Boyd

Read this (Warning: It's about as bad as it can get.). I am almost unable to select any portion to reprint here on my PG rated blog. However, here is a relatively tame excerpt.

Someone named Hunter:

Yeah, I'm an Italian American, with the funny sounding name and the brownish-blackish hair and the big, black eyebrows above two eyes that look like the apocalypse may burst right the hell out of them at any particular moment of the day. I'm part Sicilian, and I'm another big part Scottish, which means between the two of them that my natural demeanor in this fight is to rip off your arms, beat you to death with them, and serve the remains stuffed in dissected sheep parts and delivered to your parents' doorstep.

The Kos Kids are melting down. This is their worst nightmare. It appears they didn't actually think Bush would pick a conservative.

Here are a few serious questions. Who does Daily Kos appeal to? What type of person is attracted to their political style? Anyone want to live under a government dominated by these types?

Rubin via Cone:

But Sands was not there for eulogies.

He sees the Web as the salvation of newspapers, and showed some of the work going on that gives hope, experiments in video at his own paper, that documented moments like a girl's first day in kindergarten, the day two moose got loose in downtown Spokane. Here in Philly, I think they would have shot them.

The message I came away with was: Use your army of 400-plus journalists to beat the local television and radio stations to the punch, create "a culture of urgency" online, post sound and video and cherish the freedom of being able to offer longer, more in-depth pieces that commercial considerations have scared electronic media from offering.

I don't see it happening. I read somewhere the other day where someone on the content side of things was lamenting Google and the cataloging side of things. He was wondering how it was possible that a card catalog was worth so much more than the books it was cataloging. However, this makes perfect sense when you understand the tremendous oversupply of content that is now available and the undersupply of good resource locators.

There is simply no way that a newspaper like this one in Philly will continue to be able to pay 400 reporters. Here's the problem. People buy newspapers for many different reasons: comics, movies, tv listings, obits, classifieds, local news and most important, habit. All of the content related reasons for buying a paper are going to be peeled away by savvy businesspeople. There's just too much content available from too many sources. Why do I need the News and Record for AP stories? All that will be left are the habit folks and they're old. Wired kids are never going to have subscriptions to newspapers just like they'll probably never have land based telephones. If you're in the newspaper business, you're going to have to begin dealing with the reality of negative growth and believe me, financing models don't work very well when expected rates of return are less than zero.

10. Candyman: You're not even safe from spooks in the ghetto.
9. Hellraiser: Original monsters.
8. The Omen: You can't go wrong with the anti-christ.
7. Carrie: Watched this one at 2:00 am once by myself. The very last scene killed me.
6. Alien: Classic.
5. The Ring: Very original. The 'scared to death' angle - excellent.
4. Nightmare on Elm Street: They were all good. However, #1 was when they were serious before the Freddy one-liners. Bonus - you get to see Johnny Depp killed off.
3. The Shining: Kubrick + King + Jack. How could you go wrong?
2. Halloween: This one still gets me. I love it. The mask is the best.
1. The Exorcist: I will not argue about this. The Exorcist was ahead of its time. It's perfect. I read the book a few years ago. The movie is just as good or better. That's saying something.

Update: The Exorcist III is not that bad. That scene with the white thing crossing the hospital hall to decapitate someone is a classic. Plus it's got George C. Scott.

Update II: Context means everything when watching a horror movie. I saw one called Prince of Darkness at the midnite movies on Halloween 1987. Leaving the theatre I'd have said it was the scariest movie ever made. Watching it a few years later on cable, it made me laugh out loud.

Update III: Brian Baute takes me to task in the comments for leaving off Friday the 13th. Why leave it off? Mainly it doesn't scare me. Yeah, it's a classic for the franchise it spawned, but story and suspense are where it's at.

Update IV: There's a Japanese horror film, Audition, that is supposed to be incredible, better even than Ringu (The Ring). Let me know if you've seen it before I shell out the cash for the DVD.

Update V: This post has to go back on top for tonite.

USA Today:

Che demanded worldwide revolution, even if it meant a stream of death and misery. He said the utopia that could be built on the ashes of the old world would make the suffering worthwhile. That's why he advocated a nuclear exchange during the Cuban missile crisis.

In fact, if you read through Che's speeches, with his constant refrain of glorious martyrdom, they're remarkably similar to another well-known "revolutionary" — the tall, bearded one holed up somewhere on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Che hated the United States and the global free market system that sustained it. Just ask him. "Let us sum up our hopes for victory: total destruction of imperialism by eliminating its firmest bulwark, the oppression exercised by the United States of America."

Here's the real question: if these wannabes wearing Che shirts knew his true history, would they be more inclined or less inclined to wear them?

This is what they've been waiting for.

From the comments (and no, I don't have any idea what they're talking about, but it seems to be an insult):

The American Taliban may still change the subject, but at least we're not offering to do it for them.

Update: Know what this whole thing is like? It's like you're at an NWA match on Thanksgiving 1979 and at first you thought you were getting Blackjack Mulligan vs. Ricky Steamboat for the world title and then Jim Crockett came out and said he had a real special treat, instead of Ricky Steamboat it was going to be Blackjack Mulligan vs. Dino Bravo. After a few minutes of stunned silence, the crowd begins to boo and it grows and it grows and then the fans begin pelting Crockett with cups and spit cans. All of a sudden the lights go down. The theme from 2001 starts, the fireworks go off. Ladies and gentlemen. RIC FLAIR!!!

Fumento via Instapundit:

Oil sands in a single Venezuelan deposit contain an estimated 1.8 trillion barrels of petroleum, with 1.7 trillion in a single Canadian deposit. In all, about 70 countries (including the U.S.), have oil sand deposits although technology hasn't yet made them economical for exploitation. Of Canada's reserves alone, about 255 billion barrels (almost equal to the entire proved oil reserves of Saudi Arabia) is currently considered recoverable. And recovering it they are.

The Saudis get "roughly 75% of budget revenues, 45% of GDP, and 90% of export earnings" from oil. They're in real danger of becoming irrelevant.

I'm going to kick this around a bit. First, intelligence was wrong about WMD in Iraq. If the agencies responsible for intelligence get this 'slam dunk' wrong, what else do they get wrong?

And therein is the problem. Since what they do is classified, we have no way to hold them accountable. What we do know is that bureaucrats since the beginning of time like cushy jobs and no responsibility.

CNN:

Legal experts consider him so ideologically similar to Justice Antonin Scalia that he has earned the nickname "Scalito."

I only know what I've read about him in the past week. However, anyone compared favorably to Scalia is strong coming out of the gate.

However, sometimes she's right on:

After all, sometime in the 1960's flirting went out of fashion, as did ironing boards, makeup and the idea that men needed to be "trapped" or "landed." The way to approach men, we reasoned, was forthrightly and without games, artifice or frills. Unfortunately, history has shown this to be a misguided notion.

Girls, listen up, here's the secret: guys are 1000 times more basic than you think. It's easy to outsmart us. Just don't overthink your strategy. Oh yeah, and be confident and enthusiastic.

Update: Drudge is having a caption contest for this photo.



My favorite so far? Do you think I could get a job here too, Mr. Rather?

I've been mad for days at this comment at Ed Cone's place:

Still gotta say that our constitution had its historical and cultural roots and grew out of a desire that the states gain some autonomy from the central ruling class. Where is the grassroot genesis of this constitution? How is this going to last when this is a structure superimposed on a culture that at base does not understand it? That is not to say that they are not capable of understanding it, that is to say they are not culturally oriented to accept it.

The conversation began about media coverage of the 2000 deaths in Iraq. David Wharton brought up the fact that the media seemed to be downplaying the ratification of the Iraqi constitution.

In response to the comment, I believe we're all oriented toward freedom regardless of our culture. To believe otherwise opens the door to oppression. All individuals deserve the chance to pursue happiness. This pursuit is easier if you're free, almost impossible if you're under the thumb of a tyrant.

I don't care if you think it's arrogant or hubristic for the US to spread democracy or not. It's the right thing to do. We've had a chequered history of supporting democracy some places and supporting oppressors in others. Now is the time to be consistently on the side of freedom. It'll make the US and the rest of the world safer and more prosperous.

And if you don't believe certain people are not 'culturally oriented' to democracy and freedom think of Japan pre-WWII vs. Japan post-WWII.

Thanks to the Mudville Gazette for their open post.

Aljazeeera:

The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fired his country’s ambassadors to Britain, France, and Germany, a government official told Iran Focus.

“Ahmadinejad has been angered by what he sees as the envoys’ meek reaction to the global condemnation of his Wednesday speech against Israel and the West”, the official said on condition of anonymity, adding that the President “made the speech with the full blessing of the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] and has his green light to stifle any dissenting voice within the government”.

Jay Nordlinger from Friday:

Every time I hear some Middle Eastern leader call for the destruction of Israel — as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did on Wednesday — I think of those famous words of a Holocaust survivor. Asked what lesson he had drawn from the experience, he answered, "When someone tells you he wants to kill you, believe him."

As I said here, you people who oppose the war in Iraq and have piled on Bush have made it that much harder to do anything about Iran. While we froth at the mouth over Scooter Libby, Iranian scientists happily punch the clock unlocking nuclear secrets. I hope your faith in Ahmadinejad is well placed.

Update: Here is Hoder's take:

I'm very sorry about what this fundamentalist moron who happens to be Iran's president has recently said. But I have to say he doesn't represent the way the majority in Iran think. This guy is a fraud and is a puppet of Mesbah-e Yazdi, a radical cleric who is only gaining power after Khomeini's death.

If he doesn't represent the way the majority think, then it's time for the majority to make a stand.

Althouse:

At the time of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal, we scorned a President livid about leakers and made heroes out of journalists who found sources and revealed secrets. Now we are in a new era, with a different President and a different war, and the journalists slip into a different position. Oh, it's all different -- you may say -- when the leak comes from the Administration, by those who would preserve the position of the powerful, in the interest of supporting a war. Are you sure you shouldn't worry about the free press right now?

Are you for leaks and a more complete picture of what's going on around you or shall we take everything at face value? Or does it depend on the circumstances and which side you are on?

VDH:

It is also time to step up lecturing both the American people and the Iraqis on exactly what we are doing in the Sunni Triangle. We have been sleepwalking through the greatest revolutionary movement in the history of the Middle East, as the U.S. military is quietly empowering the once-despised Kurds and Shiites — and along with them women and the other formerly dispossessed of Iraq. In short, the U.S. Marine Corps has done more for global freedom and social justice in two years than has every U.N. peacekeeping mission since the inception of that now-corrupt organization.

What we are attempting in Iraq is the stuff of legend. Imagine if we succeed! Which side do you want to be on, the side of murdering reactionaries or the side of liberators? You're only small if you choose to be.

Thanks to the Mudville Gazette for their open post.

Victoria Toensing who helped write the law (Agent Identities Protection Act) about outing a CIA agent writes on October 18:

It’s a hard law to violate. Its high threshold requires that the person whose identity is revealed must actually be covert (which requires at the least a foreign assignment within five years of the revelation), that the government must be taking “affirmative measures” to conceal the person’s identity, and that the revealer must know that the government is taking those measures.

So why didn’t Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel investigating the “leak,” close up shop long ago?

One possible answer is that someone lied about a material fact when testifying before the grand jury or obstructed justice in some other way. If that is the case, the prosecutor should indict.

and...

Congress intended to criminalize only disclosures that “clearly represent a conscious and pernicious effort to identify and expose agents with the intent to impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States….”

Similarly, a conspiracy “to discredit Wilson for his statements critical of the White House’s use of intelligence,” another reported possible Fitzgerald approach, does not violate any law. If it did, every administration since George Washington would be guilty of a crime.

and...

On July 6, 2003, the New York Times published an op-ed by former Amb. Joseph Wilson, who not only revealed he had been sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate the uranium purchase, but also continued the theme that ran through the unnamed source articles, that the trip was at Vice President Dick Cheney’s request. Wilson claimed he had reported to the CIA that such a purchase was “highly doubtful” and accused the Bush Administration of having “twisted” intelligence “to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

Savvy Washington journalists scratched their collective heads, questioning, “Why Wilson?” Why would the Vice President send a person to Niger on a mission about WMD who was not an expert in that subject, had never served in a senior capacity in Niger, had not worked for the CIA, and was known to oppose the White House Iraq policy? Wilson, in addition to all that, was known around town as a grandstander and a bit of a flake.

The “Why Wilson” question was being asked by the Washington Post, New York Times, Time Magazine, and columnists such as Novak. Reporters were not the only ones asking. Cheney was surprised that Wilson had claimed the mission was at his request since it was not true. It probably was not a pleasant call that went from Cheney’s office to then CIA Director George Tenet.

As I said here, I just can't understand why people continue to lie under oath. It's pretty clear Libby lied (and I expect a plea although if he wants to go to court let's be open-minded) and it was correct that he be indicted. I'm consistent. I thought Clinton should have resigned and when he didn't Congress was right to impeach him. He should have been thrown out. If our leaders can't be expected to tell the truth under oath, the legal system will fall apart.

That being said, this is all a bunch of nothing. If Libby had told the truth, everything would've been fine. The AIPA standard is impossibly high in this case. The left has overshot once again. Their giddy anticipation this week of expected indictments against Rove and Libby was embarrassing. They'll now try to make political hay out of Libby's perjury charge. It'll fizzle. What you guys need to do is work on your ideas instead of trying to throw Republicans in jail. Oh wait, your ideas never get you elected. Maybe you're right. Your only hope might be to indict the whole Republican party.

MSNBC:

They say some of the planned changes include:

A points chase and playoff system. Players will accumulate points during the season and earn their way into an August-September series of four tournament with significantly higher purses.

Golfers who play in those four events will qualify based on year-long performance.

Those events include the Barclays Classic, the Deutsche Bank Championship and the Cialis Western Open.

The series will end with the Tour Championship, which will be played in September.

Six or seven events will follow the Tour Championship. Those events won't be part of the "chase," the paper reported, but will count toward final money rankings.

If true, do you reckon the GGO will be one of the final six or seven events following the Tour Championship? Did you think it was possible for the GGO to be even more irrelevant than it is now? What are the odds of Tiger playing in one of the six or seven events following the conclusion of the points chase? Feel like watching the Diamondbacks play the Mariners next weekend even though the World Series is over?

China Daily:

A friend of mine once told me a joke: A job hunter, a philosophy major, went here, there and everywhere in his search for employment, but in vain. Having run out of options, he swallowed his pride and took up the offer of playing a bear in a costume at a zoo. He was locked up in a cage, where he was supposed to imitate various bear-like movements to entertain visitors.

To his horror, another bear appeared in the cage and started approaching him. He panicked and was on the brink of collapse when the bear said: "Don't be afraid. I'm also a philosophy major."

E&P:

...the former Washington Post reporter who shared a Pulitzer Prize for helping to expose the Nixon administration's wrongdoing says some parallels can be drawn between the two investigations, particularly the way both helped uncover extended dishonesty in the White House.

Q: How long can you live off of one story?
A: About 32 years.

I continue to be amazed at my influence.

VDH:

Before Harriet Miers, conservatives pined for a Chief Justice Antonin Scalia, with a Justice Roberts and someone like a Janice Rogers Brown rounding out a battle-hardened and formidable new conservative triad. They relished the idea of a Scalia frying Joe Biden in a televised cross-examination or another articulate black female nominee once again embarrassing a shrill Barbara Boxer — all as relish to brilliantly crafted opinions scaling back the reach of activist judges. That was not quite to be.

But now, with the Miers' withdrawal, the president might as well go for broke to reclaim his base and redefine his second term as one of principle rather than triangulating politics. So he should call in top Republican senators and the point people of his base — never more needed than now — and get them to agree on the most brilliant, accomplished, and conservative jurist possible. He should then ram the nominee through, in a display to the American people of the principles at stake.

Read the indictment here. When will these people learn to tell the truth under oath? Since he wasn't indicted for outing a CIA agent, it's probably a good bet that if he'd told the truth everything would be cool.

On the other hand, ignore Democrats who try to make this into more than it is, mainly that it's proof that Bush lied to get us into a war with Iraq. It's nonsense.

Let me lay it out for you. We simply can't take a chance on a tyrant developing or acquiring nuclear weapons when there's a real possibility that said tyrant might share those weapons with a terrorist group who would then destroy New York.

People who are opposed to the war in Iraq, do you know what you've done? You've made it harder to go after Iran who we absolutely know are developing nuclear weapons. Their president this week called for the destruction of Israel and won't back down. How do you feel about trusting him not to deal with a terrorist group who might smuggle a nuke into Tel Aviv or New York? Congratulations on getting Scooter Libby.

Via Malkin.

Jeffrey Starr, a Marine corporal, was killed on April 30. He was profiled this week in the NYT as part of the coverage of 2000 Americans who have died in Iraq. A letter to his girlfriend was found on his laptop. Here is part of his letter that didn't make the NYT:

Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.

Corporal Starr died at 22. How is it possible for a 22 year old to be so humble, so courageous and so wise?

He's right. We're all doing to die and whether you die at 82 or 22, it's a blink of an eye in the real scope of things. What's important is what you do with your time here. And spending your time helping spread freedom to oppressed people is about as noble it gets.

NYT:

Lawyers in the C.I.A. leak case said Thursday that they expected I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, to be indicted on Friday, charged with making false statements to the grand jury.

Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, will not be charged on Friday, but will remain under investigation, people briefed officially about the case said. As a result, they said, the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, was likely to extend the term of the federal grand jury beyond its scheduled expiration on Friday.

The whole freaking thing is over a leak to the NYT and others. Yet here is the NYT reporting on grand jury proceedings about the original leak with leaks from unnamed sources.

Moving on, the most telling aspect of this whole affair has been the White House's treatment of Fitzgerald. A little different than the treatment Ken Starr received from the Clinton White House, no?

His first entry is here. If nothing else it should give you confidence that folks in Congress aren't any smarter than you. That's not necessarily a bad thing, by the way.

However, I really don't get this:

But what are these oil companies doing to bring down the cost of oil and natural gas? They haven't built a refinery here in America since the 1970's. They've built refineries overseas, but nothing here at home.

We want some answers and you folks out there in the blogosphere do too. When are new refineries going to be built here in America?

Could it be because of all the regulations the US puts on folks who might like to build refineries? Perhaps it's easier to build refineries overseas. How does the speaker not understand this?

Newhouse:

Q: Does the idea that there might be large extra dimensions suggest a way to experimentally test for their presence?

A: They offer a tantalizing hope of making the physics associated with string theory (operate) on a scale where they might be detected with the next generation of particle accelerators.

By smashing particles together, we may see some of them disappear into extra dimensions, which would be really amazing. Or we may produce new kinds of black holes, little tiny ones, that do strange things, some of which are to release energy into extra dimensions.

They also offer the other tantalizing possibility ... maybe a millimeter away in an extra dimension there could be a whole other space, with galaxies, maybe even universes with different laws of physics.

What does this mean? I have no idea and neither do you.

Coulter:

Although the circumstances were unfortunate—we prefer fighting liberals to fighting our President—the Miers withdrawal is an unparalleled victory for conservatives. Liberals were never able to do this to Clinton when he hosed them. It will be a long time before the White House thinks it can use and abuse conservatives again.

Brian Baute points the way toward a better method of charity - microloans to budding businesspeople. Awesome idea. I will be investigating. Read the post here.

Malkin:

Sen. Trent Lott on Fox News this morning: "Who will remember the name Harriet Miers in a month?"

Trent Lott doesn't care anymore. He's given up the fake glad-handing and is just telling it like it is. Now, lose the hairspray Trent and you'll be presidential material.

Page D7 of today's WSJ about revenue sharing in the NFL:

The Carolina Panthers who play in tiny Charlotte...

They'll be buzzing about that slight, uptown.

Although your humble author was the first I know of to suggest Miers withdraw (October 5), Charles Krauthammer gets credit for laying out how it should go down. Which of the two of us had more of an impact on the White House? It's hard to say.

Krauthammer (October 21):

Sen. Lindsey Graham has been a staunch and public supporter of this nominee. Yet on Wednesday he joined Brownback in demanding privileged documents from Miers's White House tenure.

Finally, a way out: irreconcilable differences over documents.

For a nominee who, unlike John Roberts, has practically no record on constitutional issues, such documentation is essential for the Senate to judge her thinking and legal acumen. But there is no way that any president would release this kind of information -- "policy documents" and "legal analysis" -- from such a close confidante. It would forever undermine the ability of any president to get unguarded advice.

That creates a classic conflict, not of personality, not of competence, not of ideology, but of simple constitutional prerogatives: The Senate cannot confirm her unless it has this information. And the White House cannot allow release of this information lest it jeopardize executive privilege.

Hence the perfectly honorable way to solve the conundrum: Miers withdraws out of respect for both the Senate and the executive's prerogatives, the Senate expresses appreciation for this gracious acknowledgment of its needs and responsibilities, and the White House accepts her decision with the deepest regret and with gratitude for Miers's putting preservation of executive prerogative above personal ambition.

Faces saved. And we start again.

Miers withdraws as suggested by this site on Wednesday, October 5, two days after the nomination.

I wrote:

The best way out of this mess would be for Miers to withdraw from consideration. That would help Bush save some face and keep Republicans from fracturing. Is Miers big enough to do this? It would take serious character.

And yes, I admire her more for withdrawing. She did OK.

VDH:

Television and the global news media have changed the perception of combat fatalities as well. CNN would have shown a very different Iwo Jima - bodies rotting on the beach, and probably no coverage of the flag-raising from Mount Suribachi. It is conventional wisdom now to praise the amazing accomplishment of June 6, 1944. But a few ex tempore editorial comments from Geraldo Rivera or Ted Koppel, reporting live from the bloody hedgerows where the Allied advance stalled not far from the D-Day beaches - a situation rife with intelligence failures, poor equipment and complete surprise at German tactics - might have forced a public outcry to withdraw the forces from the Normandy "debacle" before it became a "quagmire."

Someone - perhaps Gens. Omar Bradley, Dwight Eisenhower or George Marshall himself - would have been fired as responsible for sending hundred of poorly protected armored vehicles down the narrow wooded lanes of the Bocage to be torched by well-concealed Germans. Subsequent press conferences over underarmored Sherman tanks would have made the present furor over Humvees in Iraq seem minor.

TSG:

Q: As a new father (and especially the father of a girl), you should watch out for the following fantastically horrific trick to play on a buddy with a new daughter: The next time you're in Vegas and end up in a gentlemen's establishment, buy the new father a dance, only pay the lady friend a little extra so that during the dance, she tells your buddy her name is [insert buddy's daughter's name]. If you watch your boy, you will be able to tell the exact moment at which she reveals her "name." Yes, I am going to hell.
--Bucky, Houston

SG: I would have found this e-mail 20 times funnier one year ago. But it did get me thinking ... do certain names predispose women toward becoming strippers? Like, if we had named my daughter Tiffany, Amber or Desiree, would that have dropped her "becoming a stripper" odds from 100,000-to-1 to 75-1? What happens if you name your daughter "Cinnamon" -- does she just start stripping right out of the womb? Or do all strippers have normal names, only they adopt relatively real-sounding pseudonyms when they start working at the gentlemen's establishment? I wish somebody with an MIT degree and a giant stripper database could figure this out once and for all.

Mudville Gazette via Right In Raleigh:

..."because as I look around at the state of this nation and see all of the weak little pampered candy-asses that are whining about this or protesting that, I'd be afraid to leave the fate of this nation entirely up to them."

Aljazeera:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Wednesday for Israel to be "wiped off the map, saying it is a "disgraceful blot", reported The Associated Press.

The Iranian President was addressing thousands of students at a "World without Zionism" conference, when he also condemned Iran's neighbors that have relations with Israel. "Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury," state-run television quoted the President as saying.

You may as well learn to pronounce his name.

Steele:

President Johnson's famous Howard University speech, which launched the Great Society in 1965, outlined this balance of power by explicitly spelling out white responsibility without a single reference to black responsibility. In the 40 years since that speech no American president has dared correct this oversight.

The problem here is obvious: The black shame of inferiority (the result of oppression, not genetics) cannot be overcome with anything less than a heroic assumption of responsibility on the part of black Americans. In fact, true equality--an actual parity of wealth and ability between the races--is now largely a black responsibility. This may not be fair, but historical fairness--of the sort that resolves history's injustices--is an idealism that now plagues black America by making black responsibility seem an injustice.

And yet, despite the fact that greater responsibility is the only transforming power that can take blacks to true equality, this is an idea that deeply threatens the 40-year balance of power between the races. Bill Cosby's recent demand that poor blacks hold up "their end of the bargain" and do a better job of raising their children was explosive because it threatened this balance. Mr. Cosby not only implied that black responsibility was the great transforming power; he also implied that there was a limit to what white responsibility could do. He said, in effect, that white responsibility cannot overcome black inferiority. This is a truth so obvious as to be mundane. Yet whites won't say it in the interest of their redemption and blacks won't say it in the interest of historical justice. It is left to hurricanes to make such statements.

Read the whole thing. Until we all can acknowledge this 'mundane truth' black achievement will continue to progress too slowly.

Shameless. Apple's worse than Microsoft. If Apple had been smarter they'd have had the monopoly. Only they'd insist you be glad about it.

Stossel:

Once Republicans were in power, they started spending money even faster than the Democrats did.

Big spender Ted Stevens responded to Coburn's good suggestion to kill a "Bridge to Nowhere" with a tantrum on the Senate floor: He threatened to resign and "be taken out of here on a stretcher."

Good! Sen. Stevens, please go. I'll even help carry the stretcher.

Unfortunately, Congress has an unwritten code: "Don't threaten the other congressmen's loot." The Senate reprimanded Coburn by voting 82 to 15 to save the Bridge to Nowhere.

The Ketchikan, Alaska, bridge is particularly egregious because it's a bridge to a nearly uninhabited island. Yet it will be monstrous -- higher than the Brooklyn Bridge and almost as long as the Golden Gate. Even some in Ketchikan laugh about it. One told us, "Short view is, I don't see a need for it. The long view ... I still don't see a need for it."

The people we elected to Congress as Republicans are not really Republicans. They are professional politicians who claim to be Republicans in order to get elected. They are poseurs. Vote in your primaries next year to get rid of them.

Frontpage:

Bill Clinton’s sexual assaults against us, and Hillary Clinton’s active participation in persuading America that those assaults don’t matter, represent a breach of the trust we should place in our leaders. This is not a political vendetta on our part. The two of us assaulted by Bill Clinton were political supporters of the Clintons until Bill Clinton attacked us.

Do these two women create cognitive dissonance for anyone on the left?

E&P:

Another free online classified ad service also would pose another financial threat to newspapers, which already have been squeezed in the cities where Craigslist provides free listings.

VDH:

The modern public university teaches the student that his verbal or analytical shortcomings have little to do with his lack of discipline, effort, or talent, but instead arise from a variety of social and state pathologies — ranging from poverty and racism to gender bias and public neglect. Redress can start only when the student realizes why and how he has been victimized and discovers that the same government that harmed him also offers more enlightened public servants to undo the damage. He is expected, after graduation, to proselytize for this creed of entitlement, big government, and victimization.

The often well-meaning educators who advance that ideology embrace a therapeutic rather than a realistic — and, therefore, often tragic — view of human nature. They are committed to the idea that their budgets, counseling, and sensitivity can do what math, science, and liberal arts cannot: produce a happy and nice citizen. It is not so much that these adjunct staffers (who, unlike part-time faculty, are often employed full-time and well protected by the university) are irrelevant to the academic mission of the university as that they are antithetical to it. They give students perennial crutches, teach them to believe that others are responsible for their shortcomings, and persuade them that skills can somehow be obtained in ways less painful than the old academic notion of reading great literature, mastering English composition and basic math, and learning correct grammar.

On the other hand, if we dispense with the arcane notion that the billions spent on public higher education are supposed to produce creative, independent, thoughtful, and well-versed Americans, and assume instead that what we need are students who feel their nation’s injustices and express their disillusion with exquisite sensitivity, then the university is not failing at all.

Right on.

Guarino posts about the travesty that is Kelo.

The John Locke Foundation argues that we need a constitutional amendment to protect public property in North Carolina, and I am inclined to agree.

Cobb:

In my case, I found it rather sad that the cat engaging me was literally screaming for the answer to the question - What is the Republican plan for helping blacks in the ghetto? The quick answer to that question, any conservative will tell you in well rehearsed soundbites: We need you to help yourself out of the ghetto - it's a plantation of dependency from which you must escape. Of course when you get down into the details there's much more nuanced stuff to say, but there is one basic undeniable point on which most all on the Right will agree. America is not responsible for solving the ghetto dysfunction. In the infamous post-Katrina phrasing: "You're on your own".

As Cobb notes in the next paragraph, this sounds harsh to a lot of folks. However, it's the way it has got to be. The government can't take care of you a tenth of how well you can take care of yourself.

Cohen:

Both JFK and FDR were Democrats, of course, and the party has always been associated with internationalism -- everything from the League of Nations to the United Nations. Somehow, though, that moralism -- that urge to do good abroad -- has drifted over to the GOP. It is Republicans, particularly neocons, who talk the language of moralism in foreign policy and who, weapons of mass destruction aside, wanted to take out Saddam Hussein because he was a beast. It mattered to them that he killed and tortured his own people. It says something about the Democratic left that it cheered Michael Moore's infantile ``Fahrenheit 9/11'' even though the film made no mention of Saddam's depredations, not even his gassing of Kurdish villages. Moore's morality stops at the water's edge.

It is probably no accident that so many Middle East hands supported the war. They had seen enough to be appalled and to think, probably incorrectly, that ridding the region of Saddam would have a beneficial effect. The supposed afterthought about democracy -- the apparent fallback position once WMD proved not to exist -- was in fact the top priority for many neocons. As Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair in 2003, WMD was just one reason to go into Iraq. Democracy and human rights were not only others, but possibly more important.

It's never a bad thing to be against murdering thugs rather than neutral or for them as in Moore's case. The issue is how you exercise that opposition. That's where the Democrats should be. They shouldn't be opposed to US involvment in Iraq, they should be presenting their own plan to establish democracy in the Middle East. Come on guys, give it a go.

Mallaby:

Last week's terrible results from Ford; this month's bankruptcy of the big auto parts maker Delphi; and the rising tide of speculation about the potential bankruptcy of GM — a big cause of all this grief lies in excessive non-wage benefits. Hourly pay may be a little high: It averages about $27 at GM and Delphi, compared with the $17 average for American manufacturing. But health and pension benefits are the real killers. Once you've counted those, workers cost $74 an hour at GM and $65 an hour at Delphi.

and...

Now the future has arrived. GM is providing gold-plated health plans to more than 1 million retired Americans; its health costs came to $4 billion last year and will top $5 billion this year. These "legacy costs" — the legacy of bad management decisions encouraged by bad government rules — are driving the carmakers to the wall. Last week GM forced retirees to swallow cuts in their health plans, and Delphi seems likely to use the bankruptcy courts to impose similarly sour medicine.

In a sane world, Washington would absorb Detroit's painful lesson. Tax breaks and rules that encourage phony corporate promises end up betraying workers. From now on, tax incentives should not encourage welfare systems that depend on the false premise of corporate immortality. And the law should oblige firms to recognize the cost of compensation promises immediately and transparently.

The real answer? Don't tax corporations. Then you won't be able to 'incentivize' companies to do anything by offering tax breaks. You get all sorts of unintended consequences when the government gets in the way of the market.

This question from a reporter to Connie Mack via Andrew Sullivan's site:

Is that fair to our children? If we keep borrowing at this level, won't the Arabs or the Chinese eventually own this country?

Buying a bond doesn't convey ownership of anything. If you own a bond what you have is the promise of the issuer to pay you interest every so often and to give you your principal back at some future date. No matter what you think of the national debt, it doesn't mean that the government is selling the country off piecemeal. Good lord, you'd think a reporter asking a question about the finances of the country would understand this basic fact. It's the first sentence of the first chapter of any book about how bonds work.

In today's WSJ there's a front page article titled "Novel Way to Assess School Competition Stirs Academic Row." The father of the voucher idea, the wonderful Milton Friedman, states:

"The case for vouchers is so simple. In area after area, things the government does, private enterprise can do at half the cost."

Don't be on the wrong side of Friedman.

Jay Nordlinger:

May I tell you a little music story? On Saturday night, I was in Carnegie Hall, to review the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. The soloist was the great Swedish mezzo-soprano Sofie von Otter. Believe it or not, she sang a song by Benny Andersson, co-founder of the blockbuster pop group ABBA. This was a song called "At Home," from a musical, about a woman named Kristina who emigrates to America. (This is a musical based on a famous Swedish novel — famous to Swedes, I mean.)

Before she sang the song, von Otter explained to the audience that, in the 19th century, some two million were driven from Sweden by famine. Many of these came to America, "this land of opportunity" — that's what the singer said. And the Carnegie Hall patrons around me laughed.

You see, they found that phrase — "land of opportunity" — comical, or ironic, at best. But von Otter appeared to be serious.

I'll never forget when a Chinese actor named John Lone addressed the audience at the Academy Awards. He said something about how nice it was to be in America, where you were free to say what you wanted, or create as you wanted. The audience laughed — laughed.

But John Lone wasn't laughing, and neither was Anne Sofie von Otter, and neither are we, right, dear hearts?

ESPN:

Saints owner Tom Benson declared this week that nothing will be decided on the franchise's future until after the season. But ESPN's Chris Mortensen reports that, based on information from key league sources, the team has probably played its last game in New Orleans.

According to Mortensen, San Antonio is a likely home for 2006 and Los Angeles is the preferred destination beyond that. The NFL could still include New Orleans as a Super Bowl site when the city is reconstructed, and expansion might even be a possibility, but that's 10 to 15 years away.

Althouse:

Q Mr. President, as a newspaper reported on Saturday, is the White House working on a contingency plan for the withdrawal of Harriet Miers' nomination?

THE PRESIDENT: Harriet Miers is -- is an extraordinary woman.

Captain Ed on the Coburn Amendment which would have redirected some pork to helping rebuild New Orleans:

Neither one of them (Patty Murray and Ted Stevens) recognized the ghoulishness of insisting on building a $228 million bridge that will service 50 people -- fifty people who already use a ferry to cross to the mainland now -- when we need money to rebuild bridges destroyed in New Orleans that get much more use now than 50 people living voluntarily on an island.

Fifteen Senators voted for the amendment including 12 Republicans. Pitiful. Kudos to Burr for being one of the 12.

Robinson:

It wasn't quite Oprah's couch -- Condoleezza Rice doesn't go there -- but it was close. On Friday afternoon, as the secretary of state walked into Brunetta C. Hill Elementary School for the first time since she was a precocious sixth-grader, if you watched her eyes you could see the memories register one by one -- old classrooms, old teachers, old friends.

Read the rest.

David Boyd Rule of Life Number One is that competition makes everything better. Without competition you are left to rely on the goodwill of the person/institution who holds a monopoly. To paraphrase Adam Smith, I'd rather rely on the baker's self-interest that he get up at 4 in the morning to bake bread rather than his generosity.

Arcbender has challenged my Rule Number One at Ed Cone's site. His challenge is based on my advocacy of vouchers for making public schools better. Ed's original column is partly on making Greensboro more entrepreneurial.. My point to Ed is that to foster entrepreneurship, let's start with education rather than continue to rely on the government monopoly model.

Arcbender's post is surprisingly disjointed for someone who received a law degree from UNC. However, I'll pick out the main points and respond briefly to each. His points will be in bold.

And innovation for innovation's sake alone is not good policy.

Nonsense. Innovation is the key to everything. It's how we progress. In economic activity when innovation ceases, becoming more efficient takes over and it's a race to the bottom cost-wise.

The fact is vouchers have had a very mixed success in other places and most plans proposed provide far less money to recipients than would be necessary to provide widespread entrepreneurial competition...

What do we spend in NC per student? $8000? $10,000? More? As you note, most vouchers in other states are for far less than that. Let's up the ante if that's the problem.

Look to our pharmaceutical industry for an example of the limits of entrepreneurial innovation at providing public goods without profit motive. (Got Tamiflu?)

You're out of your mind. The pharmaceutical industry in this country has helped the public untold ways. Isolated incidents where government regulations or interference (the US and elsewhere) disrupt the market does not mean the system is broke. I guarantee that you will have less breakthroughs if you have a government compensated scientist on the clock looking for them rather than an entrepreneur.

I also must add that I am a product of the Greensboro Public Schools, if more than a decade away from my days at Sternberger, Lindley, Kiser and Grimsley. I have great pride in the education the people of Greensboro gave me...

As am I, albeit Guilford County - Northeast Guilford Class of '89. My kids also go to public school and it is a fine place. I am very satisfied. However, that doesn't mean education can't be done better overall.

The public schools have done more to create commonalities within America's culture than nearly any other institution, save for the military during the World Wars. Its a dangerous risk to our nation's unity to eliminate it.

How are we unified by public schools? However, if this is true, I don't know why we can't have the same thing with schools not run by the government.

Greensboro can forecully advocate better state spending on education to help create the sound basic education our constitution requires...

I suppose. However, you're still trusting a bureaucrat to convince another bureaucrat to do something. Better to let parents handle this. Do not get between the consumer and the provider.

it can endeavor to make sure that teachers are paid well enough so that we draw from those who wish to do good and those who wish do well - a larger and better employee pool than to whicih schools currently have access...

Teachers are paid pretty well by any objective measure. However, if there's one area where you have to admit the market trumps government it's setting value for employees. Just think, with the market you could pay a teacher based on performance rather than on longevity.

There are many more ideas and I claim no expertise, but I feel very confident that vouchers benefit more from their political pyrotechnics than their substantive thought in their lofty status in this debate.

Vouchers have a bit of momentum because they make sense to a lot of people, especially people that have kids in failing schools. I don't see any 'pyrotechnics.' Vouchers are a simple market-based solution to an overly complicated problem.

Affordable loans to entrepreneurial business that tend to feed back into the city's other businesses.

With interest rates as low as they are, loans aren't going to get much more affordable.

Encouraging or mandating a living wage so that Greensboro's workers can vigorously participate in Greensboro's economy as shoppers, diners and homeowners.

What's a living wage? $10/hour? $20/hour? Who pays? Business owner? Taxpayers? What number of jobs are you willing to lose by raising the minimum wage?

Seeking new ways to expand preventive health care and health insurance to all Greensboro's residents.

Want to know how to solve this problem? Get rid of group health. Buy health insurance like you buy auto or life. The problem will solve itself. I'm OK with government vouchers for the indigent to allow them to cover shortfalls in buying their own insurance. After all, I am not a libertarian.

Create a society where job loss, health costs, inadequate education, poverty wages and residential isolation do not steal a citizen's opportunity to reach for the American dream...

I agree totally. I am as well-intentioned as you. However, it's my market-based ideas that offer a real chance of success rather than your pseudo-socialism.

Carolina Circle City blog has made the big-time.

Allen Johnson:

Now, shopping seems to be going back to the future. Malls are passe and old-fashioned shopping centers, where you actually have to walk outside in fresh air, are in vogue again. A new retail development, the Village at North Elm, takes the concept a step further, affecting the look and feel of a little self-contained town, complete with streets and alleys. It looks promising.

Still, I'll miss the dingy old concrete hulk off U.S. 29. Though probably not half as much as Billy Coore.

TSG:

From Tulsa reader Dwyane Davis: "If I were running the PA system for an opposing NFL team, I would play the Love Boat theme music everytime the Vikings did anything." Dwayne, you're officially the funniest person in Tulsa.

What happens as we grow richer? Clutter. We accumulate stuff for the sake of stuff. Shopping is a sport. I hate clutter.

AP:

:
To many observers, clutter reflects the mind-set of the modern household _ overburdened, disorganized and compulsive. To others, clutter is a broader symbol of a ravenous culture dependent on easy credit, piling up debt and consuming a lion's share of the world's resources without considering the consequences.

"People's homes are a reflection of their lives," says Los Angeles psychologist and organizational consultant Peter Walsh. "It is no accident that people have a huge weight problem in this country, and clutter is the same thing. Homes are an orgy of consumption."

I think I was Japanese in a former life. Give me simple and high quality. Even sitting on a mat on the floor appeals to me. And what is simpler than sushi? Catch the fish. Eat the fish.

Main:

The Kelo decision is testament to the expanding use of police power by the state for the advancement of private interests that are often in cozy relationships with local municipal governments. To follow the path of the takings locomotive that has chugged across this country is to see how the meaning of private property has changed in the United States from its original promise as a place of sanctuary from outside interference to a contingent relationship in which property is private and unmolested only at the sufferance of local government.

If you only own property at the whim of the government we may as well call our system communism. I can't stress enough how important this issue is.

Also, as far as the developers go, maybe what they build will increase the tax base and maybe it won't. Maybe it'll look nice and maybe it won't. I was over at Wendover and 40 today dining at La Fiesta with my second son. The shopping center the restaurant is in was one of the first to be built at this infamous intersection. Circuit City has gone on to greener pastures. The parking lot is in disrepair. Several other storefronts are empty. This shopping center is less than ten years old. It looks terrible. And this is the high rent district as far as big boxes go in Greensboro. I've got no problem with someone building a big box if they want. However, I want them to acquire the land fair and square. To use eminent domain to take someone's property and give it to someone else is egregious by itself. It's that much worse when the original reasoning behind the decision, to increase the tax base, is suspect.

Update: John In Carolina has a post about the same article. Great minds and all.

I just turned the game on. I'm reminded of my favorite Bear Bryant story. It's probably apocryphal.

Alabama owned Tennessee for years. After one particularly brutal beating a little blond headed girl about seven dressed in a Tennessee cheerleader uniform went up to Coach Bryant. With tears in her eyes she asked the old ball coach if Tennessee would ever beat Alabama. Bear Bryant looked down at her and said, "Yes, little girl, Tennessee will someday beat Alabama. It just won't be in your lifetime."

Aren't you glad you voted for him? He supported Coburn. Here are the others.

I oppose the Miers nomination. Learn how to cast your vote here.

There's been a bit of buzz about this column.

WP:

Miers's advocates, sensing the poverty of other possibilities, began by cynically calling her critics sexist snobs who disdain women with less than Ivy League degrees. Her advocates certainly know that her critics revere Margaret Thatcher almost as much as they revere the memory of the president who was educated at Eureka College.

and...

In their unseemly eagerness to assure Miers's conservative detractors that she will reach the "right" results, her advocates betray complete incomprehension of this: Thoughtful conservatives' highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution's meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path that the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result.

Schools, offices, jails?

Guarino:

Our jail facilities should be modest, spartan, austere and utilitarian. The consultant's proposals need to be scrutinized closely. We do not need to build monuments of excess-- as we have done in some areas, and as we are proposing to do in others.

It shouldn't cost $102 to $165 mil to build a jail or $40 million to build a new high school.

Althouse:

Well, I've been saying it's ideological of the Democrats not to oppose her. They opposed Roberts as much as they could, and he was sublimely qualified. How can you oppose him and not her? It must be that you think she's weak and will drift, surprise, or at least be uninfluential. This preference for a weak justice over a hyper-competent justice like Roberts is utterly political and in service of the Democrats ideological goals. Anyone who challenges Roberts and then turns around and gives Miers a pass can never credibly claim to be relying on the principles they will need to cite in the next case if they want to look like something more than purely political ideologues.

If you were the next nominee how would you feel having this White House behind you? Um, listen guys, I appreciate what you're trying to do and all, but I'll take it from here. That's alright, I'll get some lawyer buddies to do the mock hearings. And, yeah, I'll vet myself. I got it.

Kristol:

What is more, the Clinton White House mounted an extraordinary--and successful--political campaign against the office of the independent counsel and the person of Kenneth Starr. All the evidence suggests that the Bush White House has been fully cooperative with, even deferential to, the Fitzgerald investigation.

Via Andrew Sullivan. Club for Growth:

Number of Pork Projects in Federal Spending Bills

2005 - 13,997
2004 - 10,656
2003 - 9,362
2002 - 8,341
2001 - 6,333
2000 - 4,326
1999 - 2,838
1998 - 2100
1997 - 1,596
1996 - 958
1995 - 1439

The problem, I think, is opportunists. Once the Republicans seized power in 1994 and kept the momentum through the '00 and '04 presidential elections, they attracted a lot of would-be politicians only interested in power and not conservative principles. Since they're only interested in power, and spending is a pretty good way of retaining that power, we end up in this untenable situation.

Why is he posting about BBQ on the eve of the Lexington BBQ Festival? Could he have done anything in poorer taste? Not that Memphis or Texas BBQ is bad or anything, it's just that they're variations. Kneel down Tennessee, former North Carolina county, and give gratitude where it is due.

Weekly Standard:

Why did it all crumble? Several interrelated reasons - among them the grisly fact that England had lost virtually an entire generation of future leaders in the trenches of Europe. But another important cause was the waning of confidence on the part of liberal British elites, whose pacifism evolved into anti-patriotism.

In 1933, the Oxford Union - a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion - held a debate on the resolution "this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country." The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England's leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: "There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him. . . . The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate."

Churchill disdained the new liberalism, mocking one of his opponents as part of "that band of degenerate international intellectuals who regard the greatness of Britain and the stability and prosperity of the British Empire as a fatal obstacle. . . . " So deep was this liberal loathing of empire that even as the first shots of World War II were being fired, Churchill's private secretary, Jock Colville, witnessed at a theater "a group of bespectacled intellectuals" who, to his shock, "remain[ed] firmly seated while 'God Save the King' was played."

These elites could see evil only at home. The French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir did not believe that Germany was a "threat to peace," but instead worried that the "panic that the Right was spreading" would drag France, Britain, and the rest of Europe into war. Stafford Cripps, a liberal Labor member of Parliament, feared not Hitler, but Churchill. Cripps wrote that after Churchill became prime minister he would "then introduce fascist measures and there will be no more general elections."

In an important sense, the British Empire's strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.

VDH:

The Western media was relatively quiet about the quite amazing news from the recent trifecta in Iraq: very little violence on election day, Sunni participation, and approval of the constitution. Those who forecasted that either the Sunnis would boycott, or that the constitution would be — and should be — rejected, stayed mum.

When there's good news, let's hear about it too.

The Wall Street Journal agrees Miers was the wrong choice:

Although skeptical from the start, we've restrained our criticism of the Harriet Miers nomination because we've long believed that Presidents of either party deserve substantial deference on their Supreme Court picks. Yet it now seems clear--even well before her Senate hearings--that this selection has become a political blunder of the first order.

How could the White House be so stupid? How is it possible? I am utterly perplexed.

Instapundit:

Jed Babbin: Well, how tough is it going to be, though, to undo this culture of pork? I mean, the porksters are all around you. I mean, we're not naming names, but you're outnumbered there pretty solidly, so...

Tom Coburn: Look, when the American people want things to change, they will change. Just as like in 1994, they changed?

Tom Coburn for prez.

Frum:

One of the important sub-themes in the Miers story is the grave and continuing malfunction of the White House staff system. It's incredible that the staff did not act at the beginning to protect the president from a bad decision. It's incredible that it cannot now accurately convey him bad news - and the need to rethink his course. But manifestly it has failed him and is continuing to fail him.

AP:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Ten masked gunmen kidnapped the lawyer for one of Saddam Hussein's co-defendants Thursday, police said.

Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, who was in the courtroom for Wednesday's opening session of the trial, is one of two lawyers for Awad Hamed al-Bandar, one of seven Baath Party officials being tried with Saddam.

The gunmen pulled up outside al-Janabi's office in Baghdad's eastern Shaab district in the evening, broke into the building and dragged him out, said Police Maj. Falah al-Mohammedawi of the Interior Ministry.

WTF? Guys, the way this usually works is that you capture the prosecution. Capturing your own lawyers doesn't give you as much leverage.

Update: Not to mention that you're probably already not getting defense attorneys that graduated at the top of their class. Adding kidnapping and possible televised beheading to the 'con' column of defending murdering Baathists is not likely to get F. Lee Bailey in his Gulfstream headed to the Middle East.

Found this link on Carolina Circle City.

The Ghost Mall:

Some would say Carolina Circle was doomed from the start. Its design was so outlandishly "70s modern" that the whole place looked out of date within two years of its construction. The neighborhood was not great and got worse over time; Greensboro's wealth and population have always clustered to the west. On top of that, the site was plagued by an intense stench for its first few years due to a nearby waste treatment plant.

Do not underestimate the impact of the smell from the waste treatment plant in the mall's undoing. Once again proving that developers can talk themselves into anything.

Which version of Carolina Circle Mall was your favorite?

Now that is how to pose for a mugshot. Unlike this or this or this.

I suppose if Ron Jeremy can be a porn star, Harriet Miers can be a Supreme Court judge. Keep reaching for the stars.

IP:

I predict a revival of interest in term limits and a balanced budget amendment.

What I see is a big disconnect between the people and their leaders. The arrogance of these fools is impressive.

PL via IP:

Mrs. R. reports that Patty Murray is now speaking against the Coburn Amendment, and has just issued a threat against any Senators who vote for the amendment: we on the Appropriations Committee will take a "long, hard look" at any projects in your state. Can anyone say, "culture of corruption"?

AP:

President Bush vowed Thursday to avoid the "background noise" of investigations and political problems to focus on the nation's needs.

"The American people expect me to do my job, and I'm going to," he said.

Heh. Opinion Journal:

The tour itself is a 30-minute propaganda campaign explaining why the company's founders, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for their unwavering commitment to the environment and economic justice.

Meanwhile, their factory is a monument to the efficiencies of capitalism and technological progress: Several dozen giant computer-operated machines churn out hundreds of thousands of cartons a day. I half expect the massive energy-gulping freezers to be solar-paneled or powered by green-friendly windmills, but no, they use lots and lots of conventional electricity. It turns out that if you want really good ice cream, you just have to tolerate a little more global warming. That's a trade-off that I personally am willing to make.

Cline:

My team did not make it to the World Series this year, so I'll be pulling for the Chicago White Sox. I want Fidel Castro to angrily toss his Soviet-era transistor radio out the window when he hears that two more Cuban defectors earned World Series rings.

It will be a glorious day when Castro finally dies.

Jay:

I've always said that Americans — especially American conservatives — have no idea how famous and influential Noam Chomsky and the late Susan Sontag are in Europe. Here, they're considered almost fringe figures, whatever their talents. There, they are regarded as the Great Explainers of America, the Big American Brains. And Michael Moore and Paul Krugman are not far behind them.

Jay Nordlinger:

In NR, many years ago, the suggestion was made that the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize should be the American military, every year: for the American military is the planet's greatest guarantor of peace.

NYT:

Ms. Miers had an opportunity to win over the skeptics this week with her answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee's questionnaire. But her responses were so unimpressive that the top Republican and Democrat on that committee took the extraordinary step yesterday of instructing her to give it another try, this time with more "particularity and precision." She thus became perhaps the most important judicial nominee in history to be offered what amounts to a do-over on a take-home quiz.

The bigger problem with the Miers nomination is that it has caused all of us to re-examine Bush's presidency. How could a smart man, a man in touch with conservative principles nominate someone so utterly lacking? Rush Limbaugh was on Hannity and Colmes the other night and said up until Miers he was thinking Bush would go down as one of the greatest presidents of this century. I agree. The response to terrorism and the invasion of Afghanistan was appropriate. I think the Iraq war was the right move for a number of reasons. Because of those two things I gave Bush a pass on protectionist policies, McCain-Feingold, education spending and on and on. I'm not giving him a pass anymore.