Impeachable

As hard as it is with her other gifts, I admire Peggy Noonan primarily for her mind. But I think she's off here:

"If Bill Clinton, who thought Iraq had WMDs, had invaded Iraq post-9/11 and not found them, he would have been thrown out of office. That's because no one ever believed what Mr. Clinton said, and they wouldn't have believed his explanations. They assumed most of what he did had a cynical and self-serving basis."

That first sentence is the problem.

It's tempting to think that if an irresponsible dalliance with a motormouthed ditz almost got him, surely this would. But this time he would have had the truth on his side for a change, and I for one wouldn't have been pushing for his impeachment and removal on those grounds.

But maybe then we would have been treated to seeing Jamie Gorelick getting fired in disgrace, instead of being empaneled to investigate what is partly her own mess.

Diaperless Babies Seen As Earth-Friendly Solution

See this:

"As environmentalists celebrate the 34th annual Earth Day, some in the green movement are now advocating 'diaper-free' babies to help save the planet.

Citing concerns about plastic disposable diapers clogging landfills and the amount of washing and detergents that cloth diapers require, many environmentalists are taking a page from tribal cultures and seeking to eliminate the use of the baby diapers altogether.

The green movement is now promoting diaperless babies as a 'retro, cutting-edge, environmentally friendly scheme' to mothers throughout the industrialized world.
...
'There is a way to have a baby and NOT use diapers,' says one website advocating diaperless babies. Parents are urged to get in tune with their infant's body signals and hold babies over toilets, buckets and shrubbery or any other convenient receptacle when nature calls."

Sheesh, where do I start?

A few minutes with Frasier

Kelsey Grammer gets a writeup in OpinionJournal - Dorothy Rabinowitz's Media Log.

Why the Columbine killers did it

Right here. Surprise! - the contemporary reports got it wrong.

Via Instapundit and others.

Would Meryl Yourish sleep with you?

Click here to find out.

Brad Pitt and I are not on the list.

Seniors Losing Homes to Medicaid Liens

Confirmed nonlawyer Clayton Cramer points to this:

Some Nevada senior citizens say they fear losing their homes to the state after the Nevada Supreme Court upheld state liens on the estates of people who received Medicaid health care costs.

"They should warn people when they receive Medicaid that they are given a loan," said Henry Ringel, 79, of Las Vegas. "I love this country, but when we pass away we won't be able to leave our son anything. I worked for our home and now they can steal it away."

Justices ruled April 1 that the Welfare Division can continue to put liens on homes of widows and widowers to ensure the recovery of some health care costs provided for their spouses.

State Human Resources Director Michael Willden said taxpayers should not have to cover medical costs to enable a person to pass valuable property to descendants.

"The taxpayers are putting out this money and we have an obligation under federal regulations to try recover it," he said.

Interesting.

While you're over there at CC's place, check out HIV in the porn biz, assorted anniversaries, "toothing", condom effectiveness, and the Terry Nichols' trial in OKC (or The Case of the Missing Meat), and discrimination against straights.

John Kerry: a serious man?

Gary Farber was in high dudgeon about an obvious joke by Rush Limbaugh yesterday. Let's see what he thinks of this cut from John Kerry's interview with Tim Russert this past weekend (as found in yesterday's WSJ Best of the Web):

Russert: You committed atrocities.

Kerry: Where did all that dark hair go, Tim? That's a big question for me.

C'mon, Gary. This isn't a radio host known for joking about political issues. This is a candidate for President of the United States.

I don't like Kerry, I heard him say it, and it's very clear from the context that it's a joke. Unless you're humor-impaired, like GF's post was yesterday - whatever Rush said surely isn't any worse than a Presidential candidate joking about having committed atrocities in Vietnam.

Time for another addendum?

Good riddance

Just who was the man the Israelis blew up last week?

Rantisi was a pediatrician who practiced an innovative variety of physician-assisted suicide: sending bomb-laden young Arabs to blow themselves up, killing many Israelis in the process. An obituary in the Guardian, a left-wing British paper, describes him as "the man who loved the Palestinian children so much that he admitted openly that he was prepared to slaughter Israeli infants to guarantee the future of their Palestinian counterparts."

Israel may or may not love Palestinian children, but it does a better job than the Palestinian "leaders" of looking out for their welfare. "Israeli government sources said they had struck at the first available opportunity, but had to wait for weeks because Rantisi had surrounded himself with children," notes the Associated Press.

From WSJ's Best of the Web.

In Heaven there are no colostomies

Back in the 70's and early 80's David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace made a fortune with a series of "People's Almanacs" and "The Book of Lists". They were huge grab bags of information. Just how accurate they were is questionable, but they made for fascinating reading.

In the course of rummaging through some old stuff I found one of them. This is some of what it said of the Muslim Paradise:

In Paradise every desire of the soul and body shall be satisfied. Whoever drinks the fragrant milk-white waters of Mohammed's Pond, which is a month's journey in circumference, will never again be thirsty. Other refreshments will include milk, wine, dates, honey, manna, fattened birds, and beef from cattle that graze in the Garden of Eden. Body wastes will be eliminated through perspiration. All male inhabitants will become fair, beardless, curly-haired, 90 ft. tall and 33 years old. Blackeyed houris, or nymphs, of perfect beauty, free from excretions of any kind, await them in pavilions of green cushions. Other beautiful damsels will refrain from beholding any but their own spouses. Every man in Paradise will marry 500 houris, 4000 virgins, and 8000 nonvirgins

.And then there's Hell:

Hell has seven levels. The first and mildest is for sinners among the true believers, who will enter Paradise after purification. The second is for Jews, the third is for Christians, the fourth for Sabians, the fifth for Magians, the sixth for abandoned idolators, and the seventh and worst for hypcrites of all religions. In Hell the damned wwill be broiled, beaten with red-hot iron maces, suspended by their tongues, forced to dring boiling water and molten copper, and will have their brains boiled and their flesh cut with scissors of fire. True believers, lying on couches in Paradise, will see the damned suffer and laugh at them scornfully.

Is it accurate? Beats me. This came from the 3rd People's Almanac, which was published in 1981. It's likely that information for it was still being compiled in 1979 and later while the nuts who took over Iran had our hostages, and Islam wasn't getting really good press about then.

Well, I thought it was interesting anyway. Never mind.

Who was Fabrizio Quattrocchi?

Hint - he wasn't a Spaniard. Via National Review Online:

"In like manner, the terrorists present the world with an endless supply of lies, which generally take the form of accusing us of what they do (and we don't). Many of their actions are staged precisely for the benefit of reporters (like the horror scene of the four dead American contractors a couple of weeks ago). They brought in the television cameras the other day to film the execution of an Italian hostage, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, but something went wrong. After forcing him to dig his own grave, they put a hood over his head and ordered him to kneel so he could be killed. He wouldn't go for it. He tried to remove the hood, and defiantly yelled at them 'I will show you how an Italian dies.' The scene was a propaganda disaster for them, and good old al Jazeera, the modern mother of lies, announced that they had the tape but wouldn't release it because it was too terrible to witness. It was terrible, but not in the way al Jazeera wanted us to think. It showed Western bravery, not Arab domination, so they couldn't show it."

Is it true? It's good enough for me.

Ripoff!

I could redirect my blog to point to the renascent Protein Wisdom site, but that would be a bit too blatant. This is blatant enough:

Q: How many "progressives" does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: How dare you question our patriotism!

Much more at the actual site, including the comments, Michael Moore and John Kerry abuse, and great graphics including a babe with her skirt in the air advertising the next Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash. Go there, lest you should be mistaken for a flaming twisted fanatical vegan prick.

Original Income Tax Form

Dean links us to the original income tax form, which he found here.

It's not so easy to read, but it appears that no one with less than about $3000 of income had to pay any taxes. That was close to 3 times the average income of the day - see this for some examples of 1913 prices. It doesn't take a tax lawyer to figure out that the taxes start a lot lower income today.

Likewise note the highest percentage of tax - 6%. That's well below the lowest rate we have today, and a fraction of the highest.

Remember this the next time some SOB says he'll only raise the taxes on "the rich". That's how this abomination got into the door in the first place, and how it has expanded to provide the funds to permit the govt to become the monstrosity it has become today.

Jeff Jacoby: Faith in the depths of Hell

From the notes of a rabbi in Lithuania during WWII, a question:

"In October 1941, 'one of the respected members of the community' asked Rabbi Oshry if he could commit suicide. His wife and children had been seized by the Nazis, and he knew that their murder was imminent. He feared that the Nazis would force him to watch as his family was killed, and the prospect of witnessing their deaths was a horror he couldn't bear to face. He begged for permission to take his own life and avoid seeing his loved ones die."

Follow the link for the answer.

And note that today, April 19, is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Heaven's Gate

Has it already been 7 years since we heard of these guys?

Remember how they dressed up their "containers" in Nikes?

I didn't see it, but someone tells me that a Keds commercial was produced that showed the corpses wearing Nikes and suggesting that Keds were preferred by level headed people. I've found references to something like this being done as a spoof on SNL, but my source insists that there was an actual commercial.

I tried a whole bunch of keywords in googling for this but came up dry. Did anyone ever see such an ad? Do you have a link to it?

Chirac's War for Oil

Right here.

Stolen from Malcolm S. at Occam's Toothbrush.

Where angels fear to tread

Mike Silverman points out a Bleat which addresses gay marriage as only Lileks could.

Lileks is more liberal than I am on this, if only because I'm not convinced that gay marriage won't have effects extending far beyond the relationships themselves. Even so, he notes he's at risk of being branded as a bigot. In my experience, that is defined as "anyone who doesn't agree with gays".

Mr. Silverman writes this:

I want to get married for the same reason almost every other couple (gay or straight) does: because I love someone and want to make a public commitment to spend the rest of my life with them, in sickness and in health, wealth and poverty til death do us part. House, two jobs, dog. Thanksgiving and Passover with the in-laws. Gas grill in the backyard, vegetable garden, and Adult Swim at 10 PM every night.

To which I ask - why can't you have this without rewriting the law on marriage? That's what makes this my business and everyone else's too. Why must you rope in the rest of us?

And whatever happened to the people who have been telling us for years that marriage was a trap and couples should just live together?

A big publicity stunt?

Maybe not, but there's no denying that Air America has received some free publicity thanks to the recent problems.

Take your medicine

Some people don't like Ann Coulter. Tough - she's good for you, especially in this column.

If I don't publish this, who will?

Ya know, we men have been under fire by feminists for a long time as oppressors. And there are biologists who suggest that the male of the species is nothing but an adaptation toward warding off parasites - we exist to protect women genetically. Gosh, I sure feel special.

Even the Bible talks about using us guys for spare parts. You know, that rib thing (ouch! - didn't Adam have any zits or moles or hemorrhoids to work with instead?)

But wait a minute - men and women have the same number of ribs. Hmm, how to square this with Genesis? I've got it! - human males don't have a baculum, so that must be what was used!

What's a baculum? Beth, my source for biological esoterica, shows us an example here.

Scale this up to the size of the bull and entirely new products become practical. Consider the canes offered here - as noted, "the bulls don't give these up without a fight". Or if you prefer, there's a "pizzle putter", or "saco de toro", or this whip.

Fortunately we humans (even Skoptzies) are largely exempt from supplying raw materials for such products. Not even for circumcision trimmings. (Although I have heard it alleged that that's why rabbis are wealthier than priests - the rabbis get to keep the tips. But to my knowledge no one has turned these into commercial products, notwithstanding a story about a wallet made of foreskins which turned into a suitcase when you rubbed it).

Not that circumcision should be taken that lightly. It's possible to foul it up, and the results are horrible as documented here. Other related issues are discussed here.

Back to that baculum thing. Do other primates have them? Why or why not? Does this tell us anything about evolution?

Yes, I have a day job. No, I'm not a writer.

It's the bomb!

Forget about French toast - how about Jew waffles?

Alright, that's too obscure even for bloggers. It's just two Googlebombs tied together, partly inspired by Emily. The first part helps to displace an anti-Semitic site from being the first site retrieved for "Jew", and the second is given in hopes the reference to John Kerry will come up each time someone searches for "waffles".

And it's not as if Kerry isn't part Jewish.

Unselfish public service

Lonewacko has taken on the unenviable task of monitoring Air America so the rest of us don't have to.

He still has the blonde vote...

Jennifer Graham claims that George Bush lost the blonde vote here.

But Josh Claybourn noticed that this year's Miss USA, a blonde, would use her position to explain America's involvement in Iraq (Well alright, she doesn't appear to be a natural blonde...)

Good luck, Ms. Finnessey. But IMO you just painted a huge target on your back, and the Dems won't rest until they've tarred you with something.

"Slipped through" the editing...

Campaign 2004 turns extreme in Florida with the placement of a newspaper ad calling for physical retribution against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld!

"We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say 'This is one of our bad days,' and pull the trigger," the ad reads.

Fisk it yourself

Andy Rooney tells us that "Our soldiers in Iraq aren't heroes".

I won't publish what I want to tell Andy Rooney.

EXTRA - JFK responsible for his own assassination - EXTRA

How do we know that? Well, if we think like Jim Pinkerton it's easy. Presidents are threatened all the time, and according to Pinkerton we get to pick out which threats are credible and specific after the fact. QED.

He has a unique interpretation of specificity. He thinks that the title of the recently released PDB, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States", is specific. Just what would it take to be vague?

Here's some more wisdom:

Kerrey was bound by the same strict rules of classification as Ben-Veniste, but he's a free-spirited war hero and so didn't care that he was breaking those rules. "In the spirit of further declassification," he announced, "this is what the August 6th memo said to the president: that the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking. That's the language of the memo that was briefed to the president on the 6th of August."

Ouch again. "Hijacking" is pretty darn specific - which seems to contradict Rice's assertion that the intelligence was "frustratingly vague" as to the "manner of attack."

And weren't hijackings already against the law? Or do we only worry about the ones that might be an "attack inside the United States"?

And as long as I'm cussing him there's this too:

If you knew that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had received a memo a month before Pearl Harbor entitled, "Japanese Determined to Attack the United States in the Pacific," and that he had done nothing about that information, would that knowledge change your perception of FDR as a wise war leader?

Roosevelt received no such memo, of course, but President George W. Bush got a blunt warning five weeks before 9/11 and he did little or nothing. He even presided over a stand- down in preparations, concentrating on other concerns.

Of all people, he brings up Roosevelt. Problem #1 - who says FDR was such a wise war leader? Problem #2 - who says he didn't see such a memo? I wonder what Pinkerton would have had to say about it if Republicans had subjected Roosevelt to the kind of political harassment that Bush has been receiving since he took on Afghanistan, but the Republicans had some class:

At some point, private character and public duty will converge. If the false dichotomy is accepted and nurtured among our people, the results of such a convergence could be disastrous to our nation.

And so, a final story. In 1944, in the last year of W.W.II, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York was the nominee for president running against Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt was seeking a fourth term and, even though he was very popular, he was vulnerable because of his age and apparent personal illness.

All Dewey needed was a knockout issue to make the race close and, possibly, win. And his aides found him one. Dewey was told that the army had broken the Japanese code before Pearl Harbor and knew, or should have known, of the impending attack. This was a serious issue and would most assuredly weaken Roosevelt. Tom Dewey was an ambitious man. He was a bit vain. He had some character flaws. And he wanted to be president.

While he was deciding how to use the issue, he was visited by George C. Marshall, five-star general and commander of all American forces. Marshall told Dewey that he was right. We had cracked the code. We might very well have made a mistake before Pearl Harbor. But what Dewey did not know, Marshall told him, was that the Japanese were still using the same code. Our enemy did not know we had broken it. Because they were still using it, we were able to plan our attacks with near strategic and logistical perfection. Marshall couldn't stop Dewey from using this issue, but if he did use it, the Japanese would change the code.

This was a moment of convergence for Tom Dewey. He did not hesitate. He did not assume a smug self righteousness about the people's right to know. He assured Gen. Marshall that neither he nor any one on his staff would breathe a word about the code. Tom Dewey kept his word -- and he lost the election. But he showed leadership in a moment of crisis. It was leadership based on character.

Wouldn't it have been fun to go through all of the intercepted Japanese communications to see if some political points could be scored? Yeah, we could have been talking about this in the spring and summer of 1944 - to hell with preparing for D-Day.

I used to think Jim Pinkerton had a clue. No more.

Fun with the FCC

After noting Janet Jackson's "cork soaker" skit below and getting a comment speaking of "fig pluckers" I thought it's time to collect a list of phrases to annoy the FCC. (what do you call someone who works for the FCC? A FCCer? How do you pronounce it?)

Mortar forkers? Them other truckers? (as heard in "Speedball Tucker" by Jim Croce).

Somehow the word "funk" winds up mispronounced a lot. Wild Cherry's "Play that Funky Music" (wma) and Extreme's "Get the Funk Out" are two examples that come to mind.

Then there's Bob and Tom's Dickens Cider.

This wouldn't be complete without Howard Stern's "Sons of the Beach", an even dumber ripoff of "Baywatch".

You can do better - let's hear it!

The most annoying ad on TV

Yeah, I know - I shouldn't be watching it anyway. But until I break the habit I'm subject to seeing truly obnoxious ads, and this one in particular is the corker. Really - what would you do if you saw someone with that stupid expression all the time? Even that whistled song in the background is obnoxious.

"Natural male enhancement"? I thought it was just another Viagra knockoff, but this concoction alleges that it actually enlarges the penis.

Does it? Beats me. It's not a prescription drug and there have been no clinical trials, and I haven't tried it. But according to the company, the most improved men claim improvements of length and circumference totaling 4 inches. Hmm - maybe this is a personal problem, but I'm guessing that most of us would notice that.

How would it work, anyway? "Love muscle" is a figure of speech - exercises might change the angle of attack, but nothing else a partner will notice IMO. Weight loss would help though.

Highly localized fat deposits? I don't know how roadworthy that would be if it worked, and IMO anything could affect fat deposition with such precision would long ago have been adapted to breasts or butts.

Increased elasticity? Not unless you want to make mad love to Gumby. Buckling would become a problem at some point.

But hey, we're still free enough to indulge in such products if it suits us. The ingredients are listed in the article linked above, and don't appear to involve endangered animals. So I guess they're harmless enough.

After that I'm sure you're ready for more pelvic wisdom NWA style. You can start here and follow the links. Hey, at least you're not watching TV and that stupid commercial.

Janet Jackson on SNL

Janet Jackson managed to contain herself last night on Saturday Night Live. The show started with her emulating Condoleezza Rice vs. the inquisitors - when she was asked a question she got all tense and then ripped open her dress to show her right bra cup and hollered "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!" (When did Ms. Rice testify - Thursday? This must have been a last-minute idea).

Then she showed some "home movies" during her monologue. One showed a little girl playing in a wading pool when suddenly the right side of her bikini top fell down. CNN has been repeating both of these clips, and I'm sure they're all around the web by now.

A later skit had to have been designed to needle the FCC. Jackson and others were touring a winery watching as the workers "soaked corks". They kept it up with about every, um, conjugation of the words and JJ broke character several times trying to make sure she said her lines right.

At one point two of the workers reminisced about the day when they learned they could soak each others' corks at the same time. Was it in 1968? No, it was '70. But it might have been earlier... I'm not sure why they stopped short, but it was clear that they had the FCC's number.

UPDATE: I must have missed part of it - see this.

Accept no substitutes

I was here first. Then came this guy. And now we have some guy daring to call himself "Mr. Bowen".

I don't think he's a relative or anything because it appears that there are only 101 things that torque him off.

An Alternate History

A relative of mine has always been a yellow-dog Democrat through thick and thin. He's even more argumentative than I am, if you can believe that. And even he grows tired of defending that abomination the Democrats have become.

Yep, now the Dems are bound and determined to declassify the President's Daily Briefing (PDB) document dated August 6, 2001, hoping that it causes problems for President Bush. Does anyone still believe that anything will satisfy the Democrats before GW Bush leaves office?

Well, what could be on such a document that the public shouldn't know about? Think about it. Using passenger planes like cruise missiles was unprecedented, and the possibility likely would only come up for discussion in a context of brainstorming in which any number of alternative, highly unorthodox types of attacks would be considered also. That's the kind of thing that I'm willing to keep sealed - let the bastards do their own thinking.

But the Dems are casting this as if anything withheld must be damning. At the same time, does anyone who's seen them operate doubt that if they don't find anything that affects President Bush's numbers, they'll turn around and accuse him of compromising national security for his own selfish purposes?

Greg Easterbrook proposes a scenario in which President Bush took action the day after he read the PDB, and what would follow here and abroad. IMO he has it exactly right, except for the implicit assumption that it would have prevented 9/11. Not only might it have happened anyway, but if it had, then Dems might even have sounded reasonable when they inevitably blamed it on President Bush.

Thanks to Baldilocks for the link.

The Subservient Chicken

I don't know how much this job pays, but I'm sure it's not enough - check it out.

Stolen from Dean's World.

The truth is stranger than Caddyshack

And it must be true, because it's on Snopes, right?

This all happened in Ceres, CA, which I believe is also responsible for the election of former Democrat Representative and movie star Gary Condit. Remember him?

Snopes item stolen shamelessly from Dale.

Bullet therapy

From here:

There is a story told among Shiites today that as the revered Imam Hussein lay dying on the fields of Karbala in 680 A.D., he cursed the people of what is now Iraq for having deserted him in his hour of need. "May you never satisfy a ruler," he gasped. "And may you never be satisfied by a ruler."

While I'm not sure how widespread that legend is among rank-and-file Shiites, it's worth remembering as we watch radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr lead his nation off a cliff. As Hussein's anathema implies, there is something unstable and ungovernable at the heart of Shiism — something that is not specific to Sadr's intifada, but which in fact runs through the entire religious sect: a deep attachment to lost causes, alienation, failure, and death. And this, in turn, suggests that our struggle with radical Islam has only just begun.

As I've written here before, during my two trips to Iraq I've studied the Shia — praying in their mosques, attending their religious gatherings, interviewing their clerics and, most of all, examining their teachings and iconography. This last aspect particularly startled me: severed heads, amputated hands, Arabic letters dripping blood — and that's what found in mosques.

Emphasis in original. There's more:

Unless you have the instincts of a pre-Reformation Catholic peasant-or Mel Gibson — it is nearly impossible to grasp this appreciation of suffering and death. But here it is not death as a redemptive power, death as spectacle — a public expression that seeks the admiration of man as much as God. This is what, in my mind, separates Shia radicalism from its Sunni counterpart. Wahabbi and Palestinian suicide bombers seek honor and glorification by killing their enemies; the Shiites' spiritual apotheosis, on the contrary, comes from having their enemies kill them — a kind of suicidal exhibitionism that fetishizes Hussein's fate at Karbala. Early Christians felt that the blood of martyrs nourished the Church; Shiites believe that martyr blood will embellish their own holiness and that of their families for untold generations.

Draw your own conclusions about why these people attacked, and what it will take to end the attacks.

He's got a point...

From Strategy Page: "The last of the Minuteman III missiles will receive their new motors by 2008. It costs about $5.2 million to replace the rockets on each missile. The new rocket motors, which have to comply with EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) rules, will have a shorter range (which was classified, but thought to be nearly 10,000 kilometers, based on where the missiles were stationed and where likely Russian targets were.) than the original motors "

Which inspired James Taranto of Wednesday's "Best of the Web Today" to ask "If nuclear missiles have to comply with EPA regulations, what about the warheads?"

Does Howard Fineman know his role?

There's an old quote that goes something like "it's too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy shining shoes and pumping gas." Of course this guy hadn't heard of bloggers...

I'm guessing he hadn't met Howard Fineman either. It seems that he knows Condoleezza Rice's role better than she does:

A self-proclaimed expert at understanding "structural" change in large institutions, Rice wasn't aware ? may still not be aware ? that the nature of her job had changed by the time she took over as national security adviser in January 2001. Reared in the Cold War era, she saw herself following in the footsteps of Henry Kissinger. "National security" was largely a matter of global state-to-state diplomacy.

In fact, as her predecessor in effect warned her when he was turning over the keys, the model was no longer so much Kissinger as it was, say, Elliott Ness or J. Edgar Hoover. If, as she said, we had been at war with terrorism for 20 years; if, as she said, the terrorists are determined to attack America, then the NSC chief has to be a ruthless hunter for clues around the world ? and on American soil.

"In effect" warned her? And how was this?

It certainly wasn't by example. Read this to see how the FBI had already been hamstrung by fear of abuse, and how the Clinton Administration proceeded to make things even worse:

In the 1990s, the U.S. tied itself in further knots by treating terrorism as a matter for the criminal-justice system, thus bringing into play all sorts of other restrictions on collecting and sharing information. The CIA is reluctant to provide information for criminal cases out of fear that its sources and methods will be disclosed in open trial. The FBI, meanwhile, was forbidden to share information gathered from grand-jury proceedings. (This changed after September 11.) The absurdity of making the fight against terrorism a domestic legal question reached its height when the Clinton administration was hesitant to accept Osama bin Laden, if handed over by a foreign government, because it couldn't have indicted him.

As long as terrorism in the United States is treated as a criminal matter, a terrorist gets more rights and protections as he gets closer to his target: i.e., if bin Laden is in Afghanistan, we try to bomb him to kingdom come (since there he is an enemy fighter), but if he makes it to Brooklyn, we hesitate even to listen in on his sermons at a mosque (since here he is a domestic criminal). Zacarias Moussaoui -- the alleged "20th hijacker" -- benefited from exactly this dynamic. Whistleblower Coleen Rowley was outraged that FBI headquarters didn't think there was "probable cause" to request a FISA warrant on Moussaoui. But it may well be that the FBI was conscientiously following the letter of the law, displaying the tender regard for Moussaoui's civil liberties that the political culture has demanded. There was certainly evidence prior to September 11 that Moussaoui was a Muslim extremist, but "probable cause" that he was an agent of a foreign power or terrorist group? It was by no means a slam dunk.

What if there clearly was "probable cause" for a FISA warrant in late August? Unless it is determined to be an emergency, the FISA process can be a drawn-out one, as former FBI agent James J. Roth explained in a letter to the Wall Street Journal: "Even assuming that FBI headquarters agreed that there was probable cause, the FISA request still had to be reviewed and approved by the Department of Justice Office of Intelligence Policy and Review; come back to the FBI for the director's certification, which is required by law; return to Justice for the attorney general's approval, also required by law; and get scheduled on the court docket. . . . Simply put, it is unlikely that the request would have reached the court before 9/11."

All of these legal and procedural hoops existed in the context of a culture of timidity, even fear, at the FBI, as Rowley's famous memo says over and over again. "Our best real guess," she writes, "is that, in most cases, avoidance of all 'unnecessary' actions/decisions by FBIHQ managers (and maybe to some extent field managers as well) has, in recent years, been seen as the safest FBI career course. Numerous high-ranking FBI officials who have made decisions or have taken actions which, in hindsight, turned out to be mistaken or just turned out badly (i.e., Ruby Ridge, Waco, etc.) have seen their careers plummet and end. This has in turn resulted in a climate of fear which has chilled aggressive FBI law enforcement action/decisions."

Somehow Condoleezza Rice was to effect changes to permit the FBI to be effective in the 7+ months she had before 9/11, from outside the agency, in an environment where people were bitching about the Patriot Act even after 9/11.

Surely it's beneficial to examine what might have been done to prevent 9/11 in hope that it will help us prevent recurrence. But this investigation has become a partisan witch-hunt conducted by people with the brass-balled effrontery to complain that the Bush Administration was "distracted".

Thorax cake

Via Feces Flinging Monkey comes this delicacy. Warning - it's kinda graphic.

It's STD Awareness Month!

And you can test your knowledge on a popup at CNN.com You'll have to look for the link - it's over to the right of the page as this is posted.

Not what I expected to hear

Farm Accident Digest spotted this item about the Russians' attempted cleanup after a nasty nuclear accident in 1957. The focus was on compensation for the survivors.

Survivors? That was almost 50 years ago, and these people worked on ground zero of a nasty accident, and we have survivors? That's what struck me.

Then again, the health impact of radiation on humans historically has been overstated. Honest scientists want conservatism, project managers and security people wanted to discourage pilfering, enemies of the US wanted us to disarm and reduce our power generating capability, and the greens/Ralph Naders of the world want to scare us silly about nuclear power, so we're raised to think that about anything nuclear is dangerous beyond reason.

That's not to say that the survivors of the cleanup are in good shape. In fact they have health problems, as noted in the article. But most people who were of working age in 1957 aren't what they used to be either. That's not to minimize the injustice, but to note that there are confounding factors in the analysis of the impact of their ordeal.

Read my lips...

Remember back when the POW blinked out the word TORTURE in Morse code? Then there's the story of the lanterns in the window of the Old North Church - "one if by land, or two if by sea". Baseball coaches are always sending signals in plain sight. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book in which a "Lord Haw-Haw"-like propaganda character for the Third Reich was actually a double agent, and he conveyed intelligence to the Allies in the way he paused, coughed or otherwise articulated. There's an entire field called steganography in which information is hidden in other information.

It is for that reason analysts pore over every al-Qaeda video or message in hope of catching disguised instructions. Yet some would-be sophisticates seem not to grasp the import of the new initiative against pornography by the Bush administration. We know how Atta and his gang of mass murderers used to hang out with strippers, and some strippers are porn stars - how diabolically clever it would be to send messages via porn!

Those moans sound inarticulate to you? Ha! Strategic use of words like "baby", "ooh", "yes!", "more!" and others could in fact convey encoded information. Count the number of partners, what they do, positions, how many strokes, objects used, number of piercings or tattoos - all could convey messages.

And watch your P's and Q's - authorities like the late Sam Kinison have told us that the secret of success with certain practices is to "lick the alphabet". Do I have to spell it out for you?

So don't be so quick to dismiss the porn investigation. Who knows what the investigators will come across?

Porn über alles!

Hey, you know what Japanese guys do when they have erections? They vote.

It sounds like some Americans think erections and voting go together too. What is it about porn that makes otherwise sane people write fatuous things?

Glenn Reynolds linked to this, which inspired one person to comment that that was enough to get them to vote against Bush. Hmm - maybe too much masturbation does cause insanity.

Diversion of resources? Gimme a break. Wait until these guys hear that we have entire departments that aren't totally focused on terrorism. Heaven forbid we'd be spending trillions a year on govt that couldn't multi-task. Go ahead and suggest that this initiative isn't worth a few million bucks and a staff of 30-odd people, but don't tell me it's a diversion from the fight on terrorism unless you're prepared to shut down most of the rest of the govt too on the same grounds.

Using our computer forensics experts? Yeah, right. I'll bet that they cherry-picked all the anti-terror staff to find the guys best at determining what was porn and what was not. Yeah, that takes lots and lots of highly specialized training, eh?

I figure it's just more senseless Ashcroft-bashing. He's highly suspect of course - the article marvels that he is "a religious man who does not drink alcohol or caffeine, smoke, gamble or dance". Who'd trust a guy like that?

Look, if you don't want him enforcing the law, then you should be working to get rid of the law instead of fussing at him for doing his job.

I suspect that this is another case like abortion, where the pro-abortionists claim to have the public behind them but never want to prove it democratically. Let the Democrats push to get rid of our obscenity laws, so we can see who correctly calculates "the pulse of the community".

Justin Katz and his commenters have a lot more to say.

"We killed it"

IIRC those were the words of George Stephanopoulos about Gary Aldrich's book "Unlimited Access". Released before the 1996 elections, it was critical of the Clinton Administration's slack approach to security at the White House and the vastly changed culture under their leadership. And the Clinton administration immediately set about demonizing Aldrich in response. (As for Stephanopoulos, he works for ABC News now. But don't call him partisan).

Yes, Clinton's people had relaxed FBI background checking and other scrutiny of their staff applicants, and it showed. The best anecdote I recall from it was that Hillary Clinton walked around in a breeze one day, noticed some of her staff and issued a memo requiring staffers to wear panties. Better her than John Ashcroft, eh?

Here Larry Elder contrasts the reception for Aldrich's book to that of Richard Clarke's masturbatory catalog of lies, aka "Against All Enemies".

Musikgarten

"Musikgarten is a revolutionary early childhood music education company designed to enable teachers to understand how children from birth to age 9 learn music. Musikgarten provides teachers with the tools to help a child grow musically, as well as emotionally, socially and cognitively."

It could be your salvation

For all you Democrats, I recommend CrookedBush.com.

If I ever get my hands on him I'm gonna....

CNBC does have some shows worth watching. First there's Dennis Miller, and if you aren't too quick to flip channels or otherwise resume your life there's a show called "Cover to Cover". Last week it inspired the Carol Treadwell post.

This week it was about Bruce Murakami, a man who lost his wife and daughter in a fiery crash. He even got to see the flames.

Then he found out that the man who t-boned her had been drag racing, and there would be no prosecution. Later he found that the perp was still getting speeding citations and had even admitted to racing. Now what?

This is what happened.

Minimum gasoline pricing laws

Yeah, you read it right. Maryland and several other states have laws controlling minimum gasoline prices. Here's why.

And we all know how important that was

Glenn Reynolds has a long, multiply updated post which notes that
the Clinton Administration ranked missile defense as more important than terrorism.

You know them by the little penguins

Everybody has seen patches for quitting smoking, and I enjoy the ads for the birth control patches. Good grief, now drugstores are selling weight control patches. (in the "people who bought this also bought" section one of the choices was a "s'mores maker".).

So today, when I got a spam where the sender's name was "Microsoft Windows Patch", I just thought...

Doublethink

Mike S. Adams: Why I joined the N.R.A.: "Many of my colleagues who fail to muster compassion for unborn humans are staunch defenders of the local deer population. The fact that the overpopulation of deer causes numerous highway fatalities is of little concerned to them. And most would rather see a deer wrapped around the grill of a Ford Expedition and dragged down the highway than to have it experience a clean, quick death with the help of my Browning A-Bolt."

Where are the Palestinian Christian terrorists?

According to this, 25% of all Palestinians are Christians. One would think that if the circumstances of the Palestinians were responsible for their behavior, every 4th suicide bomber would be Christian. To my knowledge there haven't been any at all.

I guess they just haven't seen "The Passion of the Christ" yet. It's anti-Semitic, you know. It must be, or else how would Abe Foxman make any money off it?

"That's why they play the games"

Duke University was built with tobacco money. It was named after a tobacco baron, and in my vision of hell it will be renamed Banzhaf University. It has a world renowned graduate school of business. It's in the Atlantic Coast Conference, the toughest basketball conference in the country, which provided 2 of the 4 teams in the Final 4. And it has perhaps the best basketball coach ever, Mike Krzyzewski

What could be wrong? Their fans. There is no more obnoxious SOB on the planet than a Duke fan. That alone is good reason for rooting against them.

Although I did feel a twinge watching a senior hit a 38 foot jump shot at the final buzzer, only to lose by one point. But only for a second, until I remembered that he'll probably be in the NBA next year making enough money to burn a wet mule.

I wasn't the only one affected by that last shot - from ESPN.com:

"When Duke senior Chris Duhon nailed a 38-foot three-point shot off one leg as time expired in the semifinal game against the University of Connecticut on Saturday night, the Blue Devils still lost the game. But to those who wagered on the blue and white, the fortuitous bank shot that made the final score 79-78 meant that the underdogs covered the spread, which was between two and three points.

Those who put money on the Huskies, who had a 12-point run late in the game to take the lead, suddenly had lost their bet. Those who put money on Duke to cover collected their winnings.

With approximately $100 million being bet on March Madness each year in Las Vegas and about $2.5 billion wagered online according to the FBI, the Duhon shot transferred anywhere from $30 million to $100 million from those who bet on UConn to cover the point spread to those who bet on Duke to cover, as estimated by those closely tied to the sports gambling business."

This metrosexual crap has gone way too far

They're nuts!

False advertising

The name of this blog has inspired misunderstanding before. For my purposes a "watermelon" is a lefty who pretends to be an environmentalist. They're green on the outside and red on the inside, like a watermelon. And I hope to live to see the day when the last of them is hanged with the guts of the last PeTAphile.

But others have seen it as a reference to large breasts. And that seems to be the reason why I'm getting a lot of hits from a Russian teen porn site. All I can figure is that it's some sort of April Fool's joke to send guys looking for small breasted babes here.

There's a topic in here somewhere...

We often speak as if knowledge is of infinite value, but we can say for sure that some data have more social value than others. And I don't think it's controversial to say that some data are more fun to acquire than others.

For instance, consider Cindy Crawford. She's busy being a mother now, but that doesn't mean that she isn't still a knockout.

But she isn't absolutely perfect. For instance, there's that mole above the corner of her mouth that she's famous for. Well, how perfect is she?

Hmm, how to measure? How about comparing the amount of skin she has to the amount occupied by the mole? And I want accurate results too - you'll have to recheck and recheck. Show me hands - who'd like to take the measurements?

Well, it's not so simple. We'd like to have Ms. Crawford's consent, and that could turn out to be a problem.

For anyone but an engineer, that is. We're everlastingly applying estimating techniques for things we can't measure directly. In this case let's approximate Ms. Crawford's skin with a cylinder of 30" circumference about 70" high. That leaves her with about 2100 in² of skin surface. Now that's reductionism.

How big is the mole? Call it approximately a 1/8" circle. Sparing you the details, that amounts to 0.012 in².

So the mole occupies approximately 0.0000057 of her skin, or .00057%.

Now let's consider something else that's beautiful where I won't be drilling any time soon, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR. There's oil up that way, and in a saner world we'd be drilling there. But no, the usual suspects speak of how we'd be defiling the land, blah blah.

Well, OK. For those of us who don't appreciate the austere industrial beauty of oil rigs, just how much would be be fouling up the ANWR if we drilled as proposed in the legislation the Dems oppose so bitterly?

The proposal calls for drilling on 2000 acres. The ANWR has 19,000,000 acres of land. Thus the drilling would take up .00011 of the land surface, or .011%. Or about 20 times as great a proportion of ANWR as Cindy Crawford's mole takes up on her.

Hmm, let's try again. Suppose Ms. Crawford is nude but for a thong. How much could it cover to be in proportion to the 2000 acres to be impacted at ANWR?

2100 in² * .00011=0.23 in². That's about the size of the smallest Band-Aid I've ever seen. If you sold pictures of Ms. Crawford wearing no more than this you'd never lack for business.

But environmentalists have a problem with the 2000 acre figure:

Turns out the 2,000 acres don't have to be contiguous and only the space of the equipment touching the ground is counted. Each drilling platform can take up as little as 10 acres. The pipelines are above ground. For space purposes, the amendment counts only the ground touched by the stanchions holding up the pipe. Road widths also are conveniently left out of the space limit. "It's a complete sham," complains Allen Mattison, a spokesman for the Sierra Club which opposes drilling. "It's like a fishing net. If you count just the space of the string's width, that's small. But if you open up a fishing net and count the area it covers, that's much larger." Environmentalists complain that the House limit ends up allowing oil companies to spread out over practically the entire 1.5 million acres.

OK, I'm easy, let's say they're right. Now we have (1.5)(2100)/19 = 170 in² of fishnet for her outfit. Allow about 60 in² for some brief panties on the bottom and a tube top about 3" wide takes up the rest. I'm thinking you could sell pictures of Ms. Crawford in that outfit too.

I'm gonna have to get out more often. Hello, Bonfire of the Vanities?

The Goals of Communism

Right here.

Is it authentic? Beats me. But I don't see anything on the list that is inconsistent with the goals of those who would like to bring down the US, and nobody had more to gain by than than Communists.

What you're missing...

If you've been watching "The Apprentice", you might have been handicapping the players. Troy was a favorite, but he was fired last night.

Now he's on NBC's Today show and now he's talking about the experience.

He took it well - he's happier than "a puppy with two peters".

And if you're bummed about missing that precious moment in televised journalism, wait until I tell you that they also showed a live colonoscopy on Al Roker.

What am I doing watching this stuff anyway? My last job ended a couple of weeks ago, and another one starts shortly, so I'm at liberty to waste my time this way. I'm still in the DC area, on my fourth work site since this blog started.

Were we misled about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

Flashbunny's take.

Yes, it's the same one Glenn Reynolds linked.

There's also a spy photo of Kerry formulating policy. You know - first he goes this way, then he reverses, constantly going downhill until ultimately falling down and blaming someone else.

"Clinton, advised by Dick Clarke, did nothing."

From a devastating column by Ann Coulter, who revisits our dealings with radical Muslims from the Carter administration to today.

Scientific rudeness

No, it's not just your imagination - people are getting ruder, and the extent is being quantified here.

Via Milts File.

Military schools producing army of solid performance

From USATODAY.com, found via Rosenblog.

Daschle's Very Own Nader?

It seems that a third party may enter the South Dakota senatorial race. And this candidate is expected to draw votes from former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Heh heh. Via Rosenblog

Meanwhile Powerline points to a blog covering the Daschle v. Thune election. Specifically, an item entitled "Daschle Foundering: Even the True Believers Have Doubts"

"Leftists don’t give a damn about the Palestinians. They just hate Israel."

By the irreplaceable David Horowitz.

Bloginality

Ever heard of Myers-Briggs typology? You too can have your personality boiled down to 4 letters. Here's a quick and dirty quiz.

I'm an ISTP.

Correction: I'm an ISTJ - I mistyped with the first one. You may proceed with your life now.

"You want me to touch THAT? Do you know who I am?"

Alright, handshaking can be overdone. Especially by John Kerry. Our poor baby needs some work on his shoulder, and he'll have to lay off of handshaking for a while.

Then again, Bob Dole didn't have a problem shaking hands, and he had to do it backhanded with his one good arm. John McCain didn't have a problem with it, and he had both arms and a shoulder broken while under the kindly care of the Hanoi Hilton. Fellow Democrat Bill Richardson recently set a record by shaking 13,392 hands in an 8 hour period - he stuck his hand in some ice afterwards but otherwise he's still at it.

So what's wrong with John Kerry? Is he a wimp? Is he looking for an excuse to avoid having to touch the commoners? Did he sustain injuries when he fell on his skinny behind while skiboarding (he doesn't fall down, you know - it was some "son of a bitch" from the Secret Service who was at fault). Or did he hurt it patting himself on the back? (did you know he'd been to Vietnam?)

No, the story is that he did it bracing himself for an abrupt bus stop while campaigning in Iowa in January. It is not reported whether anyone else was hurt. I guess it's too much to ask of a patrician like Kerry to know how to ride on a bus without hurting himself - perhaps he was too busy arguing that that President Bush was "out of touch".

Enough. Stay tuned to see if Kerry can stay in one piece until the elections.

Shifting context

An argument that liberals will buy in a sex education context suddenly isn't so convincing when applied to guns. Imagine that.

It really wasn't that long ago when high schools in NYC had their own rifle teams, and students would take their rifles on the public transit system.

Fear of a Boob Planet?

Andy takes issue with my post here, where I dare to suggest that women might cover up while breastfeeding in public. I made a couple of comments on his site, then decided to write an entire post here.

Sheesh, it wasn't so long ago that breastfeeding in public simply wasn't done. Now we're cramping their style just by asking for some consideration of those members of society who, for whatever reason, don't think this should be displayed in public. Yeah, if they back down on this one, two weeks later Ayatollah Pat Robertson will have the women in burkas.

Well, no, Andy didn't say that, and it's unfair to speculate on what he's thinking. But he shows no such compunctions - he speaks of his opponents' "screwed up sexual proclivities".

Nice try, but the perv appeal is on Andy's side. I'm sure that if Beavis and Butthead were made flesh and asked about it they'd be all in favor of uncovered breastfeeding in public at every opportunity - "Yeah, then we'd get to see more boobs! Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha!"

Of course it's rude to stare (or is it? Can Andy justify constraining people in this way?). But I'm having a hard time being sympathetic under the circumstances - IMO she's rude to nurse without covering up in the first place. Or am I the only one who thinks it's perverse to do something in public that you don't want people to see?

And surely Andy and his wife have heard of breast pumps? Andy, who has praised bonding, can do it himself by helping with the feeding while giving his wife a break. And his wife can be discreet anywhere. (And if she's blonde, it'll be easier when she sterilizes the nipples).

In conclusion, this isn't about sex at all. It's about class and manners.

Christmas shopping hint

How about this?

Treating the wrong patient

But there's nothing wrong with her that some cyanide couldn't cure. See Medpundit for details.

Fort Freedom

Professor Petr Beckmann might well be new to you unless you're a nuclear power junkie. Or perhaps you've read books of his, with titles as inviting as "The History of Pi".

He's gone now, but some of his works remain alive on Fort Freedom. And he was the founder of the "Access to Energy" newsletter, which has continued and been expanded into this website.

A long hot summer?

Could be:

Higher temperatures and increased demand for electricity Monday, perhaps due to a rebounding economy, drove electricity reserves below 7 percent, prompting a Stage 1 emergency.

The Independent System Operator, which manages much of the state's power grid, lost two plants that supplied about 800 megawatts early Monday, then saw electricity use surpass forecasts by 1,100 megawatts, mainly due to higher than average temperatures, said ISO spokeswoman Stephanie McCorkle.

Note the reference to the rebounding economy's potential to drive electrical demand. Unfortunately that cuts both ways - lack of power can throttle the economy.

And this time they won't be able to blame Enron.

Yahoo! News - Heinz Seeks to Disavow Kerry Connection

Heh:

The company has received about 150 calls this month from consumers vowing to boycott Heinz products, or in some instances to buy more, said company spokeswoman Debbie Foster.

"It's just crazy," Foster said. "We haven't been involved in politics since Morris the Cat ran for president in 1988" — when the company ran a spoof campaign with Morris, the face of Heinz 9 Lives cat food, as the finicky candidate.

Yep, it's a cheap shot. No fair-minded person would say that this has anything to do with John Kerry's politics. But it just sounds so right...

What's cooler than cool? Georgia Tech in the Final Four

Right here

French this

A few days ago some Frenchman saw fit to send an email to James Taranto, the man responsible for the WSJ's Best of the Web Today. Mr. Taranto published the email and solicited responses. You'll find some of those here.

My favorite was: "Has anyone noticed the propensity of the French to convert an unhappy necessity into a virtue? Their foodstuffs were inedible, so they invented sauces; their plumbing was medieval, so they invented perfume; and their military was humiliated wherever it set foot, so they invented 'diplomacy,' by which they meant, first, collaboration and, second, appeasement. "

Where's Bull Connor when you need him?

A mob of self-important jackasses harassed Karl Rove at his home yesterday.

There is never any excuse for this nonsense, and the creeps deserved nothing better than firehoses, dogs, rubber bullets, nightsticks and tear gas.

The three main goons behind this are profiled here.

French terror alert levels

From Oxblog.

Pathetic Earthlings: Expect La Leche Suicide Bombers Shortly

Hey, never let it be said that I have anything but love, honor and respect for women's breasts (1,2,3,4). But there's a time and a place for everything, including suckling your baby.

But oh no, this has to get the full 'civil rights' treatment. As noted here, "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a mother may breastfeed her child in any location, public or private, except the private home or residence of another, where the mother and the child are otherwise authorized to be present." One would hope that that would be broad enough, but some object that this does not extend also into private residences.

No doubt proponents would indulge in flights of near-orgasmic prose extolling the beauty of Nursing a Child. OK. Then why would one choose to deny the public a chance to share in the beauty? If a woman isn't discreet enough to cover up in public during the process it's clear that she craves attention, and I think she should have it. Don't the rest of us have the right to stare, comment, or perhaps even critique?

Well, yeah, there's no law against being a jerk in public. But I for one put the indiscreet breast feeders in the same category. Whether anyone else ought to have grounds for objection is beside the point.

Abuse of sentiments

Democrats are trying to make something of an innocent joke President Bush made at his own expense at a recent event in Washington. To do so they did their usual shtick, trotting out Those Who May Not Be Questioned to announce that they were offended. In this case they found Sue Niederer, the mother of a young man killed in Iraq.

Is Ms. Niederer a typical parent of a lost soldier? No, as this shows. She took part in an antiwar protest on March 14 in Dover, DE, and managed to get her name in the WaPo for her trouble. She was also covered in the Toronto Star here as published on the Common Dreams website, and here on the Not in Our Name site. Enter "Sue Niederer" into Google and you'll get at least 13 pages of entries.

I certainly don't envy her in her loss. But I don't think her son died in Iraq so she could use his coffin for a soap box.

Does this work for dysentery too?

Here's a riddle: what is it that's green that a poor man throws away and a rich man puts in his pocket?

If you don't know the answer, then read this and try again.

And remember, sharing is caring.

Via Drudge.

Bush could have done more to stop 9/11...

Admit it guys, it's true. Bush did not spend as much time as he might have on the War on Terror in the 7-plus months he had between his inauguration and the 9/11 attacks, and he was distracted by other issues.

1) Al Gore reneged on his concession to Bush and kept things dragging for weeks before he'd acknowledge what more honorable people had known since Election Day - that Bush had won the election. The Democrats continued to suggest that Bush was an "illegitimate" President, and we still run into plenty of moonbats willing to say that he was "selected, not elected". This had to be countered if his Presidency was to be able to function effectively.

2) The Democrats did what they could to deny Bush his Cabinet choices, particularly with John Ashcroft. It would have been nice to have an Attorney General available sooner to help with what later came to be called "homeland security". But the all-partisan all-the-time Democrats were more afraid of a Christian like the ones who wrote the Constitution than they were of a radical Muslim group that had already attacked the US repeatedly before.

3) Rather than clean out a lot of the existing bureaucrats, he kept on those with a long-standing record of failure like Richard Clarke and used other vipers like Joseph Wilson.

4) Senator Jim Jeffords, nominally a Republican, chose to vote for Tom Daschle for Senate Majority Leader in 2001, making it more difficult for Bush to get business done in Congress.

I'm sure there are plenty more. The general idea is that if you try to tie the President's hands, then don't come back and fuss about what he ought to have done about what ought not to be a partisan issue. And if you don't want the President to be distracted, then don't hold silly hearings like this, especially during election season.

The Status

In looking up Carol Treadwell (mentioned below) I heard about a Web product called theStatus.com:

theStatus.com was created when Mark Pearson, the company founder, set up a web site for his sister-in-law after she was hospitalized. Mark created the page because 'Mary' needed a way to communicate with friends and relatives without burdening herself or her close family. It became the main source of information, allowing Mary to spend less time responding to inquiries and more time recovering. Family and friends could get the latest update on her condition, see pictures of her, and get important contact information. The response was phenomenal.

When Mark began receiving requests from friends to set up pages for other people, he decided to create easy-to-use templates so patients could create their own.

Now, with babyStatus.com, expecting parents can create web pages to keep family and friends updated on a pregnancy as well as show their new baby!

As theStatus.com grows, we are committed to providing users with simple, easy-to-use tools for creating personal web pages.

I don't have any links handy, but similar products exist for marriages.

Carol Treadwell

I'm watching "Cover to Cover" on CNBC about a woman named Carol Treadwell and her fight against brain cancer. And I'm cheating, looking ahead on the web to see how the story goes, or if it's over. This is what I found.

So you think you've blown some opportunities?

Ha! This guy did a better job of it than you did.

From Arts and Letters Daily.

Randomness inspired by a cheap synthesizer

Recently I was fooling around with one of those cheap synthesizer jobs from Casio. It had a few million buttons on it, so of course my inner geek had to demonstrate Technical Mastery by finagling with them. That meant playing back some of the songs in the "song bank".

I guess we've all heard many melodies without knowing their names and origins, and the saner among us probably don't worry about it. But because I'm one of those who has to watch the credits in movies, I like to know the original names and where they came from, and the song bank was revealing.

"Cielito Lindo"? No, that's the theme from the Frito Bandito! He was a promotional character sentenced to death for violating PC.

"Habanera" from "Carmen"? I first heard that on "Gilligan's Island". (So that's why artists like to control their works - here's another example)

"Ode to Joy"? I first heard it after it had been Sixtified, with lyrics like "hope and understanding" - I don't remember the artist. "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" (Walter/Wendy Carlos?), "A Lover's Concerto" (the Toys) and Beethoven's 5th have received similar treatment. (And then there was Joan Baez' "Diamonds and Rust", which was remade by Judas Priest - when does it stop?).

"Aura Lee"? Who's that? - I know it as "Love Me Tender" from Elvis Presley. Hmmm - remember that lawsuit the late George Harrison suffered, when someone said "My Sweet Lord" sounded too much like "He's So Fine"? I'm guessing you couldn't defend "Love Me Tender" that way - the other guy would just say they'd ripped off the public domain "Aura Lee" instead. Likewise for "Little Brown Jug" and Chuck Berry's only #1 hit, "My Ding-a-Ling". Then again, who's to say that the originals weren't ripped off from someone else? (As for ripoffs, what would you do with something like "Green Haze" by Elvis Hitler? He set the lyrics of the theme from "Green Acres" to the melody of "Purple Haze", and the result is better than it sounds. Oh, you know what I mean, wiseguy...).

Several other prepackaged songs I knew from movies, cartoons, other commercials, or even theme songs for professional wrestlers. Somehow it left off the themes from the "Lone Ranger" and "The Green Hornet", originally known as the "William Tell Overture" and "Flight of the Bumblebee".

Other songs it offered haven't necessarily been so commercialized, but they're so typecast you never hear them outside certain contexts. For instance, if you've been to a wedding you probably heard the "Bridal March" from "Lohengrin" on the way in and the "Wedding March" from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on the way out (I'm using Casio's names). Inexplicably, Casio omitted Chopin's "Funeral March", which about everyone must have heard played on an organ at slow tempo in creepy settings (and for the first few notes sounds remarkably like the "Bridal March"...)

How could they miss "To Anacreon in Heaven"? Oh come on, I know you've heard it. The melody, anyway - the lyrics have been replaced many times. The most popular lyrics are from a poem called "The Defense of Fort McHenry". The resulting song is known by another name.

Once in a while a song goes from commercial to pop. I understand that the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun" began as just a jingle for a bank and reached #2 on the Billboard charts. I can't think of any other cases, but wizards like CG Hill and Ed Driscoll probably can.

Oh, if you were waiting for some sort of point to this post, you can give up now.

Boston - what really happened

Well, I guess this isn't exactly timely, but I hadn't seen it before anyway.

I was in high school when Boston's first album came out, and it blew me away. I wasn't exactly a music authority, but I knew I hadn't heard anything like it. Like many, I eagerly awaited more followups. And waited, and waited... Since then, around 1976, Boston has released only 6 albums, and one of those was "Greatest Hits". Sheesh, and about every popular band in that era would make a few easy bucks with a live album...

What happened? The record label, CBS, tried to screw the guy who made Boston what it was, Tom Scholz. Here's the story.

But I'm sure it's accredited on Mars...

Alternate title: John Gray is from divorce court. Anyway, this is what his lawyers don't want you to see.

Give me that steak, NOW!

Here's a passage from Matt Ridley's fascinating book, Genome:

It is a curious fact that nearly all studies of cholesterol-lowering drugs and diets in ordinary people show an increase in violent death compared with control samples that usually matches the decrease in deaths from heart disease....It has been known for twenty years that impulsive, antisocial and depressed people - including prisoners, violent offenders and failed suicides - have generally lower cholesterol levels than the population at large.

The book is full of odd facts like this.

The Amazon page linked above offered Genome along with Ridley's more recent book, Nature via Nurture, selling the pair for $10 off.

The Old Left and the New Fear

Davids MedienKritik has some cites from the German press about Zapatero's plans to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. What makes it especially interesting is that the sources typically are left of center. Quote:

The strategy of the terror war speculates not without good reason on the moral impotence of western Europe. The announcement of designated Minister President Zapatero that he will pull Spanish troops out of Iraq can be celebrated by the assassins as an easy victory. Even if one would like to view the pull-out as justified by international law, it amounts to a capitulation in the present context that enjoys wide popularity. Post-heroic societies have only very little with which they can fight terror. Their governments fear nothing more than the return home of dead soldiers. They are incapable of being offensive. In times of danger, they retreat within themselves. They can bear no losses, have no mission, indeed, not even a consciousness that they have something to defend.

Wow - it's as if they're acknowledging that they are moral free riders. For as the famous line goes, "We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us."

Serious mixed metaphor abuse

...at Merde in France.

And I have no reason to doubt his assertion that the French have 60 nuanced ways to say "surrender".

EU corruption investigator held by police, computers confiscated

Right here.

That's not to be confused with the ongoing, underinvestigated, almost mindboggling levels of corruption at the UN, such as in the Oil for Palaces Food program. Roger L. Simon is probably the guy to see to stay up to date on this.

Stern reproach

Good grief:

Howard Stern accused Oprah Winfrey of being a fellow potty-mouth yesterday, saying the afternoon TV queen has aired the same kind of kinky sexual material for which he was being pilloried.

Being employed and oh-so-manly, I don't see much of Oprah. I don't listen to so much of Howard Stern, either - that stuff stays funny only so long once you get past junior high school. But surely he's not comparing the two shows...

Well, I could be wrong. Ladies, tune him in to see what you're missing! You're definitely missing from his demographics. I guess Howard thinks this arises not from content and presentation, but marketing failures.

Oprah can get explicit for sure. I happened to see one telecast about women who had really screwed up, and they had some doozies. The one Howard would like the most would be the 50ish woman who posed for a very explicit men's magazine.

It didn't show on TV of course, but supposedly some of the pictures were shown to the audience on monitors. The cameras panned the mostly-female audience as they about swallowed their tongues. Oprah made it sound like the woman's Fallopian tubes were showing - she kept saying "You spread your vagina!" (which reminds me of a bad joke involving an echo, but this isn't the Howard Stern show).

Anyway, that impressed Oprah as it was. But the best part was that our model was a guidance counselor at a high school, and someone there got hold of the magazine. Whoops. Her conduct was found to be inconsistent with her responsibilities.

Now suppose this woman had appeared on the Howard Stern show. Do you suppose he would have handled this differently?

Should he be disciplined for his show? Good question. He uses the public airwaves, and it's entirely appropriate for the govt to regulate them sensibly as a finite resource that crosses state jurisdictions. And I would think that there ought to be standards for what is broadcast in public just as we have standards for what is done in public. If Howard Stern can't understand that, then maybe too much masturbation does damage your brain.

OK, then what should the standards be? Like about anything else at the federal level - to the least common denominator. Just like with pollution of other forms.

How much should it cost him? He's a multimillionaire - anything less than 6 digits probably wouldn't even register, and the whole affair is giving him all sorts of valuable publicity whether he actively sought it this way or not. Maybe the Finns have the right idea...

It's not as if he has nowhere to go. Let him move to satellite radio. Maybe he can be the "killer app" that will make that technology take off.

But in the meantime he sounds like a big crybaby. And if he believes his own propaganda and thinks what's happening to him is political, maybe he should take a look at what's happening to Rush Limbaugh.

Take 2

This time I'm ripping off a real lawyer, tattoos and all. Ladies and gentlemen, Dodd Harris:

Seconds to his blessing of Command Post - the first place to go for late-breaking news anywhere in the world. Kudos to Michele, blog MVP.

A picture of a man being removed from divorce court. Your caption may differ - enter the contest!

Of Schrödinger's Politician John F'ing Kerry, who can hold all positions at once. His filthy-rich African-American wife's positions are interesting too.

But here's the corker - PeTA's proposal to amend the Constitution. These people walk among us...

Why bother? Just start at the top...

Sheesh, what's with this lawyer thing all of a sudden? I must be missing my daily fix of Glenn Reynolds.

Does John F. Kerry have the stamina it takes to be President?

Via Drudge, we have this from the NYTimes:

"Mr. Kerry arrived Wednesday night for a full week of rest and relaxation, and a rare bit of privacy with his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, at their high-altitude retreat.
His getaway came at a particularly rough time for the senator, the expected Democratic presidential nominee. For more than a week, he has had to defend himself from an onslaught of attacks by President Bush and millions of dollars in negative advertising, while taking criticism for calling Republicans 'crooked' and 'lying' and claiming to have the support of leaders whom he has not named. Moreover, a New York Times/CBS News poll indicated that many Americans were beginning to see him as the kind of politician who says what he thinks people want to hear.
Several Democrats and Kerry aides said some of his missteps were a result of exhaustion. They and some of the senator's friends said the vacation could not have come too soon. 'He needed it about as badly as anybody could need it,' said Sam Grossman, a real estate developer who has skied with Ms. Heinz Kerry here for decades, and with Mr. Kerry for years. 'The best thing that can happen is he'll sleep, relax, eat some good food, and then, in a couple of days, he'll be back firing again.'"

The last few primaries have been a cakewalk, so he shouldn't have been too worn out from that. If he gets exhausted defending himself, then makes more mistakes due to exhaustion, then when will things get any better?

It's a long time until the election. Then if Kerry wins, he'll have to come up to speed as President, staff his executive branch, and look forward to a mofo of a payback from Republicans when it comes time for confirmations. And then, if my theory is correct, it'll get a lot worse...

So IMO that's one more reason not to vote for Kerry. It's not just his foreign policy that's weak.

Larry Elder: Answers for the 'swing voter'

Right here.

How to get a lawyer to do your work for free

It's easy. Just go to one of their blogs and link all their stuff. You get all that research for nothing. So today I ransacked Clayton Cramer's blog.

Imagine being a wrongfully imprisoned person receiving a bill for room and board?

What a jackass FDR must have been! The Manhattan Project, strategic bombing, suspension of publication of scientific publications, all because he was afraid Hitler would come up with nuclear weapons. And then after the war, it turned out that there weren't any such WMDs. And unlike the current situation, they hadn't even caught Hitler using WMDs. I guess FDR is lucky he didn't have to run against John Kerry.

This shows what might have happened if that near-miss asteroid actually hit.

Or how about self-inflicted hate crimes?

Maybe it'll be easier just to go to the top and scroll down.

UPDATE - In the comments Mr. Cramer assures me that he is not a lawyer. I expect to hear from his attorney any minute. But my idea stands, doggone it - just go see Stuart Buck or The Dodd or Hawspipe instead.

Twin twins

From the Houston Chronicle:

Jacob, Jacoby, Jason and Justin -- two sets of twins weighing from 2 pounds, 5 ounces to 3 pounds, 4 ounces -- were delivered healthy by Caesarean section at the Woman's Hospital of Texas.

Good luck. The article offered a prediction that it would take as many as 10-15000 diapers that first year.

Why did the Jews stay in Europe in the 30's?

This woman attempts to explain. She's a Jewish woman who has lived in France in 1972, and now fears that she must leave.

From Moe Freedman at Occam's Toothbrush.

Morality from the heart?

I'm agnostic. Dennis Prager is not. But we can agree on this.

Bernadette, Rhonda and Jacquelyn

Anybody here, seen those three names lately? Do you wonder where they've gone? Do pop songs have a big influence on girls' names?

I'm guessing that there are a lot of 39 year old Rhondas out there. Why? Because in 1965 the Beach Boys had a big hit with "Help Me, Rhonda". (Who was Rhonda, anyway? I've been scrounging on the web and haven't found any clues yet. Or was it just a name chosen at random?)

If her name is "Bernadette", I'm guessing she's probably around 37, because that's when the 4 Tops had their big hit. Along the way there has also been a novel "The Song of Bernadette" and the Irish woman Bernadette Devlin, so they may confound the data.

And then there are other pop culture figures - how about Jackie Kennedy? I'm guessing that about any Jacquelyn you meet is pushing 40...

Alright, in the name of science I simply must know if these things have any influence. So, from the top 1000 names lists from the Social Security Administration we have the following name frequencies by decade:

1940 Rhonda 340
Jacquelyn 206
Bernadette 240

1950 Ronda 345 (Rhonda did not show)
Jacquelyn 218
Bernadette 271

1960 Rhonda 46 (and Ronda was 218)
Jacquelyn 266
Bernadette 287

1970 Rhonda 92 (and Ronda was 348)
Jacquelyn 340
Bernadette 426

1980 Rhonda 303 (Ronda was N/S)
Jacquelyn N/S
Bernadette 555

1990 Rhonda 853
Jacquelyn 271
Bernadette 891

N/S=No show - not in the listing.

Hmm. Rhonda/Ronda spiked bigtime in the 60's, stayed respectable until the 80's, then dropped like a rock in the 90's. Bernadette was actually falling and continued to fall after the 4 Tops (I wonder what this would look like if broken down by race). Jacquelyn was gone by the 80's but recovered in the 1990's (I'm guessing that that coincided with the death of Jacquelyn Kennedy Onassis, but the data cannot distinguish this).

Is this scientific? Not particularly. I used ranks, not frequencies. I haven't worried about name variations except in the case of Rhonda, and the data I'm using has some significant limitations itself. And if you even asked, you're no fun anyway.

Little Audrey!

You don't remember her? You must not have watched the kids' shows available in central IL in the 60's. "The Captain Jinks Show" ("Say goodnight, Captain" "Goodnight, Captain") showed her, Herman and Katnip and various other obscurities regularly.

Toonopedia says she was basically a ripoff of Little Lulu. She even had the same voice performer, Mae Questel, who also did Betty Boop and Olive Oyl (good grief, couldn't Popeye do any better than that? He even had to fight Bluto for her. We had better in my old engineering school...).

Audrey was PC before there was PC:

The Harvey Comics version of Audrey has an interesting distinction. Audrey's friend, Tiny, was colored black ? that is, "colored" black, because the coloring was the only way in which his racial heritage was indicated. This makes Little Audrey, in all probability, the first racially integrated comic book series in which absolutely no stereotypes of any kind were used.

How to Stage a Controversy

Democrats would love to keep George W. Bush from reminding us of 9/11. He'd be held accountable for increased defense spending, physical security strictures, and a huge negative impact on our economy without being able to defend himself.

Imagine FDR in 1944. Americans are dying abroad by the thousands, taxes are sky high, various items are rationed, and the government is spending money like mad. Apparently today's Dems think it would have been out of line for him to remind us of Pearl Harbor lest we disrespect the dead and the feelings of the living.

Matthew Continetti describes how the Dems tried to put 9/11 out of bounds here.

Sissy nation?

Maybe.

Stolen from Betsy's Page