Press release. Hat tip to Rick Ballard at YARGB

The Supreme Court will hear appeals from four plaintiffs’ groups, representing democrats, minorities, the city of Austin, and it surrounding county, of Appeals Court rulings upholding the Republican redrafting of Texas’ congressional districts map.

Richard Lawrence Cohen links an addictive game which PETA would not like one bit. Hat tip to the divine Ms. Althouse.

Mr. Cohen is mistaken: the batsman is a yeti.

Internationally renowned angling author Ernest George Schwiebert Jr. passed away Saturday morning, Dick Talleur reported on the Michigan Sportsman web-site. He was 74 years of age. Newspaper obituaries have not yet appeared.

Schwiebert graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture from Ohio State University in 1956, cum laude. He also earned a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts in 1960, and a Ph. D. in Architecture in 1966, from Princeton University . He wrote his doctoral dissertation on The Primitive Roots of Architecture. He resided in Princeton, New Jersey, and practiced for many years successfully as an architect in New York City and in Princeton.

While still an undergraduate, Schwiebert wrote his first book, Matching the Hatch (1955), which astonished the American angling community by realizing American angling’s most avidly desired, yet most unattainable, theoretical goal: reconciling traditional artificial fly patterns and their use in actual practice with Science. The book’s title became a by-word for the preferred methodology of serious dry fly fishermen everywhere.

Efforts at codifying a list of the most effective traditional fly patterns, and identifying scientifically the specific natural insects they imitated, thus reconciling angling with entomology, had been underway since the turn of the century, when Theodore Gordon’s articles in the English Fishing Gazette, reprinted domestically in Forest & Stream, began popularizing the ethos of Frederick Halford’s dry fly purism in North America. Previous authors, most notably including Louis Rhead, author of American Trout Stream Insects (1916), and Preston Jennings, whose A Book of Trout Flies appeared in a luxury edition published by the illustrious Derrydale Press (1935), had tried and failed. The goal of establishing the scientific identity of the most traditionally important mayfly hatches, determining what fly patterns constituted their most effective imitations, and which versions of these patterns were most correct, had represented the perennially sought for, never achieved, goal, the Unified Field Theory, of American angling for half a century. The sporting establishment was shocked to find that the for so long seemingly-impossible had been accomplished deftly and with unanswerable precision by an angler so young.

In a single step, the youthful Schwiebert vaulted to the supreme heights of angling authority; and, over the years, other publications appropriate to his sporting stature followed. Architectural training had taught him draftsmanship, and he subsequently became a skilled illustrator and water-colorist. This latter talent was placed on display in Salmon of the World (1970), an opulent portfolio of portraits of all the species of the King of Gamefish, produced in a small edition, and much coveted by collectors. With Nymphs (1973), Schwiebert proceeded so far into entomology that he passed beyond nearly all of his readers’ ability to follow. The boxed two-volume Trout (1978) at some 1800 pages length was intentionally monumental, and simply overwhelming, covering angling history, species biology, techniques, and featuring a rhapsodic and passionately detailed survey of high end tackle. Schwiebert wrote regularly for angling, and other sporting, serials, and published three collections of stories and memoirs: Remembrances of Rivers Past (1973), Death of a Riverkeeper (1980), and A River for Christmas (1988).

In the course of a long and illustrious career, he fished, and wrote about, the finest rivers all over the world. He was a regular habituée of the choicest waters and the most exclusive clubs, and was renowned for his enthusiasm for the best of everything. As the years went on, Schwiebert’s elitist perspective and idiosyncratic writing style came in for a certain amount of criticism. He was reported to be a colorful personality, and intensely competitive, by those who travelled in the same circles. Criticisms of Schwiebert’s latest book and anecdotes of conflicts in the field and at events became staples of gossip in the sporting community. One envious scribbler went so far as to caricature the great man in an anonymously published, pretentious and ridiculously overpriced, lampoon.

Real achievement of the scale of Ernest Schwiebert’s will always find detractors and provoke envy. It probably also true that, that like many of angling’s other greats, Schwiebert possessed a full consciousness of his own worth, and could at times be difficult. The roll of major angling writers is thickly populated with egotists and curmudgeons. His passing, however, is bound to silence criticism. Even those who did not like Ernest G. Schwiebert will be forced to acknowledge that we have lost probably the single most important angling theorist of the last century, the most important figure in North America this side of Theodore Gordon.

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12/13 Press reports are beginning to appear:

Field & Stream

NY Times

All who subscribe to the position taken in this “story” are, in this blog’s opinion, too stupid to live.

PJM is going to have a blogfest on trying Saddam tomorrow. We’re utterly and completely opposed to this sort of nonsense. Trials of defeated war opponents are only hypocritical exercises in victor’s justice, and embody the worst kind of wet, liberal impulses in the direction of internationalism and empty formalism. We ought to behave like rational adults.

When we capture an adversary like Saddam, we ought either to decide to be genteel and humane about the whole thing, and exile el supremo to some remote form of permanent imprisonment on a little St. Helena of his own. Or, we should avoid fooling around, and instruct the US commander on the scene to whistle up a drumhead court martial, followed directly by a firing party, as soon as the malefactor falls into US hands. In cases where we have good reason to eliminate a tyrant with extreme prejudice, we should hang him. C’est tout.

What we do these days is all empty ceremony and folderol designed to humbug ourselves into believing that we have become superior superhuman entities, that we are above mere vengeance. Of course, we still desire vengeance, and fully intend to have it, and enjoy it. But we insist on lying to ourselves and the world, and pretending that, so omnipotent is our materialist and bourgeois way of life, that, by us, even vengeance and killing can be rationalized and domesticated.

The LA Times is reporting that Alain Chouet, the retired chief of the French counterintelligence service, has, in an interview last week, revealed previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French intelligence, demonstrating once again the lengths the Bush Administration was willing to go in ignoring powerful counter-evidence when it brazenly referred to attempts by the Iraqi regime to purchase uranium in Niger. Isn’t it convenient the way this wonderful new French revelation confirms what retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and the domestic opponents of the US invasion of Iraq, have been saying all along?

But there are some who have noted the possibility of a connection between Joe Wilson and French Intelligence, and who contend that French Intelligence may have been conducting a disinformation operation against the Bush Administration focussed on the Iraqi Niger uranium purchase for a considerable period of time.

See also Jack Cashill and Fedora and Anchoress

An off-duty New York City police officer, Daniel Enchautegui, was killed, when he interrupted a burglary next door to his Bronx home, but the dying officer managed to shoot both burglars repeatedly. The second suspect was Lillo Brancato, Jr., a moderately successful actor, who played Robert De Niro’s son in the 1993 film A Bronx Tale. Brancato appeared in numerous other films and television programs, including The Sopranos .

Scott Johnson of Power Line quotes a Jack Kelly column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which lists notable CIA failures:

it missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Islamic revolution in Iran, the warning signs of 9/11 and Saddam’s WMDs —

and then turns to the most spectacular failure of the Agency: its failure to stop, or punish, some Agency officers’ more-recent activities:

“The CIA’s war against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years,” wrote lawyer and Web logger John Hinderaker in The Weekly Standard.

The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the Bush administration by former Democratic officeholders, and permitted a serving analyst, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book bashing the president.

The principal CIA weapon has been the leak. Reporters for ABC, The New York Times and The Washington Post didn’t have to do even the minimal legwork Mr. Laurin did to out the CIA’s clandestine “rendition” program. It was handed to them by “current and former intelligence officials.”

“So the CIA established policies that it knew would be controversial and would damage American interests if revealed, and then leaked the existence of those policies to The Washington Post for the purpose of damaging the Bush administration,” Mr. Hinderaker wrote.

A rogue CIA that subverts American democracy has long been a staple of moonbat mythology. How ironic that the rogues in the CIA should turn out to be leftists who harm America to benefit Democrats.

Kelly then refers to a conclusion reached by others:

In the 1990s, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed abolishing the CIA. That seemed far out then. It doesn’t seem so far out now. It might be easier to start from scratch than to clean up the mess the CIA has become.

“The CIA is in deep crisis,” Mr. Hinderaker said. “It is not at all clear that its survival is in the national interest.”

But the problem is even more extensive. The pouting spooks’ war against the Bush Administration has been being waged simultaneously openly and covertly, since at least the beginning of 2003, when the public announcement of the organization of Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) occurred. As we have previously reported:

Ray McGovern, in an interview with Mother Jones, stated that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

The recent leak involving CIA terrorist renditions to Poland was supplied to the press by Marc Garlasco, currently an analyst with the Soros-funded Human Rights Watch, but formerly a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, who resigned shortly after the beginning of the Iraq War.

Happenings in the PJM Wars have been slow lately, and we had been planning to post soon jesting about starting a PJM Death Pool Death Pool, but to our surprise several new postings (about PJM ads) have actually appeared.

Meanwhile, Ann Althouse has not laid aside her wrath. NYM’s author inclines to the opinion that Roger L. Simon would be well advised to send flowers, and apologize to the nice lady for hanging up on her. The role of Ms. Althouse in the Blogosphere is not unlike that of one of the female Olympians in the Homeric epics, and Mr. Simon, at the moment, looks a lot like Odysseus who managed to get more than one of the wrong gods and goddesses annoyed with him, and consequently had a very rough trip home.

Anechoic Room believes that Rick Moran of Rightwing Nuthouse has sold his soul to the forces of darkness. So recognizable is the instantaneous taint of corruption, in AR’s eyes at least, that AR is striking RN from his blogroll, and is telling readers that he henceforward looks upon that blog as dead. AR is consequently (with somewhat hypertrophied rhetoric) accusing PJM of “killing a blog.” Ms. Althouse, with a graceful air of detachment, did manage to link this one.

Riehl World View also takes a poke at the afore-mentioned lackey of the nefarious Si Fan, predicting censorship, and rhetorically disbelieving RWNH’s owner’s statement that he’s gone with PJM even though he could make more from other advertising.

Steve of Hog on Ice promises to be fair:

I’ll try to speak up if they ever do anything right. In its current incarnation, PJM is a dumb idea conceived by the greedy and clueless, but a fair person, while watching a lifeboat sink, will be honest enough to say something when he sees an occupant bailing particularly well.

But then, he immediately proceeds to machine-gun the imaginary life-boat, agreeing with the just-a-bit-exaggerated thesis that PJM has “killed” RWNH, and –reaching even further into fantasyland– asserts that “it killed Instapundit, too.” We’d say ourselves that rumors of Instapundit‘s death are greatly exaggerated.

Jim Hu of Blogs for Industry identifies a geographical mistake by Gateway Pundit, and faults some of PJM links’ coverage of the Dongzhou story, to which he brings special interest and expertise. Interestingly, it seems that somebody at PJM read his criticisms and did effect some corrections.

Sortapundit, speaking from the left, finds the current state of affairs wanting, too:

Based on nothing more than a cursory glance at the site I’m left wondering if I’m missing the point. What are they trying to be, apart from a fairly poor right-leaning facsimile of the Huffington Post? Why should I, the reader, visit a disappointingly dull, soulless blog whose posts are written by someone named Compiled by Pajamas Media Staff in Los Angeles? I can get the same information, presented in a much more entertaining format, on any number of blogs in my favourites list. Hell, I can get this information from a freakin’ newspaper. At least they usually tell me who’s writing the articles. And I get the sports.

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That the OSM, soon PJM, launch proved an anticlimax seems to be established history at this point. As Horace used to say: Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus [the mountain laboured, and a ridiculous mouse was born], but it is still early days.

Sometime about a week ago, we dropped by PJM, and actually found a useful link. We looked around startled. The world was changing, the PJM site, still no thing of beauty, was recognizably becoming actually useful, and we realized with some surprise that a subtle watershed of performance had been reached.

It may be that corporate influence will actually someday impact, and adversely influence, bloggers involved with the PJM project, but get real, guys, the time to start blogging about it is when something of the sort actually happens. Obviously, the corrupting influence of corporate gelt has nothing to do with any perceived deficiencies of format or content to-date, and bloggers who carry on hysterically about PJM, or who wage irrational vendettas (not actually personally having been hung up on by Roger Simon) are merely going to convince the rest of us that they are prone to premature judgements, and –in extreme cases– that they are complete whackjobs.

Web sources are reported the death of angling writer Ernest G. Schwiebert. More to follow.

John Cole has been moving left recently, sharing his blog with moonbat Tim F., and sobbing big, salty tears over American abuse of the poor widdle terrorists, so I reluctantly moved Balloon Juice down to Unsound Blogs to repose with Democratic Underground and Daily Koz. But every now and then, you can look in and find the old John Cole at home. John observed the democrats’ response to the Republican Party white-flag video, and responded thusly today:

Once again, Democrats are furious with the Republican party for ‘misrepresenting’ them and portraying them as wanting to ‘cut and run.’ How has the GOP done this? By taking direct quotes from the DNC Chairman, the House Minority Leader, and the Democratic candidate for President and standard-bearer just a year ago and putting them over top of a person waving a white flag.

Having lobbed that grenade nicely, John climbs back out of the trench and goes home to the enemy again. Poor chap can’t really make up his mind. He’s too smart to be a liberal, but I think he is responding to some kind of social pressure and trying his best.