Who Can Really Say?

Tonight on Nightline Ted Koppel will read aloud the names of the soldiers killed in Iraq. Koppel disclaimed political motivations, saying he thought doing this now rather than say, on Memorial Day, was a good idea exactly because folks might not be thinking of soldiers just now.

"But we felt that the impact would actually be greater on a day when the entire nation is not focused on war dead," he said.

Others disagree.

protein wisdom: "Fair enough. On Wednesday, you were quoted in The New York Daily News as saying you were initially concerned that this program not make a political statement..."

Ted Koppel: "Not only initially, I still am. I don't want it to make a political statement. Quite the contrary. My position on this is I truly believe that people will take away from this program the reflection of what they bring to it --"

protein wisdom: "-- which for the typical 'Nightline' viewer is a visceral distrust of American military force and an abiding hatred of gun-toting hicks in camouflage -- "

Ted Koppel: "-- Well sure, there's that. But I think it is just as possible for a staunch supporter of the war to come away from this program very moved and content that it was done well, as it is for someone who is an opponent of the war to come away with exactly the same feeling. I also have no illusions. I think it's entirely possible that people who hold those differing points of view will watch the same program and come away wishing it had not been done."

protein wisdom: "You realize nobody's going to watch this thing, don't you?"

Ted Koppel: "We realize we're up against Cinemax Friday Night, yes."

So what happens? The Sinclair Broadcasting Group decides to preempt Nightline tonight on its affiliates.

The company said the program "appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq."

But here's the best part. Sinclair's decision has itself been criticized:

Military Families Speak Out, whose anti-war [italics added] members have relatives or loved ones in the military, condemned Sinclair's decision, saying it was "dishonoring our troops and their families."

The group's Web site posted one member's letter of opposition.

"The Sinclair Broadcast group is trying to undermine the lives of our soldiers killed in Iraq. By censoring `Nightline' they want to hide the toll the war on Iraq is having on thousands of soldiers and their families, like mine," wrote Jane Bright of West Hills, Calif.[Italics added}. (Her son, Sgt. Evan Ashcraft, was killed in July near Mosul, Iraq.)

To recap. Ted Koppel is going to read the names of Iraq War dead but it's not political. An ABC affiliate won't broadcast it because it's political. And an anti-war group wants it broadcast because it's, well, political.

This will be on the final exam.

Posted by Peter at 7:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's the deal. Per Tim Blair, the "latest crazy random words game" is this:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

What did I find? No books in the Command Center from which I, 'er, Command this place. I walked into the next room, remembering a small pile of books on the file cabinet next to my desk, and came up with this from Keeton, Robert E., Trial Tactics and Methods:

The opening and closing witnesses have positions of special prominence.

Inspiring, no? But then I realized I'd forgotten that Churchill, Winston's, The Grand Alliance, was indeed a bit closer than the book that for ten years had propped up the shelf of my stereo rack. Page 23, Sentence 5 has Sir Winston speaking of his first meeting with Harry Hopkins:

I always enjoyed his company, especially when things went ill.

Readers -- do it in the comments.

What's next? Should we each grab the closest DVD/VHS Tape, run it out to, say, 5 minutes into the flick, and tell the next dialogue?

Posted by Peter at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This link is on the long side but well worth reading: the story of a Marine officer escorting the remains of a fallen Marine from Dover AFB to his final resting place in Montana. Link from Instapundit who takes a well deserved shot at Michael Moore.

Posted by Peter at 6:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I haven't blogged on the Oil for Food Scandal, accurately and hilariously dubbed UNSCAM by Instapundit, because:

a) the target is too easy;

b) this blogger is too lazy;

c) I received vouchers from Saddam too;

d) I don't know how to make cool charts that explain it all.

Posted by Peter at 6:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Daniel Drezner says Bush's chances of winning in November improve if the situation in Iraq doesn't stabilize. He figures that since Bush's poll numbers haven't been hurt in recent weeks it's because voters don't think Kerry's alternate approach is, in fact, much of an alternative at all. It's an interesting analysis and worth reading.

Drezner also links to a Krauthamer Op-Ed debunking Kerry's Iraq strategy. Krauthamer's point was much the same one I made earlier this month. If the point weren't so obvious I'd complain.

Posted by Peter at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Musil vivisects (is that a verb?) the NY Times over it's inconsistent coverage of conflicts of interest.

Posted by Peter at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gregg Easterbrook got a day job and will stop blogging.

Posted by Peter at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Instapundit has an uncharacteristacally long post that starts off with a link to Bush's media strategy and morphs into a more general discussion on big media bias. If you read all the links it will take you forever, but it's still worth reading just the stuff that appears in the original post and updates, like this:

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Julie Cleevely emails:

Your reader James Bourgeois has just summed up the media in Britain perfectly. A couple of honourable exceptions, but in the main our media is no more than propaganda and lies. The BBC is a serious problem- Al Jazeera for middle class snobs.

Well, I think that these criticisms are a bit strong. Media bias is more like unconscious racism, most of the time, than it is like deliberate misrepresentation. While there are certainly cases of deliberate misrepresentation, most of the time I think it stems from a worldview so deep-rooted that they're unaware of it.

But it's certainly true that the notion of the professional press as a check on the government has no foundation. The Constitution envisions freedom of speech and of the press as checks -- not the institution of the press as one. That's a key difference, I think.

Posted by Peter at 6:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Watch out, the saying goes -- you may get what you ask for.

Posted by Peter at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Sunday NY Times has a front page class journalism piece today called "Google Goes Public? Search for 'Rich Get Richer'". Google is considering going public, and the article delves into who stands to make the big bucks if that happens. Here are the opening drive-by paragraphs:

Tiger Woods has his small stake. So do Shaquille O'Neal, Henry A. Kissinger and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All can be counted among that small club of people lucky enough to own a sliver of Google, one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley and what could be the hottest deal on Wall Street this year.

Michael S. Ovitz, once a top Hollywood agent, pulled strings in an effort to enter a pool that was being offered to a group of rich investors and would eventually own a small piece of Google. But that was in the late 1990's, and apparently his star was already fading. Mr. Ovitz was turned away.

What we don't learn until the bottom of the article is that two venture capitalists, Ron Conway and Bob Bozeman, created two investment funds specializing in risky internet start-ups, that these funds invested in Google, and that it was one of these funds that Ovitz tried to join. Then we learn that one of the funds (the first and much smaller of the two) will do well if Google goes public, but the other fund has done so poorly to date with other investments that a successful Google public offering will only recoup the losses already suffered by the fund. Ovitz tried to get into one of these funds.

We also read of Stanford University, "one of the country's richest universities". It owns the Google search engine technology because it's inventors, two Stanford students, created it while working on a University funded project. Stanford licenses the technology to Google and also owns a piece of the company.

So what did we learn about how the "rich get richer"? Rich people make money by putting huge sums of it at risk (the two funds raised $180 million), losing most of it, and then breaking even or making some money, depending upon the timing of the investment. Rich universities make money by funding research.

How could this be? You mean the rich get richer by actually putting their money into high risk investments that sometimes pay off, or by funding research? All along I thought the rich just made money because they were, well, rich.

But what I still don't know is how the richest newspaper in the country get's away with stuff like this.

[Update: added link 4/27.]

Posted by Peter at 7:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since I was born a few days after the apparent invention of dirt, I was in high school during the first Earth Day. I may have been wearing Earth Shoes.

Gregg Easterbrook provides Earth Day In A Nutshell, a few quotes from which follow:

Readers of this space may have detected a certain haunting theme in my commentary on environmental issues. To recap: In the Western nations all environmental trends except greenhouse-gas accumulation are positive, but doomsayers and the media insist on pretending trends are negative, while conservatives refuse to admit that the reason trends are positive is that regulations work.

Read it all -- I cant' figure out how to quote the rest since it's all good.

Posted by Peter at 8:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Because I wanted to learn how to write stuff like this:

`(b) As used in this section, the term `profane', used with respect to language, includes the words `shit', `piss', `fuck', `cunt', `asshole', and the phrases `cock sucker', `mother fucker', and `ass hole', compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).'.

To find out more, try here.

Posted by Peter at 8:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yeah, right. But I did have to run to the grocery store, drug store, and beer store. Anyway, some quick hits:

If a story in Newsweek is true, David Bernstein says Cheney and Rumsfeld should resign. Oh, and Ashcroft comes out smelling like a rose. Go figure.

Next, this link, actually the transcript of a speech called The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States, is long and I don't expect anyone will really read it. But I can't pass up quoting some of it. It seems that marijuana use was in part demonized in the late 1930's and 1940's because 5 murder defendants were aquitted by reason of insanity -- they were under the drug's influence at the time of the crime. Does marijuana cause insanity, you say? Well, in Congressional hearings in the 1930's that's what a Temple University professor testified to. He also testified that he'd injected the active ingredient THC into the brains of 300 dogs and two of them had died -- the problem is, he testified 10 years before the THC was actually discovered. And that same professor was called as a witness at these trials. Here's how it went:

In the most famous of these trials, what happened was two women jumped on a Newark, New Jersey bus and shot and killed and robbed the bus driver. They put on the marijuana insanity defense. The defense called the pharmacologist, and of course, you know how to do this now, you put the expert on, you say "Doctor, did you do all of this experimentation and so on?" You qualify your expert. "Did you write all about it?" "Yes, and I did the dogs" and now he is an expert. Now you ask him what? You ask the doctor "What have you done with the drug?" And he said, and I quote, "I've experimented with the dogs, I have written something about it and" -- are you ready -- "I have used the drug myself."

What do you ask him next? "Doctor, when you used the drug, what happened?"

With all the press present at this flamboyant murder trial in Newark New Jersey, in 1938, the pharmacologist said, and I quote, in response to the question "When you used the drug, what happened?", his exact response was: "After two puffs on a marijuana cigarette, I was turned into a bat."

He wasn't done yet. He testified that he flew around the room for fifteen minutes and then found himself at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot high ink well.

Well, friends, that sells a lot of papers. What do you think the Newark Star Ledger headlines the next day, October 12, 1938? "Killer Drug Turns Doctor to Bat!"

Does anyone notice a timely coincidence here (is there any other kind?). Wasn't Batman created in the late 1930's? Hmmmmm? Well I'm just saying . . . .

Posted by Peter at 8:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Isn't this the kind of stuff that Andy Rooney's always complaining about?

By splitting "Kill Bill" into two parts, Tarantino and Miramax gambled that audiences would be willing to pay twice the ticket price to catch both chapters.

The risk paid off nicely. The two movies cost a total of $60 million to produce, and "Kill Bill ? Vol. 1" alone has grossed $180 million worldwide, with the movie's video release last week selling 2 million copies in its first day, padding revenues by about $40 million more.

"It was a terrific decision financially," Sands said.

Posted by Peter at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Steve Jobs has finally learned the lessons taught him by Bill Gates. When asked why Apple was uninterested in an internet music alliance with Real Networks, Job's reply?

The iPod already works with the No. 1 music service in the world, and the iTunes Music Store works with the No. 1 digital-music player in the world," he said. "The No. 2s are so far behind already. Why would we want to work with No. 2?

Posted by Peter at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I root for the Yankees because I think rich people should be able to own everything, screw everyone, and win championships every year. Adam Smith would have been a Yankee fan. Karl Marx would have pulled for Bud Selig's Brewers.

That said, the last two weeks have looked like a communist guerilla war for the Bronx Bombers -- nay dare I say it -- a quagmire! Whatever. Things will turnaround one of these days, and it would be nice if today was one of those. As much as I like watching the Yankees stick it to the Red Sox though, I'd prefer to see steady, solid play that leads to an extension of their Evil Empire come October.

In the meantime, the Phillies have a new ballpark and the local buzz about the team is strong and growing. I was looking for two tickets to a weekend game yesterday and couldn't find any available until the end of May.

I've never been much of a Phillies Phan, but I've never disliked them much either, and they'll be my alternate bandwagon this summer. I'd love to see a Yanks-Phils Series in October, followed of course by the purchase of another WS victory for the Bombers.

And no, I don't feel guilty about that in the least.

Posted by Peter at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Set your VCR's, boys and girls. Sunday night 60 Minutes will air the final hatchet job installment in their popular series "Bush for Dummies".

Part One, first seen 4 months ago, involved the "shocking" revelations in Paul O'Neill's book, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, that Iraq war planning began almost immediately after Bush's inauguration, months before 9/11. To O'Neill's credit he at least qualified the claim in the first week after the book's publication:

People are trying to say that I said the president was planning war in Iraq early in the administration. Actually there was a continuation of work that had been going on in the Clinton administration with the notion that there needed to be a regime change in Iraq.

In Part Two Richard Clarke gets no such credit. From Clarke we learned that Bush didn't take the terrorism threat seriously enough and certainly not as seriously as Bill Clinton's White House did. Hey, fair enough I suppose -- I mean, it's hard taking terrorism seriously while you're planning to invade Iraq, right? But Clarke's revelations didn't budge Bush's poll numbers and I'm guessing it's because if nothing else, people were too busy laughing at the notion that Clinton's "more serious" approach to the problem actually achieved anything.

Now comes Part Three in the form of Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack". Here we learn:

Beginning in late December 2001, President Bush met repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq even as he and administration spokesmen insisted they were pursuing a diplomatic solution, according to a new book on the origins of the war.

The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA's conclusion that Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet's assurance to the president that it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Hold the phone! I thought the war planning started when Bush took office, not after the Taliban was routed 10 months later. And get this from George Tenet -- the WMD's were a slam dunk!

I don't know how much longer Bush can get away with these awful lies. And I think the best way to expose them is to go back to the transcripts of the Congressional debate about the Iraq war resolution, and of the UN Security Council deliberations over Iraq in the winter of '02-'03. I'm sure we'll find all sorts of great stuff there, about how peaceful and well intentioned Saddam was, and how everyone could feel safe in the knowledge that he'd completely disarmed after Gulf War I. Certainly there'll be many quotes from upstanding political leaders and diplomats patiently explaining how Saddam's Iraq was ready to rejoin the peaceful nations of Earth, how the Clinton policy of regime change in Iraq, endorsed unanimously by Congress in 1998, was now outdated and unnecessary. And how about the useful insights from the likes of our French and German friends, that Saddam had disarmed, how sanctions were no longer required, and why Hans Blix could stop his inspections because we all now knew there were no WMD in Iraq.

Yeah, let's go find those quotes -- that'll be the last nail in the coffin of Bush's arrogant, unilateral, and monomaniacal pursuit of War with Iraq.

Posted by Peter at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Contractor Tells About His Mission.

Posted by Peter at 9:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Paul Berman wants to have it both ways in today's NY Times. He wrote an Op-Ed piece essentially a) making the case for the War in Iraq (that's War 2 in the Terror Wars if you're keeping count) and then b) trying to make the case that the reason we don't have more allies in the War is President Bush.

First, part a):

The Sept. 11 attacks came from a relatively small organization. But Al Qaeda was a kind of foam thrown up by the larger extremist wave. The police and special forces were never going to be able to stamp out the Qaeda cells so long as millions of people around the world accepted the paranoid and apocalyptic views and revered suicide terror. The only long-term hope for tamping down the terrorist impulse was to turn America's traditional policies upside down, and come out for once in favor of the liberal democrats of the Muslim world. This would mean promoting a counter-wave of liberal and rational ideas to combat the allure of paranoia and apocalypse.

So far, so good. Then, part b):

Now we need allies ? people who will actually do things, and not just offer benedictions from afar. Unfortunately ? how many misfortunes can fall upon our heads at once? ? finding allies may not be easy. Entire populations around the world feel a personal dislike for America's president, which makes it difficult for even the friendliest of political leaders in some countries to take pro-American positions.

Point b) is his first mistake, and he rolls rapidly downhill from there. His argument assumes without any established basis that the reason we don't have more allies is because those potential allies are put off by President Bush. This is high order hogwash. Countries make foreign policy decisions based upon their interests and their commonly held sense of self. France, Germany, and Belgium (I won't even dignify adding Russia and China to the list) didn't oppose the War because they don't like Bush. They opposed it because it wasn't in their interests, as they perceived them, and because they don't imagine themselves as having anything to offer to offer the rest of the world, short of their own self-inflated sense of importance.

Berman goes on to exhort John Kerry to bridge the gap caused by Bush's bad manners. The problem, as Glenn Reynolds points out, is that the Democratic Party doesn't want to hear what Berman's got to say, most of which was roundly rejected by the party (and, of course, Kerry) during the primary season:

Kerry's problem is that a lot of the Democratic base -- and in particularly a lot of the noisy Democratic base -- sees things differently. He's gotten into the race by stressing his differences with Bush on the war, but he's going to have a hard time being elected if he can't stress his differences with the anti-American elements within his party.

Berman's problem is that, like Kerry, he wants to blame the lack of additional international effort in Iraq on Bush -- except that the real problem is that the French, Germans, and Belgians would have voted overwhelmingly for Howard Dean.

Posted by Peter at 7:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tim Blair is an Australian journalist, so reading his blog is like straddling the Pacific Ocean. I know next to nothing about Australian politics, but I gather there's an election pending, with Prime Minister John Howard who staunchly stands with Bush and Blair on the War on Terror, opposing one Mark Latham. (I think we need a better name for the War -- channelling George Lucas I'm going with the Terror Wars).

Howard recently said even John Kerry wouldn't change US policy on Iraq, even as Latham wants Australia out. Blair bites into this chewy morsel and finds a full meal.

Posted by Peter at 7:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought President Bush could have done a better job handling some of the questions at his press conference on Tuesday. Are you sorry? What mistakes have you made? He fumbled one and muffed the other.

Fortunately, he's scrambled out of the pocket and found an open receiver in the end zone. Yes, it's a genuine apology.

Posted by Peter at 6:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A moonbat finally got on Kerry. Kerry started out his appearance with the usual we'd be better off if France was on our side speech, without ever explaining how that might actually make a difference. As convincing as he surely was, here's what he got back during the question and answer period:

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, retired college professor Walter Daum angrily accused Kerry of backing an imperialist policy in Iraq and called on the candidate to demand the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"You voted for this," Daum shouted. As he spoke, a group stood silently and unfurled a large sign that read, "Kerry take a stand: Troops out now

"You're not listening," an exasperated Kerry said at one point. ."

You and what Army?

Posted by Peter at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wasn't going to post tonight but then I read this:

So you can use this as a club against Bush and his foreign policy; or you can use it against not only Clinton's foreign policy, but his alleged committment to deficit reduction. But these sorts of arguments miss the point, which is that these guys are doing what we want them to. We wanted them to tell us we could have it all: small military, and high security. Like the other things we want from politicians, such as higher spending and lower taxes, greater personal freedom and tighter communities, less police and more safety, and so on, this turned out not to be possible. And while it's fine to yell at politicians who tell us that these things are possible, we also need to yell at ourselves, who won't vote for them unless they do.

Sheez, just read the whole thing.

Posted by Peter at 8:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another two-fer.

So tonight I'm watching NBC Nightly News and near the end of the broadcast there's a piece about how gas prices aren't that high right now if you consider inflation. Well plant hair on my head! No shit!

But for weeks they've been telling us about near "historically" high and rising gas prices, and blah blah blah blah blah. Over a month ago, Gregg Easterbrook exploded this particular piece of tripe and it was obvious to -- well at least me but I'm not smarter than all 6 or 7 of the rest of you, am I? Not by that much anyway.

Then, from Megan McArdle comes this:

Yesterday I turned on the news and caught a short item about tourism in Antarctica. The piece concluded with a quote attributed to a "leading scientist" bemoaning the increased tourism and saying (approximately) "we have two choices; we can bury our heads in the sand and do nothing, or we can take every possible measure to protect it".

But oops! The guy who's quoted isn't a scientist, he's a tour director. And oh -- he's not in favor of stopping the tours.

D'oh!

Posted by Peter at 7:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is hope for me yet.

I'd deeply appreciate it if anyone can give me Rebecca's phone number.

Posted by Peter at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The first, a link via the newly redesigned Instapundit, to a Seattle Times article illuminating errors in Richard Clarke's recent book. Clarke wrote that the capture of millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam was the result of an alert to be wary of possible terrorist activity put out at the end of 1999. The problem is, it wasn't.

The second is a link from Eugene Volokh to Jeff Jacoby's Op-Ed in today's Boston Globe. He hits Clarke's overall theme where it hurts:

Prior to 9/11, no president from Jimmy Carter through George W. Bush properly understood the swelling danger of Islamist terrorism. None recognized that we were under attack by a ruthless enemy bent on global conquest and the destruction of Western liberty. Neither did leaders in Congress, nor elite opinion makers in the media.

Far more significant is what has happened since 9/11: The Bush administration went to war. It destroyed Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan, toppled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, turned Pakistan into a terror-war ally, and intimidated Libya into ending its hunt for nuclear weapons. Crucially, it has demolished the perception of America as -- in bin Laden's words -- a "weak horse" that bolts at the first gunshot. And it did it all in the face of withering political fire at home and abroad.

How you regard that performance -- as invaluable wartime leadership by the president or as a fraud "made up in Texas" -- is likely to decide how you vote this November. For what matters now isn't who was wrong before 9/11. It is who has been right since.

Posted by Peter at 6:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A month or so ago, I believe it was the American Family Association that tried to run an online poll -- akin to "Do you favor gay marriage?" or something like that. They were going to send the poll results to Congress, assuming they'd get their hard core supporters to resoundlingly poll against gay marriage. But once the net found out about it, the poll was inundated with responses that were, well let's say contrary to the results they thought they'd get. The AFA took the poll down and ground their teeth a bit closer to the nerve I suppose.

What was really funny was that they seemed surprised at the response. But just to keep things even, John Kerry's campaign tried a similar gimmick and got plastered today. Visitors to Kerry's website today were invited to "make their own page" showing their support for his candidacy. It didn't take long for things to 'er, break down.

Like this.

And this.

And here's a little payback.

Seriously, aren't there, like, paid professionals running this site for Kerry? Are they that stupid?

Uh -- yup.

Posted by Peter at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I heard about this story a week or so ago. (If you're prompted to put in a username and password, use "laexaminer@laexaminer.com" as the name and "laexaminer" as the password. Btw, this works at a TON of news sites requiring registration, if you don't want to be bothered).

But is seems Stan Lee get's around even further. This, from an email home, from a soldier only about 3 weeks in Iraq (bold empahsis added):

Well, I am no longer in Camp Arifjan, Camp Virginia, or even Kuwait. I am right now, smack dab in the middle of Iraq in the Sunni Triangle. We convoyed up here (about 30 of us) to set up our company area for when the rest of the unit arrives. . . .

I had a civilian contractor in Camp Arifjan at the motor pool tell me after a long conversation, that there is nothing in the world worth dying for.
He tried to convince me that nothing is worth your own life. I looked at him and all I could say was "Then what do you live for?"
I look at these people and as much as I hate to think of it, I realized that these marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen who have died during this war and the aftermath have not died and should never be considered as dying for nothing. What we are fighting for are the lives of thousands and thousands of men, women, and children. No they are not Americans but they are human beings. America is a very powerful country and I was once told that with power comes responsibility.

Read it all.

Posted by Peter at 8:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some sobering thoughts on the 9/11 Commission from Megan McArdle:

The second problem is that we are all seeking some reassurance that we can somehow prevent all this stuff in the future. Everyone is very earnestly asking "What changes do we need to make so that our intelligence doesn't (for example) tell us Iraq has WMD, or not tell us that Al-Qaeda's about to attack us?" Almost no one seems prepared to accept the possibility that the answer is "None. Intelligence just sucks." The energy expended trying to blame this failure on someone--George Tenet, Louis Freeh, Condoleezza Rice, or whoever--goes beyond mere regular partisan bashing. It seems to me to express an underlying conviction that of course someone could have stopped this--it's only a question of who. For the commission, especially, it's an unacceptable answer; they simply cannot turn to a frightened American public and tell them that it's really too bad, but we live in a scary world.

Don't sobering thoughts suck?

Posted by Peter at 7:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm adding two more links to my blogroll -- and I'll pretty much leave them to speak for themselves. The first is to Mark Steyn, who introduces his latest for the Chicago Sun-Times with this:

For a year or so now, I've woken up to a ton of e-mails each morning with the subject marked BUSH LIED! -- or, to be more precise, BUSH LIED!!!!!!! I'm not one who thinks it helpful to characterize a policy difference as a ''lie.'' So, when John Kerry says he supports the Kyoto Treaty even though he voted for a bill that declared the United States would never ever ratify it, that doesn't mean he's a ''liar,'' it just means that, well, to be honest, I haven't a clue what it means, you better to take it up with him, now he's out of the hospital after his elective surgery. ''Elective surgery" means you vote to have the operation, and then spend the next year insisting you've always been strongly opposed to the operation.

The second is to James Lilek's and his Bleat (this from Thursday):

Then, a few hours later with Judy Woodruff:

Kerry: "They are doing [the transfer] in such, a frankly, an inept way, Judy, that they're not really inviting anybody sufficiently to the table. People don't want to go to work for Paul Bremer and the provisional authority. What you need to do is have a transfer of authority for the reconstruction and for the transformation of the government to a legitimate international entity. Every day that goes by that this Administration has refused to do it has complicated the doing of it. They in fact have made it much harder to accomplish what could have been accomplished and should have been accomplished a long time ago. So I refuse to accept that logic from them, and I laid out this plan months ago. They are trying to do it through the back door, almost through the keyhole, rather than openly coming forward and acknowledging they need help."

If I may coin a new term: diplobabble. We have a stark choice: Bush?s blunt and frequently inarticulate remarks, versus Kerry?s prolix, labrynthic diplobabble. Which legitimate international entity? Not the coalition we have now, obviously. He can only mean the UN, whose dealings with Iraq have not exactly been characterized by high-minded noble intentions. Incidentally: If the US pressured Israel to make peace with the PA and grant massive concessions, would anyone be complaining that the agreement hadn?t been run through ?a legitimate international entity??

Beneath all the diplobabble is a clear tenet of the Kerry Doctrine: Actions are legitimized solely by the quantity of allies. (In the case of Rwanda, Sudan et al, inaction is legitimized by the number of other Great Powers disinclined to act.) Other people don?t want to go to work for Paul Bremer, and in Kerry?s view that?s a problem.

Solution: make our Marines go to work for Kofi Annan.

Questions: when the UN takes control before the hand-over, and refuses to authorize a military response to an assault on coalition troops, and the emboldened ?rebels? kill a dozen Marines in a new attack, can we vote Kofi out of office? Can we sue Hans Blix?

And when the French officials show up to help ease the transition to civilian leadership, what do we say when they insist on banning headscarves for schoolgirls?

Steyn and Lileks. It doesn't get any better.

Posted by Peter at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nicholas Kristoff give A Spanish Lesson in today's NY Times:

It's not just that the Bush administration's arrogance and unilateralism have led Pakistanis to give Osama bin Laden a 65 percent favorable rating, compared with 7 percent for President Bush (the latest international polls from the Pew Research Center make you want to cry). Even in traditional allies like Spain, which we now need to fix the mess in Iraq, the good will after 9/11 has dissolved into suspicion and hostility.

There are a couple of things that bother me about this argument. First, it assumes that absent the so-called arrogance and unilateralism we'd have all of these useful allies on our side. After all, the notion goes, wasn't everyone on our side in the days following 9/11?

Yes, they were on our side but only in a soft and mostly useless sense. What "drove them away" was not arrogance but policy. What drove them away was our desire to do something about the universally acknowledged international problem that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

But more than that, the argument places responsibility upon the US for public opinion in other countries. They "hate" us, so it must be our fault. The possibility that they "hate" us more or less anyway doesn't enter into it. But public opinion of the US has been declining in Europe for decades. As the Cold War aged increasing proportions of public opinion opposed our strategy to strengthen nuclear missle capabilities in Europe. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Europe continued on a different path from the US -- their advocacy for the Kyoto Treaty and "hate" for us when we wouldn't embrace it is just one example. Oh -- sorry -- we "unilaterally" refused to sign it so I guess that makes it our fault too.

You want alliances? How about this: Bush 41 is fairly criticized for how he left Iraq's Shi'ites hanging out to dry in the aftermath of Gulf War I. But he also takes heat for leaving Saddam in power at all, and this point, to me, is most telling.

By pulling together much of the West, East, and Arab world in opposition to Hussein Bush 41 accomplished what Bush 43 could not. What did we get for it? We got a coalition that would have instantly shattered had we suggested the war should end with Saddam's removal. In other words, as support for removing Saddam from Kuwait grew, the liklihood that we could reach an effective resolution of the problem that was Saddam Hussein shrank to nil. To be fair, Bush 41 was happily trapped in this box with the rest of our Gulf War I allies. He never even pushed against the wall of the box.

But we are not trapped in that box any longer. Kristoff and the rest of the arrogance and unilateral crowd want us back in there though. Kristoff's argument is couched in terms of process: if we'd been better/smarter in our approach to the Europeans, then they'd be agreeing with us now. But it's really an argument about substance. It's really an argument about what to do next in the War on Terror. Europe isn't serious about aggressively fighting that war, and since we are, they don't like it. And no amount of diplomacy and nuance would change this. After 9/11, the US jumped out of that Gulf War I box. Europe still sits safely inside.

Posted by Peter at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I pointed out somewhere before that there was clearly no support from the GOP for more aggressive action by President Clinton against terrorism. Instead, whenever he took action (as paltry as that may have been) he was roundly criticised for it.

We're presently using a microscope to examine the flip side of that coin. Easterblogg consider what things might have been like though, had President Bush acted differently before 9/11.

Posted by Peter at 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Andrew Sullivan posts a letter from a Marine in Iraq.

Posted by Peter at 8:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This link is Not Work Safe.

It comes from Erosblog. I read every post on the page and nearly laughed my ass butt off.

Let's see -- I've written off proofreading, and the effort to maintain family standards appears to be suffering. (Sorry about the "ass" above.) Could Gomorrah be next?

Posted by Peter at 9:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Timothy the Tortoise is dead at, as Howard Cosell would have said, 160 years of age. Via Silflay Hraka.

Posted by Peter at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A while back as I was adding the Volokh Conspiracy to my blogroll I said this about Eugene Volokh: ". . . what I really enjoy about his writing is that he does it so well, and yet so dispassionately."

Here's a good example. Instapundit collects his usual compendium of blog comments on Sen. Ted Kennedy's recent speech, in which Kennedy said:

Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam, and this country needs a new President. . . .

Kennedy has been roundly criticized for comparing Iraq to Vietnam (see the Instapundit links) and a few have come to his defense. Read Eugene Volokh's measured rebuttal to that defense to get an idea of what I meant way back then.

Posted by Peter at 6:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jeff Jarvis, a founder of Entertainment Weekly, blogs about media and journalism. He's got two good posts today, one about his experience as a writer at People Magazine (now celebrating its 30th Anniversary), and a second collecting many blog posts about the latest idiocy of John "the government knows what's best for you to read, see, and hear" Ashcroft. The latter is the source of a major lump in my throat each time I (metaphorically) pull a lever in the voting booth.

Posted by Peter at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Toon Zone is full of all sort of cartoony goodness -- with online videos of ancient Merry Melodies and Looney Tunes shows, including Hare Ribbin' (Director's Cut) [link fixed], where Bugs shoots a hunting dog in the mouth! Cool.

Posted by Peter at 7:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A stink of sorts is brewing over some comments Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) made in a speech honoring Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV).

Here's Crow Blog's quote, and comment:

Dodd said of Byrd, "You would have been a great senator at any moment....you would have been right at the founding of this country, right during the Civil War....I can't think of a single moment in this nation's 220+ year history where you would not have been a valuable asset to this country."

You sure about that, Chris? Byrd, of course, was a Klansman at one moment in the nation's history... Let's see... Senator pays tribute to aged senator, and in the midst of ass-kissing, gives his blessing to said aged senator's past racist acts. So where exactly is the mainstream press (or more than a handful of people, for that matter) on this?

The comparison, of course, is to the Trent Lott (R-MS) Affair, when Lott, in praise of the late Strom Thurmond, said:

I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.

There are two problems here. First, Lott specifically praised a point in Thurmond's career when Thurmond stood squarely for racist segregation. Dodd has done no such thing regarding Byrd. It's true that Byrd used to belong to the Klan but I'm unaware that this took place while he served in the US Senate, and Dodd was praising Byrd's overall career as a senator -- not a specific moment in that career.

Second, I think Lott got his just desserts, which was the loss of his leadership post. Dodd isn't the Senate Minority Leader as Trott was the Majority Leader. I couldn't find on quick perusal of Dodd's website any reference to party leadership posts, and his only "official" position if that's the right term is Ranking Member of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee.

Dodd's comments broadly embraced Byrd's career. Byrd left the Klan in 1943 and the last documented contact seems to be in 1947. He also fillibustered Civil Rights legislation in the 1960's. (All of this from an unflatteringly Byrd portrayal by Michell Malkin.) But I don't think this rises to the level of Lott, who was the leader of his party, and who favorably referred directly to Thurmond's segregationist politics. Dodd doesn't hold that sort of leadership position (the forfeiture of which was Lott's consequence) and didn't wax on specifcally about how wonderful those Klan-Byrd moments were. It ain't the same thing.

Posted by Peter at 9:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From today's Washington Post:

Iraq is slipping into chaos as a radical young Shiite leader rallies the country's Arab population against the U.S. occupation, say international online commentators. . . .

Fears that Iraq is falling apart have never been more common in international news sites.

Had international commentators been even close to accurately predicting the course of the Iraqi invasion in March 2003 I'd be concerned. But they were virtually all wrong in all respcts. No humanitarian disasters, no weeks or months of street fighting in Baghdad, no uprisings from the "Arab Street", no thousands of US casualties.

I don't mean to be cavalier and I don't claim to know what's going to happen in the next few days or weeks in Iraq. But if the past is any guide I doubt this latest round of hand wringing will ultimately be justified.

More analysis from Steven Den Beste (added to blogroll).

Posted by Peter at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Start and stop. Start and Stop. Drink. Stort and stap. [slap] Sorry about that.

I tried to put something together tonight but was interrupted by the beginning of the baseball season (Pitt 2, Phl 1). I apologize for this, and promise that it will stop in November.

Posted by Peter at 9:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've tried to keep this a family blog, oh how I've tried. But I cannot resist porn in the form of an almost 200 year old wood carving.

My only saving grace is that it's in the Winterthur Collection.

Posted by Peter at 6:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My good friend and email correspondent Glenn (he was the groom in a wedding where I was the best man, and vice versa) is deeply suspicous of GWB. A while back he tossed off the line that his "conspiracy theorist" side wouldn't be surprised if hiring was still down because all the CEO's that support Bush weren't hiring yet, on the theory that they were waiting for the most opportune moment to hire, so as to boost the Bush campaign.

Little did he know how stupid brilliant Bush is.

Posted by Peter at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a 1999 Slate article, William Saletan wrote:

Some Democrats call Republicans who make these arguments unpatriotic. Republicans reply that they're serving their country by debunking and thwarting a bad policy administered by a bad president. You can be sure of only two things: Each party is arguing exactly the opposite of what it argued the last time a Republican president led the nation into war, and exactly the opposite of what it will argue next time.

Read it all.

Posted by Peter at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Thursday Yogi Berra and the NY Yankees returned from Japan. Asked if he had jet lag, Berra replied: "I had it, yesterday afternoon. But I slept it off."

Posted by Peter at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I didn't have much regard for Phillies CF Doug "I'm not a MLB talent but I play one for a living" Glanville. But after reading this, I have to say I've changed my mind.

Posted by Peter at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Instapundit says this is interesting (how stock options played a part in the Roaring 90's) and I agree:

The government was another beneficiary. Executives paid ordinary income tax when they cashed in the bonuses, and that led to a surge in government tax receipts that was little understood at the time. The budget bean counters assumed that those taxes were offset by reduced corporate taxes, because companies got deductions for the option profits, and so did not affect the deficit. But a lot of the profits came on options from unprofitable companies.

That helped to produce the Clinton budget surpluses, and the bursting of the bubble meant that most of the forecasted surpluses were going to vanish anyway, even before the Bush administration cut taxes.

It's by Floyd Norris in the NY Times.

According to Advisory Opinion, this means the deficit isn't due to the Bush tax cuts, since revenues were due to fall anyway. Well I guess so, except Bush did cut taxes and presumably that resulted in some reduction in revenues which thereby increased the deficit.

But I don't think this is a dollar for dollar exchange. I'm not sure how large the Bush tax cuts were for the tax year that just ended, 2003. But let's say they amounted to $200 Billion. Had they been only $100 Billion it doesn't mean that the deficit would have been $100 Billion smaller. Presumably, the additional $100 Billion in tax cuts induced an increase in economic activity that offset some of those losses. Still, some of the deficit has to be related to tax cuts. I agree, though, with the general point that although the projected surpluses are gone, it's not primarily Bush's fault. He only gets to preside over the result.

I don't know where this appeared in the paper version of the Times, but Advisory Opinion seems to:

The New York Times doesn?t get it right very often, but when they do they bury it in the eighth paragraph in a technical article on accounting and tax law under the fold in the business section. I guess this conclusion isn?t as newsworthy as the page 1 article (complete with silly pictures) about how Hollywood greats like Whoopi Goldberg are slamming the president in their TV shows.

Posted by Peter at 9:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Were we misled about Iraq's WMD? Maybe so.

Posted by Peter at 7:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The cast of the Simpson's -- capitalism at its finest.

Posted by Peter at 9:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was in a terrible accident today, lost both feet and one hand, but I can still count the number of people reading this blog, and they all should immediately click here and read this wonderful article (well it's part journalism and part short story) by Michael Lewis in the NY Times. Hurry up, it's already 3 days old and the Times doesn't keep stuff up forever. (It's not short so save it or print it out if you don't have the time to read it now.) If you get a dead link, let me know and I'll figure something out.

Lewis wrote Moneyball (I'm too lazy to link to it), which I've highly recommended to several friends, all of whom have ignored me to date. I'm not surprised at this, since all of my friends have achieved quite nicely and I'm certain they're acutely aware that I had nothing to do with it. Be that as it may, if you read the link and get bored, then forget what I said about Moneyball.

Posted by Peter at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today President Bush signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, making it a separate offense to harm a fetus in the commission of a federal crime committed against a pregnant woman.

It's a perfect example of my ambivalence about the Republican Party. I'm a registered Republican and vote that way most of the time but not always. But it's hard for me to feel more partisan kinship. There are few reasons to believe this law will make a difference in practice because there are relatively few federal crimes that involve pregnant women. You'd never know it from listening to its proponents however. No, it's a milestone achievement! This didn't stop Laci Peterson's parents from showing up (that is, being invited to appear), even though their daughter (and grandson in utero) was the victim of a state crime.

No, mostly this law is about laying the groundwork for future constitutional litigation over abortion. If a fetus is a person, protected by federal criminal law, then . . . well you finish the thought. Of course, the fetus was never considered a person for the purposes of a criminal prosecutions before abortion was medicinally available, but hey -- let's take a shot at it.

What bugs me most about GOP social policy initiatives is how close they are today to Democratic policies, in the sense that they so often promise to right some great injustice but in fact are simply a pretext for being able to go home to the faithful and say "See -- we got something done! Maybe it's just politics and both sides play that game. Whatever.

So all you pregnant women out there -- feel safer tonight. Even though the vast majority of crimes against pregnant women that also harm fetuses involve state laws that are unaffected, your Congress and President are at work for you!

Posted by Peter at 7:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm slowly building my blogroll, and just added Scrappleface, a place where it's April 1st every day.

I also added Stephen Green, the Vodka Pundit, who mixes politics with recipes for food and drink, a compelling combination.

The links I've added so far are to blogs I read daily or at least weekly. At some point I'll branch out but I've still got some work to do. Hell, I've got more work to do than McDonald's has buns, Goodyear has rubber, or Hooters has . . . oh never mind.

Posted by Peter at 6:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)