Zachary Roth apparently thinks so.

But I don’t know that we need to take his opinion into serious account. He’s just another of those exiled British journalists, so orthodox left that he posts in Talking Points Memo, and the sensitive sort who cries on the job.

I seem to remember the left’s commentariat having no similar problem with satirical stereotypes applied in editorial cartoons to people like Condeleeza Rice and Clarence Thomas.

Everybody today is watching this amusing skirmish in the culture wars.

Butler, Missouri car dealer Mark Muller turns the tables on oh-so-superior CNN interviewer Carol Costello foiling an attempted slam interview. Costello was intending to put Muller on the spot by confronting him in a live interview over a sales promotion at his dealership awarding a AK47 semi-automatic rifle with the purchase of a new pick-up truck.

But Muller quickly proves to be a lot more likable than the smarmy and condescending Costello. He answers frankly, as she continually targets him with hostile questions invariably presented as what “some people might say.” And the rube car dealer proves entirely capable of embarrassing the slick professional reporter by demonstrating repeatedly her weakness on details (like his name).

5:51 video

From Suzanna Logan.

Mess with the American left, its agenda, its candidate, or its appointees, and watch out! They will come after you. Well-funded organizations have the professional staff and all the resources needed to poke and pry into your life and background looking for ammunition, looking for anything negative that can be passed along to faithful and determined media allies to be used to discredit or destroy.

Sonia Sotomayor’s curt ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano (later overturned by the Supreme Court) is an obvious major vulnerability, so Norman Lear’s ultraliberal People for the American Way, as McClatchey reports, is painting a bright orange target on the middle of the back of the 35 year old fireman who brought the suit in the first place.

Supporters of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor are quietly targeting the Connecticut firefighter who’s at the center of Sotomayor’s most controversial ruling.

On the eve of Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearing, her advocates have been urging journalists to scrutinize what one called the “troubled and litigious work history” of firefighter Frank Ricci.

This is opposition research: a constant shadow on Capitol Hill. …

On Friday, citing in an e-mail “Frank Ricci’s troubled and litigious work history,” the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way drew reporters’ attention to Ricci’s past. Other advocates for Sotomayor have discreetly urged journalists to pursue similar story lines.

Specifically, the advocates have zeroed in on an earlier 1995 lawsuit Ricci filed claiming the city of New Haven discriminated against him because he’s dyslexic. The advocates cite other Hartford Courant stories from the same era recounting how Ricci was fired by a fire department in Middletown, Conn., allegedly, Ricci said at the time, because of safety concerns he raised.

The Middletown-area fire department was subsequently fined for safety violations, but the Connecticut Department of Labor dismissed Ricci’s retaliation complaint.

No People for the American Way officials could be reached Friday to speak on the record about the press campaign.

Minnesota’s new junior senator

Aided by a dishonest and partisan media, which scrupulously avoided investigating the facts and which faithfully reported the democrat party line, clown comedian and ultra-liberal Al Franken finally successfully stole last year’s close race for the senate seat from Minnesota when the Minnesota Supreme Court declined to interfere with an accomplished crime and instead declared him the winner.

The honorable exception in the major media was, as usual, the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat’s strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.

But the team’s real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman’s lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel’s findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn’t demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn’t lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election.

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As Chris Cillizza explains, the key to Franken’s successful election theft was: (1) being the first to bring in highly-paid talented legal big guns to manipulate a post-election ballot review process in his favor, and (2) media allies representing an artificially contrived and completely partisan recount as decisive and meaningful. Franken keeping his repulsive and excruciatingly vulgar personality under wraps for the duration helped a lot, too.

How did Franken manage to wind up on top? …

Marc Elias, a Democratic election attorney with Perkins Coie, was on the ground in Minnesota within days of the near-tie on election day. Elias spearheaded a series of legal victories in the early days of the recount that effectively defined the universe of votes that were counted and led to Franken going from behind on election night to ahead when they recount ended. By the time Ben Ginsberg, the Republicans’ election lawyer par excellence, got deeply involved, it was already too late. …

When the statewide recount ended, Franken led by 225 votes. … it’s hard to overstate how important the fact that Franken was (seemingly– JDZ) ahead was to setting public perception regarding the legal fight that ensued. Coleman was forced to be the aggressor legally, claiming that all sorts of ballots had been illegally counted (and not counted) while, through it all, the fact that Franken led by 225 votes hung over the proceedings. Voters tend to lose interest in politics quickly — particularly after an election as nasty and long as this race was — and that sort of fatigue played right into Franken’s hands. …

Franken’s problem throughout the race was, well, himself. … When the race ended in a tie, Franken did something very smart; he stayed out of the spotlight. He was rarely seen or heard and when he did pop into public view it was during an occasional visit to Washington when he was huddling with potential colleagues and getting briefed on issues by potential staffers.

When, oh, when will the Republican Party learn to play politics professionally against thugs, thieves, and liars? Watching Norm Coleman get rolled was like watching the team from St. Fauntleroy’s Academy for Young Gentlemen take on the Bowery Boys Reformatory team on the football gridiron. No contest at all.

A strange thrill was again running up the legs of Chris Matthews in the MSNBC studio, but joining him in tumescence this time listening to the sweet baritone of the Chosen One was Newsweek editor Evan Thomas. As Newsbusters describes it, the two commentators had what grateful women always describe to me as “a religious experience.”

Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama’s Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Thomas, appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews, was reacting to a preceding monologue in which Matthews praised Obama’s speech: “I think the President’s speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful…But what I liked about the President’s speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility…The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world.”

Matthews discussed Obama’s upcoming speech marking the 65th anniversary of D-Day and compared it to that of Ronald Reagan. He then turned to Thomas and asked: “Reagan and World War II and the sense of us as the good guys in the world, how are we doing?” Thomas replied: “Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn’t felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had, really, a different task We’re seen too often as the bad guys. And he – he has a very different job from – Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial.”

Thomas elaborated on Obama as God, patronizingly explaining: “He’s going to bring all different sides together…Obama is trying to sort of tamper everything down. He doesn’t even use the word terror. He uses extremism. He’s all about let us reason together…He’s the teacher. He is going to say, ‘now, children, stop fighting and quarreling with each other.’ And he has a kind of a moral authority that he – he can – he can do that.”

When I read the headline, I said to myself, “Good! That Cimbalo guy has it coming, for penning that tastelessly nasty piece fantasizing about amorous encounters with ten prominent female conservative commentators.”

Imagine my surprise when I read on and discovered AOL didn’t fire Cimbalo. They fired this other guy, some liberal writer named Tommy Christopher, for trying to report on the brouhaha over the Cimbalo sleaze piece on AOL’s Politics Daily.

It was this posting, entitled Bad Bunny, which was deleted by some AOL editor, then Christopher was let go.

Caleb Howe, another writer for Politics Daily told Newsbusters:

“His coverage of the Playboy “hate f***” list must have had a lot to do with Tommy being fired, if not everything to do with it” Howe told NewsBusters. “It would be absurd to think the timing is coincidental” referring to the fact that Christopher was fired three days after his original Playboy story and only hours after pitching a new story on the same topic. Further allegations of AOL censoring coverage of the Playboy controversy came to light when Christopher and Howe appeared on Media Lizzy’s show this afternoon.

At the 74:50 mark of the show Media Lizzy (Elizabeth Blackney) claimed that her editor, Michael Kraskin, sent her an email regarding a question she submitted for the AOL Hot Seat Poll. Her original question was going to be “does Playboy empower or exploit women”. In his response email Media Lizzy claimed that Kraskin asked for a different question and said “This Playboy story is something we have internally decided not to address”. …

NewsBusters contacted Politics Daily’s editor in chief, Melinda Henneberger who both deleted Tommy Christopher’s original story and fired him, for comment but she never returned our email.

The old saying “AOL Sucks” is clearly truer than ever.

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Cimbalo Playboy article

My dad once owned a 1960 Chevrolet Bel Air

P.J. O’Rourke wrote an elegy for the American Automobile, murdered by federal regulators, union leeches, and socialist looters.

Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way,

But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

But our poor cars paid the price. They were flashing swords beaten into dull plowshares. Cars became appliances. Or worse. Nobody’s ticked off at the dryer or the dishwasher, much less the fridge. We recognize these as labor-saving devices. The car, on the other hand, seems to create labor. We hold the car responsible for all the dreary errands to which it needs to be steered. Hell, a golf cart’s more fun. You can ride around in a golf cart with a six-pack, safe from breathalyzers, chasing Canada geese on the fairways and taking swings at gophers with a mashie.

We’ve lost our love for cars and forgotten our debt to them and meanwhile the pointy-headed busybodies have been exacting their revenge. We escaped the poke of their noses once, when we lived downtown, but we won’t be able to peel out so fast the next time. In the name of safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible. One might as well pry the back off an iPod as pop the hood on a contemporary motor vehicle. An aging shade-tree mechanic like myself stares aghast and sits back down in the shade. Or would if the car weren’t squawking at me like a rehearsal for divorce. You left the key in. You left the door open. You left the lights on. You left your dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor.

I don’t believe the pointy-heads give a damn about climate change or gas mileage, much less about whether I survive a head-on with one of their tax-sucking mass-transit projects. All they want to is to make me hate my car. How proud and handsome would Bucephalas look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air bags, 5-mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the tail?

And there’s the end of the American automobile industry. When it comes to dull, practical, ugly things that bore and annoy me, Japanese things cost less and the cup holders are more conveniently located.

The American automobile is—that is, was—never a product of Japanese-style industrialism. America’s steel, coal, beer, beaver pelts and PCs may have come from our business plutocracy, but American cars have been manufactured mostly by romantic fools. David Buick, Ransom E. Olds, Louis Chevrolet, Robert and Louis Hupp of the Hupmobile, the Dodge brothers, the Studebaker brothers, the Packard brothers, the Duesenberg brothers, Charles W. Nash, E. L. Cord, John North Willys, Preston Tucker and William H. Murphy, whose Cadillac cars were designed by the young Henry Ford, all went broke making cars. The man who founded General Motors in 1908, William Crapo (really) Durant, went broke twice. Henry Ford, of course, did not go broke, nor was he a romantic, but judging by his opinions he certainly was a fool.

America’s romantic foolishness with cars is finished, however, or nearly so. In the far boondocks a few good old boys haven’t got the memo and still tear up the back roads. Doubtless the Obama administration’s Department of Transportation is even now calculating a way to tap federal stimulus funds for mandatory OnStar installations to locate and subdue these reprobates.

The Shiawasee County, Michigan Argus-Press reports that being the victim of international disapprobation has brought a Michigan welfare mom 15 minutes of fame.

An Owosso (Michigan) woman says she was recently denied permission to cross the Canadian border because she is on welfare.

Rose Kelley, 25, said she was trying to visit friends and family who live in Canada, but ran into many complications on the way.

She arrived at the Sarnia, Ontario, border May 1 with her children Xander, 5, and Onyx, 1. When she reached the customs and immigration office she was given a list of items she needed to cross the border – some of which included: evidence of citizenship, financial support, financial assistance, confirmed means of departure, and more. …

Because of this, she had to travel back to Owosso to get the necessary papers and then return May 3.

“I brought everything. My entire folder had every piece of paperwork that they could ask for,” Kelley said

However, she was once again denied entry.

“They said I don’t make enough money and people on welfare shouldn’t take a vacation,” said Kelley, a single mother who has been on assistance for five years. “I was told that I wouldn’t be allowed to cross the border until my life ‘drastically changed.’”

She said she was stunned by the events. …

Because of the incident, Kelley said she filed a discrimination complaint with the agency Tuesday, but has heard no response yet.

Dozens of outraged liberal Canadian readers expressed indignation, reported the Toronto Sun, which also quoted Ms. Kelley observing indignantly:

It has been a terrible ordeal,” Kelley, 25, of Owosso, Mich., said of last Sunday’s trip to the Sarnia border crossing where she was turned back. “I have family and friends over there and I want to visit them.” …

“This trip has been a big ordeal for me and my children,” Kelley said yesterday. “I have never done anything wrong and have a squeaky clean criminal record.”

Amusingly, both American and Canadian press accounts strike poses of open-mouthed astonishment at the man-bites-dog bizarreness of those Canadian Border Service Agents actually looking upon being on welfare as a discreditable status.

Ever wonder how the same story with exactly the same spin manages to appear in so many columns and lead stories at exactly the same time?

Warner Todd Huston explains that it is not an accident.

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz has let the cat out of the bag in the Post’s April 27 issue about a regularly scheduled secret media dinner attended by some of the top left-wing journalists in the country. But it isn’t just the lefty scribblers that have attended these secret, off-the-record dinners for these gatherings have each featured a guest. Rahm Emanuel, Sec. of the Treasury Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke have all recently had their chance to schmooze the press and guide them with the spin desired by the White House.

So, not only does Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have secret daily phone calls with which to program the media’s coverage of the White House, now it is revealed that Emanuel and other Obama staffers have been attending secret dinners to help the press “understand” what the White House wants reported? As Kurtz says, it all sounds “rather cozy,” doesn’t it?

The secret dinners for Obama staffers and his boosters in the Old Media have been going on for “more than a year” and are sponsored by David Bradley, the owner of the Atlantic. In attendance have been some of the most well known lefty journalists in Washington. Not surprisingly, not a single name mentioned in the Kurtz report is conservative.

Paul Begala, at Huffington Post, thinks he’s very clever in quoting the not-clever-at-all John McCain who is also completely wrong.

In a CNN debate with Ari Fleischer, I said the United States executed Japanese war criminals for waterboarding. My point was that it is disingenuous for Bush Republicans to argue that waterboarding is not torture and thus illegal. It’s kind of awkward to argue that waterboarding is not a crime when you hanged someone for doing it to our troops. My precise words were: “Our country executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American POWs. We executed them for the same crime we are now committing ourselves.” …

I was referencing the statement of a different member of the Senate: John McCain. On November 29, 2007, Sen. McCain, while campaigning in St. Petersburg, Florida, said, “Following World War II war crime trials were convened. The Japanese were tried and convicted and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding.”

Sen. McCain was right and the National Review Online is wrong. Politifact, the St. Petersburg Times’ truth-testing project (which this week was awarded a Pulitzer Prize), scrutinized Sen. McCain’s statement and found it to be true. Here’s the money quote from Politifact:

“McCain is referencing the Tokyo Trials, officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as ‘water cure,’ ‘water torture’ and ‘waterboarding,’ according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning.” Politifact went on to report, “A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps.”

Actually, murders, massacres, and death marches head the International Military Tribunal for the Far East’s list of war crimes, and the use of water simply happens to the first item addressed in a subsequent heading titled “Torture and Other Inhumane Treatment.” Since burning, flogging, strappado, and pulling out finger and toe nails are mentioned after the “water cure,” it is far from obvious that the authors of the Tribunal’s list of war crimes were intending to rank it as more inhumane than the others.

Politifact’s anonymous authorities (drawn from presumably the staffs of the St. Petersburg Times and the Congressional Quarterly which created Politifact as a joint venture) are betraying their own liberal journalist prejudices and manipulating the available data to suit their own preferences.

They, and Paul Begala and John McCain, are most particularly and obviously in error in equating the Japanese “water cure” torture with US water-boarding.

In the “water cure,” according to the Tribunal’s war crimes description, [t]he victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach until he lost consciousness. Pressure was then applied, sometimes by jumping upon his abdomen to force the water out. The usual practice was to revive the victim and successively repeat the process.

The Tribunal does not mention it, but historically the “water cure” torture technique was often performed with sufficient brutality that internal organs would be ruptured with fatal results, or merely performed excessively to the point where the victim’s body’s electrolyte balance was fatally compromised, producing death by “water intoxication.”

In the “water-cure,” the victim’s mouth is forced open, and enormous quantities of water are poured down his throat. If he fails to swallow any of the rapidly-poured water, it goes into his lungs and he really does experience drowning.

In the US-government-authorized water-boarding of three mass murderers, a cloth or cellophane barrier was placed over the criminal’s face and water poured on it for intervals of 10 to 40 seconds. Water was specifically prevented from entering the subject’s respiratory system.

Elaborate and carefully calculated protocols had been laid down, in precisely the opposite manner of the Japanese case, 1) confining the use of such comparatively harsh interrogation techniques to a tiny number of extremely guilty terrorists likely to possess extremely vital information on major threats to the lives of many thousands of innocent American civilians, and 2) assuring that no real lasting physical or mental harm was ever actually inflicted on the three major terrorist prisoners.

Those are extremely significant differences, Mr. Begala.

Beyond that, Begala, Politifact, and even Senator McCain overlook another very important consideration: the laws and customs of war.

We punished the defeated Japanese after WWII, and US troops commonly punished Japanese encountered in the field by offering no quarter, for Japanese disregard of the civilized European world’s military customs of avoiding the practice of perfidy (i.e. not falsely surrendering and then opening fire, not wearing the wrong uniform, and so on) and according prisoners of war honorable status and treating them humanely.

We do not owe Al Qaeda terrorists prisoner of war status. We do not, in fact, owe them, by the conventional laws and customs of war, anything beyond summary execution following drumhead courts martial at the pleasure of the officer in immediate authority. United States military forces, in fact, would by traditional standards not only possess every right to extract forcibly by any measures necessary any and all information necessary to preserve innocent life, they would have a grave obligation to do so.

It is the Al Qaeda terrorists who, like the Japanese in WWII, reject the civilized world’s customs of limiting behavior in war. And, as we punished the Japanese during and after WWII for failing to adopt our customs, we ought to be punishing Al Qaeda terrorists the same way for the same reasons. That is how the laws and customs of war are enforced.

Terrorist prisoners, in their capacity as hostis humani generis, by the conventional laws and customs of war for thousands of years, are entitled to nothing whatsoever in the form of rights, judicial proceeding, or sympathy. They deserve absolutely nothing other than execution by some harsh method particularly expressive of contumely like hanging.

Jeffrey Lena admires the MSM’s reportial double-standards.

On March 2nd there was a demonstration in Washington D.C. It was billed as the largest demonstration for green power/global warming awareness/stop dirty coal/ let’s all go live in a tepee, ever held. It was attended by, (are you ready for the number?), 2,500 people. That was the largest one ever! This demonstration was covered by every major television and news service. No station or alleged newspaper gave any coverage to opposing opinions. Ironically there was a blizzard that day another fact which, to the best of my knowledge, was not noted by any major news outlet.

Thirteen days later one of the first of the grassroots “Tea Parties” was held in Cincinnati Ohio. Over five thousand average middle-class folks showed up on Fountain Square in the center of the city. Their message was simple, we can’t afford our government! Did you see it on CNN? Maybe you caught it on ABC or MSNBC? If you did you need to check the strength of your prescriptions, it wasn’t on any of them. …

In thousands of cities and towns across America, hundreds of thousands of plain folks came out into the streets to say. “Enough!” This was not a protest against any party or person in particular but against a paradigm in governments from Washington D.C. to the local city halls that assume there is no end to the amount of money we are willing to kick in.

You wouldn’t know that from the coverage. Everyone from CNN to MSNBC to my local paper went out of their way to make it seem like anyone who attended one of these gatherings was a right-wing extremist! Right-wing extremist, hummm where have I heard that term lately? Wasn’t there some sort of government document leaked to the public the day before all these Tea Parties? I am not a believer in coincidence, especially in politics. I believe that the Department of Homeland Security report was released in an effort to intimidate some citizen and keep them from attending the anti-tax rallies.

These demonstrations were too many and too big to be ignored so the leftists in the media moved to their second tactic, belittle and mock.

When any small group of fringy leftwing kooks and nutcases protests anything, the leftwing punditocracy gravely stroke its collective chin and warns of the rising tide of popular indignation. But when thousands and thousands of Americans participate in more than 600 protests against taxes and federal spending in cities all across the nation, the left sneers at the symbolism and dismisses the protests as unrepresentative and contrived.

Marc Ambinder was the rare exception in the liberal punditocracy who questioned the official party-line.

The… tea-party enthusiasm on the American right has provoked a fairly typical reaction from the organized American left. It’s a fake. It involves tea bags and (a) Dick Armey. It’s got the consistency of astroturf, not natural grass. …

In the age of hyperconnectivity, just what would an organic grassroots movement look like, anyway? Are people who’ve organized on behalf of causes before forbidden from joining? Can the movement not accept help and money from outside players?

Ambinder’s right, of course. And the scale of yesterday’s protests ought to be considered far more significant in the light of the consideration that protests and street theater are not really our thing. Conservatives write angry letters to the editorial page and argue with liberal friends. We don’t typically march around in public waving signs.

Conservatives tend to be busy and productive people with responsibilities. It’s a lot harder to assemble a mob of mortgage-paying adults with jobs they need to be at than to get yourself a gang of students and urban slackers ready for a lark. The thousands seen yesterday obviously constituted only the smallest tip of a much larger iceberg, an iceberg which does reliably vote.