The Democratic National Committee’s page, democrats.org, currently links to a porn site. (Go to their links and click on “Willie Velasquez Institute.” Better yet, just take our word for it.)


Editor’s note: You really don’t want to follow that Willie Velasquez link.

Court unseals decade-old fraud papers the implicated Gov. Davis in a bribery scheme.

As a long time follower of Drudge Report page stats, I’m looking forward with great anticipation to the day when his annual hits pass the 1 billion mark. (He’s currently over 975 million.) Drudge has been pronounced dead so many times by the liberal media and other species headed for extinction, it’s worth noting that his circulation shows no sign of diminishing. I remember the days when 15 million hits a month was a good showing. Now he’s getting 110 million a month and climbing. It’s hard to argue with objective measures of success, at least credibly. It won’t stop his critics, but who reads them anyway?

Here’s a good account from the London Times on the siege at the Moscow
theater.

As this story from the Daily Telegraph reveals, despite having two “jobs” (she is the UK’s industry minister and its “minister for women”), British politician Patricia Hewitt is clearly a woman with too much time on her
hands.

Couple of weeks ago I remarked in a column that the two most widespread
forms of hate* in these United States are (1) hatred of white people by
nonwhites, and (2) hatred of religious people by the irreligious. The
Public Interest article Stanley Kurtz has brought to our attention to
certainly confirms my (2). The article is brilliant, and raises all sorts
of interesting questions. E.g. will black “church ladies” go on voting
solidly Democrat (as they apparently do) if it dawns on them that the
Democrats are, in fact, the party of irreligion? (I think I could make a
case for the answer probably being “yes.”) Some of these observations,
though, are not new. It is around 20 years since Peter Berger, commenting
on the then-emerging picture of America as an irreligious elite governing a
religious populace, encapsulated the phenomenon as: “Swedes ruling over
Indians.”

* As opposed to “hate,” as in “disapproving of homosexual marriage,” or
“seeing nothing wrong with racial profiling.”

An Islamic superstate.

A USAID diplomat in Jordan was gunned down at his home today.

I’m fascinated by the juxtaposition of a couple of op-ed’s in today’s Washington Post. Fred Hiatt defends affirmative action in the face of its possible demise at the hands of the Supreme Court. Hiatt points to the “10 percent rule” by which Texas tries to circumvent an affirmative-action ban, and notes that even the pro-Bush Senate candidate in Texas backs both the rule and the basic goal of diversity in Texas schools. On the same op-ed page, William Raspberry criticizes the feminists who are trying to force Tiger Woods to oppose the men-only rule at Augusta, and takes on Harry Belafonte’s swipes at Colin Powell. The tribe that really matters, says Raspberry, is the human tribe. Why should blacks be forced to toe any given political line, he asks, or be treated as “house slaves” if they don’t? As Raspberry points out, whites aren’t subject to the same pressure for political conformity. But of course, as long as the pro- “diversity” policies supported by Hiatt (and probably Raspberry as well) are in effect, blacks will continue to be treated as members of a group, rather than as individuals, and thus forced into political conformity.

The new article from The Public Interest, “Our Secularist Democratic Party,” (linked in my previous blog) is important for other reasons as well. For one thing, it provides a kind of socio-political grounding for my argument in pieces like “The Church of the Left” and “The Faith-Based Left” that the ideologies of the secular Left now function as a de facto religion. The same Democratic national convention delegates who identified themselves as secular were the ones who carried the ideologies of the new post-sixties movements. It’s also interesting to note that the Democratic secularists had a hostility to traditionally religious folk that would have been called prejudice if maintained against any other group. In effect, what Bolce and DeMaio show in this piece that our contemporary culture war was started, not by religious conservatives, but by the rise of ideological secularism. And again, the media, being secular, Democratic, post-sixties ideologues themselves, have ignored or suppressed this fundamentally important angle on the contemporary relation of religion and politics. This article is a must read.

The current issue of The Public Interest headlines a piece that just may be the best article on press bias I’ve ever read. In “Our Secularist Democratic Party,” Louis Bolce and Gerald DeMaio show that the real story of religion and politics in the past few decades has not been the takeover of the Republican party by religious conservatives. On the contrary, the real change since the sixties has been the takeover of the Democratic party by militant secularists. The rise of ideological secularists within the Democratic party–and particularly the party leadership–is an historically unprecedented and hugely significant development. Yet it has been entirely ignored by the media–chiefly because the media elite is also secular, and would rather skewer the Republicans than accurately report a secularism that tends to separate the Democrats from mainstream America.

The AP has a piece up on crime being on the increase. Eli Lehrer wrote about the numbers in July on NRO.

From Jay Nordlinger’s Impromptus today: “Eileen Simpson, wife of John
Berryman, died. Her obituarist quoted Delmore Schwartz as saying, ‘All poets
’ wives have rotten lives.’ Did he mean it to rhyme? Was it accidental?”
Jay: No, not accidental, these are actually the first two lines of a poem.
The rest of it goes: “What could possibly be worse / Than a husband hooked
on verse?”

Tom Sylvester, at marriagemovement.org, has a powerful analysis of leftist cultural bias at the New York Times. Sharon Lerner, the Times reporter in question, was recruited from The Village Voice, where she specialized in knocking marriage promotion and other programs in support of the traditional family. Having come to the Times, Lerner’s barely concealed bias comes through in the way she puts scare quotes around the claims of pro-marriage experts but not critics, and in a whole range of other devices.

Andrew: When my mother was in her last illness, I asked her what she would like to have sung at her funeral. “Well,” she said, “Either ‘Crimond’ or
’Abide With Me,’ I don’t really mind.” I pointed out that we had sung
“Abide With Me” at my father’s funeral. Mum: “Oh, that’s right. ‘Crimond,’
then.” And “Crimond” it was. [Note for non-Anglican readers: "Crimond" is
the tune to which Anglicans usually sing the 23rd Psalm. The name comes
from the village in Aberdeenshire where Jessie Seymour Irvine, apparently
while just a teenager, composed the tune as an exercise for an organists'
class she was attending, circa 1855.]

From Time: The FBI has long been worried about the vulnerability of the nation’s rail system to terror attack. But the threat was deemed immediate enough late last week for the agency to issue a formal warning. The alert cautioned that al-Qaeda, “possibly using operatives who have a Western appearance,” might try to destroy key rail bridges, derail trains or target hazardous-material containers. What prompted the unusually specific warning? Intelligence sources tell Time it came as a result of the attack by two gunmen who killed one U.S. Marine and wounded another on a Kuwaiti island on Oct. 8. Kuwaiti authorities who afterward raided an al-Qaeda cell believed to be supporting the gunmen found a computer hard drive with photos of American passenger and cargo trains as well as rail crossings. At about the same time, senior al-Qaeda operatives in custody told their CIA and FBI interrogators that the organization had plans for targeting railroads.

On Meet the Press yesterday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich outlined the case against the Democrats’ soon-to-be Senate candidate in Minnesota: “Walter Mondale chaired a commission that was for the privatization of Social Security worldwide. He chaired a commission that was for raising the retirement age dramatically. He has a strong record of voting to raise taxes. And I think that what you’ll see on the Republican side is an issue-oriented campaign that says, you know, ‘If you want to raise your retirement age dramatically and privatize Social Security’–Walter Mondale’s a terrifically courageous guy to say that-’and if you want a big-tax-increase person with a long history of raising taxes, Walter Mondale’s a perfect’” Sure, his proclivity for tax increases is a good reason to vote against Walter Mondale, but it seems odd to attack Mondale on social security privatization. As one friend noted, that’s probably the best policy recommendation Mondale’s ever made.

The former head of Sony (where she made three movies) winds up on Winona Ryder’s jury. Well, it does help make it a jury of her peers.

Fox News wants to go in to Iraq with the weapons inspectors (assuming weapons inspectors ever go in).

Might be a fact.