Reductio ad Ahmadinejad

Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria makes an excellent point, then immediately forgets he ever made it:

When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)

Leaving aside quibbles about the reliability of the CIA's intelligence, the logical conclusion to draw from all this would be that the person you really need to worry about with regard to Iran is Khamenei, not Ahmadinejad.

Instead, though, Zakaria spends his column expounding on why Ahmadinejad is really not so bad, how Iran hasn't invaded anyone for over 200 years--which is SUCH a comfort when the actions we're worried about Iran taking don't involve invasion at all--and so forth.

I do agree that there's a tendency on the part of many to overemphasize the importance of Ahmadinejad in the overall picture.

Unfortunately, Zakaria took that valuable insight and ran with it...straight off a cliff.

--Shack

Let's play "Count the Parallels"

David Brooks had a column in the New York Times yesterday touting Mike Huckabee as a potential Republican nominee.

The thing is--take away the names and the slightly different labels, and for much of the column, it sounds like Brooks is talking about George W. Bush, circa 2000.

"He talks about issues in a down-to-earth way ... a collaborative conservative ..." And so forth. I counted no fewer than six different Huckabee-Bush parallels, and I'm sure I missed a few.

The GOP nominating Bush 3.0 would, it seems to me, be the surest way to ensure that the next White House occupant is addressed "Madame President." Qualified or not, deserving or not, the similarities would guarantee Huckabee's obliteration in the general election.

--Shack

Keeping your environmental issues straight?

Kind of a head-scratching passage in the Chicago Sun-Times' contribution to the endless parade of editorials serenading Nobel Environmentalism Peace Prize winner Al Gore:

Global warming is a problem that needs solving.

Carbon dioxide emissions are boring a hole in the Earth's atmosphere and are predicted to cause more extreme weather, harm crops, kill off animal species, invite disease and ignite wars.

Now, I know no one's really talked about it for a while, but this sounds more like a description of depletion of the ozone layer than it does of global warming--and I don't recall carbon dioxide emissions having anything to do with the ozone layer.

Of course, I could be wrong. After all, who am I to quarrel with an editorial board?

--Shack

WHO's electable?

Maggie Gallagher takes aim at the idea that Rudy Giuliani can beat Hillary Clinton--or any other Democratic candidate, for that matter--in the general election:

The once-powerful Reagan coalition had three legs -- strong on defense, less government and social conservatism. But the war in Iraq is not the same as the war on communism. It's very unpopular, and Rudy has become as identified with this unpopular war as John McCain. Meanwhile, he has abandoned social conservatism. What's left of the Reagan coalition for Rudy to run on? Naked fiscal conservatism? Conservatives are deluding themselves if they think fiscal conservatism by itself is a winning political coalition. Do they not remember the party of Gerald Ford? It was very fiscally conservative, socially moderate, and a permanent minority party.

The halo of "America's Mayor" is already slipping. For months, polls showed Rudy Giuliani leading Hillary Clinton in a head-to-head matchup, but by June of this year that lead had begun to evaporate. The latest poll, conducted in late September by ABC News and The Washington Post, shows Hillary Clinton beating Rudy Giuliani by eight points. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney trails Clinton in a head-to-head matchup in the latest Rasmussen poll by only nine points. One point better than Romney does not a convincing argument make for abandoning all principles.

To put it mildly.

--Shack

GOP debate thoughts

Once again forgot to tape the debate (I work second shift, and couldn't watch it live) but managed to find it online. Not a whole lot to say, just a few things that jumped out at me:

-Chris Matthews did a decent job as a moderator, overall...but his asking the candidates whether they'd support the Republican nominee was idiotic, and I'd like to know how much Ron Paul paid him for all those softball questions (pun intended).

-Mitt Romney's showing signs of contracting FrontRunnerItis from Rudy Giuliani, going after Hillary Clinton on a number of occasions. I think that in Romney's case, there's a certain degree of desperation to it--he's trailing badly nationwide, and I believe his support in the early states is slipping, as well. It looks to me like he's trying to make people believe that he's a frontrunner without looking at whether he actually is, in hopes that his poll numbers will then follow suit.

-Not one candidate besides Paul gave a straight answer on whether the President needs Congressional approval for a military strike--read, Congressional refusal = no military action--which makes sense, since the right answer ("ABSOLUTELY NOT!") is political suicide, especially in the general election.

-Romney's rambling suggestion about consulting his attorneys might have been almost as bad, though.

-Scripted or not, Romney's "Law and Order" crack was the line of the debate.

-Fred Thompson did very well, I thought. He had good control of the material, and didn't seem out of his element. (He wasn't even tripped up by the cheap-shot pop quiz on Canada's prime minster.) Still too early to say whether he'll manage to overtake Giuliani, but this was an important milestone. He looked like he belonged up there, and there was some doubt about that.

-This debate was mostly about economics, and I can now safely say that I would feel comfortable entrusting this country's economy to any of the GOP frontrunners...which is more than I could have said for Romney or Giuliani before the debate.

--Shack

It depends on what you mean by "normal"

A pretty telling opening to a column by Froma Harrop:

One of Newt Gingrich's favorite verbal firebombs was calling Democrats "the enemies of normal Americans." We will ignore the nasty code contained in the former GOP House speaker's remark. But suffice it to say, Democrats used to spend much time catering to narrow interest groups at the expense of the middle-class masses.

That was then, and then is clearly not now.

Democrats have emerged as champions of horse sense and competent governance. And they're on the offensive, accusing Republicans of downright weirdness in their fiscal recklessness and seeming obsession with the interests of the richest few.

Classism. Pure, unmitigated classism.

At its core, the Democratic Party believes that people define themselves primarily by their income and relative economic status--and in opposition to those of differing status.

As opposed to, say, profession, religious beliefs, stances on issues, etc. etc. etc. You know--the things that people actually base their votes on.

Much as I despise Bill Clinton, he proved to be the rare exception to the rule: For Democrats to win, Republicans have to first lose. (And even that exception is questionable, as Ross Perot's candidacy threw the entire 1992 election into chaos--and Clinton didn't get anywhere close to a majority vote.) The party has put itself in a position where it doesn't work the other way around.

(Now that I think about it, that goes a long way towards explaining the longstanding preoccupation with slamming Republicans at the slightest provocation--real, imagined, or manufactured.)

Virtually the only time the donkey is ascendant is when the elephant is first in freefall, as was the case last year--and, sadly, as looks to be the case in 2008.

--Shack

40 Days for Life

40 Days for Life--a 40-day pro-life campaign consisting of prayer, fasting, and peaceful prayer vigils around abortion clinics 24/7--kicks off tonight.

The nationwide campaign includes five locations in Wisconsin, with two in Milwaukee--Affiliated Medical Services on Farwell Ave., and Planned Parenthood on Jackson St.

For more information, see the homepages of the national campaign and its Wisconsin branch.

--Shack

Doing something for the sake of doing something

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is jumping on the global warming bandwagon, with a round table and accompanying editorial in this Sunday's edition.

The title of the editorial is "A threat so severe that waiting is not an option." Based off the round table, it proposed a variety of changes, including energy efficiency, conservation, and new technology, to reach, as one round table participant said, "a return to 1990 emission standards by 2020. That will require a 25% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. That's of the order of what is needed."

Only problem is, it won't work. The changes suggested won't get there. It isn't even close--and that's been known worldwide for over a year. As Robert Samuelson noted last July:

From 2003 to 2050, world population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty -- and freeze everyone else's living standards -- we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.

Just keeping annual greenhouse gas emissions constant means that the world must somehow offset these huge increases. There are two ways: improve energy efficiency; or shift to energy sources with lower (or no) greenhouse emissions. Intuitively, you sense this is tough. China, for example, builds about one coal-fired power plant a week. Now, a new report from the International Energy Agency in Paris shows all the difficulties (the population, economic growth and energy projections cited above come from the report).

The IEA report assumes that existing technologies are rapidly improved and deployed. Vehicle fuel efficiency increases by 40 percent. In electricity generation, the share for coal (the fuel with the most greenhouse gases) shrinks from about 40 percent to about 25 percent -- and much carbon dioxide is captured before going into the atmosphere. Little is captured today. Nuclear energy increases. So do "renewables'' (wind, solar, biomass, geothermal); their share of global electricity output rises from 2 percent now to about 15 percent.

Some of these changes seem heroic. They would require tough government regulation, continued technological gains and public acceptance of higher fuel prices. Never mind. Having postulated a crash energy diet, the IEA simulates five scenarios with differing rates of technological change. In each, greenhouse emissions in 2050 are higher than today. The increases vary from 6 percent to 27 percent.

25% reduction. Riiiiiiight.

Improved efficiency and reduced energy usage, on their own merits, are unquestionably good ideas--but don't imagine that they will do much, if anything, to reduce the threat or impact of global warming, if it is as bad as Al Gore et al claim.

If global warming is truly such a great threat, then there are only two ways to seriously combat it: radically new technology or the abrupt, total, and permanent immolation of the global economy.

Even then, neither of those is a sure thing. New technology is a crapshoot--there's no guarantee that it will emerge in time (or at all, for that matter)--and the global economy may have already done too much damage to the planet for its removal to make a difference now.

But if you're taking global warming seriously, then it isn't something you can nickel-and-dime to death. The point where those kinds of changes might have made a difference was a decade or two ago--just a few years after we emerged from the last global cooling scare.

"Waiting is not an option"? Perhaps. But if waiting isn't an option, then neither is doing something merely for the sake of doing something.

--Shack

Making an effort to do better

It's somewhat ironic, when you think of all the heat Ron Paul has taken from Iraq war supporters for his claim that US actions abroad led to 9/11, that President Bush's actions throughout the War on Terror are very similar in direction, though not in degree.

Bush certainly does not believe we brought that day on ourselves, as Paul does; but he clearly does believe that America's actions abroad had played a large part in creating the environment that gave birth to Al Qaeda and similar entities.

His actions speak eloquently in this regard. For example:

• he held the country harboring Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, responsible for those attacks, and retaliated accordingly;
  
• he broke the stalemate in Iraq that spawned two of Osama bin Laden's three professed excuses for attacking America (Iraq sanctions and US troops in Saudi Arabia);
  
• further--the point of this post--he afterwards broke with a longstanding US trend of ruling via military proxy, by disbanding the Iraq army.

Christopher Hitchens, as useless as the man may be when the subject is religion, is once again spot-on in discussing Iraq:

If there was one thing about U.S. foreign policy that used to make one shudder, it was the habit of ruling by proxy through military regimes. Especially beloved by the CIA, this practice befouled us in Chile, Greece, Indonesia, and numerous other cases where we made ourselves complicit in the policies of a local uniformed elite. The case of Iraq, where the armed forces routinely acted as a phalanx of naked aggression against neighboring countries and as a spectacularly cruel internal police force, as well as a parasitic consumer of the national income, was the instance above all where it was right to break with this abysmal tradition.

The Iraqi army was also the replication of sectarianism within the state, consisting of a Sunni oligarchy using conscripts from other communities to enforce its will and eating up the common national treasury to conceal unemployment and inefficiency while subjecting young people to involuntary servitude. Yet almost every liberal in America—as you can see most recently by watching the tendentious documentary No End in Sight—appears to be committed to a nostalgia for Saddam Hussein's draft.

Take a moment to imagine what would have been written in the liberal press had the old military class been preserved and utilized to "stabilize" Iraq. I can write the headlines for you: "Baathist War Criminal Gets Second Career as American Employee"; "Once-Wanted Man, Brigadier Kamal Now Shares Jokes With 82^nd Airborne"; "Kurds and Shiites Say: What Regime Change?"; "From Basra to Kirkuk, America Brings Saddamism Without Saddam." And, if you like, I can add the names of the reporters who would have written the stories.

Clumsy as he's been in doing so, George W. Bush has been going out of his way to do things differently from how the US did things in the past (which, I think, explains to a considerable degree the visceral hostility with which the Iraq Study Group report was greeted--it was seen as a call for America to go back to the "old way" of doing things).

He's not going to get any credit for it from either side, but he IS trying--which is more than I can say for a certain asinine political party.

--Shack

Taking a despicable idea and MovingOn with it

Via Hot Air: MoveOn didn't come up with "General Betray Us" on its own. No, that "honor" goes to a gentleman (and I use the term loosely) who was last seen in this household doing a dead-boring comedy routine in lieu of recapping football games (which is what he was supposed to be doing at the time) on NBC's Football Night in America.

A pox on the whole lot of them. Don Surber has quote and video of Senator Orrin Hatch blasting MoveOn on the Senate floor, and pretty much everything the senator said about the group can and should also be applied to the blowhard.

--Shack

Signs of the apocalypse

Plagues and disasters...

...the dead rising from their graves...

...me agreeing with the New York Times on anything:

The presidential primary system is broken. For years, the nominating process has unfolded in an orderly, if essentially unfair, way. The schedule has worked very nicely for early-voting states, which have had a steady stream of would-be presidents knocking on their doors, making commitments on issues like the Iowa full-employment program, also known as the ethanol subsidy. The losers have been states like New York and California, which have often gotten to vote only when the contests were all but decided. Issues that matter to them, like mass transportation, have suffered.

...

The states bucking the system are right about a larger point: the nominating process must be changed. An ideal system would start slowly enough that candidates who are not well-known or well-financed can score some early victories or at least show well. At the same time, it would allow larger states to participate early enough in the process that their voters could play a significant role in choosing the nominees. It would spread out primary days over a long enough time that a true campaign could emerge, rather than the near-national primary that is likely to occur next Feb. 5.

Many worthy reform proposals are circulating. One calls for dividing the nation into four regions and having them vote in sequence: one in March, another in April, and the last two in May and June. In future elections, the regions would vote in a different order. Unfortunately, a leading version of this plan calls for Iowa and New Hampshire to keep voting first. Another appealing idea, the “American Plan,” starts with small states and moves onto larger ones, so long-shot candidates can build momentum, but it does an especially good job of ensuring that voters from all states have a reasonable chance of voting early in the primary season.

The two parties should begin a discussion of the best reform proposals now, and plan on having a new system in place for 2012. The presidential nominating process is too important to American democracy to be allowed to descend into gamesmanship and chaos.

I, for one, like the "American Plan." It would let small states matter by virtue of their early, high-profile primaries, while also letting the largest states matter by making it very hard for candidates to accumulate enough delegates to sew up the nominations before the later primaries.

One way or another, we can't have the presidential campaign starting within months of the midterm elections like we did this time. With so much time to campaign and build up before the primaries, this election smacks of trench warfare at its very worst--long, drawn-out, brutal struggles to gain perhaps a foot or two of ground at a time, at astronomically high costs.

Doing it that way once has already been more than enough.

--Shack

A 2-step exercise in argument-evidence

Step 1: Read Michael Gerson's Washington Post column today on how, according to the Democratic Party of Louisiana (not to mention the Democratic Party in general) holding strong religious beliefs--and consciously accepting the logical consequences of those beliefs--is an unforgivable sin.

Step 2: Click on "View all comments" at the bottom of the column, and read page after page of liberal readers proving his point for him.

--Shack

Gonzales Gone

The attorney general is history.

What happens next is anyone's guess, but given that Bush is going to have to negotiate with Democrats over confirming the next AG...

--Shack

Reduce Global Warming: Don't Exercise.

I wish I were making this up.

From Times Online, via Constitutionally Right:

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”

Better for the human body? Probably not.

But then, it's been a long, long time since the well-being of the humans living on this planet was a priority for environmentalists.

--Shack

Turning point or point of no return?

Something very odd happened earlier this week. The New York Times--the same paper that just recently handed down its Definitive And Infallible Judgment (TM) that the war in Iraq is lost, over, doomed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera--published an op-ed claiming that this is far from the case.

The pollyannas over at NRO promptly convoked a symposium to discuss what this might mean--and as the title "Turning Point?" suggests, most took a rather optimistic view of the situation.

Color me a pessimist. I do not think it is a coincidence that the Times ran an op-ed like this, nor do I think it is a good sign.

The editorial board of the New York Times has, almost from Day 1 of the invasion, had one goal and one goal only with regards to Iraq: to get the US to pull out. Its editorials and columns have been working to undermine the American position there--by undermining the pro-war position here--with a single-minded tone and fervor that has been more than a little frightening to watch.

Even the token opposition columns/articles that normally bolster the paper's credibility by providing it with some pretense of balance have been, by and large, conspicuously absent...until now, that is.

I find that enormously significant.

It isn't that the Times' editors have been forced to provide an opposing viewpoint. It's that they believe they can afford to.

Even more than its "all is lost" editorial a little under a month ago, this is, I think, a declaration of victory (or, more accurately, defeat). The Times evidently believes that public sentiments have reached, not a turning point, but a point of no return--and that those sentiments are decidedly opposed to the Iraq war.

They believe they have finally succeeded in sabotaging this country's last and best chance to undercut Islamofascism in the Middle East.

All things considered, I'm hard-put to disagree with them.

--Shack

Democrats: The Party of the Flying Imams

The John Doe Amendment, which would have shielded citizens reporting suspicious behavior from retaliatory lawsuits, is dead.

Charlie Sykes has the pertinent details--including contact information for Sens. Kohl and Feingold, who joined 36 of their Democratic brethren (plus 1 indedpendent) in voting to kill the shield.

This is an absolute travesty, and I only hope voters remember it when these people come up for re-election.

--Shack

Final words on the Thompson "scandal"

The New York Times has the records and the details. Fred Thompson, in 1991 and 1992, spent a whopping 20 hours working for a pro-abortion client his firm had taken on.

IMAO sums up this tempest in a teapot quite nicely:

Shocker: Fred Thompson Only 99.925% Pro-Life Before His Senate Career

Conservative will have to ask themselves whether they can vote for someone like Fred Thompson who, while 100% pro-life since at least 1994, was only 99.925% pro-life fifteen years ago? How will he compare to our other choices such as Rudy Giuliani (used to be 3% pro-life, now 5% pro-life), Mitt Romney (averages about 63% pro-life over his political career), and John McCain (pro-life percentage N/A due to death of campaign)?

Couldn't have put it better myself--but since past Thompson clients, real or alleged, will almost certainly pop up again at some point, let's end this post by quoting the end to the NY Times story:

In a column published on the conservative blog Powerline, Mr. Thompson wrote that in light of lawyer-client confidentiality, it would not be appropriate for him to respond to those who are “dredging up clients — or another lawyer’s clients — that I may have represented or consulted with” 15 or 20 years ago.

If “a client has a legal and ethical right to take a position, then you may appropriately represent him as long as he does not lie or otherwise conduct himself improperly while you are representing him,” he wrote.

He continued, “In almost 30 years of practicing law I must have had hundreds of clients and thousands of conversations about legal matters. Like any good lawyer, I would always try to give my best, objective, and professional opinion on any legal question presented to me.”

--Shack

Words to ponder

From Dennis Prager:

Just about every generation has some horrific evil that it must fight. For the Democratic Party today that evil is carbon dioxide emissions. For the rest of us, it is an ideology that teaches that its deity is sanctified by the blood of innocents, just as the Aztec deities were.

History will see that clearly. And judge accordingly.

Just how clearly remains to be seen, considering that the greatest evil of the last generation (communism) is for the most part depicted by historians (read: academics [read: far left]) as having been either a) an overblown threat or b) not that bad, really.

Of course, at this rate, we won't be the ones writing the history of this generation.

That is, after all, a privilege reserved for the victors.

--Shack

You can't make this stuff up.

Via Dr. Sanity:

Iranians arrest 14 squirrels for spying

The headline speaks for itself.

--Shack

Ironic.

John McCain very publicly and very deliberately risked his presidential campaign with his support of an unpopular war.

It's looking more and more like his campaign has been blindsided and all but killed by his support of an unpopular immigration bill.

Just saying.

--Shack

Global Warming: Rutherford-Appleton vs. Duke

The BBC reports a new study disputing any link between the sun and modern climate change. The organization interviewed one of the researchers, Mike Lockwood of the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who uttered the dangerous words: "This should settle the debate."

Calling anything about this debate settled (beyond the plain facts that the earth is warming and that human activity has played a part in it to some degree) is just asking for trouble. And in looking at the early commentary on the story, I found, via Smoke If You Got 'Em, some 2005 research from Duke University that would seem to poke some holes in the study as described in the BBC story.

The major underpinning of the new study is that the sun's output has decreased over the past twenty years--since about 1985--and thus doesn't mesh with rising temperatures. However, in examining the report on the Duke study, we find some problems with that assumption:

According to Scafetta, records of sunspot activity suggest that solar output has been rising slightly for about 100 years. However, only measurements of what is known as total solar irradiance gathered by satellites orbiting since 1978 are considered scientifically reliable, he said.

But observations over those years were flawed by the space shuttle Challenger disaster, which prevented the launching of a new solar output detecting satellite called ACRIM 2 to replace a previous one called ACRIM 1.

That resulted in a two-year data gap that scientists had to rely on other satellites to try to bridge. "But those data were not as precise as those from ACRIM 1 and ACRIM 2,” Scafetta said in an interview.

Nevertheless, several research groups used the combined satellite data to conclude that that there was no increased heating from the Sun to contribute to the global surface warming observed between 1980 and 2002, the authors wrote in their paper.

Lacking a standardized, uninterrupted data stream measuring any rising solar influence, those groups thus surmised that all global temperature increases measured during those years had to be caused by solar heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases such as carbon dioxide, introduced into Earth's atmosphere by human activities, their paper added.

But a 2003 study by a group headed by Columbia's Richard Willson, principal investigator of the ACRIM experiments, challenged the previous satellite interpretations of solar output. Willson and his colleagues concluded, rather that their analysis revealed a significant upward trend in average solar luminosity during the period.

If the new study is wrong about what the sun's been doing, then it's little more than a waste of paper, since its methodology is a direct comparison of solar output and cosmic ray intensity to the average global surface temperature. (It's probably also worth noting that if the researchers are working with measurements of solar output from the last 40 years, as the BBC story claims, then a little over a quarter of their data came from before 1978. Go back and reread the first paragraph of the above quote to see the significance of that.)

The Duke researchers, using the Columbia group's estimates of solar output as the base for their calculations, concluded that the sun was responsible for a minimum of 10-30% of the increase in the planet's surface temperature between 1980 and 2002.

Who's right? I'm hardly in a position to say one way or the other. I am, however, in a position to say that the debate is far from settled.

--Shack

Update on LA Times Thompson story

The LA Times website now includes the following insert near the top of its Fred Thompson attack:

An earlier version of this article included a passage in which Judith DeSarno said Fred Thompson reenacted a cowboy death scene from one of his movies. The version of the article that was printed in Saturday's newspaper replaced the earlier, online version. That newer version omitted the reference, because confirmation of the name of the movie could not be made before the story got reprinted. Based on DeSarno's account, the scene that she said Thompson reenacted appears to be from "Keep the Change," a TNT television western that would have been in production around the time of the lunch and dinner that she described.

So, ultimately, no alterations were made to the version of the story that appeared in the print edition. That is very good to see.

"Keep the Change" was officially released in 1992, so it appears when I was checking Thompson's filmography, I stopped a year too soon.

According to the IMDb, in "Keep the Change," Thompson played a character called Otis. So now, if someone can confirm that 1)Otis was a cowboy and 2)Otis died in the film (bonus points if it was a death scene Thompson could have reenacted at a lunch or dinner without causing a scene) the Times looks to be safe...on that front, anyway.

That doesn't excuse its ignoring the Clinton connections, the lack of records, or the overall irrelevance of alleged pro-choice Thompson activity from 1991 (that is to say, before an alleged 1994 pro-choice survey stance--all parties agree that if he was at that point pro-choice, he has long since made a complete and firm conversion to a pro-life position).

--Shack

LA Times Retconning?

Okay, time to unleash my inner geek.

A "retcon"--short for retroactive continuity--is a storytelling technique often seen in serial fiction (TV shows, comic books, professional wrestling, movie series, video games, etc.). Basically, when some new story element contradicts something previously established in the series, the historical background of the series is altered--either to reconcile the two conflicting elements, or to eliminate one (normally the older one) in favor of the other.

The all-knowing, all-perfect authors/producers/editors are, of course, not usually eager to trumpet these maneuvers, because each is an implicit admission that they screwed up; fans, for their part, will often wryly note them, for the same reason.

But that's fiction for you--nothing's real; it's all part of the game.

It's a bit different when it apparently happens with a newspaper. NewsBusters notes that, without notice or explanation, the LA Times has altered a highly problematic paragraph from its story a few days ago about Fred Thompson's alleged pro-abortion lobbying:

In the July 7th version of the story Judith DeSarno, the woman making the accusation that Thompson worked for her pro-abortion organization in '91, mentioned that she had talked with the Senator about his "cowboy death scene" in a movie he was in. She claimed she talked to him about this scene during one of the diners she claimed to have had with him where they discussed his lobbying efforts.

The problem with DeSarno's original claim is, Thompson was never in any westerns in the 1990s. In fact, he appeared in a western only recently with the HBO movie "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee", which was released this year -- and in that he played president Ulysses S. Grant.

So, in an apparent attempt to make DeSarno's claims of a 1991 meeting seem more truthful, the "cowboy" section was removed from the story.

The old paragraph read:

At one of the meals, she recalled, Thompson re-enacted a cowboy death scene from one of his movies. She also remembered him telling her that Sununu had just given him tickets for a VIP tour of the White House for one of Thompson’s sons and his wife.

The new paragraph reads:

Thompson kept her updated on his progress in telephone conversations and over meals at Washington restaurants, including dinner at Galileo and lunch at the Monocle, she said. At one of the meals, she recalled, Thompson told her that Sununu had just given him tickets for a VIP tour of the White House for a Thompson son and his wife.

There you go, all nice and cleaned up so that the dissembling is removed and NOW it looks more truthful... again!

Now, it's possible that the DeSarno inconsistency could be explained by the film in question not being recent (when the year is 1991, the '90s don't cover much ground). It wouldn't explain the paragraph being altered, but it would make it look less sinister.

So, let's double-check. Here, from his IMDb profile, is Thompson's complete movie filmography, up to and including the year in question (1991):

• 1985: Marie (historical drama; played himself)
• 1987: No Way Out (government thriller)
• 1988: Feds (comedy)
• 1989: Fat Man and Little Boy (historical drama)
• 1990: The Hunt for Red October (thriller)
• 1990: Days of Thunder (racing drama)
• 1990: Die Hard 2 (action)
• 1991: Flight of the Intruder (military drama)
• 1991: Class Action (law drama)
• 1991: Necessary Roughness (comedy)
• 1991: Curly Sue (comedy)
• 1991: Cape Fear (thriller)

I don't see any cowboys. Do you?

--Shack

New Thompson promo

Blogs for Fred Thompson notes a clever new video promo for the soon-to-be candidate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFD23fAEpis

I'm still not quite sold on Thompson, but--at least as far as the GOP primary goes--his people certainly know where his strengths are. (Of course, I despise both the movie Titanic and that !#$%#$&$@^ song, so I might be just a little biased with regards to this particular promo.)

With McCain apparently on the verge of imploding, the better Thompson looks, the better I'll feel.

--Shack

Sheehan vs. Pelosi

Now this is rich.

Sheehan Considers Challenge to Pelosi

CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) - Six weeks after announcing her departure from the peace movement, Cindy Sheehan said Sunday that she plans to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unless she introduces articles of impeachment against President Bush in the next two weeks.

Sheehan said she will run against the San Francisco Democrat in 2008 as an independent if Pelosi does not seek by July 23 to impeach Bush. That's when Sheehan and her supporters are to arrive in Washington, D.C., after a 13-day caravan and walking tour starting next week from the group's war protest site near Bush's Crawford ranch.

"Democrats and Americans feel betrayed by the Democratic leadership," Sheehan told The Associated Press. "We hired them to bring an end to the war. I'm not too far from San Francisco, so it wouldn't be too big of a move for me. I would give her a run for her money."

(H/T Don Surber)

So, which is Sheehan? Voice of the Democratic base, or useful idiot? (For the Democrats, I mean--we already know she's a useful idiot for Al Qaeda et al.)

This is a win-win situation for the GOP. Pelosi--a voice of the Democratic Party--will have to twist herself in knots trying to defend herself without admitting that Sheehan and her cohorts are in fact the latter. If Pelosi manages to do it, she'll have given Republicans a treasure trove of soundbites for 2008.

And if she can't pull it off, the Democratic base shatters.

--Shack

This should scare people.

At Forbes.com, John Mauldin notes a very ominous sign for Iran's future: Net oil exports in that country are projected to drop down to zero by around 2014, largely because of problems inherent in the government that the mullahs have set up. Economically, the country is set to self-destruct.

Mauldin seems to believe that this is all to the good--that, as he puts it, "I expect Iran to be the new friend of the U.S. sometime next decade." To which, I can only pose two questions:

1. What are you smoking?
2. Can I have some?

What's likely to emerge from the ruins of the Iranian theocracy isn't a US-friendly country. What's likely to emerge from the ruins of the Iranian theocracy is a failed state--something along the lines of what happened to Russia in the 1990s (and what the left wing in this country is pushing to have happen to Iraq) magnified.

Here's the real scary part: By 2014, Iran is virtually guaranteed to have gone nuclear.

We're still worrying and fretting about the nukes that scattered every which way when the USSR went under, some of which might have or may eventually fall into the hands of terrorists.

How much easier--and how much more likely--would it be for the likes of Hezbollah to pluck nuclear weapons out of the wreckage of a country that, more than any other in the world, has made its name as a state sponsor of terrorism?

--Shack

NYT makes it official

It was just a matter of time. The New York Times has been doing everything it could to undercut the War in Iraq (as well as the War on Terror in general) for a very, very long time. Last November, for the first time in its history, the paper endorsed a straight Democratic party ticket--largely because American troops were still in Iraq.

And today, the paper's editors finally came out and said publicly what pretty much anyone capable of adding 1+1 and getting 2 has known for years: They want the US to pull out.

The paper claims, in essence, to be reading the writing on the wall. What they neglect to mention is that much of that writing is graffiti--and that they and their allies are the ones who spray-painted it there.

Don Surber says pretty much everything I could hope to way about the Times' shameful performance today. Particularly memorable was this passage from the Times editorial:

That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

...and Surber's blistering response:

By “could” the Times means “will.”

This is madness. It is lunacy to suggest that UN peacekeepers drawn randomly from other countries and thrown into the maelstrom with no leadership skills or experience will do a better job than 150,000 professional soldiers with 4 years experience in Iraq.

Africa burns while UN blue helmets look askance and indulge themselves in child porn and petty theft. That is the Times prescription for Iraq.

The chaos would result in zero civil liberties for 25 million Iraqis. The Times clamored for extraconstitutional rights for 500 or so jihadists at Gitmo — men captured on the battlefield. Now the Times is willing to forfeit any civil justice system at all in Iraq.

What the Times proposes may be over-the-top, but it should be remembered for the Times has abandoned its principles.

Its next call to spend more money on the environment will be framed with the reminder of how large a carbon footprint the Al-Qaida Car Bombing Brigade will leave in Iraq if we surrender immediately.

Its next call for equal pay for women will be framed with a reminder that the Times is willing to allow in Iraq for the stoning of raped women as punishment for “adultery.”

Its next call for more spending on education will be framed with the reminder that the Times is willing to allow students in Iraq to be blown up in their schools and to be forced to attend jihadist schools.

Its next call for “affordable housing” will be framed with the reminder that the Times is willing to allow for millions more to become refugees in Iraq as they flee the violence that will engulf that nation in the wake of a withdrawal of the U.S. troops.

Its next call for revamping Homeland Security will be framed with the reminder that the Times is willing to allow Iraq to resume its role as the chief exporter of terrorism to Israel.

Along those same lines, Jules Crittenden offers an analysis of the editorial that pretty accurately sums up the Times' priorities: Genocide Preferred.

Pathetic. Despicable. Predictable.

Ladies and gentlemen: The New York Times.

--Shack

Thompson under fire

It now appears that the strongest lines of attack against Fred Thompson will focus on his work as a lobbyist--and, in particular, some of the clients he may or may not have represented.

Witness an LA Times story (later picked up by the AP) claiming Thompson did lobbying work for a pro-abortion organization in 1991.

Now, leave aside the fact that this was in 1991--back before a 1994 survey where he allegedly took a pro-choice stance, which isn't that big a deal (all sides are in agreement that he has long since taken a strong and consistent pro-life position). Nonetheless, NewsBusters tears the story to shreds.

(They also note that the people making these claims about Thompson have ties to the campaign of a certain other presidential candidate. Three guesses who that candidate is, and the first two don't count.)

--Shack

Those crazy, crazy presidents

President Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence, which he claimed to be excessive, was unquestionably a clumsy political move. But a travesty? Impeachable? As far as presidential mercy goes (along with its attendant explanations) Bush's exercise of it was better than a few P.S. Ruckman Jr. at National Review could name:

The government section of the public library must be a spooky place for those who find Bush’s explanation of the lowest-grade quality. In the Annual Report of the attorney general, one can see pardons have been granted because criminals were “reformed,” promised to reform, or because their release might cause others to reform. Pardons have been given to those who were insane, went insane in prison, and those who might have gone insane if put into prison. Pardons have also been granted so criminals could take care of someone else who went insane, was going insane or did not want to go insane. Benjamin Ogle (convicted of manslaughter) was pardoned by Abraham Lincoln, in part, because Ogle was “rather remarkable for his good-humored disposition.” Now, imagine if Bush had written that! Lincoln was also moved by John Lawson’s “reputation for honesty.” Lawson (alias John Lassano) had been convicted for passing counterfeit money. If you think Bush’s explanation was among the very poorest, you just don’t have a library card.

Reductio ad Lincolnium doesn't do it for you? Then here are a few more presidential examples:

As long as presidents swear to uphold the law and pardon those who have violated it, we can complain about inconsistency and hypocrisy. George Washington argued ignorance of the law was a “frivolous” plea, but justified his first pardon on the ground that the recipient had not “informed himself” of the law. Vice President John Adams was angry that Washington pardoned the Whiskey Rebels. But, as president, Adams pardoned participants in Fries’s Rebellion. William H. Taft argued it was “necessary” for rich criminals to serve out their sentences, but pardoned some of the wealthiest people ever convicted. Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned Ezra Heywood because he thought Heywood had been wrongly convicted for “obscenity.” After Hayes got a good chewing-out from his wife, he refused to “nullify” the law or “intrude” when persons were convicted for similar behavior. Grover Cleveland had pardons for vote fraud committed in favor of his own party. Otherwise, it was a “barefaced and wicked” offense. Dwight Eisenhower took Harry Truman to task for last-minute pardons, then followed suit.

Might I also suggest that if Bush were issuing a pardon or clemency for the crime of leaking Valerie Plame's identity--rather than for apparently inconsistent testimony from a politically-charged fishing expedition--those complaining might have a bit more of a leg to stand on.

But it would be silly of me to think that liberals believe that's what Libby was convicted of, wouldn't it? It would be like liberals thinking that people like me believe 9/11 was orchestrated by Saddam Hus...

Wait a sec.

--Shack

The klutz in the White House

A deft political operator, our president is not. This should come as no surprise to anyone by now, on either side of the aisle--President Bush will be remembered as much for his tone-deaf political pratfalls (see Michael Brown, Harriet Miers, Donald Rumsfeld, Dubai Ports, immigration, etc.) as for his verbal ones.

His decision to commute Scooter Libby's prison sentence falls squarely into this pattern.

Let's get this out of the way straight off: It should also be clear to all involved that Libby was not the fish Democrats were looking to fry. The situation is, in many ways, similar to the Georgia Thompson scenario here in Wisconsin; just as the Thompson trial was seen as an indictment of the Doyle administration, so Libby's was seen as the Bush administration on trial.

Let's also get this out of the way: Libby was convicted of perjury by a jury of his peers (albeit with substantial problems--more than sufficient grounds for appeal, and I do think that Libby's conviction will eventually be overturned, as Thompson's was). His punishment, while far closer to the maximum allowable than the minimum (and twice as harsh as the prosecution wanted--though even what the prosecution wanted would have put him in prison for well over a year) was within prescribed sentencing guidelines. The sentencing judge was acting well within the letter of the law once Libby had been convicted.

If there was a justification for Bush to get involved here, it would be that the case should never have gone to trial in the first place--that the special prosecutor, having discovered early on the source of the leak which prompted his appointment in the first place (and having determined that the leaker had not committed a crime in doing so) proceeded to go on a fishing expedition--a witch hunt, in essence--looking for someone--anyone--to haul before a jury.

The thing is, those aren't grounds for commuting Libby's sentence. Those are grounds for a full pardon.

By doing anything in this case, Bush draws the wrath of the Democrats and their media allies. But by allowing the conviction to stand, Bush implicitly concedes that Libby should have been prosecuted--and that the administration, by proxy, is guilty of whatever nefarious schemings Joseph and Valerie Wilson are claiming this week.

In typical ham-fisted fashion, Bush has garnered the worst of both worlds--for himself, for his administration, and for his party.

--Shack

Godwin's Law and the Journal Sentinel

Today's Crossroads section includes a column by Nancy Bauer-King. The column--largely about how the columnist's husband pitched a fit when, in buying a new car, he was required by the Patriot Act to provide his Social Security number--included this gratuitous little paragraph near the end:

In a magazine article titled "Fascism Anyone?" (Free Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 2), Laurence Britt, who studied fascist regimes, lists 14 common threads. Here are a few: powerful and continuing nationalism; disdain for human rights; identification of enemies as unifying cause; obsession with national security; rampant cronyism and corruption in positions of power; and religion and government intertwined.

Three points to be made here:

• While it's not an online discussion, the corollary of Godwin's Law--which holds that whoever brings up the Nazis (or, in this case, their more generic fascist equivalents) has lost the argument--should probably apply here.

• With the exception of the last two points--one of which applies just as well to Democrats as to Republicans, and the other of which is used/abused by the columnist to confuse religious activism with a state-sponsored church--these "common threads" are largely exaggerations of traits that are essential for a nation's survival and prosperity.

• Whether one believes these traits have crossed the line into fascist characteristics is almost certainly determined by whether one believes we are confronted by a serious threat.

Suffice it to say that Bauer-King and I have very different opinions on that last question.

--Shack

How...*inconvenient.*

In the Chicago Sun-Times, James M. Taylor notes, among other things, a few claims from Al Gore's 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" that had been refuted before the film was even released:

Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."

[...]

Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts. However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."

Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet. But according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." In late 2006, researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the past two decades were the coldest for Greenland since the 1910s.

Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting because of global warming. Yet the Jan. 14, 2002, issue of Nature magazine reported Antarctica as a whole has been dramatically cooling for decades. More recently, scientists reported in the September 2006 issue of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, that satellite measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet showed significant growth between 1992 and 2003. And the U.N. Climate Change panel reported in February 2007 that Antarctica is unlikely to lose any ice mass during the remainder of the century.

Taylor ends his piece by wondering whether Gore will "rise to the occasion" and "lead by example in his call for an end to the distortion of science."

Taylor, apparently, has forgotten that Al Gore was a high-ranking member of the Clinton Administration--and that of the few to rise to the occasion in that administration, fewer still can be mentioned in polite company.

--Shack

Betting Milwaukee on Yi

While I don't normally talk about sports on this blog, one aspect of the debacle that has been and continues to be the Milwaukee Bucks' 2007 NBA draft jumps out at me.

When you consider some of the other teams that Yi Jianlin's handlers considered acceptable places for him to end up, it becomes clear that most of the reasons suggested for their objections to the Bucks--team quality (Boston), geographic location (Chicago), Asian-American population (both of those, as well as Philadelphia), etc.--don't hold water.

You keep coming back to one conclusion: it isn't that Yi's handlers don't want him playing for the Bucks. It's that they don't want him playing in Milwaukee.

It's all about the tiny Milwaukee market--and that's what makes this such a dangerous situation. Keep in mind that there is a very real chance that, when Senator Kohl finally sells the team, the Bucks will move to another city if they cannot get a new arena (the name I hear bandied about every so often is the Las Vegas Buck$, and I'm hard-put to disagree), and that it is already a no-go location for most of the NBA's established stars (to such a degree that, when a player refuses to leave the Bucks, as happened with Michael Redd in 2005, he's considered to be "snubbing" the other team).

That kind of leverage from the likes of Kobe Bryant, while we might complain about it, can be tolerated. But from a draft pick--from what is supposed to be the rebuilding safeguard of all NBA teams?

By drafting Yi, Larry Harris has stupidly picked a fight--and wagered Milwaukee's very suitability to host an NBA franchise on the outcome. If he loses--and I think he will--and the Bucks are forced to trade Yi (or Yi goes back to China rather than play for them) then for the good not only of the team, but of the NBA as a whole, the Bucks will be forced to move.

And the city of Milwaukee will be the big loser in the fiasco.

--Shack

RIP, classi--*bzzt*crackle*

I like classical music. I don't go out of my way to listen to it, but I'd hardly be inclined to turn it off, either--and it's far more tolerable than a great deal of what passes for "music" these days.

However, I hardly ever listened to WFMR-FM, which was Milwaukee's only classical music station--until midnight Monday, anyway, when the station switched to smooth jazz--and consider its format switch no great loss.

Why?

Because I listen to the radio pretty much exclusively when I'm in a car, and WFMR's radio signal was exceptionally weak. Rarely, if ever, could I get a clear reception; static riddled the station's broadcasts, and occasionally, when driving through the wrong spots, other stations' feeds would overlap and actually break through.

If there's anything less welcome than classical music with more static than cello, it's classical music interrupted by bursts of country or hip-hop.

The classical music radio format was already in decline; given the lousy way it was presented around here, it's amazing WFMR held on as long as it did.

--Shack

6 degrees of Bill Clinton

NewsBusters reminds us just who is behind the Center for American Progress, the group that co-authored Thursday's report on the Evils of Conservative-Dominated Talk Radio (TM):

For those unfamiliar with the Center, its President and CEO is none other than John Podesta, the former Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton. And:

• The Executive Vice President for Management is Sarah Rosen, who was also a member of the Clinton administration.
• Senior Vice President for Development Debbie Goldberg worked for the Clinton campaign.
• Senior Vice President and Director David Halperin was a speech writer for President Clinton.
• Vice President of Communications Jennifer Palmieri was Clinton’s White House Deputy Press Secretary.
• Senior Vice President for External Affairs Winnie Stachelberg worked at the Office of Management and Budget under Clinton.
• Vice President of Finance and Operations Brad Kiley worked for the Clinton administration.
• Ditto Peter Rundlet, Anna Soellner, Debbie Fine, and Michelle Jolin.

In reality, the staff and Senior Fellows listing of this Center reads like a Clinton administration Who’s Who.

Starting to get the picture?

Of course, far be it from me to ascribe something so base as a political motivation to all this. After all, the Clinton Administration was famous for its highly principled stances and...

...I'm sorry, I can't type that with a straight face.

--Shack

Axe-sharpening

I normally don't say anything when I make a change to the sidebar (I'm tinkering with it all the time) but I decided to make an exception here.

Under the Ideology section, "My Axe"--which previously led to the National Right to Life Committee--now links to a site that makes it just a little clearer what it is I have to grind.

--Shack

But I thought AMERICA was the problem.

That was why all the fuss about us not signing onto Kyoto, wasn't it?

From Guardian Unlimited:

China overtakes US as world's biggest CO2 emitter

That would be China, as in long one of the fastest-growing countries in the world--and the same country that Kyoto let completely off the hook.

We may as well all get together and wish the environmentalists of the world the best of luck--they're going to need it. If they thought they were having a tough time pressuring the United States to go along with their insane, self-destructive agenda, just wait until they try sneering at the Middle Kingdom.

--Shack

On Fairness (or lack thereof)

In the Brew City Brawler's recent scuffles with Patrick McIlheran over the Fairness Doctrine, it seems to me that there is a certain lack of understanding on the part of both combatants as to what the doctrine in question would actually entail.

Saith the Brawler:

A radio station can run Rush Limbaugh if it wants. But if it's going to run the rantings of that big, fat idiot, it needs to run countering views.

Confirmeth McIlheran:

Suppose WTMJ runs Charlie Sykes in the mornings, then gives the Brawler all afternoon to rant in reply.

In short--both apparently believe the doctrine would simply require conservative commentators to be balanced by liberal commentators.

Here's the thing, though. The Fairness Doctrine wasn't looking to regulate a balance in political commentary as a whole. It was looking to regulate balance individually, on each specific issue discussed.

In other words, it wouldn't be enough if you gave, say, Al Franken two hours to offset two hours of Rush Limbaugh. You would have to take each and every issue Rush raised, and find someone to offer the opposing view on each and every issue--more than likely several someones, unless you have a duly appointed anti-Rush, who argued the opposing positions simply because it was his or her job (in other words, a lawyer).

It's not a rule friendly to freewheeling, multi-topic talk radio. You, as a broadcaster, would be far better off picking a single issue and then bringing in the opposing viewpoints.

And even then, you're not safe, because the presentation for each issue doesn't just have to be equal--it also has to be fair. Is it a fair presentation if one side did a better job than the other? If one side failed to present the best arguments? If one side presented its arguments in a busier timeslot than the other?

And horror of horrors--what if one side actually won the argument? Would that be fair?

(Keep in mind, too, who's enforcing this--the FCC, whose chair is a presidential appointee. If you think the party in power isn't going to make a difference as to what's considered "fair," I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.)

It's virtually the same situation as the Title IX athletics fiasco. In theory, there were three ways for schools to come into compliance with that law:

1. Demonstrating continual expansion of athletic opportunities for women.
2. "Full and effective accomodation" of women's abilities/interests.
3. Athletic opportunities proportionate to the student body makeup (i.e. a strict quota).

In practice, the first two methods for compliance were so vague as to be virtually unintelligible. Schools trying to follow one of these methods had no way of knowing whether they were doing it right until they were ruled to be in violation.

The only safe way of complying with Title IX was option #3: the quota. And so--because it's far easier economically to eliminate existing men's programs than to add new women's programs--a number of men's sports were decimated.

Likewise with the Fairness Doctrine, and its vague, undefined "fair." When you don't know the rules, the only winning move is not to play--and by and large, that's exactly what broadcasters did, and would do again. Rather than risk being penalized for an unfair presentation of an issue, they would simply seek to avoid presenting the issues altogether.

That may be a win for stances shared by the "unbiased" fraternity of journalists--whose "objective" news broadcasts would once again reign supreme over the airwaves--but it's hardly a win for the public interest.

And after all, as the Brawler rightly noted--the public interest is the bottom line here.

--Shack

An excellent turn of phrase

There's very little I like about Rudy Giuliani. There is no circumstance where I would vote for him in the Republican primary, and I have serious doubts about whether I would vote for him in the general election.

But I will give him this--in announcing his campaign's "Twelve Commitments" (H/T Power Line) Giuliani leads off with the perfect response to John Edwards' idiotic denunciation of the War on Terror as a mere bumper sticker slogan:

1. I will keep America on offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us.

Giuliani shouldn't win the Republican nomination. But Republicans would be well-served to adopt this particular facet of his campaign party-wide.

--Shack

Rule of law? HILLARY?

President George W. Bush believes warrantless wiretapping to be justified by the threat of terrorism--which, as far as justifications go, is a pretty high-level danger.

As National Review's Byron York relates while discussing two new biographies, Would-Be President Hillary R. Clinton's threat threshold is just a little bit lower:

For example, we’ve all heard about the famous War Room of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. But Gerth and Van Natta reveal that across the alley from the War Room was a more secretive effort, headed by Hillary and known as the Defense Team, that really got into the down-and-dirty stuff. The Defense Team’s job was to knock down any allegation, no matter how well founded, about Bill Clinton’s girlfriends, his avoidance of the draft, Whitewater, Hillary Clinton’s legal work — anything that might hurt the campaign. And to do it by any means necessary, legal or not: Gerth and Van Natta report that on one occasion Mrs. Clinton listened to a “secretly recorded audiotape” of Clinton adversaries talking on the phone about the next possible bimbo eruption. “Bill’s supporters monitored frequencies used by cell phones,” Gerth and Van Natta add, “and the tape was made during one of those monitoring sessions.” Who knew that Mrs. Clinton was an early advocate of warrantless wiretapping?

I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again--the more I hear about Hillary Clinton, the harder it is to believe that anyone could take her seriously as a candidate.

That she has at least an even chance of actually winning the presidency is scary.

--Shack

More understanding = less understanding

Kathleen Parker has a real head-scratcher of a column on the departure of General Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, filled with all kinds of bizarre explanations--from speculations on how a move initiated by the White House was "a way for the Democratic Congress to further undermine President Bush" to this little gem:

What we do know is that even in wartime, everything is political. Thus, a better route to understanding may be to pose the question raised by Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness: ``Cui bono?'' Who benefits?

One doesn't need much of a running start to make the leap to Sen. Hillary Clinton, who also sits on the Armed Services Committee and who, you may have heard, is running for commander in chief. No one benefits more from Pace's removal than Clinton, who would have had to vote for or against the man and be stuck with a position that could hurt her.

So President Bush removed General Pace to help Senator Clinton's presidential campaign.

...WHAT?

--Shack

Fred builds steam, friction

The latest polls show Fred Thompson rising rapidly--only six points behind Giuliani, according to the most recent LA Times/Bloomberg poll.

Meanwhile, George Will has a column in the June 18 Newsweek blasting Thompson as a candidate who's all sizzle and no substance--Reagan as his critics saw him, Will charges, as opposed to the real thing. (Judging from the only policy stance ascribed to the candidate in the column, Will has an axe to grind here--namely, McCain-Feingold, which Thompson voted for while in the Senate.)

--Shack

Gore caught using bogus data (again)

This time, as Andrew Ferguson details in the Washington Post, the Inventor Of The Internet (TM) is abusing not science, but history:

You can't really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, "The Assault on Reason." It's a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I'd love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.

In a chapter entitled "The Politics of Wealth," Gore argues that the ancient threat to democracy posed by rich people run amok has finally been realized under the man who beat him in the 2000 presidential race. Even Lincoln, Gore says, saw the age of Bush coming in 1864: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

The quote is a favorite of liberal bloggers, which is probably how Gore came across it. And as a description of how many on the left see the country seven years into their Bush nightmare, it's pretty much perfect.

[...]

It's a fake.

Writing in 1999 in the Abraham Lincoln Association's newsletter, the great Lincoln historian Thomas F. Schwartz traced the bogus passage to the 1880s, about 20 years after Lincoln's death. One theory is that it first appeared in a pamphlet advertising patent medicines. Opponents of Gilded Age capitalism -- Gore's forerunners -- found the quote so useful that Lincoln's former White House secretaries felt compelled to launch a campaign "denouncing the forgery," Schwartz said. Robert Todd Lincoln, who was the president's only surviving son and himself a wealthy railroad lawyer, called it "an impudent invention" that ascribed to his father views that the former president would never have held.

"I discovered what I think is the true and only source of this supposed quotation," Robert wrote in an unpublished letter, probably tongue-in-cheek. "It originated, I think, at what is called a Spiritualist Séance in a country town in Iowa, a number of years ago, as being a communication by President Lincoln through what is called a Medium." Even bloggers might think twice about trusting such a source.

For more on the fake Lincoln quote, see snopes.com.

--Shack

Back in the day...

Jessica McBride notes that a conservative state legislator submitted a letter to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in her support, but that the paper didn't run it. She ponders:

Pretty telling. Imagine what happened to the conservative voice on various issues in the days before blogs. It just didn't get through the media gate.

Now, as it happens, I have some experience in this area. Over the years, I've written, and had published, a number of letters to the Journal Sentinel, and to the Journal before it. And I can tell you from experience that the media gate wouldn't just sit on the conservative voice. Even when they let it through, they'd work to dilute it, with every loophole in their arsenal; if you didn't know the rules of the game, you were screwed.

A couple of examples:

• My very first letter to the editor, written way back in the days of the Milwaukee Journal, blasted an aspect of the pro-choice position prominent in the abortion debate at the time. (I haven't changed much, as you can see.) I never heard back from the Journal; my letter just suddenly appeared in the paper one day--almost half a year after I sent it in. Lesson learned: always respond to specific events/articles.

• When the Journal and Sentinel merged, one of the first editorials the new paper put out described the board's position on abortion. I didn't think much of their reasoning, and sent a letter blasting the paper's stance as "journalistic cowardice." (Hey, cut me some slack--I was still in high school.) The Journal Sentinel printed my letter, all right--again, many months after I sent it, long after anyone had any idea what editorial my letter was referring to. Lesson learned: always include the date and/or title of the event/article you're responding to.

There have been other examples. The paper used to have a "Talk Back" feature, where the editors would respond to selected letters. They once picked one of mine--another abortion letter, to which they flippantly replied that Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, so there. (They ended up printing another letter about a week later blasting their response, so I count that occasion as a win for me.) On a number of occasions, I've had letters edited--changes that seemed to me to be more about blunting the effectiveness of my wording than about conserving space, though I suppose that is open to debate.

My most interesting experience, though, came when I once had a letter published in response to another letter that had recently appeared in the paper--this one on the subject of US promotion of birth control internationally, if I remember correctly. A few days later, the Journal Sentinel printed a response to my letter...by the author of the original letter, in blatant violation of the paper's "1 letter every 2 months" limit. (I tried sending in a response to the response--sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, I argued--but the paper did not print it.)

Even more interesting--I received an anonymous letter a few days later claiming that the letter-writer I'd just been clashing with had been dead for several years. I didn't investigate then (and I've since forgotten the name of the deceased scribe) but that, in combination with the paper mysteriously waiving its normal restrictions, leads me to believe that I'd stumbled over a member of the Journal Sentinel staff, publishing his/her own letters under a pseudonym.

(I once mentioned this incident to someone who works at the paper, and was told that some time ago, the paper tightened up its verification procedures. Certainly, sometime after that incident, the paper started contacting me for verification before publishing my letters, so something like that last one probably wouldn't happen anymore.)

So yes, it would happen--and that's not counting the letters of mine that never made it into the paper. And given that it happened so often to me--an above-average wordsmith, in my not-so-humble opinion--I can only imagine what the "gatekeepers" did with other writers.

--Shack

Two tales of 2006

It strikes me, in following the Democratic and Republican campaigns for President, that there are two competing explanations about the 2006 elections.

The explanation bandied about on the Republican side is that the GOP lost big in 2006 because the party had lost its way--because of wasteful spending, because of corruption, because of mismanagement in Iraq. These are fixable issues, according to this explanation--and on Iraq, in particular, what voters want is victory.

The explanation bandied about on the Democratic side, by contrast, is that the GOP lost big in 2006 because of America's very presence in Iraq. The voters don't want victory anymore, according to this explanation--what they want is out.

Candidates on both sides are, by and large, running their campaigns according to their party's explanations, and whichever candidates win the nominations of their respective parties will likely continue to do so through the general election.

Here's the thing, though--these two explanations are mutually exclusive. They cannot both be true. At least one of them is false.

Either the Republicans or the Democrats have drastically misread the message voters sent in the 2006 midterm elections. Whichever party that is will likely find itself completely out of power following Election Day 2008.

(Which party do I think that is? Much as I'd like to buy the GOP vision, the Democrats and their media allies have been pushing a self-fulfilling prophecy of unremitting gloom and disaster in Iraq for the last four-plus years. Their Big Lie has worked, and worked to perfection--and I fear it's far too late for anything the Republicans [or General Petraeus in Iraq, for that matter] can do to make a difference.)

--Shack

How to attack Fred?

NewsBusters takes a look at what it calls three "trial balloons" from the media regarding potential negative storylines about Fred Thompson.

The first--that Thompson isn't to be trusted because he quit his acting job in order to run for president.

...right. Moving on...

The second--by running, Thompson is stabbing his friend John McCain in the back.

A compelling soap opera storyline, but I doubt it will get much traction in a presidential race. (I also suspect that someone across the pond has been reading a few too many tabloids.)

The third is the one I brought up a few days ago--the charge that Thompson is too lazy to be president, exemplified here by a new story in Newsweek.

Thus far, that looks like the most credible line of attack--and that's not much.

As I've said before, we haven't seen anything yet. When Thompson enters the presidential race, he's accepting an invitation to run the gauntlet. Thompson's opposition will give him as thorough a vetting as anyone could imagine--and if they can't manage to dig anything up, someone, in desperation, will make something up.

Either way, the media will fall on whatever comes to light like a pack of wolves.

And that's the point where we'll find out whether Fred Thompson is presidential material.

--Shack

Van Hollen: WI partial-birth law unenforceable

The AP reports:

Wisconsin’s ban on so-called partial birth abortion likely will remain unenforceable even though the U.S. Supreme Court in April upheld a federal ban on the procedure, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said Thursday.

That is because Wisconsin’s law is based on a broad Nebraska ban the Supreme Court struck down, not the more narrow federal ban it upheld, Van Hollen said in a legal opinion requested by two Republican legislative leaders.

...

The Supreme Court said the differently worded law that Congress passed and President Bush signed in 2003 does not violate a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. Van Hollen said that law contains a more narrow and precise definition of the procedure than Wisconsin’s ban.

Because of that, a federal judge is unlikely to lift the injunction, Van Hollen said.

Van Hollen issued his legal opinion in response to a request from Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch, R-West Salem, and Senate Minority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau.

In light of the opinion, Fitzgerald will now look at what changes need to be made to bring Wisconsin law in line with what the Supreme Court ruled was an acceptable ban, his spokesman Mike Prentiss said. When the bill passed in 1998 it had bipartisan support, he noted.

I have a feeling Fitzgerald can put "a new governor" at the top of his list of changes needed. Given the recent example of legislators like Harry Reid and Joe Biden--who voted for the federal ban and then proceeded to express shock and dismay when the Supreme Court had the audacity to actually uphold the law they'd passed--it's safe to say that many Democrats who supported the ban did so solely to try to lure pro-life voters...with the unspoken expectation (understanding?) that the courts would strike the ban down.

There's no reason to think things are any different on the state level. Now that Democrats know that what they vote for will actually stick, you can expect that "bipartisan support" to dwindle rapidly--to well below the numbers required to override a Jim Doyle veto.

--Shack

Early shots at Fred Thompson

As expected, now that Fred Thompson is in the presidential race, the scrutiny is starting to ramp up. An early example of how he'll likely be attacked comes from John Dickerson of Slate:

One of the biggest (and longstanding) knocks against the former senator is that he doesn't have the heart for the race or the job. In short: He's lazy. A campaign that relies on pithy lines and the Internet feeds the lounge-chair image. It looks like he's trying to elevate laziness into a virtue. Several of Thompson's rivals, who know him from his time in Washington, elaborate on that theme. He wasn't known for his hard work in the Senate. Exhibit A, they say, was the 1997 campaign-finance hearings he chaired, which he started with a bang by promising grand disclosures but ended in a fizzle without uncovering much.

Fair or not, the laziness rap against Thompson is like the rap that former presidential hopeful Sen. George Allen isn't a genius. Or that John McCain is a hothead. It's an unresolved issue waiting for its moment to become a crisis for the campaign. Thompson's spokesman, Mark Corallo, brushes off critics with a line Ronald Reagan used when belittling what he considered his opponent's hysterical distortions: "There they go again."

The laziness charge can be deadly because however much voters like the notion of no-sweat solutions, they also want to be sure that their president is up at night worrying about terrorist attacks so they don't have to. They also like to know they're getting their money's worth from their public officials. After the early-to-bed Bush administration, this may be truer than ever.

The other problem with being a lazy candidate is that laziness makes you think you can wing it. This may explain Thompson's much-discussed (by Republicans anyway) lackluster performance at the California Lincoln Club in May. He tore up his speech and just ad-libbed. The lack of direction showed, at least as far as influential conservative columnist Robert Novak was concerned. Because Thompson's candidacy benefits so much from his performance abilities, like Barack Obama on the Democratic side, he pays a bigger price than other candidates if he doesn't consistently excite party activists each time he gets on stage.

Jessica McBride also notes potential problems for Thompson in abortion, as he was apparently pro-choice at one point back in 1994.

I'm not very concerned on that front. Thompson's voting record in the Senate was consistently pro-life; his conversion--if there was a conversion--was not a recent or politically contrived phenomenon (as opposed to, say, Mitt Romney) and is thus far more likely to be the genuine article. I think he can be trusted here.

It's still early, and as of yet the opposition hasn't really dug into Thompson. It'll be interesting to see how he handles it when they do.

I'll be watching.

--Shack