Holland’s slow suicide continues.

Blogging away from that sad, threatened country The Dutch Reporter has the details of a small, but symbolically interesting, incident which shows how far things have gone:

”Cals College in IJsselstein has prohibited two of its students to have Dutch flags on their bags. The 16 year old boy and his friend where told by the director of their school that they "urgently should consider" to remove the Dutch flags from their bags, it could provoke other students, mainly Moroccan students. The two considered the urgent request of the school as a prohibition.”

Time, I think, to fly the Dutch flag.

Via Peaktalk.

Sections of the European left love nothing more than proclaiming that the West’s moment has passed. Here’s an example from today’s Guardian by Martin Jacques (a man who edited a magazine called Marxism Today when that bizarre and murderous cult was, thankfully, already yesterday). His main theme? The rise of India and China. Interesting, perhaps, but you don’t have to be an American triumphalist to find this piece more than a touch bizarre in the frenzied desperation of its arguments. My favorite bit?

“The contrast between China and the United States could hardly be more striking. The former dates back thousands of years, the latter not much more than 200; the former is a product of an ancient civilisation, the latter an invented nation whose citizens bear allegiance to a political document, the constitution. It is little wonder that Americans constantly need to reinvent themselves: the Chinese, unsurprisingly, have no such problem, they know exactly who they are.”

The Chinese feel no need to reinvent themselves, eh, Martin? Maybe it’s just my faulty memory, but I seem to recall they have had a revolution or two themselves over the past century.

But perhaps that’s just my imagination.

Lots of email like this:

He shouldn't be complaining that Moore and Kennedy can't read arabic... He should be complaining that I can read arabic. I served as a Marine intel operator and translator for seven months in Iraq. I've had Shi'ite instructors, talked with the Shi'ites of southern Iraq about their grievences. *I* know his pessimism is unfounded. I know he's on the wrong side of history and this "Goldberg doesn't know anything about Iraq" defense won't fly with me.

Ms Zolfaghary said she considered having an abortion, but had changed her mind. "Part of me feels very special because this is so unusual. And I was just enjoying being a full-time mum to Zach."

Here's a quick round-up of representative emails. I've got to get back to real work. Thanks for all the kind words etc.

The shrillness of [Cole's] claim to have superior expertise arises from the Iraqi election. THOSE WHO KNOW ABOUT SUCH THINGS all said it would be a disaster. Events proved otherwise, and the people have quite rightly devalued the opinions of these experts. They can speak Arabic and they've read all the right books. But they were wrong on the big question.

And:

Hi Jonah,

Let me pile on briefly. Glad to hear you got smacked down by Juan Cole. I must admit however that it was merely confirmation of what most everyone outside of your bubble on the pseudo-right already knew. At any rate- just delicious.

And:

It is my opinion that you have the more sound academic footing here. The "This thing was more like a referendum than an election." comment is what gave it away. The opportunity to construct a democracy with liberty and justice for all is an option that was never included in the 1997 Iranian election. It was surely included in the options in the recent Iraqi election! Keep hammering away! Pretty soon Cole will be denigrated into shouting NeoCon! and posting your name to http://www.sourcewatch.org.

Have a good superbowl sunday

And the kicker:

Mr. Goldberg,

As I believe Greg Djerejian has pointed out on occasion, the problem with Cole is that whatever expertise the man may have is entirely swept up in his monomaniacal hatred of the Bush administration and its policies. It is precisely these types of sentiments that leads him to make such insane claims as that Israel was responsible for the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib, that Michael Ledeen and Michael Rubin want regime change in Iran so that Israel can take back southern Lebanon, that Zarqawi and al-Tawhid were shadows made up by the US so that Bush could claim that Iraq is tied to the WOT, and now his even more startling claim that the most recent Iranian elections (he says 2005 but likely means 2004 as no elections have yet taken place in Iran) were more transparent than their Iraqi equivalents, even though everybody accept the folks in academia accept that it was rigged in favor of the hardliners. You want links to any these more bombastic statements, just let me know and I'll be happy to send 'em your way.

Basically, if Cole is going to complain about you making statements that are "inaccurate" (i.e. disagree with his own) about Iraq, he needs to get the freakin' Redwood out of his own eye.

[Name withheld]

PS - You may want to note that for all of Cole's complaining about you not knowing any Arabic (even though, as somebody already mentioned, Cole doesn't know any Hebrew but has no problem lecturing us on his thoughts on the subject of Israel), one might note that he cites Mike Scheuer's second book favorably because he can use it to attack Satan, err, Dubya. Scheuer doesn't speak a word of Arabic, he relies almost entirely on FIBS to get ahold of his info, so why isn't he held in equal contempt by Cole among the punditocracy?

Of all the emails Cole has received because of this silly brouhaha this is the one the great scholar sees fit to post:

"I wouldn't rush to pack your bags. But if you actually do get an oppurtunity to verbally castrate this weasel, ask him if he truly meant "In the weeks prior to the war to liberate Afghanistan, a good friend of mine would ask me almost every day, "Why aren't we killing people yet?" And I never had a good answer for him. Because one of the most important and vital things the United States could do after 9/11 was to kill people." '

He looks to be of military age. Ask him why his sorry a** isn't in the kill zone."]

For the record, I did in fact mean it. I wrote it here. As for why my sorry a** isn't in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give -- I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few -- ever seem to suffice. But this chicken-hawk nonsense is something that's been batted around too many times to get into again here. What I do think is interesting is that out of the thousands upon thousands of emails I've gotten from people in the military over the years, maybe a dozen have ever asked this question. Invariably, it's anti-war leftists who believe that their personally defined notions of hypocrisy trump any argument and any position. Meanwhile, the military guys have been overwhelmingly friendly and very often grateful for the support we offer around here.

From a reader:

Important New Rule I'm Sure K-Lo will Agree With!

From now on, you can replace "Is it because I'm a Lesbian?" with "Is it
because I don't speak Arabic?"

If you post this, call me your "Beating a dead horse into the ground" guy.

Or, since I'm reading The Corner at home for a change, use my name

Joe Auchter

From a reader:

I love it!! You and Cole are like a pair of rappers calling one another out. The Corner needs more of this kind of thing. Do me a favor and [tick] off Chris Mathews so I can see you make a fool of him. Not that he needs help.

WEST SIDE!

James Wolcott, who continues to write like he should be the fifth girl on Sex and the City, shockingly takes Juan Cole's side. I'm devastated, of course.

Now, as I conceded Juan Cole is an expert on the Middle East. But Wolcott is an expert on....what? I saw in the latest issue of Vanity Fair he's writing about latenight cable lesbianism. I bow to his expertise there. And I'd take his "argument" about me more seriously (even his unceasingly unoriginal and catty fat jokes), but he almost never makes arguments. Indeed, from what I've been able to tell, Wolcott's simply the middle-brow wordsmith Vanity Fair signed on to make sunbathing second wives in the Hamptons feel like they're intellectuals while they get their pedicures. I wouldn't debate Juan Cole about the Middle East for the same reason I wouldn't debate Paul Krugman about economics.

Nevertheless, about American politics or foreign policy, I'd have no problem or reluctance debating either of them. And as for Wolcott, I cannot imagine there is a subject I would be undermatched to debate him on, save perhaps on how he manages to keep a straight face while he musters the nerve to call anybody else in the English-speaking world a "hack."

But I do think Wolcott's prredictable bitchy-lefty approach to this whole thing illuminates something interesting. Obviously, Wolcott doesn't speak arabic and knows certainly no more about the Middle East than me. Yet there's no doubt Cole will celebrate Wolcott's endorsement even though according to Cole's own criteria, Wolcott is no more qualified to have a worthwhile opinion on any of this than I am. Moreover, the fact that Jimmy Wolcott seriously thinks Cole talks like a professor simply illustrates the partisan hackery he ascribes to me. Wolcott thinks Cole is professorial not because of Cole's scholarship -- and certainly not because of his prose -- but because Wolcott agrees with Cole about Bush, Iraq and me. I'm perfectly willing to admit that I'm cherry-picking my experts (including the various arabic speaking Iraqi bloggers). But Wolcott operates from the assumption that if Cole agrees with him, he must be an unimpeachable scholar. That sounds more like narcissism than judgment.

I've never been as wowed by Condi Rice as some, but if she keeps saying things like this I will be:

"There cannot be an absence of moral content in American foreign policy," she says. "Europeans giggle at this, but we are not European, we are American, and we have different principles."

From a reader:

J.,

The *essence* of Cole's outburst is that *concepts are useless*. (Tony at
"Across the Bay" flails in the general direction of refuting this. He
doesn't hit it squarely, although he does illustrate Cole's hypocrisy in
trying to have it both ways.)

It is in no way necessary to "live in the Middle East" in order to be able
to grasp -- *conceptually* -- the issues that occupy us there, any more than
it was necessary to have lived on the moon in order to achieve the first
landing on its surface.

In "The Gulag Archipelago", Solzhenitsyn wrote that "To taste the ocean
requires only a single drop." He did not explicate it in these terms, but
he was referring to the utility of concepts to human affairs. Juan Cole is
essentially arguing a radical empiricist angle, the necessary implication of
which (in a *consistent* -- not hypocritical -- application) is that
transmission of knowledge is impossible because only direct experience with
every discrete detail (grains of *sand*, even) can result in knowledge.

Tony glanced off one implication, which goes like this: Why should anyone
pay attention to Cole's books? We couldn't learn anything from them,
anyway, because they have no standing next to direct experience of what he
attempts to impart.

I'm sorry for not explaining that. Indeed, for all I know Juan Cole doesn't consider it an insulting comparison.

Jerry Hough was a prominent Sovietologist (not a historian) who never missed an opportunity to be incandescantly wrong on the big picture but was gifted in defending himself by hiding behind his C.V. and his "expertise." In 1991 -- two years after the Berlin Wall fell -- Hough declared "The belief that the Soviet Union may disintegrate as a country contradicts all we know about revolution and national integration throughout the world."

He once explained that ""the Soviet leadership almost seems to have made the Soviet Union closer to the spirit of the pluralist model of American political science than is the United States."

My favorite anecdote about Hough comes from Robert Conquest:

I remember at Columbia University more than twenty years ago Stephen Cohen saying to me, "There's someone here who thinks Stalin only killed ten thousand people." "No there isn't," I said confidently. Steve took me over and said, "Jerry, how many people did Stalin kill?" "Ten thousand or so."

This anecdote comes from this essay by Conquest about the moral idiocy and myopia of "experts" during the Cold War. It remains one of the most devastating and illuminating essays I have ever read and one can almost feel the parallels to Cole and his crowd emanating from the pages.

In an excellent rejoinder to Cole here, Tony at Across the Bay writes:

Needless to say, that regardless of his Arabic and his book on Shiite Islam, Cole's non-academic writings are for the most part shrill and rarely insightful, amounting to little more than a pessimistic news round-up, as we've shown several times on this blog (which is why most everyone has dismissed Cole. Even Michael Young called his site "overrated!"). Besides, Cole knows no Hebrew, can't read Israeli papers, knows nothing whatsoever about Israeli society, and yet pontificates constantly on Israel, Sharon, the Likud, etc. His opinion on these issues, by virtue of his own logic, matters not. Yet he graces us with it regularly.

More than discrediting Goldberg, Professor Cole has revealed a great deal not only about himself, but about the Left in general. One wonders how many intellectuals, some of them with tenure, have spent the past week festering because, for all of their degrees and language knowledge and books authored, right-wing simpletons are not only being proven right, but they're being proven to be on the right side of the issue. The problem that so many intellectuals have — across the disciplines — is that they haven't been visiting and learning languages and writing books to understand their subjects, but to cram them into a Leftist worldview. Consequently, an understanding of human nature, which is available to all of us equally, trumps scholarly perambulation, and the "academic retreat into expertise," as Goldberg calls it, will become a retreat into obscurity and irrelevance when reality makes the people confident to laugh at the professors' credentialized bluster.

Not a bad point since my column was, in fact, about America's reaction to the Iraqi elections. From a reader:

Mr. Cole misses one important point. Yes, his expertise on the Middle East qualifies him to present his opinion and perhaps demand a stronger hearing than others.

But, in the case of the Iraq elections, the impact on American public opinion is just as important as the impact on Iraqis.

And we can state conslusively that YOU are just as qualified as Mr. Cole to hold forth on the subject of American opinion.

Looks like I hit a nerve with Juan Cole.

I think it is time to be frank about some things. Jonah Goldberg knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can't read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq's neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres. Why should we pretend that Jonah Goldberg's opinion on the significance and nature of the elections in Iraq last Sunday matters? It does not. ....

And...

If Jonah Goldberg had asserted that he could fly to Mars in his pyjamas and come back in a single day, it would not have been a more fantastic allegation than the one he made about Iraq being a danger to the United States because of the nuclear issue. He made that allegation over and over again to millions of viewers on national television programs, to viewers who trusted his judgment because CNN and others purveyed him to them.

There's more, of course. I'm a practitioner of "monstrous warmongering," for example. But the gist seems to be Prof Cole knows more about the Middle East than I do. And he goes to great -- and at times hysterical -- lengths taking my opinion seriously in an effort to show that you shouldn't. I'll come back to some of this stuff later, but I should say that I don't think I made the allegation that Saddam had nuclear weapons "over and over again" on CNN or anywhere else. My point was actually the reverse. Iraq didn't have nuclear weapons and therefore we could remove Saddam at comparatively low risk -- an option we didn't, and don't, have with North Korea. Also, I wrote columns more than once criticizing the effort to boil the whole thing down to the WMDs issue.

As for the fact that Professor Cole reads Arabic, has lived in Arab lands and all that, Bully for Him. I do love this academic retreat into expertise. Don't get me wrong I believe in expertise and the value of books. But I wonder, does Professor Cole ever complain that Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore or Ted Kennedy don't read arabic? Or does he bust out the "Whose is bigger" academese only when he encounters people who disagree with, or don't suck up to, the good doctor? Absolutely, Professor Cole knows more about the Middle East than I do. That doesn't make him right about everything having to do with the Middle East. If it did, folks like Bernard Lewis wouldn't disagree with him. Indeed, during the Cold War how many Sovietologists got everything wrong? Answer: Lots. I'm no expert on Doc Cole nor on the Middle East, but I get the distinct impression that he's a contender to be the Jerry Hough of Middle East experts. My point is that he may be an expert, but he's not one I rely on. This seems to enrage Cole for reasons that say more about him than me.

As for the only substantive rebuttal he offers to my column (you need to claw through the whining and insults to find it), he makes a pretty good case for the democratic nature of the 1997 Iranian elections (though it smells of whitewash to me. I'll consult some experts.). Of course, he now concedes that the candidates were selected by the Mullahs on ideological grounds and that others were excluded -- a point he did not make when he originally praised the Iranian elections as "more democratic" than Iraq's. The reason he didn't make it was because it was inconvenient to his ideological -- not scholarly -- agenda. Indeed, as Reihan at the American Scene has noted, Cole's larger point was to dismiss the Iraqi elections as somehow particularly undemocratic when the system used in Iraq is hardly unique. Did Cole consider the South African elections in 1994 undemocratic? How about elections in other countries which use proportional representation? It is a curious instinct which causes such a scholar to burnish the democratic credentials of a theocracy like Iran's in order to discredit an election like we saw in Iraq last Sunday. It is an even more curious tactic when the good professor clearly understands that the nature of Iraq's election wasn't nearly so undemocratic as he initially insinuated.

Which brings me to his opener. He says that now is the "time to be frank about some things." To which all I can say is, it's about time.

Finally, a history lesson. There have been 16 Super Bowls pitting a team that had won the big game at least once in the previous five seasons against a team that had not. The teams with a Super Bowl title under their belts were -- sorry, Eagles fans -- 15-2. Teams, such as this year's Patriots, with more than one title in the previous five years are 4-0 against all opponents, which is why Mr. Belichick may be the most important Patriot of all.

Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg and I trooped over to his Georgetown class yesterday to talk about religion and politics. I enjoyed the discussion--college kids must have gotten smarter over the last ten years.

We didn't talk about Social Security, though, which is the topic of E. J.'s column today. The basic point of the column is to minimize the fiscal problem. He does this chiefly by ignoring the $5.8 trillion the government will have to come up with to pay for benefits between 2018 and 2042. Dionne also argues that repealing Bush's tax cuts would cover the program's shortfall. I'll bet that he is, again, ignoring the $5.8 trillion (I haven't had a chance to read through the report to which he refers). But there's another point worth keeping in mind. The way our tax system is set up, the federal tax burden as a share of the economy rises over time. It's projected to go up to an unprecedented 20.9 by 2018 and to 27 percent by 2078. Repealing Bush's tax cut will yield the money Dionne wants only if we assume that the tax burden goes even higher than that. Congress probably wouldn't allow that to happen, and shouldn't.

E. J. objects to Bush's reference to Social Security as "bankrupt." "That is nonsense. By 2042 (or 2052, according to the Congressional Budget Office), Social Security will still be able to pay between 70 and 80 percent of promised benefits -- which, because of wage indexing, would be higher in real terms than today's benefits." First of all, I think a lot of people and companies who go bankrupt end up paying a portion, but not the entirety, of what they have promised to people, so the word doesn't seem inappropriate here. But I also think Dionne is making a bigger concession than he realizes. If an immediate 20-30 percent cut in benefits in the year 2042 is no big deal, then how terrible can it be to enact a plan that would involve reducing benefits in that decade so that they're 40 percent lower than currently scheduled? Especially when that plan would involve a gradual change, with no year-to-year cuts?

I feel a tremendous sense of gratitude to my alma mater, Dartmouth College. Indeed, apart from my family, I ascribe just about everything good that has happened in my life to my college education. Foremost among the experiences that contributed to my education as an undergraduate was the opportunity to study literature in every one of the classes taught by Professor Jeffrey Hart [of the Dartmouth English department and also a senior editor of National Review] during my four years at the college. Yet I wonder if it would be possible for students at the college today to have an undergraduate experience like mine. See Dan Knecht's sobering Dartmouth Daily article "The monolith on the hill."

Last year Cypress Semiconductors chief executive officer and Dartmouth alum ('70) T.J. Rogers successfully waged an insurgent campaign for election to the Dartmouth board of trustees. I believe his election to the board will greatly benefit the college, but as of today he is more or less alone in the perspective that he brings to the board.

Peter Robinson ('79) is one of Professor Hart's most prominent former students. Peter famously put his literary education to work in writing President Reagan's world-shaking "tear down this wall" speech. His excellent book on his experience as a member of the Reagan speechwriting staff is How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life.

Peter is now a Hoover Institution fellow and is seeking a seat on the Dartmouth Board of Trustees as a petition candidate in the trustee election this coming March. In order to be included on the election ballot he needs to collect 500 signatures supporting his candidacy by mid-February. Click here [www.peter-robinson.org] to take a look at Peter's site and download a petition form. I support his candidacy and if you are a Dartmouth alum I hope you will consider doing the same.

My guess is they'll raise the money fast.

Jonah, The “best” part of that article you linked is: “[the plaintiff] said the families' apologies rang false and weren't delivered in person." Add that to your “well, duh” column. Gee, I can’t imagine why the girls didn’t want to knock on that woman’s door in order to apologize.

Cliff raises an excellent topic for Conerites: Most Fraudulent Academic Disciplines.

I agree Ethnic Studies is bad, but it must take a back seat to Post-Colonial Studies. I don't want to steal anyone else's thunder. Nominations? Arguments? Merriment?

From a reader:

Jonah--

Thanks for keeping an eye on the Mattis story.

Ya know, it's all just so puzzling--let me get this straight: a stressed-out abused woman administers an agonizing death to her sleeping husband by lighting his bed on fire (as re-enacted by Farrah Fawcett in “The Burning Bed”), and we’re supposed to be sympathetic.

Or three women get their revenge on the men who’ve wronged them— the secretaries in “Nine to Five” who kidnap their boss and hold him hostage in his underwear suspended from the ceiling in a harness all day long for the criminal offenses of ogling them and sending them on trivial errands, or the betrayed wives (in “The First Wives’ Club”),one of whom has her husband kidnapped at gunpoint by gangsters and taken as a hostage to a deserted building where she dictates to him the terms of their divorce—and we’re supposed to find this comically satisfying.

But when a man who has devoted his whole life to the defense of his country, facing down danger and death over and over again, and training his troops in such a way that they will stand the best chance of returning home alive to their families—when he speaks to an in-house audience in a non-serious way of taking satisfaction from ending the lives of terrorists and tyrants IN COMBAT, there are people who want him to suffer public humiliation and to offer a groveling apology for his lack of sensitivity.

Help me out here—will Jane Fonda star in this movie too?

[Name withheld]

proud mother of 2nd Lt. [Name withheld], USMC

On the subject-that-is-banned. But KJL won't see this post because I've activated my cloaking device. Note: Contains mildly offensive language.

From a reader:

Jonah,

My son is a US Marine, 1st Marine Div. He is a LCpl and as such has no use for officers, or anybody in the army, navy or air force unless they are flying air cover for his guys. That said, he told me, since the Mattis remarks, they would happily "...follow that guy into hell."

God bless Gen Mattis! We need more like him. (Got that Wes Clark?)

As for the Democratic response, Harry Reid looks and talks like a small-town undertaker whom you want to trust but wonder about, especially when he says the deceased would love the brass handles. Although Nancy Pelosi continues to look startled, even alarmed, her comments are predictable and pedestrian. Both seemed eager not to agree with Ted Kennedy's recent "Iraq is Vietnam" statements, which more and more seem not just stupid but scandalously so. Absent endorsing radical defeatism, however, Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi had little to say. They made Important Sounds. Neither seemed sincere or serious. The president seemed both.

(New York, February 4, 2005) — A New York State court ruled today that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry, in a decision that Lambda Legal called “a historic ruling that delivers the state Constitution’s promise of equality to all New Yorkers.” Lambda Legal filed the lawsuit last year, representing five same-sex couples seeking marriage licenses in New York.

In a ruling issued this morning in New York City, State Supreme Court Judge Doris Ling-Cohan said that the New York State Constitution guarantees basic freedoms to lesbian and gay people – and that those rights are violated when same-sex couples are not allowed to marry. The ruling said the state Constitution requires same-sex couples to have equal access to marriage, and that the couples represented by Lambda Legal must be given marriage licenses.

No link, because I'm making the claim right here, right now. "He" was a composite.

Update: I have now received my full quota of emails making jokes about the porn movie by the same title.

After all this "Miller's Crossing," "Office Space," "Simpsons," "Kingpin" nonsense -- You've finally gotten around to the one true comedic masterpieces of the last five years [Deuce Bigalow - Male Gigolo].

And a conservative film at that: free enterprise, love over sex, and "only one animal was hurt during the making of this movie" political incorrectness -- where not even the blind, handicapped, gay, afflicted, or overweight are spared hilarious satire.

I've received a great many complaints from readers that they now have the Inquisition song stuck in their heads. In case you don't know how infectious this song is, Click here where you can download and hear the song (Yes, some profanity).

Yes, I'm a cruel bastard.

RIVERVIEW -- In an era in which billions of dollars are awarded in class-action settlements nationwide each year, some Downriver residents have said "no."

At least 30 have rejected up to $550 per family member, which is their share of a $1.2 million settlement prompted when about 2,500 residents evacuated their homes during a July 2001 chemical leak.

To be eligible, all they had to do was sign a form that said they been home in the affected areas of Grosse Ile, Wyandotte, Riverview or Trenton at the time of the leak. While some acknowledged that they weren't home, several others said they didn't support the lawsuit or deserve the money.

"I look at it this way: Nothing happened to me, and when I left home the birds and squirrels with their little tiny lungs were fine and when I got back, they were still fine," said Thelma Diemer, a Trenton retiree who lives on Social Security and dividends from Ford Motor Co. stock. "I didn't feel I was being honest accepting the money and you have to think about the hereafter, especially when you're 86."...

HEY!! Long-time reader, fairly long-time subscriber and now first time e-mailer. I must insist, even demand, that Mr. Derbyshire's line from his Corner post today ("I shovel my driveway, mow my lawn, and crimp my own RJ45's") be on the next round of NRO stuff. I'll be amazed if yer not gettin' same from likeminded readers. If not, let the groundswell begin here!

A U.S. Department of State official was indicted on fraud and bribery charges for allegedly issuing visas to foreign nationals in exchange for cash. Piotr Parlej was arraigned Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington and pleaded not guilty to visa fraud, bribery and conspiracy charges, which were outlined in a 13-count indictment handed down by a federal grand jury Wednesday.

He is accused of fraudulently issuing visas for money while working at the U.S. Embassy in Armenia.

Rich mentioned this story about General Mattis yesterday. But I think it's heartening that -- so far -- this hasn't turned into a politically correct brouhaha. Mattis said at a conference:

"Actually it's quite fun to fight 'em, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up front with you, I like brawling," said Mattis.

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil," Mattis said during a panel discussion. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

Now with all the usual caveats aside, I just think it's great that we've got military leaders who want to kill the right people. That's what we have military's for. Or at least it's one of the reasons. That doesn't mean he shouldn't play by the right rules and keep political and strategic objectives in mind. But by all accounts he did that. And at the end of the day we have a military to kill the bad guys.

Besides if you want to see what a real bloodthirsty speech by an American general is like I refer you -- once again -- to Patton's humdinger. [Note: Much profanity]

The Iraqi people are turning (more) violent against the insurgency.

From Free Iraqi: (nod to gaypatriot)

Citizens of Al Mudhiryiah (a small town in the "death triangle") were subjected to an attack by several militants today who were trying to punish the residents of this small town for voting in the election last Sunday.

The citizens responded and managed to stop the attack, kill 5 of the attackers, wounded 8 and burned their cars.

3 citizens were injured during the fire exchange. The Shiekh of the tribe to whom the 3 wounded citizens belong demanded more efforts from the government to stop who he described as "Salafis".

(Sorry I got the Inquisition song from History of the World Part One caught in my head). Jihadi Muslims vexed by the ancient quandry, Show we kill the Jews or convert them? My only question is, if Jews can be converted, can apes and pigs?

While the Palestinian Authority may come down clearly on the side of killing Jews for divine Islamic reward, other Muslims think converting Jews is even better. Although, they'll agree, killing Jews is still good.

Speaking on Saudi Arabia's Iqra TV last month, Sheikh 'Aed Al-Karni expounded:

"The Prophet Muhammad, as is said in the Hadith [post-Koranic instructions for behavior and belief - ed.], sent Ali to the Jews - to the Jews, the brothers of apes and pigs - to fight them. Ali, being so brave and daring, thought he was sent to behead them. The Prophet Muhammad told him that it was better to guide them to the righteous path than to kill them...."

Subject: Washington Post on Social Security

Rich, I thought I’d help to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the Post’s article this morning. Jonathan Weisman’s error was due to a misunderstanding of the differences between a “clawback” and an “offset.” As initially described this morning, a “clawback” provision takes a certain amount of a worker’s final equity return and uses it to pay for benefits elsewhere. Using this mechanism, if you earned 10 percent over the lifetime of the account, the government could take some portion of that 10 percent and spend it elsewhere. However, from my conversations with administration officials, that is NOT what the White House is advocating.

What they are proposing (and this is not new at all – it’s part of almost every reform proposal including personal accounts) is that the defined benefit portion of Social Security will be offset for each dollar that is placed into a personal account. For example (and I don’t know if these numbers exactly represent the White House proposal), for every one dollar that you put in your personal account, you will receive one less dollar from Social Security’s traditional defined benefit. However, one dollar fifty years from now is going to be less than one dollar today. Given that your personal accounts would be annuitized only once when you retired, each dollar that you contributed to your personal account over time would have to be indexed to inflation. If I contributed one dollar today, and withdrew that dollar 30 years from now, the Social Security Administration would have to apply inflation to that dollar over 30 years in order to figure how to offset my traditional defined benefit upon withdrawal.

I understand that it’s a very arcane and wonky difference, but there is a HUGE difference between an offset and the clawback that was described this morning. I’m glad to see that there will be no discussion of clawbacks. Many of us around here were shaking our heads when we saw the article this morning because 1) clawbacks were just not going to happen and the whole discussion seemed to come out of nowhere, and 2) offsets are not new; there was no “new” news here. Par for the course for Weisman. Hopefully this clarifies some things.

Once, when I was a senior in high school, I overheard two kids talking about comics while riding the bus. They were super-geeks, getting into the deep weeds on John Byrne versus Frank Miller etc. I was about to interrupt to correct them about something when of them turned to me and said "Excuse me Mister, do you have the time?"

I was crushed at being called "Mister" then and this was almost 20 years ago.

The post-Harry drive to ban display of Nazi symbols across the EU is misguided for a number of reasons, most of them to do with the principle of free speech, but if the swastika is to be banned, so should the hammer and sickle. A number of Eastern European members of the European 'parliament' are now making the same point. There is, they say, "a double standard in treating the extreme right and extreme left ideologies" in Europe.

So there is.

But this doesn't seem to worry the EU's Justice Commissioner, Franco Frattini, who looks to draw some sort of 'distinction' between Nazism and the (by implication) lesser horrors of communism, a distinction that may be lost on the one hundred million or so people slaughtered in its name.

Frattini has insulted the dead and made a mockery of history, interesting pastimes for a 'justice' commissioner.

Under the White House Social Security plan, workers who opt to divert some of their payroll taxes into individual accounts would ultimately earn benefits more than those under the traditional system only if the return on their investments exceed the amount their money would have accrued under the traditional system.

The mechanism initially detailed by the Washington Post in today's editions and posted earlier on the Post's Web site was incorrect….

From a reader:

Well, remember, too, that the Saudis are holding municipal elections within the month. And it's important to note that if the Saudis didn't think they had to do it, they wouldn't. Bush is the factor.

From a reader:

Jonah,

Lately, I have been finding that I have been clicking on less and less
links from that site. I'm not quite sure if it is due to it sliding
more left, or that I am finding fewer articles of interest.

That said, I'm thinking of changing my homepage from there. Perhaps I
should just change it to the Corner, as I find I read that at least two
or three times a day. Heck, I can get my geek news, political news, and
movie recommendations from one place!

Matt Yglesias makes an intersting point amidst all the rah-rah about Bush taking on the Saudis and the Egyptians in his State of the Union: Bush has said it before:

The government of Saudi Arabia can demonstrate its leadership in the region by expanding the role of its people in determining their future. And the great and proud nation of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.

But in November 2003 at the National Endowment of Democracy, Bush said:

By giving the Saudi people a greater role in their own society, the Saudi government can demonstrate true leadership in the region. The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East, and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.

But Yglesias doesn't make a great point. He sees this as an example of Bush's words not meaning much. I see it as an example of Bush doing what he can where he can when he can. Besides, the context is very different today. We are on the heals of a successful election in Iraq and in the Palestinian territories. Indeed, by signalling out the Saudis Bush is doing what folks like Yglesias always complain he doesn't do enough. If Bush hadn't criticized the Saudis who can doubt that Bush would have been criticized for the ommission? Indeed, wasn't there a chorus after his inaugural saying, in effect, What about the Saudis? And What about Egypt?

By continuing to put rhetorical pressure on our Arab allies, he's making it clear that he really means what he says, even if he's got to set realistic priorities.

The most dramatic moment occurred when he acknowledged a dead marine's Texan mother in the balcony. As she handed what appeared to be her son's dogtags to an Iraqi woman, the president bit his lip and looked like he was about to cry -- a poignant tableau that superseded all the flag-covered coffins the Pentagon has shielded from cameras and all the soldiers' funerals the president has not attended.

The emotional highpoint of last night's event came near the end when Bush introduced the parents of a U.S. Marine from Texas, Sgt. Byron Norwood, who was killed in the assault on Fallujah, Iraq. As Norwood's mother tearfully hugged another woman in the gallery, the assembled senators and representatives responded with a sustained ovation, and Bush's face appeared creased with emotion.

On the recommendation of my friends at the Corner, I borrowed Office Space and watched it with my wife.

I guess I've not got such a jaundiced view of office work. I was bored with the amatuerish film.

i would say that the Prez's opening bid is toast... Problems with the plan:

1. not really private accounts
2. federal ownership of sinificant ammounts of corporate stock
3. long phase-in means new political clients would increase slowly as a % of the voting public
4. participants only get back earnings over 3% return? huh?

The Democrats are going to attack this plan from the right and left!

Conservatives will NEVER vote for private accounts as described in the details of the plan - or at least by Weisman.

Already talked to two top aides in the House and Senate and their response cannot be aired be repeated on family television,

The Old Media has given us an uncritical regurgitation of the anti-reform crowd’s argument that needs to be debunked. Jonathan Weisman’s article on the Post is dead wrong. There is no “clawback” in the Social Security proposal the President outlined last night. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59136-2005Feb2.html The stuff about account balances and the amounts taken out is completely made up. People would own the entirety of their accts -- opponents are seizing on the fact that people would give up bennies up front to get the acct to sow deliberate confusion about a clawback -- which there is not. I don’t know if this is an example of a journalist being hoodwinked by the opposition, or a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts, but the truth is this is a basic actuarially fair offset. An offset is based on how much you put into your account, while a clawback is based on your account's end balance. With the second, all the risk and reward lie with the govt, which undermines the ownership element.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The ranks of Americans lining up to file initial claims for jobless benefits thinned by 9,000 last week, the government said on Thursday in a surprisingly strong report that signaled healthy job growth. Initial filings for state unemployment aid fell to 316,000 in the week ended Jan. 29, matching a reading seven weeks ago as the second-lowest since before the economy tipped into recession in 2001, the Labor Department said.

he's been ecstatic for days now. it's hard to explain what life is like for iraqis right now. i think it's full of overwhelmingly emotional moments like that one [the hug]. he told me of some of his aunt who lives in a very bad (read: terrorist-infested) area of Baghdad. she is a widow (and a Sunni)- her husband was killed by Saddam. All night the imam at the mosque was broadcasting not to vote, how it is against islam to vote. in the morning she got up and went to her neighbor's house and told her friend she was going to vote. These two women left together. When they came back with their blue fingers they could see their neighbors peeking out from behind curtains. Soon after, people started streaming out of their houses and soon everyone from their neighborhood went off to vote.

he told me also how iraqis who before had been terrified of being identified as pro-American and therefore hadn't so much as looked up when passing soldiers on the street were suddenly handing out candies to them. they now get why we're there. i don't think they believed it before. so yes- the hug was amazing- and an important symbol of what is happening.

One name we honor is Marine Corps Sergeant Byron Norwood of Pflugerville, Texas, who was killed during the assault on Fallujah. His mom, Janet, sent me a letter and told me how much Byron loved being a Marine, and how proud he was to be on the front line against terror. She wrote, “When Byron was home the last time, I said that I wanted to protect him like I had since he was born. He just hugged me and said: ‘You've done your job, mom. Now it’s my turn to protect you.’” Ladies and gentlemen, with grateful hearts, we honor freedom’s defenders, and our military families, represented here this evening by Sergeant Norwood’s mom and dad, Janet and Bill Norwood.

The whole world is seeing that the car bombers and assassins are not only fighting coalition forces, they are trying to destroy the hopes of Iraqis, expressed in free elections. And the whole world now knows that a small group of extremists will not overturn the will of the Iraqi people.

And we have declared our own intention: America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

Because a society is measured by how it treats the weak and vulnerable, we must strive to build a culture of life. Medical research can help us reach that goal, by developing treatments and cures that save lives and help people overcome disabilities – and I thank Congress for doubling the funding of the National Institutes of Health. To build a culture of life, we must also ensure that scientific advances always serve human dignity, not take advantage of some lives for the benefit of others. We should all be able to agree on some clear standards. I will work with Congress to ensure that human embryos are not created for experimentation or grown for body parts, and that human life is never bought and sold as a commodity. America will continue to lead the world in medical research that is ambitious, aggressive, and always ethical.

In case you're not keeping up with the French press, I thought I'd give you a report. Figaro was on board from day one. Le Monde gave relatively favorable coverage at first, but a very mixed editorial. Today's news coverage suggests that they are feeling the ground move beneath them too. I have not gotten to the others yet, but the news-analysis on TV... suggests it is the case.

Quick, before the conventional wisdom hardens, it needs to be said: The Iraqi election was not the second coming of the Constitutional Convention. The media have made it sound as if last Sunday was 1776, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague Spring, Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Filipino "People Power," Tiananmen Square and Super Bowl Sunday all rolled into one.

[The Iraqi election]…is an event like Dien Bien Phu or the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It marks a turning point in history. It changes the future, of course, but it also changes the past.

"The greatest threats to our homeland security are the tons of biological, chemical, and even nuclear materials that are unaccounted for or unguarded. The President says the right words about the threat, but he has failed to take action commensurate with it.

"We can and we must keep the world's most gruesome weapons out of the world's most dangerous hands. Nothing is more important to our homeland security, and indeed to the safety of the world."

Paydirt! From a reader:

I knew there was something missing from my day... A random "Fletch" quote!

Love your articles, and The Corner. Keep up the great work!

In fact, that random quote has done it. I can't freeload any longer... I'm subscribing to NRODT right now. Of course, I'm going to put it on Mr. Underhill's account, but still...

Nick Schulz from TechCentralStation writes:

Jonah:

First of all, I'm dubious about Kos' traffic numbers.

Second, the Standard piece claims:

“This week, under the headline "They Finally Fear Us," Kos excerpted a Los Angeles Times story which reported that in spite of some unease with the idea of a Dean chairmanship, prominent Democrats were loath to speak out against the Vermont governor, lest they enrage the increasingly powerful lobby of Internet activists personified and led by Kos. As Kos astutely summarized the situation, the Internet activists are in the process of achieving parity with special interest groups like NARAL, the unions, and the NAACP. What he doesn't point out is that those groups for the most part maxed out long ago in terms of power and influence. The Kos community is still in its infancy.”

Nonsense. The Internet activists (i.e. folks like Kos) were supposed to deliver big for Dean in Iowa. What happened? The Internet activists failed to get out the vote, killing Dean’s candidacy. Kerry had the Democratic establishment in Iowa helping him out (thank to Gov. Vilsack). Seems the old way beat the new, hands down. Besides, labor unions (except California longshoremen) and activist groups like NARAL are good at adopting new technologies.

The Internet is a powerful tool; subtract the adjective, and you have Kos.

Ramesh, that is a very interesting -- albeit too brief -- piece. One objection I would raise is how Barnett ends it. He writes:

Many in the conservative blogosphere have been quick to label Kos a "moon bat" because of his unforgiving left-wing politics and his strident tone. Kos in turn dismisses these critics as "wing nuts." (Who says dialogue in the blogosphere isn't edifying?) This kind of juvenile give and take, however, obscures the vital fact that Moulitsas leads an influential movement, a movement whose influence is likely to grow even larger.

Whether or not that's good for the Democratic party remains to be seen.

It seems to me that whether it's "good" or "bad" for the Democratic party is at best a secondary issue. The first question is whether it's good for America and it seems to me that it's objectively bad, at least from the perspective of the Standard or NR. As you've written, it's not necessarily good for conservatives when the Democrats move to the left, even it is good for Republicans. What Barnett is identifying is a very troubling trend among Democrats to prositute their (alleged) principles to the neo-McGovernite/Michael Moore populist left. And that's not good. Period.

Geek updates.

Star Trek: Enterprise is cancelled. If they had better theme music and more Vulcan nudity, it would have lasted another season.

Stan Lee takes credit for Kirby's work.

This is an odd one, so it's primarily aimed at academic types, armchair historians etc.

I'm trying to illustrate the level and extent of intellectual interaction between the United States and Europe from the end of the 19th century into the 1930s. For example, one thing I would really love to find is a concrete illustration of the degree to which American scholarly journals (and the ideas therein) proliferated in Europe and vice versa. For reasons too complex to get into here, I want to show that America was not intellectually cut-off from intellectual currents on the continent. I've found lots of stuff on trade -- European and American economies were much more connected a lot earlier than most people might guess -- but is there any way to show that the trade in ideas was also substantial? I know it was, but I'm having a hard time making that case without droning on and on about obscure academic squabbles. If I could find out how many European subscribers there were to, say, Political Science Quarterly or how many American subscribers there were to the German or French equivalents that might help. Then again, not knowing the answer it might hurt my case. But that would be good to know too.

Similarly, I know that a great number of academics from the progressive era studied in Germany and England in the 1890s and afterwards. Is there any place I can find the hard data of the extent and prevalence of such exchanges? How about the number of foreign-born or visiting European professors at Ivy League universities?

Are there other examples I'm not thinking of? Colorful, interesting anecdotal stories are useful too (so long as they can be documented). Please send suggestions, answers, etc to JonahResearch@aol.com.

I'm still on for the speaking and the opining at American University tonight. Starts at 7:30. At the AU University Club in something called the Mary Graydon Center.

So, my girlfriend was following yesterday's Coen bros. movie thread on The Corner, and she mentioned to me that she had never seen Miller's Crossing.
BR> Since Tuesday nights are our "movie nights", I suggested I'd swing by my local video store here in Philly on the way to her place and pick it up.
BR> But when I got to the store and made the request, the clerk behind the counter gave me a strange look and--without even checking the computer--informed me that it was already rented.
BR> I asked him if he was sure, and he rolled his eyes and said: "Yeah, I'm sure. And the reason I'm so sure is because you're like the 20th guy since this afternoon to walk in here and request it. Normally, that thing gets rented only about 3 or 4 times a month. In fact, almost every one of our Coen brothers films have been rented out since this afternoon. It's like someone's throwing a filmfest somewhere or something."

Naturally, I blame you guys!

It might be more instructive to see what sort of correlation there is between the rate of population growth and economic development.

Of course, shrinking birth rates will cause some problems. Nevertheless - and maybe it's because I come from a small crowded island - but I view the prospect of smaller populations with calm, contentment and, yes, enthusiasm for the greater legroom.

A friend writes:

Hey - Newsweek sucks [expletive deleted], no doubt, but their insurgent cover almost certainly went to the printer on Saturday before the elections... They made a bet that the story would be the violence, and they lost... a bad decision, but different from ignoring the elections...

Judge Chertoff on the August ’02 DOJ memo (called the “torture memo” by Dems): Memo was prepared by Office of Legal Counsel, not the Criminal Division. He was not involved in how or why the memo was generated. His own view is that the memo did not contain a “sufficiently comprehensive” definition of torture.

Chertoff’s role in the discussions on interrogation was as a practical prosecutor discussing with other prosecutors the factors that the government should consider in determining if issues arose about whether actions should be prosecuted. He was careful not to deal in hypotheticals that could be used by anyone as forward-going license to run afoul of the torture laws.

His position was that whenever you have a criminal statute that has a specific intent standard, the good faith of the actors becomes critical in any decision whether they should be prosecuted. His consistent advice – without giving advance advice on any particular interrogation techniques – was that interrogators should conduct themselves comfortably on the right side of the line marking a good faith belief that they were not violating the law.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday held out the possibility of U.S. support to train and equip Palestinian forces as she seeks to promote Middle East peace on a visit to the region next week.

Researchers in Boston have isolated a kind of cell from human bone marrow that they say has all the medical potential of human embryonic stem cells -- a claim that, if verified, could shake up the debate over human embryo research that has divided the country for the past six years.

I almost never check my DC Office voicemail. I should, but I forget. Anyway, I got an email from the NRDC gang saying that our voicemail system was full and could we all delete our old v-mails. So I just spent 20 minutes going through messages from the last year (my apologies to all the talk-radio bookers who must think I'm a major jerk for not returning their calls).

As is often the case there were a sizable number of messages from drunks, freaks, paranoids, et al. determined to set me straight, chew me out or alert me to my own villainy. I particularly liked the message from an anti-Bush "journalist" who swore that Bush was about to lose the NH Primary because he had the goods on Bush's Nazi past. He assured me that when his story broke Bush would drop out and my Nazi, Zionist, a** would be deported to Israel. I need to check with NR legal about the issues involved in uploading voicemail to the web. Really funny stuff.

MEMORANDUM FROM YALE LAW SCHOOL

TO: The Law School Community
FROM: Harold Hongju Koh
DATE: February 1, 2005
RE: Military Recruiting and the Spring 2005 Interviewing Program

As you know, the Defense Department has lately interpreted the Solomon Amendment to require denial of federal funds to institutions of higher education that withhold assistance from military recruiters who will not pledge to refrain from discrimination in recruiting. Last year, groups of Yale Law School faculty and students filed suit in the federal district court in Bridgeport challenging the legality of the Defense Department's interpretation of the Solomon Amendment. On December 9, 2004, Judge Janet C. Hall (D.Conn.) heard argument on motions for summary judgment in these cases. A few weeks earlier, in the FAIR litigation, the Third Circuit directed entry of a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the Solomon Amendment, stating that "[t]he Solomon Amendment requires law schools to express a message that is incompatible with their educational objectives, and no compelling governmental interest has been shown to deny this freedom. ... In this context, the Solomon Amendment cannot condition federal funding on law schools' compliance with it." Yesterday, Judge Hall granted summary judgment in favor of the faculty plaintiffs. Judge Hall's opinion confirmed that the Solomon Amendment has been unconstitutionally applied to Yale Law School and permanently enjoined the Defense Department "from enforcing it against Yale University based upon Yale Law School's Non-Discrimination Policy." Judge Hall's opinion declared: "The Solomon Amendment violates the [faculty] plaintiffs' First Amendment right to freedom of speech.. . . " Yale Law School, "acting through the Faculty, has been unconstitutionally coerced into foregoing its own message [of nondiscrimination] and into assisting DoD in the dissemination of DoD's message of its "Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy...." "In addition, DoD offers no evidence to support a finding that the Solomon Amendment, and the suspension of the N[on-]D[iscrimination] P[olicy] for the past two years at YLS that it caused, has advanced its goal of raising an army through effective recruiting." ... "[T]he Solomon Amendment is not narrowly tailored to advance a compelling government interest, and thus unjustifiably burdens the Faculty Members' First Amendment right of expressive association." I am gratified by Judge Hall's judgment, which seems to me clearly correct. Her ruling brings us closer to the day when all members of our community have an equal opportunity to serve in our Nation's armed forces. This Thursday, February 3, 2005, the Spring 2005 Interviewing Program will begin. In light of the District Court's opinion and injunction, Yale Law School will enforce its nondiscrimination policy during the Spring 2005 Interviewing Program without exception. Harold Hongju Koh Dean, Yale Law School

The last few days in The Corner seem to indicate that much of the NRO readership are also big Coen brothers fans. I propose that the next NRO DC get together be a Coen brothers film festival. Just make sure not to show Barton Fink or The Hudsucker Proxy. Either that, or rent out a few lanes at "Strike Bethesda" for a Big Lebowski bowling party.

Both sides should stop playing these games. Republicans should admit they really want to restrict abortion. And Democrats should admit they just want to keep abortions cheap.

The department has accomplished a great deal in immensely difficult circumstances, but it could have accomplished even more if it had had more aggressive and experienced staff," said [Richard A.] Falkenrath, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. "It would have done better if it had been less timid, less insular and less worried about facing down internal and external opposition.

We cannot thank you all enough for the support you’ve provided us – always, but especially during the sentencing in December 2002 and the parole hearing. We were absolutely stunned by the number of people who signed the petition. ... There’s a lot of loneliness in grief, but the outpouring of affection for David and for us helps more than you can know. You can do one last thing for us. If you circulated our original request for help to friends and family who signed the petition and/or wrote a letter, please let them know of this outcome. We have no way of contacting the 1,700 people who signed the petition because we do not know most of them.

Moscow may soon make finable offenses out of courtyard fireworks, panhandling, pushy proselytizing, and loud music in apartments during the day. The City Duma on Wednesday will consider legislation to impose fines of 100 rubles to 5,000 rubles for a raft of activities that the bill's author, Deputy Oleg Bocharov, says are disrupting peace and order in Moscow streets and homes. The bill is a piecemeal collection of offenses that bug Moscow residents and police, and Bocharov said it is in response to complaints from his constituents…. "If this bill helps soothe one citizen, then it is important," Bocharov said, dismissing suggestions that police or disgruntled neighbors could misuse the daytime noise ban.

Kathryn - doesn't "disappointing" imply that you expected otherwise from the Ringo Starr of the 20th century?

Update Many Ringo defenders writing-in. I don't agree with many of their arguments. But one is irrefutable. Ringo Starr was, in fact, the Ringo Starr of the 20th Century.

Even though they are not filibustering Gonzales, Reid said earlier Tuesday that Democrats are "not going to cut and run" from a battle over Bush's judicial nominations.

"If they bring back the same judges we're going to do the same thing," Reid said of the administration.

Bush has threatened to renominate the 10 nominees Democrats blocked last year, and Republicans say they will change long-standing Senate rules to strip Democrats of their ability to filibuster if they try to stop them.

Reid sounded a note of defiance Tuesday. "Well, let them do it," he said.

If reports are true and the terrorists have murdererd one of our dolls, we must stand firm. We will destroy ten of their dolls. We will smash their rock-em-sock-em robots. And we will leave the lids of their Play-dough until it grows dry and flaky!

We cannot tolerate this aggression.

Yes, agreed, it’s all true: the nobility of the vote, the courage of the Iraqis, the challenge to the Terror Party, the lines to the voting booths with the smiling women who make the victory sign and show their inked fingers, and now the hope for a sovereign national solution that banishes the memories of the horrors of war and occupation.

All true, heaven knows, but also all false and cynical, too comfortable and easy, too condescending and consoling.

The true glory of these elections is that they flowed from bayonets, which are the dry and bitter fruit of a war and a tenacious military occupation, they are part of the global strategy of the United States, part of a wager and a strategic doctrine for global security and therefore command, they are purely and simply the exportation of a modern Western cultural model that is alien to the very roots of fundamentalist Islamic culture , that rightly considers it blasphemous, according to the fundamentalists’ principles. From a certain point of view, Democracy and Liberty are meta-principles, recurrent forms of universal human identity that run through history, from and to which they enter and exit in a thousand different forms. The Iraqi version is the reincarnation, in Arab-Islamic soil, of a social method that has become a philosophy and a myth and even a religion, which it is hard to resist in modern times.

But it is also a much more prosaic political strategy, made possible by thousands of deaths, by enormous wealth spent in weaponry, by the decision to move and use armies to confront an ambitious, global terrorist challenge, a fundamentalist uprising within a great premodern civilization like the Islamic one.

Too easy, and stupid, is the position of those who were opposed to the war and now praise the elections, without reconsidering their previous position, because the elections are a direct product of the war, they would be inconceivable without the Anglo-American troops, without the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by bombs, without all the dirty work of the Coalition Provision Authority, without the checkmate of the U.N., and the acceptance of the fracture within the West.

The elections in Iraq are an act of global sedition, the imposition of liberty as a model, a revolutionary act of the imperial sort, a ring in the chain of political necessity, not a new version of rainbow idealism, of the religion of good, humanitarian religion.. Their nobility, which is real, is tempered by steel and does not permit hypocrisy

I still don't buy that Byrne is gay in Miller's Crossing for, among other reasons, his constant bedding of the films main "twist" Verna. Not that I know a lot about such things, but chronic alcholics with gambling problems, it seems to me, would have a hard time arousing the energy to "fake it" night after night.

Yes, homosexuality is a theme in the film but it seems odd to me that the Coens would deal with it so directly in the case of Bernie and then be so mysteriously subtle when it comes to Byrne. Sure, Byrne has feelings for Albert Finney but I think it's a big leap to say they're homosexual feeling. I've never found another reviewer who agrees with John on this. I think he needs to turn down the gain on his gaydar.

Before he (sort of) signed off on regular blogging, Andrew Sullivan asked why religious conservatives aren't pushing for an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution. He said that the fact that it wouldn't win enough votes in Congress can't be the answer; neither would the Federal Marriage Amendment, and religious conservatives want a vote on that. He concludes, "[An anti-abortion amendment] deals with a much graver issue, by the religious right's reckoning--an immense loss of human life, rather than the grave evil of two human beings committing to one another for life. So why this priority? Surely, abortion is a more important matter than same-sex marriage--even for the religious right. Or is it?"

Actual supporters of the FMA would be better situated to answer this question than I am. I assume the answer is political. Republican politicians think that pushing for an anti-abortion amendment would be politically damaging, whereas pushing for the FMA isn't damaging and may even be helpful. Religious conservatives know they therefore won't get anywhere asking politicians to push for an anti-abortion amendment but will get somewhere asking them to hold votes on the FMA.

Perhaps I am incorrect in this description of the political dynamic at work here. But it does seem to me that political actors can legitimately take account of these sorts of considerations when deciding what to push for. A religious conservative, or anyone, trying to figure out whether he should fight for a constitutional amendment on a particular issue has no obligation to base his decision solely on the abstract importance of that issue. He can respond to political circumstances. Having said this, I certainly agree with Sullivan that abortion is a far graver evil than any that may be involved in same-sex marriage. And I wish him all success in his non-blog endeavors.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Miembros del Consejo Congresional Hispano comentaron hoy por medio de las siguientes declaraciones sobre el debate y voto que viene esta semana sobre la nominación del Juez Alberto Gonzáles para el puesto de fiscal general de los Estados Unidos:

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Congressional Hispanic Conference released the following statements today from several of its members regarding the Senate's debate and pending vote this week on Judge Alberto Gonzales' nomination for Attorney General:

"Alberto Gonzales is a highly qualified nominee who happens to be a true American success story and a source of pride for Hispanics across the country. I implore Democratic Senators to put partisanship aside and vote to confirm him."
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chair (FL-18)

"President Bush's selection of White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to serve as Attorney General illustrates an unwavering commitment to bring a diversity of experienced voices into the discussion of how to best protect our nation. Alberto Gonzales personifies the American dream-and as the first Hispanic Attorney General he will be uniquely qualified to fulfill the duties of the position. I urge the Senate to expeditiously confirm his well-earned appointment."
Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (FL-21)

"Judge Gonzales has excelled at every position he has held and is clearly capable of handling the duties of Attorney General. Judge Gonzales takes the War on Terror seriously, and confirming him will be a triumph for America and a great boost to the Hispanic community"
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-25)

"As the Senate approaches a vote on Judge Alberto Gonzales' nomination for Attorney General, I reaffirm my unwavering support for the confirmation of this extremely qualified nominee. Judge Gonzales' proven leadership and outstanding legal qualifications make him the perfect candidate to lead our Department of Justice."
Resident Commissioner Luis Fortuño (PR)

As far as the Gonzales nomination, the decision's been made by the Democratic Caucus that we will take 10 hours of debate over the next few days, and then there will be an up-or-down vote on Gonzales when that debate time is completed -- 10 hours on our side.

As you know, there is extremely strong feelings with the Democrats over the Gonzales nomination.

I said what I think a lot of people feel, I said this in the caucus: I'm impressed with his story. He has a story that is American success story. But that doesn't make up for the problems we have with his being the person who was the legal adviser to the president that signed off on these torture memos.

As far as I'm concerned, this torture that's gone on in Iraq, Afghanistan, is going to be something that's going to haunt this country for years to come. It's going to be a legacy that my grandchildren will inherit. It's a legacy that, with our fighting men and women around the country, they're captured, who can imagine what might happen to them after the example that we have set as Americans with torture.

So I'll be happy to respond to any questions that you have.

QUESTION: How many votes in your caucus do you think will be against Gonzales?

REID: You're asking me how many will be against Gonzales. I think probably 25 or 30.

QUESTION: Will you be one of them?

REID: Yes, I will be one of them.

You know, I've kind of adopted the Bush strategy. Start low, and if you get more than that, it looks pretty good.

QUESTION: Senator Reid, what kind of message does it send to have 25 to 30 or even more Democrats voting against the Gonzales nomination?

REID: Well, I think it sends a message that the chief legal adviser to the president has a real problem when he starts.

I don't know -- and I really don't know -- but I've had in my office -- just people from the state of Nevada, not people from around the country -- hundreds and hundreds of people who have e-mailed me, called, written letters, who are just terribly upset about this.

Every week I get calls to the Carson, Reno and Las Vegas offices about people calling in about whatever they want to call about. And by far the largest ticket item this past week has been Gonzales, even more than Social Security.

QUESTION: Senator was there actual discussion about the filibuster? Senator Leahy came out and said that it wasn't mentioned.

REID: There was a decision made there not to filibuster, and that was obvious. I think what Senator Leahy said, and meant to say, is there was never a discussion that we were going to try a filibuster. I think there was a general feeling going into the meeting that this wasn't the time to filibuster.

QUESTION: But did Senator Kennedy and others suggest there should be a filibuster? There have been reports that they did.

REID: Senator Kennedy and I had a very pleasant conversation this morning, prior to the caucus, and there was never a suggestion from Senator Kennedy that this be filibustered.

Folks, let me just set the record straight on one thing. I really didn't like the Big Lebowski. I love the Coen brothers. But TBL just didn't do it for me. I will re-watch it sometime though. Please -- and I mean really please -- no emails telling me how great it is. I'll watch it again. I'm not giving anyone the high-hat, I just don't have the email room or mental patience at this particular moment to discuss a movie I don't know well enough to discuss intelligently.

That said, Miller's Crossing is one of my all-time favorite movies. I don't see much religion or philosophy in it (indeed, I don't see much religion or philosophy in 99.998% of the movies I see). But I could watch that movie over and over again.

When I was elected district attorney of Philadelphia sometime ago -- 1965 -- there was not a single Hispanic lawyer in Philadelphia.at that time I made an effort of outreach to bring minority representation into the district attorney's office as assistants and couldn't find a single Hispanic. So it is thought a great deal of progress here. Now there are Hispanics in state attorney general's office, Solicitor General, but Judge Gonzales would be the first Hispanic to be attorney general of the United States, if confirmed.

He would bring, I think, a unique perspective because of his minority status. I think he would have a broader view, a different view on civil rights. We have an issue which is subject to some congressional oversight where some 762 alien detainees were rounded up after 9/11, and according to a report by the inspector general of the Department of Defense, there was never any showing of connection to terrorism or to al qaeda or to any reason for their detention. And while we know we live in a very, very dangerous world, there has to be some reason. It may not be as strong as probable cause for an arrest or probable cause for search and seizure or even sufficiency for stop and frisk, but there has to be a reason for detention, and that is something that I think Judge Gonzales might have some greater perspective on.

Judge Gonzales, I think, also would be expected to have a broader view on the immigration laws, being Hispanic and being from Texas, seeing the kinds of problems which are present both from the point of view of stopping illegal immigrants and also from the point of view of immigrants who come to this country who seek -- who seek a better way of life.

Similarly, I think he might have some greater insights into voting rights.

He took a position broadly viewed as divergent from the administration on affirmative action in the controversial cases involving the university of michigan. Affirmative action, always a complicated, controversial subject, but one where differing views and a broader perspective is a quality I think that would be well-served in the Attorney General of the United States.

He also took a broader view on the issue of what was required on parental notification under the Texas statute, drawing oppositions from some on the so-called right of the party. There again, a little different view and a little broader view reflective of his background and reflective of his own attitudes...

Via Clive Davis.

What if it turns out Bush was right, and we were wrong?

It's hard to swallow, isn't it?

I've long since accepted the fact that there are few material rewards -- other than a paycheck -- for the kind of writing I do. I don't get asked on many junkets. I don't get to "test drive" fancy new cars. Etc. When I wrote my lavishly sycophantic Ode to Budweiser for the magazine, I expected that I might get a case of beer or some such from the home office in St. Louis. Instead I got a nice letter from the CEO which was mostly dedicated to telling me that I was right to say nice things about Bud. My defense of McDonald's earned me not even a cold McNugget. My defense of sweatshops didn't even garner a single free rubber shower shoe from Vietnam.

Nevertheless, I'm holding out hope for some Suntory times with Bill Murray in response to the article. Though I'm sad to say it, I suspect that if I'd written a pro-Groundhog Day piece for The Nation an invitation for a drink would be more likely. I don't know much about Murray's politics, but that's my suspicion. Regardless, Bill, if you're reading this, the drinks are on me.

Several readers have asked for links to the essay by Michael Foley I mentioned in my Groundhog Day piece. Here it is. Though, if you think I over-intellectualized the movie (as many readers do), your head will explode if you read this.

But I'll take credit until it's proven otherwise. From a reader:

I'd never seen Groundhog Day, probably because I had it mixed up with Caddyshack. So, spurred by your article, I went to Netflix to order it and got a message that there was a "very long wait" for it.

Could you possibly be that influential?

On Islamofascism, his views appear fairly straightforward to me. He understands the danger, he thinks it should be fought, but he is highly critical, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, of the way in which this war is being conducted. Fair enough, I reckon.

BC-UN-GEN--APNewsAlert 02-01 0033 BC-UN-GEN--APNewsAlert,0034

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- A U.N. diplomat has said former U.S. President Bill Clinton has been selected as the top U.N. envoy for tsunami relief.

So, you want to be a reporter?

Internship opportunity for aspiring journalists

The National Journalism Center, which offers free training in the skills of media work within a context of a free society, is accepting applications immediately for its spring 2005 internship program.

The NJC provides practical experience in researching, writing and editing, plus outside assignments with professional journalists in the Washington, D.C., region and post-internship placement assistance.

Interns are responsible for their housing accomodations.

You can apply online. The spring session is tweleve weeks beginning immediately. For more information, contact Mark LaRochelle at 110 Elden St., Herndon, VA 20170. The phone number is (800) USA-1776 and the fax is (703) 318-9122. The e-mail address is Editor@NationalJournalismCenter.org.

Daily Kos posted this excerpt from a 1967 New York Times article:

U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

Me: And the guy's point is....what, exactly? That we were right to abandon our Vietnamese allies? That we should do the same to Iraqis? That the left wing of his party hasn't been moved by the democratic aspirations of those facing totalitarianism for four decades? Or maybe his point is to illustrate that the only foreign policy prism he and his kind can see through is Vietnam, even though the two conflicts have exactly nothing in common -- save their ability to elicit incoherent rage and bad historical analogies from the left.

The British founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world's biggest animal rights group, is auctioning off a lizard tattoo on her right arm -- with proceeds going to the charity.

Billed as "waterproof and weathered" and "suitable for making into a wallet or watch strap", the tattoo is being offered on Web site eBay to draw attention to the plight suffered by skinned animals.

"It's the only skin you can wear and use with the express permission of the original owner," said Ingrid Newkirk of her tattoo.

It's 0800 and only three postings in the corner; is today a holiday?

Crack that whip!

"I have never seen anything like this before," Mr. Spencer said. "It's chilling to see photographs of people who probably have no idea that they're on the Web site. Hamas's Web site would post self-congratulatory accounts of their attacks on civilians, but barsomyat.com's users are telegraphiing their intended victims in advance."

Mr. Spencer added that barsomyat.com is a "prime example" of how some Islamic extremists can utilize technology to attempt to bring Islamic religious law to the West.

"We saw in the Theo van Gogh murders that some Muslims will take these kinds of matters into their own hands," Mr. Spencer said. "The Internet makes it easier for them to do so by disseminating this kind of information. You could imagine 15 years ago how hard it would be for people to get this much information on people who they believe should be killed."

"The night before [the ceremony] I could not sleep," Yahav tries to explain. "My whole life passed before me, I felt immense anger, and I wanted to shout. Then, when President Katsav got up to speak, without thinking much, I took off my coat and stood behind him. It was 15 degrees below zero, but I was not cold. I didn't feel anything, only the anger that had built up in my gut for 60 years. When the president finished speaking, I told him that I wanted to add a few words. He moved away from the microphone and I walked up to it and asked, Why? I wanted everyone to hear my cries, even though I knew that no one would give me an answer."

Abuse of public funds and EU-federalism, yet again.

More news from the Tories:

"Oliver Letwin, the shadow chancellor, is backing plans for pacifist taxpayers to be allowed not to contribute to the Government's defence spending."

I despair.

The majority of the email responding to the G-File thanks me for (re-)introducing the work "dybbuk" into the national conversation. For what it's worth.

He's right. I did miss this one. From a reader:

I know you are getting flooded with Kingpin lines about now, but here is one you may have missed because you really have to listen to catch it. After Bill Murray wins the final tournament he is swallowed up by the crowd. In the midst of this he says:

“I’m above the law now.”

I can't say I'm an enormous fan of Kingpin, though I do like it. Bill Murray steals the show and he has one my favorite lines from his entire oeuvre. He orders his standard tanqueray and tab and then says to the waitress, "Keep 'em coming sweets, I've got a long drive." You can hear it here, though the grandeur of the scene doesn't translate well.

I was going to join in the obvious fun Kathryn's having by posting as JJ Goldberg -- my middle initial is Jacob. But there's another writer by that name and it didn't seem worth muddying the waters. Also, for a long time I went by Jonah J.S. Goldberg because my original family name was Stavaskavski, but American immigration officials forced my great-great grandfather (I think I have the right number of greats in there) to change it to Goldberg --or so family lore has it. My brother and I thought it was the right thing to do to restore the family name and stick it the Leviathan State for changing the name in the first place. Unfortunately too many of our legal documents were already set. So the Leviathan won, again. Anyway, I could go by J. Jake Goldberg (a very loose homage to J. Jonah Jameson). Or, as I did in prison, Jonah "Boom Boom" Goldberg. But I think I'll stick with the way I've always done it.

During the State of the Union address, I'd like to see GOP members of congress don those big foam hands seen at sporting events, all with the upraised finger dyed purple. I'd suggest the same for Senators Kennedy, Kerry and Boxer and their ilk, but imagine they'll be sitting on their hands during the entire address.

The Tony Blair's story made me smile....I told my husband when we were dating that the only time men send you flowers is when they are having an affair. The first time he sent me flowers I would know what he was trying to say.

In 25 years I haven't gotten flowers.

On the bright side I did get a new car for our 25th anniversary. Much better!

A federal judge ruled Monday that foreign terror suspects held in Cuba can challenge their confinement in U.S. courts and she criticized the Bush administration for holding hundreds of people without legal rights.

Fred Barnes has an editorial in the Standard arguing that Democrats have adopted "brutal tactics": calling Condi Rice a liar, Iraq a disaster, and Bush's Social Security plan an attempt to "destroy" the program. Barnes thinks that the Democrats are trying to replicate Newt Gingrich's success in 1993-94, but are misunderstanding the sources of that success.

Here's Barnes's bottom line: "The media tolerate or even encourage Democratic rage. But the White House can't afford to. Senate Democrats have enough votes to block major Bush initiatives like Social Security reform and to reject Bush appointees, including Supreme Court nominees. They may be suicidal, but they could undermine the president's entire second term agenda. At his news conference last week, Bush reacted calmly to their vitriolic attacks, suggesting only a few Democrats are involved. Stronger countermeasures will be needed, including an unequivocal White House response to obstructionism, curbs on filibusters, and a clear delineation of what's permissible and what's out of bounds in dissent on Iraq. Too much is at stake to wait for another Democratic defeat in 2006."

Mickey Kaus writes that the Democratic strategy might not be "suicidal" in terms of fundraising. I suspect that the strategy is based on genuine beliefs that have been adopted, in part, because holding them offers great psychic rewards. It allows liberals to rationalize political defeats as a matter of their superior virtue, and to rationalize viciousness as fighting fire with fire. Many liberals reacted to the 2002 and 2004 elections by concluding, with very little evidence, that they would have won if only they had been louder.

But I don't think Barnes's remedies will work. How exactly is the White House to delineate "what's permissible and what's out of bounds in dissent on Iraq"? Should the White House press secretary declare that people should watch what they say? Any attempt to restore or create a political norm will be treated as a crackdown on free speech. It will reinforce the Democrats' sense of their own persecuted virtue.

Bush faces a steeper challenge on Social Security reform than Clinton did on health care. Both parties understand the power of the issue to transform the electorate in the ’06 congressional elections. Polling data by Democracy Corps and others show overwhelming opposition to Bush’s plan among seniors, along with a high degree of skepticism that Republicans can be trusted to do the right thing on a social program their party historically opposed. Given those attitudes, Democrats are united for now in opposing Bush’s plan, but that won’t be enough to revive the party. A fighting spirit is fine, but ultimately the Democrats have to figure out how to make progressivism palatable again to the American people. Republicans have a 28-point advantage over Democrats in “knowing what they stand for.” By reaching out to the other side on a difficult issue like abortion, Hillary has begun the necessary task of defining a new politics that will be difficult for the Republicans to ridicule.

Every soldier on election duty heard intelligence warnings that insurgents would try to slip bomb-laden suicide vests into polling places beneath the long gowns of an Iraqi woman or of a man in woman's clothing. That presented a particular difficulty in a society where it is not acceptable for a man to search a woman, and there were hardly enough women in the Iraqi Interior Ministry to spend a day at every polling site conducting body searches.

But American officers devised a solution. They agreed on a plan with Iraqi security forces, who were the visible presence inside each polling place, that one of the first women to arrive at larger polling places would be searched, and that woman would in turn be asked to search 10 others. One of those 10 would then search 10 others before voting, and so on in a daisy chain.

The last two American presidential elections should have taught us not to take too much for granted when it comes to election returns. It may in fact turn out that the election results are more modest than we think them to be now. If so, I doubt it would change the overall moral of this story, but you can be sure there are lots and lots of people looking for bad news to undermine the elections' success and legitimacy. If that happens, Bush and those supporting democracy in Iraq should be very clear that we side with the voters. What I mean by this is more than we should be pro-democracy or that we should applaud those who voted. As I argued into today's column, it's important that we make those who voted the only legitimate voice of the Iraqi people. Consider, for example, the French resistance. There certainly was a French resistance. But it was hardly comprised of every able-bodied man and woman in France. De Gaulle did not command massive armies of "Free French" either. But the French --with the help of the allies -- were able to make the resistance the sole legitimate voice of the "real" France -- eventually (one could argue that Petain's Vichy government had more success on this score during the war). This was not a majoritarian argument, it was an aspirational argument. Or consider what the liberal babyboomers have done with the 1960s. They've managed to claim that hippies, anti-war protestors and Woodstock attendees represented the "real sprirt" of that decade. This is a bunch of nonsense, of course. But their success in pulling-off this marketing is instructive. For America's sake and for the sake of democracy in Iraq and the Middle East, we have to be very careful and committed to making these brave Iraqis the voice of the real Iraq.

G-File on the Iraq elections is up.

The behind-the-scenes anxiety about Dean probably equals the public support he has generated. But even some of his opponents grudgingly concede that the former Vermont governor is likely to win the four-year term unless key players in the party unify behind one of the alternatives.

A keenly awaited U.N. investigation into human rights abuse in Sudan's Darfur region does not describe violence against villagers there as "genocide," said Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail.

"We have a copy of that report and they didn't say there is a genocide," Ismail told reporters Monday on the sidelines of an African Union summit in the Nigerian capital.

However, the most dramatic revelation was his reply to Sarpong's question whether he still sends his wife flowers, prompting his interviewer to shriek in disbelief.

I've never sent her flowers. If I sent her flowers, she would get worried," Blair said.

But he added: "I am romantic. There are other ways of being romantic."

Here's his opener:

I'm just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday. I said on television last week that this event is a "political earthquake" and "a historical first step" for Iraq. It is an event of the utmost importance, for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All the boosterism has a kernel of truth to it, of course. Iraqis hadn't been able to choose their leaders at all in recent decades, even by some strange process where they chose unknown leaders. But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan.

Me: Okay, so he's "appalled" because while he said that this event is a "political earthquake," a "historical first step" and of "the utmost importance" it's just wrong, wrong, wrong for other media outlets to say the same thing? I don't get it.

He then goes on to document that Bush didn't originally want this kind of election but he had to go with it because that's what Sistani wanted. Uh, okey dokey. I just think it's refreshing when anti-Bush critics accuse him of being too flexible. It's such a nice change of pace from the usual stuff about him being a rigid ideologue.

He then writes, "With all the hoopla, it is easy to forget that this was an extremely troubling and flawed 'election.' Iraq is an armed camp. There were troops and security checkpoints everywhere. Vehicle traffic was banned."

I don't know which rah-rah for America station he was watching, but I do recall that this was a fairly well-covered fact. It's not easy to forget. Indeed, it's impossible to forget because the underlying necessity for such security is what makes this such an uplifting story, even though Cole is beyond miserly when it comes to dispensing adjectives celebrating the heroism of the Iraqi people. His prose in the wake of this histroic event is so antiseptic you could eat off it.

C'mon dude, of course this wasn't the highwater mark of democracy and human liberty we all recognized the Bahrainian elections of 2002 to have been. But it was a pretty good day. Don't let the fact that the folks you don't like are happy about it get in the way of recognizing that.

Odd story from Dilnareen at Kurdistan Bloggers Union: And now for the weirdest story yet, in Holland a bunch of kurds hired a bus to take them to voting center, they all dressed in Kurdish clothes waving Kurdish flags and even packed enough dolma to feed an army. Anyway out of all ppl that could get annoyed by this, it was some islamist morrocans who came and fought with them. Honestly huh? How did that happen. And whats weird is that its morroco, in the middle east they're kinda considered too liberal, but the morrocans in europe are a totally different story. Haven't found any media coverage of this.

In another presentation, Senator John Thune of South Dakota introduced senators to the meaning of "blogging," explaining the basics of self-published online political commentary and arguing that it can affect public opinion.

Codey is serving the final 14 months of former governor James E. McGreevey's term. McGreevey stepped down after declaring he was a "gay American" and had an affair.

The man replacing the mayor of Baghdad — who was assassinated for his pro-American loyalties — says he is not worried about his ties to Washington. In fact, he'd like to erect a monument to honor President Bush in the middle of the city. "We will build a statue for Bush," said Ali Fadel, the former provincial council chairman. "He is the symbol of freedom."

Not a MSM tipping-point, but a switch in focus -- from the bad-US to the good-victim-Iraqis, which allows the reporters to display their PC-approval of non-US people, without having to give any credit to Bush & the US.

As long as the US does not get credit, the media-professionals can aid democracy, of only because it is in their self-interest

This page has not hesitated to criticize the Bush administration over its policies in Iraq, and we continue to have grave doubts about the overall direction of American strategy there. Yet today, along with other Americans, whether supporters or critics of the war, we rejoice in a heartening advance by the Iraqi people. For now at least, the multiple political failures that marked the run-up to the voting stand eclipsed by a remarkably successful election day.

But once the votes are fully counted and the new governing and constitution-writing bodies begin their work, those errors, particularly the needless estrangement of mainstream Sunni Arabs and their political leaders, must be urgently addressed. In the longer run, this election can only be counted as a success if it helps lead to a unified Iraq that avoids civil war and attracts a broad enough range of Iraqis to defend itself against its enemies without requiring long-term and substantial American military help.

Yesterday, however, Americans finally got a good look at who they are fighting for: millions of average people who have suffered for years under dictatorship and who now desperately want to live in a free and peaceful country. Their votes were an act of courage and faith -- and an answer to the question of whether the mission in Iraq remains a just cause.

A democratic Iraq is not just a giant step forward for Iraq itself; it is a blow right at the heart of the global terrorism that seeks destruction not just in Iraq but in Britain and every major country in the world.

fred, are you okay with Rowe V Wade as it stands?

Posted by puddleriver*in*WV at January 30, 2005 07:43 PM

------------- I believe it was a bad move. I would much rather have seen abortion dealt with State-by-State and/or through Congress even if it took an amendment. In other words, there was a debate and legislative/democratic/ballot box process missing and that's why the issue won't go away.

Put the shoe on the other foot. Would you like nine men deciding that abortion should be banned?

To answer your question. I have no great love for Roe v. Wade. Doing away with it would not make abortion illegal in the States that have decided it to be legal.

According to NARAL that means today it might be banned in about nine (probably red) States. I wonder how many of the women seeking abortion in those States have to travel to get one anyway?

People should vote on laws not have Judicial Decrees decide their lives.

The fact that it was declared a Constitutional right can be applied to many contraversial subjects and to the right-to-life of a fetus as a human being as well, with which we do agree if the mother "chooses" to want the child. The law is unsettled and two-faced.

Posted by fred from Or at January 30, 2005 08:00 PM

More miserable news from Holland:

Via the BBC: “Murdered director Theo van Gogh's controversial film Submission has been pulled from the Rotterdam Film Festival because of security fears. It was one of three of his works to be shown as part of a freedom of expression event in tribute to the late film-maker's life.”

That’s terrible, but, ironically, it only emphasizes the importance of what Van Gogh was trying to say.

Worried by last week’s reports on the dangers of global warming? Well, this article in the Sunday Telegraph provides a bit of balance:

“While the world's leaders and pop stars were in Davos, a group of dissenting climatologists and oceanographers met at the Royal Institution in London to question the scientific orthodoxy on global warming. They were supported by the former editor of Nature, John Maddox who, though himself hardly a noted champion of scientific dissent – he declined to publish studies questioning the link between HIV and Aids – has nevertheless been moved to describe the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as "monolithic and complacent".

“It is not hard to see what Maddox means. While all work questioning the extent of global warming tends to be dismissed by the global warming lobby as propaganda on behalf of the oil industry, wild theoretical predictions of global warming are allowed to stand without challenge. Last week, Nature carried the results of a project called climateprediction.net, which has harnessed the spare capacity of 90,000 personal computers to run and re-run simulations of climate change. An accompanying news story in Nature was headlined "Biggest-ever climate simulation warns temperatures may rise by 11 degrees C". Inevitably, the story was widely reported in these alarmist terms. Yet when read in detail, the Nature paper told a different story.

“The climate change simulations were run 2,000 times, each time with slightly different assumptions. Only the very highest estimate predicted a rise of 11C. Most simulations suggested a rise of around 3.4C, while several actually predicted a fall in global temperatures (though these were discarded by the researchers on "technical grounds"). Moreover, the simulations proposed no timescale for the predicted changes.”

If the case for manmade global warming is as strong as we’re told, why the need for so much exaggeration?

Problems in Manchester, England at a polling station for Iraqi expats. The BBC reports that “about 200 demonstrators were chased by another group who burned their flags, while other Iraqis clashed with police.”

The reason for the trouble? An Islamic group was protesting against the elections. Some Iraqis objected to being told that they shouldn't vote.

“David Kahrmann, from the Iraq Election Team, said the protesters "were not even Iraqis". "The Iraqi community here were saying, 'Why are these people who are not even from Iraq protesting against these elections?',"

Indeed.

I think that, at least for some time, the election has turned the tide regarding the MSM. I'm watching CNNI right now, and I can hardly trust my ears. Anderson Cooper calls the terrorists "thugs", tells about their using a young man with Down syndrome for a suicide attack as a proof for their ruthlessness. Christiane Amanpour is full of praise for the Iraqi voters, Paula Zahn instinctively says "Terrific!" in reaction to the reports. I would not have thought all this to be possible, I expected "doom and gloom" reports all over. As far as I can follow the other US media, I really think this will at least temporarily have made a change for the better.

It's even true for some media in Germany. "Spiegel Online" is now finally using the "T" word and asking Europe to do more to help. The Financial Times Germany reacts very positively. Only our friends from the left, "Frankfurter Rundschau" and "tageszeitung" can't join the Iraqis in their celebrations. It's all illegitimate, only meant to help the "occupiers" and their "puppets", civil war is imminent, there's no reason to be joyful. Roger L. Simon is so darn right: Those people on the left are indeed the "new reactionaries"...

Sitting in a hotel lobby in Sofia, Bulgaria Dr. Khaled Hakki sips slowly his coffee.

"Elections in Syria are Next" he vows with the confidence of a Kurdish doctor who speaks fluently seven languages.

The reaction to the Iraq vote amongst Syrians has been something of a phantasmagorical dream. Gone are the skeptics who have claimed that the US entered Iraq for its oil to replace it with Syrian faces green with envy for a new and democratic Iraq whose population has suffered as much under Ba'athism as have the Syrians. The smug on their faces are gone. Now, they believe.

"Don't you find it strange that Iraqis vote in Syria and Syrians cannot vote in their own country?" fused Dr. Mohammed al-Ghaida, the son of the leader of one of the largest tribe in northern Syria that boasts close to 150,000 members of which close to 10,000 have already joined the Reform Party of Syria. Smoking continuously, he adds: "It is just a question of time before we take control of our destiny and for all Syrians to return to Syria to choose a new leadership capable of bringing Syria into the 21st century". Amen Dr. Al-Ghaida.

These conversations took place exactly a week before the elections but if the news coming out of Iraq today is true, Iraqis have in one day silenced the critics who claimed that Arabs cannot handle or better yet do not want democracy, have sent a very clear and loud message to all the other oppressive regimes in the region that autocracy is crumbling, and have, with ink on their finger, challenged the wisdom of most American policy makers who, through years of badly constructed policies, kept the Iraqis chained to their rulers. Conventional wisdom in Iraq says that Kissinger is out and Wolfowitz is in.

In the aftermath of this elated and historical day, it is hard to imagine Syria standing still or better yet the world standing still in the face of Syrian despotism. No matter what happens next, Syria is about to change dramatically and not because Assad wants to but because Iraq is forcing the ripples of democracy and the Ba'athists in Damascus can do nothing but stare in disbelief. If Assad has any iota of wisdom or self preservation he would announce tomorrow that Syria is changing its constitution to allow other parties to participate in the political process, freeing all prisoners of conscience such as Riad Seif and Aref Dalilah, and capitulating to a new Syria where the best and the brightest can govern with total transparency and accountability to the Syrian people.

But then self preservation is the last thing Assad can handle at the moment because although democratic Iraq is breathing down his neck, he cannot see it the way he did not see the effects of 9/11 on the United States.

the Moose contends that the democratic left should hope for a positive outcome in tomorrow's vote. Millions of brave Iraqis will risk their lives to vote. We must honor the democratic aspirations of Iraqis and the selfless courage of our troops despite our profound differences with the Bushies. Fascism and terrorism must not succeed in Iraq.

The Election Day just ended. The first real multiparty election in the history of Iraq just closed. I had to vote in Duhok where I am registered for the food ration since nearly 13 years ago. In Duhok (vast majority Kurds) the process was very smooth with a huge participation, very safe and secure environment and well organized.

According to initial readings from voters and officials in all Kurdistan (by the current definition the three provinces of Duhok, Erbil and Sulimaneya) the participation in the minimum was more than 85%. The three provinces while having the highest percentage of voting had no incidents at all (Thanks God).

In the controversial province of Kirkuk the Iraqi police and security were able to control the situation to a great extent. Nevertheless a blind bomb was able to kill one civilian. People I talked to from Kirkuk stated that the family of the innocent citizen insisted to vote before burying the body. The killed man was a middle age Kurdish man.

In Mosul, nearly two millions and divided by Tigress into two halves, one majority Kurd and the other majority Sunni Arabs the situation was very diverse. The Kurdish side did welcome the election and participate wherever possible while the other part of the city was completly election free!

In Baghdad the contribution has been much beyond the expectations. Today I talked to two families living in two different places in Baghdad. I was surprised to hear how motivated people in Baghdad were! This is the first time since the fall of Saddam that I could feel the stand of the silent majority. I never believed that innocent people can challenge the terrorists. In one center in Baghdad a suicide bombers exploded himself at around 7:30 am while people were just arriving to vote. The incident resulted in the killing of few innocents. The person I talked to who lives in that neighborhood stated that the attendance to the attacked center later in the day was unbelievable! The second family I talked to, also in Baghdad, had a similar story.

Another pro was the freedom in decision making. The voting centers were amazingly free from any political party influence! Oh my God, for people in my age group and older this is unbelievable. We remember the Saddam's elections with the outcomes of 99.99.99%…and how fearful was it when you would arrive in the voting center. Although there would be no more than one candidate (Saddam Hussein) and all what you had to do was to say yes or no but the attendance used to be really 99.99% simply because you and your family would be in a real danger if you would not go. The joke among Iraqis after each election was that the new government's number one's task or agenda was to find the .001% of the population who said no for Saddam and kill them!! The new experience of free voting today for Iraqis was huge, just huge.

The cons to this election were the complexity of the voting forms. Every one had to make three choices in Kurdistan and two in the center and south by selecting numbers one in each form. One would be who do you chose for the Iraqi National Assembly (who could be a person or a list, but in both cases will have a name and a number, for example 273), the other for Iraqi Kurdistan's National Assembly (for the Kurds living in Kurdistan) and the third for the province's councils (18 around the country). Thus every one would be required to remember three or two numbers among tens of numbers. Of course one could read the names too but finally the shortcuts will be numbers and this was a bit difficult for unused Iraqis!

Overall at the end of the voting day, like majority of Iraqis I am very happy but wish to know when tis ink will be cleared from my thumb!. Around the country there have been around 10 terrorist (some of them suicide) acts. I just feel that for the first time since the fall of Saddam there is a good chance for the new Iraqi government and those who support a free Iraq. On the other hand today's elections were a blow on the face of many countries in the region who do not agree with any progress toward stability and happiness and democracy for Iraqis (even if American way!!).

According to the independent high Iraqi commission for elections report earlier today around 70% of Iraqi voters did participate. Regardless to who will win and who will make coalitions with whom the most important thing in my view is the courage and voice of silent Iraqi majority. Iraqis were continously asked where are the majority? It is about how to express politics and interest!! Not that all the problems are solved but a chance for learning from mistakes and a big step forward.

Nice email:

Just thought you might appreciate this reminder that today is also the anniversary of the Tet Offensive. Cronkite's gone, Dan's on his way out, and we have you, Fox, and the rest of the blogosphere to tell this story straight today. Thanks for all you do. If you guys weren't there we'd be fighting Vietnam at home and losing all over again.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — A young man smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee in a Saudi cafe worries that Iraq's elections could lead to civil war. On the banks of the Nile, a student strolling with his girlfriend dismisses the polls as a sham meant to place a pro-American government in Iraq. Yemenis, chewing their mildly stimulating khat leaves, express hope the United States will pressure other tyrannical regimes to change.

"And as John Nichols in The Nation and Robert Fisk write, this "election" is not going to have the results Bush and his warmongering cronies want it to have."

We can only pray that's true. For the sake of peace, this sham can't be seen as a success