Screwing the Military at the University of Illinois
Our buddy John Ruberry has a terrific and compelling piece about how a program to offer 110 MBA scholarships to our military fell apart:
What happened next is shocking. Ghosh, DeBrock, Admissions Dean Sandy Frank and Ikenberry decided to take matters into their own hands. So they got a copy of the admissions database from the Executive MBA program, studied it, and in an ex post facto manner, put in new procedural deadlines for the completion of application materials in order to reduce the number of military veterans in the program.
They basically looked at military candidates' application data and came up with new deadlines that they knew military candidates hadn't met. Sort of like betting on a horse a couple days after the race...or moving the goalpoast before a field goal attempt.
They told van der Hooning to implement the new policy. They e-mailed him a letter to send military candidates and told him to sign it on official College letterhead. He refused. Eventually, Ghosh sent DeBrock to meet with van der Hooning. DeBrock came armed with a list of about 35 military veterans to rescind from the MBA program. Again, van der Hooning protested on grounds of ethics and discrimination, so DeBrock added one civilian to the list of rescinded candidates.
This is a terrific piece of reporting by John, and I highly recommend reading it all.
In his documentary, the former Vice President calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home.
The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh--more than 20 times the national average.
Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh--guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore's average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.
Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore's energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.
As with Survivor All-Stars, I couldn't help wincing some times at the thought that these were supposed to be the best teams. Some astoundingly bad mistakes in this episode that make one wonder. As the teams are pulling out, One and a Half Women get stuck in ditch. Team Coal Miner pulls them out, and a bond is (apparently) formed. Team Baldy also gets stuck, but one of the guys harnesses himself to the vehicle and helps to pull it out. Hilariously, his partner then almost kills him by not stopping.
First task: Fly to Santiago Chile. Rob & Ambuh get an earlier-arriving flight as do the Young Gays, but the rest of teams get the second plane. However, as always connections are dicey and in fact the other eight teams get to Santiago before they do. However, given that the times were middle of the night, I figured that there would be some sort of bunching obstacle--a building that wouldn't open until a particular time in the morning.
Instead, teams were given no break--they went right into the Roadblock. This one involved using your powers of observation to notice the letters of the alphabet shown in a boardroom, and then use those letters to spell out one of the places on the wall. Joyce & Uchenna arrived at this task first, and Uchenna (DOH--Joyce) decided to tackle the task. Because the task is difficult, the teams all get bunched up here anyway. The Beauty Queens are the first to solve the puzzle, and teams start getting it after that. David and Mary solve the puzzle and help out One and a Half Women. In the end, only Uchenna (DOH--Joyce) and one of the baldies are left, and she idiotically helps him out by spelling the clue for him.
The next task is the detour, at a Copper Mine. Teams must choose between tightening the lug nuts on a giant mine car, or using a backhoe to cover a stake with dirt. Rob and Ambuh arrive first and Rob is experienced in construction. They make short work of the backhoe task and take an easy lead. The Old Gays also do this task, while the rest choose to tighten lug nuts.
It sounds easy, but there are something like 50 and they have to be properly positioned, so it does seem a difficult task. Of course, One and a Half Women are disadvantaged because they cannot try the backhoe. But still, somehow they finish just before the Beauty Queens, with Team Baldy and Team Coal Miner slipping behind.
And then comes the really stupid part. One and a Half Women have hired a guy to drive them to the next location, but they don't want the Beauty Queens to piggyback off their effort. So they stop and try to get the BQs to chip in on the cost of the guy. Finally the BQs decide to pass them by, followed by several other teams. Now One and a Half Women are in last place in the final drive to the Pit Stop.
Next stupid part comes at the entrance to the Valley of the Moon. Teams are instructed to go no more than 40 klicks per hour on dirt, but they can go 50 klicks once the paving resumes. Team Baldy decides to skip past this advice, which seems to serve them well until they get on the pavement, where everybody passes them by. They insist on sticking to the 40 kph limit. Along in here, too, One and a Half Women pass Team Coal Miner. Why after all we've done for them.... it is clear that Team Coal Miner has finally decided to stop trying for the Team Congeniality prize.
A bunch of teams zig when they should have zagged. Rob & Ambuh finish first (again) followed by the Old Gays. Team Baldy's insistence on driving their (incorrect) limit of 40 KPH ends up costing them at the finish, and they are Phil-liminated.
While Mitt Romney condemns polygamy and its prior practice by his Mormon church, the Republican presidential candidate's great-grandfather had five wives and at least one of his great-great grandfathers had 12.
Polygamy was not just a historical footnote, but a prominent element in the family tree of the former Massachusetts governor now seeking to become the first Mormon president.
Romney's great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, married his fifth wife in 1897. That was more than six years after Mormon leaders banned polygamy and more than three decades after a federal law barred the practice.
Who cares about this crap? As Mitt Romney has noted, he's one of the few Republicans in the race who hasn't had more than one wife.
Look, what matters is what Mitt has done in his own life. If his great-grandfather broke the law, that's mildly interesting but completely and utterly irrelevant.
Senate Democratic leaders intend to unveil a plan next week to repeal the 2002 resolution authorizing the war in Iraq in favor of narrower authority that restricts the military's role and begins withdrawals of combat troops.
House Democrats have pulled back from efforts to link additional funding for the war to strict troop-readiness standards after the proposal came under withering fire from Republicans and from their party's own moderates. That strategy was championed by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) and endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
And do you know what's going to prevent this from happening? The fact that the Republicans did not use the nuclear option last year. If they had, there would be no 60 votes required for cloture. Since the Democrats will not get 60 votes in favor of cutting off debate, they will not be able to pass the repeal.
Boy, you know, John McCain looks smarter every day.
Although this article seems focused on Al and Hillary, really the candidate who's gotta be dreading the return of the Goron has to be Obama.
Mr Gore has reinvented himself: a wooden performer seven years ago, he is now a passionate and visionary advocate for action against climate change.
And unlike Hillary Clinton, with whom he had a testy relationship in her husband’s White House, he opposed the Iraq War from the outset.
Mrs Clinton, along with other Democratic candidates, is now said to be anxiously studying his girth, which expanded rapidly when he left office six years ago, as a measure of his political ambitions. If they can get their arms around him, he might be standing or, as Ms Brazile put it: “on Oscar night, if Al Gore has slimmed down 25 or 30 pounds, Lord knows.” She believes that over a drawn-out race for the presidency, other candidates will be facing “burn-out” by the autumn. “Al Gore could enter the race tomorrow, September or November.
And if he does, it's bye-bye to Barack. Hillary stands a chance against him, but Obama?
As I remarked last year, it seemed like the liberal blogs last year had one goal in mind: to defeat a sitting Democrat (Joe Lieberman). They failed in that attempt, but the party they support succeeded wildly. And the liberal blogs, somehow convinced they pulled it off, are now readying the circular firing squad for some of the moderate Democrats who comprised the new majority.
Progressive blogs -- including two new ones, Ellen Tauscher Weekly and Dump Ellen Tauscher -- were bashing her as a traitor to her party. A new liberal political action committee had just named her its "Worst Offender." And in Tauscher's East Bay district office that day in January, eight MoveOn.org activists were accusing her of helping President Bush send more troops to Iraq.
Helping? Jennifer Barton, the lawmaker's district director, played them a DVD of Tauscher blasting the increase as an awful idea in a floor speech eight days earlier.
"The words are fine and good, but we are looking for leadership," scoffed Susan Schaller, one of the activists.
The WaPo points out the idiocy of this crusade:
She has annoyed the left by supporting legislation to scale back the estate tax, tighten bankruptcy rules and promote free-trade agreements. She served as vice chair of the pro-business Democratic Leadership Council, which many liberal activists dismiss as a quasi-Republican K Street front group. And she voted to authorize the Iraq war, although she did so with caveats, and she was quick to express her displeasure with its execution.
But liberal groups such as the Children's Defense Fund and the League of Conservation Voters give Tauscher impeccable report cards, while the National Rifle Association gives her straight F's.
"It's not just about her voting record," said Bob Brigham of San Francisco, an activist who recently started the Ellen Tauscher Weekly.
What is it about? That's not hard to gather:
The latest blog wars began simmering in December after Tauscher led a New Democrat delegation to meet with Bush about bipartisan cooperation, irritating the Net roots. They boiled after her former chief of staff, Katie Merrill, posted a scathing piece on a California Web site attacking the Net roots for attacking Tauscher. Outraged activists immediately began mobilizing for a fight in 2008. "I didn't even know who Tauscher was 5 mins ago, but now I support a primary challenge against her," one typical commenter replied.
The "politics of the last five minutes" has rarely been expressed so plainly. I suppose Republicans should be pleased with this push for more radicalism from Democratic moderates, but the concern is that they will succeed without losing control of congress, and then the entire country will suffer.
In an effort at "balance", Hotline provides this McCain clip:
But notice the crucial difference? Romney pledges, "I will preserve and protect a woman's right to choose," abortion, while McCain wants "the elimination of abortion". McCain does say "I think that we can all be members of the Republican Party, whether we are pro-choice or pro-life," and certainly that seems to be the case. Nobody suggested kicking Mitt Romney out of the party in 2002.
My personal take on abortion is that it's wrong but not so clearly wrong that it should be banned. But I am 100% in favor of of the repeal of Roe v. Wade and allowing the states to make that decision for themselves.
Recall how Thune was the '04 cycle's Barack Obama for Republicans. He was a Giant Killer, defeating Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) , and has been, for more than two years, on many pundits' short lists for the Republican vice presidential nomination. Thune tells the Washington Post that he somehow convinced McCain to promise to appoint "guys like Roberts and Alito" to the Supreme Court.
I don't get where Barack fits in as the '06 cycle's John Thune; he didn't defeat any giants.
It's standard operating procedure for journalists covering a controversial issue to offer contrasting opinions in the interest of balance.
But for years there's been consensus on this topic among scientists, with just a few skeptics on the fringe. Sometimes the facts are so overwhelming on one side that it's unfair and inaccurate to give equal weight to both sides. This is one of those times.
Journalists have gradually accepted that, and people who follow climate change closely have noticed. When I asked a couple of scientists and a senior research fellow at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change why they thought this has happened, they answered along the lines of the Pew Center's Jay Gulledge, who said, “The science became all the more compelling in the last year.”
Ah, yes, that compelling science. But how compelling is it?
For staff writer Craig Rose, it was “a watershed moment” when the international report on climate change concluded that the chances are at least 90 percent that global warming is caused by human activity.
Well, if it's 90% certain, then it's 100% certain, I suppose. Errr.
"I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned," the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.
McCain also vowed that if elected, he would appoint judges who "strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States and do not legislate from the bench."
Although the article tries to portray this as some sort of pander to social conservatives, in fact McCain has been consistently pro-life. Check out his page over at NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League), a pro-abortion group:
2006 Senator McCain supported the interests of the Planned Parenthood 0 percent in 2006.
2005-2006 Senator McCain supported the interests of the National Right to Life Committee 75 percent in 2005-2006.
2005 Senator McCain supported the interests of the NARAL Pro-Choice America 0 percent in 2005.
2004 Senator McCain supported the interests of the NARAL Pro-Choice America 0 percent in 2004.
2003-2004 Senator McCain supported the interests of the National Right to Life Committee 82 percent in 2003-2004.
2003 Senator McCain supported the interests of the NARAL Pro-Choice America 0 percent in 2003.
2001-2002 Senator McCain supported the interests of the National Right to Life Committee 33 percent in 2001-2002.
2001 Senator McCain supported the interests of the Planned Parenthood 0 percent in 2001.
2001 Senator McCain supported the interests of the NARAL Pro-Choice America 0 percent in 2001.
2000 Senator McCain supported the interests of the NARAL Pro-Choice America 0 percent in 2000.
1999-2000 Senator McCain supported the interests of the National Right to Life Committee 66 percent in 1999-2000.
1999 Senator McCain supported the interests of the Planned Parenthood 0 percent in 1999.
1996-2003 Senator McCain supported the interests of the Planned Parenthood (Senate) 0 percent in 1996-2003.
1995-2004 On the votes that the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Assocation considered to be the most important in 1995-2004, Senator McCain voted their preferred position 0 percent of the time.
Contrast this to pro-choice Rudy Giuliani and Mitt "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country" Romney:
I watched the opening and I was pretty sure that the only former winners were Joyce & Uchenna. Rob & Ambuh were inevitable, pleased to see the dwarf gal and her good-looking sister, the Beauty Queens and David and Mary. Looks like two gay male couples. One of the Frat Boys returns with one of the gals who got eliminated early on that same season. No obvious villains, no screaming boyfriends from seasons past as far as I can see. We get the obligatory mention that Rob & Ambuh are reality TV royalty.
First task is to fly to Quito. There are two flights, but (obvously because of a layover, the first flight to depart is second to arrive, by a long time. Rob & Amber and a couple others are smart enough to figure out the important thing is when you get there, not when you leave. Team Coal Miner (my faves from last year) remind me why you don't root for dummies, by asking after they've been checked in. But they do con the BQs into sticking around too long to catch the other flight.
As it works out the teams are about divided in half for the two flights. Once in Ecuador, they must find the Plaza San Francisco.
This is a basic cluebox stop; next task is to find Pim's, a nearby restaurant and grab a departure time. Of course, this serves to bunch teams up compared to their arrival times in Ecuador, and thus there is only a half hour between them when the next day starts.
In the morning they must find their way to the Cotopaxi National Park, North Entrance. At least two teams go to the South Entrance and decide to muddle through the park rather than curcumnavigate it. Rob & Ambuh reach the cluebox first: Detour. In Wrangle It, teams must hold down a wild horse while it is being trimmed in the hooves and tail. In Recover It, teams must search a field for a sword, a button, and a pair of epaulets.
Rob & Ambuh try to recover it on the basis that animals are always tricky. But after awhile of looking they decide to do the horse trick. This seems to be the choice of everyone thereafter, and it does not appear particularly challenging which diminishes the drama. At first it looks like the dwarf gal and her sister will be in trouble, but they have come through the south entrance succesfully and gotten back on the path. Jon Vito and Jill, a couple from an earlier season are now apparently in last and sure enough, there is no real drama as they come to the mat last. Rob & Ambuh win the leg.
No roadblock this episode, probably because reintroducing the teams took so long.
Not sure if the Viking Pundit's going to post on the show this season; he's commenting on another amazing race from Sunday.
A national coalition of kooks and nutbars is calling for a nationwide boycott to impeach (President Bush) for peace and justice.
Consumers are asked to withhold their spending for seven days, beginning on Sunday April 15 and lasting until Sunday April 22, 2007. Do NOT shop corporate outlets Minimize use of oil and gas. Carpool: bus, bike or walk. If you buy, BUY LOCALLY.
Plan Ahead and Stock Up
Of course, by shifting their buying to before April 15, the net effect of all this, even if it did take off, is zero. I suggest a more meaningful and lasting economic protest would be to cease being consumers altogether:
Investigative blogging can be very difficult and time-consuming, but it can also pay off in recognition around the blogosphere and in the mainstream media as well.
How can you do some investigative blogging? Well, you have to start off with a story that doesn't seem right in some way. For example, consider the Christmas in Cambodia tale that John Kerry often regaled audiences with. Back in May of 2004, Kitty discovered the story in a sidebar to a longer article, and posted it to Kerry Haters:
Vietnam Vet Kerry Told Senate He Saw Military Action in Cambodia By J. Michael Waller Did decorated Vietnam War veteran John F. Kerry see military action in Cambodia? He says nothing about it on the campaign trail, but he stated it as fact on the floor of the U.S. Senate on March 27, 1986. In that speech, Kerry accused President Ronald Reagan of leading the United States into another Vietnam in Central America, accusing the administration of Nixon-like duplicity and saying that he should recognize it because of his Vietnam experience.
Kerry told his colleagues he was on Navy duty in Cambodia at a time when President Richard M. Nixon lied to the public and said that there were no U.S. forces in that country. He even took enemy fire. In his words, "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared - seared - in me."
Now I looked at that story and something just smelled rotten. It had the aroma of one of those after dinner anecdotes that have been polished over the years, too convenient by half for the point that Kerry wanted to make about Reagan and Nicaragua.
A big part of having a nose for a phony story consists of expertise in your subject. For example, I broke a story a few weeks ago on a 9-11 conspiracy theory panel. I have been covering these conspiracy theories for awhile now over at Screw Loose Change. I noticed that the panel listed mostly members with whom I was familiar--people like Bob Bowman, Steven Jones, Kevin Barrett, etc., but there was one guy who was unfamiliar: Eric D. Williams. So I did some digging on him and quickly discovered that he had recently written a "book" called The Puzzle of Auschwitz, which he claimed was a look into what was true about the Holocaust, and what was a myth. It was not hard to see that this was Holocaust Denial, which may not be a crime in the US, but is certainly distasteful. That made it a minor story, but then I did a little more digging and discovered that Williams was not just another speaker at the conference; he was the conference director. That made it a really big story, potentially devastating to anybody who was foolish enough to attend.
Another example was the Jack Abramoff story. As Abramoff's crimes became apparent, the media (accurately) reported that the scandal did not cut solely against the Republicans; many Democrats had also accepted funds from the tribes he represented. Then the American Prospect trumpeted a story which claimed that this was not true, that the Abramoff tribes had dramatically curtailed their funding to Democrats once he took over. Many liberal bloggers picked up the meme, as did Paul Krugman.
Once again, the story seemed a little too convenient by half and my suspicions were aroused. Another big hint: in order to believe the American Prospect's claim, you had to believe that the mainstream media was helping out the Republicans by portraying this as a bipartisan scandal.
Some story has aroused your suspicion. Now what? You've got to start digging. Obviously there are plenty of internet resources, but it is important not to limit yourself to stuff you can find on the web. In the Christmas in Cambodia story, I went to the library and borrowed a copy of Tour of Duty, Douglas Brinkley's hagiography of John Kerry's Vietnam service. I was stunned as I read the section on Christmas of 1968 to realize that Brinkley had John Kerry about 55 miles from the Cambodian border.
Now I knew I had a story. But almost as important, I had something nobody else on the web had; a couple paragraphs that I transcribed from the book. This non-web content was linked endlessly by bloggers discussing the Christmas in Cambodia story when it hit the mainstream media in early August of 2004.
If you do not have web-exclusive content, then people will commonly bypass you to link directly to the source. Yes, sometimes you will get a "hat tip" link, but that's nowhere near as valuable as a "here's the evidence" link.
Another way to generate web-exclusive content is to do significant work on a story. In the Abramoff example, I spent hours (probably 10 total) putting together spreadsheets to analyze the contributions from his tribes before, during, and after his tenure as their lobbyist. I copied those spreadsheets and placed them on my blog and voila, I had web-exclusive content.
Now, you've got a story and you've got some content that other bloggers will need to cover the story, how do you break it? Well, first you have to compose your post. Second you need to publicize it in the blogging community. Most bloggers of any size will be happy to listen to pitches for stories, but it has to be something they're interested in. Part of your expertise in your subject matter is knowing which big bloggers like your topics, and how to pitch it to them as individuals.
In the case of the Abramoff story, I knew Donald Luskin loves anything that discredits Paul Krugman, so I pitched it to him. This had huge benefits, as Luskin writes regularly for the National Review Online and was also able to push for a retraction from the New York Times (to which they eventually agreed). In the case of the Holocaust Denier Eric D. Williams, I approached an mainstream media reporter who had written occasionally about the 9-11 crackpots and presented him with the scoop. Since Dylan Avery (the creator of Loose Change) was scheduled to be at the conference (he has since bowed out), I sent the story to Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, which had posted a few stories on Avery in the past (apparently Dylan had been an occasional pest commenter on LGF years earlier). Hot Air had been kind enough to cover a few of our stories at Screw Loose Change, so I sent it to Allahpundit as well. If I'd been thinking I would have pitched it to Instapundit along the lines of "this is how blogs and mainstream media are working together to break a story".
I still think his campaign is a longshot at best, but he's making some good choices. John Hawkins announces a (temporary) consulting assignment:
On February 3, Nathan Tabor from TCV Media got in touch with me and asked if I'd be interested in consulting for the Duncan Hunter campaign. We bantered back and forth, came to a basic understanding that Saturday, and then finalized the deal the next day. Long story short, TCV Media brought me on board to be their point person in building up buzz for Duncan Hunter online.
Since I am a blogger who's doing some consulting on the side, not a consultant doing blogging to get his name out there, I did attach a condition to my employment that Nathan was willing to go along with:
#1) I agreed to work a maximum of 3 months for the campaign -- which should be, in my estimation anyway, plenty of time to give Hunter a huge boost in name recognition and prominence in the blogosphere.
Additionally, while I am working on the campaign, I'm not planning to blog about any of the 2008 Republican contenders on RWN unless a story too big to ignore hits the wires. That's because I don't want to come across like a shill for Duncan if I eviscerate one of his opponents or talk him up. Additionally, if I'm done by May of 2007, at the latest, it's not as if it will be too late to get in on the serious 2008 discussions.
I linked to Hawkins' interview with Hunter a few months ago. He strikes me as a solid person, and there may be an opening for him with the front-runners being fairly moderate Republicans. But the jump from Congressman to President strikes me as unlikely.
I've already endorsed John McCain for president. But it is still early enough in the campaign that we can welcome more contenders as strengthening our eventual nominee. Duncan Hunter's made a smart move.
Update: I asked Gayle in the comments if she could name the last person to jump directly from the House to the Presidency, and admitted that I could not. I did a little poking around and it looks like the answer is James Garfield.
Perhaps America could regain its reputation if General Pace would send a division of US Marines to arrest Bush, Cheney, the entire civilian contingent in the Pentagon, the neoconservative nazis, and the complicit members of Congress and send them off to the Hague to be tried for war crimes.
Now this is Paul Craig Roberts, whose CV Wikipedia sums up as follows:
Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service. He is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology and he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He was a post-graduate at the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.
And, of course, a thorough kook. He's a 9-11 Conspiracy Theorist:
I will begin by stating what we know to be a solid incontrovertible scientific fact. We know that it is strictly impossible for any building, much less steel columned buildings, to “pancake” at free fall speed. Therefore, it is a non-controversial fact that the official explanation of the collapse of the WTC buildings is false... Since the damning incontrovertible fact has not been investigated, speculation and “conspiracy theories” have filled the void. Some of the speculation is based on circumstantial evidence and is plausible. Other of the speculation is untenable, and it is used to protect the official explanation by branding all skeptics “conspiracy theorists.” The Popular Mechanics article and the TV documentary are obviously false since they both endorse the official explanation that the WTC buildings “pancaked” at free fall speed, an obvious scientific impossibility.
Yes, this supply-side economist knows more about building collapse than the hundreds of engineers that examined the World Trade Center's destruction. But he apparently doesn't know that there's no such thing as "free fall speed", since the speed in freefall is constantly accelerating due to the force of gravity.
And the idea of an academic and columnist calling for a military coup in this country just shows how deranged the Bush-haters are.
Christian Conservatives Beginning to Realize It's McCain or Nothing
You've got to get to the end of this article to find the real meat:
But McCain has at least one thing going for him with the religious right: Christian leaders are also wary of the other leading GOP presidential hopefuls, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani supports abortion rights and gay rights. Romney has supported both in the past, although he now opposes abortion and gay marriage.
With no clear social conservative among the top-tier candidates, religious right leaders like the Iowa Christian Alliance's Steve Scheffler say they are now willing to at least give McCain a chance to explain himself.
That's a turnabout from last April, when Scheffler told The Associated Press, "There's no support for McCain in this constituency."
Since then, McCain has "made overtures to talk about his record," Scheffler said in a recent interview. "In many cases, he has a record conservatives would feel comfortable with."
As time goes by a lot of Christian conservatives may come to that realization.
I am scheduled to be interviewed on the BBC radio sometime this afternoon regarding the debunking James and I are doing over at the Screw Loose Change blog, I presume for airing later in the day. I will post more details as they become available.
Update: I will be on the World Today, a BBC show that airs over many NPR stations nationally. You can also listen at the link at 23:00 GMT, which I believe is 6:00 PM on the East Coast, with rebroadcasts at 10:00 PM and 1:00 AM. They had already interviewed the Loose Change boys (all three participated) and asked me a few questions. I have done quite a few radio interviews, but this was the first time I'd actually done one from a studio. Thanks to Bill Shedd and the rest of the folks at KJZZ and the BBC for setting this up!
Update II: It appears that we will have to wait for the show to be archived; I do not appear to be in the show shown under the 23:00 GMT link.
Update III: Some people caught the stream here; try it at 10:00 Eastern. Also, it looks like the full program is an hour and some NPR outlets may only cover a half-hour. You can now listen to the archived show here.
Word of Marcotte's resignation came as Fox News Channel commentator Bill O'Reilly was leading his program with a full-throated attack on the two bloggers.
A conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin, wrote recently: "Seems that everyone but the Edwards campaign has tracked Marcotte's foul-mouthed nutroots diatribes. Or perhaps the Edwards team is well aware of her lunatic blogging and can't wait for her to unleash her unbridled anger on their spiffy website to give him a gritty, 'progressive' edge."
But a liberal blogger, Chris Bowers of MyDD.com, wrote that "Republican attempts to make Democrats look bad though guilt by association with us crazy bloggers were a miserable failure."
Three months away from his expected retirement, President Chirac has for the first time confirmed his appetite for extraconjugal affairs, saying that he loved many women in his lifetime “as discreetly as possible”.
It turns out that by at least one measure—the number of unforced errors—men play equally well throughout the match. They make unforced errors on about 30 percent of the most important points, about 30 percent of the least important, and about 30 percent of all those in between. But women show a very different pattern: 34 percent unforced errors on the least important points, steadily rising to almost 40 percent on the most important. That's almost surely too big a difference to be mere coincidence.
What, besides choking, could explain those numbers? Maybe the closest games are usually played late in the match, when players are more fatigued; maybe more of those games involve weak players; maybe more of them occur at the French Open, where the court is harder to play. But professor Paserman tests all these theories, and none stands up to statistical analysis.
Fascinating stuff, of course, but risky for any man to be writing about, particularly when you try to apply it to the business world, as he goes on to do.
She confronted him about this at dinner one night, and he confessed, in some anguish, that he didn't love Sophie, didn't love dogs in general, never had.
They broke up the next week. More accurately, she dumped him. "What can I say?" Edie told me, somewhat defensively. "Sophie has been there for me, day in and day out, for years. I can't say the same of men. She's my girl, my baby. Sooner or later, it would have ended."
The article goes on to speculate about why humans love dogs and concludes it's because they're cunning charmers:
Or, to look at it from the opposite direction, Archer suggests, "consider the possibility that pets are, in evolutionary terms, manipulating human responses, that they are the equivalent of social parasites." Social parasites inject themselves into the social systems of other species and thrive there. Dogs are masters at that. They show a range of emotions—love, anxiety, curiosity—and thus trick us into thinking they possess the full range of human feelings.
This catches a bit of it, but more than that, I suspect humans and dogs have evolved together for reasons that annoy the neighbors of people with dogs; the fact that they bark when they hear somebody. For most of human history, knowing when others were approaching was potentially critical to remaining alive.
Here's an interesting story about attempts to sue a bank that is providing "life insurance" for suicide bombers.
The Arab Bank is one of the largest and most important financial institutions in the Arab world. The Jordan-based private bank, of which 40 percent is still held by the founding Schuman family, is active in 28 countries. The Jordanian monarchy even awarded Abd al Hamid Schuman a medal for his achievements and services to the country.
But the bank has long been suspected of directing money used to finance terrorism in the Palestinian Territories. And accounts at its Palestinian branches are also supposedly used to pay a type of life insurance to the families of youthful suicide bombers, who blow themselves up with the aim of killing as many Israelis as possible. The blood money paid for a son turned murder is 20,000 Saudi riyal -- roughly €4,000 or $5,000. The funds take a circuitous route to the accounts of those families that prove the death of their son by showing a death certificate at the Arab Bank branch in the Palestinian Territories. Then monthly deposits are made just like in Takruri's case.
Suicide bombers with foresight can take care of all the necessary paperwork before they blow themselves to smithereens. A so-called Martyr Kit includes everything from a death certificate from the Palestinian Authority to an account card at the Arab Bank.
How convenient!
Seriously, though, it highlights what a dysfunctional society the Palestinians inhabit. Everything is slightly distorted and backwards, like the Bizarro world of Superman comics.
Unstoppable because it's coming from the sun. John Hawkins interviews the author of a new book on this topic.
If this is such a good explanation -- and it does seem to make sense -- why do you think there are so many scientists out there who say that man is responsible for global warming?
Well John, if people believe me, there wouldn't be 2 billion dollars a year in federal research grants to set-up computerized climate models, Greenpeace wouldn't be selling memberships to people terrified of warming, and Al Gore would have to get a real job.
Mr. Edwards announced on Thursday, after 36 hours of deliberation, that he would keep on his campaign staff two liberal feminist bloggers with long cybertrails of incendiary comments on sex, religion and politics.
Deliberations over the fate of the two bloggers, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, created a crisis in Mr. Edwards’s nascent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 and illuminated the treacherous road ahead as candidates of both parties try to harness the growing power of the online world. The case of the two women had left Mr. Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, with difficult choices.
Mr. Edwards could keep the women on his staff and have to answer for the sometimes vulgar and intemperate writings posted on their personal blogs before he hired them late last month. He could dismiss them and face a revolt in the liberal blogosphere, which is playing an increasingly influential role in Democratic politics and could be especially important to his populist campaign. Some bloggers saw the controversy as manufactured by conservative groups.
Or, as Mr. Edwards did Thursday, he could keep the two bloggers on staff, but distance himself from their views.
Edwards had two basic options here; fire the bloggers and deal with the fallout on the left, or retain them and deal with the fallout on the right. Since the latter will only come if he actually gets the nomination (a dicey proposition), he decided to do the smart thing politically, but the wrong thing morally.
It's been awhile since this story hit the press. An academic named Jerry Lembcke claimed to have examined newspaper accounts of the time and found no mentions of antiwar protesters spitting on Vietnam veterans; in fact, he claimed, the reports started after 1980, apparently in an attempt to discredit the antiwar movement.
Jim Lindgren of the Volokh Conspiracy smelled BS and did his own digging.
Indeed, according to an August 27, 1967 New York Times article by Neil Sheehan, as part of military training in the national guard, soldiers were actually being drilled by being spat on, abuse to which they were instructed not to respond.
One of the more amazing stories of protester abuse of veterans (and one veteran’s violent response) were the attacks on Congressional Medal of Honor winners. In a March 14, 1968 column in the Bucks County Courier Times (and elsewhere), the head of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, WWII Medalist Thomas J. Kelly, reveals that even Medal of Honor winners have been abused and “spat upon as ‘monsters.’”
Glenn Greenwald, observing that John Edwards' blogstress is under attack for her profane and anti-Catholic screeds tries to draw an equivalency with Patrick Hynes' work for John McCain. Of course, he can't find any profanity or anti-Catholicism, so he tries other smears:
Miner: Is it fair to call America a “Christian nation”?
Hynes: Yes. America is a Christian nation. As I write in my book, “Is America a Christian nation? Of course it is. Don’t be ridiculous. What a stupid question.
Does McCain agree with that view, or think it is acceptable to label as "stupid" objections to the notion that "America is a Christian nation." Is that not as divisive and offensive, at least, as anything Marcotte wrote?
The problem for Greenwald is that there's almost nobody on the planet outside of a few atheists who believe that America is not a Christian nation.
He also brings up a contest that Hynes had for coming up with a nickname for Henry Waxman. Kind of an oddball idea for a contest, but Greenwald waxes indignant at some of the names the ABP's commenters came up with. He's especially upset that Waxman's nose was compared to a pig's snout, but Hynes is hardly the first to make that comparison:
Greenwald also brings up Hynes' supposed Mormon-bashing. But in fact, the posts he points to are not Mormon-bashing but legitimate speculation as to whether a Mormon can win the presidency. Given that some polls have shown that over 40% of Americans say they would not vote for a Mormon, it seems a legitimate issue.
Greenwald does bring up one mildly fair issue, which Patrick has already acknowledged, that he should have disclosed his work for John McCain's PAC a little earlier than he did. But this was in July of 2006; McCain wasn't even a declared candidate for 2008 back then.
The Catholic League, a conservative religious group, is demanding that Mr. Edwards dismiss the two, Amanda Marcotte of the Pandagon blog site and Melissa McEwan, who writes on her blog, Shakespeare’s Sister, for expressing anti-Catholic opinions.
The Times manages to make it about "bloggers" and not these specific moonbats:
Two bloggers hired by John Edwards to reach out to liberals in the online world have landed his presidential campaign in hot water for doing what bloggers do — expressing their opinions in provocative and often crude language.
Yeah, because all of us bloggers use crude language like Marcotte and McEwan.
Update: Michelle Malkin channels Marcotte. Funniest thing you will see all day:
A Washington state group is trying to put a measure on the ballot to require married couples to have a child within three years.
Initiative 957 was filed last month by Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance. That group was formed last summer after the state supreme court upheld Washington's ban on same-sex marriage.
Under the measure, marriage would be limited to men and women who are able to have children. Couples would be required to prove they can have children in order to get a marriage license, and if they did not have children within three years, their marriage would be subject to annulment.
All other marriages would be defined as "unrecognized" and people in those marriages would be ineligible to receive any marriage benefits.
Now, that's not just silly, but it's something that even gay couples frustrated at not being able to marry should recognize is an offensive intrusion of the government into people's private lives.
Pam Meister has the story of a soldier in Aghanistan's mother who's being harrassed by her condominium association over the flying of an American flag in front of her condo.
I suspect there are some peaceniks on that condo association board. The first question I asked when I bought my house was "Is there a homeowners' association?" Only when I was assured that none existed was I willing to sign the offer.
The first Canadian to earn a PhD in climatology says it's bunk:
Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.
No sensible person seeks conflict, especially with governments, but if we don't pursue the truth, we are lost as individuals and as a society. That is why I insist on saying that there is no evidence that we are, or could ever cause global climate change. And, recently, Yuri A. Izrael, Vice President of the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed this statement. So how has the world come to believe that something is wrong?
Meanwhile, the Lefty bloggers are incensed that a new poll reveals that very few Republicans believe in their Global Warming revelations. David Roberts has a cow:
But we survey the Democrats and find a patchwork of apathy and equivocation. We find endless hearings and tepid cap-and-trade proposals. Only two bills -- Waxman's Safe Climate Act in the House, Sanders' Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act in the Senate -- even pretend to target the 80% emissions reductions by 2050 scientists say will be needed to avoid irreparable damage. Suffice to say, those bills -- the closest thing on offer to alarmism -- are not supported by 87% of Congressional Democrats.
On the eve before a possible congressional showdown on Iraq strategy, Senator McCain of Arizona contended that the bipartisan proposal amounted to a demoralizing "vote of no confidence" in the American military. The measure, he said, criticizes Mr. Bush's plan to add 21,500 troops in Iraq yet offers no concrete alternatives.
"I don't think it's appropriate to say that you disapprove of a mission and you don't want to fund it and you don't want it to go, but yet you don't take the action necessary to prevent it," Mr. McCain, who is a 2008 presidential candidate, said.
The New York Times's Advertising Columnist gets his 15 minutes of fame with a piece that has to be read to be believed.
No commercial that appeared last night during Super Bowl XLI directly addressed Iraq, unlike a patriotic spot for Budweiser beer that ran during the game two years ago. But the ongoing war seemed to linger just below the surface of many of this year’s commercials.
More than a dozen spots celebrated violence in an exaggerated, cartoonlike vein that was intended to be humorous, but often came across as cruel or callous.
I don't remember all the ads but there were a lot of ones that made me laugh. About the only one that seemed questionable was the one with the cat and the mouse, but it turned out okay.
It was as if Madison Avenue were channeling Doc in “West Side Story,” the gentle owner of the candy store in the neighborhood that the two street gangs, the Jets and Sharks, fight over. “Why do you kids live like there’s a war on?” Doc asks plaintively. (Well, Doc, this time, there is.)
Look, humor depends on surprise. Cartoon-like violence generally comes as a surprise and works as humor. Every year there are commercials at the Super Bowl with sudden, cartoonish violence. The difference is that this year, Stuart Eliot felt like writing about the war and not about the Super Bowl ads.
If he'd chosen to write about, oh, say, religion, he could write about the silly commercial with the crabs stealing a cooler full of Bud Light. If he wanted to talk about homosexuality, there was the ad where the two guys chomp on opposite ends of a Slim Jim (or something) and meet in the middle by kissing.
Blue Crab Boulevard was also not amused, but he is amusing:
Let's cut to the chase, shall we? There was an ad that mentioned the Prudential Insurance company and its long standing symbol, the rock of Gibraltar. An icon that it has used as a symbol since before your reporter was even a gleam in his father's eye. But if you say the words, "The rock" repeatedly after drinking three bottles of cheap wine while standing on your head in your bathtub, it sounds a lot like "Iraq". Or possibly like "Scooter Libby" which would be almost as good.
A judge Friday sentenced four black teenagers to probation and 60 days of house arrest for their roles in the mob beatings of three white women on Halloween night, evoking tears of joy among the defendants and their relatives and gasps of indignation among the victims' families.
"Juvenile Court is a joke," said Barbara Schneider outside the Long Beach courthouse as her daughter Laura, who suffered a concussion during the attack, sobbed next to her.
Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrea Bouas had asked for nine months in probation camp for three of the teenagers. Her jaw dropped when Judge Gibson Lee gave the first defendant probation, and as the hearings went on, she choked up, wiping her eyes with tissue.
Despite testimony that their involvement in the beatings varied, Lee handed identical sentences of probation, house arrest and 250 hours of community service to Anthony and Antoinette Ross, twins who turned 18 during the trial; to their 16-year-old sister; and to another 16-year-old described during the trial as Anthony's girlfriend.
Not only did the punks show no remorse, they are still claiming innocence:
"The three months in Juvenile Hall were the hardest months of my life," said Antoinette Ross, who turned 18 in December. "It hurts to know my life is slowly going down the drain for a crime I did not commit."
This goes back in the archives a ways! Mahmdouh Habib, a former Gitmo detainee whose claims of torture included the rather bizarre one that his interrogators showed him pictures of Osama bin Laden having sex with his wife, is now running for a seat in the legislature of West South Wales, Australia.
He got his brief moment of fame in the US when Bob Herbert, the New York Times' worst regular columnist, picked up his story. Among other incredible tales of torture:
Mr. Habib said he was taken to a room with hooks on the wall and a barrel, set sideways like a roller, on the floor. His arms were stretched out, he said, and each wrist was handcuffed and fastened to a hook on the wall. By his description, the only way not to be left hanging was to stand on the barrel; an electric wire ran through it. Mr. Habib said he believed the interrogators in that room were Pakistani.
Those fiendish Pakistanis!
Anyway, you had to dig a little into the story to discover that miracle of miracles, Mahmdouh Habib had the signal honor of meeting both the Blind Sheikh who ordered the 1993 World Trade Center attack, and Osama bin Laden, who financed and provided the muscle for the 9-11 attacks. What a fortunate fellow, I'm sure he's no terrorist. And he can't be one, because there are no terrorists in Australia, according to him:
Mr Habib launched his campaign today for next month's state election on a human rights platform on which he opposes the country's anti-terror laws.
He said the laws were not necessary in a peaceful country like Australia.
"We have no terrorists in Australia," Mr Habib said in the Sydney electorate of Auburn.
"This country is a peaceful country, I believe Australia is the best country in the world.
"The terror laws are if you have terrorists, but we don't have terrorists, I believe."
John Edwards Hires Liberal Blogger Who Supports Duke Lacrosse Prosecution?
Been awhile since I've looked at the Duke Lacrosse case because it seems like such an obvious farce that I feel like I'm beating a dead horse's ass by taking on Nifong. But amazingly, there are still kooks out there who think that the young men were guilty. And John Edwards just hired one of them as his campaign's blogger!
“Left-wing blogger Amanda Marcotte of the vociferously anti-war web site Pandagon has been named by the John Edwards campaign as their new blogmaster.
“The extent of Ms. Marcotte’s responsibilities at the Edwards site, and the nature of the political operations she will be undertaking as a member of the Edwards campaign, have not yet been detailed publicly.”
Liestoppers, a blog that is apparently dedicated to the Duke case, points us to a post by Amanda that has now been taken down (oooh, the coverup is always worse than the crime), but here's a clip:
In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good f*cking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and f*cked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. "Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? "So unfair.”
As you can see, not only is Amanda a kook, but a foul-mouthed kook as well. Here's the place where the original post was:
Since people are determined to make hay over this quick shot of a post, I’m deleting it and here’s my official stance. The prosecution in the Duke case fumbled the ball. The prosecutor was too eager to get a speedy case and make a name for himself. That is my final word.
So she still believes that the stripper was raped. Grade A kook. Great hire, John!
The peaceniks love to castigate those of us not in the service but who support the war as "chickenhawks", the theory being that if we really believe in the war, we should put our own rear ends on the line. Of course, this formulation essentially promotes the military as the only people who can express an opinion on the war, not that the antiwar types actually believe this, as Arkin's "apology" reveals:
I also reiterate my core point, which is that military attitudes should not serve as a censor of the civilian debate at home, either literally or through intimidation.
That was definitely one of the funniest pictures of Kerry in 2004, right up there with the sports photos. But it turns out that NASA was breaking the law that day:
NASA allowed Kerry to conduct a political stump speech and rally at the space center and broadcasted it to KSC employees, and the latter part violates the law, the Office of Special Counsel ruled, according to Local 6 News partner Florida Today.
Beaming the presidential campaign rally to government employees all over the spaceport violates laws prohibiting electioneering using federal resources, according to the report.
We came out a little ahead on this deal. Yeah, Kerry probably picked up a few NASA votes, but he also gave us all a heck of a photograph!
Breaking At Screw Loose Change And New Times: 9-11 "Truther" Conference Hosted by Holocaust Denier!
Okay, I've been hinting about this for awhile, but today, Screw Loose Change teams up with the Phoenix New Times (an arts & entertainment weekly known for its excellent investigative journalism) to break the story of a 9-11 "Accountability" Conference. It turns out that the Conference Director is a Holocaust Denier.
This confab is scheduled to feature some of the biggest names in 9-11 tinfoil hattery, including Steven Jones, Kevin Barrett, the Loose Change boys, and Colonel Robert Bowman, the Democratic nominee last year for Florida's 15th Congressional District.
This comes fresh on the heels of last night's Paula Zahn segment (scroll down about 3/4 of the page) on the connections between the 9-11 "Truthers" and anti-Semitism.
