The Republican National Committee on its web-site note that 40 of the 45 democrats in the Senate accepted money from Jack Abramoff, his associates, and Indian tribal clients.

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Earlier posting

Sabine Herold

Joel Shepherd, Australian Sci Fi author, profiles France’s most prominent Libertarian organization, and introduces us to its photogenic heroine, Sabine Herold, the ideal nominée for la République’s next Marianne.

Liberté Chérie (liberty most-cherished) is a liberal think tank comprising of 2000 members in cities throughout France. It’s far from the only libertarian organisation in France, but it is perhaps the most prominent… it functions like an information and PR centre for the promotion of the concept and philosophy of libertarianism…

(Its) first brush with fame came two years ago, during one of Paris’s predictable general strikes that paralysed the city. Liberté-Chérie called for a counter-demonstration, against the strikers. A little publicity was expected to draw perhaps a few thousand people — instead, 80,000 exasperated Parisiens arrived.

Hat tip to Paul Belien found via the succinct, but talented, Glenn Reynolds.

VoIP Watch is reporting rumors:

There are some rumors circulating that Steve Ballmer is about to step aside at Microsoft as its day to day operations head to make room for another president. Ken and I reported on this on KenRadio’s World Technology Roundup earlier today.

Bill Clinton.

Here’s what I know. Sources near Microsoft headquarters report that over the past few months the ex cigar smoking prexy has made trips to Microsoft headquarters and has been interviewing for the top slot as the company looks at ways to transform themselves for the future. Given the global implications of technology, having a leader that is an ex country president would be massive.

Why now? Well Ballmer has driven the company. His hard charging sales leadership style helped Microsoft during a time when that approach was needed. But Microsoft folks I’ve talked to admit those days are over and a new style is needed to be more change oriented.

Given Clinton’s global stature and statesman status just imagine the possibilities of what that would mean to Microsoft.

But this is only a rumor now, and no one at Microsoft would dare to comment on this one, so why bother asking…if true, you can say you read it here first.

UPDATE–Some readers and other sources say Bill’s visits to Redmond have had more to do with being on the Microsoft board than anything else…stay tuned.

William Corder’s Trial, bound in William Corder’s skin

A Boston Globe article exploits a fairly well-known bibliographic curiosity to provoke some public shock:

Brown University’s library boasts an unusual anatomy book. Tanned and polished to a smooth golden brown, its cover looks and feels no different from any other fine leather.

But here’s its secret: the book is bound in human skin.

A number of prestigious libraries — including Harvard University’s — have such books in their collections. While the idea of making leather from human skin seems bizarre and cruel today, it was not uncommon in centuries past, said Laura Hartman, a rare book cataloger at the National Library of Medicine in Maryland and author of a paper on the subject…

The library has three books bound in human skin — the anatomy text and two 19th century editions of “The Dance of Death,” a medieval morality tale.

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Bibliophile publications, and the literature of the supernatural, sometimes feature colorful stories of rare older books, particularly grimoires (i.e., instruction manuals for practicing black magic), purportedly bound in human skin (usually that of a virgin slave), but real examples seem to be mostly unique Victorian and Edwardian exhibition bindings of anatomical texts or avant garde literature.

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The above story probably came about via a reading of this one from the Harvard Law School Record.

A Los Angeles Times story sees Mandarin winning out over Cantonese in American Chinese communities.

over the last three decades, waves of Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants have diluted the influence of both the Cantonese language and the pioneering Cantonese families who ran Chinatowns for years.

The surging Chinese economy today has challenged Cantonese further. Because Mandarin is China’s official language, entrepreneurs like Hom have been forced to adapt, often learning the hard way that business can’t be done with Cantonese alone.

Many Cantonese speakers are racing to learn Mandarin any way they can — by watching Chinese soap operas, attending schools, paying for expensive immersion courses and even making more Mandarin-speaking friends. This is no cinch. Although Cantonese and Mandarin share the same written language, they are spoken as differently as English and French.

At the same time, few people are learning Cantonese…

With the changes, some are lamenting — in ways they can do only in Cantonese — the end of an era. Mandarin is now the vernacular of choice, and they say it doesn’t come close to the colorful and brash banter of Cantonese.

“You might be saying, ‘I love you’ to your girlfriend in Cantonese, but it will still sound like you’re fighting,” said Howard Lee, a talk show host on Cantonese language KMRB-AM (1430). “It’s just our tone. We always sound like we’re in a shouting match. Mandarin is so mellow. Cantonese is strong and edgy.”

Cantonese is said to be closer than Mandarin to ancient Chinese. It is also more complicated. Mandarin has four tones, so a character can be intonated four ways with four meanings. Cantonese has nine tones.

Beginning in the 1950s, the Chinese government tried to make Mandarin the national language in an effort to bridge the myriad dialects across the country. Since then, the government has been working to simplify the language, renamed Putonghua, and give it a proletarian spin. To die-hard Cantonese, no fans of the Communist government, this is one more reason to look down on Mandarin.

Many say it is far more difficult to learn Cantonese than Mandarin because the former does not always adhere to rules and formulas. Image-rich slang litters the lexicon and can leave anyone ignorant of the vernacular out of touch.

Bulldogpundit analyzes (at Ankle Biting Pundits) how the Associated Press-Ipsos Poll results showing that Americans favor giving Democrats control of Congress by a 49 percent to 36 percent margin were actually achieved.

Hat tip to terrye at YARGB.

The NY Times reports:

In letters sent Saturday to fellow House Republicans and to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Mr. DeLay said he supported the call for an election for a new leader and was stepping aside to avoid becoming a political liability as Republicans battle to hold their majority.

“The job of majority leader and the mandate of the Republican majority are too important to be hamstrung, even for a few months, by personal distractions,” said Mr. DeLay.

Mr. DeLay intends to seek re-election to his seat representing the Houston suburbs and reclaim his position on the Appropriations Committee.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio said of Delay:

I can say without hesitation he is one of the most effective and gifted leaders the Republican Party has ever known.”

An international team of archaelogists working at the Museum of Ireland released information today on the forensic analysis of two Iron Age bodies discovered in Irish bogs. The bodies were both found in the course of routine work in peat bogs 25 miles apart. The first body, found at Clonycavan in February, 2003, was that of a young man 5′ 2″ in height, with unusually-styled pomaded hair. The second, found in the course of clearing a ditch near Croghan Hill, County Offaly, was that of an exceptionally large male individual estimated to have been 6’6″ in height. Both bodies exhibited signs of extreme violence.

BBC account.

Irish Times

Mirror

Stephen F. Hayes in the Weekly Standard reveals that a treasure trove of up-to-now unreleased captured Iraqi documents and photographs provide clear refutation of one cornerstone position of critics of the US invasion — the belief that the secular Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein would never work with radical Islamist organizations:

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis…

The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million “exploitable items” have been thoroughly examined. That’s 2.5 percent.

Apparently, opinions on releasing the material were fiercely divided within Congress and the Bush Administration. Many were eager to release nearly all of the massive collection of information, but some influential officials of the Defense Department, having been burned before, feared that the

mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. “There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to ‘prove’ that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we’d spend a lot of time chasing around after it.”

Newspaper reports earlier today of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s death were in error.

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Rumors are also circulating that Sharon has indeed died, but that the Israeli government has chosen to follow the example of the PLO regarding Yassir Arafat, and is concealing his death in order to conduct succession negotiations in private prior to the announcement.

I normally avoid posting jokes, but it is impossible to omit this blonde joke.

Scott Johnson, one of the three attorneys publishing the Power Line blog, discusses the New York Times’ violation of federal law 18 U.S.C. § 798:

Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information—
(1) concerning the nature, preparation, or use of any code, cipher, or cryptographic system of the United States or any foreign government; or
(2) concerning the design, construction, use, maintenance, or repair of any device, apparatus, or appliance used or prepared or planned for use by the United States or any foreign government for cryptographic or communication intelligence purposes; or
(3) concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government; or
(4) obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government, knowing the same to have been obtained by such processes—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

the Times’ inconsistency in its positions on leaking and the Law, and the unlikeliness of the Times getting away with it.