The San Francisco Chronicle reports some eye-opening statistics from a study by the National Association of Homebuilders of the distribution of federal tax benefits for homeownership.

Homeowners in a single congressional district in California, the 14th District in Silicon Valley, took more in mortgage interest write-offs than all the residents of six states combined. Homeowners in the 14th—which covers most of San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, plus part of Santa Clara County—claimed $3.2 billion in mortgage interest deductions during the year covered by the study, compared with $2.9 billion by all the residents of Vermont, Wyoming, West Virginia, Alabama and North and South Dakota. The average deduction in the 14th District was $35,000, compared with an average of $9,500 for homeowners nationwide.
—Residents of a single congressional district on Long Island wrote off more in real estate property tax deductions than all the homeowners from seven states combined. Owners in New York’s Third District took $1.25 billion in deductions—more than the $1.2 billion total claimed during the same period in Hawaii, Wyoming, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia and North and South Dakota.
—The average New Jersey homeowner claimed $6,005 in real estate tax write-offs—more than five times the average deduction by residents of Hawaii ($1,126). New Yorkers claimed an average $5,181 in property tax deductions, followed by the residents of New Hampshire ($4,830), Illinois ($4,129) and Vermont ($3,845).
—The average California homeowner wrote off $14,217 in mortgage interest deductions, while the average homeowner in Oklahoma wrote off $5,710. Washington, D.C., homeowners took an average $11,759 in mortgage interest deductions, while the average homeowner in North Carolina got $6,808.

Higher federal deductions mirror the impact of liberal governments. Home prices (and mortgage deductions) are far higher where new development is intensely regulated and curtailed, and liberal states and municipalities impose (naturally) the highest real estate taxes resulting in the largest local tax deductions.

Thus, the cost of bad government in San Francisco, Manhattan, and the District of Columbia is shared with residents of low regulation, low tax red states.

5 minute video of Darth Vader working as supermarket day shift manager. He should have sold those tech stocks sooner.

Pictures of a variety of different bullets striking gelatin, oranges, and other target media.

Victor Davis Hansen thinks the patience of the Western democracies is wearing thin, and that beyond a certain point efforts to placate Islam are bound to end and be replaced by a very different approach: old-fashioned total war.

Yet for all their threats, what the Islamists—from Hezbollah in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle—don’t understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?

Perhaps nothing.

What then would be the new Western approach to terrorism? Hard and quick retaliation—but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst.

Any new policy of retaliation—in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank—would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.

If they are not careful, a Syria or Iran really will earn a conventional war—not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well.

So in the meantime, let us hope that democracy prevails in Iraq, that our massive aid is actually appreciated by the Middle East, that diplomacy ultimately works with Iran, that Syria quits supporting terrorists, and that Hamas and Hezbollah cease their rocket attacks against Israel—more for all their sakes than ours.

Playing with Google Earth is pretty popular in tech circles. One can snoop into all sorts of earthly matters from heaven’s perspective. Lester Haines at the Register reports on one of Google Earth-ers’ most al-time intriguing finds: a Chinese military installation at Huangyangtan features an astonshingly detailed 900×700m scale model of a very mountainous landscape.

The army of Googlers applied ther obsessive analytic skills and identified the model’s subject location: a disputed region of the China-India border.

The extraordinarily elaborate model was obviously painstakingly produced for some sort of military training. The Google General Staff College theorizes that the purpose may be to familiarize Chinese pilots with the landscape in preparation for some future conflict. Considering just how much trouble and expense the Chinese have gone to with this one, India had better be prepared for a renewal of Chinese pressure for concessions, backed up by military force.

——————————————————Hat tip to PJM.

Bill Kristol argued on Fox News that the people of Iran would welcome “the right use of targeted military force.” He added that military force could “trigger changes in Iran,” causing them to embrace regime change. Faiz at American Progress linked the video.

Reuters reports that Human Rights Watch has actually protested Hezbollah’s use of ballbearings to modify its rocket warheads into antipersonnel weapons aimed deliberately at Israeli civilians.

Hezbollah’s attacks in Israel on Sunday and Monday were at best indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas, at worst the deliberate targeting of civilians. Either way, they were serious violations of international humanitarian law and probable war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today.

Attacking civilian areas indiscriminately is a serious violation of international humanitarian law and can constitute a war crime…

.. the warheads used suggest a desire to maximize harm to civilians. Some of the rockets launched against Haifa over the past two days contained hundreds of metal ball bearings that are of limited use against military targets but cause great harm to civilians and civilian property. The ball bearings lodge in the body and cause serious harm.

Michael Kraft, posting at the Counterterrorism Blog, adds details of a revolting tactic.

There also have been reports that the metal fragments are sometimes dipped into a pesticide, in order to maximize the damage to the victims and make it more difficult for doctors to effectively treat their patients. However there has been little public reporting in the western media of this tactic, which causes torture to the victims who survive the original blast and additional agony for their families and friends.

Let’s hope Israel gets to apply “a proportionate response” to all those responsible.

The Southern (reporting from Southern Illinois) tells a heartwarming story. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Grayson Gile of Marion, Illinois, while serving in Afghanistan as an officer in the Combined Joint Special Operation Task Force, met an elderly Hazara man who had taken a year, working in secrecy, to hand knot a rug as a personal gesture of thanks for the liberation of Afghanistan to the American President.

While in the country, Gile got to know many of the natives. “We got to have quite a bit of interaction with the people of the host nation, probably more contact than most soldiers. It took time to establish a rapport with them, but once we established trust, we had friendships,” he said.

One of those friendships involved a Kabul rug merchant who pulled Gile aside before he left the country. The merchant told Gile the story of an elderly man, so overwhelmed with gratitude to the United States for its intervention in the conflict that he made a gift for President Bush – a gift that was a year in the making and made, given the conditions of the country, under penalty of death.

Gile was astonished when he saw the hand-knotted rug, a portrait of Bush, filled with Christian and Catholic symbolism. Filling the center of the rug is an incredible likeness of Bush, dressed in religious vestments, standing at a podium decorated with the official seal of the country and flanked by two waving American flags.

Directly above Bush is Jesus with a sacred heart and stigmata carefully knotted into the rug’s pattern. The rug also shows cherubs and, apparently in an homage to both Bush and a fallen Northern Alliance leader, two lions.

“(Ahmed Shah) Masood was often called ‘the Lion of Panjshir.’ As one of the country’s military leaders, he put some very, very heavy licks to the Soviets and then turned around and delivered the same to the Taliban,” Gile said. “He was assassinated two days before 9/11.”

One corner of the rug reads, “President George W. Bush,” while the opposing corner has the words, “Number one champion.”

I can hear the leftists’ teeth grinding even now.

The Amazing Screw-On Head is a half-hour animation based on a 2002 comic book by Mike Mignola (author of Hellboy). Screw-On Head, a robot that can screw his head onto a wide variety of bodies, is a secret agent working for Abraham Lincoln, battling Emperor Zombie, an undead supervillain intent on releasing an ancient demon.

A nerd’s delight, the story is a tongue-in-cheek homage to Jules Verne, H.P. Lovecraft, and the tradition of Marvel Comics, executed in the manner of Edward Gorey.

Video on Sci Fi Channel web-site.

Air Force Academy cadet uses hidden camera to tape his dancing-fool roommate dancing to hip hop.

video

Today’s youth!
———————————
Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

Reuters reports:

The New York Times Co. plans to narrow the size of its flagship newspaper and close a printing plant, resulting in the loss of 250 jobs, the company said in a story posted on its Web site late on Monday.

The changes, set to take place in April 2008, include the closure of a printing plant in Edison, New Jersey. The company will sublet the plant and consolidate its regional printing facilities at a plant in Queens, the paper said.

The newspaper will be narrower by 1 1/2 inches. The redesign will result in the loss of 250 production jobs, the company said.

The New York Times said it expected the changes to result in savings of $42 million.

The narrower format, offset by some additional pages, will reduce the space the paper has for news by 5 percent, Executive Editor Bill Keller said in the article.

Heartbreaking news, isn’t it?

You’d think they could just adopt an Arabic-language format, and increase sales to their natural readership.

Mark Steyn inveighs against popular culture’s white-washed fantasies of peaceful primitives living in harmony with Nature.

In his shrewd book Civilization And Its Enemies, Lee Harris writes:

“Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary.”

It’s worse than Harris thinks. We’re not merely “forgetful.” We’ve constructed a fantasy past in which primitive societies lived in peace and security with nary a fear that their crops would be stolen or their children enslaved. War has been the natural condition of mankind for thousands of years, and our civilization is a very fragile exception to that. What does it say about us that so many of our elites believe exactly the opposite—that we are a monstrous violent rupture with our primitive pacifist ancestors? It’s never a good idea to put reality up for grabs.

Austin Bay notes the way in which Iran and Syria take advantage of illusory concepts of nation-state sovereignty to hide behind “Lebanon” while using surrogates to make war on Israel.

When fired from positions in southern Lebanon or Gaza, the extended-range Katyushas place roughly sixty percent of Israel’s population in range. (That’s my estimate.) All of Israel’s major cities and towns may soon be a bull’s eye— Hezbollah leaders boast of striking beyond Haifa and “beyond beyond Haifa.” Indeed, there are indications that longer range rockets are being employed. These rockets are “FROG-type” — free rocket over ground. They lack guidance systems but have more reach. They may be able to carry chemical warheads (the Russian series of FROGs could carry chemical warheads).

But now for the layer complexity: Hezbollah hides these weapons among apartment houses and in villages— other words, nests of rockets in neighborhoods.

These neighborhoods and villages are controlled by Hezbollah, not the Lebanese government.

Israel is being fired upon from a Lebanon that “is not quite Lebanon” in a truly sovereign sense.The rockets, of course, come from “somewhere,” but Hezbollah’s “somewhere” is a political limbo in terms of maps with definitive geo-political boundaries. Lebanon is a “failed state”— a peculiar failed state (its not Somalia), but nevertheless failed. It will continue to fail so long as the Lebanese government cannot control Hezbollah—and control means disarm.

So Hezbollah attacks Israel with ever more-powerful, longer-range rockets, then hides behind the diplomatic facade of the greater Lebanese nation state.

Thus terrorists and terror-empowering nations, like Iran and Syria, abuse the nation-state system— or exploit a “dangerous hole” in the system..

Iran and Syria then appeal to the United Nations (a product of the Westphalian “nation state” system) to condemn Israel for attacking Lebanon— when Israel is attacking Hezbollah, which “is and is not Lebanon.”

H/t to Glenn Reynolds.

From Vengeance is Mine (1950):

I palmed that short nosed .32 and laid it across his cheek with a crack that split the flesh open. He rocked back into his chair with his mouth hanging, drooling blood and saliva over his chin. I sat there smiling, but nothing was funny. I said, “Rainey, you’ve forgotten something. You’ve forgotten that I’m not a guy that takes any crap. Not from anybody. You’ve forgotten I’ve been in business because I stayed alive longer than some guys who didn’t want me that way. You’ve forgotten that I’ve had some punks tougher than you’ll ever be on the end of a gun and I pulled the trigger just to watch their expressions change.” He was scared, but he tried to bluff it out anyway. He said, “Why don’tcha try it now, Hammer? Maybe it’s different when ya don’t have a license to use a rod. Go ahead, why don’tcha try it?” He started to laugh at me when I pulled the trigger of the .32 and shot him in the thigh. He said, “My God!” under his breath and grabbed his leg. I raised the muzzle of the gun until he was looking right into the little round hole that was his ticket to hell. “Dare me some more, Rainey.”

AP reports that Frank Michael Morrison Spillane passed away yesterday at the age of 88 at his home at Murrells Inlet, South Carolina.

He was born March 19, 1918 in Brooklyn, and grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Spillane began writing for the pulp magazines in high school. He briefly attended Kansas State Teachers’ College, but dropped out of college before long, and returned to New York, where he worked briefly as a sales clerk at Gimbel’s, then tried his hand at writing comic books.

With the outbreak of WWII, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, where he served principally as a fighter pilot instructor. He married for the first of three times in 1945. Returning to New York, after the war, he purchased a lot intending to build his own house. The first of the Mike Hammer mysteries, which made him world famous, was written to raise money for building material.

Spillane’s ultra-hard-boiled hero, his simple, no-nonsense prose carrying the flavor and cadences of the streets, and his readiness to push the contemporary limits of sexual description made his books ideal reading for the enormous potential market of working-class young men home from the war. He produced seven mystery novels between 1947 and 1952, which all sold in the millions of copies. Spillane quickly became one of the most financially successful writers of his day. He wrote seven of the top ten best-sellers of the 20th century.

The critical establishment thought little of Spillane’s prose style, and considered his lurid violence and inclination to celebrate vigilantism appalling, but he had one defender: Ayn Rand.

The Mike Hammer novels’ unvarnished patriotism, frankly expressed hatred of Communism, and utter lack of moral ambiguity endeared them to Rand. She probably didn’t mind the spectacular violence meted out by the tough detective to bad guys a bit either.

With Mickey Spillane we see the passing of one of the Last of the Mohicans, one of the last representatives of the WWII generation of genuinely masculine Americans, as a group, by and large much like Spillane’s own Mike Hammer: smart-mouthed and cynical, but equipped with an intransigent code of honor; quick with their fists, and always ready to come to the defense of women or the helpless; supremely competent, stoical, and strong; good men to have around in a fight or when a man’s work is needed to be done.

Fan site

It should hardly be surprising to anyone that, informally and in private, President Bush speaks like anybody else, using colloquial expressions and occasionally colorful language.

A press microphone, earlier today, accidentally caught a private conversation between Bush and Blair, in which the president said, (presumably referring to Kofi Annan and the UN) “what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this sh*t.”

(CNN story & video—If you actually care.)

Well, not since the day our second-grade nun banged her finger, and exclaimed “Darn!,” have I seen such a display of infantile astonishment at the descent of Olympian authority to the level of ordinary humanity.

This unutterably trivial event was dotingly recorded, memorialized, and pondered over from Manhattan to Timbuktoo today, proving once again (in case there was doubt in anybody’s mind) exactly how childish and inane the collective intelligence which identifies and comments on the day’s news events actually is.

Those new Intel-powered MacBooks apparently run rather hot. One owner demonstrates just how hot by cooking his egg on it.

Daniel W. Corson, an engineer, decided to try making his own watch, and documents the whole project on a web-site.

The work took him a year, but provided a great deal of amusement. Corson writes:

One of the joys of this work was the constant changes in skillset needed. From machinist to watchmaker to silversmith, etc.. As such the work is never boring, never repetitive, always new challenges and unknowns to be overcome.

A letter to the Palestinians from Youseff M. Ibrahim, an Egyptian-born American reporter.

Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:

The war with Israel is over.

You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.

We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the “eternal struggle” with Israel.

Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.

At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn’t going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.

You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation. Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins.

Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.

In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day.

What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world’s have-nots?

We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.

Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you.

Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.

Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods — more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives — while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.

The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?

Mr. Ibrahim’s advice is certain to be ignored, but its wisdom is obvious.
————————-

Hat tip to Jack Kelly.

Charles Johnson has a few choice words about the New York Times’ culture of disloyalty.

Can anyone imagine a photographer employed by an American newspaper happily collecting pictures of a Jap sniper firing at US forces in WWII? (There is even worse at the beginning of the slideshow.)

The Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania: (in red, clockwise from 9 o’clock, Northumberland County, (Montour County is not included, and is white) then Columbia County, Luzerne County, Lackawanna County, Carbon County, and Schuylkill County.

The community of fashion is largely unaware that a mere two and a quarter hours (111 miles) from midtown Manhattan, one may enter a startlingly different universe, a hardscrabble countryside dotted with working-class towns, falling into ruin after eight decades of decline.

Anthracite coal mining was the Region’s sole economic engine, and cheaper and more convenient forms of energy began challenging hard coal’s position in the American economy as early as 1920. The mineworker’s union unpatriotically broke its pledge to refrain from striking during WWII, and when the miners came back from the war, they found those war-time strikes had very effectively promoted large-scale domestic conversion to heating oil.

Modern environmental regulation in the 1950s was the final straw. By that time, the easy coal in veins close to the surface had been mined out, and it was necessary to dig deep for coal. Available remaining deposits lay below the water table, and the Federal Government would no longer permit collieries simply to pump mine water (thoroughly laden with sulphuric acid) out into local streams and rivers, heading for the Susquehanna and ultimately Chesapeake Bay. Maple Hill, the last colliery operating in my hometown, closed in 1954.

Populations have steadily declined for decades, and the only countervailing trend has been the arrival in the Region in the course of the last two decades of a rapidly increasing new population of Hispanics.

Welfare recipients from New York and Philadelphia first migrated outward in search of a cheaper cost of living (where a welfare income would go farther) to the Lehigh Valley cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton. But prisons, constructed during the prison-building boom of the War on Drugs atop the mountains of the Region as a sop to the regional economy persuaded the same element to cross the Blue Mountain. In some cases, they wanted to be able to visit relatives inside serving time.

The Anthracite Region is a backwater, preserving, as in amber, the culture, values, perspectives, and racial attitudes of a couple of generations back. Only the fact that a very substantial proportion of the local population is over 80 years old significantly diminishes the combustability of the mixture of a newly immigrated Hispanic population (often of less than ideal respectability) with a witches’ brew of belligerent white ethnics.

Even half a century ago, when I was a boy, life in the Region drifted along at its own pace, safely removed from the mainstream currents of news and fashion. But, this time, a part of the Region is at the forefront of national political developments.

The city of Hazleton, in Luzerne County, has responded to a one third growth in population by newly-arrived Hispanics post-2000 with drastic steps aimed at illegal immigrants, taking advantage of recent headlines to fuel radical political action in much the way Berkeley, California would. Even worse, Hazleton’s outbreak of Nativism is attracting press coverage, and inspiring the local Solons of other municipalities to emulation.

The LA Times reports:

Under the new law — which is a modified version of a ballot initiative proposed in San Bernardino — anyone seeking to rent a dwelling in the city will have to apply to the city for a residency license, and submit to an investigation of citizenship status. Landlords found renting to people without licenses will be fined $1,000 a day. Business owners found hiring, renting property to, or providing goods and services to illegal immigrants will lose their business permit for five years on a first offense and 10 years on a second.

There is a certain irony in the descendants of the Central European miners, shot down by nativist sheriff’s deputies in 1897 at Lattimer, keeping the old Luzerne County spirit of hospitality alive, just the same as it has always been. I really wonder who it’s going to be that the grandchildren of today’s Mexicans and Dominicans are going to be trying to kick out a hundred years hence.
——————————————————UPDATE

Well, Hazleton’s moment as Immigration policy vanguard will soon be over.

A leftwing coalition of rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, is suing Hazleton.

There isn’t going to be a contest. I’m not really sure whether the ACLU’s latte budget exceeds the real estate tax revenues of the city of Hazleton, but you get the idea. Financially speaking, Coal Region communities are definite non-starters in modern litigation battles. The mayor of Hazleton will be waxing the Pennsylvania ACLU head guy’s car on Saturdays henceforward, if that’s what he requires. Experiments in Draconian local policy on illegal immigration will need to be conducted in places like California and Arizona, where cities have the wherewithal to fight.

I think myself that the case of the immigration of Roman Catholic Latin Americans of primarily European descent to the United States is a very different thing from the Islamization of Europe, but Fjordman’s pessimistic essay attacking Third World immigration Trans-Atlantically is, as usual, an insightful contribution to the debate.

Imagine you have two such houses next to each other. In House A, the inhabitants have over a period of generations created a tidy and functioning household. They have limited their number of children because they wanted to give all of them a proper education. In House B, the inhabitants live in a dysfunctional household with too many children who have received little higher education. One day they decide to move to their neighbors’. Many of the inhabitants of House A are protesting, but some of them think this might be a good idea. There is room for more people in House A, they say. In addition to this, Amnesty International, the United Nations and others claim that it is “racist” and “against international law” for the inhabitants of House A to expel the intruders. Pretty soon, House A has been turned into an overpopulated and dysfunctional household just like House B.

This is what is happening to the West today.

link

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Andrew Sullivan momentarily paused in his perenniel campaign of demanding kinder treatment for cuththroats to second the leftwing blogosphere’s posterboy of prolixity, Glenn Greenwald, in attacking the amiable Glenn Reynolds.

According to Andrew Sullivan, Reynolds is guilty, forsooth, “of never challeng(ing) in any serious way the abuses of power in this administration nor the extremism of the Malkinesque blogosphere.”

Those who haven’t been drinking moonbat koolaid don’t actually believe this administration is guilty of abuses of power at all. Really, if anything, it is guilty of neglecting to prosecute and punish war-time sedition and treason.

And face it, Andrew, anyone still really libertarian is on the right, and not on the San Francisco-style left. A commitment to socialism at home and surrender overseas, even seasoned with debauchery, is not libertarianism, old boy. Barry Goldwater was right: There’s nothing wrong with extremism in defense of liberty. Those of us still libertarian, still on the right, respect and admire Michelle Malkin precisely because she is a fighter. In fact, as a symbolic rejoinder on this subject, I’m going to add this little item to my links collection today.

I can understand, of course, how Michelle Malkin would scare someone like you.
———————————————————-

Turning to that odious windbag Greenwald, aptly recognized by Charles Johnson as “the left’s most dishonest blogger” (a title not easily achieved):

On Tuesday, Greenwald indulged in a little gamesmanship, first pooh-pooh’ing the significance of last weekend’s ravings in Jeff Goldstein’s Comment section by deranged (then University of Arizona Psychology Instructor) Deborah Frisch (who subsequently resigned), and then proceeding to claim rhetorically the moral high ground in order to equate an obvious exasperated rant by Mischa of Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler with Dr. Frisch’s sinister and highly disturbing comments, applying imagined violence and sexual acts to Mr. Goldstein’s children.
———————————————————-

Mischa’s rant:

So keep that in mind. Should we ever make the mistake of capturing any of the perpetrators of the war crime against PFCs Menchaca and Tucker alive, we can forget about interrogating them in order to catch the rest, according to the Supreme Whores. Well, unless they’re willing to give up information if we ask “pretty please?”, since anything other than that has been deemed illegal by those blackrobed tyrants. Are we exaggerating? Try doing anything to those mutilating darlings of the Supremes in order to extract life-saving intel from them, and then wait for the Supreme Whores to decide that you were “humiliating” them in doing so.

Five ropes, five robes, five trees.

Some assembly required.

Personally, I have a lot more of a problem with the name-calling language “Supreme Whores,” than I do with the “five ropes, five trees… Some assembly required” rhetorical flourish at the end.

OK, Mischa’s posting is not an example of closely-reasoned and totally exemplary blogging, but the current debates over public issues and policy are often emotionally charged, and we all blog unevenly. Many bloggers occasionally descend to the literary form of the rant. But, frankly, the most lurid right wing rant has a tendency to resemble an example of the most dignified and restrained expressions of partisanship found on many of the left’s best known blogs. Mischa would have to chug down a lot of tequila shots, and be in a really bad mood, to come even close to Digby or Atrios on an average day.

Greenwald’s alleged outrage over Mischa’s post is just like the faux-pious nonsense from leftwing moonbats filling up my own Comments section over the Hadji Girl song: just a bunch of opportunistic righteous posturing, the left’s favorite form of self-gratification.

There is a great deal of difference between the downright spooky comments involving his kids that Jeff Goldstein was receiving over the weekend, ultimately accompanied by some very real Denial of Service attacks, and Mischa’s crack. The Supreme Court was not put out of action for a few days, and Justice Stevens didn’t lose any sleep wondering if Mischa was really serious about that tree and that rope.

Former Ambassador Wilson and wife never got what they wanted for Fitzmas, so what can they do but sue?

I never knew that there was a Constitutional right to immunity from rebuttal, but Joe Wilson says his was violated.

Florida Crime rates have fallen to the lowest level in three decades, reports the St Petersburg Times:

The state’s serious crime rate fell to the lowest level in three decades last year, a development Gov. Jeb Bush hailed Tuesday as validation for his policies on gun control and criminal justice.

Bush credited tougher penalties as one reason for the lower crime rate. He also said the figures show that controlling human behavior, not guns, is the way to reduce crime.

“I think law-abiding citizens who have guns for protection are actually part of the reason we have a lower crime rate,” Bush said at a press conference in the Capitol. “I don’t think that there’s a lot of data that suggests that gun control reduces crime.”

Florida licenses to carry concealed handguns are easy to obtain, and Florida recently passed legislation abolishing a legal requirement in liberal states that obliges the law-abiding citizen to make every possible effort to retreat before defending himself when confronted by an attacker.

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, where even ownership of handguns is prohibited, the July Homicide total has risen to 14 (in 13 days), and the chief of police has declared a crime emergency.

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey reacted yesterday to a recent surge in homicides by declaring a “crime emergency,” a move that gives him the freedom to quickly adjust officers’ schedules and restrict their days off.

The victims included a popular store owner slain at closing time, a community activist killed in a park and a British citizen whose throat was slit in Georgetown.

The most recent to die was 23-year-old Michael Dorsey, of Capitol Heights. He was found shot in the chest just after 2 a.m. this morning, in the hallway of an apartment building of Gallaudet St. NE. Three other people were also shot in the city overnight, but were expected to live, police said…

Eleven men, two women and a 16-year-old youth have been killed in the city since July 1. About 25 hours before Dorsey was killed, Laquanda Johnson, 24, was found fatally shot in the 3600 block of 22nd Street SE. A suspect was arrested yesterday afternoon in Suitland.

Despite the recent uptick in violence, the 95 homicides recorded in the city so far this year is only one more than the total committed by this date in 2005. But the number of robberies is up 14 percent, and Ramsey and other commanders are concerned that more holdups will turn deadly.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry says that Hezbollah is trying to move the Israeli soldiers captured on Wednesday to Iran.

Jerusalem Post

A celebration of the burkha at Time Magazine.

Kos made FoxNews.com yesterday, with Noel Shepherd wondering: Is the Daily Kos About to Implode?

It appears that the post-Yearly Kos month from hell is continuing for Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the proprietor of the Internet’s premier liberal blog Daily Kos. After receiving some extremely negative press from major publications such as The New York Times, The New Republic and Newsweek immediately following his seemingly successful bloggers’ convention in Las Vegas, Kos is now faced with an even greater challenge: dissension within his ranks.

Such internal squabbling comes at the same time that many prominent Democrats seem to be privately expressing concern about the direction the “netroots” — the self-described Internet grassroots movement of liberal bloggers and their loyal followers — are taking the Party. This seemingly inconvenient planetary alignment is not only threatening the long-term viability of this crusade, but also is putting Kos in an uncomfortable position just as his notoriety is skyrocketing.

As reported here on June 30, revelations about Kos’s friend and former business partner Jerome Armstrong — from stock fraud allegations to accepting consulting fees from not so liberal candidates — have cast a cloud over the blog and its leader. This pall has also undermined the stellar relationship Kos has had with the traditional media up to this point.

Yet, maybe more important, these revelations — along with the way Markos and his Kossacks reacted to them — have caused some prominent DKos bloggers to question the behavior of Zuniga and his devotees. Such a civil war within the liberal blogosphere certainly has the potential to further discredit it, while likely making the mainstream media as well as the candidates they revere less apt to associate with this developing train wreck.

Some prominent bloggers on the left have even begun to criticize Kos. Last Saturday, KosKid Maryscott O’Connor, in a posting titled Something is Rotten in Blogmark, condemned the customary Partyline mentality which flourishes on Daily Kos:

Sometimes I am embarrassed to call myself a member of DKos.

This is one of those times.

There is a sort of groupthink, Lord of the Flies kind of behaviour at DKos over certain issues that absolutely makes me nauseated…

Increasingly, I have begun to feel intimidated or wary about writing my thoughts and doubts about these issues, lest I be set upon by a pack of Defenders of the Kos. It is this sense of intimidation that spurs me to write this, among other reasons: when I start censoring myself because I’m afraid I’ll be punished with disapproval, anyone’s disapproval, I know I’m allowing others’ opinions to matter too much to me. I shouldn’t be deciding what to say and not to say online based on any anticipated reaction.

And predicted that not even the left blogosphere’s chorus of howler-monkeys can ultimately succeed in shouting down questions about the exchange of the Kos’ influence for cash. The Kosola scandal “WILL NOT GO AWAY simply because some people don’t think Markos should be held to the standards that he WILL, ultimately, BE held to.”

But many on the left, like Steve Gilliard, think lefties should

“Say nothing bad about Commander Kos.”

They’re scurrying to the barricades over on DailyKos today, posting defensively about the media’s “obsession with trying to bring down the progressive netroots.”

We all knew that Woodstock, New York and Berkeley, California have a demented moonbat problem, but Rolla, Missouri?

A local editorialist there named Dave Weinbaum is afraid that Bush is going to run again.

Yes, I know the 22nd Amendment limits presidents to two terms, but Mr. Weinbaum has figured out a loophole.

Bush has finally done it.

He now acknowledges that Karl Rove stole two presidential elections in collusion with Diebold Corporation and the Supreme Court. He’s so repentant that he has decided to run once more for the presidency…legitimately.

You see, if he was never legally elected, term limits don’t apply to him.

Since he claims no knowledge of the actual crimes committed by Karl, learning of them after the fact, there’s no likelihood that he’ll be indicted, much less impeached. Republicans, if they maintain their control, can stop all Lib attempts at such feeble gestures…

The only way Dems can stop this from happening is to win the majority in Congress…or bribe enough Republicans to vote against the President.

And I thought the strongest US pot was grown up in Humboldt County….

Paleontologists excavating in the Riversleigh Fossil Beds (also) in Northern Australia have made some exciting finds:

Palaeontologists digging in northern Australia claim to have found the fossilised remains of the ultimate fighting marsupial – a flesh eating “killer kangaroo” that had wolf-like fangs and once walked the earth more than 10 million years ago.

The team from the University of New South Wales made the discovery along with 20 other previously unknown species in northern Queensland, including the carnivorous kangaroo, known as Ekaltadeta, and a large predatory bird described by the team as a “demon duck of doom”.

The vertebrate palaeontologist Sue Hand said the meat-eaters would have looked remarkably different from kangaroos around today. “These things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh,” she said.

Professor Michael Archer, another team member, described the remains of two kangaroo species, one with wolf-like fangs and another with long forearms that was unable to hop like a modern kangaroo. “Because they didn’t hop, these were galloping kangaroos, with big, powerful forelimbs. Some of them had long canines like wolves,” he said.

The killer marsupial and duck of doom flourished in the Miocene epoch.

At American Thinker, essential commentator on the Pouting Spooks Anti-Bush Operation, Clarice Feldman, offers her latest observations on Robert Novak’s account of his role in the Plamegame scandal, published yesterday in Human Events.

Novak writes:

For nearly the entire time of his investigation, Fitzgerald knew—independent of me—the identity of the sources I used in my column of July 14, 2003. A federal investigation was triggered when I reported that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was employed by the CIA and helped initiate his 2002 mission to Niger. That Fitzgerald did not indict any of these sources may indicate his conclusion that none of them violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Causing Feldman to ask:

If Fitzgerald knew by January 12, 2004 who the leaker was and that it wasn’t Libby or Rove, why did he later call them to testify before the grand jury? Was it simply to determine whether he could trap them into making perjurious statements, something the law does not permit?

She believes, along with many others, that Novak’s unnamed source “is almost certainly Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s Deputy Secretary of State. The same man who almost certainly was Bob Woodward’s source as well.”

Feldman makes an important connection:

If Fitzgerald has known since January 12, 2004 of the name of the leaker, why is he still protecting him, and why is he treating the leaker’s (that is, Armitage’s) source, who is almost certainly Marc Grossman, former Under Secretary of State for political affairs, the man reportedly the source for the first accusations against Libby and Rove, as an impartial witness to the events? In the discovery process it turned out that Grossman was a longtime friend of Wilson’s, dating to their college days at the University of California—Santa Barbara. Is it likely that the famous prosecutor missed this fact?

and then asks another question:

Finally (and I hope to report more fully on this soon) what role, exactly, did former Deputy Attorney General Comey, who set up this extra-statutory (and I think unconstitutional) appointment of his friend Patrick Fitzgerald, play in steering Fitzgerald toward the mistaken notion that Libby was lying, not Wilson or the CIA?

Our own Comey Connection report here.

From Wuzzadem.

Hat tip to Beth.

Marc Gunther, reviewing Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail in Fortune, deplores “the extinction of mass culture.” Some of us consider it cause for celebration.

Anderson rejoices in the proliferation of niche markets and consumer choice, but Gunther argues that “The advent of 300 channels and the Internet has fragmented audiences – and the explosion of choice has left us poorer.”

I think the explosion of choice has left us poorer in at least two arenas. The first is journalism. (Yes, as a Fortune writer, I’ve got a stake in the health of the mainstream media, which bloggers call the MSM.) The network evening newscasts, big-city newspapers and the national news magazines once had the money, access, skills, commitment and power to deliver lots of original reporting and put important issues on the national agenda. Today, they are all diminished.

To pick a single, timely, example, The Tribune Co. announced just the other day that its newspapers would be closing foreign bureaus in Johannesburg, Moscow, Lebanon and Pakistan. This is happening all over newspaperdom and it happened years ago at the broadcast networks.

Yes, there is more information available to us than ever, but I don’t think we are better informed. Niche media will, inevitably, continue to weaken mass media.

The second arena where we are worse off is politics. This is related to journalism, as the moderate and responsible (okay, bland) voices of the MSM get drowned out by partisan, opinionated cableheads and bloggers.

Yeah, right, I’m really depressed about how responsible (but, unfortunately, lying) voices like Dan Rather’s were drowned out by (fact-checking) Charles Johnson and Powerline.

A complete list of things caused by global warming

Air pressure changes, allergies increase, Alps melting, anxiety, aggressive polar bears, algal blooms, Asthma, avalanches, billions of deaths, blackbirds stop singing, blizzards, blue mussels return, boredom, budget increases, building season extension, bushfires, business opportunities, business risks, butterflies move north, cannibalistic polar bears, cardiac arrest, Cholera, civil unrest, cloud increase, cloud stripping, methane emissions from plants, cold spells (Australia), computer models, conferences, coral bleaching, coral reefs grow, coral reefs shrink, cold spells, crumbling roads, buildings and sewage systems, damages equivalent to $200 billion, Dengue hemorrhagic fever, dermatitis, desert advance, desert life threatened, desert retreat, destruction of the environment, diarrhoea, disappearance of coastal cities, disaster for wine industry (US), Dolomites collapse, drought, drowning people, drowning polar bears, ducks and geese decline, dust bowl in the corn belt, early spring, earlier pollen season, earthquakes, Earth light dimming, Earth slowing down, Earth spinning out of control, Earth wobbling, El Niño intensification, erosion, emerging infections, encephalitis,, Everest shrinking, evolution accelerating, expansion of university climate groups, extinctions (ladybirds, pandas, pikas, polar bears, gorillas, whales, frogs, toads, turtles, orang-utan, elephants, tigers, plants, salmon, trout, wild flowers, woodlice, penguins, a million species, half of all animal and plant species), experts muzzled, extreme changes to California, famine, farmers go under, figurehead sacked, fish catches drop, fish catches rise, fish stocks decline, five million illnesses, floods, Florida economic decline, food poisoning, footpath erosion, forest decline, forest expansion, frosts, fungi invasion, Garden of Eden wilts, glacial retreat, glacial growth, global cooling, glowing clouds, Gore omnipresence, Great Lakes drop, greening of the North, Gulf Stream failure, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, harvest increase, harvest shrinkage, hay fever epidemic, heat waves, hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late, human fertility reduced, human health improvement, hurricanes, hydropower problems, hyperthermia deaths, ice sheet growth, ice sheet shrinkage, inclement weather, Inuit displacement, insurance premium rises, invasion of midges, islands sinking, itchier poison ivy, jellyfish explosion, Kew Gardens taxed, krill decline, landslides, landslides of ice at 140 mph, lawsuits increase, lawyers’ income increased (surprise surprise!), lightning related insurance claims, Lyme disease, Malaria, malnutrition, Maple syrup shortage, marine diseases, marine food chain decimated, Meaching (end of the world), megacryometeors, Melanoma, methane burps, melting permafrost, migration, microbes to decompose soil carbon more rapidly, more bad air days, more research needed, mountains break up, mudslides, next ice age, Nile delta damaged, no effect in India, nuclear plants bloom, ocean acidification, outdoor hockey threatened, oyster diseases, ozone loss, ozone repair slowed, ozone rise, pests increase, plankton blooms, plankton loss, plant viruses, polar tours scrapped, psychosocial disturbances, railroad tracks deformed, rainfall increase, rainfall reduction, refugees, release of ancient frozen viruses, resorts disappear, rift on Capitol Hill, rivers raised, rivers dry up, rockfalls, rocky peaks crack apart, Ross river disease, salinity reduction, Salmonella, sea level rise, sex change, ski resorts threatened, smog, snowfall increase, snowfall reduction, societal collapse, songbirds change eating habits, sour grapes, spiders invade Scotland, squid population explosion, spectacular orchids, tectonic plate movement, ticks move northward (Sweden), tides rise, tree beetle attacks, tree foliage increase (UK), tree growth slowed, trees less colourful, trees more colourful, tropics expansion, tsunamis, Venice flooded, volcanic eruptions, walrus pups orphaned, wars over water, water bills double, water supply unreliability, water scarcity (20% of increase), weeds, West Nile fever, whales move north, wheat yields crushed in Australia, white Christmas dream ends, wildfires, wine – harm to Australian industry, wine industry damage (California), wine industry disaster (US), wine – more English, wine – no more French , wind shift, winters in Britain colder, wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less, workers laid off, World bankruptcy, World in crisis, Yellow fever.

(list complete with intact links here)

and all on 0.006 deg C per year!

Advice of any omissions (with sources) or broken links is welcome at warmlist@numberwatch.co.uk

Hat tip to Paul Ceruzzi.

The Financial Times reports

the White House on Tuesday confirmed that Gordon England, deputy defence secretary, sent a memorandum to senior defence officials and military officers last week, telling them that Common article III of the Geneva Convention — which prohibits inhumane treatment of prisoners and requires certain basic legal rights at trial — would apply to all detainees held in US military custody.

The Administration is knuckling under to the Supreme Court’s preposterous application of Geneva Convention status in Hamdan.

The sanctimonious do-gooder element is burbling with joy. Dave Hoffman aptly compared Hamdan with Brown, and he’s perfectly correct.

As in Brown, the Hamdan decision takes a leap of faith in the legitimacy of particular justices’ self-righteous moral intuitions as a basis for overruling objective law, counting on the sentimentality of the general public to affirm politically over time the Court’s decision.

There is a difference, though. The Brown decision was made at a time when state segregation represented a strange anachronism, when the laws under scrutiny were nearly universally despised, when the legal fruit was already overripe and ready to drop off the vine of its own accord.

The principle of reciprocity in the laws and usages of war has considerably greater vitality and reason behind it than Jim Crow ever did. The entire point of the Geneva Convention is to encourage humane treatment of prisoners of war on the basis of reciprocity. Signing the Convention is a promise that, if you do not abuse our soldiers who fall into your hands, we will also spare yours.

Justice Stevens’ generosity in the awarding of honorable status, rights, and protections to illegal combatants really represents a fraudulent check written at the expense of American fighting men.

When Justice Stevens effeminately promises that illegal combatants, terrorists, murderers, and brigands will all be treated as honorable adversaries, attempting to preclude the American fighting man, exposed to the hazard of falling alive into the hands of a merciless and barbarous enemy, from punishing violations of the customs and usages of war, he goes far beyond his own legitimate perogative. The decision to spare this enemy’s life, or that, belongs to the man who bested him, not to some theorist and scribbler sitting in a marble building in the District of Columbia.

In WWII, my father served in the USMC on Guadalcanal. He told me that the Japanese had people able to speak English, and in the long tropical nights, the Japanese forces would amuse themselves by imitating the pleas for assistance of a wounded American lying helpless between the fighting lines. Naive young Marines often had to be restrained physically from climbing out their foxholes and dashing off into the night to the rescue of their miserable and suffering fellow Marine. Every now and then, an individual hero would break free, and go out there. They always found him the next day, crucified with Japanese bayonets to a palm tree, his reproductive organs cut off and stuffed insultingly in his mouth. The Marines on Guadalcanal consequently took no Japanese prisoners, except for the purpose of short and forcible interrogation.

In today’s absurd world, bourgeois lawyers, safe in the United States and far from the fighting (who know nothing of war) would interpose their own opinions and emotions between the just revenge of American fighting men and a cowardly and dishonorable enemy.

The answer to Justice Stevens is simple. US forces will need to be certain to take no illegal combatants alive.

For an evening block of shows termed Midnight Spank on G4.

video

Look closely in order to avoid missing the butterfly’s threatening antenna gesture .

Looking at the differences in platforms and culture from another perspective.

video

SenecatheYounger quotes from the Richmond Times-Dispatch the sort of obituary we all hope to deserve (one day long from now).

Frederic Arthur (Fred) Clark, who had tired of reading obituaries noting other’s courageous battles with this or that disease, wanted it known that he lost his battle as a result of an automobile accident on June 18, 2006. True to Fred’s personal style, his final hours were spent joking with medical personnel while he whimpered, cussed, begged for narcotics and bargained with God to look over his wife and kids. He loved his family. His heart beat faster when his wife of 37 years Alice Rennie Clark entered the room and saddened a little when she left. His legacy was the good works performed by his sons, Frederic Arthur Clark III and Andrew Douglas Clark MD, PhD., along with Andy’s wife, Sara Morgan Clark. Fred’s back straightened and chest puffed out when he heard the Star Spangled Banner and his eyes teared when he heard Amazing Grace. He wouldn’t abide self important tight censored. Always an interested observer of politics, particularly what the process does to its participants, he was amused by politician’s outrage when we lie to them and amazed at what the voters would tolerate. His final wishes were “throw the bums out and don’t elect lawyers” (though it seems to make little difference). During his life he excelled at mediocrity. He loved to hear and tell jokes, especially short ones due to his limited attention span. He had a life long love affair with bacon, butter, cigars and bourbon. You always knew what Fred was thinking much to the dismay of his friend and family. His sons said of Fred, “he was often wrong, but never in doubt”. When his family was asked what they remembered about Fred, they fondly recalled how Fred never peed in the shower – on purpose. He died at MCV Hospital and sadly was deprived of his final wish which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a double date to include his wife, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to crash an ACLU cocktail party. In lieu of flowers, Fred asks that you make a sizable purchase at your local ABC store or Virginia winery (please, nothing French – the censored) and get rip roaring drunk at home with someone you love or hope to make love to. Word of caution though, don’t go out in public to drink because of the alcohol related laws our elected officials have passed due to their inexplicable terror at the sight of a MADD lobbyist and overwhelming compulsion to meddle in our lives. No funeral or service is planned. However, a party will be held to celebrate Fred’s life. It will be held in Midlothian, Va. Email fredsmemory@yahoo.com for more information. Fred’s ashes will be fired from his favorite cannon at a private party on the Great Wicomico River where he had a home for 25 years. Additionally, all of Fred’s friend (sic) will be asked to gather in a phone booth, to be designated in the future, to have a drink and wonder, “Fred who?”

Molliter ossa cubent. [May the earth lie lightly on his bones.]

goes to Jeff Goldstein. This one is definitely worth a link.

The Loeb Classical Library has been a reliable, if not always inspiring, cultural institution since 1912. This year, the Loeb Library marks a publication milestone with the arrival of its 500th volume: Volume I of the Lesser Declamations of Quintilian.

The Loeb Library is celebrating this landmark with the publication of an anthology: the Loeb Classical Library Reader, featuring selections from 33 Loeb titles.

Tracy Lee Simmons, author of Climbing Parnassus, acknowledges the occasion with an essay in the Weekly Standard.

They may look quaint, but these midget volumes have become the missals of the bookish classes. Generations have known them as “the Loebs,” though they belong to what is properly called the Loeb Classical Library, and, within the English-speaking world, they are deemed an essential accouterment to the life of the mind. For within them we can find, in all their antiquated Greek and Latin glory, those exquisite feats of the ancient Greeks and Romans in poetry, drama, philosophy, and history—not to mention architecture, agriculture, geography, engineering, mathematics, botany, zoology, and even horsemanship and hunting…

From the publication of the first volume of the series in 1912 (the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius) the Loeb Library, which never published in any particular order of works, has always catered more to those unable or too unpracticed to read Greek: 322 of the current collection are greens (Greek), while only 177 are reds (Latin). The Top Ten Loeb Bestsellers are predictable: Homer (three volumes), Virgil (two volumes), Ovid, Hesiod, Caesar, Aristotle, and the All-Time Number One, the Plato volume containing the dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and the Phaedrus.

Not surprisingly, these volumes hew closely to those texts most often assigned in schools and universities.

When surveyed as a whole, the Loeb Classical Library does make an arrestingly imposing set of books, so much so that the Harvard University Press has broadcast some fun facts worthy of Trivial Pursuit. The Loebs take up precisely 43 feet of shelf space, weigh 372 pounds, and were anyone ever inspired to do this, he could stack the volumes vertically end-to-end to build a column of 276 feet, the height of each tower of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Hexagenia limbata Yellow Drake

The annual Hexagenia limbata mayfly hatch on the Mississippi in parts of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin is heavy enough this year to be visible on radar.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal – Winona Daily News

New York Times Leakmeister Eric Lichtblau, writing with Scott Shane, on Saturday, exposed a secret and undisclosed May 18th letter from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra to President Bush. The Times treats the story as the revelation of another Administration secret Counterterrorism program.

In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters.

The letter from Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, did not specify the intelligence activities that he believed had been hidden from Congress.

I’m not sure that the Times’ interpretation of the story is correct.

Tom Maguire, the right Blogosphere’s specialist in these matters, reviews the guesses as to the object of Chairman Hoekstra’s wrath from various MSM and blogosphere sources, which suggest:

1) the SWIFT program.

2) the missing Iraqi WMDs.

3) some “more explosive secret” previously alluded to by NSA-leaker, and renowned stalker, Russell Tice.
——————————————
I have a wildly speculative alternative theory. It just might be that the Times has completely missed the point.

Mr. Hoekstra was also interviewed on Fox News (Allahpundit has the video). In that interview, Chairman Hoekstra referred to his committee having a passion about three things:

1. Getting the right people in the right leadership positions in the Intelligence Community.

2. Implementing the establishment of the office of Director of National Intelligence.

3. Complete and aggressive oversight of all the programs pursued by the Intelligence Community.
——————————————
Number one is clearly referring to the appointment of Stephen R. Kappes (Previously mentioned here)

In the Times-revealed May 18th letter to President Bush, Hoekstra objects vehemently, and at length, to Kappes’s appointment, writing:

the choice for Deputy Director, Steve Kappes, is more troubling on both a substantive and personal level…

Regrettably, the appointment of Mr. Kappes sends a clear signal that the days of collaborative reform between the White House and this committee may be over… Individuals both within and outside the Administration have let me and others know of their strong opposition to this choice for Deputy Director. Yet, in my conversations with General Haydon it is clear that the decision on Mr. Kappes is final…

I understand that Mr. Kappes is a capable, well-qualified and well-liked former Directorate of Operations (DO) case officer. I am heartened by the professional qualities he would bring to the job, but am concerned by what could be the political problems that he could bring back to the Agency. I am convinced that politicization was underway well before Porter Goss became the Director. In fact, I have been long concerned that a strong and well-positioned group within the Agency intentionally undermined the Administration and its policies. This argument is supported by the Ambassador Wilson/Valerie Plame events, as well as by the string of unauthorised disclosures from an organization that prides itself with being able to keep secrets. I have come to the belief that, despite his service to the DO, Mr. Kappes may have been part of this group. I must take note when my Democratic colleagues – those who vehemently denounced and publicly attacked the strong choice of Porter Goss as Director – now publicly support Mr. Kappes’s return.

Further, the details surrounding Mr. Kappes’s departure from the CIA give me great pause. Mr. Kappes was not fired, but, as I understand it, summarily resigned his position shortly after Director Goss responded to his demonstrated contempt for Congress and the Intelligence Committees’ oversight responsibilities. The fact is, Mr. Kappes and his deputy, Mr. Sulick, were developing a communications offensive to bypass the Intelligence Committees and the CIA’s own Office of Congressional Affairs. One can only speculate on the motives but it clearly indicates a willingness to promote a personal agenda.

The subject of the House Intelligence Committee’s wrath seems not to be the Administration, but rather the Administration’s adversaries.

I’m going to climb way out on a limb with a speculation of my own. I think, perhaps, the “secret program” Chairman Hoekstra is indignant about, which he says is in violation of the law, may not be an Administration program at all. He may actually have been referring to the briefing of the Congressional oversight committees about a very secret Intelligence Community program, viz., the Anti-Bush Administration Intel Operation, described by a reluctant Administration at Congressional request.

Suppose Pete Hoekstra is fed up with the Administration’s failure to expose and prosecute the cabal of Pouting and Leaking Spooks behind the Plamegame, the NSA flap, the renditions story, and all the rest, and is now trying to hold the President’s feet to the fire in order to force him to act. Investigation, exposure, and prosecution of the leakers and conspirators could be initiated by Congress itself, instead of the Justice Department.

I could be completely wrong, of course.
——————————————
The (Australian) Advertiser seems to read this story the same way I do.

Democratic Strategist Scott Winship looks at the national political division, and does not like the way the numbers break down:

• Adults, late 2004, based on my own analyses of the 2004 National Election Study: 35% liberal, 55% conservative (remainder are moderates, non-identifiers, or reported inconsistencies before and after the election)

• Adults, late 2004, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: 19% liberal, 39% conservative (remainder are moderate)

• Voters, late 2004, based on my own analyses of the 2004 National Election Study: 33% liberal, 56% conservative

• Likely Voters, January 2006, Democracy Corps: 19% liberal, 36% conservative

My own analyses are different from the others in that I have two responses from each person — one before and one after the election — and because the NES tries to get as many people as possible to choose either liberal or conservative rather than moderate. Anyway, the bottom line is that when respondents can choose “moderate”, roughly twice as many people identify as conservative as call themselves liberal. If moderates are forced to choose, they split roughly evenly, leaving 55-60 percent more conservatives than liberals. And these statements hold whether one is looking at adults, voters, or likely voters.

then tries to find comfort by classifying people who are libertarian as liberal. Personally, I don’t think this analysis will help much electorally.

OK, the response from those who don’t like these facts is invariably that a lot of people really are liberal, but the term has been made into a dirty word by conservatives. If you ask people about their policy preferences and values, liberals would be in the majority.

Of course, saying it doesn’t make it so, but this assertion could be true. To test it, I used the NES from 2004, first choosing questions from the survey related to values and values-laden issues; foreign policy and national security; economic and social policy; and fiscal policy.* Within each of these four domains, I created weights for each question based on how well it predicted the presidential vote. Then I categorized everyone as a liberal or conservative in each domain by seeing whether weighted liberal responses to the questions out-numbered weighted conservative responses. Finally, (de-glaze your eyes) I weighted the four liberal/conservative designations based on their predictive power and categorized everyone as an “operational” liberal or conservative.

Now the good stuff. Based on my weighting scheme, the country is evenly split between operational liberals and conservatives. Adults are conservative on foreign policy and national security (52 to 48) and values (62 to 38), but liberal on economic/social policy (57 to 43) and fiscal policy (60 to 40). Consistent with the idea that liberal is a stigmatized word, just 56 percent of operational liberals self-identified as liberal, while 30 percent self-identified as conservative. In contrast, 79 percent of operational conservatives said they were conservative.

It shouldn’t be surprising though. What does the left really have to offer America? A democrat electoral victory will simply ensure surrender and withdrawal abroad; higher taxes and more government programs at home; greater privileges and perquisites for that party’s client base of whiners, spongers, and the gender-dissatisfied; and a never-ending chorus of accusations for the rest of us.

In the Bolivean Andes: narrow, big dropoffs, no guardrails. photos.

Personally, I think the Tioga Pass (from Yosemite down to Mono Lake), the Geiger Grade (from Virginia City down to Reno, Nevada), or the Stage Road (north of Pescadero, California) have certain similarities.

The Bolivian road reminded one of our commenters (and me too) of the great film by Henri-Georges Clouzot La Salaire de la peur [The Wages of Fear] (1953 Amazon has the date wrong), which was redone by William Friedkin as PJM.

In Today’s Times, reported Edmund L. Andrews grudgingly acknowledges “surprising” (and soaring) federal revenues, and undaunted by mere facts, demonstrates how to spin one’s way out of such damaging admissions.

Democrats and many independent budget analysts note that overall revenues have barely climbed back to the levels reached in 2000, and that the government has borrowed trillions of dollars against Social Security surpluses just as the first of the nation’s baby boomers are nearing retirement.

Just treat the democrat partisan slant as conclusive, throw in some unspecified “independent analysts” ’ opinions as confirmation, and point accusingly at federal standard budgetary operating procedure (spending Social Security revenues) as supposedly unique to this administration and this congress.

John Hinderaker goes after the Times story here.

It’s not easy to get to the bottom of all this, since elements of the moonbat left have targeted Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom with not one, but two, Denial of Service attacks (reported via Blackfive).

Evidently, one Deborah Frisch, a University of Pennsylvania Ph.D., employed as an adjunct instructor in Psychology at the University of Arizona, a lady actually capable of defending Ward Churchill in these terms:

Hours after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Ward Churchill compared the victims to the Nazis. A professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he wrote in an essay that those killed at the World Trade Center were not innocent civilians but “little Eichmanns.”

The analogy is so outrageous, one thinks, that surely he immediately got into trouble.

Actually, the analogy is extremely apt and not outrageous at all. It is clear from the context, that Professor Churchill was referring to Hannah Arendt’s comments about Eichmann.

Hannah Arendt was a journalist for the newspaper “The New Yorker” when she saw the Eichmann Trial in Israel in 1961. Her book is based on a series of articles she wrote about the trial.

In the article, she coined the term “banality of evil.” Hitler’s henchmen who had behaved monstrously did not look like monsters. Instead, they were bland and benign. According to Arendt, Eichmann’s character flaw was mindless obedience to authority, not a sadistic or psychopathic personality.

This, of course, is even scarier than finding that Eichmann and other Nazis were crazy in some way. Arendt’s analysis inspired Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority at Yale University and Philip Zimbardo’s Prison Study at Stanford University.

So there is nothing absurd or outrageous about using the term “Eichmann” to refer to the stockbrokers who died that day. It’s a little strange to completely ignore the firefighters, secretaries and building maintenance workers who died that day. And singling out the stockbrokers and ignoring the firefighters dehumanizes them the same way Nazis dehumanized Jews.

I agree with Churchill that America was not an “innocent victim” on 911. I’m tempted to agree that “titans” of finance are more guilty than the rest of us. But even though they’re better compensated than the rest of us, they’re no more guilty, really. We’re all little Eichmanns. Only the far left is willing to admit it.

made a series of postings in the Comments section of Goldstein’s blog of an irrational and highly inappropriate character. Some readers thought these postings might actually constitute a threat to Mr. Goldstein’s child, and a number of people lodged complaints with the University of Arizona and the authorities.

Having provoked a firestorm, La Frisch prudently resigned her teaching position, and asked for the whole thing to stop.

Goldstein, posting on another site, denied feeling victimized.

1) I don’t feel victimized. Debbie Frisch is as nutty as the ring around a squirrel’s crapper, but I don’t think she’s a threat. She’s more of an object lesson in having too many cats.
2) I allowed Debbie to continue commenting here because she was (paraphrase: making a fool of herself).
3) (parahrase: She did make a fool of herself: a big one.)
4) But no matter. I don’t want apologies.
5) On the other hand, pie would be nice.
6) Or a bottle of really good tequila.
7) Blue agave, Deb.
8) None of that cheapass rail shit you were huffing the other night.
9) Go on, I’ll wait…

Deborah Frisch seems to have a long record of posting less-than-civil comments to blogs she disagrees with. I found another case early in 2005 at Professor Bainbridge.
—————————————-

UPDATE

This unseemly affair started 7/3 with Frisch posting comments in response to criticism of the New York Times’ publication of the SWIFT program.

Frisch’s academic career.
—————————————-
FURTHER UPDATE

All this unseemly correspondence, and denial of service attacks on Protein Wisdom, are still continuing Sunday night. link

Baron Bodissey, this week, has a terrific essay identifying the crucial components of Islam’s attack on the West:

Covert funding based on successful long-tern extortion via the manipulation of petroleum prices.

The use of criminals, psychos, and malcontents as cannon fodder.

And so we have what might be called a Demonic Convergence, a confluence of destructive impulses that Islam gathers unto itself. In the terms of Chaos Theory, Islam is a “basin attractor”, an asymptotic solution to all the differential equations of nihilistic human behavior.

Any impulse that longs to destroy Western Civilization — which, for the modern world, means all civilization — will gravitate towards Islam. The criminal gets ideological justification for his behavior, the sadist gets to rape and murder to his heart’s content, and the hippie radical gets to stick it to the Man for all eternity.

This is what we’re up against: the Big Tent of ideological nihilism. The closer any given society gets to the behavioral sink, the more Islamic it tends to become.

And, finally, the habitual treason of the journalistic clerisy of the West, providing the essential Fifth Column.

A must-read article.

Hat-tip to Richard Fernandez.