit a bridge abutment while drunk, and "blew" 0.16 on the breathalyzer test.

Almost on the Range has a great mug shot of Duluth Mayor Herb Bergson after his arrest on charges of driving while intoxicated (DWI) on Friday. Apparently his honor had a little problem keeping his car on the road near Spooner, Wisconsin. From the Duluth News Tribune:

Bergson was southbound on U.S. Highway 53 on his way to a Great Lakes environmental conference in Chicago when his vehicle struck a bridge abutment, left the road and hit a guard rail in the median.

The incident was reported at 6:25 p.m. just north of Washburn County Highway H, Karen Snearly, police communications operator for the Wisconsin State Patrol, said Saturday.

UPDATE---More from Almost on the Range:

Our mayor blew about a .16 on the roadside breathalyzer, pleaded with passersby not to call the cops, and tried to refuse medical attention. This man is an embarrassment to each and every citizen of Duluth.

A .16 at 6:30pm? He must have been hitting it hard, right? Not according to Herb's story:

The mayor declined to say how much he had drunk and refused to say where. He told DeStefano he'd had only two drinks -- a beer and a drink with vodka, according to the trooper's report.

A drink with vodka? One of JB's holiday bracers perhaps?

I'm afraid that we laugh about this, as the mayor is a lefty from the People's Democratic Republic of Duluth.

The New Donkey on Eugene McCarthy and "Fusion Candidates"

The New Donkey blogger, who is a DLC guy, writes about the thread in Democratic politics from Adlai Stevenson, to Eugene McCarthy, himself, to Mo Udall and Bill Bradley:

But while Kusnet focuses on the temperamental aspects of the tradition that linked Adlai and McCarthy to such later liberal activist heroes as Mo Udall and Bill Bradley--candidates who sometimes conveyed the sense they were too good to actually win--I think there's a more obvious strain that runs from Stevenson to McCarthy to McGovern to Gary Hart to Paul Tsongas to Howard Dean (and could include Russ Feingold if he emerges as a major candidate in 2008). It's a tradition of candidates who expanded the Democratic appeal into previously Republican or independent upscale professional territory, but at the risk of losing touch with the old Democratic coalition of working-class and minority voters.

For those of you who tend to think this trend began much more recently, it's sobering to recall that the term "egghead" was first popularized as an anti-intellectual slur against Stevenson supporters in 1952. And each of "Adlai's children" in later Democratic candidacies drew his signature support from social and economic elites determined to overthrow some aspect of mass culture or politics, from Stevenson's implicit attacks on the philistinism of Ike's America, to McCarthy's ironically detached refusal to play "politics as usual," to McGovern and Hart's crystallization of discontent with old-line Democratic "machine" politics, to Tsongas' mix of social liberalism and economic conservatism, to Dean's antiwar-fed revolt against the Washington Democratic Establishment.

Wretchard reports on the rioting in Australia

Rioting centering around Middle Eastern people in Australia is breaking out. Wretchard, writing at The Belmont Club, has the story:

Too early to tell now but it looks like the Lebanese gangs have struck back. The radio reporters are talking about "white Australians". The PC front is fraying. People are angry and I don't blame them. But the cops can't cope with the guerilla tactics because the raid on Cronulla has been in the kind of hit and run that was reported in Paris.

Interesting. Very interesting. I think Oz is the middle of the biggest political crisis of the decade. This is going to polarize the population, not fatally, but as never before. More importantly, it has made the issue of Muslim immigration and impossible one to ignore.

Look for this to spread because the modus operandi of the 'youths' is to fan out and hit other areas. Lebanese Christians are calling in and saying that they're different from Lebanese Muslims. There's a Lebanese Christian who is on and saying "they've taken Christmas away from us". Multiculturalism may not be dead, but it's certainly taken a hell of a ding.

Allan Sloan seems conservative next to Scott Jagow

Allan Sloan was on the Marketplace Morning Report with Scott Jagow, today, doing his usual "Sloan Sessions". Alan Sloan, who is liberal who works for Newsweek, looked very conservative next to Scott Jagow. They were discussing Ford Motor's restructuring plans. Scott kept worrying about laid off workers being put onto the street, being a good communist as he is (apparently). Allan Sloan told him not to worry, and that besides, what is Ford to do? Alan told Scott that most of the people who will be affected will be given early retirement, which is another problem.

Tom Maguire has more scoop about Viveca Novak

Tom Maguire, writing at JustOneMinute, has more scoop about Viveca Novak, the suspended Time magazine reporter. Tom writes:

Viveca Novak, reporter for TIME and casual confidante of Karl Rove's lawyer, Don Luskin, tells her side of the story that may have saved Rove from indictment. Let's say this - Matt Cooper of TIME has expressed an aspiration to be a professional comic; maybe he could take Viveca into his act.

And folks who whacked Bob Woodward for failing to disclose his little leak situation to his editor had better strap themselves down and take a sedative before reading Ms. Novak's account. My question - are Mr. Woodward and Ms. Novak the only two reporters in Washington who don't talk to their editors about every little (and not so little) thing? Or is keeping the boss in the dark a much more common journalistic practice than the hand-wringing about Woodward might have suggested?

Well. The article informs us that Ms. Novak is currently on leave from TIME, "by mutual agreement".

As to her story, the broad theme is as expected - she strongly suggested to Luskin that Rove was one of Cooper's sources. By his reaction to this, she surmised that Luskin was surprised.

And why might this be viewed as at all exculpatory by Luskin and/or Fitzgerald? Presumably, Special Counsel Fitzgerald has been troubled by Rove's seemingly convenient memory - Rove forgot all about Cooper until Cooper had been subpoenaed and lost an appeal, at which point his fog lifted (or at least, an important email was discovered).

Luskin's pushback - hey, I really was surprised, ask this reporter.

Paul, at Power Line, writes about Eugene McCarthy

I was interested to read Paul's take on Eugene McCarthy, on the Power Line blog. 1968 was my first election to vote. I was in Ann Arbor at the time, as a college student in art school. I was feeling like overturning the establishment, and Eugene McCarthy seemed like the guy. By the California primary, I had become a Bobby Kennedy supporter, as my wife says that she was. After Kennedy was assassinated, I made a protest vote by going with the goofy Eldridge Cleaver. Paul writes:

In 1968, McCarthy ran as an anti-Vietnam war candidate in a series of Democratic primaries. He did well enough in New Hampshire to cause President Johnson (whose name did not appear on the ballot) to announce that he would not run for re-election. McCarthy's success led Robert Kennedy, who had been holding back, to enter the race. The big showdown between the two occurred in California. Kennedy won, but was killed on election night. The Democrats went on to nominate McCarthy's fellow Minnesotan, Vice President Humphrey, at a convention marred by rioting. Humphrey was narrowly defeated by Richard Nixon in the general election. They don't make political campaigns like that anymore, which is just as well.

McCarthy's most ardent supporters were college students. Most of my anti-war friends preferred him to Kennedy, as I did (and still do). First, McCarthy had shown more guts than Kennedy by challenging Johnson before it was clear how weak the president's position was. Second, McCarthy came across as cool; Kennedy as anything but. Yet deep down, most of the college kids I knew were mainly just interested in becoming involved. One of my friends left college for Indiana, where a primary had just been held, in order to join up with the McCarthy campaign, which was heading to Oregon. When he missed the plane, the Kennedy campaign offered to pay his way to Oregon, and he defected.

In many respects, some of them superficial, Robert Kennedy's position in 1967 can be compared to Hillary Clinton's position today. It's more difficult identify the new Gene McCarthy (it's certainly not Howard Dean). He was one of a kind.

Can you believe it? My puppy just ate my new leather briefcase

Well, she didn't eat the whole thing, but she chewed what was to be my new briefcase so badly that I threw the away the one I bought today. When I buy another tomorrow, I will not let her (our 8-month old puppy) near it.

Philip Wadler pointed out a good post on categorization on the web "Ontology is overrated"

I checked Philip Wadler's blog, and the title of what he pointed out caught my eye, because of what I am currently doing. Clay Shirkey writes: "Ontology is Overrated". He concludes:

If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.

Critically, the semantics here are in the users, not in the system. This is not a way to get computers to understand things. When del.icio.us is recommending tags to me, the system is not saying, "I know that OSX is an operating system. Therefore, I can use predicate logic to come up with recommendations -- users run software, software runs on operating systems, OSX is a type of operating system -- and then say 'Here Mr. User, you may like these links.'"

What it's doing instead is a lot simpler: "A lot of users tagging things foobar are also tagging them frobnitz. I'll tell the user foobar and frobnitz are related." It's up to the user to decide whether or not that recommendation is useful -- del.icio.us has no idea what the tags mean. The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users. This is not a way to inject linguistic meaning into the machine.

It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.

Razib, at Gene Expression, points out some good sources that explain evolution

Razib, the principal behind the Gene Expression group blog, has a long post that points out many good resources that explain evolution:

With all the 'debate' about Intelligent Design out there I'm sure some of you are curious about evolution. I just heard from an acquaintance of mine that he purchased Mark Ridley's anthology Evolution (Oxford Readers). Good. Recently I happened to refamiliarize myself with some old articles in The Boston Review by H. Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester. Here is an interesting snip:

To a historian or electrician, Behe certainly looks qualified. He is a biologist. But it's not that simple, as can be seen by turning the tables for a moment. If I, an evolutionary biologist, were to announce that biochemistry is deeply flawed-I've shown, for instance, that enzymes are not catalysts-I doubt I'd get a listen. I surely wouldn't get a publisher.... ... Now I don't pretend to know the details of Behe's education, but I do know this: he is not at home in the technical evolution literature. His book reveals that his grasp of evolution derives mostly from the pop literature (Gould, Dawkins-good stuff, but no stand-in for the real thing) and from computer searches of the scientific literature that he strangely makes a big deal of. While I have utter confidence in Behe's biochemistry, I am less confident that he can say what soft selection, or Muller's ratchet, or the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection is-all bread and butter of evolutionary biology....

What Orr referes to is a problem. In the fall of 1996, when I read this piece in The Boston Review, I was pursuing a degree program in biochemistry. I found Darwin's Black Box unconvincing, Michael Behe after all was simply reworking some old philosophical ideas in cytochemical clothing. But on a fundamental technical level I had missed most of Orr's points, I didn't know what the Fundamental Theorem was, nor Muller's ratchet. Going over Orr's work for The Boston Review I am struck by the density and layers of information that he nested within them, the subtle sneers, crystal clear insights and occasional dirty tricks.¹ 10 years after I first read Orr's articles I now have an "evolutionary education," I know the details of the processes of microevolutionary theory, the fundamentals of population genetics. I was missing that back in 1996.

Eleanor Clift on the Warner-Clinton competition for 2008

I would not have thought that the outgoing Democratic governor of Virginia could beat Hillary, but Eleanor Clift thinks that he could. In her latest column, Eleanor says that:

If there’s a formula for electing a Democrat president, Warner is the latest iteration. Like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, he’s a son of the South, although by way of Indiana, Illinois and Connecticut. Warner was not born in Virginia, but his cultural adaptation has been flawless. While national Democrats championed gun control, Warner actually loosened gun laws in Virginia. Fresh from helping elect a Democrat as his successor, Warner was a guest speaker at the Gridiron winter dinner in Washington last weekend, along with Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham.

Eleanor thinks that Hillary is to obvious in her political moves and comes across as calculating and pandering to groups, while Mark Warner is authentic (at least, Eleanor thinks so).

Radio Blogger has more transcripts: the Beltway Boys

One of the nice features of Duane Patterson's Radio Blogger blog is the transcripts from the Hugh Hewitt show, where Duane is the producer. I am a Beltway Boys fan, so having the transcript of Mort and Fred is great. They guys do a preview of their show on Fox News. It is almost a regular feature of Hugh's show. At times, he may only be able to talk to one of the guys, as they are not always both available. The topic in this segment is the Democrats being so far to the left:

HH: We've got Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes of the Fox News Channel Beltway Boys. You can watch them tomorrow night at 6pm in the East, 3pm in the West. It repeats later, and again on Sunday. Fred and Morton, welcome. There's a lot to cover, so I'm going to start with the beating like a bongo drum of the Democrats this week. Morton, they can't get away from this, because they can't fire Howard Dean. How do you get rid of a loser like this?

MK: Well, they ought to fire Howard Dean. But...or they ought to...there ought to be a deputation to tell him to shut up, except that a lot of Democrats agree with him. And I would say that Nancy Pelosi definitely agrees with him. As a matter of fact, Nancy Pelosi is to the left of Howard Dean, because Howard Dean doesn't...is not calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. He's got some other cockamamie policy of redeployment. I think it's removing 80,000 National Guard and reserve troops first, who of course, are vital to doing civil affairs and intelligence functions and translating and all that. We can't afford to lose them. But nonetheless, he's actually to the right of Nancy Pelosi, who is part of the bug-out brigade, whose one of the leaders of the bug-out brigade. They're not going to fire him.

Marc Cooper believes in Free Speech, even for those he doesn't like

Unlike many of our other leftist buddies, Marc Cooper is a stickler about Free Speech. Even if he doesn't like someone, say like Ann Coulter, he thinks that she has a right to talk:

Either we believe in free speech. Or we don’t. I find Ann Coulter to be a buffoonish political idiot. I suppose if I took her seriously enough I would also find her views to be repulsive.

But the brain dead students at the University of Connecticut who shouted her down in front of a crowd of 2000 the other night make me shiver.

Who in the hell do these kids think they are in deciding what people can and cannot choose to say and hear? Who appointed them censors?

Newsday quotes a 19-year-old sophomore journalism and social welfare major named Eric Knudsen saying: "We encourage diverse opinion at UConn, but this is blatant hate speech." This kid heads up a group called Students Against Hate – a group that evidently believes you combat hate with louder hate. And this boy’s a journalism major to boot? When he grows up will he decide to cover news only he deems won’t offend anyone?

If you can’t come up with arguments to defeat the stupidities that roll out of the mouth of Coulter, it’s probably better you just check out of the university.

Jack Kelly on Able Danger and the 9-11 Commission

Jack Kelly has a piece about two articles about Able Danger and the 9-11 Commission:

today. Michael Smerconish, writing in the Philadelphia Daily News, wonders what the 9/11 Commission is hiding:

Or, as ex-FBI Director Louis Freeh said to me this week, "Why is the 9/11 Commission talking about hurricanes and tunnels and all these other things when it looks like they may have missed the single most important fact with respect to Sept. 11?"

--snip --

"How could you fully investigate, with all due respect to Mr. Hamilton who is not an investigator, a fact of that potential significance within 10 days?" Freeh asked.

"As for me reviewing new evidence, that is not my job. It was the 9/11 Commission job to go out and not only find, but to fully and fairly evaluate evidence, and how could they do that in 10 days, it is ridiculous," Freeh said.

While I was interviewing Freeh, Weldon called. He was much more blunt. "Lee Hamilton has just lied to the American people. They did NO investigation."

In a lengthy article in National Review Online, Andy McCarthy asks:

'Tis the season when annual performance awards are handed out. If there is one for chutzpah, could there possibly be a more worthy candidate than the 9/11 commission?

The self-styled "Center for Public Integrity", a leftist advocacy group

Tonight, I heard part of Terry Gross's show, Fresh Air, where she spoke with Alex Knott. Alex represented the leftist advocacy group, the self-styled "Center for Public Integrity". The segment consisted of Terry Gross giving Alex a series of setups that allowed him to give his largely anti-business pitch. Frankly, I thought Alex was making up stuff as he went along, as he seemed to not be very knowledgable. Why would he not have his notes along for this interview? Oh, and he also seemed to be opposed to free speech by his political opponents. I thought it amusing that NPR describes the group as "nonpartisan".

Is Nicholas Kristoff another reporter hiding his involvement in the Plame affair?

Tom Maguire speculates that Nicholas Kristoff is hiding his involvement in the Plame affair:

MORE: The Sun and the Times are at odds over the objective of the Fitzgerald investigation. Per the Sun, Fitzgerald's task is to:

investigate whether any laws were violated on the way to a Robert Novak column in which Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was identified as a CIA employee.

But the Times has a more expansive view:

The inquiry has focused on whether any government official disclosed her identity as part of an effort to disparage the findings of her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who had accused the Bush administration of misinterpreting intelligence about Iraq's unconventional weapons program to justify the war.

Emphasis added to the bit we find so interesting. If we are following then, for example, if the goal of the leaker to Woodward was something other than to disparage Wilson's findings - if, for example, the goal was to disparage the CIA - then Fitzgerald need not investigate it?

This careful positioning by the Times is certainly consistent with my suspicion that their columnist Nick Kristof received an early leak and is playing his own private Bob Woodward game.

I finally got some of the "Illegal Website" spam with a virus

I was protected by anti-virus software, which stopped the virus attachment, but the text email arrived. K9 did not catch it as spam, as it looks like a normal mail. There are no misspellings or features that are otherwise spam-like. I finally received two copies of what my ISP warned me about last week, the mail with "You_visit_illegal_websites" subject (the subject seems spam-like, with the underscores). It is signed "YOurs faithfully, Steven Allison", from the "CIA" (hah). I still find the concept of "illegal websites" bothersome. Do we live in the PRC or Singapore?

A friend of mine in the Netherlands uses the Clusty search engine

I noticed today that someone had found my old comment on Media Junk about the Vivisimo search engine, which is what Clusty is built around. Michael Heraghty had posted on his blog about such clustering search engines. I had written "Yes, I am a former Vivisimo user. At first, it seemed like I was getting better results, and it seemed useful to have the clustering. I have at times been frustrated with Google as it might be possible to find content from my naval history blogs on one day on not after that. I even stooped to "Ask Jeeves" for a while, as it might occasionally outperform Google (admittedly on my obscure content)."

December 7th had a profound effect

I would not want to minimize the importance of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The effect on people's lives in the United States was enormous. The attack pulled the majority of the people of the country into the war effort. My father enlisted the day after the attack. All my uncles served, one being wounded at Guadalcanal. My mother eventually worked as a draftsman at the "Bomber Plant" at Willow Run, where Ford produced B-24's. My mother's father served in the Unformed Public Health Service in Washington, and wore an army uniform. My father's father and his mother moved to Ocean View, VA, where my grandfather worked on designs for buildings, as he was a civil-engineering oriented mechanical engineer. My wife's uncle worked at Ford Island, as a machinist. He and his brother saw the attack and went on base immediately afterwards to help clean up afterwards. Young men, who were able-bodied all served in some way. My father's Japanese friend, who he met at art school at the University of Michigan, after the war, fought in Italy, in the army. Everywhere my father went, up until he died, he met other veterans. One was a P-51 pilot, another served on PT boats. The GI Bill, after the war, educated a great number of men, and helped them buy homes. These were just a few of the far-reaching effects.

Razib has some good links at Gene Expression

Razib, the leader of Gene Expression, has a good set of links about science and scientists, especially in relationship to Intelligent Design:

Update II: I've been busy today, but it has come to my attention that something similar to what I allude to above has been occurring on the political Right over in The Corner. I haven't read it in detail, but Derb is joing the fray and mixing it up. Here are the links: Science vs. scientism - John J. Miller Science vs. scientism - Jonah, quoting a reader:

It is therefore not the task of science to recognize and define the boundaries of science. This is a job for metaphysics (the study of non-physical realities) and epistemology (the study of how we know what we know). Both of these are elements in the philosophy of science.

More from Jonah (Jonah has some good common sense in this comment, in my opinion). On science vs. scientism - Derb Re: on science vs. scientism - Jonah (defends humanists) Himmelfarb - Ramesh (defending her piece in TNR, beyond subscription wall, but you aren't missing anything) More science vs. scientism - Derb What Derb owes - Jonah (annoyed with Derb) Yet more science vs. scientism - Derb (taking a hard evolcon stand) Himmelfarb, CTD - Ramesh Does Himmelfarb deserve better - Derb disses Gertrude again! Science and philosophy - Ian Murrray, English conservative, tacitly supports Derb (from what I can tell) Re: does Himmelfarb deserve better - Charles Murray shits on Derb here. In Derb's defense, the piece in TNR was a whole lot of fluff. I'll read her other stuff later perhaps, so I can't say.... Uh-Oh - Derb trying to make peace Kristol, Theocons & Power - Jonah talks about some political stuff The one thing you can say about Irving Kristol - J-Pod types something Neocons vs. Darwin - Derb throws a rock at J-Pod Feedback - K-Lo defends pro-ID conservatives (most of 'em in America)

I'm sure I missed stuff, and I didn't read 'em all. But, kind of interesting, shows how some Tribes cross political boundaries. If I didn't know any better I would have guessed GC got a hold of John's account and started posting, some of the comments were so biophilic....

Hot news: an American Airlines passenger was shot and killed by Air Marshals

Air Marshals (or maybe just one) shot and killed an American Airlines passenger arriving in Miami from Medellin, Columbia. The passenger claimed to have a bomb in his bag and reached for his bag instead of surrendering. He was shot and killed. Reuters has the story.

Today is one of those days: freezing rain coming, if not snow in Dallas

I can still remember seeing on Dallas on television, when I was living in Columbia, Maryland in the early 1980's. They showed pictures of big rock haulers twirling on ice and hitting bridge abutments. Today could be one of those days. It is conveniently hitting after rush hour has started. We are also going to see low temperatures at night. We have animals, so that complicates life for both us and the animals.

Marc Cooper on "Syriana"

Marc Cooper got to see Syriana, and he was not impressed.

I just came back from the Burbank studios of Warner Bros. where I saw a screening of the new thriller, Syriana.

In a word: disappointing.

Syriana’s commercial tag-line might, indeed, be “Everything is Connected” but its 126 minutes made me feel like I was pitched into a roiling sea of free-radical dots with very little coherence at all. As I watched a particularly gruesome scene of George Clooney’s character getting his fingernails pulled out, I breifly considered if it might be worth my time to trade places with him.

Our buddies at NPR

I listened to a few minutes of NPR early in my trek to work. As expected, it was the usual bothersome experience. Among other topics, they were edifying the 9-11 Commission and its commissioners. That whole operation was an exercise in Bush-bashing. With almost all the recommendations implemented, they are engaged in saying that the country is not as safe as it was prior to 11 September 2001, which is baloney. If that were true, we would have been hit by a string of devastating attacks, which have not happened. I particularly thought that the "9-11 Report Card", with its D's and F's was an innovative move. I am sure that they will cause more damage, as that is the intent, not doing something helpful. When anyone questions either the "9-11 Commission" or NPR, the reponse is that they are speaking truth, the questioner just does not want to hear it. The problem is that many people do not follow current events and do not realize that these people are telling untruths, and they are influenced by the bogus rhetoric.

Jack Kelly has a link to a story about Gov. Blanco and anger management

Jack Kelly, writing at the Irish Pennants blog, has a post about Gov. Blanco of Louisiana and her anger management problem:

The New Orleans Times-Picayune

has a story about how during the midst of the Katrina crisis, Gov. Blanco's staff was concerned chiefly about how to blame the federal government for their mistakes.

Fortunately for them, they had many willing accomplices in the media.

Here is another unflattering account of Blanco administration's preoccupation and performance.

Patterico has a post about The LA Times and a new Ramparts scandal

Patterico has a post about a new Ramparts-related scandal in Los Angeles that includes the LA Times, which seems to have become part of the coverup:

When the L.A. Times’s Chuck Philips covered the Biggie Smalls civil trial, I was amazed at some of the reporting I saw. One example stands out in my mind: an article trumpeted the fact that a witness worried about gang retaliation was — gasp! — recanting! Can you believe it?!

The article made it sound like this was the end of the plaintiffs’ case, when it was obvious that witnesses in such a situation would often recant. This and other articles seemed quite biased against the plaintiffs.

I was very interested because I had read Randall Sullivan’s book LAbyrinth and had written this post about it. But I didn’t have the time or energy to write about the coverage of the Smalls civil trial while it was happening. I made a few comments to my wife about it, and left it at that.

Luckily, Sullivan has continued to cover it extensively, as noted in a fascinating article titled Scandal Erupts at the L.A. Times by Jan Golab. It offers a possible explanation for the biased reporting — one which, if true, is an explosive allegation.

Firefox is looking worse and worse (too bad there is no real alternative)

I see Mozilla Firefox getting worse and worse. Not only is the copy and paste issue still greatly irritating me, but with advertising graphics, they will do bad things (popping and out of position). I see the graphics problem in the College Football page on MSNBC, for example. I also suspect that the problems with Blogger are largely Firefox-related. The example is that I type something, and then stop to think. After sitting for a minute, the text area has lost focus, so that when I start typing again, it asks me if I really want to leave the page. Other problem issues have to do with hot keys, particularly when I am trying to type, into Blogger or Gmail, and I type a "/" or an apostrophe. That often, but not always, opens the search box in the lower left of Firefox, and aggressively moves focus to the input field, messing up my typing, and often causing Firefox to use so many cycles that I can't type, unless I can find a way to close the input field for the search (which ought to be easy, but can be hard). The problem is that there is no viable alternative. IE6 is so bad that whenever I start to use it, I get mad. I also am addicted to the multi-tab browser.

I was in a smalltown Black church, today

We went to a funeral for my wife's former assistant at school. The funeral was in a smalltown, black Baptist church in Texas. You knew you were in a community of strong believers, and you could feel the spirit moving. I keep wondering why people who are strong believers are allied with the leftist, atheist, anti-Christians. The Southern, white Evangelicals have a lot more in common with them then the radical leftists in Minneapolis, at "the U", in Madison, and Ann Arbor. I think that there has to be some sort of re-alignment, but how that will happen is one question, and where we will all end up is another. I am not sure that I will end up in the same political party as our buddies, the law professors.

Radio Blogger on ANWAR

Duane Patterson, at the Radio Blogger, has the transcript of the interview between Hugh Hewitt and Gale Norton, the Interior Secretary, talking about drilling in ANWAR. What is cute is the picture that I have seen before of caribou overrunning the landscape near the pipeline. The pipeline changes the ecosystem to be better for the caribou. This is a piece of what is at Radio Blogger:

HH: I would like to talk specifically about ANWAR with you today, Secretary Norton. I covered it a lot in November. I was cheered when the November 4th vote in the Senate occurred, allowing exploration in ANWAR. I was very disappointed that the House version of that bill removed it. Do you have the votes to get exploration under way in ANWAR?

GN: We're working to make sure that we do. We understand that this is a critical vote. If America is going to be serious about having jobs here in the United States, instead of sending our money overseas, if we are going to do the things that are tough decisions that need to be made in order to have America have energy security, and price stability, we need to be looking at ANWAR.

HH: Now Secretary Norton, I spent Sunday, Monday and Tuesday with the Western Business Roundtable, conferring over in Phoenix. And I got tutored a bit by Jack Ekstrom of Pioneer, and a number of other people who've been back and forth to ANWAR. And I thought I knew a lot about this, but I really didn't. Can you explain how big the drilling area is that we're talking about here?

GN: By law, the area that would be the footprint of drilling would be about 2,000 acres. Now if you think about the front page of the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times, and envision the State of Alaska being that front page. ANWAR itself would be about six column inches.

Tom Maguire is still the go-to-guy on the Plame affair

Tom Maguire has the lastest scoop about Karl Rove, Viveca Novak, and the Valerie Plame Wilson case. Tom is still the guy to read on this story.

The NY Times joins the story about Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, asking TIME reporter Viveca Novak to testify on behalf of Karl Rove. And the Old Gray Lady is merely a day behind the Hot Young Ladies at firedoglake, since Jane Hamsher had live sources for this very story yesterday. Stay with it lads! (By odd coincidence, the Times explanation of Ms. Novak's testimony mirrors my own guess from Monday - I just didn't see it as exculpatory.)

Tom concludes:

Let's go the the key paragraph of the story in question:

Both contended that Wilson's report on an alleged Iraqi effort to purchase uranium from Niger, far from undermining the president's claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq sought uranium in Africa, as Wilson had said, actually strengthened it. And some government officials have noted to TIME in interviews, (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Gosh, that reads like "some government officials" to me. However did the Times misread that?

Now, when the Times mis-spells the name of a Russian ballerina, they fall all over themselves to run the correction. Why am I utterly confident that they will stonewall this?

Because Paul Krugman slipped it past whoever pretends to be his editor on July 22, 2003, and the Times now feels married to this mistake. On this minor point the Paper of Record has become the Paper of Broken Record.

Ace has the post on Joe Lieberman

Joe Lieberman was on Sean Hannity's show on Wednesday. Ace writes and quotes:

Lieberman: Saddam Had WMD's At Time Of Invasion

Is this guy getting ready to flip? How can he remain in this party?

"The so-called Duelfer Report, which a lot of people read to say there were no weapons of mass destruction - concluded that Saddam continued to have very low level of chemical and biological programs," Lieberman told ABC Radio host Sean Hannity on Wednesday.

Tom Maguire is still investigating Andrea Mitchell

Tom Maguire, at the JustOneMinute blog, is still digging around to find out more about what Andrea Mitchell knew about Valerie Plame. Andrea seems to be working hard to hide any contacts she had about this and try and say that she didn't know anything. Our guy, Don Imus, is the only one pressing Andrea at all on this subject, and she won't "fess up" to him. Tom writes:

Andrea Mitchell - What Did She Know, And When Did She Know It?

We are fascinated by the question of whether Andrea Mitchell is poised to become the next Bob Woodward and announce that she received a leak about Valerie Plame ahead of the rest of the pack. Some research has advanced the ball a bit, providing circumstantial evidence that Ms. Mitchell was in the right place at the right time to get such a leak.

Of course, our favorite bit of evidence is still her own admission on Oct 3, 2003 that she knew about Ms. Plame:

Murray: Do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?

Mitchell: It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger. So a number of us began to pick up on that. But frankly I wasn't aware of her actual role at the CIA and the fact that she had a covert role involving weapons of mass destruction, not until Bob Novak wrote it.

From my narrow perspective, the job market seems to be improving

I only have my experience to help judge the current IT job market in the Dallas area, but the market seems to be improving. This year has seen me improve my rate and stay employed all but 2-1/2 weeks. I have not seen such a year since 2000. I also spent most of three years in Minnesota, in the Minneapolis area, because the reputation of the Dallas job market at the time was so bad, that I did not try very hard to find something here. Now, I have been working over the last year, living at home. I am actually doing better than I did with my last contract in Minneapolis, because although the rate is somewhat less, my overhead is much lower. I am also getting to do interesting work, rather than the drudge work of 2001-2003.

OK, so what if Saddam's guy was in Niger at the same time as A Q Khan?

Tom Maguire has a post at JustOneMinute about the "curious coincidence" of the Pakistani nuclear proliferation guy being in Niger at the same time as Saddam's guy in 1999. Are they connected.... nah!

Who was in Niamey, the capital of Niger, in February 1999? Jack Kelly of Irish Pennants has some questions, and we have some thoughts below.

Per the SSCI, the CIA had "reporting from 1999 which showed that an Algerian businessman, Baraka, was arranging a trip for the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawi, to visit Niger and other African countries in early February 1999."

Now, bits of the SSCI are redacted, which just adds fuel to my fantasies, but check this, from a book published in 2000 by a London-based accountant who claimed to be a pal of A.Q.Khan, Pakistan's Father of the Islamic Bomb

Glenn Reynolds' hybrid SUV

Duane Patterson, at Radio Blogger, has the transcript of an interview by Hugh Hewitt with Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, talking about Glenn's hybrid SUV. You can get the flavor by this bit:

HH: Now let me ask you, though, about this. You read the piece in the Wall Street Journal, right?

GR: Yeah. And he's totally wrong about the mileage. I don't know where he gets his claim that the hybrid Highlander doesn't get better mileage than the gas version. Popular Mechanics has got a test car, and I actually ran on my blog a letter from Jim Meigs, their editor, and he says they're getting about double the mileage in the city with the hybrid over the gas Highlander, and that's certainly my experience.

HH: So my question is, do you think it is selling because of its gas mileage, or because it is so conspicuously virtuous a vehicle, as the Wall Street Journal put it?

GR: Well, I think it's more than that. I mean, I don't have to show conspicuous virtue. I'm a professor. We are by definition virtuous.

HH: Of course.

GR: What I think is it's cool. I mean, I'm kind of a gadget guy, and it's a gadget. And I really like it. I get a lot more pleasure out of it than I would out of a gas hybrid, because I think it's cool. And as I said on my blog, I don't really recommend people buy these as an economic proposition, because you really ought to hope gas prices never get high enough...

Shimon Peres is going to support Ariel Sharon and campaign for him

Talk about a changed landscape. Shimon Peres has left the Labour Party and is supporting Ariel Sharon and his new party. Fox News has a piece on the story. Ariel Sharon is onto something, and we can only hope that he succeeds. we have tended to be very hard line and supported the Likud, as there was no alternative. Ariel Sharon has been painted by the left as a monster, but he is the leader that is presently needed. Let us hope that his course works, as that is not a sure thing. It well could be a disaster, but the Likud is about to explode with the religious right dominating it.

So-called "patriotic Democrat" Paul Hackett

Paul Hackett served in Iraq, so now that makes him the great political and military expert. His main claim to fame is that the media wants to talk to him, since he is rabidly anti-Bush. David Adesnik writes about Paul Hackett:

CHICKENHAWK BUSH SNORTED COKE, SAYS PATRIOTIC DEM: Paul Hackett is the Marine vet of Operation Iraqi Freedom who came within a hair's breadth of winning an open congressional seat in Ohio earlier this year. He lost the race to Jean Schmidt, but his success has propelled him into a run for the Senate in 2006.

Last Wednesday, Hackett was on Hardball, where he denounced Schmidt and others for "play[ing] politics with the lives of young Americans" and avoiding the real issue of what to do about Iraq. In order to restore the proper level of dignity to American political discourse, Hackett promptly started talking about the President's alleged coke habit

Yeah, Paul Hackett is this great guy. He has nothing to say, so he talks maliciously about President Bush. He is the current media favorite, replacing Cindy Sheehan, who is destined for oblivion, along with Paul Hackett.

One point about leftist activists

When you saw the photos of a lonely Cindy Sheehan, they should not be surprising. Lefties generally don't have money of their own. This is an overgeneralization, but everything that they do is funded. If they travel, someone paid for it. There are certainly those with inherited money, or are funded by their parents or spouse. Almost certainly, Cindy Sheehan's book is of little interest, except as a souvenir for those who are into such things. If there were not crowds of lefties in Crawford, it was because the usual sources of money didn't find sending people there to be worthwhile. The locals are Texans, so there are likely to be very few people in Crawford who are sympathetic to Cindy Sheehan's message.

My cousin, the leftist activist, is or was funded by Ohio State University to do community activist things (whatever such a person would do). We should not be surprised to see upper Midwest universities pumping money into such activities. Just look at those hotbeds of revolution in Ann Arbor and Minneapolis (both U's of M).

If there was no money, leftwing activism would be reduced to the old women in sweats, with short haircuts, standing holding hand-lettered signs on overpasses in Minneapolis.

WMD's in Iraq

The Air Force Family blog has a post about WMD's in Iraq. The blogger's husband writes:

The following blog post was written for you by my husband, who posts under the name "airforceguy."

To get this out of the way early, you will not see any classified information in this post. Everything I will write about has been extensively documented in many other sources. Everything I say has been said by other professionals, both civilian and military. The importance of what I say actually lies not in the content, but in the speaker and the medium. Last thing first, the blogosphere is a new phenomenon, and a new medium which allows common guys like me as wide a broadcasting net as the mainstream media (MSM). If you did not know this already you would not be reading this entry. The real reason you are reading this has to do with the fact that I am not a reporter, sending news filtered through desks and editors. I am a simple soldier, writing what I saw, what I deduced and what I know to be true.

The conclusion says:

So, what is the moral of this story? The military can be inefficient? The intel community is short-sighted? Politicians are stupid? Yes, yes, and yes. But mostly, the moral of this story is that there was and IS WMD in Iraq. And the media could tell this story better then I can. But they don’t want to.

*More complete source information and detailed civilian-available bibliography for much of what I've discussed can be found in the book Disinformation by Richard Miniter. That is the only place I've seen a nearly complete accounting of what I saw and participated in while with the ISG.

Marc Cooper on Ramsey Clark

Marc Cooper's assessment of Ramsey Clark is that he is "visibily addled". Marc writes:

In the recent past I’ve written rather harshly about former Attorney General Ramsey Clark who, once again, finds himself in Baghdad as part of Saddam Hussein’s defense team. The right-wingers call him a traitor. Some intelligent leftist critics call him the best friend of war criminals. I, on the other hand, just think the poor old guy is visibly addled.

Reading yesterday’s reports of Clark standing on the Baghdad court steps and making lofty statements about the right to a fair trial in a duly constitued court, I paused to reflect…and, frankly, I tried to evoke a more charitable view of him. After all, I also believe in due process…be it in Gitmo or in Saddam’s court room. I also oppose the death penalty faced by Saddam; I oppose it for anyone. Especially for genocidal dictators upon whom I wish a long, long life and an even more prolonged and anguished death. In any case, anyone — even the most heinous criminal– deserves the best legal representation possible. And no lawyer should be condemned for defending the worst of criminals.

Marc concludes:

That Clark, instead, chooses to defend a war criminal already outfitted with literally dozens of lawyers and paid for the by vast fortunes he has squeezed from his victimized population, makes it impossible (at least for me ) to have any tempered view of him. I can only conclude that in helping Saddam, or in gesturing to help him which is more like it, Clark believes he is making some broader political statement about America’s role in the world. It’s a piss-poor platform from which to do that sort of political work. And it is marvelously counter-productive and I would say downright stupid when you have simultaneously positioned yourself as a major figure in an already struggling peace movement. And that’s the trouble with Ramsey. Big trouble.

Wretchard on Randy Cunningham

I just Wretchard's piece (at The Belmont Club) about Randy Cunningham's airbattle in the Viet Nam war. One thing that stuck out for me was the mention of Dwight Timm. As a captain in 1978 and early 1979, he was my commanding officer on the USS Nashville (LPD-13). Wretchard starts off by writing:

On the tenth of May, 1972 Lieutenant Randy Cunningham and his RIO, LT(JG) Willie Driscoll, flying a Phantom F-4J, ShowTime 100, would shoot down two MIGs, making them the first American aces of the Vietnam War. Then they would shoot down a third.

This is the reference to Dwight Timm:

.. VF-96 Exec, Cdr Dwight Timm had three MiGs on his tail, one being very close, in Timm's blind spot. ... After more maneuvering, Cunningham re-engaged the MiG-17 still threatening his XO. He called again for him to break, adding, "If you don't break NOW you are going to die." The XO finally accelerated and broke hard right. The MiG couldn't follow Showtime 112's high speed turn, leaving "Duke" clear to fire.

The main thing I remember about Captain Timm is that he and his wife collected Alfa Romeo cars and drove them.

Duane Patterson has the dope on Cindy Sheehan

Duane Patterson, at Radio Blogger, has the pathetic pictures of Cindy Sheehan at the failed book signing. Duane is Hugh Hewitt's producer on his radio show. The great thing about Radio Blogger is that Duane puts up transcripts from the Hugh Hewitt show. In this case, he has pictures. Duane writes:

One of the things I'm thankful for at this time of year is some of the people over at Free Republic.

Someone there saw an AP photo story of Cindy Sheehan back in Crawford, Texas, waiting for people to show up and have her sign autographs.

Cindy Sheehan had her 15 minutes of fame, and she doesn't realize that it is over. She just might have a clue of this book signing that no one is interested. I heard a tape of her on a conservative talk radio show, and she was really incoherent and unimformed.

Tom Maguire thinks that Andrea Mitchell is being evasive

Tom Maguire, of the heavily read JustOneMinute blog, is always on top of the Plame affair. He believes that Andrea Mitchell is hiding something and being deliberately evasive. Tom writes:

Is Andrea Mitchell The Next Bob Woodward?

The lady doth protest too much. Is Andrea Mitchell sitting on a Bob Woodward style revelation about Fitzgerald's investigation into the Plame leak? Does her nagging conscience want her to reveal that she had received an early leak of the news that Ms. Plame was at the CIA?

Twice now, Don Imus has asked Andrea Mitchell to explain why she said, back in October 2003, that among reporters probing the story of the Wilson trip to Niger it was "widely known" that Joe Wilson's wife worked at the CIA.

On November 10, Ms. Mitchell was unprepared, and gave an answer that was comically absurd.

And last Wednesday, November 23, Ms. Mitchell delivered a Thanksgiving turkey. Her new explanation for her Oct 2003 statement is elegant in its simplicity - "I screwed it up". Hmm. Maybe Scooter could try that on at his trial.

Rob Port's Frappr map

Rob Port, at the Say Anything blog, had gotten a Frappr map in the last month or so. He averages about 1,500 readers a day, according to his Sitemeter listing. The last time I looked, he had about 42 people signed on Frappr, including himself and me. Frappr even can handle foreign locations, as Rob has a reader in Australia. In my family of blogs, I have many readers in Europe, Asia, South America, as well as the US. I had not realized this until recently, but Sitemeter now has a map, as well. From the sitesummary page, click By World Map, and you can see what they using. The URL looks like it is the wrong site, but I hope that it is correct, anyway.