Boyd

Bloomberg:

William F. Buckley Jr., the longtime conservative writer and leader, said George W. Bush's presidency will be judged entirely by the outcome of a war in Iraq that is now a failure.

"Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq," Buckley said in an interview that will air on Bloomberg Television this weekend. "If he'd invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn't get him out of his jam."

Buckley said he doesn't have a formula for getting out of Iraq, though he said "it's important that we acknowledge in the inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we should look for opportunities to cope with that failure."

and...

"The neoconservative hubris, which sort of assigns to America some kind of geo-strategic responsibility for maximizing democracy, overstretches the resources of a free country," Buckley said.

Spreading democracy as an antidote to terrorism is a worthwhile goal. However, in retrospect, attempting to use the military alone to accomplish the task was really the epitome of stupid.

Buckley's right. If we didn't have candor in the administration before we went to war, we need it now. Politics be damned.

The other thing he's right about, and was always right about - his whole life, is that there are limits to our power. And that's really what I keep kicking myself over. Conservative thinking folks are supposed to see the world as it is, not as they want it to be. The intertwining of conservatives and Republicans and the acquisition and retention of Republican power the last few years is to blame. Power corrupts. This is how. It has unmoored us from our principles.

MacDonald:

If boys lag in undergraduate enrollment, let them study a little harder, or stay a little more focused, on their own. They don’t need the inevitable new bureaucracies in order to pull up their own bootstraps.

This would be a good time to take back a little manliness by not grovelling for a handout. If not us, who? If not now, when?

Robinson:

...the small-government, tight-money conservatives have finally reached the point of utter disgust about another issue -- the fact that George W. Bush and a conservative Congress have presided over a massive expansion of government and an explosion of debt. For this group, having to point to Bill Clinton as a model of fiscal probity redefines the word "galling."

Pretty much.

Ed found the pic. And while Ed linked to the pic for the noble reason of defending us hicks against Philly smugness, I will link to the pic for no reason other than - Good lord, that is some kind of smoking, hot prom dress.

Here is the link.

Frum:

In 2005, Mexicans in the United States remitted some $20 billion home. That's 3% of Mexico's entire national income.

It's a sad commentary that a country that borders the US and has free trade with the US and has 106,000,000 million people of its own, and hardworking people at that, is so pathetic economically. It's just pitiful. The folks protesting could do so much more good demanding reform in Mexico rather than demanding to be let on the dole here.

Or should I say red? I am mailing my taxes.

Please indulge me as I trot out, once again, my favorite policy proposal of all time. This proposal would do more to reform Washington and put power back in the hands of the people than any other reasonable proposal on or off the table.

Are you ready?

Are you sure?

Here it is.

There is no going back.

I warned you.

Eliminate withholding.

If the people in this country received all the money they make and had to sit down to write a check to the government once a month or once a quarter, there would be a million times more scrutiny of spending than there is now.

Via IP. This is not helpful. In fact, it makes me think we've gone from folks looking for opportunity to folks invading.

Waas:

Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews.

We're getting to the point, if we haven't blown by it already with the drug bill and Miers and immigration and protectionist policies and all the rest, that Bush is going to seriously damage the conservative movement.

Goldstein:

...the Orwellian concept of "tolerance" driven by the implied authority within identity politics for a particular identity group to determine the parameters of acceptable speech relating to that group, is completely anathema to western classical liberalism—and in fact promotes the exact opposite of tolerance.

Hess:

Why do inviolable laws about the productive benefits of technology seem to stop at the schoolhouse door? Organizations like the Postal Service make effective use of technology because they must keep up with the competition. Knowing their competitors are constantly seeking ways to boost productivity, hold down costs, and develop new products, for-profit enterprises are always on the lookout for similar advantages. It's not that any executive likes painful measures such as downsizing; they take these steps because survival requires it.

Yeah, he said Postal Service. And held them up in a positive light even. Mainly because they've become more efficient and have been able to reduce headcount by 40,000 in the past four years.

No one who is selling likes competition. It makes life hard. But what of buyers?

We, the taxpayers, are buyers of eduction from the public school system. It's the teachers and administrators who are selling and have a vested interest in eliminating competition. However, it's the buyers who must encourage competition to ensure value. Otherwise you have to take their word for it.

Bremmer:

...if the central government collapses -- we can expect that Iraq will break into three autonomous blocs that represent the Kurdish north, Sunni center and Shiite south of the country, plunging Iraq into widespread sectarian fighting and putting an end to international reconstruction aid.

Would three countries be all that bad? We'd have to deal with Turkey on the Kurdish question, but the country was put together as sort of a lark anyway. If this is what the people want, why try to hold it together?

Will:

Conservatives should want, as the president proposes, a guest worker program to supply what the U.S. economy demands — immigrant labor for entry-level jobs. Conservatives should favor a policy of encouraging unlimited immigration by educated persons with math, engineering, technology or science skills that America's education system is not sufficiently supplying.

And conservatives should favor reducing illegality by putting illegal immigrants on a path out of society's crevices and into citizenship by paying fines and back taxes and learning English. Faux conservatives absurdly call this price tag on legal status "amnesty." Actually, it would prevent the emergence of a sullen, simmering subculture of the permanently marginalized, akin to the Arab ghettos in France. The House-passed bill, making it a felony to be in the country illegally, would make 11 million people permanently ineligible for legal status. To what end?

I hate the idea of a fence. However, practical is practical and in the end it's corruption that is the problem for not giving Mexicans a decent chance. I know a bunch of folks from across the border, most of them hardworking. It's a terrible shame that Mexico can't match that talent with opportunity.

Along with the fence and allowing in the brightest of the brightest and legitimizing the people already here, we should drastically increase the number of regular folks we allow in legally. We still get the workers, they get a chance, we know who is who, taxes get paid, no one is a criminal. We need an Ellis Island in Texas.

Noonan:

There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration and we all know them--economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anyone able to come in.

But there's another thing. And it's not fear about "them." It's anxiety about us.

It's the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don't do that, you'll lose it all.

I think this is true and I think it has to do, or not to do, with the whole of us being more earnest than not. In the end, you have to think that objectively you've got it figured out a little better than the other guy.

Profile in Go Triad. Unfortunately it's difficult for me to stay awake that long.

They've got a Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia is dangerous and must be stopped.

The New Yorker:

...newspapers remain a surprisingly robust business and generate tremendous amounts of cash every year. Most of them have profit margins that dwarf those of the average company; McClatchy’s operating margin last year was twenty-eight per cent, while ExxonMobil’s was around sixteen per cent, and the typical supermarket’s is around four per cent.

Don't underestimate inertia. Remember, Blockbuster is still hanging around.

I stumbled across a blog that had a post of 100 things about the author and then I found another and another and another. Evidently this was an old school blog idea for generating content before anyone knew what they were doing. Being as narcissistic as the next teenage girl, I thought I'd play.

1. I was born in 1971 in Greensboro.
2. My family moved to Gibsonville in 1977.
3. I moved back to Greensboro in 1989.
4. I moved back to Gibsonville in 1994.
5. I moved to Burlington in 1996.
6. How many is that?
7. This is hard.
8. I went to high school at Northeast Guilford.
9. I started in the classical guitar program at UNCG in 1989.
10. I started thinking about dropping that major about a month in when the guitar teacher said to all the guitar majors that we should take a variety of other classes since we'd never make money playing the guitar.
11. Reflecting on this and realizing the essential truth in what he was saying, I switched my major to psychology.
12. I thought psychology was more practical than philosophy.
13. I really liked the behaviorists.
14. My first paying job was pulling tobacco.
15. My next paying job was at Georgia Pacific stacking plywood.
16. I worked at UPS on Industrial for a while. Hated it. Money was good though.
17. Went to work at Sears on Lawndale the summer before my senior year in high school.
18. I stayed there until they closed it down which happened to be the year I graduated college.
19. After college, I had no idea what to do so I went to work selling stocks. Seen the movie Boiler Room? That was me.
20. Hated that too.
21. Quit and played golf all summer.
22. Went to work for a bank in Winston-Salem in 1993.
23. Commuted for ten years.
24. Met my wife there. She was commuting from Burlington.
25. She left. Went to work for what became United Healthcare.
26. I left in 2002 during a merger. They offered me a job in Charlotte.
27. Found a job in Burlington
28. I don't think I'll make it to 100.
29. Realizing that psychology was a worthless degree, I went back to business school in 1994.
30. I went nights and summers and graduated in 1998.
31. I made many trips to New York in the late nineties and early oughts.
32. I love that town. However, you need money to do it right. Otherwise, it's just a big hassle.
33. I guess 32 is true of most anyplace.
34. I had a meeting scheduled in New Jersey on 9/11 at 11:00. I was to have stayed at the Marriott at the WTC which is where I stayed most of the times I was there.
35. I canceled the trip in August because of the bank merger.
36. On 9/11 I was talking to my wife on the phone when I realized something was wrong.
37. We had TVs on our trading floor that we used to watch CNBC.
38. I was looking out of my office window when I noticed a building on fire on one of the screens.
39. I walked out to take a look when the second plane hit.
40. My first kid was born in 1999.
41. My second kid was born in 2001.
42. I voted for Clinton in 1992.
43. I voted straight Republican in 1994.
44. I rarely play the guitar anymore.
45. I was on the wrestling team in junior high.
46. I wish I had stuck with it. I was pretty good.
47. My balance was terrible, but I was tenacious.
48. I quit playing baseball when I was a kid because my hitting was getting worse and worse.
49. I needed glasses.
50. My favorite thing to do in high school was to walk around downtown Greensboro late at night.
51. There was no night life like now. Only Twiggy's.
52. I'll go to the movies alone in a second.
53. The first time I saw a band in a bar was Sans Sobriety and Geezer Lake at Somewhere Else Tavern.
54. I was blown away.
55. Way better than a concert in an arena.
56. I am the only person in the history of the world to have been to The Metropolitan Opera and to have seen Pantera in concert.
57. I have read every Herman Hesse book.
58. It was during my Nietschze phase.
59. Germans are a humorless people.
60. Good beer though. Beck's Dark is my favorite mass produced beer. I like Samuel Adams too.
61. There is no better sport to watch in person than baseball.
62. Pro football and golf are the worst sports to watch in person.
63. In pro football, they stand on the field and wait for the commercials to end.
64. Why not just stay at home on the couch?
65. College football is a whole other thing.
66. With golf, it's crowded and you don't know what's happening. It's pointless to watch in person.
67. Unless you're just there for the party.
68. I've been to The Masters. Best behaved large crowd ever.
69. It's like being in church.
70. The Undercurrent is my favorite restaurant.
71. I'll do the rest later.
72. I don't generally procrastinate.

Update: Some more.

73. I like McMansions. No matter what Wharton says.
74. Although I like condos in town and craftsman style houses as well.
75. Although liking McMansions, I see little point in moving thirty miles out of your way to live ten feet from someone.
76. The best thing about McMansions are home theater rooms and wine cellars.
77. Oh yeah, and game rooms and gourmet kitchens.
78. I hate streetlights.
79. What's the point? It's night isn't it?
80. If I could be a car, I'd be a Maserati Quattroporte.
81. What's up with all this European finery, when many of the people are socialist at heart?
82. I became a raging capitalist after reading The Communist Manifesto followed by The Wealth of Nations.
83. None of us is as smart as all of us.
84. Markets are the most efficient method of getting the most out of the resources we have.
85. There is no room for sentimentality.
86. Folks who argue against markets want to be the ones to control resources.
87. I trust the people.
88. As far as I'm concerned, the government's role is to make things fair and get the heck out of the way.
89. I have no hope that a majority of Americans will ever agree with 88.
90. The country that best adheres to 88 will be a force to be reckoned with.
91. That country could be India if they ever get over their class strife.
92. I dislike folks in the US who have no perspective, yet disparage the US at every chance they get.
93. Yeah, there are problems here. But something's gone right. Something's gone better here than for any other country in the world.
94. Maybe we ought to figure out what's good about the US and concentrate on that.
95. Zero-based budgeting is a very good thing.
96. I have little use for bureaucrats.
97. Dr. Pepper is my favorite soda.
98. To be free is to not owe anyone.
99. However, moving capital through lending is vital.
100. I follow directions.

Boettke and Tabarrok:

This is...the idea behind GMU's free-market-oriented economics department. The department got started with a heretical premise: The academic market is inefficient, so how can we exploit it? GMU knew it couldn't afford to be a first-class MIT and didn't want to be a second-class MIT, so successive chairs of the department, backed by entrepreneurial university presidents George Johnson and Alan Merten, looked for unexploited opportunities.

James Buchanan, GMU's first Nobel Prize winner, has never had an Ivy League position and indeed he has never taught above the Mason-Dixon Line. Gordon Tullock, a potential future Nobelist, has no degree in economics and took only one class in the subject. Vernon Smith, who moved his team from the University of Arizona (again, no Harvard) to GMU in 2001, had to fight to get people to treat experimental economics as more than a cute parlor game.

A few years ago I was involved with the UNCG business school doing this and that. One of the higher-ups told a group of us that his goal was to get UNCG into the top twenty of the US News rankings These are the best of the best - Sloan, Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg, Tuck, Darden and on and on. He called it a BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal).

Somewhat regrettably (somewhat not) this is when I checked out. This goal completely demotivated me. First, rankings are incidental. Go do something great and if it's great, you'll be recognized.

Second, Wake had just started promoting Babcock heavily. UNCG wasn't even the best business school in the Triad. Why worry about US News? Yeah, sure, you have to dream big and all that, but don't be a dumb ass.

Sullum:

The so-called Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), which resolved state lawsuits against the largest tobacco companies, is not a classic extortion scheme in which a business pays to be left alone. Instead Philip Morris et al. are paying for protection against their competitors, and they are passing the cost on to their customers, the very people whose victimization by Big Tobacco supposedly justified the lawsuits in the first place.

We all knew this was going to go badly didn't we? Every time the government gets involved in something big, inconsistencies and abuses abound. Read Sowell's take asking why we need illegals to do the work that Americans won't do when that work is producing surplus crops that we don't need and can buy cheaper elsewhere.

Parker:

There's nothing like the sight of 500,000 protesters on U.S. turf, demanding rights in Spanish while waving Mexican flags, to stir Americans from their siestas.

In Los Angeles, the iconic phrase may be "Si se puede," but in Muncie, it's "What the ... ?"

Bennett:

Paul Ray Smith had given his life protecting his men and his position. He had almost single-handedly blunted an overwhelming attack which might well have overrun the nearby aid station.

"There are two ways to come home, stepping off the plane and being carried off the plane," Sgt. Smith had written in an unsent email to his parents. "It doesn't matter how I come home, because I am prepared to give all that I am to insure that all my boys make it home." He had been the only American killed in the courtyard fight.

Stein:

Once in a while, I take my selfish head out of the stock pages and stop thinking about how to make more money. Then I realize how many men and women in this great country are doing amazingly brave, unselfish, generous, caring work for others, human and animal, without the means to help themselves. They do it pretty much anonymously and for no money.

The magazines and the TV shows are all about stars' hairdos, billionaires' houses, playboys' cars, superstar athletes' salaries. Guess what. It's all baloney. The real work that makes this country sing is done by the woman teaching the homeless how to get a job, rebuilding the homes of the Katrina victims, saving horses in Montana from getting shot by riflemen in helicopters, risking their lives to disarm IED's in Karbala.

0 for 3 so far. How about next week we just have Chris sing for the whole show.

Update: Simon's right. That was indulgent on Chris's behalf. 0 for 6 so far.

Update II: Good lord, what a trainwreck tonight.

Prager:

...Nazis and Communists wanted to live and feared death; Islamic authoritarians love death and loathe life.

That is why MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) worked with the Soviet Union. Communist leaders love life — they loved their money, their power, their dachas, their mistresses, their fine wines — and were hardly prepared to give all that up for Marx. But Iran's current leaders celebrate dying, and MAD may not work, because from our perspective, they are indeed mad. MAD only works with the sane.

There is much less you can do against people who value dying more than living.

We all know this mindset is true among many of the followers, hence their willingness to blow themselves up. But how true is it of their leaders? Osama and Zarqawi seem to be doing all they can to stay alive.

Remember Stand By Me and Gordie holding the gun on the gang? Ace says, "Are you going to shoot us all?" Gordie replies, "No Ace, just you."

Needless to say, Ace and his henchmen split. So maybe MAD can work if we're able to specifically threaten Islamist leadership.

Update: I realize foreign policy built on a Stephen King story turned into a movie is somewhat problematic from an intellectual standpoint, but, hey, it can't be worse than where we are now.

Goldstein:

Kelo, as many (on both sides of the political divide) pointed out at the time, is nothing more than the destruction of the wall separating private property ownership from control by the state. That the state can pick and choose makes it that much worse.

Go here to read about the latest creative use of Kelo by a politician.

Maybe we need a new amendment clarifying this part of the fifth:

nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Can't we just define public use as roads? Other than that, let bureaucrats find and buy property the way everyone else does.

How am I not aware of this until now?

Samuelson:

The dilemma of advanced democracies, including the United States, is that they've made more promises than they can realistically keep. Their political commitments outstrip the economy's capacity to deliver. Sometimes the commitments were made dishonestly. Sometimes they were made sincerely based on foolish assumptions. Sometimes they've been overtaken by new circumstances. No matter. The dilemma is the same. To disavow past promises incites public furor; not to disavow them worsens the country's future problems.

Pretty much.

Ferguson:

...Murray proposes to do away with all government transfer payments, including such social welfare programs as Medicare and Social Security, along with agricultural and corporate subsidies.

This much should be expected, I suppose, from the author of ``Why I Am a Libertarian.''

But wait. Then comes the second part.

Murray proposes a radical, and completely un-libertarian, redistribution of wealth. All the money that now funds the nation's welfare programs (social and corporate) would be returned in the form of a $10,000 annual cash payment to every American over the age of 21.

The cash grant would be tax-free for anyone earning $25,000 or less. But no one, regardless of income, would have more than $5,000 of his grant taxed away.

I'm a lot more for this than the current system.

Here are her thoughts.

One of the commenters at the Defamer site says it looks more like Ashley Judd. Agree.

I'm still contemplating the 'crowning' thing from the press release. Defamer's probably right. What is there to say, really? This is one of those times when it's best to just shut up, put mockery back in the closet and have a drink.

du Pont:

And Mars is warming significantly. NASA reported last September that the red planet's south polar ice cap has been shrinking for six years.

I looked up the claim about Mars getting warmer.

Reuters:

The images, documenting changes from 1999 to 2005, suggest the climate on Mars is presently warmer, and perhaps getting warmer still, than it was several decades or centuries ago just as the Earth experienced its own Ice Ages. Malin said scientists had no explanation yet as to why Mars might be warming.

Pretty interesting. du Pont's point is to do what we can to reduce CO2 emissions without endangering the economy by submitting to Kyoto-like proposals. The ideas he puts forth include building nuclear power plants, importing more liquefied natural gas and growing sugar cane on one million acres to make ethanol. All of these ideas have environmental impacts that will bring out naysayers, but if we're serious about reducing CO2, and not just serious about scoring political points, these ideas are good places to start and include the added benefit of making us less dependent on oil.

Additionally, if Mars is warming and it's not just coincidental with the Earth warming, but is due to a common cause, we might ought to think about adaptation which might mean spending less money at the Outer Banks building bridges and trucking in sand.

Krauthammer vs. Fukuyama:

Fukuyama's book is proof of this proposition about the lack of the plausible alternative. The alternative he proposes for the challenges of Sept. 11 - new international institutions, new forms of foreign aid and sundry other forms of "soft power" - is a mush of bureaucratic make-work in the face of a raging fire. Even Berman, his sympathetic reviewer, concludes that "neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all - the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them."

Yeah. Knowing how to combat a murderous ideology is a killer. Wouldn't matter all that much, I don't guess, if not for technology advancement and the ability of small numbers of them to kill large numbers of us.

As I said yesterday and before, I think soon we'll be back to the law enforcement model for dealing with terrorists where we investigate happenings as best we can and attempt to infiltrate these groups when and where we're able. Using the military will, no doubt, be a component of the law enforcement mechanism, but we're out of the invasion and occupation business barring an imminent threat.

As far as bureaucratic make-work, God help us. Doing something worthless (TSA, hello) is worse than doing nothing.

Cassidy:

The problem.

Consider a hypothetical single mother with two teen-age sons living in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, a neighborhood with poor schools, high rates of crime and unemployment, and few opportunities for social advancement. The mother works four days a week in a local supermarket, where she makes eight dollars an hour. Her sons do odd jobs, earning a few hundred dollars a month, which they have used to buy stereo equipment, a DVD player, and a Nintendo. The family lives in public housing, and it qualifies for food stamps and Medicaid. Under the Earned Income Tax Credit program, the mother would receive roughly four thousand dollars from the federal government each year. Compared with the destitute in Africa and Asia, this family is unimaginably rich. Compared with a poor American family of thirty years ago, it may be slightly better off. Compared with a typical two-income family in the suburbs, it is poor.

The kicker.

Although many poor families own appliances once associated with rich households, such as color televisions and dishwashers, they live in a society in which many families also possess DVD players, cell phones, desktop computers, broadband Internet connections, powerful game consoles, S.U.V.s, health-club memberships, and vacation homes. Without access to these goods, children from poor families may lack skills—such as how to surf the Web for help-wanted ads—that could enhance their prospects in the job market. In other words, relative deprivation may limit a person’s capacity for social achievement.

The solution.

The conservative case against a relative-poverty line asserts that since some people will always earn less than others the relative-poverty rate will never go down. Fortunately, this isn’t necessarily true. If incomes were distributed more equally, fewer families would earn less than half the median income. Therefore, the way to reduce relative poverty is to reduce income inequality—perhaps by increasing the minimum wage and raising taxes on the rich.

They'll never give up the dream, will they?

Fukuyama and Garfinkle:

Radical Islamism needs to be dealt with separately from democracy promotion. This involves doing everything we can to ensure the political success of the governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also involves killing, capturing or otherwise neutralizing hard-core terrorists in many parts of the world, and keeping dangerous materials out of their hands, in what will look less like a war than like police and intelligence operations.

I suspect we'll end up at this position by default very soon since invasions and occupations are, so far, of undetermined value in promoting democracy.

Krauthammer:

With infinitely accelerated exchanges of information helping develop whole new generations of scientists, extremist countries led by similarly extreme men will be in a position to acquire nuclear weaponry. If nothing is done, we face not proliferation but hyperproliferation. Not just one but many radical states will get weapons of mass extinction, and then so will the fanatical and suicidal terrorists who are their brothers and clients.

I think this is right. However, even if we take out Iran's nuclear capability, proliferation will continue (although it may buy us time). The big picture is that the genie is far enough out of the bottle that he's not going back. Sooner or later, this technology is going to find its way to whatever state wants it. This is why I've always thought spreading democracy is so important. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as just getting rid of tyrants.

A short bio here.

Throughout his career Mason was guided by his belief in the rule of reason and in the centrality of the natural rights of man. He approached problems coolly, rationally, and impersonally. In recognition of his accomplishments and dedication to the principles of the Age of Reason, Mason has been called the American manifestation of the Enlightenment.

It's a mortal lock. It might not be this year. But we're close, people, we're close.

I'm setting the over/under at 14 months. For reference, Jennifer Love Hewitt is currently at 28 months.

I can't help you. How good was that?

Paulie killed me with the ice pack.

Carmela's visit to Melfi was the most revealing Melfi session ever. Carm admitting to her deal with the devil, but now worrying that she's made that choice for her children? Terrific.

Getting to see Steve Buscemi anytime is a good thing.

Idiot mobsters trying to make a horror flick cross between Saw and Godfather and wondering about the practicalities of corpse reassembly once it's been distributed across various landfills and debating the finer points on the differences between Michael Myers and Jason.

Sil's wife wondering how much money he'd be bringing home as boss and Sil cracking under the pressure.

Paulie and Vito looking so dejected giving up the $100k each to Carm.

And finally, Meadow dismissing Fin's worries about Vito and Vito's designs on Fin.

The weakness last night was the acting chops of the guy playing Phil. They need to get Johnny Sack out of jail quick.

Rockwell:

Did the Swiss puzzle and plot over what kind of government the Iraqis should have? Did they set out to make the rest of the world more like Switzerland and think that other peoples secretly yearned to be Swiss themselves? No, these are imperial inanities.

I liked this quote too from the same article as the previous post. Just about all conservatives used to think like this. What changed? The prospect of nuclear terrorism. This one possibility suddenly made all sorts of courses of action palatable. Curiously though, some common sense courses like improved border and port security and tightening up on illegal immigration haven't been sold at all.

Rockwell:

...all the money government could ever want is easily available via a monetary policy that depends critically on the capacity of the Fed to create currency out of thin air. The Fed’s printing presses back every debt note issued by the Fed, and the new currency is sopped up by foreign central banks and private holdings around the world, particularly among Asian nations. The dollar is, for now, the world reserve currency, which permits the U.S. to sustain a world empire without paying the price—again, for now.

So. What are you going to do with all that cash?

Update: Good lord, re-reading that, I sound like Steve Forbes.

Patterson via Althouse:

So what are some of the cultural factors that explain the sorry state of young black men? They aren't always obvious. Sociological investigation has found, in fact, that one popular explanation — that black children who do well are derided by fellow blacks for "acting white" — turns out to be largely false, except for those attending a minority of mixed-race schools.

An anecdote helps explain why: Several years ago, one of my students went back to her high school to find out why it was that almost all the black girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly all the black boys either failed to graduate or did not go on to college. Distressingly, she found that all the black boys knew the consequences of not graduating and going on to college ("We're not stupid!" they told her indignantly).

So why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the "cool-pose culture" of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black.

Not only was living this subculture immensely fulfilling, the boys said, it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths. This also explains the otherwise puzzling finding by social psychologists that young black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image is independent of how badly they were doing in school.

I call this the Dionysian trap for young black men. The important thing to note about the subculture that ensnares them is that it is not disconnected from the mainstream culture. To the contrary, it has powerful support from some of America's largest corporations. Hip-hop, professional basketball and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry pie. Young white Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book.

For young black men, however, that culture is all there is — or so they think. Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and self-respect, is a major factor in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.

I understand the appeal of the 'cool-pose culture' that he's talking about. I saw plenty of people back in the day fall into this trap. A few years of slacking between fourteen and twenty-four can be crippling for future job prospects. However, when you're twenty and you're hanging out, having fun, talking to girls, what's a few years? It's easy to rationalize away working.

CNN:

Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

We heard for years and years that global warming would mean the temperature of the Earth would increase about a few degrees or so over the next hundred years. Now it appears we are doomed in the next couple of months.

We can't even get the ten day forecast right. We are idiots when it comes to predicting this stuff. How can you know what to do?

Might be time to figure out the adaptation angle.

Update: The other thing that's being widely reported recently is that Greenland is returning to temperatures last seen 130,000 years ago.

CS Monitor:

Global warming appears to be pushing vast reservoirs of ice on Greenland and Antarctica toward a significant, long-term meltdown. The world may have as little as a decade to take the steps to avoid this scenario.

Already, temperatures in the Arctic are close to those that thawed much of Greenland's ice cap some 130,000 years ago, when the planet last enjoyed a balmy respite from continent-covering glaciers...

What steps shall we take and what are the odds of success? And if this was a naturally occurring phenomenon 130,000 years ago, how sure are we about what we should do now?

...the team's assumption that the amount of carbon dioxide would triple by 2100, although moderate among climate forecasts, is not a done deal. It depends on how quickly industrial and developing countries adopt low-emission technologies and take long-term steps to reduce greenhouse gases.

The stuff I've seen about Kyoto says that if fully implemented, it would reduce the effects of warming by one half degree or so over the next one hundred years. Well, if we're in crisis mode what good will that do?

Guardian:

All models agree that the effect of the Kyoto protocol on the climate will be minuscule (even more so after the negotiations in Bonn). One model, by a leading author of the 1996 IPCC report, shows us how an expected temperature increase of 2.1C by 2100 will be diminished by the protocol to an increase of 1.9C. To put it more clearly, the temperature that we would have experienced in 2094 has been postponed to 2100. In essence, the Kyoto protocol does not negate global warming, but merely buys the world six years.

Update II: I changed my first sentence from one degree to a few degrees. The consensus seems to be global warming increases average temperatures 2 to 10 degrees.

Sloan:

Friday was the sixth anniversary of the record high set by the market's two most important broad indexes: the S&P and the Wilshire 5000 (now called the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000). As of Friday these indexes were down 15 and 11 percent, respectively, from where they stood on March 24, 2000. Even including six years of dividends, your portfolio would be worth less than it was six years ago.

Conventional wisdom about where to make money moves from market to market. Currently that wisdom in the US is focused on oil and housing. However, when it focuses elsewhere, it can focus elsewhere quick.

Remember how Japan Inc. was going to doom the US? Sudden negative growth followed by years of no growth put an end to that talk.

No, Ollie wasn't there. It was cold though. And it hailed on us. Tent had ice all over it this morning. Jack was a ham all night. He suggested we sing campfire songs. He started. His choice?

What you gon' do with all that junk?
All that junk inside that trunk?

Carney NYT LTE via Althouse:

Having served as an educator, administrator and admissions officer, I am obliged to note that the practice of "gender norming" in college admissions is hardly new.

It is the dirtiest little secret in higher education, primarily because it operates in favor of young white male applicants in the form of quotas. Without this practice, nearly all of the elite, historically male colleges would be more than 80 percent female.

Several Althouse commenters dispute the 80% figure, but it may not be so out of line. Many 'elite' schools are already at 60% women and the schools I suspect he's talking about are the most desirable, the elite of the elite, where all top females apply.

I suppose the bigger question is have we encouraged girls to excel at the expense of boys since all colleges, not just the elite, are becoming more predominately female. The implications are profound.

Volokh on Rahman:

...there is something very wrong in Islam today, and not just in some lunatic terrorist fringe. Doubtless many, I would hope most, Muslims would not endorse executing converts. But a strand of the religion, and a strand that is not far from the levers of political power in at least some countries, does seem to endorse such a position. This is deeply dangerous, most obviously to residents of countries in which radical Islamism has broad support, but also to residents of Western countries as well.

The more we pay attention to Islam, the further apart it seems we are. This is going to be a long road. Faith is a hard thing to dispute.

AP:

(KeyShawn) Johnson called Smith "the most dominant force in the NFL at wide receiver" and said he was looking forward to lining up next to him.

"I didn't come here to catch 100 balls," Johnson said. "I came here because I feel Carolina is the team with the best chance to get to the Super Bowl."

I might be over the NFC Championship game by August.

Barber:

The irony of ironies is that despite the "independent woman" meme pushed by feminists, too many of their inner city and low-income "sisters" are not independent nor are they dependent on husbands-oppressors, either. They are dependent on the government. The state is the provider. The children grow up mired in a cycle of poverty that is passed from one generation of fatherless children to the next.

Via IP. Liberty Just In Case found one:

In action near the Baghdad Airport on April 4, 2003, (Paul) Smith, a Soldier in Company B, 11th Engineer Battalion, working with units of the 3rd Infantry Division, was tasked to build a compound to hold enemy prisoners, when his small force came under attack by more than 100 enemies.

Smith threw two grenades and fired rocket launchers at the enemy before manning a .50-caliber machine gun on an M-113 Armored Personnel Carrier to protect his troops. While engaging an enemy attacking from three sides, Smith fired more than 300 rounds from the machinegun before being killed.

He prevented the enemy from overtaking his units position, protected his Task Forces flank, and defended the lives of more than 100 Soldiers, according to his award citation.

Excellent document here mentioned in the Henninger post below. We have to think rationally about our strategy in Iraq. The immediate, emotional reaction to get out once you believe Bush mistakenly invaded is wrongheaded. Kagan makes the point that Kerry had the opportunity in '04 to make the case that Bush was incompetent for invading. The people rejected that argument. There's nothing to do now, but press on.

Kagan:

There is much to criticize in the administration’s strategy in the counterinsurgency struggle in Iraq, and debate over the best course for that strategy is healthy. Honest debate about the value of continuing to try to win in Iraq is also an important part of the American democratic system and should not be shut down or attacked. But this debate can only help the formulation of sound policies if it is based on reality and focuses on the issues at hand.

The deep polarization of American politics, particularly over this issue, has distorted the discussion, however. U.S. policy in Iraq is too important to allow such distortions to persist. It is time to put away the ideological and rhetorical cudgels and begin to reason again about the best course to choose. The reestablishment of such an objective and rational discourse is the only hope of avoiding disaster.

Henninger:

The public's pessimism is at least understandable. Less defensible is that of Washington's exit-seeking elites. A bracing reality check for these folks has just been written by Frederick W. Kagan, a military specialist with the American Enterprise Institute. Hardly a flack for the White House, Mr. Kagan argues persuasively in "Myths of the Current War" (find under the Scholars listing at aei.org) that all the woulda, coulda, shoulda about going into Iraq and now getting out fast is simply irrelevant. "It does not matter now why we went into Iraq," Mr. Kagan writes, "only what will happen if we do not succeed there."

VDH:

If I could sum up the new orthodoxy about Iraq, it might run something like the following: "I supported the overthrow of the odious Saddam Hussein. But then the poor postwar planning, the unanticipated sectarian strife and insurrection, the mounting American losses, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction — all that and more lost my support. Iraq may or may not work out, but I can see now it clearly wasn’t worth the American effort."

Pretty much. Here's the thing, if you had said to the country before the war that this is where we'd be three years in and unlikely to be out before '09, most folks would have said it's not worth it. All the peripheral reasons like establishing democracy, showing strength, getting rid of a tyrant were not enough to get the country behind the effort. It took the imminent threat of WMD to sell the war. When that reason fell apart, what we needed was extreme competence to get the country stabilized and functioning and us out of there.

A prerequisite of extreme competence, however, is the ability to be honest about a situation. This appears to be beyond the Bush administration. Everything seems to have to go through a political filter before it can be discussed. Obviously this hinders action, since any change of course or expression of doubt is seen as a political defeat. However, here's a news flash - adaptation is not defeat. Ask the Marines.

But here's the thing, we are where we are. We absolutely cannot leave before the country is stable. To paraphrase Powell, we broke it, we bought it. Throwing up our hands is a worthless strategy.

Who saw it coming? Who could've imagined that times would be so good for big spenders with the Republicans in control of all branches of government? If you would have suggested this back in '94, people would have looked at you like you were an idiot. There is no law more sure than the one about unintended consequences.

Franc:

A triumphal Sen. Arlen Specter (R.-Pa.), author of an amendment to add $7 billion to health and education programs, exclaimed after the overwhelming 73-27 vote (a majority of 28 Senate Republicans supported Specter) that "The Republican Party is now principally moderate, if not liberal."

Think the Democrats offer an alternative?

...this fiscal rage prompted every Senate Democrat to vote against raising the debt ceiling.

It would be entirely fair for someone listening to these speeches to conclude that the modern Democratic Party is dominated by a bunch of dour budget scolds who want to balance the budget, preferably with tax increases, and look askance at any new proposal to increase federal spending.

Well, get out the smelling salts, because what transpired shortly after the Senate agreed to increase the debt ceiling can only be described as a budgetary feeding frenzy.

A parade of Democratic senators, and Sen. Specter, took to the floor and offered amendment after amendment seeking to add billions to Sen. Gregg's vanilla budget resolution. In all, 18 such amendments were voted on, almost entirely along partisan lines. Only two passed, including Specter’s. Taken as a whole, they reflect the Democratic Party's collective judgment as to what next year’s budget should look like. That vision, alas, bears no resemblance to the tough fiscal rhetoric that preceded it.

In total, these amendments would have increased spending next year by nearly $75 billion and by $374 billion over five years. Most of this proposed spending would have been accompanied by unspecified tax increases on individuals with incomes over $1 million, on corporations, and through more efficient collection of taxes already owed.

So, there you go. Democrats plan to vote for fiscal sanity (although not raising the debt ceiling would've been insanity) when they know they'll lose and then turn around, hat in hand, to get whatever 'crumbs' fall from the table.

Hey, I'm enjoying the heck out of the economy. I hope I'm wrong and excessive spending and exploding debt keep us on a prosperous path. I hope the investments we're making in entitlements and expanded government pay off with tremendous returns and lead to greater productivity. I hope economic laws are different for the United States in 2006 than they have been at all other times in history.

One of my favorite quotes. Came up today when I was talking to someone.

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

Calvin Coolidge

Ben Domenech is done. The evidence (which you can find all over the place here) is damning. There are too many smart, conservative bloggers to waste bullets for this guy.

Update: It was fun while it lasted.

From Doug Clark's blog I learn that Christian Peacemaker Teams has ammended their statement to thank the military. I questioned their thinking yesterday.

CPT:

We are grateful to the soldiers who risked their lives to free Jim, Norman and Harmeet.

Yes, Redick has played his last game, but McRoberts will very ably fill his shoes. McRoberts will be in the pantheon of loathsome Duke cagers before his career ends. I'll venture to say he'll be loathed as much as even Laettner (assuming of course that he's good enough to keep his job and plays enough to become familiar). He is arrogant and presumptuous along with being emotional - an impossible combination.

Duke's loss was inevitable. LSU's athleticism exposed them and easily made up for the Tigers' inexperience and woeful free throw shooting.

Ed Hardin was prescient as usual with his column this morning. Maybe the N&R will post it next week.

Update: Here it is. Check this out.

Duke got its traction before our very eyes, blowing through Greensboro on its way to Atlanta, where tonight it plays LSU of the Southeastern Conference, which is probably down to its last two teams and its last two nights in the national tournament.

The dark-horse team left in the field isn't Texas or UCLA or Gonzaga or even top-seeded Memphis. The dark horse is West Virginia, the team Texas must deal with tonight, the team Duke likely will have to go through to reach Indianapolis.

Bonus Hardin pick - WV over Texas. Hey, Ed, how about poker at my house Saturday?

Fields:

Who among us has not been tempted to think that we in what we loosely call "the West" are under attack by barbarians, that what we've always considered one of the world's great religions has become instead a conspiracy of violence, hijacked by madmen determined to find a bridge back to the 12th century?

But the weakness of the West is that a lot of us want to believe that we can wish the clash about civilization away if we just wish hard enough. That way lies the catastrophe of global civil war.

Warren:

Because our societies were built on Judaeo-Christian foundations, we take it for granted that it is wrong to kill someone for his religious beliefs. Whereas Islam holds it is wrong not to kill him, for abandoning Islam.

Is Islam really a religion of peace? Or do we project too much on it?

AP:

Senior Muslim clerics demanded Thursday that an Afghan man on trial for converting from Islam to Christianity be executed, warning that if the government caves in to Western pressure and frees him, they will incite people to "pull him into pieces."

Good grief. I think we need a remedial course in how democracy is supposed to work.

"The government will lose the support of the people," (Hamidullah) said. "What sort of democracy would it be if the government ignored the will of all the people."

Uh, no, that's not really the whole idea. We might ought to back up and cut our democracy with a little secularism instead of taking it straight.

Drudge:

A top producer at ABC NEWS declared "Bush makes me sick" in an email obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT.

John Green, currently executive producer of the weekend edition of GOOD MORNING AMERICA, unloaded on the president in an ABC company email obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT.

"If he uses the 'mixed messages' line one more time, I'm going to puke," Green complained.

It's not surprising, is it? It's also not surprising that news types would like to keep these types of feelings private, hence the denial of media bias for all those years. What is surprising is that someone so high up would be so stupid as to send an email expressing these thoughts.

VDH:

...the greatest difference is that those first four generations who lived and died in this house shared a certain tragic vision of man's limitations. Perhaps they lost too many crops before harvest. Or they grew to assume that optimistic weather reports and upbeat cooperative newsletters were hardly to be trusted as "intelligence." They considered the choices in their many wars only between bad or worse, and that the Americans who fought them did not have to be perfect to still be good.

Optimism is a powerful thing. How else to explain interest-only mortgages? However, the land of hubris is just across the border.

WSJ:

...Mr. Bush is rightly wary of committing more American blood and treasure to a conflict in Sudan that the rest of the world doesn't seem serious about ending in any event. One lesson of Darfur is that there really are limits to American power, and in its absence the world's savages have freer reign.

200,000 civilians dead in three years and 2 million refugees and the UN impotent just like with Yugoslavia.

Weld:

Kelo has turned the relationship of the state and its citizens upside down. Now, the government exists independent of its citizens, and lives to feed its own appetite for cash. The citizens’ role is to sate this appetite.

CNN:

U.S. and British forces have freed three Christian aid workers held hostage in Iraq, ending a four-month ordeal in which an American captive was found dead on a Baghdad street.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch said coalition forces launched the rescue after receiving intelligence on their location from a detainee who was captured the night before.

So does Christian Peacemaker Teams thank the military? One guess.

Found this post from a month ago at Mudville Gazette. It's a letter from the mayor of Tall Afar praising an army regiment.

Najim Abdullah Abid Al-Jibouri:

I have met many soldiers of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment; they are not only courageous men and women, but avenging angels sent by The God Himself to fight the evil of terrorism.

Regardless of how or why we are in Iraq (and the how and why are no doubt important in terms of Bush's place in history and for entering into future conflicts), it's more important what we do now. We need foresight and candor. To make good judgments, we need facts. We need to be able to define success.

Saying that Bush was wrong therefore we should immediately pull out is childish. One has nothing to do with the other. It is a visceral reaction that might very well make things far worse than what they are now.

Feeling lonely? Are you depressed? Curious about how you got here? Want to know your purpose?

Become a charter member of the world's newest religion - Boydology. However, be warned. The path is long and difficult. Enlightenment takes much time and effort. Only the worthy will learn the truth.

Send $499 to get started.

PS Don't forget to watch South Park tonight.

Whoa. I'm not looking all that forward to part 2. Although, it's quite possible that body doubles and CGI will be involved which could make things palatable.

AP:

Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon have established contacts with al-Qaida followers linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, according to two Israeli officials.

Al-Zarqawi has established footholds in the countries neighboring Israel — Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan — and is interested in bringing his fight to Israel, too, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because Israel does not want to identify those involved in the issue.

Forget the inevitability of this news and consider for a moment that anyone in the world who wants to get in touch with al-Zarqawi seems to be able to, except the CIA. I mean, you know, he's exchanging letters with Osama. Here's an idea - follow the donkey.

Our current strategy seems to be to kill a few random dudes and then make them all lieutenants.

Shift change at Langley:

CIA #1: Blew up a tent in Afghanistan last night.

CIA #2: Who'd we get?

CIA #1: Ajkjlhhkdlk and Mlajsdlfjlj.

CIA #2: Cool.

CIA #2: Any idea who they are?

CIA #1: No clue.

Later at the CIA press conference...

CIA Chief: Last night, in a coordinated effort with the Afghan Army, we killed Ajkjlhhkdlk and Mlajsdlfjlj. Messrs. Ajkjlhhkdlk and Mlajsdlfjlj were ruthless terrorists second only to Osama himself in terms of operational capability.

Reporter: Any way we could get an org chart?

CIA Chief: Not a chance.

Forget the economic arguments for a minute, the tax is completely and utterly unfair. The government ought not be automatically entitled to a potentially large chunk of your assets just because you have the misfortune to die.

More here.

Toronto Star:

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

Wonder what the confident, resilient, self-reliant kids from, oh I don't know, SOMEWHERE OTHER THAN BERKELEY grow up to be?

Via Althouse. BBC:

The Basque separatist group Eta has declared a permanent ceasefire.

The group's activities have been waning, with the number of bombings falling in recent years. The last deadly Eta attack was in May 2003.

Some analysts said its campaign became virtually untenable after the bomb attacks on Madrid in March 2004, blamed on Islamists, caused widespread popular revulsion.

This is hopeful news. Al Qaeda has repulsed other terrorists.

The article goes on to say that the group has been hit hard by the arrests of many of its leaders. Certainly getting rid of the top talent in these organizations is extremely helpful given their small size. Take out a few execs from a Fortune 500 company and it hurts, but it's not the end of the world. Take out the top talent of a small business and that business is done.

I like this column from Allen Johnson's archives.

Johnson:

With our 30th reunion fast approaching, I wondered aloud recently whether the white members of Dudley's first integrated graduating class of 1973 held the same fondness for the school that we black students felt. Was Dudley a proud part of who they are or a sour memory tucked away in dusty old yearbooks?

I'll regret not seeing Chris in a bar around here. That guy is a unique talent. Maybe he should lose so AI doesn't bottle him up and destroy his soul.

Menand:

Let’s continue to try to shape the world, but let’s not be so stupid about it, is the general idea.

Thomas:

Not so long ago, in a country that now seems far, far away, Ronald Reagan told the nation: "we don't have deficits because people are taxed too little. We have deficits because big government spends too much."

Do the Republicans still claim Reagan? Who'd have ever thought they'd try to out-Democrat Democrats?

Newman:

...Americans are often the last to know about fast-moving changes beyond their shores, and many other foreign innovations may surprise Yanks accustomed to the premise that we're No. 1. In Hong Kong, 60 percent of homes get television service through ultra-high-speed broadband connections, which transform TVs into computers and make "video on demand," sophisticated gaming, and other futuristic services possible. Nearly two dozen cities in China are installing radio-frequency tracking systems, the most sophisticated in use anywhere, for cargo that arrives in ports and air terminals. Throughout Europe and Asia, smart cards with embedded memory chips are replacing credit cards and even cash, simplifying shopping, reducing fraud, and putting an infrastructure in place for consumers to receive real-time traffic data and other useful info. And as most Americans who travel overseas recognize, the ubergizmo known, for now, as the cellphone typically works better and does more things in many other countries than do the phones in the United States.

There's much more at stake than a few additional amusements for couch potatoes. New technologies tend to get developed in markets where there's infrastructure that supports them and consumers who demand them, which often spurs further innovation and the high-paying jobs that come with it.

Innovation is the key to everything, economic and otherwise. Who innovates the best, wins.

Kondracke:

It's suddenly occurring to Republicans that if Democrats capture control of either chamber of Congress, they'll use their subpoena power to make life pure hell for Bush and the GOP over the next two years.

Dems will overreach. They won't be able to help themselves.

Zalaquett and Wampler:

...Chancellor James Moeser has been tepid in his response. "I agree, this could feel like terrorism, especially if you're standing in front of a Jeep that's heading toward you trying to kill you," he said recently. Nonetheless, he continued, "we've come more and more to the conclusion that this was one individual acting alone in a criminal act."

Compare this with the chancellor's attitude last year after a homosexual student was attacked near campus. Moeser, who publicly spoke following that attack, rightly noted that an "act of violence against a Carolina student concerns us. This act appears to have been motivated by bias involving sexual orientation raises additional concerns." He added, "To those of you feeling threatened by this attack, please know that there are people here on campus to support you and policies to protect you."

What's Moeser afraid of?

Jim Rome says Clinton's first official act would be the reinstatement of certain Carolina Panthers cheerleaders.

WP:

The president and his aides say that the positive developments in Iraq get overwhelmed by the grim pictures of mayhem and massacre that dominate the evening news. If Americans knew about the success stories, the White House maintains, they would understand Bush's confidence of victory.

It's disingenuous in 2006 to continue to blame your problems on the media. The media do what they do. You know their playbook. It hasn't changed. What has changed is the number of outlets to use to get your message out if it's being obscured or distorted.

If things are going well in Tall Afar, explain what progress is being made and how we're measuring that progress. Then explain how we export that success to other areas.

If we're not making progress, let's just be honest about it. No one expected to be in this position three years in. We need to be able to talk about the war candidly. Otherwise, we just tread water until we get lucky or things get so bad there is no choice but to talk. Either way, it's not leadership.

Reuters:

"This is not a clash between civilizations, it is a clash about civilization," Blair will say in a speech this afternoon, according to extracts released by his official spokesman.

"'We' is not the West. 'We' are as much Muslim as Christian or Jew or Hindu. 'We' are those who believe in religious tolerance, openness to others, to democracy, liberty and human rights administered by secular courts," he will say.

Babbin:

The nascent Iraqi democracy is neither the center of gravity in this war nor a factor determinative of victory or defeat. Iraq is but one key campaign in a larger war and if it becomes a democracy that is a collateral accomplishment, nothing more. To say that doesn't make the sayer an isolationist or someone who wants to abandon Iraq. We didn't invade Afghanistan and Iraq because they weren't democracies. If the lack of democracy were a casus belli we'd be at war with about two-thirds of the world. We counterattacked the Taliban because with malice aforethought they provided the base from which Osama bin Laden organized an attack that killed three thousand Americans and then refused to turn him over to us when we gave them the choice between doing so and war. In Iraq we sincerely believed that the Saddam Hussein regime posed a threat to Americans and attacked only after the UN failed, as it always does, to deal with such a threat. The only goal of this war...is to end the threat of radical Islam and the terrorism that is its chosen weapon against us.

Many interesting ideas in this piece. However, you can't divorce democracy from toppling Saddam. The reason we're still in Baghdad, three years later, is because we can't leave a vacuum. Democracy was always part of the equation. If it was just Saddam and WMD, we'd have left once we scoured the country and pulled the guy out of the spider hole. However, we knew we had to leave the place better than we found it. Otherwise we risk a humanitarian crisis of our creation which is at odds with the American spirit and immeasurably hurts us in the hearts and minds battle with the rest of the Muslim world.

Update: Derb, a To Hell With Them Hawk, doesn't much mind the humanitarian crisis:

One doesn’t want to be accused of inhuman callousness; but I am willing to confess, and believe I speak for a lot of THWTHs (and a lot of other Americans, too) that the spectacle of Middle Eastern Muslims slaughtering each other is one that I find I can contemplate with calm composure.

In this post I say that I now view the Iraq war as a mistake. I don't feel very good about saying that having been a big supporter of the effort. However, I'd feel less good if I wasn't flexible enough to go with the facts. It's exceedingly difficult these days to justify the war and its execution. When the contra-arguments make more sense, you have to surrender. It is what it is. Wishful thinking changes little.

There were two main reasons to go to war as far as I'm concerned - WMD and countering terrorism by promoting democracy in the Middle East by liberating Iraq. The latter was just as important to me as WMD. However, nuclear WMD was what sold the war to most of us.

Regarding WMD, if we knew Saddam didn't have nuclear WMD, we wouldn't have gone to war. Period. End of story. Which brings us to the 'honest mistake' defense. Everyone thought he had them, he wanted everyone to think he had them, therefore we were justified. The glaring problem with this is what it says about the intelligence agencies in the world. This was the biggest question they'll face in decades and they blew it. If they were this 'slam-dunk' wrong about WMD, it's worse to have intelligence than not. What's the Twain saying? It doesn't bother me wh