Beware: New Internet scam

There is a new scam online: People who claim to be Republicans putting up Web sites to solicit donations. Do not give these RINOs money! They only push liberal open-borders and bailout agendas (and lose elections to Democrats). Ace has the details of the scam that any Nigerian would be ashamed to attempt.

UPDATE: My friends, I've been linked at Cold Fury.

'Don't they have any firehoses?'

Little Miss Attila works two blocks from the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles and reports on the protests:

My boss tells me that our need to commute to the office trumps the protesters' right to free speech, and claims to think that a totalitarian state would work out just fine, provided he was "part of the totality."
We are looking down on the two groups of protesters from the 14th Floor of the Petersen Building; it is really the 13th Floor, but isn't called that because of superstition and/or the presence of a couple of firearms in our gun safe.
"Why do they let them do that?" he keeps asking. "Don't they have any firehoses?" And he almost means it.

LMA also has a nice post about Internet writing:

It’s not just a matter of bloggers having utter license in what subject matter they cover, though that, too: it's also the fact that no one is bound by column length; no one is writing copy to fit into a certain amount of space, and no copy-fitting need be done. . . .
To write on the web is to write prose that is, like Abraham Lincoln's legs, exactly the right length to reach the ground.

She's obviously off her meds again. Her writing is so much more colorful when she's off her meds. As long as you can avoid become an ax-murderer in an unmedicated state, that's always better as a writer.

Joe goes to Gaza

Joe the Plumber will be a war correspondent for PJTV. Wow. (H/T: Michelle Malkin.)

Buckley & Reagan

Bill Buckley's last book, The Reagan I Knew, gets reviewed by Hunter Baker at The American Spectator:

What one sees in the letters between the two great icons of 20th-century American conservatism is a conversation between equals. Buckley was not the Machiavellian manipulator liberals might have believed Reagan "the amiable dunce" needed. Instead, he was an ideological soulmate, a debate partner, and occasionally an opponent. These were two men working to the same end, but never shy to differ or to try to convince the other of their own position.

I've read the book, and it is absolutely charming. You will enjoy the inside jokes between Reagan and Buckley, who keeps promising to run away to Casablanca with Nancy, and refers to himself as Reagan's ambassador to Kabul. You should definitely buy the book.

January Jones, dissed?

A reader e-mails:

You've been giving a lot of love to Christina Hendricks (which is QUITE understandable), but let's not forget another good reason to watch Mad Men.

He then links to a Vanity Fair feature on co-star January Jones:

I don't know. The thing with Christina Hendricks is that she's such a rara avis. Skinny blondes are a dime a dozen in Hollywood, but you just don't see so many bombshell redheads. But I'm a free-market blogger, so if there is more demand for January Jones, I'll try to provide the supply.

Jack Kemp diagnosed with cancer

Via Newsalert: Politico reports:

Former GOP vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp, 73, has been diagnosed with cancer. According to a statement from his consulting firm, Kemp Partners, doctors are still testing Kemp before determining a course of treatment.
"Mr. Kemp and his family are grateful for the thoughts and prayers of friends and appreciate respect for their privacy at this time," read a statement from his spokeswoman Bona Park.

Kemp is one of the great free-market, supply-side champions of the Republican Party.

Video: Sarah with her hair down

(BUMPED & UPDATED)

(Via Hot Air.) This is the woman that the media wants you to believe is an unqualified moron who is hated by the majority of American voters. Do you believe that?

UPDATE: Welcome, Team Sarah members! You might want to read some of my American Spectator columns about Sarah Palin:

• 12/23: Rousing the Rabble
• 10/31: Stickin' With the Hockey Mom
• 9/10: Sweetheart of the Heartland
• 9/8: The Miracle Worker

Meanwhile, Kevin Vance of the Weekly Standard has a report on the Left's effort to discredit Team Sarah. I reported on this Saturday, and Victor Morton of The Washington Times has a report today.

BTW, Team Sarah will have a breakfast for pro-lifers Jan. 22 before the annual March for Life in Washington.

UPDATE II: Flopping Aces: They're not worried, right?

Democrats agree to seat Burris?

A Democratic Party crisis averted?

Roland Burris, the man appointed to Barack Obama's Senate seat by embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, will be allowed to take the seat, according to the Associated Press. Spokespersons for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin are denying the report.
Burris showed up in Washington for yesterday's Senate swearing-in session, but was turned down by Senate Democrats who had previously vowed not to seat anyone appointed by Blagojevich. The governor has been charged with effectively trying to sell the seat and hearings are being held in Illinois over impeaching him. Now, however, the Senate Democrats "plan to embrace Roland Burris for President-elect Barack Obama's vacant seat," the AP reports.

Some people haven't gotten the memo, it seems. The Obama transition keeps "chugging down the tracks to Smoothville," as MK Ham said.

UPDATE: "Clean and articulate." Heh.

'Oddly engrossing'

If your name is Hua Hsu, you're allowed to describe Lothrop Stoddard's 1920 book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, as "oddly engrossing." Otherwise, don't even acknowledge that you've ever heard of anyone named Stoddard. Or Madison Grant, Wilmot Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, Sam Francis, Mark Steyn . . .

Perhaps I should change my name?

The immigration crisis you never hear about

Law-abiding people who want to play by the rules are put through the wringer, as in the case of an American who wanted to bring his pregnant Polish fiance to this country:

I met Justyna while studying abroad in London in 2005. She is Polish by birth but had been living, working, and attending school in the United Kingdom for over two years at the time. With only an easily obtained student visa, I enjoyed the same privileges, including England’s national health care system -- a resource that proved especially useful when Justyna became pregnant in the spring of 2006.
We decided that I would return to America and finish my degree while she would go home to Poland to have the baby near her family. With the intention of bringing my wife to America after the birth of our child, I filed an I-129f Petition for Fiance(e) visa in October 2006. Thus began our protracted and degrading experience with the United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS.

"Degrading" being the key word here. The necessary corollary to boundless tolerance of illegal immigration seems to be a process for legal immigrants that is humiliating and expensive. Ask any Canadian or Brit who's tried it.

There is a passage in Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation where a foreign-born friend talks about the difficulty of bringing over his mother, and Brimelow advises: "Just get her a tourist visa and let her overstay." It's very practical advice. The enforcement mechanism is broken and, even if La Migra came for Mum, the appeals process can delay deportation almost infinitely. It's easier to break the law than to obey it.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

UPDATE: Another way to avoid the immigration hassle? Tell them you're gay! (H/T: Michelle Malkin.)

UPDATE II: Linked at Sundries Shack. Thanks.

Kudlow on the economy

Does it make sense to open the neo-Keynesian floodgates if we're already at or near the bottom?

President-elect Obama said today that we should expect trillion dollar budget deficits for the next few years. But do we really need this unbelievable increase in the size and scope of government? Art Laffer is very gloomy about big-government spending and borrowing. He believes deficits of this magnitude and a large increase in the government share of GDP are liens on future tax hikes that will slow the economy's potential to grow.
It was Milton Friedman years ago who taught us that the real tax burden on the economy is best measured as the government spending share of GDP. That measure has been falling for over 20 years, until President Bush’s second term. Now Obama’s plan will ratchet this tax burden much higher.
My point? We don't need all this. Lower tax rates for large and small businesses along with easier money and lower gasoline prices will get us on the right track to increase the economy’s potential to prosper.

I think Kudlow is too optimistic about the prospects of a recovery in the short term, but I agree that Obama's mega-stimulus talk is the wrong way to go. It won't work.

The bright side? If any Democrat ever tries to lecture me about deficits again . . .

Good news (PGNJB)

Republican prayers -- Please God, Not Jeb Bush (PGNJB) -- have been answered:

This morning, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush released the following statement on the 2010 United States Senate race in Florida for Senator Mel Martinez's Senate seat:
"After thoughtful consideration, I have decided not to run for the United States Senate in 2010.
"While the opportunity to serve my state and country during these turbulent and dynamic times is compelling, now is not the right time to return to elected office.
"In the coming months and years, I hope to play a constructive role in the future of the Republican Party . . ."

Blah, blah, blah. K-Lo, Allah and Ace are all depressed by the news, but the only thing I find depressing is that Jeb Bush still wants to be involved with the Republican Party -- meaning he might still seek the presidency at some future point. Is there some way we could get the Bushes to switch to the Democrats?

Britney's titneys

I have no idea if the photo is real, but it's definitely not safe for work. In this kind of economy, you don't want to risk getting fired, so you probably shouldn't click that link. I mean, the odds are it's a PhotoShop fake and you wouldn't want to get fired for that.

UPDATE: In thematically related news:

"Not only is she the most amazing actress in the entire world, she's nude in a lot of her films which shows she’s just fearless."

Via WeSmirch.

Breitbart's Big Hollywood debuts

The site went live this morning and there's nothing (yet) that knocks me out, but it's a work-in-progress. I interviewed Andrew Breitbart last month:

The content of "Big Hollywood" will be a "constant evolution," Breitbart says. He recalls that the Huffington Post was originally conceived as a group blog for Arianna's celebrity friends, but has since "developed organically" into a more news-oriented venture with political commentary and only occasional contributions by big names. "It really is hard to look at that site and see it as a celebrity blog," he says.
And while he expects "Big Hollywood" to undergo a similarly slow process of development, the one aspect of HuffPo that Breitbart's new site won't emulate is the vitriol. "That's not my style," he says, declaring that the blog will strive for "a more tolerant tone." Tolerance? In Hollywood? What a concept!

The "organic development" model is the only sensible way to do things on the Internet. You start the site with some particular vision in mind, see what works and what doesn't, do more more of what works and drop those things that don't. What Big Hollywood is on Jan. 6 is probably but a shadow of what it will be on July 6.

BTW, Andrew, if you want to add some kind snarking-on-paparazzi-plagued-starlets feature -- or maybe occasional essays on the cultural signficance of Christina Hendricks' cleavage -- just let me know. And good luck!

Blackwell 'dangerously incompetent'?

Ken Blackwell's campaign for RNC chairman comes under anonymous attack. Suspects? Given what I know about South Carolina GOP politics -- there is nothing dirtier this side of Chicago than a Republican primary in South Carolina -- my suspicion would naturally fall on the Caton Dawson camp. But that's probably unfair, and certainly there is no direct evidence to support my suspicion. It could be the Duncan people or any of the other rivals. Whoever is behind it, I hate to see oppo-research smear tactics deployed in intramural combat.

Gaza update

Jules Crittenden suspects Glenn Greenwald of self-parody, although Greenwald's latest is actually one of his more rational exhalations. Perhaps his encounter with Hugh Hewitt steadied him. Or maybe he saw the light via the Sonny Corleone analogy. At any rate, there is no shortage of cruel irony in the latest news:

At least thirty people were reportedly killed and 53 wounded in an explosion in a UN-run school in the town of Jabalya in the northern Gaza Strip, according to Palestinians. The IDF issued a statement saying the school grounds were used by terrorists to fire mortar shells at the troops.
Troops inside Gaza The infantrymen returned mortar shell fire into the school grounds, the army said. Defense officials told The Associated Press that booby-trapped bombs in the school triggered the secondary explosions which killed scores of Palestinians on the site.

So, the United Nations builds a school in Gaza, which Hamas converts into a mortar base. (Michelle Malkin shows that this has been going on for months, and Ace has related thoughts.) As good an argument for defunding the U.N. as I've heard lately (of course, there are no bad arguments for defunding the U.N.). Other recent items:

• Steve Emerson ponders the "I (Heart) Hamas" bumper stickers plastered all over the New York Times coverage of the Gaza war.
• Egypt's Hosni Mubarak comes out forcefully against Hamas.
• Richard Cohen comes out forcefully against Hamas. (Nearly as surprising as Mubarak, although Cohen probably does not risk assassination by taking an anti-Hamas stance.)
• Ed Morrissey examines the parasitical nature of Hamas.
• Philip Klein explains how Israel protects its civilians.
• The war has achieved a basic military objective, namely disruption of the Hamas command-and-control structure. It appears that Hamas operations are now being directed from Syria.

Muqata has comprehensive coverage.

Justice by percentage

Ta-Nehisi Coates gets interviewed on NPR and James Poulos reflects:

Ta-Nehisi was challenged to affirm that a Senate which lacked even one black Senator, in this day and age, was by definition an unjust and/or unacceptable Senate. . . . "Okay," I told the radio evenly, "imagine I grant that a Senate without any black and/or African(-)American Senators is unjust and/or unacceptable. Why doesn’t the minimum threshhold then become two such Senators? Or three? Or…?"

Or how about 12? If 12% of the U.S. population is black, and the Senate is a representative institution, then why aren't blacks equally represented? And why aren't there 51 women senators? Why don't we have a Senate that "looks like America"?

We are once again back to the liberal fetish of equality, rooted in the hidden premise that equality and justice are the same thing, the obverse of which is that wherever one finds inequality, one has also found injustice. And James discovers CNN giving voice to Latinos who assert that they are underrepresented in the Obama Cabinet.

The unexamined "truth" that equality and justice are synonymous is pernicious enough when it involves ethnic mau-mauing over political spoils. Egalitarianism is actually more dangerous when applied to economics, as Ronald Reagan once wryly observed:

We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.

And it is this same egalitarian fallacy, I have argued, that motivates both feminism and the gay-rights movement. Mere liberty -- the freedom to live their lives with a minimum of government interference -- will not do. Rather, they demand that the coercive power of government be applied to rearrange society for their benefit.

Believe me, sir, those who attempt to level, never equalize. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.

The egalitarian fallacy rears its ugly head not merely in complaints of underrepresentation, but in overrepresentation, as in the ADL's fearfulness that some people suspect Jews of controlling Hollywood. Well, they do -- so what? And, to bring the subject back around to the Senate, while Jews are less than 2% of the U.S. population, they are 14% of the Senate. My own ethnic group, redneckus Americanus, might be said to be overrepresented among NASCAR drivers and country music stars. Is this evidence of a fiendish hillbilly conspiracy?

When children are thwarted, they are wont to complain, "That's not fair!" And as my parents inevitably replied, "Whoever told you life was supposede to be fair?" There is something puerile in the complaint that every inequality is unfair. Political maturity -- statesmanship -- requires a certain indifference to such complaints, and if Obama can resist pressure to apportion his appointments by quota, he will deserve praise for his statesmanship.

Vive La Difference!

The amazing Helen Rittelmeyer enthusiastically embraces the radical notion that men and women are different:

How do I know that gender differences matter? Gay men told me so. The very fact that people think of hetero- and homosexuality as inflexible sexual preferences tells us that gender isn't just any characteristic, but a fundamental one. . . .
A culture that cannot acknowledge gender differences has hobbled itself: it can't speak the truth and, if we know one thing about truth, it's that it always comes out one way or another. If we can’t talk about gender, we can’t develop helpful ways to deal with it; if we can’t deal with it, we guarantee that, when gender differences do surface, it will be in unhealthy ways. If gay marriage consigns us to that slow, unpleasant declension -- and it does -- it's something to think twice about.
Advocates of gay marriage may think they're showing due conservative respect to the institution of marriage, but, however much deference we give the institution of marriage, the fact of gender deserves infinitely more.

Miss Rittelmeyer is one of the few intellectuals who sees this issue with clear common sense. More often, the confrontation between common sense and intellectualism reminds me of a memorable scene from "No Time for Sergeants":

Like Private Stockdale, I'm from Georgia.

UPDATE: Donald Douglas at American Power gets in on the debate, as does liberal Freddie at L'Hote. There's even a thread at Memeorandum.

RNC chair debate

(RE-BUMPED; UPDATES BELOW)
Republicans need to have a "shareholder revolt," Ken Blackwell told a standing-room-only crowd Monday at the National Press Club, where the former Ohio secretary of state was one of six candidates engaged in a debate for the Republican National Committee chairmanship.

Blackwell, who has been endorsed by several major conservative leaders, is widely considered a favorite for the RNC post. He is challenging challenging incumbent chairman Mike Duncan, as are Michigan GOP Chairman Saul Anuzis, South Carolina GOP Chairman Caton Dawson, Tennessee GOP activist Chip Saltsman and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele.

The debate was liveblogged by "Buddha Riggs," a guestblogger at LOTUS. Also liveblogging was David Weigel (Part I, Part II, Part III). More than 500 people turned out for the debate, which was emceed by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform.

Some highlights of the debate:

• In his introduction, Norquist got a laugh when he noted that Obama's handpicked choice for DNC chairman was "Tim Kaine, the tax-raising governor of Virginia." Norquist noted that this debate was the first of its kind, so "everybody here is part of a historic first."
• After Dawson had talked about his party work in South Carolina, Blackwell got a laugh when he said, "We know how hard it is to win elections in that swing state of South Carolina."
• Norquist asked the candidates who their favorite president was and everyone said Ronald Reagan. "You all got that one right," Norquist said drily.
• Blackwell compared Bush's bailout policies to Herbert Hoover, suggesting the bailouts would "pave the way" for even bigger boondoggles by Obama.
• Asked to name the biggest Republican mistake of recent years, Duncan said the Iraq war.

Who won the debate? Some conservatives I talked to afterwards said they thought Saltsman -- who managed Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign -- "exceeded expectations" with a very smooth, concise message. Another told me he thinks Duncan will surprise everyone by retaining the chairmanship. And another said he thinks the current situation favors Anuzis, whom he described as "everyone's second choice." I scored a brief post-debate interview with Anuzis:

I also caught Michael Steele talking to a TV crew:

And here is Patrick Ruffini talking about the debate, during which he and Rebuild the Party colleague Mindy Finn got to ask questions.

Everyone agreed the debate, carried live on C-SPAN, was a splendid idea. "I think this is great . . . to let the grassroots see what's going on," said Texas RNC member Tina Benkiser, who has endorsed Blackwell, along with such heavy hitters on the Right as David Keene, Al Regnery, Ed Meese, Richard Viguerie, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly, Tony Perkins, and Brent Bozell.

Eight TV cameras and scores of reporters and bloggers were on hand for the debate. Among those I saw were John Tabin, Philip Klein and J.P. Freire of the American Spectator, Amanda Carpenter of Townhall.com, Ben Smith of the Politico, Jon Henke of the Next Right, David Weigel of the Economist, John Gizzi of Human Events, Penny Starr of CNS, Tom LoBianco and Ralph Z. Hallow of the Washington Times, and Mary Katharine Ham of the Weekly Standard.

Pictured (L-R): Phil Klein, MK Ham, John Tabin.

Ralph Z. Hallow with Texas RNC member Tina Benkiser.

Among the more piquant (and accurate) characterizations of the current state of the GOP:

"Some people are pissed off at [Americans for Tax Reform President] Grover [Norquist]. Some people are pissed off at the Conservative Steering Committee. Some people are pissed off at [current RNC chair] Mike Duncan. Some people are pissed off at social conservatives. The social conservatives are pissed at leaders in Congress," said a Republican consultant who has worked with the RNC. "Everyone is basically pissed."

Hey: Don't blame me -- I voted for Bob Barr!

Michelle Malkin is certainly "pissed off at Grover" :

Will the next RNC chairman remain silent about Norquist's security-undermining strategic alliances? Will the next RNC chairman openly reject the same race-card-playing strategies that have corrupted a money-grubbing party establishment? Or will the field of candidates kiss the ring and hold their tongues?

Allah has a roundup, and Little Miss Attila wonders, "Why are we doing this?" The Washington Times reports:

Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, an accomplished speaker, and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, not well known for dazzling performances, each repeatedly drew sustained applause and appreciative laughter during Monday´s debate among the six candidates for the Republican National Committee chairman post. . . .
The debate produced more entertainment value than any national party chairman contest in recent memory.
Candidate Robert M. "Mike" Duncan, the incumbent national chairman, shocked the audience when he said "the Iraq war and its prosecution" was the worst mistake of the Bush administration in an answer to moderator Grover Norquist's inquiry.

Dana Milbank in the Washington Post:

The half a dozen men vying to be Republican National Committee chairman assembled at the National Press Club for a debate yesterday, but it quickly turned into a duel over who could best disparage their president and their party. Even the incumbent chairman, Mike Duncan, who is running for another term, warned that "if we don't do something about it, we're going to be the permanent minority in this country."
Luckily, all six RNC candidates agreed on a solution to the party's woes: They would say Ronald Reagan's name over and over, as if it were a tantric incantation.

Notice how Milbank puts a pejorative spin on Republicans criticizing Bush; now imagine what Milbank would write if any of them had praised Bush. Well, that's the kind of snark to be expected, I suppose. Liberals haven't had a president they could be proud of since JFK. Jimmy Carter sucked beyond words, and Bill Clinton is not exactly a name to conjure with. So the fact that nearly all Republicans today consider Reagan a lodestar is something that liberals routinely ridicule -- even as the self-same liberals prostrate themselves in idolatry of Obama.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers. And thanks to Joan of Argghh for this comment:

You could put every member of the RNC leadership in a big, canvas sack, close it up, hit it with a stick, and be completely certain you'd hit the right person.

Perhaps the GOP should try this method. Not that it would necessarily produce a better chairman, but surely we can all agree that politicians getting hit with a stick is a good idea.

PREVIOUSLY: Just got back from the debate for Republican National Committee chairman, sponsored by Americans for Tax Reform. I've got photos, videos, and lots of notes -- but hey, conservatives don't do reporting, right? Will begin uploading, etc., in a few minutes. Stand by for updates.

Sonny Corleone in Gaza

From my latest column at Pajamas Media:

By going into Gaza in Sonny Corleone fashion, Israel aims to ensure that the Hamas attacks -- as cowardly as Carlo's battering of Sonny's sister Connie -- are permanently ended.
Of course, Hamas being Hamas, they will never stop trying to kill Jews. Fans of The Godfather will recall that Carlo, being Carlo, chose a coward’s revenge by betraying Sonny to rival mobsters, so that at last Michael Corleone assigned Clemenza to deal decisively with Carlo.
If this analogy can be stretched a bit more, then, where does Glenn Greenwald fit? He's Connie pleading frantically on behalf of her abusive husband: "It was my fault! … I started a fight with him. … Sonny, please don't do anything. Please don't do anything." This is what the Blame Israel First crowd always says whenever Israel responds to repeated attacks by striking back against the terrorists. Always the demand is that Israel should make concessions, always condemnation is reserved for Israel's defenders who are, Greenwald assures us, "guilty of insufficiently weighing the deaths of Palestinian innocents."

Please read the whole thing. Video of the famous encounter between Sonny and Carlo:

Harry Reid, liar

"With the possible exception of the sentence, 'I first met General David Petraeus in Iraq,' everything that Reid says is contradicted by history."

Heh, indeed

"They told me if I voted for McCain, I'd have a President who didn’t properly vet his nominees–and they were right!"

My guilty chromosome

Merely being male makes me complicit in the financial meltdown:

I can't help noticing that all the perpetrators of the greatest economic mess in eight decades are, well, men. Specifically, they are rich, white, middle-aged guys, same as the ones who brought us Watergate in the 1970s, the Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s and, presumably, the fall of Rome. . . .
Although the Y-chromosome is undeniably overrepresented along all tiers of finance, it is particularly overrepresented at the highest levels of power and in those sectors most deeply implicated in the current crisis. A Catalyst Research study last year found that women make up almost 60 percent of the workforce at Fortune 500 finance and insurance companies but account for only 17.9 percent of corporate officer positions and none of the chief executive positions. In the world of hedge funds, women are notable largely for their absence. . . .
Whatever the reason, the experience of the past year suggests that we desperately need to bring more women into leadership positions on Wall Street, in politics, in regulatory bodies and in American life generally.

Thus speaks Debora Spar who is (conveniently enough) not cursed with a Y chromosome. Interesting how that works out. Why do I suspect she's gunning for a position in the Obama administration?

Gaza War news

Israeli blog Muqata offers ongoing coverage of the Gaza campaign. I've got a noon appointment at the National Press Club, so blogging will be light today.

Most Annoying Liberals of 2008

The competition was tough this year. Eliot Spitzer -- who would be a contender for top of the list under normal circumstances -- was only No. 15, according to Right Wing News.

Well, that explains everything

After several months of trying to figure out what Conor Friedersdorf's problem was, now I see:

I graduated from college in 2002, when newspapers really were skeptical of blogs. By 2004, I was being paid by a Media News Group paper to blog full time. In 2006, I attended a top flight journalism school where professors forced students to blog, new media guru Jay Rosen constantly harped on the need for newspapers to innovate, and almost none of my peers, all people who sought journalism degrees, had any objection to blogging. (Emphasis added.)

Let that be a lesson to you young people: Whatever else you do, avoid journalism school. Unless you plan to be a first-round pro football draft pick like Joe Namath, or a future president of the United States, like Sarah Palin.

It would be impossible to compile a list of famous journalists who never attended journalism school, because it's pretty much all of them. If you want to be a journalist, the first thing to do is get a job at a newspaper -- sweeping the floor or driving a delivery route, if that's all they've got -- and go from there. My first newspaper job, I got paid $4.50 an hour and, yes, my duties included driving the delivery truck on Wednesdays.

As to blogging, why in God's green earth would a blogger pay money to go to journalism school? Just open up a Blogspot account and get cracking. It ain't rocket science. Hell's bells, even lawyers can do it.

(H/T: Instapundit.)

UPDATE: Now that I think about it, welcome to the Robert Stacy McCain Blogging Academy. The curriculum:

• BEGINNER BLOGGING 101 -- Covers basic HTML, Memeorandum, trackbacking like a mofo.
• INTERMEDIATE BLOGGING 201 -- Downloading photos, embedding video, Christina Hendricks.
• ADVANCED BLOGGING 301 -- Drinking with Joy McCann, Rusty Shackleford, Pam Geller, Ace of Spades and Stephen Green; trying to prevent Jeff Goldstein from starting a riot; avoiding the cops when they come looking for Goldstein.
• SENIOR SEMINAR 401 -- Glenn Reynolds' personal e-mail address; photos of Glenn Reynolds at an AB301 session during CPAC.

Most people don't have what it takes to survive AB301.

UPDATE II: In the comments, Conor informs us that he got free tuition to J-school. See what I mean? They have to give the stuff away.

UPDATE III: An "uncommonly naked expression of the Sarah Palin right" -- see? It's not like Conor hasn't learned anything: naked+sarah+palin = mega-traffic! Not as good as naked+glenn+reynolds perhaps . . .

PGNJB Update

PGNJB = Please, God, Not Jeb Bush:

Former President George H.W. Bush said he wants more than a Senate seat for his son Jeb. He wants him in the White House.
Bush, appearing on Fox News Sunday, made the statement in response to questions about his son's political future.
"I’d like to see him run [for Senate]," the elder Bush said. "I'd like to see him be president some day." . . .
George H.W. Bush acknowledged that asking the country to elect a third "President Bush" might be asking for too much.
"I mean, right now is probably a bad time, because we've had enough Bushes in there," he said.
But he added that his son would be "as qualified and able as anyone I know on the political scene."

You were warned more than two months ago:

Conservatives who support Palin recognize her as a potential fresh start for the GOP, whereas devotees of the status quo are looking to continue the Bush dynasty. Republicans got stuck with John McCain as this year's nominee not because there was an overwhelming landslide for McCain (who finished with just 47% of the GOP primary vote) but because conservatives failed to unite behind an Anybody But McCain candidate.
Mark my words, the 2012 primaries will come down to Jeb Bush vs. Please God Not Jeb Bush, and Palin is the obvious PGNJB candidate. If the field gets overcrowded with a bunch of wannabes -- Huckabee, Romney, etc. -- dividing up the PGNJB vote, then we'll get Jeb Bush. We've already had two Bushes too many.
So, yeah, the GOP is screwed because somebody made the wrong running-mate choice, but it wasn't made by John McCain in 2008. It was made by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Conservatives should rally around the slogan, "NO MORE BUSHES."

Republicans now slagging Palin are paving the way for another Bush, whether they admit it or not.

UPDATE: K-Lo jumps aboard the Jeb bandwagon. We're doomed.

Yglesias, right and wrong

UPDATED & BUMPED: Michelle Malkin calls "bullcrap." (BTW, I give Michael Goldfarb a hard time in this post, written Saturday, but I took his side today against Greenwald, so I it's not personal. I just don't enjoy being insulted indirectly. "Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining," to quote the Outlaw Josey Wales.)

PREVIOUSLY: Matthew Yglesias:

There are tons and tons of conservative media outlets, most of them with a web presence, and the web presences of places like Goldfarb’s Weekly Standard blog would be higher if they were breaking interesting news the way ThinkProgress, HuffingtonPost, TPM, Washington Independent, etc. do. What the right lacks are people with the skill to do the job.

Having spent 22 years in the news business, I ought to resent this remark. The problem is that Yglesias's misapprehension is the fault of the conservative movement, which would rather hire pundits, wonks, P.R. flacks and media consultants than spend a dime on actual journalism.

True story: The day after my January announcement that I was leaving the Washington Times, I got a call from someone at a conservative media outfit who expressed an eagerness to hire me for an opening on their staff. Well, I had another project on the front burner, but I might be willing to talk about something down the line, and he said he'd get back to me. When he did get back to me he said he'd talked to his boss, but the boss wasn't familiar with my work and would I be willing to take a freelance assignment, sort of as a tryout?

Well . . . no. If you have a job opening on your staff, interview me. But I'm not a raw beginner who needs to prove anything to anybody, and I can get plenty of freelance assignments without kowtowing to your goddamned egomaniacal boss by writing on spec. For that matter, before I'd work for the kind of sadistic bastard who would ask me to do such a thing, I'd go drive a forklift.

Fast forward to March, after my front-burner project had ended, when I found myself sitting around the house asking, "What next?" The Pennsylvania primaries were coming up, so I went online to see if maybe there was a campaign event within driving distance, which there was. I called my friend Wlady Pleszczynski at the American Spectator and was on my way to Greensburg, Pa., the next morning.

I subsequently covered Hillary in Harrisburg, Pa., and in Shepherdstown, W.Va., covered the Libertarian convention in Denver ("best national coverage," said Dave Kopel), covered John McCain in Pennsylvania, returned to Denver for the DNC, went on the road to cover Sarah Palin in Ohio and Pennsylvania. . . . well, that's a sample. I also did some reporting and commentary for Pajamas Media and SpliceToday, all the while blogging constantly. But the one thing I didn't do is offer to write anything for that outfit whose egomaniac boss thought I should take an assignment on spec as a tryout for a full-time job.

This is not just a "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" story. Yglesia gloats that there are no conservatives who know how to do reporting, yet here I am, an experienced journalist with no small amount of Web savvy (I've even recently learned FinalCutPro), winning praise for my coverage and -- well, where are those conservative organizations lined up to hire me?

In point of fact, at a time when we are told that conservatives should be investing more in reporting, the Media Research Center just did a round of layoffs. The only recent conservative media startup, Culture11, isn't even interested in news reporting. Well, then, to read Michael Goldfarb complain that "Republicans have no equivalent outlet" to support "a bunch of right-wing Greg Sargents" -- making that complaint on Rupert Murdoch's dime! -- is slightly more than mildly ironic.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoy reading the Weekly Standard, and they do some good reporting. (Matthew Continetti's account of the Abramoff scandal was simply the best thing written on that saga.) But am I the only one who sees the inherent contradiction in Goldfarb (a) returning from a gig as a full-time professional partisan operative on the McCain campaign and then (b) complaining of a lack of fierce, independent, take-no-prisoners conservative journalism? The two functions are incompatible. If you want to be a GOP hack, be a GOP hack, but don't expect me to applaud any of your goddamned lectures about journalism.

UPDATE: Complaints from Red State give John Cole an excuse to revisit the Ben Domenech plagiarism scandal. The most memorable thing to me about that episode was the discovery that Domenech had plagiarized a Salon piece about Britney Spears for National Review Online.

Salon: This is what she looked like when you first saw her: pigtails, Catholic schoolgirl uniform, Lip Smackers baby-doll pink lips. She was a good girl, but suddenly gone bad, having tied her little white shirt in a knot over her Madonna-influenced midriff. She was a 17-year-old babe -- in both senses of the word -- who already knew too much.

Domenech: Spears first hit the music scene just last year. ... Decked out in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform -- complete with pigtails, pink Lip Smackers, and white shirt tied in a knot over an exposed midriff -- she teased at disobedience, and dangerously tempted the voyeur.

Grant that a thing is what it is, and there are only so many ways to describe Britney's appearance in her first music video. But the similarities in the space of a single sentence are too much, and the real telltale factor is the reference to "Lip Smackers." What guy knows the name brands of lip gloss?

Look, it's one thing to crib quotes or facts from other sources, but . . . you can't come up with an original description of Britney Spears? I've had my share of goofs and gaffes over the years, but that's a problem I've never had.

UPDATE II: John Cole now has buyer's remorse:

I would like to point out that the point of this post was to mock the notion that the media would not pick a right-of-center pundit . . . not to provide a forum to crap all over Ben and re-visit the plagiarism scandal. . . .
[H]e was always nice to me, and I think is at heart a decent person, so please stop it. I hate pile-ons, and I hate the notion that because someone made a mistake, their life should be ruined. That just isn’t cool.

No, but there are two things you can't do in journalism: Make stuff up (falsification) and rip stuff off (plagiarism). Plagiarism is a "mistake" in the same sense that car theft is a "mistake" and, as was revealed at the time of his firing from the WaPo, Domenech had been playing Grand Theft Auto since he was in college. Domenech's reputation as a brilliant young writer -- which is the only reason the WaPo would have given a 24-year-old such a prominent position -- was based on other people's work.

Nor was there any plausible excuse for the kind of wholesale plagiarism Domenech did. (Movie reviews? WTF?) It's useful to compare Domenech's plagiarism to the Ruth Shalit scandal. What Shalit did was to compile boatloads of Lexis-Nexis research for feature profiles and omit some of the attributions. It was wrong, but once you saw what she was doing, you understood that her crime was mainly carelessness. No such explanation can account for Domenech's collegiate habit of lifting entire paragraphs from movie reviews.

What Shalit and Domenech had in common was extreme youth, and frankly, this business of wunderkind journalism . . . Look, when Robert Novak joined the Associated Press's Washington bureau in 1957, he was 26 years old, but he had been a journalist since he was 16 (beginning as a sports stringer for the Joliet Herald-News) and had spent two years at AP bureaus in Omaha and Indianapolis. Novak writes in Prince of Darkness that when he came to Washington:

I was the only AP newsman in Washington less than thirty years old, and there were precious few under forty.

Being a member of the Washington press corps is, or ought to be, an achievement, not a place for rookies just learning their craft. If a 24-year-old wants to cover politics, he ought to be doing it in Omaha or Indianapolis, not the nation's capital -- except maybe covering the DC City Council. I don't care what your SAT score is; intelligence is not a substitute for knowledge and experience.

I never felt that Domenech's "life should be ruined," but (a) wanton, wholesale plagiarism is a career-ender in journalism; and (b) since he was hired by the WaPo specifically to represent the Right, his disgrace was an ugly stain on the conservative movement. Michelle Malkin didn't hesitate to cut him loose, even though he'd edited one of her books. Milli Vanillis, we don't need.

UPDATE III: A commenter says, correctly, that John Cole did not specifically reference plagiarism when he invoked Domenech. But it's like mentioning Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair, isn't it?

Also, I like and admire Erick Erickson, but he shouldn't attempt to excuse Ben Domenech, who burnt a bridge that others might have crossed.

Greenwald vs. Goldfarb

UPDATED & BUMPED: Ace of Spades weighs in:

The idiot Sullivan even calls Greenwald "fearless" for taking an anti-Israel position which not only won't lose him any readers, but is common wisdom among the liberal establishment.

Read the whole thing. I borrowed Ace's shtick today and got an Instalanche with it, so if you don't read the whole thing, the terrorists win.

UPDATED (AGAIN): Reliapundit delivers a barrage of facts with Black Hawk minigun ferocity.

PREVIOUSLY: Glenn Greenwald today accuses Michael Goldfarb of bloodthirstiness in the death of Nizar Ghayan (or Nizar Rayan, as some have it). Goldfarb's offending post was not a mindless advocacy of violence, but rather a reflection on the fundamental difficulty of fighting a fanatical enemy:

The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it's not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions. Or maybe not, and the only way to stop Hamas is to eliminate its capacity for violence entirely. Or Israeli leaders can just try to find a diplomatic solution -- as a majority of Democrats apparently favor. It worked so well with the last cease fire.

The notion that the obliteration of Ghayan's entire family might "give his colleagues at least a moment's pause" is enough to inspire 1,500 words of Greenwaldian gibberish, including a shot at Glenn Reynolds for displaying a "wretched mindset" by suggesting that the Israelis are "civilized people and not barbarians." One mercifully brief slice of moonbat pie:

If you see Palestinians as something less than civilized human beings: as "barbarians" -- just as if you see Americans as infidels warring with God or Jews as sub-human rats -- then it naturally follows that civilian deaths are irrelevant, perhaps even something to cheer. For people who think that way, arguments about "proportionality" won't even begin to resonate -- such concepts can't even be understood -- because the core premise, that excessive civilian deaths are horrible and should be avoided at all costs, isn't accepted. Why should a superior, civilized, peaceful society allow the welfare of violent, hateful barbarians to interfere with its objectives? How can the deaths or suffering of thousands of barbarians ever be weighed against the death of even a single civilized person?

Wait a minute: Who is ultimately responsible for the plight of Gazans? Has it been non-stop misery since 1967? Or at some point over the past four decades, did the Palestinians in Gaza actually have a better life under Israeli occupation than they have had under Hamas rule?

This war was not caused by any genocidal ambition of the Israelis, but by the genocidal ambition of Hamas. Excuse me for repeating myself:

You cannot negotiate with a shark. To the extent that Hamas represents any coherent political philosophy, that philosophy can be summed up in two words: Kill Jews.

And, to further repeat myself, the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas by a landslide majority. The Gazans fully intended that there should be consequences to their election of genocidal terrorist leaders and their only disappointment is that the consequences are not (yet) what they intended, namely the death of every Jew in Israel.

You will perhaps be surprised (or perhaps not) that Greenwald imagines it is supporters of Israel who need a lecture about "excessive tribalistic identification." Sending suicide bombers to obliterate Shiri Negari and 18 other passengers on bus 32A -- that's not "excessive," eh?

UPDATE: "Jihad to its maximum degree" -- Right. Like they haven't been trying hard enough to slaughter the infidels. There is kind of a "Black Knight" quality to this.

UPDATE II: Fausta Wertz has a post showing how the genocidal Hamas mentality has spread to the streets of America. "Death To All Juice!"

UPDATE III: At NRO, Gregory McNeal notes that IAF is delivering phone warnings to targets, compared to the 15 seconds of "Code Red" warnings for Israeli civilians targeted by Hamas:



Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom has related thoughts.

UPDATE IV: The Times of London:

Israeli troops fought heavy battles with Hamas fighters in two densely populated Gaza towns today as the Army sought to split the strip into three sections to cut off the Islamist group's supply lines. . . .
The Israeli strategy of splitting Gaza into north, central and southern sections mirrors a similar tactic employed when settlers used to come under attack in the strip.
It enables the military to stop Gaza City being supplied from the south, stops Hamas movements and gives troops distinct areas to clear.
Israeli troops also took up positions in the old Jewish settlement of Netzarim which controls the main north-south road.

Hmmm. It's almost as if the Times were suggesting that Israel's erstwhile policy of territorial settlement was vital to the embattled nation's self-defense. Nah, couldn't be . . .

UPDATE V: A pro-Israel rally . . in France? Somewhere, a French intellectual is muttering to himself, "If only we could have kept the Vichy for another few months . . ."

UPDATE VI: MK Ham: "The Guardian is now eulogizing terrorist leaders in official 'obituaries' chock-full of euphemisms and moral equivalence. Not news stories, but obituaries."

Name That Party!

Obama Cabinet Appointee Lightning Round:

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, tapped in December by President-elect Barack Obama to serve as secretary of Commerce, has withdrawn his name for the position, citing a pending investigation into a company that has done business with his state.
"Let me say unequivocally that I and my Administration have acted properly in all matters and that this investigation will bear out that fact," he said Sunday in a report by NBC News' Andrea Mitchell. "But I have concluded that the ongoing investigation also would have forced an untenable delay in the confirmation process."

Drew M. at AOSHQ notices that the word "Democrat" appears nowhere in the MSNBC report.

UPDATE: Video via Hot Air:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

UPDATE II: MK Ham: "The Obama transition train just keeps on chugging down the tracks to Smoothville, huh?"

UPDATE III: Under the bus goes another erstwhile friend of Obama.

'There was a tense moment . . .'

". . . when Pamela Geller stood up and asked to see Steyn's birth certificate . . ."

Kathy's right, Spencer should write funny more often.

Boys have cooties

Schools target "dating violence," which has apparently become widespread:

Texas recently adopted a law that requires school districts to define dating violence in school safety codes, after the 2003 stabbing death of Ortralla Mosley, 15, in a hallway of her Austin high school and the shooting death of Jennifer Ann Crecente, 18, two years ago. Rhode Island in 2007 adopted the Lindsay Ann Burke Act -- prompted by the murder of a young woman by a former boyfriend -- requiring school districts to teach students in grades 7 through 12 about dating abuse.
Experts say the abuse appears to be increasing as more harassment, name-calling and ridicule takes place among teenagers on the Internet and by cellphone.

"Experts say" -- and who can disagree with the experts? Our daughter is 19. When she was a kid, we taught her the most important lesson of life: Boys have cooties.

Why don't they teach that in schools? That is to say, why don't schools discourage the whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing? Girls especially need to be encouraged to develop a sense of independent identity, so that they don't fall into the all-too-common teenage trap of thinking that their life is meaningless if they don't have a boyfriend.

Girls get into abusive relationships because adults fail to teach basic lessons in childhood. Boys don't hit girls. Ever. This is one of the rules in our house. Our sons know that, however much rough-housing they do amongst themselves, under no circumstances are they allowed to hit their sisters. It is unmanly for a boy to hit a girl, even if she hits him first. And the natural corollary is that no girl should ever put up with a boy who hits her.

Why is it that "experts" say we need special laws and school curricula to deal with an epidemic of "dating violence"?

"Few adolescents understand what a healthy relationship looks like," [researcher] Dr. [Elizabeth] Miller said.
Adolescents often mistake the excessive attention of boys as an expression of love, she said.

Duh. Where did they get that idea? Whatever happened to dads and brothers chasing off pesky boyfriends? We need traditional values, a la Sonny Corleone:

UPDATE: Pandagon is offended by Sonny Corleone. So was Connie. Michael fixed that problem, though, didn't he?

Israeli air strikes kill cute kittens and Hamas terrorist leaders

But mostly Hamas terrorist leaders:

Senior Hamas terrorist Hussam Hamdan, who was in charge of Grad-type rocket launches into Beersheba and Ofakim, was killed in an IAF strike on Khan Yunis on Sunday afternoon.
Another senior Hamas terrorist, Muhammad Hilo, was also killed in the same airstrike. Hilo was in charge of the Hamas special forces in Khan Yunis.

Via Memeorandum, with a hat-tip to Ace of Spades for the headline style.

UPDATE: From the Israeli military Web site IDF Spokesperson:

• Between Israel’s evacuation of Gaza and the election of Hamas (Aug. 15, 2005 - Jan. 25, 2006), there was an average of over 15 rocket and mortar attacks a month.
• Between Hamas’ election and Hamas’ forceful takeover of the Strip (Jan. 25, 2006 - June 14, 2007), there was an average of over 102 attacks per month -- an over 650% increase.
• Between Hamas’ takeover and the start of the Tahadiya (State of Calm), (June 14, 2007 - June 16, 2008), there was an average of over 361 attacks per month -- an increase of an additional 350%.
• On Nov. 4-5, Israel launched Operation "Double Challenge", targeting a tunnel Hamas was building as part of a plan to kidnap Israeli soldiers.
• From the end of Operation "Double Challenge" until the end of the Tahadiya, (Nov. 4 - Dec. 19, 2008) a period of only a month and a half, there were 170 mortars, 255 Qassams, and 5 Grads fired upon Israel’s civilian population centers.
• Since the end of the Tahadiya (Dec. 19, 2008) until the beginning of Operation "Cast Lead," (Dec. 27, 2008) a period of little more than a week, there were approximately 300 mortars and rockets fired onto Israel.

Which is to say, Hamas deserved an ass-kicking.

UPDATE II: Utterly predictable Hamas response:

Hamas officials called on Palestinians to rise up against Israel with suicide attacks and vowed to make Gaza "a graveyard" for Israeli soldiers.

Right. Holed up in their bunkers, Hamas leaders vow to fight to the last Palestinian civilian.

UPDATE III: Welcome, Instapundit readers. Professor Reynolds gets an additional mention in the related post, Greenwald vs. Goldfarb.

UPDATE IV: Linked by Lawhawk at LGF. Thanks.

UPDATE V: Thanks to commenter Mike for pointing out the secondary explosions caused by cute kittens in Gaza:

UPDATE VI: Yes, DoublePlusUndead, I am a moron. And, in related news, don't mess with Sonny Corleone's sister.

UPDATE VII: Linked by the Smallest Minority and MacsMind. Thanks.

UPDATE VIII: Also linked at Pirate's Cove, A Blog For All and Random Thoughts. Thanks to all.

UPDATE IX: Linked by The Sundries Shack, which reports that sheep are sleeping easier in Gaza tonight.

'Jane! Stop this crazy thing!'

We are living in the future, it's just not the future anybody predicted:

When I was a kid, the future was supposed to be filled with flying cars, orbiting space cities and endless free time; instead, we work more hours than ever, drive internal combustion cars on crumbling, congested freeways and endure endless cuts in airline service. Meanwhile, Web searching, handheld GPS systems and online shopping -- the technologies that have, in fact, changed our lives -- came more or less out of nowhere.

I'm lousy at making predictions. I was one of the first ones to call John McCain's defeat (see also here and here) but that was Oct. 2, after the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan, and more than a week after the idiotic Sept. 24 bailout stunt, so there was ample evidence that the election was effectively over. As late as Sept. 22, I'd warned against a GOP panic, although later that same day, Steve Schmidt lashed out at the New York Times, which ought to have been recognized as proof that Schmidt knew the election was over.

But in terms of long-term trends, I'm blind as a mole. After the 2004 election, I had no foreboding of the GOP meltdown that began in 2006, simply because the events that caused that meltdown hadn't happened and couldn't be predicted. The Abramoff scandal? The Foley scandal? The blundered mishandling of Social Security reform? The mad push for amnesty? None of that was on the radar in November 2004, and so it was impossible to see the disaster coming.

The same thing is true of the Obama administration. A lot of my Republican friends seem demoralized, as if there is no hope of effectively opposing The One and his agenda. But I figure there's at least a 50-50 chance the Obama presidency is going to be a political disaster on the order of Jimmy Carter (or the first two years of Clinton), and thus am quite sanguine about the future. However, the only prediction I'm willing to make is that the Obama economic plan won't work, because it can't. Keynesian theory is demonstrably false, and so the one safe prediction is that the economy won't improve so long as Keynesian policies are pursued.

Senator Al Franken

Get used to saying it:

DFLer Al Franken won an impressive share Saturday of what may be the last ballots tallied in the U.S. Senate recount, boosting his unofficial lead over Sen. Norm Coleman to 225 votes heading into a Monday meeting where the state Canvassing Board will certify the final result of the race.
At least two things, however, still stand in the way of Franken becoming Minnesota's newest U.S. senator: the possibility of a ruling by the Minnesota Supreme Court that more wrongly rejected absentee ballots should be counted, and a legal contest that Coleman attorneys all but promised should Franken prevail.

Americans ought to be ashamed that it has come to this. And why did it come to this? Norm Coleman voted yes on S.B. 1629. His NumbersUSA grade is C. So while I am mortified that Al Franken will be a member of the U.S. Senate, I am at least comforted that Norm Coleman can no longer disgrace the Republican Party by voting for open borders.

Hasta la vista, Norm.

UPDATE: A couple of commenters have leapt to Coleman's defense, with one saying:

I think there is never a good reason to vote for a Liberal...especially this clown.

Well, friends don't let friends vote Democrat, but that's not the point. The fact that Coleman was unable to command even a plurality in a three-way race demonstrates, to my mind, the folly of open-borders Republicanism.

An open-borders position won't win you any extra "swing" votes, while utterly alienating the conservative base. By contrast, a strong border-security position might win over some blue-collar voters who otherwise would either stay home or vote Democrat. So even apart from ideological or moral considerations, border-security is a political winner for Republicans.

Therefore, every defeat of an open-borders Republican like Norm Coleman (or Mike DeWine or John McCain) demonstrates that there is no advantage for the GOP in the pro-amnesty position. It's not that I want Democrats to win, but if these Republicans don't want Democrats to win, maybe they shouldn't have voted for open borders.

'Some things are better than others'

Nelson Guirado says the unsayable:

[W]hat's happening now isn't a desire to think of people as on par cosmically or for a legal equality, but a reluctance of people to publicly say that some things are better than others. I imagine that most people who don't mind same-sex marriage see that it's dissimilar to opposite-sex marriage in some way, but that they're intimidated into not saying so (For the first time in history, gay activists were "outing" people who supported exclusive opposite-sex marriage.) for fear of breaking the first leftist commandment: Thou shalt not distinguish. . . .
[S]mart people can say things are different without "hating" and that some things, in fact, are. Men and women are different and it's legitimate to say so and even set up laws that take that difference into account. Whether a particular distinguishing law is wise is another matter that smart people can figure out. For example: It's wise to have separate bathrooms. It's not wise, necessarily, to prohibit women from driving.

Well, we have to give the Saudis some credit, eh? But seriously . . . the leftist fetish for equality is an idol that crumbles at its first exposure to reason. Men and women are different, and in important ways, and I am amazed at the Left's success in compelling people to pretend otherwise. Nelson is writing in reply to my discussion of the gay-marriage debate:

[S]o many of those who would defend traditional marriage find themselves unable to form a coherent argument, because traditional marriage is based on the assumption that men and women are fundamentally different, and hence, unequal. Traditional marriage assumes a complementarity of the sexes that becomes absurd if you deny that "man" and "woman" define intrinsic traits, functions, roles.

If you are unwilling to contradict the modernist dogma of equality, it becomes impossible to argue effectively against gay marriage. Viva la difference!

'Destroy the Hamas terror infrastructure'

Israel launches its ground war in Gaza:

"The objective is to destroy the Hamas terror infrastructure in the area of operations," said Israel Defense Forces Major Avital Leibovitch, a military spokeswoman, confirming that incursions were under way. "We are going to take some of the launch areas used by Hamas." . . .
Large numbers of forces are taking part in this stage of the operation including infantry, tanks, engineering forces, artillery and intelligence with the support of the Israel Air Force, Israel navy, the Shin Bet security service and other security agencies. Meanwhile, the cabinet has authorized an emergency call up of tens of thousands of IDF reservists.

Meanwhile (via Ace), in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., hundreds of pro-Hamas protesters show their humanitarian civility:

UPDATE: Little Miss Attila is not amused.

UPDATE II: Meanwhile, via Zombie, a little bit of Gaza comes to San Francisco:

More on BSMD

The list of Blog-Specific Mental Disorders -- forms of craziness to which only bloggers are susceptible -- gets updated by William Jacobson's definition of SiteMeter Envy, which is not to be confused with Instalust (obsessive craving for an Instalanche). Like sexual lust, Instalust is insatiable. The more 'lanches you get, the more you want. Also, if you look at your SiteMeter immediately after you get 'lanched, the upward spike is an appropriately suggestive visual metaphor.

Fighting over the spoils

This morning I said I'd defer all future Blago blogging to Marathon Pundit, but the revelation of Harry Reid's involvement in the Illinois Senate Auction (what else would you call it?) is too rich to ignore. I especially appreciate liberal blogger Chris Bowers' take:

[U]sing "electability" as the rationale, Reid did advocate on behalf of two candidates, one of whom, Attorney General Lisa Madigan, attempted to remove Blgaojevich via judicial coup. If the Senate's move to block Roland Burris wasn't already viewed as a political move rather than one of ethics, this story should put an end to that once and for all.

Bowers points out that Obama's seat was previously held by Carol Mosley Braun and yet Reid seems to believe that a black appointee would be "unelectable" in 2010. By appointing Burris, Blago has put the Democrats between a rock and a hard place. All of this uproar, it should be noted, would never have happened if Democrats had trusted Blago to make the decision in the first place. Instead, as a creation of the Chicago machine, Blago was treated as a stooge, incompetent to pick his own appointee, and expected to take dictation from Team Obama.

This entire episode has been an eye-opening lesson in how the Democratic Party actually works.

Stupid liberal tricks

Liberal trolls pretending to be Sarah Palin supporters in an effort to discredit Team Sarah (H/T: Michelle Malkin).

Such vandalism is a species of "progressive online activism" for which there is no parallel on the Right. But it's not the only such species. Back in September, Ace called attention to the "concern trolls" who were apparently part of a Team Obama astroturfing campaign, the apparent object of that effort being to spread negative memes about the GOP ticket via comment fields at conservative Web sites:

The script--
1. The Pledge: I'm a conservative/I'm a Christian/I'm a conservative Christian
2. The Turn: My heart is with you guys, really... but I have these concerns...
3. The Prestige: I hear all these great things about Obama and/or did you hear this horrible stuff about Palin?

It's formulaic, and I've seen the same basic technique in the comment fields at AmSpecBlog -- the guy who claims to be a serious, committed conservative but who is invariably negative. Anything I write about Sarah Palin at the American Spectator is certain to elicit comments from at least one troll asserting that Palin is an unmitigated disaster for the GOP.

Yes, there are Republicans who aren't enthusiastic about Palin, but the trolls don't articulate any real argument against Palin, or express support for an alternative candidate by praising, inter alia, Mitt Romney, Bobby Jindal or Mike Huckabee. No, it's just the "Sarah is a sure loser" meme, the transparent propaganda intent being to spread among conservatives the idea that the most popular elected official in the Republican Party can't possibly win.

Blago blogging

You may have noticed a relative paucity of BlagoGate blogging here lately. Why? It's one of those situations where so many people are blogging about it that I don't feel I can add anything fresh or different. So Marathon Pundit is your all-Blago 24/7 source.

Good news!

"California Will Be Bankrupt Before General Motors"

'The once-great New York Press'

Sam Schulman discusses Toby Young's essay on the "celebritariat," and writes:

Melik Kaylan and Toby Young were my confreres at "Taki's Top Drawer" in its first incarnation as a section in the once-great New York Press.

Those were the day, eh, Russ?

Lies, damned lies and liberal statistics

"Statistics lead to liberalism and should not be collected."

Actually, I love statistics. The problem with the statistics of Sixties liberals is that they sought out statistics as evidence of social problems about which government ought to do something. Well, they did something, and those social problems immediately got much worse, and pretty soon it was possible to statistically demonstrate a correlation between liberalism and socioeconomic disaster -- a correlation long suspected prior to the Sixties, but now a proven fact that only fools dispute.

Utah: Worse than Canada

In hindsight, I now realize that it was a mistake to admit Utah to the Union. What the heck kind of name is "Utes," anyway?

Utah state motto: Armpit of the West.

UPDATE: Thanks to Dandapani:

'This isn't ideal'

I had previously overlooked the Palin family's press release on baby Tripp's birth:

Governor Sarah Palin has welcomed her first grandchild, Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, born to Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston on December 27.
"We are over the moon with the arrival of this healthy, beautiful baby," Governor Palin said. "The road ahead for this young couple will not be easy, but nothing worthwhile is ever easy. Bristol and Levi are committed to accomplish what millions of other young parents have accomplished, to provide a loving and secure environment for their child. They are both hard workers, they're very strong, and have faith they've made the right decision in setting aside their own interests to make this child their highest priority."
Palin added, "When Bristol and Levi first told us the shocking news that she was pregnant, to be honest, we all at first looked at the situation with some fear and a bit of despair. Isn't it just like God to turn those circumstances into such an amazing, joyful blessing when you ask Him to help you through?"
Bristol Palin said she "obviously discourages" teen pregnancy and knows that plans she previously made for herself will now forever be changed. "Teenagers need to prevent pregnancy to begin with -- this isn't ideal. But I'm fortunate to have a supportive family which is dealing with this together. Tripp is so perfectly precious; we love him with all our hearts. I can't imagine life without him now."
Bristol begins her final semester of high school next week where she'll get her last credit needed to graduate. She looks forward to continuing her record of good grades and high achievement. Levi is continuing his online high school work in addition to working as an electrical apprentice on the North Slope.
Bill McAllister, the governor’s office communications director, adds: "The governor's office previously declined to comment to honor the family's wishes that the event remain as private as possible. However, the high volume of press inquiries, along with some erroneous information that was published, prompted the governor to make a statement."

I dislike the idea of Bristol Palin offering generic advice -- "Teenagers need to prevent pregnancy to begin with" -- rather than acknowledging any personal responsibility for her own situation. Is the problem that teenagers in general are getting pregnant, or that you got pregnant? In point of fact, teen pregnancy is at an all-time low. Is it too much to expect something like a mea culpa?

UPDATE: PaleoPat agrees with me, but in the process calls me a neocon. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. Yeah, Pat, tell that one to David Brooks, Frank Fukuyama and Ken Adelman. Here's the difference between me and neocons: Neocons believe we should invade foreign countries in order to spread the universal benefits of democracy. I believe we should invade foreign countries because it's a good live-fire field exercise for the troops. What's the point in having aircraft carriers if you don't occasionally pound some Third World dictatorship to smithereens?

My biggest beef about Iraq is that, if we're going to go around the world toppling evil regimes, we ought to start in Cuba. It's 90 miles from Key West, and occupying Havana would be like a vacation. Military recruiters could use the prospect of Cuban occupation duty as an inducement: Jineteras, mojitos and cigars under the swaying palms. Put some Xavier Cugat music on the soundtrack of the recruiting commercials. "Join the Navy and screw the world."