REGURGA-BLOG

2002-06-17T02:32:00.000-04:00

I've moved!

I have a new name, a new look, and a new URL. Go to http://www.horologium.net, and don't forget to update your bookmarks.

2002-06-16T03:19:00.000-04:00

I am infected (infectuous?)

Check out the Human Virus Scanner. Here's my result: (some of these are not accurate!)

Human Virus Scanner
The virus that have infected you will be show here along with thier cures, if known.

Viruses you suffer from:

Junkfood
Eat some real food. Something which you can identify the source of every ingredient, not the point of manufacture.

Amiga
Gnome is better than workbench. BEOS is better than Amiga OS. The TV Modulator was a pain in the arse and an EXTERNAL power pack? I ask you. And it didn't have a built in MIDI port like some of its rivals.

Religion
Read "God's Debris" by Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert guy)

Windows
Try MacOS X. It's based on UNIX, it has a smoother UI than Windows and it doesn't suck.
As an extra feature the boxes look nice.

Politics
Stop caring!

Brand Names
Having a well-known name doesn't make it good.

Hippyism
Free love is passe and potentially dangerous, and patchouli smells like cat piss.

Conspiracy Theory
Face it, the elected government is in control. Actually that's quite scary.

Environmentalism
Consume more stuff! It's easier to buy new stuff than to recycle.

Viruses you might suffer from:

Linux (80%)
Install the latest version of Microsoft Windows. Learn to love it.

USA (80%)
Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves! [repeat]

Gaming (70%)
Life is not a game. Roll 3D6. On a 4 or more go out and do something with your life.

Sci-fi (80%)
Stop wearing the stick-on ears.

Discordia (90%)
Buy a suit. Invest your money. Eat hotdog buns on a friday.

Computer Games (90%)
Stop staring at the screen and get some fresh air. You should see a doctor about the RSI in your thumbs.

Macintosh (80%)
Use a mouse with more than one button.

---------------------------------------------------

Link courtesy of Doug's Dynamic Drivel, by way of Patio Pundit.

2002-06-15T22:13:00.000-04:00

Civil Unions for All

While doing a little surfing today, this article in the Manchester Union-Leader caught my attention. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with this paper, it makes the Washington Times look like the New York Times; they supported Steve Forbes in the 2000 GOP primary, and it wasn't because of his position on the flat tax. I found it absolutely incredible (but gratifying) to see an article supporting gay rights in a publication of their reputation.

Although this article was written in October, I did not see the article before today. Nonetheless, it very closely tracks with one of the very first items I blogged here, after following a debate between Shouting 'cross the Potomac's Tony Adragna and Zonitics's Edward Boyd. What I wrote was:

What I propose is a radical redefinition of marriage--only marriages performed by a religious leader shall be defined as a marriage. Any other type of joining, including heterosexual unions performed by a justice of the peace, shall be considered a civil union, with the same legal priveleges.

What Mr. Swayne wrote:

Enact a federal civil union law. Change the laws with property, representation and dependent protections from “marriage” to “civil union.” Eliminate penalties that keep blended families and elderly couples from getting hitched. Make civil unions available to gays and straights alike. And give marriage back to houses of worship. You want legal protections? Get a civil union. You want marriage? Go to your faith community.

While we are arguing from fundamentally different viewpoints, we arrived at the same conclusion.

2002-06-14T20:08:00.000-04:00

Light Posting

Sorry for the low post count over the past few days, but an attack of Real Life™ intervened. Couple that with some changes for this blog, and you end up with a disincentive to post.

Posting will be light until Sunday evening, unless the middle east blows up, or the EU dissolves, or somebody says something monumentally stupid (Robert Scheer and Cynthia McKinney are excluded, because they always say monumentally stupid things).

2002-06-14T20:01:00.000-04:00

Tapped vs. the Green Party

Tapped has been on the warpath lately regarding the Green Party (this post has links to a Salon piece--which requires a subscription-- and an American Prospect article, which does not). Seems they are bent out of shape at the fact that the Green Party is now running candidates against "good" liberals such as Paul Wellstone, and it may be hurting the Democrats in their efforts to retain control of the Senate, and to take control of the House of Representatives. Tapped feels that the Greens should support the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, in order to keep the evil Republicans from running the show, even if the Democratic Party isn't an exact ideological fit with Green Party issues.

I wonder if they felt that the Reform Party should have supported the reform-minded wing of the GOP in 1992 (when Perot's candidacy doomed Bush's chances for a second term). How about the Libertarians? They scored enough votes in the 2000 election to topple Slade Gorton and make Maria Cantwell the junior senator from Washington. Neither of these groups have views entirely congruent with the GOP, but they could have worked inside the GOP to achieve their goals, but instead ran candidates which sucked away votes from the Republican candidates.

The Green Party is currently the largest third party in the United States (in terms of votes received in the 2000 election), due for the most part of the self-destruction of the Reform Party. However, like all minor parties, they don't have a snowball's chance in hell of electing a major candidate (Jesse Ventura was a fluke, and Angus King of Maine doesn't belong to any party). The last person initially elected to congress as something other than a Democrat or Republican was Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont; there has never been a Libertarian, Green, Reform, or Natural Law candidate elected to a statewide or federal post (except for Ventura, who has left the moribund Reform Party). The only reason the minor parties exist is for the electorate to express their dissatisfaction with the current platforms of the major parties. This is not Europe, where multiparty coalitions form the government; our system is not set up as a parliamentary democracy, which is why third parties are less relevant in the US then they are elsewhere.

Full Disclosure: I am registered as a Libertarian, although my voting record is mixed. I cannot see registering as a Democat, but as long as the Republican Party retains its current cast on social issues, they will not enjoy my support.

2002-06-14T14:39:00.000-04:00

The Enneagram test

It seems to be taking the blog world by storm. I took it, and this is my result:

take free enneagram test

I'm not sure that that is all that accurate a reflection of myself, since this, totally dissimilar, result was tied with the above:

take free enneagram test

I'm not that empathic, but I'm also not overwhelmingly self-critical.

2002-06-13T00:29:00.000-04:00

Experts say study definitively shows kids' vaccines are safe

Not that yet another exhaustively documented, thorough study will have any effect on the anti-vaccination agitators.

I am a strong proponent of vaccination programs, because they work. Measles outbreaks are very rare in this country, because most kids are vaccinated.

One of the groups behind the anti-vaccination movement here in the US appears to be chiropractors. While I do not know if they are formally organized, many chiropractors are firmly in the anti-vaccination camp. While I believe that the chiropractic method has its applications (I've had several fix me up when I've been sore), I don't agree with their "all medication is bad" philosophy. For the same reason, I oppose any type of medical practice that eschews proper use of medication, such as holistic medicine or naturopathy.

I don't think that chiropractic can effectively deal with my condition, which is controlled fairly well by medication. A routine blood test 18 months ago revealed that I had an astronomically high triglyceride level of 977. After three months on Lopid, it had dropped to a high, but much more reasonable 229, where it has remained (with continued use of the drug). Such an abnormally high count cannot be accounted for solely by diet; there are strong indications that genetics are at work here, a view that is strengthened by my parents' medical histories. Consequently, I will most likely be taking this medicine for the rest of my life. Those who would advocate against medication argue that I am poisoning myself, whereas I believe that I am correcting a genetic defect.

2002-06-12T01:59:00.000-04:00

Gotta love Ebay

Where else but Ebay could you find something like this?

(Link courtesy of Radley Balko, at The Agitator.)

2002-06-11T23:56:00.000-04:00

Private Data Vs. Public War

The Christian Science Monitor takes note of Bob Barr's relentless work on protecting privacy issues with this editorial. Barr has proposed a bill that requires a "Privacy Impact Statement" that will assess the impact of any bill. It notes a few new bills currently making their way through congress, and points out how privacy may be trumped by a bureaucracy that wants unrestricted access to information, whether or not it is needed. The problem with centralized databases is that they can be hacked, and such a large target would be irresistable for those who want information for any purpose, nefarious or benign.

It's a shame that Bob Barr is such a wing-nut. He is the biggest advocate of privacy issues of the 535 senators and congressmen, but his bombastic, overbearing style (and his views on social issues) make him an easy target. He makes Newt Gingrich look like the Tooth Fairy. If he were to dial down the rhetoric just a tad, he'd be a far more effective legislator, but the damage is done, and his image is set in stone. If we're lucky, someone else will take up his drive for privacy, someone who is a little less over-the-top.

2002-06-11T23:30:00.000-04:00

Victims need constitutional rights, too

The trial of David Westerfield, accused kidnapper and murderer of 7-year-old Danielle van Dam, began this week in a San Diego courtroom.

Two especially interested parties will be excluded from most of the otherwise public proceedings – the dead little girl's parents.

This is the beginning of an excellent Joseph Perkins column in the San Diego Union-Tribune, which details how a concern for the civil rights of perpetrators has trumped (or trampled) the civil rights of the victims, the ones who were wronged. Any time the concept of victim's rights is broached, the ACLU reacts, claiming that the laws already on the books adequately protect the interests of victims and their families.

Someone let the Van Dams know that the laws are looking out for them; they probably think differently right about now.

2002-06-10T23:43:00.000-04:00

Islam: The next American religion?

This article, from the Arab Times, is one of the most unintentially amusing articles I have seen in a while. Susanna Cornett of Cut on the Bias takes down the writer with a few well-placed comments. You can almost hear her laughing as she kicks the legs of his arguments out from underneath him.

2002-06-10T23:37:00.000-04:00

Mob boss John Gotti dead at 61

God puts a hit on the Teflon Don.

Read about it in the Seattle Times, here.

2002-06-10T23:32:00.000-04:00

Don't Freeze Us Out on Drilling

is the title of a guest editorial in today's Los Angeles Times. The author is an Alaskan resident who worked for an environmental study group concerned with the impact of constructing 6000 miles of pipeline through Canada to the US. Much of his research was conducted on Alaska's North Slope, where the Bush administration wishes to begin drilling. His views are ones that are seldom considered by the environmental agitators on K Street (the vast majority of whom have never been to Alaska), and are worth reading.

2002-06-10T00:01:00.000-04:00

Another blogger takes a flying leap

...Off of Blogspot. Cut on the Bias has a new home, and a slightly crisper look.

2002-06-09T23:13:00.000-04:00

In Israeli Hospital, Bomber Tells of Trying to Kill Israelis

This is an account of the life of a failed suicide bomber, currently undergoing treatment in an Israeli hospital. You may remember him as the chap who was dragged along the road by the Israeli bomb-squad robot after his explosive charge failed to detonate correctly. It is rather interesting how he works to justify what appears to be a rather nihilistic decision to kill himself, while taking out as many Israelis as possible.

He said he was "pushed" to make his attack not by Israeli action or a terrorist group, but by "the love of martyrdom." He added: "I didn't want revenge for anything. I just wanted to be a martyr."

This is the problem the Israelis are facing. How does one deal with people who are so disdainful of human life, including their own?

"I know Israel," he said, recalling his six years as a peddler here. "I know that the individual Israeli citizen is innocent like us. Unfortunately, we are victims of our leaders, sitting on their chairs."

No, you're not. Your decision to try and blow yourself up has nothing to do with Israel's leaders, and little to do with the Palestinian Authority.

Mr. Zaydan, who has been interrogated by the Israelis and is expecting to be prosecuted, said bitterly that he knew he would be jailed for life and remembered only as a terrorist.

Gee, he's bitter that history will correctly note his role. Reap what you sow, bud.

"I feel sorry, because it was a mistake," he said. "But as a human being, I should live like others. The way there is an Israeli state, there are people living in this state, enjoying life, having someone protect them. I don't live in this situation. I don't feel I'm secure."

<heavy sarcasm>

It was a MISTAKE? You mean, you DIDN'T intend to strap on that bomb and kill Israelis? Oh, our mistake. Sorry about that.

</heavy sarcasm>

Soldiers could enter Jenin at any time, he said, and he constantly feared being arrested. "As long as life continues like this," he said, "you will have people who think like me." He insisted that he wanted peace, but said he saw little chance for it.

You mean, when te suicide bombers finally killed enough Jews for the Israelis to react, they actually ARRESTED people who were involved in terrorist activities? For shame! Perhaps peace would become a reality if poeple like you stopped strapping 30 pounds of fertilizer on, and then finding Israelis amongst which you detonate yourself.

2002-06-09T22:42:00.000-04:00

N.Y. Jews to Start Armed Patrols

Citizens armed with shotguns will patrol the streets of the heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhoods because of comments a suspected terrorist made about targeting them, a rabbi said.

Expect to see the Brady Center and some of the more extreme left gun-grabbers complain that this "sends the wrong message", that "we must stop the cycle of gun violence" and so forth. I don't think it will do much to stop terrorism such as what we witnessed on September 11th, but I am willing to bet that crime will drop even further in neighborhoods with patrols. Just a guess on my part.

The whole story can be found here.

2002-06-07T23:49:00.000-04:00

Ouch.

Another link to Media Minded, this time to a reply to a bloviating "indy media" type who took offense to MM's first dismantling. This time, MM pulls no punches, and the results are devastating. Check it out.

2002-06-07T22:07:00.000-04:00

Global Capitalism foes overwhelmed by counterdemonstrators

hehehe

Link is here.

A quote from ExxonMobil's chairman quietly blows away the anti-globos arguments:

ExxonMobil chairman Lee Raymond told CNSNews.com that he was unfazed by the protesters. "We operate in over 200 countries around the world and for some reason that is bad," Raymond explained. He said ExxonMobil is a good corporate citizen throughout the world, hiring citizens from the countries in which it operates to satisfy 95 percent of its labor needs.

"If that is what they mean by globalization, then frankly everybody should support it," Raymond said.

Refute that, anti-globalization fanatics.

2002-06-07T21:49:00.000-04:00

Campaign Finance Reform bad for Democracy

No, I am not quoting Limbaugh or National Review or Mitch McConnell, I am quoting everyone's favorite left-wing blog, Tapped.

Tapped read a brief Alterman post about campaign finance reform (he doesn't understand the topsy-turvy politics behind it), and pumped out this screed. I, of course, have to add my own comments to their post.

First of all, it was not "obvious" that the recently passed reform bill was going to benefit Republicans more than Democrats, as Alterman suggests. Or rather, it was obvious but no one wanted to talk about it. Only TAP's campaign finance expert was saying such things publicly (and had been for years).

Well, that's not the fault of the GOP, as Tapped is alluding.

But no one else wanted to discuss the obvious political implications of the bill because that might have rocked the boat. The reform groups were so committed to achieving some kind of reform that they didn't want to do anything that might jeopardize its passage. In fact, Common Cause willingly accepted (some have gone as far to say they suggested) the compromise of raising the hard money limits in exchange for a partial ban on soft money. (The ban is "partial" because it only effects national parties -- state parties can continue to raise soft money, as can the myriad of other political committees that will be established just for that purpose.) Meanwhile, the Democrats in the House and Senate lulled themselves into thinking that they could keep pace with the Republicans in raising hard money (in spite evidence to the contrary). And the editorial boards of the Post and the Times stayed above the political fray. Finally, the Republicans in the Senate, House, and White House were hardly going to squeal.

Again, it was not the job of the GOP to point out that the pet project of so many Democrats (and a few McCain acolytes) was likely to hurt the Democrats more than the Republicans.

That's an important part of the explanation of the politics behind this reform. But there's more: Congress and the White House, in the wake of Enron, felt something had to be done to free themselves from the taint of special interest money. It became a way to get out from under the political scandal. After all, both parties and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue had been bought off by Enron and Andersen. They figured as long as they could get a bill that didn't disturb the status quo all that much, why not pass it to provide political cover?

Enron provided the excuse to pass this turkey; it has been kicking around (in a similar form) for quite some time now.

There's also another political axis on this issue -- incumbents vs. challengers.

This new reform works well for all incumbents. After all, they are not running against each other, but against challengers who already operate at a disadvantage in the money game. There's no way challengers can keep up with incumbents in raising those $ 2,000 contributions. And the reform is perfect for President Bush (another soon-to-be incumbent lest we forget, and one who broke the bank the last time on money from wealthy individuals). It will make his job of running for president even easier the next time around. He'll once again call himself "a reformer" (stealing that mantle from John McCain). Moreover, Bush knew -- as did every Republican in Congress -- that overall the bill plays to the GOP's fundraising strengths.

Well, if the Democrats cannot count, then the GOP shouldn't prevent them from running off a cliff. Or perhaps, it was political principles at work here (The GOP had a few too many members who blinked, and therefore prostituted themselves to supporting a law that will likely be found unconstitutional. Bush should be lumped in with that group for signing it. If it were simply a matter of looking at the numbers, why would Mitch McConnell (R-KY) work so tirelessly to defeat a bill that would benefit his party? (Conversely, why would loyal Democrats such as Russ Feingold work to pass a bill that would harm their party? There are principled members of both parties, although Tapped would probably disagree with me on that, or on who in each party qualifies for that label).

Reformers should have been fighting -- and should continue their fight -- for reforms that strenthened democracy. Unfortunately, this new law won't improve the sorry state of the "American experiment," which is why Alterman is right: The strum und drang wasn't about principle, it was about posturing. One of the most interesting articles written near the end of the debate came from Fred Barnes in the Wall Street Journal (sorry, no link), a piece debunking Republican fears about the campaign finance bill. Its title? "Armageddon for the GOP? Hardly."

I posted a suggestion for REAL reform in April, and sent a copy of it to TAPPED earlier this week. They have not responded to it, so it apparently does not strike their fancy, as it would result in a severe clamping down on political posturing. <sarcasm> It's unconstitional, but we're far too interested in progressive feel-good policy to worry about little details like that. </sarcasm>

I think the line Reformers should have been fighting...for reforms that strenthened democracy would read more accurately if the last two letters were changed from "cy" to "ts", as that is what Tapped is really trying to say.

2002-06-07T11:38:00.000-04:00

Today's newsrooms

Media Minded has a lot to say about today's newsroom culture (and I use the term loosely) after reading a Kathleen Parker column. Go see what he has to say in this entry. His last paragraph is a fairly scathing indictment, and I cannot imagine that his newspaper is vastly different from all of the others.

2002-06-07T00:24:00.000-04:00

Headline of the day

Goes to the San Diego Union-Tribune for this one:

Mental review scheduled for naked suspect

There's so many different lines of attack on this headline...

2002-06-06T23:55:00.000-04:00

Take a look at what the growth boundary created

King County, in which the city of Seattle is located, has had a growth boundary in place for about 10 years. Land outside this boundary cannot be subdivided for housing. As the city's population has increased, the amount of land available upon which to build has dwindled, and homes have become very expensive. Bruce Ramsey, editorial columnist for the Seattle Times, discusses this anti-populist populist measure, and its unintended consequences, in this column. A telling statistic:

A typical single-family lot — 6,000 square feet, flat, no view — costs $140,000 or $150,000 in King County.

This is Seattle, mind you, not New York or San Francisco. Eventually, when it becomes impossible for the average worker in Seattle to ever hope of owning a home, perhaps the policy will be rethought. On the other hand, slow-growth ordinances only pass in one-party People's Republics, and I've never heard of one being repealed (if you read this and know of one, please let me know), so it appears that housing will continue going up in neighboring counties, increasing commute times (and incidentally increasing pollution, since the transit systems don't do a lot of linking from county to county, decreasing the attractiveness of mass transit).

2002-06-06T23:31:00.000-04:00

United States Recognizes Russia as a Market Economy

Interesting article in today's Seattle Times. I was surprised to discover that private enterprise accounts for 70% of Russia's economic output. Granted, it's 70% of a much smaller pie, but it's still far higher than I would have guessed, had someone asked me. Although it has caused a few howls from some industries that are not competitive with Russia, it is a good deal for Russia, and for us, I think, because a cementing of economic ties will allow more stable investments in Russia by US companies.

(This will get rewritten for editorial purposes when the caffeine buzz wears off and I can think clearly.)

2002-06-05T22:23:00.000-04:00

U.S. Unveils Fingerprint Plan, Angers Arab Groups

This is a step in the right direction, but of course, the usual suspects are already lining up against it. "It's profiling!" the scream. Yes, it is. Guess what? All 19 of the perpetrators of the WTC/Pentagon/Attempted White House hijackings were Arab immigrants. That's not profiling, that's not conjecture, that is FACT. Zogby can bitch and whine all he wants, but that does not change the fact that 19 Arab men killed 3000 people, most of them Americans, on American soil.

I really hope that some of the EUnuchs criticize this move, because it will be a chance to shove facts into their sanctimonious faces. France, for example, requires long-term visitors to register within seven days of their arrival, every 12 months after that, and whenever they move.

2002-06-05T00:24:00.000-04:00

Tapped's brains in a lockbox?

Yesterday, Tapped had this to say about Social Security:

THE "SCARE CAMPAIGN" IS WORKING. Against the Republicans, that is, who are apparently pretty worried about Democrat attacks on their Social Security and prescription drug plans this summer. Tapped has always found this particular complaint -- Oooh! The Democrats are scaring old people about their Social Security payments -- rather funny. It not only infantilizes senior citizens. It assumes that something besides common sense and a cursory attention to fact is required to know that the Republican privatization plans will force either tax hikes or benefit reductions (thanks to Bush's tax cut). As The Prospect's Nicholas Confessore reported recently, Social Security and prescription drugs look to be pivotal in November. And the House Republicans are just on the wrong side of these issues.

Well, sometimes the truth hurts. The Democrats have been very successful in portraying Social Security reform as sure death for all the old people out there, and many of them have bought into it. But what caught my eye is the line about privatization. Bush's tax cut has nothing to do with privatization, and unless you start prattling about the non-existent "lockbox", there is no connection. Tax hikes or benefit reductions are two possible choices, but Tapped overlooks the obvious spending cuts that could be made.

Even more deceptive is the link that Tapped provides, to the "Campaign for America's Future". CAF is , according to their website:

Over 100 Prominent Americans - citizen activists and policy experts concerned about our country and our planet - have joined together to launch and build the Campaign for America's Future. We are challenging the big money corporate agenda by encouraging Americans to speak up - to discuss and debate a new vision of an economy and a future that works for all of us.
"America's Future will insist that the question of falling wages and rising insecurity be placed at the center of our national debate. We will challenge those who suggest that nothing can be done and expose the conservative agenda that has made things worse. America's Future will work to revitalize a progressive agenda, and fight to make this economy work for working people once again. We will engage citizens, activists and political leaders in a renewed debate about the kind of country - and the kind of world - we want to build for the generations yet to come."

Which should make it clear where their priorities lie.In any case, they discuss benefits in 2032, 2058, and 2075, failing to note that the Social Security Administration is projected to become insolvent in 2032, unless steps are taken to repair it, steps such as Bush's privatization plan. As it stands right now, I won't be drawing any benefits from Social Security, even though I have already paid into it for the past 18 years or so.

The Democratic Party's deceitfulness is demonstrated by their warnings to America's seniors, who will never see the effects of privatization. Bush's plan does not address current receipients, nor does it address those who will begin receiving benefits within a few years. This obvious fact doesn't stop Serpenthead Carville or his elected lackeys from demogoging the issue.

As to the snivel about prescription drugs, see my post from Friday which addresses the issue. Better yet, read the article in Reason from which most of the rebuttal is derived.

2002-06-04T23:40:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles Times Editors vs. Scheer

The sound of one hand clapping is eminating from the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times.

Today's editorial is a measured dissent against the hand-wringing from the left about the new investigatory powers afforded the FBI, and how John Ashcroft is going to trample our civil rights and turn us all into Pentecostals. They point out that most of the limitations are an overreaction to J. Edgar Hoover's excesses, and note that as long as we don't have an FBI director who terrifies politicians, Hoover's transgressions will not be repeated.

Contrast that with Robert Scheer's latest tirade, which is every bit as bad as the editorial fears. It's rather interesting that these two pieces would run on the same day, without a deliberate "pro/con" slant. (The LAT used to run "Column Left" and "Column Right" which featured, respectively, a liberal and a conservative columnist, but they never included the paper's own editorials in those columns).

2002-06-04T19:35:00.000-04:00

Paging Eric Alterman

This article may be just what Alterman was asking for when he make his snide comment about finding bin Laden's "Cheney".

2002-06-03T21:26:00.000-04:00

Opinions are like... Dept.

Robert Jensen, professor at University of Texas--Austin, is responsible for this odious article in last Wednesday's Newsday. One line really sets me off (he is discussing patriotism):

At its best, it is self-indulgently arrogant in its assumptions about our uniqueness.

This is for what I am defending the country? Sure, he has the right to say it. I have the right to say he is an asshole.

2002-06-03T18:54:00.000-04:00

Oh.my.God.

I have become immune to most of the bureaucratic idiocy of the EU, but this sets a new standard for the EUnuchs.

(Link courtesy of InstaPundit, who has a much more creative (and amusing) interpretation of this article)

2002-06-03T15:03:00.000-04:00

Way too much time on his hands...

NZ Bear, over at The Truth Laid Bear, has a fascinating project that he started, one that keeps track of who links who on the blogosphere. He has a map, and a chart on the side. He also somehow managed to miss me (he must have blinked as he whizzed by), so don't look for me on the map (maybe next week). Check it out, and see where you (or your favorite blogger) dwells on the "food chain".

2002-06-03T14:26:00.000-04:00

Virginia's New Commemorative License Plate

Virginia appears to be the first state that intends to issue plates recalling the 11September attacks upon the Pentagon and World Trade Center (and the foiled attempt upon the White House). This article discusses the plates and has a picture of the approved design. A minimum of 350 plates need to be ordered before they can be printed.

How much do you want to bet that some anti-American group (in the SF bay area, most likely, or the Upper West Side of Manhattan, or Hollywood) will protest these plates, calling them jingoistic and insulting? I'm sure that it will occur, if it hasn't already. Ms. Pollitt, phone call on line one.

(Link courtesy of Midwest Conservative Journal.)

2002-06-02T22:37:00.000-04:00

About my pseudonym

After seeing yet another google search on my name (this is about the tenth one), I have come to realize one of two things. Either "scutum" is a very popular search term, or people are looking for the meaning behind my name. I think it is safe to assume that the latter is the case. For those who wonder, here is the skinny on my name.

When I first ventured onto the internet, my roommate had a cable modem (what can I say--I started late). In order to use the one modem, all of the computers in the house (we had four) had their own names, and they were all astronomical names. Each time one of the computers was replaced, it got a new name. By common agreement, they all began with a sibilant (s or soft c). We went through Sirius, Cygnus, Centaurus, Sagittarius, Sagitta (the arrow fired by Sagittarius), and a few others. When I got this computer, even though the roommates were gone, I kept the tradition alive. Scutum (The Shield) was one of the few constellations we had not used. In addition, I liked the symbolism behind the name--it has a militaristic aspect, and it serves as a "shield" to hide my identity.

There are differing opinions about the proper name of the constellation, although "Scutum" is the official IAC name. I have seen "Scutum Sobieski", "Scutum Sobieskii", and "Scutum Sobiescianum" given. I went with Sobieski because it is the first form I ran across.

2002-06-02T22:03:00.000-04:00

Oh, yeah, he did that too...

Another article in the New York Times had this interesting description:

The letter was also signed by Raymond L. Flynn, a former ambassador to the Vatican who now leads the Catholic Alliance, a national Roman Catholic political organization.

He was also the mayor of Boston for nine years. I wonder why that fact was left out. Maybe it is because it doesn't mesh well with the hed of the piece--"Two Conservatives Tell Bush They Oppose Plan for Police". It's just a bit odd that they overlooked his mayoral career.

2002-06-02T21:49:00.000-04:00

Study Shows Building Prisons Did Not Prevent Repeat Crimes

I don't ever recall seeing that argument presented before. Constructing more prisons reduces crime because it allows us to keep more criminals behind bars. However, The New York Times is spinning a new direction for its old refrain against more jails, and I'm sure that the chorus of the usual suspects (ACLU, PAW, prisoner's rights groups, et al) will seize the results of this study and run with it, even though it demonstrates nothing with any real meaning--"Gee, more jails don't create a bigger deterrent." In any case, the whole article is here.

2002-06-02T21:37:00.000-04:00

You thought the 2000 election was strange...

When it comes to election oddities, things don't get much stranger than in Long Beach, where Tuesday's runoff for mayor features three--not the customary two--candidates.

And just one name on the ballot.

Read the whole article here. (LA Times; registration required)

2002-06-02T21:13:00.000-04:00

Beyond Memorial Day

This is a letter to the editor in yesterday's Seattle Times. I have included the writer's name because he deserves recognition for his letters, both of them.

One year ago I wandered through the parking lot at the University of Washington Hospital. I noticed a truck parked in the disabled section with Pearl Harbor Survivors license plates and stickers showing life membership in the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the U.S. Marine Corps. I was disappointed someone had placed a parking ticket on the windshield, because it was obvious the owner was there for some emergency.

The next day I wrote a letter that thanked you for your service to this nation in wartime. The Times printed my letter on Memorial Day, May 28, 2001, and you read it. You called me and I was amazed as you described how you survived the attack on Pearl Harbor while aboard the USS Maryland (BB-46). You told me that you were seriously wounded while attacking the defenses at Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa with the 6th Division two days before the island was declared secure.

Your country needed your dedication and sacrifice during World War II. We need to know why you were willing to pay such a great price to preserve our freedom. We need to listen to your wisdom.

— Dale Taylor, Buckley

2002-06-02T20:59:00.000-04:00

Yucca Mountain and Transport of Nuclear Waste

Today's issue of the Seattle Times had an editorial regarding Yucca Mountain, storage of nuclear waste, and the transport of same. It's worth a read, as some of the most egregious lies about the project are dismissed with facts instead of hysteria. A sample:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission-approved containers are designed to be virtually indestructible with standards much higher than those for other hazardous materials. The government has run diesel engines into them, dropped them onto cement, and burned them in aviation fuel for 90 minutes. Not once has a container failed.

Not that it will shut the greens up, but it is reassuring to know that research and empirical testing have been conducted to ensure our safety.

2002-06-02T16:04:00.000-04:00

Anagrams

(or, something to post without getting mad or depressed)

George Bush: When you rearrange the letters: He bugs Gore
Dormitory: When you rearrange the letters: Dirty Room
Evangelist: When you rearrange the letters: Evil's Agent
Elvis: When you rearrange the letters: Lives
Desperation: When you rearrange the letters: A Rope Ends It
The Morse Code: When you rearrange the letters: Here Come Dots
Slot Machines: When you rearrange the letters: Cash Lost in em
Animosity: When you rearrange the letters: Is No Amity
Mother-in-law: When you rearrange the letters: Woman Hitler
Snooze Alarms: When you rearrange the letters: Alas! No More Z's
A Decimal Point: When you rearrange the letters: I'm a Dot in Place
The Earthquakes: When you rearrange the letters: That Queer Shake
Eleven plus two: When you rearrange the letters: Twelve plus one
President Clinton of the USA: When you rearrange the letters: To copulate he finds intern

2002-06-01T22:25:00.000-04:00

2000 hits

I have had my 2000th visitor. Two months and three days.

Where's my prize? (grin)

2002-06-01T22:09:00.000-04:00

Note to self:

Washington is not too far north to ignore sunscreen.

2002-05-31T23:05:00.000-04:00

USA Today vs. Reason

I am not one who bashes USA Today; I feel that it is unfairly maligned. To be sure, it revolutionized the use of color and changed the layout of many papers, but there are those out there that find the writing to be sub-par. I disagree.

However, when it comes to the editorial page, USA Today is a reliable supporter of regulation. Today they trained their sights on the pharmaceutical industry, one of the favorite whipping boys of the regulations crowd (after tobacco companies and firearms manufactureres, of course). They make several claims (all tried and true) that beg to be rebutted. Luckily for us, Ronald Bailey did just that, in Reason magazine. The interesting thing is that he anticipated USA Today's line by over a year, as his article appeared in the April 2001 issue of Reason. I have linked both articles, but I am going to excerpt both down below. For clarity's sake, the USA Today quotes will be in italics, and Bailey's writing will be in boldface. Any statements in normal face are mine, as USA Today's initial statements cover an area that Bailey did not discuss in his article.

In fact, Clarinex isn't particularly new. It is a modified version of Schering's blockbuster drug Claritin, which will lose its patent protection, and much of its $2 billion in annual sales, by year's end. By modifying Claritin, Schering got a fresh patent and the monopoly profits that go with it.

By attacking Clarinex, USA Today is attacking the idea of copyrights, although they don't realize it. Does a performance of a song (such as an orchestra recording Beethoven's Fifth symphony) not have copyright protection? After all, it's been done before, and previous performances already had copyrights protecting their renditions. We could extend this to print--Paul Ehrlich keeps repeating the same apocolyptic tales of horror in his books, yet each has its own copyright, and the newest will still enjoy copyright protection when the others are in the public domain. Does USA Today really believe that drug companies that improve their medications should not reap the benefits of their research? (Remember, the FDA does not approve drugs that use the same effective ingredients, but provide little to no improvement.) Clarinex probably has some significant improvements, either in reduction of side effects or in treatment of the allergic reactions it was designed to combat.

But the study shows the industry turns tidy profits by making simple modifications to already-proven therapies. The findings are just the latest evidence suggesting the drug industry is more interested in fattening its bottom line than funding innovation.

Such charges raise several issues. First, do less-expensive medicines work just as well as those "newer and more expensive ones"? In a study of the benefits and costs of newer drugs, [Columbia University economist Frank] Lichtenberg shows that older drugs are, in general, not as good as newer drugs. Using data from the 1996 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, an in-depth national survey of the health care expenditures of more than 22,000 people, Lichtenberg developed an econometric model to compare the costs and benefits of using older and newer drugs to treat similar medical conditions. He concluded that "the replacement of older by newer drugs results in reductions in mortality, morbidity, and total medical expenditure."

Fighting generics. Once a drug goes off patent, cheaper generic copies flood the market, lowering prices. To combat that, the industry uses a number of tricks to extend patents, some of them of questionable legality. The government is investigating the tactics, and this week, the AARP joined a class-action case claiming drug companies illegally thwart generic competition.

Lichtenberg also found that "denying people access to branded drugs [as opposed to cheaper generic drugs] would increase total treatment costs, not reduce them, and would lead to worse outcomes" (emphasis in original).

Fighting discounts. The industry is battling a discount plan in Maine that extends drug discounts to low-income consumers and is lobbying against similar plans in other states.

Central to virtually all "reform" agendas is reining in those drug company profits. Will that contain health care costs? "Suppose we seize all pharmaceutical profit," suggested Sidney Taurel, CEO of Eli Lilly & Co., in a speech last October. "Drugs are just 8 percent of total health care. To simplify the arithmetic, let's stretch and say [profits are] 20 percent of sales. Twenty percent of 8 percent equals just 1.6 percent of total health care costs. Does that sound like a solution to you?" Despite its political appeal, it's not much of one. In fact, that sort of thing would almost certainly retard the development of new drugs by destroying the incentive for research. (It's not called the profit motive for nothing.)

Aggressive marketing. The industry spends more marketing new drugs than on research and development.

This widespread assertion, however, is just plain wrong. In 1999, for instance, the pharmaceutical industry spent $13.9 billion on advertising and promotion. (Half the promotion costs, incidentally, were for drug samples that doctors give to patients for free.) R&D expenditures for 1999 were more than $24 billion.

The industry complains that Blue Cross, which sponsored the NIHCM study, has a clear interest in cutting drug costs. But so do employers and consumers, as spending on drugs nearly doubled since 1997. That has helped push up health insurance premiums, forcing many companies to reevaluate the coverage they provide.

In many cases, spending on drugs does lower health care costs, but often enough the new drugs do cost more than earlier, less effective therapies, so third-party payers are shelling out more money while patients are getting greater benefits. From a strictly actuarial point of view, it's cheaper for patients to drop dead of heart attacks than for the government or insurers to pay for years of cholesterol-lowering life-extending drugs. Employers who don't want to pay the rising costs for employee health insurance, and politically potent seniors who have been schooled by Medicare to think that all health care is a right, complain to legislators that drug costs are out of control. Such complaints focus on increased spending on drugs, while ignoring the costs saved through pharmaceutical treatments and the suffering and disability that afflicted patients before pharmaceutical companies developed the new drugs.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average consumer spends just over 1 percent of her annual income on pharmaceuticals, about the same amount that gets spent on tobacco and alcohol. The elderly, who are by far the largest consumers of medicine, spend roughly 3 percent of their annual income on drugs, about the same amount they spend on entertainment. Households with seniors 65 to 74 years old spend $1,587 on entertainment and $698 on drugs, while those over 74 years old spend $875 on entertainment and $719 on drugs. (The average income for 65-74-year-olds is $28,928; for those over 74 it is $23,937.)

As mentioned before, Americans are indeed spending more on prescription medicines in absolute terms. Average expenditures per household were $301 in 1993 and $370 in 1999. But spending totals aren't the end of the analysis. A more important question is whether we are getting value for our money. According to Lichtenberg, the answer is absolutely yes. Between 1960 and 1997, life expectancy at birth for Americans rose from 69.7 years to 76.5 years. "Increased drug approvals and health expenditure per person jointly explain just about 100 percent of the observed long-run longevity increase," writes Lichtenberg in a working paper done last year for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Lichtenberg found that for an expenditure of $11,000 on general medical care, there is a gain of one life-year on average. (A life-year in this context is simply an extra year of life that a patient gains by being treated.) However, spending just $1,345 on pharmaceutical research and development gets the same result. Economists have calculated that, on average, people value an extra year of life at about $150,000. (That figure is based on people's willingness to engage in risky jobs.) Assuming an average value of $150,000 per life-year, the benefits from medical care expenditures outweigh the costs by a factor of more than 13; the benefits of drug R&D are more than 100 times greater than its costs. As important, drugs can also reduce health care costs. In "Do (More and Better) Drugs Keep People Out of the Hospital?" -- a 1996 study published in the American Economic Review -- Lichtenberg found that "a $1 increase in pharmaceutical expenditure is associated with a $3.65 reduction in hospital-care expenditure."

The story of stomach-acid-blocking drugs such as Tagamet and Zantac illustrates how drugs save money by keeping patients out of the hospital. In 1977, the year in which such drugs were introduced, surgeons performed some 97,000
operations for peptic ulcers. In 1993, despite population growth, that number had shrunk to 19,000. The shift from surgery to highly effective pills -- a change that has made life better for tens of thousands of people with stomach problems -- is the sort of quiet development that escapes much attention. The Boston Consulting Group's health care practice reported that it saves patients and insurers at least $224 million in annual medical costs.

Other examples abound. In 1991, for instance, the benefits that drugs offered became painfully apparent when New Hampshire, in a cost-saving measure, adopted spending caps on the number of reimbursable medications that Medicaid patients could receive. The result was that nursing home admissions doubled among chronically ill elderly patients and raised government costs for institutional care by $311,000, which was 20 times more than was "saved" by imposing spending caps on drugs. As John Calfee, a drug policy analyst at the market-oriented American Enterprise Institute, has noted, drugs that break apart blood clots cut hospitalization and rehabilitation costs for stroke victims by about four times the cost of the drug. In his recent monograph Prices, Markets and the Pharmaceutical Revolution, Calfee also reports that schizophrenia drugs costing $4,500 per year save more than $70,000 in annual institutional treatment costs.

A yearlong study of 1,100 patients done by Humana Hospitals found that using drugs to treat congestive heart failure increased pharmacy costs 60 percent, but cut hospital costs by 78 percent, for an overall savings of $9.3 million. Better still, the death rate dropped from an expected 25 percent to 10 percent. In Virginia, an asthma study found that new asthma drugs cut emergency room visits by 42 percent. And, relevant to my cat situation, a study by the consulting firm William M. Mercer concluded that every $1 spent on non-sedating antihistamines yielded a $3.07 return to employers, due to increased productivity and reduced accident costs.

Please, read the article in Reason. I have only quoted a few sections of Bailey's article, which is very well written, and demolishes virtually all of the myths and allegations against the pharmaceutical industry.

(EDIT 9:00 PM--sorry about the missing close italics tag. It's fixed now)

2002-05-31T21:18:00.000-04:00

EU ratifies Kyoto

Read a report from USA Today here.

OK, now that someone has actually ratified this turkey, the ranting can begin.

Oh, wait, they started that last year. My bad...

2002-05-31T15:08:00.000-04:00

Change of Address

Daily Pundit has moved to a new home, and my, is it stylish. Stacy Tabb (the goddess behind the loveliness of VodkaPundit, InstaPundit, Blogatelle, Dawson dot com, and more) transformed his site. Right now, the site can be reached via http://64.247.33.2/~icebergw/, but once the DNS catches up, the old address (http://dailypundit.com) should take you there.

2002-05-31T00:11:00.000-04:00

Adjusting to life up north

It's 9:01, and the sun has just set.

Growing up in South Florida, I never understood why people up north talked about it being dark at 5PM. Because of its latitude, Florida has less variation in the length of time the sun shines--it's usually about 10-14 hours. Life in San Diego was similar, although the amount of time between sunrise and sunset was more noticeably different. However, up here in Washington, the sunsets (in the summer) are way too late for my body, and it's playing havoc with my circadian rhythm. I'm not used to going to bed an hour after sunset, which is what I have been trying to do here, since I awake at 4:45 every work day. I imagine that I will have a similar problem in the winter, when I will want to go to bed at 7pm, because sunset was 3 hours prior. I am sure I will adjust, but it is certainly a struggle sometimes.

2002-05-30T22:40:00.000-04:00

Reigning in the Bureaucracy

Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), a California state senator, has introduced a bill (SB 1428), that goes after the dizzying array of state boards, agencies, and commissions. The bill, which is written to sunset after three years, would require a thorough audit of all state agencies by California's fiscal authorities and the "Little Hoover" commission, and link all of the deadwood into a single package for the legislature to vote upon. Since there is little appeal trying to publicly defend a vote to preserve useless agencies (as opposed to the hidden deals that usually preserve them), this bill, which passed 33-1 in the California Senate, should be passed into law.

The Los Angeles Times has written an editorial supporting this measure, but the last paragraph of the editorial is simply wrong:

One other point: McClintock is so stingy with the public's tax money he's proposing to limit the commission to $250,000 in the first year and $500,000 over its lifetime of two to three years. That's about enough for an office, an executive director and a few low-paid aides. It may take a bigger bureaucracy than that to really attack the bureaucracy.

Office space is not going to be a big requirement--an office somewhere in one of California's many state government buildings will suffice. In fact, with the advent of the internet as a communications tool, a few small offices, located in different areas of the state, could be used, with a net cost of $0 for rent. As to the salaries of workers, why would a high-paid executive director need to be hired? This is something that can be handled by mid-level employees, without supervision. In fact, there are a wealth of good-government/anti-waste groups out there (liberal, conservative, and nonpartisan) that would be more than willing to assist in such an effort, free of charge. Judicious use of available resources would allow this low-budget project achieve significant savings to the state's taxpayers, and probably improve service as well.

2002-05-30T22:08:00.000-04:00

Another Catholic Scandal--not

Norah Vincent's column in today's Los Angeles Times notes that not all "scandals" are really all that scandalous. She documents a case of what appears to be extortion against the church, riding on the coattails of the ephibophilia revelations currently occupying the church. The only problem is that the alleged victim was 30 at the time of the alleged molestation, and is not physically or mentally challenged.

2002-05-29T23:27:00.000-04:00

More news on the McDermott Circus

Yes, it continues to get worse. This report in Roll Call tells us about McDermott's attempts to subpoena three Republican representatives in what appears to be a clumsy attempt to embarrass the GOP. It's fascinating watching McDermott's lawyers justify their antics, as McDermott opposed subpoenas from a grand jury investigating the case by citing the Constitution's Speech or Debate Clause, which the three GOP former ethics panel members are citing in their request to quash the subpoenas. The house counsel's brief noted senior government officials are subject to deposition only in extraordinary circumstances. McDermott, they argued, has not met the test defined in dozens of cases that would allow the questioning of busy, high-ranking government officials. They also pointed out that what McDermott is attempting to obtain in the depositions is not relevant to his case against Boehner. Roll Call notes:

Cicero, McDermott's attorney, wrote in letters to the general counsel that he wanted to question the three former ethics members on whether they believed the conversation captured on the tape violated the terms of the agreement with Gingrich. But the House lawyers said they could not discern any link between this information and Boehner's claims or McDermott's defenses.

It is a rather transparent attempt to coerce Boehner to drop his suit by strongarming his fellow Republicans.

2002-05-29T22:58:00.000-04:00

Another installment of the Scheer Idiocy Watch

Scheer's latest toxic spewing is even more vile than normal. Please activate the flamethrower.
(registration required to read link)

OK, so maybe John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller are not the sharpest tools in the shed. How else to explain that, after Sept. 11, it took the attorney general and the FBI director more than eight months to get around to telling the president and his top national security advisors about that prescient memo from the Phoenix FBI office warning of potential terrorists flooding American flight schools?

Because, it was only obviously important when one views it with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. The FBI has hundreds (perhaps thousands) of clues that they are tracking, and it may not be readily apparent which clues are important, and which are simply red herrings.

Of course, the best thing would have been to clue in the president when there was still time to tighten airport and immigration security and possibly avert tragedy. But, at the very least, you would think that Ashcroft--who learned of the Phoenix memo a few days after the attack--would have piped up when the president asked his top people whether U.S. intelligence had advance warning of the terror attacks.

Let's see, Ashcroft found out *after* the attacks. Tightened security was in place after the attacks, but they would not have prevented the attacks. Scheer is such a flourescent idiot that he misses an obvious point.

Further, since Scheer has never shut his yap about how Ashcroft has been trying to curtail our civil liberties, any actions taken before the attack in an effort to prevent it would have been met by outraged resistance by all the flaming lefties, and I'm sure that Scheer would have led the charge.

Remember, though, that Ashcroft, who managed to lose a Senate race to a dead man, was not picked for his smarts but rather as a naked political concession to his fellow right-wing fundamentalists. The new president wanted to assure conservative zealots that he would hew to their religious commandments when it came to appointments of prosecutors and judges--and to zing ACLU liberals by putting an extremist in charge of our nation's civil liberties. Unfortunately for the victims of Sept. 11, the consequences of putting a Keystone Kop in charge of federal law enforcement mock such callow Beltway calculations. Ashcroft's FBI chieftains ignored field reports of outspoken Muslim fanatics training at U.S. flight schools--and later cited manpower shortfalls for not investigating further--while the bureau had plenty of resources for drug interdiction forays and surveillance and questioning Wen Ho Lee, now exonerated of spying.

Ashcroft had been running neck-and-neck with Mel Carnahan, a popular two-term governor, but was starting to show a small lead. When Carnahan died, the new governor announced that he would appoint Jean Carnahan (the bereaved widow) to the seat if Carnahan won. Carnahan won, due in large part to the sympathy vote for his widow.

Before Ashcroft was a senator and governor, he was the attorney general for the state of Missouri, and was elected by the 50 attorneys-general as the leader of their organization, a testament to his qualifications. The fact that he was conservative was clearly a consideration for Bush, but he was not chosen because he was conservative, he was chosen because he was an excellent choice who happened to be conservative.

Ashcroft was not responsible for the attacks. The FBI's budget for intelligence shrank approximately 20% during the Clinton administration, and over 40% of the FBI's agents were on the job for less than eight years. The Wen Ho Lee case, which ultimately proved to be incorrect, was most certainly an important activity for the FBI to investigate (even without the added concern of Clinton's ties to the Chinese government). While I will agree that the war on drugs is of dubious value, I doubt that most Americans would agree with my assessment.

Federal agents in Minnesota, who questioned alleged wannabe terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui last summer, were so frustrated with HQ that they took the radical step of going to the CIA for help in their investigation, according to FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley. Some of the Sept. 11 terrorists were so clumsy before their suicide missions as to suggest a subconscious desire to be caught: asking to be taught to fly but not to land airliners, for example, and showing up at flight school with huge quantities of cash and little aviation experience. Moussaoui was exposed to agents as an extremist because he had talked openly about his respect for "martyrs" who kill non-Muslims.

I agree with Scheer's contention that there is deadwood in the FBI, but firing entrenched bureaucrats is a daunting task at best. Considering that Ashcroft was confimed in March, and his choice to head the FBI, Robert Mueller, was confimed in August, it is fairly obvious that they didn't have enough time to reshape the agency. The command structure in place at the time of the attacks was almost entirely left over from the previous administration's Justice Department, headed by the spectacularly inept Janet Reno.

The good news is the FBI has some very good agents who picked up these troubling signs. The bad news is that these warnings stalled in a chain of command that included Ashcroft and never made it to the president.

Again, Scheer inserts Ashcroft's name into the mix in an attempt to tie him to something that was not entirely his fault. The insertion of "including Ashcroft" is obvious and heavy-handed, and should have been omitted. The fact that Scheer has to get in his jab at Ashcroft weakens his argument.

Meanwhile, the clues picked up inside the country were meshing in frightening ways with those gathered beyond our borders. In late June, Osama bin Laden promised a major attack on the United States in an interview with the Arabic television channel MBC. Ashcroft later said he was unaware of any such specific threats at that time. Two weeks later, however, a top FBI official issued a grim warning.

"I'm not a gloom-and-doom type person," FBI Assistant Director Dale Watson told a gathering of state governors July 10, "but I will tell you this ... [We are] headed for a [terrorist] incident inside the United States."

Ashcroft was present when Watson spoke, but if he understood the speech's import he apparently did not convey the G-man's sense of urgency to the president.

Gee, that's a really prescient statement, one that indicated that the FBI knew exactly when, where, and how the terrorists were going to strike.

Perhaps not coincidentally, in the eight months of his presidency leading up to Sept. 11, Bush rarely mentioned Afghanistan, the Taliban and Bin Laden in the same context.

When he spoke of terrorism, he usually focused relentlessly on his father's nemesis, Iraq.

Please show me someone who often mentioned Afghanistan, the Taliban and bin Laden in the same context.

Iraq was the focus of terrorism because Iraq is a sponsor of terrorism, and unlike the relatively insular Taliban, he has boasted of his efforts to strike at the US.

China too was a devil in Bush's first-year foreign policy; before Sept. 11 his administration seemed intent on fighting a new Cold War with China. Playing geopolitical chess with "enemy" states appealed to the old Cold War enthusiasts who dominate the Bush team, but combating stateless terrorists was slippery new terrain.

I'm sure the illegal interception, damage, and detention of our aircraft had nothing to do with Bush's animosity towards the Chinese.

Instead of godless communists controlling tank battalions, the new enemy was a shadowy collection of individuals motivated by religious fanaticism who saw their actions as the ticket to heaven.

I want to hear specific ideas on how we could have combatted terrorist threats without outrage from the left. Even *after* the attacks, we still have people like Scheer fretting that we are headed toward a police state due to egregious violations of our civil rights by the government. Any attempts to isolate Islamic extremists would have resulted in CAIR and PAW screaming about "profiling" and the like.

Perhaps it is just too difficult for a stern, God-fearing fundamentalist like the attorney general to fully anticipate the dark side of religion's wrath.

And it's obviously too difficult for a stupid, Christian-hating ideologue like Robert Scheer to fully anticipate the bright side of religion's worth.

In any event, whether because of bias or incompetence, Ashcroft is clearly not the right man to wage this new "war" against religious fanatics. It's time for him to go.

Scheer's attacks against Ashcroft are reminiscent of the tactics utilized by David Bonior against Newt Gingrich; Bonior filed over 70 ethics complaints against Gingrich, of which only one stuck. (Incidentally, the FEC later cleared Gingrich of the charge for which he was fined $300,000.) Scheer has waged a ceaseless campaign against the Attorney General in a hope that one of his charges will catch the attention of the public. So far his crusade (irony intended) has not succeeded; let us hope that it continues to fail.

2002-05-27T20:50:00.000-04:00

My blog, and my nom de blog

While looking through my referral logs, I saw a referral from a site with which I am unfamiliar: http://sassafrass.pitas.com/. So, of course, I headed over to check it out. I discovered that the writer (who appears to be leftist, but literate and thoughtful) misses Sgt. Stryker (since the sarge has hung his uniform up and is wearing ony his civvies). He has started a list of military blogs. Well, I'm not sure if I fit the bill. Sure, I'm military, but most of my views are independent of my job; I'd hold these views even if I was an accountant in Topeka. Sgt. Stryker was different--his posts were more explicitly about military views and the impact of politics upon the armed forces. I write about my job occasionally, but it is not the central focus of my blog, and that is not likely to change.

He also notes the fact that I write under a pseudonym (and presumably won't be getting any hits from Charles Murtaugh),and points out one other (non-military) pseudonymous blog, The Man Without Qualities. I've discussed my reasons for writing under a pseudonym, and don't use it as a cover to slag others (I'd be just as vitriolic at those with whom I disagree if I was using my real name). However, posts such as the one I wrote last night, in which I criticized President Bush's trade policy, can literally jeopardize my job. I'm not likely to get kicked out,l but I could be reprimanded, which would stop any chance I have to advance further. A Marine major was punished for criticizing then-President Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998; his views were published (under his own name) in the Navy Times, and the powers-that-be came down upon him. I'd rather not have the same happen to me, thankyouverymuch. The pseudonym allows me a little freedom, although I doubt it would protect me against serious misconduct.

2002-05-27T20:10:00.000-04:00

More on McDermott

Reader (and fellow blogger) James Miller sent me this information about the McDermott tape issue.

Here's another aspect of the McDermott tape case that most have missed. The original NYT story, written by Adam Clymer - yes, that Adam Clymer - included the transcription of the crucial portion of the tape. The conversation on it convinced McDermott, Clymer, and other Gingrich haters that Gingrich had broken his promise not to campaign against the agreement he had reached with the Ethics Committee. Even a casual reading of the transcript shows that to be false, that Gingrich and the others were not organizing a campaign. Gingrich explicitly says that he is not to campaign against the agreement. Then, one of the other congressmen predicts that the Democrats will attack Gingrich and that the Republicans will be asked to reply. That's it. No plan for planting stories, no suggestions for contacts with supporters, nothing to show that Gingrich was not keeping the agreement.

It shows, I think, just how much McDermott, Clymer, and others hated Gingrich that they could read this innocuous conversation this way. Or, perhaps, it shows just how cynical they were to present it as evidence
against Gingrich. Either way, it isn't a pretty sight.

This was something of which I was not aware. I went searching, and I found the excerpt from the tapes cited by the New York Times. The link can be found here. While it is true that Gingrich and his allies are looking for the best possible way to deal with an embarrassing situation, they are clearly following the constraints placed upon them. The hysterical fulminations of some lefty Seattleites notwithstanding, the republic was not being threatened by their actions in any way.

2002-05-27T08:19:00.000-04:00

Today is Memorial Day.

Remember to take time today to remember those who died to defend our country, and our troops who died to defend other countries from totalitarianism the world over.

Don't forget the national moment of silence at 3pm (your local time).

2002-05-27T00:38:00.000-04:00

Airport Security--The Ultimate Solution

Steve at Happy Fun Pundit discusses his experiences at Bay Area airports, and hits upon the best way to solve the problem.

Actually, I think I'd be more comfortable with Disney running the security system... when's the last time you heard about suicide bombers on the Matterhorn Bobsleds?

2002-05-26T23:03:00.000-04:00

Political Prostitution on Trade

Tapped has this to say about the fast track authority bill passed recently by the senate:

The latest confirmation of our Postest with the Mostest theory came this morning, when both the Post and the Times (NY) ran stories on the Senate's final passage yesterday of the fast track trade bill. Both papers noted the final vote (it passed 66 to 30), but only the Post broke down that vote by party. And lo and behold, it turns out the Democrats actually opposed final passage, albeit by the narrowest of margins (25 Nos, 24 Ayes).

This, of course, is the only notable aspect of the bill's passage, which has been assured since time immemorial. While House Democrats have routinely opposed free-trade accords by steadily widening margins, Senate Democrats have long been staunch free-traders. For instance, when Congress voted two years ago on permanent normalizing trade relations with China (essentially, paving the way for China's entry into the WTO), House Democrats opposed the bill by a two-to-one margin, while Senate Dems approved it 37-to-7, as visions of business contributions danced in their heads.

Wheras I, cynic that I am, have to note this:

Democrats in the Senate supported Clinton, while opposing Bush. Partisanship trumps principles.

Remember, NAFTA only passed due to overwhelming GOP support, despite the fact that it was a victory for Clinton. Clinton also got fast-track trade authority with the assistance of the Republicans. Even though they were the opposition party, they supported the president (because his aims coincided with theirs). The Democrats in the senate appear to be willing to prostitute their vote, depending on which party controls the White House.

They go on to lament:

As to the votes of the individual Democratic senators, one fact stands out: all of the four potential 2004 presidential candidates (Daschle, Edwards, Kerry, Lieberman) voted yes. This reflects more than the gang-of-four's personal convictions, of course. It also acknowledges one of the grimmer political realities these days: No one can run for president without a huge war chest, and no one can amass such a war chest absent major support from American business. Voting No might mean you'll get money from steel and textiles, not to mention unions, but all the other money (oodles, by actual count) is on the other side. Today, for the first time, the odds that a Democratic Senator is not a free trader may be just under 50-50. But the chances of a Democratic President not being a free-trader is precisely zilch.

Big business, Tapped seems to forget, provides jobs to millions of people. They donate money to candidates that are willing to support the issues that are important to them, and these days, globalization is one of those issues. The presidential candidates know this, and vote accordingly. Perhaps it really *is* personal convictions that led these four to support the bill. Besides, there is always Dick Gephardt to nominate for president if you want an anti-business crusader rather than a potentially electable candidate.

Besides, given Bush's trade record, what is Tapped squawking about? He's run well to the left of Clinton so far, with protectionary measures on steel, and ignoring Pakistani president Musharraf's request for an increase in the quota for textiles and clothing that can be imported to the US from that country. He seems to have an instinct to coddle American business if it is unable to compete with other countries.

UPDATE: 8:45 PM Radley Balko did a nice piece on Bush's trade sins (with plenty of links to articles discussing particular issues) two weeks ago; you can find it here.

2002-05-26T22:16:00.000-04:00

The Wage Canary and the Price of Asparagus

is the title of an editorial in today's Seattle Times, and it is instructive. Washington state has the highest minimum wage in the nation ($6.90/hour), and its ramifications are beginning to affect the eastern portion of the state, which is an agricultural region. The biggest problem is that the cost-of-living increases in the the minimum wage (courtesy of Prop 688, in 1998) are tied to Seattle, where the cost of living is increasing faster than that of Pasco or Walla Walla. Further, Seattle's unemployment rate is 5.4%, while it is as high as 11.4% in places such as rural Columbia County, home to an asparagus and carrot processing plant. As labor costs continue to increase, produce becomes less competitive with offerings from other regions and from countries such as Peru. The result is that farming is declining in those areas, and finding industry to replace farming will be difficult, especially in the more remote communities.

Asparagus is considered a bellweather crop (the "canary" of the headline, as in "canary in the coal mine"), and a drop in the cultivation of asparagus imply that other crops may be in trouble too. Seneca, which owns the plant in Columbia county, slashed 24% of the land they contracted with local growers from previous years, so it is not a small drop we are talking about (7100 acres are planted with asparagus this year).

2002-05-26T21:51:00.000-04:00

The Blame Game

Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., who is certainly no apologist for Bush, takes the Democratic Party to task for their attacks upon Bush in today's column. He also reminds Dick Cheney that it is not treason to question the government. Go read the whole thing; I'll still be here when you're finished. A sample to whet your appetite:

For the record: I didn't vote for George W. Bush and have never been favorably impressed by his cognitive abilities. But do I believe he would have stopped the Sept. 11 attacks if he'd had half a chance? Yes. Do I believe he had half a chance? No. Does anybody seriously believe otherwise?

2002-05-26T21:30:00.000-04:00

How many crooked politicians can dance on the head of a pin?

While bloghopping this weekend, I ran across this article at the Daily Pundit, discussing this article at Rhetorica.net. One section of this fine article caught my attention:

Bad news bias: ... this bias makes politicians look far more crooked than they really are.

It made me stop and think for a while. Now, while most will find fault with many politicians out there for outrageously stupid statements (from both sides; their perceived idiocy level is likely to be inversely proportional to your support of their voting record), it is true that there are few bad apples in congress. In the senate, we have Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, both of whom labor under an ethical cloud. Who else? Oh, yeah, we have Robert Byrd, who used to be associated with the KKK 40 years ago; this is not crooked, just ignorant. I can't think of any more that are crooked.

In the House, we have Gary Condit (at least until January). We have Jim Traficant (until January, or until he's jailed, whichever comes first). We have Jim McDermott. We have a few with checkered pasts, such as Henry Hyde and Dan Burton, and wing nuts such as Cynthia McKinney and Bob Barr, but not a whole lot of crooks.

Six, out of 535. I'm sure there are others, but really, there are not a lot of crooked people in congress, yet we (here in the blogosphere, and elsewhere) fulminate about how crooked congress is, and the news media fan the flames.

We have had some celebrated crooks in the past, such as Dan Rostenkowski and Jay Kim, as well as former presidents Nixon and Clinton (There were others, but they are the two biggies in the last 30 years). But they tend to get weeded out in fairly short order (witness Condit, who was a cinch for reelection until last May, and Kim and Rostenkowski, who lost reelection bids after their legal troubles surfaced).

Anyone who disagrees with me?

2002-05-25T23:43:00.000-04:00

Style Change at Regurgablog

I have started using headlines in my posts, to make it easier to figure out what I will be discussing, since many of my posts tend to be longish. It's a shame that automatic headline creation is not supported by Blogger (Blogger Pro has this feature, but it's not free, and I'm, um, frugal). I may slip from time to time, but I will eventually catch myself and add the headline. If this change really pleases or annoys you, let me know. I'm just as big a feedback 'ho as any other blogger out there, and I'd like to make changes that my readers like.

2002-05-25T23:33:00.000-04:00

Grocery Club Cards, and those who hate them

An issue that has been receiving lots of press coverage here in Western Washington is the decision by supermarket chain QFC (a division of Kroger) to start tying their savings to a "frequent buyers" style card which tracks the holder's purchases. The idea is not new (I had a card from Ralph's in Southern California in the early 1990s) nor is it new to the northwest (Safeway already has a similar card here, as does at least one other local chain). But to judge from the outraged howls here, one would think that they are executing men, raping women, and selling children into slavery--I cannot believe the opposition to this card. It's positively surreal.

I don't like the cards, as a general rule. Von's (a California subsidiary of Safeway) used the purchase history of a customer to fend off a lawsuit--one of their customers slipped and fell in the store, and sued them. They discovered that he purchased lots of wine, and managed to convince the jury that he slipped because he was drunk. For that reason, I stopped shopping at Von's, and never got a card from them. But that was my choice, as was my choice to shop at Albertson's, because they didn't have a card. If they introduced a card (as they have done in the Dallas area), I would find another grocer to shop. That is my choice.

However, there is absolutely no requirement that a grocery store offer sale prices without some sort of tracking involved. If they wish to institute a policy, they do so knowing full well that they risk losing customers who feel as I do, that they are invasive. They do not require the cards to shop in the store (like clubs such as Sam's and Costco); they simply tie their sale prices to them. It's a quid pro quo--you agree to let them track your purchases, and they allow you to save money on said purchases. If you choose not to use their card, they don't give you a good deal on the food you buy. Fair enough.

The people here in Washington (particularly in the Seattle area) are acting like a bunch of whiny children over this issue, in general. The newspapers are in the thick of it--there have been news articles, columns, editorials, and a whole slew of letters to the editor, all in a furor over this tempest in a teacup. It's not the end of the world, folks. There are at least two other major chains in the area that don't use the cards, and hundreds of smaller independent grocers that don't use the cards and never will. Get over it.

2002-05-25T16:12:00.000-04:00

Biaslide in action

A discussion at Cut on the Bias about Instalanches, Biaslides, QuickRushes, and the like comes into sharp focus with this as an example. I made a post on Thursday evening, and last night, Susanna linked to it. This is a cut-and-paste except from my last twenty referrals, from my counter service:

1
unknown
2
http://bias.blogspot.com/
3
unknown
4
http://bias.blogspot.com/
5
http://bias.blogspot.com/
6
unknown
7
http://bias.blogspot.com/
8
http://bias.blogspot.com/
9
http://bias.blogspot.com/
10
http://bias.blogspot.com/
11
http://bias.blogspot.com/
12
http://bias.blogspot.com/
13
http://www.XXXXXXXX.XXX/
14
http://bias.blogspot.com/
15
http://bias.blogspot.com/
16
http://sm6.sitemeter.com/defau...=stats&site=XXXXXXX&report=11
17
http://bias.blogspot.com/
18
http://misinfo/main.php?page_disp=3
19
http://bias.blogspot.com/
20
http://bias.blogspot.com/

The top half of the second page follows a similar pattern.

(note: I have altered the entries for numbers 13 and 16; I felt they contained information that need not be divulged. My point was to show how a simple link from an established, respected blogger can make a tremendous impact on a smaller blog.)

So, you see, it's not a "barely over the banks wash" when you link someone, Susanna. It's not the thousands of visitors of an Instapundit, or even the 200 of an Inappopriate Response, but it is certainly noteworthy. I think you are selling yourself short by downplaying your impact.

2002-05-25T02:13:00.000-04:00

Press releases as news

The View from the Core has a wonderful take on how the press has become a publishing source for a variety of liberal advocacy groups. I sometimes wonder if anyone even reads press releases before inserting them in the newspapers, especially on a busy news day, when fact-checking breaking stories occupies the writers and editors.

Thanks to Media Minded for the link.

2002-05-25T00:33:00.000-04:00

McDermott's Tale of the Tape

On Monday, the Seattle Times ran an editorial on Rep Jim McDermott (D-Comfy), that was somewhat less than fawning. It was still more or less positive, but it was very backhanded praise. Even so, it was apparently too much for some of the far-left loons in the People's Republic of Puget Sound, as witnessed by this pair of unhinged responses (I am referring to the first two letters on the page.)

Okay, I have two words for the two letter writers: Linda Tripp.

"But that is not the same thing!" they will cry. Well, that's true. The tapes Linda Tripp released were tapes of her own phone calls, as opposed to the tape that McDermott released, which was an illegally intercepted cell phone conversation between Gingrich and several other congressmen, including John Boehner (R-OH). A pair of Florida Democratic party activists taped this conversation, then sent the tape to McDermott, who released it to the media in an effort to embarrass Gingrich (a rather difficult endeavor, as Gingrich was pretty damn shameless). The tape revealed that the GOP was working to time press releases (certainly nothing new in Washington), but it was no "smoking gun" or "plotting against our nation", as the two nitwits allege. Boehner filed a lawsuit against McDermott, which has been dismissed and reinstated a few times (it is currently active, as a federal appeals court refused to dismiss it last week). McDermott did not acknowledge releasing the tape to the media until last week, and flat-out lied when initially questioned about it. ("I only know what I read in the newspaper this morning," he told reporters in January, 1997.) McDermott's lawyers are claiming first amendment rights in the release of the tape, which is a dubious claim at best.

Both of McDermott's supporters are big on his "progressive" agenda, which apparently trumps any ethical concerns that he might present. (Gee, sounds like another prominent Democratic politician that will go unnamed.) The first letter writer notes McDermott's "shining a light on the hypocrisy of the far right", which is breathtakingly stupid. I guess that moral equivalence is okay only when it suits the liberal elements of the Democratic Party; otherwise, it falls under that "shredding the constitution" clause, about which the left is fond of squawking.

2002-05-23T20:26:00.000-04:00

Cultural sensitivity for thee, but not for me?

A discussion at work today started a thought in my head--one that begs to be aired. It's not politically correct, but then again, a lot of what I have to say isn't popular with the beautiful people.

The military organization to which I am attached deploys overseas on a regular basis. One of the places to which we occasionally deploy is Saudi Arabia. Before we deploy there, we are given a thorough briefing on the culture and mores of their brand of Islam, and are expected to adhere to a fairly rigorous set of restrictions, in order to avoid offending our hosts. (Similar restrictions are laid out for any military forces that visit the region, including Oman and the United Arab Emirates.) Until recently, American women stationed in Saudi Arabia had to wear an abaya (a head-to-toe robe) when they left the confines of the military base, and had to travel with a male (and in the back seat of the car) when off-base. Legal restrictions such as these, in our country, would be blocked as unconstitional in a heartbeat (and rightly so). However, they are the law of the land in Saudi Arabia.

In any case, all of these restrictions are deployed in the name of "cultural sensitivity". Fair enough--we are in their country, and we should follow their rules. I may not agree with the restricitions (or their religious context), but it is common courtesy to adapt to the laws and customs of a country that one is visiting or residing).

However, when we return to the US, we discover that we are expected to make exceptions for Islamic immigrants and other immigrant groups, again in the name of "cultural sensitivity". What about sensitivity to OUR culture? The multi-cultists claim that they are trying to reinforce the notion that no culture is superior to another (a notion which I disagree with, in and of itself), but their actions seem to indicate that they believe any culture is superior to our own, as long as it isn't European or patriarchal. Those who dare to disagree with their aims are branded racist, sexist, religiously intolerant, or xenophobic (or a combination of these terms).

This debate-in-my-mind recalls the agenda Pim Fortuyn was advocating.He advocated restrictions on immigration because he was afraid that his country's culture (one of the most tolerant in the world) would be destroyed by those who immigrated to the Netherlands, yet steadfastly refused to assimilate, to adopt the values of the country to which they had moved. Holland is not alone is this regard--Germany, France, Belgium, and Sweden all have large immigrant populations that retain their culture, and form an underclass in their societies.

The same could be said of the United States, where Latino and Asians who immigrate and assimilate prosper, but those who do not suffer from stagnant wages and lack political currency. Previous waves of immigration brought people who were unskilled, illiterate, and ignorant of English, but they ensured their children grew up as Americans, rather than Irish, or Greek, or Italian, or Dutch, or whatever. It is only in the past 30 years, with the rise of multiculturism (the multi-cult), that this trend has changed. Now, immigrants are encouraged to "retain their heritage", rather than adapt to and enrich our American culture. The result is staggeringly high dropout rates, high unemployment, elevated crime levels in their communities, and more calls for reduced immigration. Immigration isn't the problem, lack of acculturization is the problem. It won't be solved until the hyphenated-American ethnic pressure groups stop destroying the urge to assimilate our new American citizens.

2002-05-22T00:13:00.000-04:00

Bush Says He Has Never Respected Arafat

Ouch. Bush has touched upon this subject before, but he elaborates his views in a discussion with European reporters.

How much do you want to bet that this honesty will result in a flood of hostile articles in the European press attacking Bush for his "simplistic" support of Israel? Remember, you heard it here first.

2002-05-21T23:47:00.000-04:00

This report, from the Jordan Times, is too stupid to rebut, but you should read it anyway, to get further evidence that Palestinian apologists here in the US will stop at nothing to smear Israel.(The author is a professor at Marist College in New York, and a Jordanian citizen.)

One thing is notable--there is not a single incident in his article that I had not seen before. The fact that he finds incidents that *were* reported in US media is telling; if there were a vast conspiracy such as he claims, I doubt these stories would have seen any play. His effort to spin these into a major Israeli terrorist offensive against the US is laughable.

2002-05-21T23:28:00.000-04:00

Former Congressman John Miller has a column in today's Seattle Times that should be required reading for all who claim that conservative support for Israel is hypocritical. His rebuttal to Times columnist Bruce Ramsey is thorough and detailed. Check it out.

2002-05-21T11:52:00.000-04:00

Ugh. Blogspot crashed again.

I may be moving off Blogspot. Stay tuned.

2002-05-21T00:44:00.000-04:00

Buried in her comments section, Emily Jones at Give War a Chance comes up with a wonderful metaphor for continuing the sanctions against Cuba:

I just don't like the rationale that says that the hard-line isn't fully providing the results that we were hoping, so let's call the whole thing off. That's sort of like saying all these years of cancer research, and still no cure, so why should we bother.

Thought provoking.

2002-05-20T22:43:00.000-04:00

Today's blast of idiocy comes from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Pacific Northwest's answer to pre-1990 Pravda. It concerns Jimmy Carter's recent trip.

Si to Carter, no to Bush

Making sure we know what their aim is, right up front.

Today in Miami during a re-election fund-raiser for his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Bush is expected to announce even more stringent measures to isolate Cuba.

If he does, it will be a mistake.

It's well understood that the Bush brothers' political fortunes are dependent on keeping the good will of Florida's expatriate anti-Castro Cuban community. But issues of more import are at stake here: It is in this nation's self-interest to normalize relations with Cuba.

It must be simple vote-counting. It could not possibly be that the Bushes agree with the Cuban-American view on sanctions.

President Bush should exhibit the risk-taking statesmanship shown by former President Jimmy Carter on his historic visit to Cuba last week and adopt a more enlightened and productive strategy for improving U.S. relations with that country.

Risk-taking? Isn't the left still pissed at Bush for his "reckless" diplomatic honesty for admitting that we were not going to ratify the Kyoto Treaty (which still has not been ratified by any industrialized nation), or that we were not going to participate in the International Criminal Court (aka the "Israelis are Criminals Court")? I thought that they were upset at Bush's "cowboy" risk-taking, but apparently I was misinformed.

Speaking in Spanish during an unprecedented live television address to the Cuban people, Carter said:

"Our two nations have been trapped in a destructive state of belligerence for 42 years, and it is time for us to change our relationship and the way we think and talk about each other. Because the United States is the most powerful nation, we should take the first step."

Why? Other than feel-good rhetoric, Carter provides no justification for why we should drop sanctions.

He made clear the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba is not the cause of that country's economic woes, but he rightly urged that it be abolished as a sign of good will.

If he felt so strongly about this, why did he wait until *22 years* after his term in office had expired? Why did he keep silent during the eight years of the Clinton administration, where his arguments might have been seen as a suggestion to the administration? What is the good will we are attempting to generate by lifting the embargo? Does he expect Bush and Castro to embrace like long-lost brothers if the embargo is lifted? Please...

It's regrettable that the administration rejected Carter's pleas with the tiresome bromide that free trade with Cuba would "prop up an oppressive regime."

Apparently it is only a tired bromide when it is employed by conservatives. I am sure the Post-Intelligencer supported Carter's boycotting of the 1980 Moscow Olympics (an embargo in all but name), the sanctions placed on South Africa until the transition to black-majority rule, the sanctions Clinton slapped on Yugoslavia (the Serbian part) when that country disintegrated, and so forth. All of these sanctions were imposed to send a message to the regime in power, and to deny them the use of US monies to further their oppressive policies.

Speaking in Havana with Cuban President Fidel Castro at his side, Carter bluntly, and quite correctly, criticized the Cuban government's failure to allow democracy in Cuba. And he endorsed Project Varela, a grass-roots movement seeking a voters' referendum on whether to grant Cubans the right of free speech, free assembly and the freedom to create a business. Carter also acknowledged that Cuba's socialist revolution had in some respects brought improvements for Cubans compared with life under corrupt former regimes.

Does anyone that that Project Varela will actually succeed in pushing Castro into allowing Cubans the right to free speech? No communist regime (and very few dictatorships of any kind) have survived the right to a free press; Castro knows this, and will ignore Project Varela, which will quietly vanish, as have other movements in Cuba and elsewhere.

As to Carter's dicovery that Cuba's dictators were corrupt--Duh! Cuba has never had a free government. What Castro has done is level out the misery so that virtually nobody lives well; everybody lives in abject poverty. Whether or not that is an improvement is debatable.

But he pulled no punches in deference to his host. Democracy, he told Cubans, "is based on some simple premises: All citizens are born with the right to choose their own leaders, to define their own destiny, to speak freely, to organize political parties, trade unions and non-governmental groups and to have fair and open trials. Your constitution recognizes freedom of speech and association, but other laws deny these freedoms to those who disagree with the government."

Carter actually said something sensible. The only reason this part of the speech was aired was for the propaganda value of a former US president speaking against his country. Carter would never have been able to say this if it had not been squeezed into his denunciation of US policy.

Carter wisely acknowledged that, "My nation is hardly perfect in human rights," citing among examples this country's high rate of incarcerating its citizens and its lack of universal health care. But he stressed that "guaranteed civil liberties" offer U.S. citizens the opportunity to legally change injustices.

GIVE ME A BREAK! Our high incarceration rate is due to a high crime rate; the drop in crime seems to track fairly closely with the longer sentencing that began during the Reagan administration. Cuba had plenty of criminals in jail, too, until Castro sent them to the US in 1980, during (what a coincidence!) the Carter administration. And a lack of universal health care is not a human rights crime, despite what the left-wing extremists in the Democratic Party would have us believe.

Bush's prescription for changing Cuba is to do more of what has not worked. Carter's strategy for bringing democracy to Cuba has far more promise of success.

When has what Carter suggested ever worked?

The biggest grip that I have about Carter is the fact that he won't shut up. Unlike LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Reagan (for obvious reasons) and Bush I, Carter seems to think it is his duty to be a "diplomat without portfolio", heedless of the views of the current administration. His trip to Cuba was very wrong. I won't call it treasonous, but it borders perilously close. Carter is a private citizen now, and it would do him well to follow the example set by his predecessors in office, who stayed out of the political arena once they were out of office. If Carter wants to play politics, he can run for office and see if anyone in the US really wants him representing them. I would tell Clinton the same thing, lest he get the urge to play hero, which appears to be the direction he is heading.

2002-05-20T00:40:00.000-04:00

Yes, more goofy Which <whatever> are you? quizzes...

	You are Kermit! Though you're technically the star, you're pretty mellow and don't mind letting others share the spotlight. You are also something of a dreamer.
*Take the What Muppet Are You?* Quiz!**

And this...

Whole Brain Dominant
leaning to the left
You enjoy structure and work best when you can devote your attention to one task at a time. You also work well with abstract ideas and can visualize theoretical situations.

test yourself at geekykid.net

I found both of these on the FAQ page for Dawson.

2002-05-19T20:27:00.000-04:00

Suicide Bomber Kills Three in Israel

Yet another one. This one was carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. PFLP is a typical marxist group, which "aims to mobilize and lead the struggle of the Palestinian masses for the return to Palestine, self-determination, and the establishment of a Palestinian state. These, in turn, are steps along the path of defeating the Zionist entity, liberating all of Palestine, and establishing a democratic Palestinian state where all citizens enjoy equal rights, free from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or religious belief. Beyond this, the PFLP aims at the establishment of a democratic socialist society." Among other links, they have the arabic words to The Internationale, the "worker's anthem", on their site.

Something tells me that a "democratic socialist" Palestinian state would not be free from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or religious belief. The fact that their website has a picture of Al-Aqsa mosque dominating the home page would seem to indicate a predisposition towards Islam. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

2002-05-19T18:59:00.000-04:00

Robert Scheer is at it again. Today's Los Angeles Times column is another mindless screed against Enron, desperately attempting to tie Bush and Cheney to the latest round of allegations against Enron's machinations in California. Apparently his January broadside failed to convince enough people, so it's time for a reload. He's still off base (and off his rocker). (Registration required to view the articles)

Now that the Enron culprits have been caught red-handed, might not the media inquire of the president whether he takes any responsibility for nearly bankrupting California by refusing to come to the state's aid in a timely fashion?

It is not the federal government's job to bail out California because of a botched energy restructuring.

I am not a disinterested bystander; I had a $500+ electric bill *for one month* (without air conditioning) due to the fiasco. However, that does not make it Washington's responsibility to fix California's mistakes.

Forgotten in all the excitement of the damning revelations of internal Enron memos describing the energy company's dastardly techniques for market manipulation is the apparent stupidity, if not complicity, of the Bush administration that made Enron's chicanery possible.

Hmmmm. let's see, most of the rolling blackouts and insanely high bills occurred in 2000, before George Bush was in the White House. Witihin a few months of his inauguration, there were no more rolling blackouts. However, in Scheer's tiny little mind, Bush is apparently responsible for something that happened on Clinton's watch, or while Gray Davis was governor of California.

Too rough, am I? Just go back a year, when rolling blackouts were helping to wreck California's massive economy while the Bush-Cheney team stood insufferably aloof, blaming the victim. Exonerating Enron and other energy traders, President Bush refused to impose wholesale federal price caps to end the gouging. Couldn't do that, the Bush administration said, because that would intrude on the supremely rational free market. But now we know that the Invisible Hand was actually the grasping tentacle of Enron, and probably other Texas-based energy hustlers, whose antics must have poor Adam Smith spinning in his grave.

The Cato Institute had an article last year that totally demolishes what Scheer is trying to spin. The highest charges for energy came from Seattle Light and Power and BC Hydro, followed by other publicly owned utilities. Enron, Dynergy, and Reliant were charging less than the market average for power, which is hardly screwing the consumers.

It is true that Bush refused to intercede, and his decision was the right one. Imposing caps on the market would have simply prolonged California's crisis, as the boom in power plant construction probably would not have occurred. California was importing 25% of the state's energy consumption from outside the state, which was a recipe for disaster. Other states had to put up with the negative effects of the power plants, while California used the energy those plants provided.

A year ago, Dick Cheney said the Bush administration viewed wholesale price caps as "a mistake" because "there isn't anything that can be done short-term to produce more kilowatts this summer." Yet, at the same time, Enron was grabbing electricity from California and selling it in Oregon at an obscene profit. Federal price controls would have prevented Enron from playing one state against another. If Cheney didn't know that, he must not have learned anything from his own enormously lucrative days in the Texas energy racket.

If Enron was making such obscene profits, why are they bankrupt? Besides, a year ago the problem was in Oregon, which due to drought, not only could not send power to California (as had been the case previously), but they could not even provide enough power for their own customers.

And could Bush himself not have guessed that his Texas buddies were gaming the market? After all, his vaunted business experience was also in Texas--and in the energy industry. But let's assume he saw no evil when he was on the inside of the energy biz; wouldn't it have behooved him to have done some due diligence research on his top campaign donor? Could it be that he wasn't too eager to find out that his political career was hugely indebted to money siphoned from Enron's apparently ill-gotten gains?

This trope, undoubtedly the most bloody overused chorus against Bush, is a total red herring; it is complete and utter bullshit. If Bush was so indebted to the oil industry, he would have permanently blocked the Clinton administration's last-minute regulations on diesel fuel emissions, which are expected to cost the oil companies *billions of dollars* annually, and he would not be proposing a plan that will cause a drawdown in coal-fired power plants (which will reduce pollution).

Enron was his largest donor--so what? He was governor of Texas for six years, and Enron was the largest company based in Texas. Why wouldn't he get a lot of money from Enron?

Surely Army Secretary Thomas E. White could have tipped off his commander in chief to what was brewing, since he had been recruited by the administration from his position as head of Enron Energy Services--a subsidiary of the collapsed energy giant--which was deeply involved in ripping off California consumers.

Oh, I see. Because Bush hired an Enron employee, he must have known what was going on.

Or maybe Poppy Bush could have warned his son, since as president he had signed into law the 1992 Energy Policy Act, which opened the way for electricity to become a tradable commodity, and an appointee of his, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairwoman Wendy L. Gramm, had sealed the deal by exempting electricity trading from the regulatory oversight afforded other commodities. (Gramm, wife of a Texas senator, herself moved on quickly to join Enron's board of directors, even serving as a member of the board's ill-fated audit committee.)

I see--Scheer is attempting to smear the whole deregulation process. Well, it took eight years for their labor to bear fruit. Is Scheer actually crediting Bush I, Bush II, and Wendy Gramm with the foresight necessary to profit, eight years down the road, from their actions in 1992? If that is the case, more power to them--I want people who can successfully run a business running the government. Governance is not intended as a for-profit venture, but demonstrated knowledge of personnel and fiscal management is a good thing.

In any case, during its first year, the younger Bush's administration catered to every whim of Enron chief and Bush family sponsor Kenneth Lay. After six meetings with Lay and other Enron executives, Cheney came up with an energy plan that did nothing for California but used the state's woes as justification for nuclear power and further deregulation, accompanied by the planned rape of pristine wilderness areas.

Enron has never operated a nuclear power plant.

The "planned rape of pristine wilderness areas" refers to the less than 1% of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that Bush proposed to open for drilling. The ANWR is larger than 10 states, so there will be plenty of unspoiled natural area left is drilling is ever permitted.

Out West, California officials were spending billions of taxpayer dollars to secure power to keep vital services functioning, while inside Enron a memo admitted that the company "may have contributed" to a Stage 2 power emergency, pushing the state to the brink of widespread blackout. If some wacko damages a transformer in a hospital to cause a power outage, it's jail time. But these Enron characters deliberately denied Californians energy needed to sustain life while Bush blithely covered for them.

More lies. How Stuff Works has a nice page on the operation of the California Independent System Operator ISO). The page mentions that hospitals are exempted from blackouts. (I cannot find anything on the ISO webpage, because it is mostly charts and graphs relating to current conditions. They might have a statement somewhere that delineates exemptions). While it is not mentioned here, people with special medical conditions are also exempted from the blackouts, if they contact their power distributor. In short, nobody's life was endangered by a stage 2 alert, which doesn't even prompt blackouts.

Another memo detailed the company's so-called Death Star strategy: jamming transmission lines in order to collect payments for fixing problems they created.

Enron's actions have been described in great detail. None of these articles have explained why the federal government was supposed to step in and deal with the problem California created.

When the mob does things like this, we call it blackmail and extortion. Now that a glossy corporate giant cozy with the president has done such things, what does the Justice Department propose we call them?

I guess the multiple investigations against Enron and Arthur Anderson are not enough for Scheer, because they don't implicate Bush or his administration in any illegal activity. (A list of current investigations against Enron and Arthur Anderson can be found at the Boston University Law Library website.)

2002-05-18T16:30:00.000-04:00

When is "E. Nough" (a regular poster at Little Green Footballs) going to start his own blog? He has another devastating take, this time on the "Bush knew about 9/11" crowd. Check it out, in the comments section of this post.

Link courtesy of Daily Pundit, by way of Transterrestrial Musings.

2002-05-18T15:12:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, The American Prospect's "Tapped" column said this:

Still no rebuke from a national Republican to Wayne LaPierre over LaPierre's atrocious comparison of Andy McKelvey and Osama bin Laden, as Chatterbox reports.

To which I replied (via e-mail):

In yesterday's edition of Tapped, you write that you are still waiting for a rebuke of Wayne LaPierre for his comparison of Andy McKelvey and Osama bin Laden from GOP bigwigs. I'm sure that it will be issued as soon as Julian Bond apologizes for his comments about the "Taliban wing of the Republican Party" and various "progressive" groups retract their incessant swipes at Richard Mellon Scaife for his financial support of the investigation of Whitewater. LaPierre's comment was hyperbolic, but the media get a case of the vapors whenever one of their favorite causes, gun control, is attacked by the NRA or any other group. If such a comparison had been made by a pro-choice figure, in reference to a pro-life supporter, I doubt it would have received *any* coverage (in Tapped, or anywhere else). This double standard is one of the reasons why many conservatives decry the bias in the media--not so much the overt bias, but the (perhaps subconscious) selection of what stories to run, and how they are to be framed.

--------------------------------

At least I can read The American Prospect without screaming. I can't handle The Nation or Mother Jones; I do have some standards.

2002-05-17T01:07:00.000-04:00

Seattle schools react to 9th circuit decision

Today's Seattle Times contained two articles concerning a court decision that banned race as a consideration for determining student placement. The first is a news story reporting on the numerical and percentage compositions of the entering classes for the 2001 and 2002 school years, with quotes from both supporters and detractors of the decision. The news piece appears to be relatively balanced, although I might quibble with occasional word choice or phrasing.

Glancing over the article, it is apparent that the "education establishment" in Seattle is upset by the ruling. The superintendent, Joseph Olchefske, commenting on Ballard High (32.3% nonwhite, down from last year's 44.9%) and Franklin High (88.1% nonwhite, compared with last year's 79.7% nonwhite), remarked that students are losing "the kind of richness culturally and socially that I think we could have." An assistant principal at Nathan Hale High School (39% nonwhite, last year 45.3%) groused, "That's going in the wrong direction. We want to increase the number of students of color at Hale, not decrease it." Both are obvioiusly operating from the assumption that diversity is always good. However, the leader of the group that sued the district, Kathleen Brose, pointed out that neighborhood schools are important as well, a view echoed by James Kelly, the president of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle.

The second article is an op-ed piece jointly written by all of the high school principals in the Seattle School District. It is long on trendy theories on why diversity in schools is important, and short on hard facts. There is a lengthy quote from Cornell West (big surprise) that fulminates against "maldistribution of wealth and power" and condemns the "weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse". The fact that these educators chose such a comment to support their position speaks volumes of their outlook on education. Later, they state that they are "grateful for the opportunity to make public the long-standing need for discourse about institutionalized racism, white privilege and their effect on student learning," and they remark about embracing "standards of equity and social justice as well". If I had children attending a school led by one of these people, I would look for a private school that I could afford, or take a serious look at homeschooling. I do not agree with what they are pushing, and I would not want any children of mine subjected to an agenda such as they propose, one that appears to emphasize diversity over teaching. Diversity is not bad or wrong, but it should not have any bearing on educational policy.

2002-05-15T22:43:00.000-04:00

The Los Angeles Times carries this Reuters report on the Dutch elections which has a few barbs that need to be highlighted.

The projected outcome was a surprisingly strong victory for the right-wing Christian Democrats

Only in Europe, Hollywood, or the fevered imagination of a reporter's mind could the Christian Democrats (especially in the Netherlands) be considered right-wing. They are centrist, perhaps a bit on the liberal side. The fact that they differ a bit from the Socialists and Labor parties does not make them "right-wing".

Irreverent, charismatic and a dapper dresser, Fortuyn attracted a huge following with his brash but ill-defined policies.

I really have trouble seeing a reporter applying labeling such as this to a left-of-center candidate, if his platform has been the subject of discussions for quite some time in the Netherlands and elsewhere. It wasn't ill-defined, it was ill-received in some quarters.

Although he was seen abroad as a something of a copy of France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, Fortuyn never fit conveniently into the image of "extreme right-winger."

Yet the media insist on applying that label to him, and invite comparison to somebody whose only real resemblance is his dislike of immigrants. Even that is a stretch, as the root cause of their animosity is totally different--Fortuyn feared that unassimilated immigrants will destroy a tolerant multicultural society, while Le Pen rails against immigrants because they are different.

Fortuyn was shot dead in the parking lot of a radio station after an interview on May 6. Police have arrested a 32-year-old animal rights activist whose motive remains unclear.

Hmmmm, maybe because Fortuyn advocated a resumption of the fur trade, and because of his clashes with environmental groups? This appears (at least to me) to be a pretty obvious case of intense dislike for Fortuyn's politics.

2002-05-15T22:21:00.000-04:00

Borrowing a page from the playbook of the Daily Pundit, I have a beef about one of the letters to the editor in today's Seattle Times. Here is the letter, in its entirety:

Dustbin of history
The Mundane Doctrine

The National Assessment of Educational Progress results showed that 60 percent of high-school seniors could not explain the Monroe Doctrine. I would be willing to wager that if you did a random sample of 1,000 American adults, they would do no better, in fact probably much worse ("Don't know much about history... " editorial, May 13).

The tests are designed by academic scholars, those people who spend years and years in college studying history. The average person memorizes this stuff in school only to pass a history test, and then forgets it because it has no day-to-day real-life application.

This is the problem with the current high-stakes testing bandwagon. Too much of what it tests for is irrelevant to the real world of working, dealing with people, and making a good life. Becoming a history teacher is the only job you will ever apply for that requires knowing about the Monroe Doctrine.

I agree that 100 percent of history teachers should know about the Monroe Doctrine. For the rest of us, I think it would be much (more) beneficial to America to test our students for more practical knowledge, like how to do taxes, get along with people who are different than you, or how to spot political propaganda techniques.

Rob Sandelin, Monroe

I will agree that some of what we learn in school is a bit arcane and has little real-world application for the general public (Geometry, Chemistry), history is not one of them. George Satayana once noted "Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it," a truism that still applies today. While studying specific dates may seem to be a bit much for some, it is necessary to establish a chronology in order to understand the conseqences of actions taken. As to the specific example of the Monroe Doctrine, its application had a very strong effect on the actions of the European powers and their attitudes towards the new world, effects that are still being felt today, and politicians and sociologists (as well as history teachers) would do well to understand its ramifications.

Mr. Sandelin then goes on to cite examples of subjects he feels the schools should be teaching. The first--how to do taxes--is something that is ostensibly already taught in school; we call it mathematics. To cover all the tiny loopholes and exemptions and schedules is something that no high school teacher is (or should be) equipped to do. Perhaps a simplification of the tax system would make this wish a reality. His other two suggestions are apparently a product of a left-wing mindset--they are social engineering dreams. They are not something that should be part of a core curriculum, or even taught as seperate subjects, although some of their salient points could be covered in other courses. (While his last statement might be value-neutral, its positioning after the "getting along" request suggests to me that he is thinking primarily about countering conservative propaganda, not liberal. I could be wrong on this point, however.)

2002-05-13T22:49:00.000-04:00

Regular posting will set in tomorrow, as I have a suite of my own, a phone line of my own, and free time on my hands. Stay tuned for some late-night posts (after 10pm Pacific time).

It's good to be back. (big grin)

2002-05-11T21:34:00.000-04:00

Wow...go to Eristic and read this post, in which Quana X. Jones blows apart a Saudi writer's defense of his kingdom. It's not for the faint of heart, but it is definitely worth the time.

Link courtesy of Cut on the Bias.

2002-05-11T21:06:00.000-04:00

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial page is biased. Take, for example, this editorial, from yesterday's edition. The writer has his anti-gun blinders on, and sure as heck isn't going to let anything like facts prevent him from making his point.

If you wonder, you might want to look to the Supreme Court, which interprets the Constitution, and the federal government, which must honor and enforce it. For more than 60 years now, those two branches of government have been of one mind about the Second Amendment: It's meant to protect the right of states to organize militias, they've long agreed -- not to safeguard any sort of individual right to own guns.

Um, right. The supreme court is a branch of the federal government, but the federal government is not a branch of itself. Work on the logic before you start bloviating.

Surprised? Don't be. This long-held view has done a lot to shape the world you live in. Because of it, your neighbors can't cavort about town with machine guns. Your irascible coworkers can't carry pistols in their pockets without police permission. And when your thrice-jailed, wife-beating cousin tries to buy a handgun, he has to undergo a background check to determine whether he should have one.

None of these issues have anything to do with the argument you are setting up. Forget about the straw men and work on a real rebuttal, if one is possible.

Scores of state and federal laws regulate private gun ownership -- all because the Supreme Court has said such laws are constitutional. In 1939, the court maintained that private citizens have no constitutional right to own a gun. The Second Amendment's real purpose, the court ruled then, is to secure "the preservation of efficiency of a well regulated militia." In its every expression before and since, the U.S. Justice Department has made the same case -- thereby defending government's entitlement to restrict who can own a weapon.

And in 1857, the Supreme Court affirmed that slaves were the property of their masters. And in 1896, the Supreme Court ruled that "Seperate but Equal" was an acceptable comprimise. Sometimes, the Supreme Court is wrong. I believe that the 1939 decision was one of those times. Just as the Brown vs. Board Of Edcuation ruling overturned the judicially unsound Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, this is the court reacting to a prior court's poor judgement. Just because you don't like the ruling doesn't make it wrong.

Until this week, that is. Attorney General John Ashcroft, lifelong member of the National Rifle Association, has seized the moment and tossed precedent in the trash. In briefs filed Monday, Ashcroft's Justice Department told the Supreme Court that the Constitution "broadly protects the rights of individuals" to own firearms. The declaration came in a footnote in each of two briefs filed by the department -- in gun cases so arcane that the government argues they shouldn't be heard. That makes the move all the more alarming: Though seeing no ready chance to push its philosophy forward, the Justice Department was nevertheless keen to declare its Second Amendment turnabout.

Guess what--the DoJ is arguing that the wording of the second amendment (the people) is the same individual right that has been interpreted in EVERY OTHER CONTEXT to be an individual right.

What next? It all depends upon the court. Chances are slim that it will take up either of the gun cases now before it, especially against the government's recommendation. But several justices are known to be itching for a chance to undo the 1939 precedent -- and Ashcroft has made clear he'll do whatever he can to help. Sooner or later, the amendment is likely to get its day in court. If Ashcroft's view prevails, all sorts of modest gun-control laws could be at risk.

Modest gun controls such as the wholesale banning of weapons (such as the Morton Grove, Illinois law)? Laws that act as a de facto ban on guns, such as the arcane licensing requirements in Washington, DC and New York? 15 day waiting periods in California, instead of the 3 days for which most gun grabbing groups agitated? Laws that ban weapons based on appearance, or specific model? Laws that ban the sale of affordable home protection for low-income people to protect themselves? These are all laws that the Strib undoubtedly supports, that many argue are unconstitutional. If I am gauging the writer's attitude correctly, he probably objects to *any* gun law being overturned, personal liberties be damned.

It takes nerve to chuck a government stance that has prevailed for more than six decades -- and a fair bit of audacity. Ashcroft's move is proof, if any were needed, of his brazen willingness to exploit his power to promote personal agendas. That's exactly what nominee Ashcroft told a Senate confirmation committee he'd never do.

Yeah, "seperate but equal" was a real winner for 62 years, until the court threw it out. I guess that the Eisenhower administration was brazenly abusing its power when it called in the national guard to escort those black kids to school. For shame.

The Strib seems to be aiming to become the Midwest's version of the New York Times--all the bias that is fit to print. But that seems to be common to several McClatchey papers--the Bees in California (Sacramento, Modesto, and Fresno) are all of the same mold, too, but they don't have the influence of the Minnesota paper.

2002-05-11T20:34:00.000-04:00

<snivel>

Well, I'm here.

I still don't have a phone, so I am using the computer center on base for internet access. This is somewhat less than optimal, so until I move into my permanent room (Monday if I'm lucky), I can't even talk to AT&T about phone service, let alone actually *have* phone service.

After yesterday's ordeal, I understand why people hate flying. I've never really had hassles before, but yesterday made up for that in spades.

I arrived at the airport, and was told that (unlike every other flight I have made) I could only check *two* bags (I had intended to check three); they would charge me $50. Then the counter attendant looked at the smallest bag, and informed me that I could take it as a carry-on item (this was in addition to my laptop). I was a bit perplexed, as I thought the problem was limiting the number of carry-on items, not checked baggage. Whatever. Then she informed me that the larger of my (now two) checked bags was over the weight limit, and was going to cost me (again) $50, unless I was able to make it fit under the limit. 15 minutes and three repacking sessions later (this is all in front of the ticket counter, BTW) I finally got it (just) under the limit, and it was processed through.

Then, armed with a boarding pass, I head over to the security checkpoint, and the next round of fun begins. Of course, the laptop has to be taken out of the case, and the row of eight rechargable AA-cell batteries emptied into a seperate container (else it will look like a detonator). Of course, I forgot about my nail clippers (which were confiscated), and while my stuff went through the x-ray machine, I get the wand treatment. The metal eyelets on my topsiders set the wand off, so they make me take them off (leaving me barefoot in the terminal) so they can verify that I don't have anything in the 1/4 inch soles of my shoes.

The flight itself was uneventful, and all of my luggage arrived intact. When I went to the ground transportation counter to enquire about a shuttle to my destination, he asked me "Do you have a reservation?" which is always a bad sign when one doesn't know that a reservation is usually required. He looked at his watch, and informed me that if I was quick, and there was room available, I might make the shuttle that was departing in five minutes. Well, I got a seat (the last one) for the 3 hour, 20 minute trip to the base. When we were about halfway there, we had to switch shuttles (the one from the airport went in one direction, the one we wanted went in a different direction). It was then that I forgot to grab my laptop computer, something that I did not realize for about 30 minutes. Luckily, the shuttle drivers confirmed that my laptop was still there, and we arranged for a delivery time (they brought the computer to me this afternoon).

When I arrived, it was 10:20 on a Friday, so of course nobody was around to get me checked in. They weren't sure where to put me, so they gave me a room in what might be the worst barracks on the base (it is being renovated right now, so it's all torn up and rather down-at-the-heels) and told me to be ready to switch rooms on Monday. I'll be happy, as this barracks is rundown, noisy, and confusingly laid out.

</snivel>

2002-05-11T20:12:00.000-04:00

Note to self:

Leaving the laptop computer on the shuttle bus from the airport is a BAD thing.

Not everyone will jump through hoops to return it to its owner.

2002-05-09T11:18:00.000-04:00

I will not be updating for a few days. I am moving tomorrow, to the Pacific Northwest. I will start posting again as soon as I have a phone line, which (hopefully) will not be too far into the future. If all goes well, I will be settled in and blogging on Monday. In the meantime, visit the sites on my new and improved blogroll on the right. Lots of good stuff to be found at these sites.

2002-05-09T10:57:00.000-04:00

JunkYard Blog has this hilarious photo of Arafat that has to be seen to be appreciated.

(Link via Cut on the Bias.)

2002-05-08T23:42:00.000-04:00

Jeff Goldstein, over at Protein Wisdom, links to this article on NRO by Victor Davis Hanson which parallels some of my comments in a post I made last week. Thanks to Jeff for the heads-up on the Hanson article, and thanks for the link to my post.

2002-05-08T21:52:00.000-04:00

A timely report on the California Legislature's misbegotten plan to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars, from Benjamin Zycher, of the Pacific Research Institute, can be found here.

This footnote is a lovely slap in the face to the faux green legislators:

Did you know that legislators in Sacramento are allowed to choose autos that the state purchases for them for their official activities? The Associated Press reports that almost half have chosen low-gas-mileage sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks, and most of the rest picked sedans with lower than average fuel efficiency.

I'd love to see the breakdown, by party, of the distribution of these vehicles. The legislature is divided 50-30, with the Democrats in the majority, yet I doubt the the "anti-environment" Republicans all drive SUV's, which would need to be the case to sustain the statistic cited by Mr. Zycher.

2002-05-08T20:56:00.000-04:00

Ipse Dixit has a cool little archive entitled "Five songs you can never grow tired of". Well, I looked over the selections, and while I like a lot of the songs there, none of my personal faves are listed. So, here is MY list, in no particular order:

Only Yesterday--Carpenters

Shattered Dreams--Johnny Hates Hazz

Missing--Everything But the Girl

Dreamwalk--Keiko Matsui

New Day for You--Basia

All of these songs are vocals, except for "Dreamwalk", although I could easily add another five songs and end up with five vocals and five instrumentals. That is not the rule, however, so five will have to do.

2002-05-08T20:21:00.000-04:00

More Search Engine Hits

It's been said before that Google loves blogs. Considering the number of hits I received today from Google (and its international cousins), I can believe it. Among the highlights:

A search for Jeningrad returns my site as the number one result (Go, me!).

However, a search for Scutum Sobieski ranks me as sixth. (I'm not the original owner of the name; what can I say?)

And on the repugnant front, a Quebec ISP with possible Arabic connections was the source of "Ariel Sharon is a war criminal". (Blow it out your ear, scumbag.)

2002-05-08T14:36:00.000-04:00

Ye Olde Blog has a picture of the new EU flag.

WARNING: Eye-searing. May induce vomiting. Keep out of reach of small children.

2002-05-08T02:11:00.000-04:00

Another idle thought:

All of the suicide bombers have come from the West Bank, despite the fact that the Gaza Strip is the real hotbed of Anti-Israeli sentiments. Since there is a fence around the Gaza strip area, that has kept the Palestinians from Gaza out of Israel. I suggest to Israel that they annex the West Bank, and the Palestinians can have the Gaza Strip as their country. (I'd suggest relocating the Israelis who have settled there, though, as they would become instant targets.) Offer Israeli citizenship to the Arabs that remain in the West Bank, and deport those that decline.

Europe would howl, but they're doing that already. What are they going to do that they haven't done already?

As I said, it's just an idea, and probably not a very good one. I'm in a grouchy mood, and the bombing set me off again.

2002-05-07T23:55:00.000-04:00

We've all heard about the bombing, but I want to highlight one sentence in this article about the attack in Israel today.

It was the first suicide attack since Israel launched its offensive on March 29 in the West Bank aimed at uprooting suicide bombers.

There were no suicide attacks while the offensive was underway, but less than a week after it ends, the suicide bombings begin again.

What this means, apparently, is that the only way the Israelis can be safe is to use their military to occupy the West Bank on a continuing basis.

The Palestinian "leaders" of Hamas (or Fatah, or whoever else claims responsibility for the bombing) are DIRECTLY responsible for any of the deaths that result from the next Israeli offensive. It is no coincidence that the bombing occured when Sharon was in Washington to present a peace proposal. It shows the world, once again, that the Palestinians don't want peace.

Of course, European leaders are so blind to the hypocrisy of the Palestinians that they will find a way to hold the Israelis responsible, as they have assigned blame for all of the strife in the mideast.

2002-05-07T22:25:00.000-04:00

From Navy Times: (not available online)

ABOARD THE CHARLES DE GAULLE, North Arabian Sea--Early in February, Lt. Jeremy Tyler was preparing to talk over the radio to an AV-8B Harrier Pilot.

Tyler, a British air controller serving aboard the French carrier Charles de Gaulle, figured he would need to brush up on his Italian, since the Harrier launched from the Italian carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi.

But the voice that crackled across the airwaves astounded him. A U.S. Marine was flying the jet.

"I thought I would get an Italian," said Tyler, marvelling at the thought of a British officer aboard a French ship talking to an Italian Harrier flown by an American.

-------------------------------

All in a day's work. The current war on terrorism has brought together the navies of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, Australia, Greece, and Bahrain. among others. The level of cooperation required with such a large and changing cast can be difficult, but we've all pulled together to make it work.

As part of the teamwork effort, there has been an informal exchange of personnel with some of the navies, where Americans spend time embarked on foreign ships, while personnel from other navies work on our ships. It's not a formal program, such as the Personnel Exchange Program, but it allows sailors from various navies to learn a little about the military culture of other countries.

On the cover of this week's Navy Times is a cool photo (taken in February) of the Charles de Gaulle, Illustrious, and John C. Stennis sailing side by side in the Northern Arabian Sea. A French Navy pilot took the picture, which is now appearing in a publication devoted to the US Navy.

2002-05-07T17:37:00.000-04:00

It appears that due to my e-mail inquiry to the IPC, I am now on mailing list for Palestinian propaganda. I received mail this morning on the account that I used to make the inquiry. More interestingly, I received a different e-mail from them on a different e-mail account, one that I cannot say I have ever used to contact them, which is odd, to say the least.

I will blog later tonight; I am recovering from my final exam today. (urk) I did well enough, although not as well as I had hoped. When we review tomorrow, I will find out what areas I still need to study.

2002-05-06T22:33:00.000-04:00

U.S. Pulls Out of International Court Treaty

Good riddance. As a member of the US Armed Forces, the idea of being called up for "war crimes" because someone has his skivvies in a bunch offends me deeply.

This court is flawed in other ways. It specifically excludes terrorism.

One provision criminalizes the transfer of civilian populations into territory the government occupies.

(Both of the above appear to be aimed at Israel)

Weapons of mass destruction (such as nuclear or biological weapons) are excluded.

Within hours of the ratification of the court, proposals to indict Israeli leaders began to proliferate. Any doubts that the court was to be used as a weapon against Israel (and the United States, its primary benefactor) were laid to rest when these demands were made, before the ink had time to dry.

This was not the first time the Palestinians had tried this gambit. Since Belgium has decided that they are the moral authority of the world, and can try anyone for war crimes, the Palestinians petitioned for Sharon to be indicted there.

For more on this issue, see this post at USS Clueless. His post sums up why this court is a bad idea. The US should not be a party to bad ideas, and Bush is doing the right thing, despite what the EU-nuchs and the media elite in this country would have us believe.

2002-05-06T14:07:00.000-04:00

Pim Fortuyn murdered!

This name may not sound familiar to you, but he was the leader of the Netherlands' largest right-wing party, one which advocated closing the country's borders.Fortuyn's party recently swept the elections in Rotterdam, and was expected to poll strongly in the elections on May 15th.

He was also gay, unusual for a right-wing politician in this country but not unheard of in Europe (Austria's Jörg Haider has been the subject of rumors). Unlike far-right politicians in this country, neither are openly anti-gay, and in the Netherlands such a stance would not fly; the country legalized gay marriages and is known for its acceptance of homosexuality.

Thanks to Moira Breen at Inappropriate Response for pointing this article out.

UPDATE-12:35pm--InstaPundit has an interesting quote on Fortuyn (from Financial Times) on how his sexual identity directed his politics. It's an interesting paradox.

UPDATE-5:33pm--Andrew Sullivan has a revealing elegy on Fortuyn. He was not far-right, except by Dutch standards. Elsewhere, he'd be considered a mainstream conservative.

Another thought--what will happen if the killer is an immigrant?

UPDATE-5:33pm--Thankfully, he's not. I'd much rather he be a standard left-wing nut job than an immigrant.

2002-05-06T01:54:00.000-04:00

Just in case I have a reader or two who don't visit InstaPundit on a daily basis, this link, found by the professor is a must-read.

Swedes less well off than poorest Americans -study

African-American households have a higher median average income than the Swedes. International Monetary Fund data from 2001 show that U.S. GDP per capita in dollar terms was 56 percent higher than in Sweden while in 1980, Swedish GDP per capita was 20 percent higher.

Socialism will be the death of Sweden, although it will be a slow, lingering death. Unlike much of the rest of Europe, which is moving rightward (Austria, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Portugal, and perhaps the Netherlands and Germany in their upcoming elections), Swedes are strongly wedded to the welfare state. The fact that they have the slowest rate of growth in Western Europe *might* be related, although I am quite sure that they will argue such a conclusion.

2002-05-06T01:37:00.000-04:00

From the “can’t let it go” department:

I was fact-checked today, and it was warranted. It all arose from my question to the International Press Center over a map that appeared to imply a view of “Palestine” that included what most people refer to as “Israel”. This is a view popular with a number of terrorist organizations.

I suppose I should have been more direct with my questioning, instead of trying to be diplomatic. What I asked was "Why is Israel not on the map?" with a few follow-up notes. The Israel question was not answered, at all; the response focused on my additional comments. A two-state policy is implied, but never actually stated, but that map seems to imply otherwise. It would be akin to going to an official website for Great Britain, and seeing a map that covered Ireland, India, most of Sub-Saharan Africa, British Guyana, a sizable chunk of Southeastern Asia, and a portion of the middle east, including Palestine. Such a map would be historically accurate, since prior to Irish independence in 1922, that was the extent of the British Empire.

The answer that that is an historical map of Palestine doesn't wash; Historical Palestine was only confined to the specific boundaries of current-day Israel and the "Palestinian" areas for a short time, during which the objective of creating a Jewish homeland was always intended. Prior to 1923, Mandatory Palestine included the current-day Jordan. Before the British revived the name in 1917, the concept of "Palestine" as a separate administrative district had not existed since the Romans overran Israel in 70 BC. It did not exist during the Ottoman period, which began in 1516. During the Ottoman period, there was no Palestine, only districts that do not conform to current borders. Three Sanjaks–Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre (which is in current-day Lebanon)–had jurisdiction over most of the area. Nablus and Acre were part of the province of Beirut, while Jerusalem was ruled directly from Istanbul, due to its religious significance.

The biggest problem with the map (and the linked map reached by clicking it) is that it appears on the official Palestinian press agency website, and despite the “historical” disclaimer it appears to be a de facto claim for the whole region. Considering that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hizbollah all want Palestine to occupy the whole area, it seems to be a provocation. Simply adding the label "Israel" on the second map, and moving it forward would eliminate most of my concerns. I still have problems with their claim of a totally occupied Jerusalem (which is stated in the notes on Jerusalem in the West Bank map), and I want to know why they label so many towns in an area for which they are supposedly not fighting (the 14 towns in Israel proper).

The answer that the Palestinians "had to give up land to attain peace" is so ludicrous that I actually stared at my screen for about 20 seconds before I started laughing. I literally could not believe what they had said. There is no peace; there has not been peace since the Arabs rejected the UN partition plan in 1947. (Recall that the UN plan allotted a larger portion of the region to the Arabs then they ended up with when the dust settled.) And the Palestinians never "gave up" land, they had it taken from them after each ill-advised attack on the Jews.

UPDATE: It appears that not everyone has seen my earlier rebuttal. It's right here. That post is why this one is entitled "unable to let go", as I began researching this post after I completed the first rebuttal. There is very little duplication in the two posts, so if this topic interests you, check out the other one.

2002-05-05T18:00:00.000-04:00

I have had my 1000th visitor today. I expected this milestone about two weeks from now, but the links to my post about the map have generated a lot more traffic than I normally see.

Just in case anyone cares, yesterday was my busiest day since I installed my meter, with 130 visitors. My normal visitor load is about 25 people, although this last week has seen a lot more traffic.

2002-05-05T17:51:00.000-04:00

This is extremely troubling. DPM sums up my views nicely.

2002-05-05T17:41:00.000-04:00

Jim Henley over at Unqualified Offerings fact-checks my ass, and I admit that his conclusions are, for the most part, justified.

However, I do have a few quibbles.

Firstly, he points out a few Israeli-government issued maps that include the West Bank and Gaza Strip areas within Israel's borders. Well, technically, they *are*, because Jordan and Egypt, respectively, have renounced claims to those areas (the fact that Jordan's claim on the West Bank was recognized only by Britain and Pakistan notwithstanding). Since there is no working agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis yet, they *are* part of Israel until an agreement has been made. Besides, the Israeli outline maps show "boundaries and cease-fire lines". Israel has boundaries with Egypt and Lebanon (and, since 1994, Jordan, although it is not reflected on the 1993 map). They have a cease-fire line with Syria (due to the ongoing dispute over the Golan Heights). Until an agreement is struck, there *is* no Palestine for all practical purposes. The fact that Israel identifies areas under Palestinian control appears to be more than the Palestinians are willing to admit, considering that the word "Israel" appears on no map on the Palestinian website. Additionally, several cities that are clearly inside Israel (14 of them) are identified as "Palestinian cities", although there is no additional info available on them. If the purpose was simply to identify major population centers, then why was overwhelmingly Jewish Tel Aviv left off, while smaller, more Arabic cities receive labels?

Further, I did a little digging of my own, and found this official Israeli map, which shows that the Israelis *do* differentiate between Israel proper and non-Israeli territories. Notice that the Golan Heights (which Israel fomally annexed in 1981), and the Eastern portion of Jerusalem (annexed in 1967) are included in the Northern Districtand the Jerusalem district, respectively, while the Gaza and West Bank areas are not included at all. (I suspect that the Central Bureau of Statistics, from which this map comes, has a wealth of maps with similar distinctions. However, I do not read Hebrew, so I have no idea how to navigate the site.) As I have pointed out in the past, if Israel were truly against the idea of a Palestinian state, they simply would have annexed everything (West Bank, Gaza, and all). The fact that they didn't should tell one something.

I agree that both sides appear to be playing fast and loose with the borders (the fact that I had to dig so far into the Israeli government website to find *any* maps is telling), but I still think the Palestinians are ahead in the dishonesty game. The semantic hoops they jumped through in their response to me indicates that they are trying to have it both ways.

2002-05-05T15:04:00.000-04:00

Gallows humor from Mark Steyn. Referring to the telethon held in Saudi Arabia to raise money for Palestinian "martyrs":

Maybe they'll make it a weekly show: Who Wants To Be A Million Air Particles?