Duck Season

DCE at Weekend Pundit has the story.

The United Nations rules that Carmen Electra should have control of www.carmenelectra.com. Currently, it redirects visitors to celebrity1000.com. Of course, as is the norm, the UN hasn't actually yet enforced the decision it made ...

John Kerry didn't have a good day yesterday in the Zogby Iowa poll, but he has jumped eight points in New Hampshire in the last five days. He's almost caught up with Clark after falling behind two weeks ago. Also, Kerry is now ahead of Dean in New Hampshire among independents, 21%-15%. This came from a remarkable shift in independent support in the last week. From 1/9 to 1/16, Kerry skyrocketed among independents from 4% to 21%, while Dean slipped from 36% to 15%. If Kerry wins Iowa, he'll probably take over the lead in New Hampshire.

Went 3-1 last week, for a 7-1 total in the playoffs.

Patriots 30, Colts 27
Defense beats offense (almost) every time. Going almost unnoticed is the fact that the Patriots have averaged 40 points in three games against the Colts since Brady became the quarterback.

Panthers 24, Eagles 20
Even if Stephen Davis doesn't play, the Panthers will still be able to run the ball with DeShaun Foster. Also, unlike the Rams, the Eagles doesn't have the receivers to take advantage of the Panthers secondary.

Jane Galt points out a problem with the otherwise reasonable MoveOn ad: it attacks Bush for the deficit, but very few voters will think that any of the Democrats can do any better.

The Washington Post reports that laws protecting women's rights have rolled back.

Check it out.

In no way do I endorse the politics of Rachel Corrie, yet I can't help but be disgusted by the illustration and tone of comments associated with this Little Green Football's post.

The French have something snooty to say about President Bush's mars proposal:

In France, Le Monde cast a weary transatlantic eye over past joint projects such as the International Space Station and concluded Mr Bush's plan marked "a break with the period of international cooperation which has prevailed for the past 30 years".

"The ascendancy of Airbus over Boeing illustrates the kind of battles that are being fought in the corridors of space exploration," it said.

(Link via OxBlog)

MORE: Merde in France has more examples.

From OpinionJournal:

THE OLD ADAM: Bill Martin may be taking Christian fundamentalism in a whole new direction. According to the Orlando Sentinel, Mr. Martin and his associates are planning to open a Christian-based nudist colony outside Tampa. Mr. Martin told the Sentinel that it's not as outrageous as it seems--that the original nudist movement had Christian impulses and that his community will try to return nudism to those Eden-like roots by eliminating the sexual overtones and easy access to alcohol that have plagued his more secular competitors. "Everyone seems to be losing their standards," he told the paper.

We won't see the MoveOn ad during the Super Bowl.

I've found a new Ann to despise:

As I've written, Castro's locking away of these dissidents, including the independent librarians, has caused considerable debate within the American Library Association. On December 9, one of Castro's defenders, Ann Sparanese, a member of the policy-making council of the ALA, sent a letter to her colleagues on the council, in which she wrote:

"Despite the fact that we as librarians prize them highly, political rights—for instance, intellectual freedom—is only one of a constellation of human rights, some of which Cuba respects in greater measure than the United States." Among those, she added, was "universal, free education."

Being faced with such a brilliant mind I decided to learn more about Ms. Ann Sparanese. Here's what google found:

You may know Sparanese's name because Michael Moore says she saved his book, Stupid White Men, which his publisher refused to release because it was critical of George W. Bush. The publisher disputes that this is the reason the book was finally distributed, but when Sparanese raised the alarm, librarians swamped the company with complaints and orders. Sparanese sees this as proof that librarians can fight back—and win—against the squashing of dissent.

She thinks librarians' commitment to free expression is needed now above all, because the USA PATRIOT Act has "put libraries in the crosshairs of its new homeland security policies. It is clearly a time…for small and large acts of resistance to the erosion of our rights."

Or how about this mind-numbing response to Nat Hentoff's piece:

Mr. Hentoff -- hardly a human rights guru in my book -- is a prominent man with a strong opinion. But lest we forget: immediately before our Annual conference in Toronto, and on the day it began, we were the subject of an organized media campaign including Mr. Hentoff -- to pressure us to pass a resolution against Cuba. Articles appeared initially in the Washington Times (ho-hum), but then the Wall Street Journal, the NY Times and some other more mainstream press. I suspect that Mr. Hentoff’s article might be the opening salvo for a similar attempt to embarrass ALA into doing “something” about Cuba in San Diego. That has been the strategy of Mr. Kent’s group in the past and it will remain so.

But rather than being a “shameful silence” on Cuba, ALA’s position thus far has demonstrated an extraordinary resistance to being drawn into a situation which is not easy to decipher, despite its simplistic characterization by Hentoff and others. ALA has shown intelligence in trying to independently investigate where the truth (or truths) lie, something neither Mr. Hentoff or IFLA have attempted.

Karen, it isn’t that Mr. Kent’s posts are just “obnoxious.” They are part of a very smart, well-financed, well-connected and relentless strategy to get the ALA involved in an important U.S. foreign policy offensive. If you think not, then you don’t know history. We have resisted thus far because it has smelled a little fishy all along. In Toronto, Kent finally admitted to the LJ reporter that his “Friends of Cuban Librarians” receives government funds. Why do you suppose that is and what funds might those be? (Emphasis my own)

That's right. Before we send in the Marines, the CIA, or the black helicopters, we mobilize the vast political power of the American Library Association!

And it just goes on like that folks:

Suppose the shoe was on the other foot and *we* were the small country being overwhelmed by money from a huge nation determined to change our political and economic system by any means necessary. Would we not have the right to defend ourselves?

Apparently not, since Ms. Sparanese opposes the PATRIOT ACT and, I can only assume, everything else the Bush administration has done in the war on terror.

MORE: I found this website which contains a ton of discussion on the Library/Cuba subject. It appears to be some sort of archive.

Mickey Kaus gets an email from a Democratic pollster saying that Zogby's Iowa polls might not be very accurate. According to the pollster, since very few voters actually show up at the caucuses, the Zogby polls might include a large number of people who won't be showing up. Nevertheless, Kaus says that the polls are useful in capturing recent trends that Kerry and Edwards are surging while Dean is losing his support from non-Deaniacs.

The new Zogby numbers, incidentally, has Kerry 24, Dean 19, Gephardt 19, Edwards 17.

In the Village Voice, Nat Hentoff takes the American Library Association to task for not condemning Castro's imprisonment of Cuba's librarians. The ALA is refusing to support the Cuban librarians because they're not "professional librarians". Seriously. I guess, in the grand scheme of things, free speech isn't that important when it's compared to something like accreditation.

Howard Dean says he suffered panic attacks in the 80's. I'd be more worried if he had any chance of getting elected.

Heard pollster John Zogby on the radio this morning. From what I remember:

--He said Wesley Clark is just a "placeholder" for those who wants to see Dean lose. If it becomes obvious that Dean isn't strong enough to force his opposition to unify behind one candidate, the Clark supporters might go back to the candidate they had supported but thought couldn't win.

--He mentions blogs, and how he sees that Dean supporters are pledging not to cause trouble if Dean isn't the nominee.

----Advice to Dean: stick to emphasizing his anti-war position rather than arguing about his electability or the inevitability of his nomination. To Kerry: emphasize ability to beat Bush.

You can now bid on a $5 bill signed by Paul O'Neill on eBay. As of 10 p.m. the high bid is $1925. (Via Miller's Time)

It's the conventional wisdom that Al Gore is looking at a run for the presidency in 2008. Gore presumably endorsed Howard Dean so that he would become the torch bearer of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party after Dean loses to Bush. But what if Dean doesn't even win the primary? When happens to Gore's plans? I think it's likely that if Dean doesn't get the nomination this time he'll run again in 2008, and most of his supporters wouldn't abandon him for Gore in that case. And of course the fact that Dean's poll numbers seemed to have stopped rising at precisely the moment that Gore endorsed him doesn't help Gore either.

Jacob Levy asks, "Why would any vampire hang out in Sunnydale?"

The Master was bound into the Hellmouth, and some of his servants were bound to him. Occasionally there was a vampire who wanted the glory of killing a Slayer. But then there were the countless, often nameless, vampires who just inhabited the town and treated it as their feeding ground-- until they got staked. The Hellmouth might have attracted demons, made it more likely that new vampires would be created, and generated generic magical weirdness. But wouldn't an even-remotely-rational vampire, even one who had been created in Sunnydale, move out of town immediately upon realizing that he or she was much more likely to get destroyed there than any other place in the world? Even the glory-hounds must have thought that the glory of killing a Slayer was inordinately valuable, given that they should have wanted to avoid any risk at all of getting slain. Instead, they continued to congregate in the least rational place for them to do so.

Sunnydale, California had always been where one of the Hellmouths are, but it's not the case there's always a Slayer in Sunnydale. The vampires living in Sunnydale could be making a rational calculation that sooner or later the Slayer would be killed and be replaced by another who lives far away. If the next Slayer was some fifteen-year-old living in Cleveland, she can't be expected to move to Sunnydale.

Also, since so many more vampires were created in Sunnydale than most places, it only takes a small percentage of them to stay to create a sustainable vampire population.

Lastly, Jacob's question came from Tyler Cowen's about whether immortal humans would be risk-averse, with car accidents as the only risk of death. I think an analogy can be made between Tyler's theoretical and the Buffy universe. Jacob thinks that any rational vampire would want to avoid the vampire, but would all immortal humans avoid driving, or any other activity with any risk of death?

As an aside, I don't think that the demon community gives much extra respect for killing a Slayer. Spike killed two slayers in the past, but I don't remember his being especially well-respected by the other vampires in town.

re: The next Internet sex tape

Does this strike anyone else as more than just a little convenient? "America's Next Top Model" is already UPN's top show, and with the end of "Simple Life" on Fox America has run out of sex-tape starlets.

After reading the Fox article (see Hei Lun's post) I'd wager money that the alleged orgy was probably more tame than any Skinemax film.

The article is worth reading for yourself, if only to giggle at the "Click to Enlarge" link under a runway shot of the fabulously gorgeous Tyra Banks.

Denial must also be a river somewhere out in western Massachusetts. Says Viking Pundit: "Wow – these polls may be wildly inaccurate (for example, no way is Kerry leading in Iowa) ..."

Eric, MASSACHUSETTS HAS FROZEN OVER, maybe this is directly related to a Kerry surge?

Four contestants from the UPN show "America's Next Top Model" were taped having an orgy with four men.

"We've been viewing the tape repeatedly to determine our corporate reaction, and we'll have to get back to you on that," a grinning UPN spokeswoman said yesterday.

Two good reports on the current state of Iraq in the news today.

1) Returers has a story on the tearful Iraqis who're being allowed to freely make the haj pilgrimage to Mecca.

2) OpinionJournal has an article on the improving conditions of Iraqi schools.

So Howard Dean's been saying for months that he's the outsider and the establishment is out to get him, and now ABC decides to run a bogus story that the state trooper in charge of Dean's security detail is a wifebeater. The is their lead:

In his presidential campaign, and as governor of Vermont before that, Howard Dean has taken a tough, zero-tolerance stand on domestic violence, accusing the Bush administration of not being committed to the issue. Yet Dean said he had no idea that one of the men closest to him was repeatedly abusing his wife.

What does it mean, "Dean said he had no idea"? Is it trying to imply that he did know about it? And what about the "yet"? Is Dean supposed to be psychic?

This looks like a hit piece to me. It's the Thursday's before an election, which is the absolute best time to release bogus accusations against a candidate. Any earlier than Wednesday the candidate would have had time to respond, and if it's Friday or later it'd be obvious that the story was held until it's right before the election. This was exactly like the LA Times piece on the women Arnold allegedly grope, which was also released on the Thursday before the election, except that in this case there's even less evidence that Dean did anything wrong.

There are a lot of reasons to not like Howard Dean and to vote against him, but this isn't one of them.

In the Zogby poll (a.k.a. "crack of the weak", according to The Note). He's currently on top in three-day polling at 22%, while Dean has dropped to a two-way tie with Gephardt for second at 21%. Also, the Edwards surge continues, and he's now at 17%. Zogby :"this race is actually a four-way statistical dead heat." Dean has dropped 7 points in two days, but Zogby says, "Dean is NOT in a free fall."

Even though Kerry is probably my least favorite of the candidates, I hope he does well in Iowa, because as a political junkie I really want to see a brokered convention ("Currently Harold Ford Jr. is likely to lead the seventeenth ballot, with Dennis Kucinich in second place ..."). And it might be time for me to take a second look at John Edwards.

Is Al Gore the unluckiest man on earth or what? First there was that Florida thing, which, whatever you might think about it, you'll have to agree that he lost thousands of votes because of the butterfly ballot, which he didn't and couldn't complain about because it was designed by a Democrat. Then recently, when he endorsed Howard Dean, that got pushed to the backburner because we captured Saddam a few days later. Since then Dean's momentum has pretty much been stopped, and his nomination looks less inevitable every day. Now today he's going to deliver a speech on global warming in New York when it's currently 8 degrees Fahrenheit. Even if his speech makes an airtight case, everyone will be focused on the fact that it's freezing cold outside.

Michael Totten answers: Why We Went to Iraq.

Also be sure to check out Slate's Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War.

Tom Brady is apparently a metrosexual and carries a man-purse.

Glenn Halpern points us to someone who's been invited to join a conspiracy to overthrow that evil George Bush. This conspirator, "Lovernuts", is planning on starting a super-secret website with its own super-secret message board that only he and fellow co-conspirators can access. Apparently, chatting with like-minded people on message boards and agreeing with each other all day is the way to get rid of an elected president. This doesn't seem like the way to go, but I've never been part of a conspiracy before, the hell do I know? Seriously, if these people stop doing useless stuff like this and spend their time doing something more productive and boring, like stuffing envelopes for a local candidate or working on getting voters registered, they wouldn't have as much to whine about because someone they agree with might actually be in power.

I'm very disappointed with the winner of the MoveOn contest for an anti-Bush ad. The entry that won was reasonable, moderate, and it makes a good point! I was expecting, and hoping for, some crazy stuff about BushitlerCheneyHalliburtonAshcroftFlorida. Instead, what we got was something that says our children will be paying for Bush's $1 trillion deficit. Where's the fun in that? And who would have thought that MoveOn wanted us to cut spending?

MoveOn wants to show the ad during the Super Bowl, but CBS is probably going to say no to that because, according to a spokesman, "it was likely that the spot would pass standards and practices". I'm hoping they approve it, if only to see some of the reactions from people I know when they first see it.

PS Slate needs to stop having the top banner ad be the one for the Ann Coulter doll. That thing is just creepy.

This sounds like a bad idea to me. 1.5 billion dollars? For marriage promotion?

For months, administration officials have worked with conservative groups on the proposal, which would provide at least $1.5 billion for training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain "healthy marriages."

What the hell is that suppose to mean?

From this mornings USA TODAY:

"Since it is clearly no longer possible to take action in conjunction with NATO and the United Nations, I have reluctantly concluded that we must take unilateral action."

Those would be Howard Dean's words, in a letter to President Clinton dated July 19, 1995. How ever did the press get their hands on that letter? I wonder.

(via K.Lo in The Corner)

French Sikhs voice their concern over the French ban of religious symbols in yesterday's New York Times.

I could have told you this:

Los Angeles: Contrary to popular opinion, school bullies do not suffer from low self-esteem and are often popular and considered "cool" by their classmates, a new study has found.

Here is what is truely frightening:

Most anti-bullying programs in schools were based on the belief that bullies picked on others because they had low self-esteem, Dr Juvonen said. Attention should focus on how to discourage support for bullying behaviour by other students, she said.

"Unless we do something about this peer support and encouragement, we're probably not going to make much headway.

"We need to be addressing bullying not only at the level of individual, aggressive kids, but at the level of the whole social collective. How can we get the other kids to be less supportive of the bully and more supportive of the victim?"

So let me get this straight. Instead of smacking these bullies around and telling them to cut the crap, we're to end bullying by trying to convince a majority of the students who is and who isn't cool? Isn't that only going to make the bullies seem cooler?

John Kerry is closing in on Howard Dean in Iowa and actually led the field in Monday's polling. He's also jumped three points in the last two days in New Hampshire. But of course, as Mickey Kaus points out, this just raises his expectations and sets him up for a disappointing showing.

Dave Barry has the cure for what ails the upwardly mobile set:

Have you ever wondered why the entire world runs so smoothly? The answer is: Guys.

Don't get me wrong: I have the deepest respect for women. My own wife is a woman. But when things need to get done, you cannot beat the results you get when guys swing into action.

For an excellent example, we turn now to a news story from The Greenville (S.C.) News, written by John Boyanoski and sent in by alert reader Michael Ester. The story concerns a guy -- let's call him Guy A -- who had a problem: There were leaves in his yard. So he fired up his leaf blower.

Leaf blowers are the ideal guy tool, because they have engines, they're loud, and they enable you to blast debris, ray-gun-style, from one place to another without having to actually pick it up. I'm willing to bet that somewhere in America, there's a guy who, at least once, cleaned his living room by firing up his leaf blower indoors and blasting everything -- pizza boxes, beer cans, ancient potato-chip shards, underwear, deceased spiders -- into a less-critical area, such as the dining room. (This guy is not married.)

But getting back to our story, which I am not making up: Guy A, taking action, used his leaf blower to blow the leaves off of his property. Problem solved!

Except that the leaves wound up in the yard of another guy. Let's call him Guy B. He now had leaves in HIS yard. What do you think he should have done about this? Should he have asked Guy A, politely but firmly, to remove the leaves? Should he have avoided a potential confrontation by picking them up himself? Or should he have decided that life is too short to be bothered by this kind of petty annoyance, and simply ignored the leaves?

If you answered ''yes'' to any of these solutions, you are, with all due respect, a woman. What Guy B did, according to the Greenville County sheriff's department report, was the same thing that roughly 175 percent of the guys reading this column would have done: He fired up HIS leaf blower, and he blew the leaves back onto the yard of Guy A.

Go read the whole thing for yourself.

The Metrosexual revolution must be stopped:

More evidence that the end of the world is at hand: Newsweek magazine has discovered the phenomenon of bikini waxing for "upwardly mobile heterosexual men." A beautician at an upper East Side salon tells reporter Holly Peterson: "It's not their backs I'm waxing. It's their b--s." Lidia Tivichi of New York's Kimara Ahnert salon opines: "Without the hair, everything down there looks bigger."

Life imitates Dilbert in my company e-mail box:

-----Original Message-----
From: ****
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2004 1:25 PM
To: ****
Subject: FW: Garage Parking for Braintree & Crown sites

FYI to All Associates

Due to the expected severe weather later this week, Facilities will need to keep both underground garages closed to prevent further damage to the sprinkler system and handle the current repairs. I will send another e-mail update on Friday, 1/16/04, regarding the status of the re-open date for both.

Sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause.

[Name Withheld by me]
Director of Corporate Services

So let me get this straight. Our garages, structures designed to shelter cars and people from the awful weather, cannot be used because we're having bad weather???

While we're watching the Colts-Patriots game, something much more important will be going on in Iran.

David Kasper has posted a translation of a German newspaper article on his blog which, amazingly enough, reports that things are going well in Iraq:

(One) has to imagine an Iraqi who has been in a deep sleep for a year … suddenly his eyes open wide. On TV CNN, BBC or – more probably – the broadcaster banned under Saddam just as it is now, Al Jazeera, is running. His brother is talking to his cousin in Germany on the cell phone. Cell phones were banned under Saddam and families with relatives abroad were viewed with suspicion as a rule. … The brother earns 100 dollars a month, four times the average salary under Saddam. He works as a proof reader at one of the around 150 new, independent newspapers in Iraq in which everything can be written and said, other than calls to violence. …

From now on no more visits from the State Security trying to pressure the son to join the Fedayeen Saddam or threatening imprisonment if one didn’t betray what the neighbor was saying. And on top of it all: two more cousins are free who were locked up by Saddam for reasons that they and their families still can’t figure out.

And it goes on just like that for many more paragraphs. Be sure to check it out.

On abortion, on one end, you have people who think abortion is murder and that it should not be allowed under any circumstances. On the other end, if one were to take the opposite of that, it would be people who favor abortion anywhere, anytime, for any reason. But isn't that kinda loopy? I can understand why one would take the former position out of conviction, but the latter position is just insane if one takes it to the logical conclusion. What if a woman's water breaks, and she decides on the spot that she just doesn't want to go through with it? Can she have an abortion then? What about when dilation begins? 3cm? 6cm? 9cm? What about when the head starts coming out? What if the baby's feet comes out first and the woman decides that she can't go through with all the pain? Can she have an abortion then?

The reason I ask this is that Wesley Clark says it would be perfectly okay for the women to abort her baby in any of these circumstances:

McQuaid: Late term abortion? No limits?

Clark: Nope.

McQuaid: Anything up to delivery?

Clark: Nope, nope.

McQuaid: Anything up to the head coming out of the womb?

Clark: I say that it's up to the woman and her doctor, her conscience, and law--not the law. You don't put the law in there.

I'm not going to condemn Clark for believing this, because I don't think this is what he actually believes. For all I know he's an ardent pro-lifer and there's a tape out there from two years ago with Clark's saying that abortion doctors are baby killers. No one knows what Clark really thinks on any political subject, and Clark likes it that way. In that respect, he's the opposite of John Kerry: while Kerry takes both sides of an issue and hope you only heard the side you agree with, Clark takes no position and hopes that you project your positions onto him.

But when he is forced to take a position, like in this case with abortion, Clark takes the position of the interest groups he'll need to please. I have absolutely no data on this, but I can safely guess that few people outside of feminist groups would be in favor of allowing a woman in labor to abort her baby. Despite that, however, Clark still thinks that taking such a position would help him win the nomination. Now I realize that politicians need to put together a coalition of voters, but juxtapose this to Bush's illegal immigrants plan to see what the difference is in the two parties and why the left is going to lose badly in November. While Clark and others on the left seek votes by taking the positions of the special interest groups of their party, Bush is gathering moderate support by giving the finger to special interest groups of his party. With the political situation and demographics the way they are now, Democrats need every interest group of their party to fully support their candidate for them to win a national election. This is doubly true for the primaries, which while it makes what Clark said more understandable, it makes it no less wrong or depressing.

And lastly, the is a terrible political move, because it will hurt his chances at getting the nomination. The appeal of Clark, as someone with no discernible political opinions, is that he's "electable" because he's a general and can appear moderate to swing voters. But if he were the candidate, all Bush has to do is play this tape of Clark on abortion and any tapes in the future of Clark's pandering to the far left. And once Democrats realize that statements like these make Clark no more electable than Dean, they'll flock to the candidate with whom they actually agree rather than the one that seems most likely to beat Bush.

Make no mistake about it. Wesley Clark is a terrible candidate. He just doesn't seem to know what he's doing. If he were the Democratic nominee, Bush will not only beat Clark. Bush will slaughter Clark. And yet somehow Clark is considered by everybody as the leading "moderate" in this field of candidates. Speaking as someone who voted for Gore four years ago and have no interest in seeing the Republicans acquire a supermajority, this just makes me more disgusted at what a pathetic bunch of Democrats we have this year.

Brendan O'Neill, who was against invading Iraq, takes on the people who declare supporters of the Iraq war as stupid:

The left's focus on the power of propaganda also represents the worst of the "Not in My Name" approach to opposing war, in which critics throw their hands in the air at what is happening around them rather than trying to challenge the drift of events and make an impact for the better. Instead of putting forth convincing, popular arguments against American and British intervention abroad, too many opponents of the war, especially on the left, despaired over the apparently insurmountable combination of propaganda and the gullibility of the masses. If they really want to know why Bush and Blair got away with their lame war stories, maybe they should look a little closer to home.

Of course propaganda can be persuasive, sometimes even decisive, for individuals making up their minds over whether to support a war, a political party, or whatever. But the influence of propaganda is determined by the broader political climate and by the general level of public debate. In a healthy, critical climate, it is likely that Bush and Blair would have received even more ridicule for their Iraqi propaganda. But at a time when serious political debate is hard to find, our leaders can offer dodgy dossiers and half-cocked claims as if they were good coin. In short, it is often the weakness of the opposition that allows leaders to take their chances with paltry propaganda.

Liberals and the left must shoulder their fair share of the responsibility for the degraded discussion over Iraq and for the opinion polls that suggest a majority of Americans and Britons supported the war. If those who are anti-war spent less time wringing their hands over Big Bad Bush and the fickle people, and more time developing a coherent case against war, then maybe we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now. Surely the pro-war lobby is best challenged by being shouted at, rather than shouted about.

Tom Maguire dedicates Avril Lavigne's "Complicated" to John Kerry.

In the last week, Joe Lieberman has gone from 6% to 10% in the ARG tracking poll for New Hampshire. Meanwhile, John Kerry drops from 14% to 10%, while Clark seemed to have peeked at about 20%. Maybe Lieberman can finish second if Clark continues to say stupid things and John Kerry keeps being John Kerry ...

MORE: Nationally, Clark is closing in on Dean, while John Edwards comes out of nowhere to claim third place (maybe I haven't been paying attention enough).

Karl Rove must be laughing his ass off:

The former Vermont governor, taking a question from the audience after his standard stump speech, found himself being criticized for condemning the policies of President Bush and, with the assistance of the press, showing no respect for authority.

"It just makes me furious when the political media and the columnists slam, bam, and bash Bush," contended Dale Ungerer, 67, a registered Republican from Hawkeye.

"If you analyze it, how many times did you criticize Bush, but what's the sense if you don't actually say that `My plan involves this and this?' "

Ungerer called on the Democrats to heed the biblical maxim of "love thy neighbor," adding: "Please tone down the garbage, the mean-mouthing, of tearing down your neighbor, and being so pompous."

Dean, who listened quietly, immediately replied, "George Bush is not my neighbor." When Ungerer tried to interrupt, the former governor shouted: "You sit down! You had your say, and now I'm going to have my say."

Jeebus, sports radio talk show hosts are more polite than this.

Dean went on to tell Ungerer: "George Bush has done more to harm this community right here with unfunded mandates, standing up for corporations in a takeover of farmers' land, . . . sending our kids to Iraq without telling us the truth first about why they went. Our problem is we haven't stood up to George Bush enough."

In his party call to arms, Dean has argued that a unified, conservative majority in Congress has shaken the Democrats' commitment to their core political values. Yesterday, he said Ungerer's criticism was part of that pattern.

"Under the guise of supporting your neighbor, we're all expected not to criticize the president because it's unpatriotic. I think it's unpatriotic to do some of the things that this president has done to the country," Dean said to applause. "It is time not to put up any of this `love thy neighbor.' I tell you, I love my neighbor, but I want that neighbor back in Crawford, Texas, where he belongs."

Translation: we don't need no stinking moderates!

In an interview afterward, Ungerer said he came to the event because he sometimes votes Democratic and it was near his home.

Asked for a rebuttal to Dean's response, he took aim at Dean and his infamous temper.

"He put me down, definitely, because he is who he is," the retired farm equipment worker said.

I wonder which candidate Ungerer will be voting for in November?

Woman gets married so she can vote for Howard Dean in the Iowa caucuses. I wonder what Andrew Sullivan's going to say about this?

(Via David Bernstein)

Why Hei Lun and I take seperate vacations:

Not far from the red, white and blue paving stones, the Ku Klux Klan graffiti and the "Chinks out" notices scratched outside south Belfast Chinese takeaways, Hua Long Lin was at home watching television when a man burst in and smashed a brick into his face. His wife, also in the room, was eight months pregnant. The couple had moved into the terrace two weeks before.

Neighbours expressed regret but one white family told a community worker they couldn't offer a Chinese family friendship in public or they would be "bricked" too.

"It's like Nazi Germany," they explained.

Northern Ireland, which is 99% white, is fast becoming the race-hate capital of Europe. It holds the UK's record for the highest rate of racist attacks: spitting and stoning in the street, human excrement on doorsteps, swastikas on walls, pipe bombs, arson, the ransacking of houses with baseball bats and crow bars, and white supremacist leaflets nailed to front doors.

When did Ireland because a suburb of France?

The student who protested the Chinese occupation of Tibet while Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was giving a speech at Harvard last month is now facing disciplinary action. Before the speech, Harvard took the unusual step of adding an insert in each ticket that read "members of the audience are asked to be courteous and not interrupt the speaker or disrupt the meeting in any way", and the audience was reminded of Harvard's free speech rules before Wen arrived. I wouldn't have a problem with all this if it's Harvard policy that anyone who causes a disruption must face a hearing, but I highly doubt it.

Instapundit has a wrap up of terror activities in Europe, including a foiled chemical attack in France and a foiled suicide bombing plot in England.

This Viking Pundit post prompted me to watch the replay of Meet the Press on CNBC last night. I was left with a much different opinion than our friend Eric, who seems to think blogging was given a bad name in the panel discussion (I'll blame that Jeff Jarvis guy.)

Granted, Roger (no L.) Simon was in many ways a shrinking violet, but he backed off of blogging the way a moderately social person shirks off some of their eccentricities. For example: "I'll watch an occasional episode of Star Trek but I'm no Trekkie. Space is cool, but those people are freaky and uhm, Seven of Nine is really hot.... hey is that your phone I hear ringing?"

I imagine that Roger was just being understandably weasely in lieu of being the only oddball at a table of old media stalwarts.

And contrary to Ron Brownstein's assertion, I don't think anyone believes that bloggers invented the highly partisan candidate:

MR. BROWNSTEIN: A long time before the Internet, Henry Luce said, ?A magazine creates a community of interest that it did not know it existed.? And the blog does something of the same thing, but I think there’s a broader political question here, Tim. If you think of the blog as part of the overall phenomenon of the Internet growing in importance in politics, one question that has to be raised looking at Dean’s success is whether what it takes to succeed on the Internet and to generate this passion is inimical to what it takes to win a general election and to win over a lot of voters who are less passionate. Does it take a message and a persona that is so cutting and polarizing to attract attention on the Internet that you will then have trouble in November winning over the Senate. I mean, in the end, you need 50 million votes or so to win a presidential election and that’s a lot more people than you have at any given moment signing on to your blog.

On the flip side of this conversation was David Broder who bent over backwards (so much as he can at his advanced age) to praise blogging:

MR. BRODER: No, but I think it’s a tremendous tool, and it’s part of what is the healthiest trend in our politics, which is going back to personal communication, away from the mass media forgive me, NBC. But I think the healthiest thing that’s going on now is people talking to people, either through the Internet or, as we’re seeing on the ground in Iowa, face-to-face communication.

And then there was awe for the people-power generated by Howard Dean's blog:

MR. TODD: And this letter-writing thing that you talk about that was done at the meet-ups, these monthly meet-ups. They write these letters. They’re handwritten letters. You know, they did a poll, the Dean campaign, to find out how many likely Iowa caucus-goers said that they had received a handwritten letter to ask them to support any candidate; 70 percent said they had received a handwritten letter. That’s stunning.

So what are blogs and who are bloggers?

Meet the Press would have you think that bloggers were a community of somewhat uncool people dedicating their free time to a passion for intelligent, open, vigorous, constant debate, and who're determined to expand democracy. I've long felt that blogging was a clear extension of the 18^th century attempt to make a truly public space from which societal progress could occur, and if Meet the Press introduced you to this term on Sunday you might think the same.

To which all I can add is: "Beam me up."

Howard Dean openly questions President Bush's patriotism on the campaign trail according to Spinsanity's Brendan Nyhan.

Today in The Corner Andrew Stuttaford quotes Houston Texans Quarterback David Carr's reaction to Fidel Castro's latest suppression of freedom, a ban on the internet:

"So there we have it. A country that has (allegedly) 100% rates of literacy but you are not allowed to actually read anything."

For a particular display of numb-headed thinking be sure to scroll through David's comments section where reader Nina D. points out that:

This is a non-news story.

Basically, Cuba is making explicit the rules that globalized capitalist countries have created: only the elite are allowed internet access.

I'm not sure I understand Nina's point at all. When did it become the noble purpose of the great revolution to recreate the capitalist cesspool of the West inside of Cuba?

While I greatly agree with Nina's later statement that most people in the West are privileged because we were lucky enough to be born here, it's a shame that Nina serves as just another example of a Leftist/Liberal (don't get Michael Totten mad at me!) who can't accept that there's something really wrong going on in the Third World without indicting the Western world as the aggressor.

Point of curiosity: Cuba tops the (extremely brief) list of Third World countries I'd like to visit someday. I watch a lot of PBS late at night and I've seen Global Trekker's exploration of Cuba enough times to really capture my imagination. I believe Brit's and other Europeans can travel to and from Cuba freely (this is the impression my British host left me), and I had a friend travel to Cuba via Canada in a quasi-legal manner, but I can't quite picture myself visiting Cuba until our relations with that country improve dramatically... which brings me to my point of curiosity: Regime Change.

We all know that Castro is a very old man, but we all have to go sometime. Does the United States government currently have a developed plan for transitioning Cuba to a democratic society once Fidel is gone? Should we be developing a plan based upon the lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan? What might this plan look like? Would the successors to power in Cuba accept our aide, or should we invade the country shortly after Castro is gone to help with the transition? Would it be morally acceptable to occupy Cuba to bring its transition to democracy?

Cuba poses a special problem because of the precedent set in Iraq. I don't doubt that Castro is a brute, but my brief review of NGO reports on Cuba (here and here) seems to suggest Castro's crimes have less in common Saddam Hussein's and more in common with dozens of other regimes in the world, including several US allies, based upon body count alone. These reports could be wrong, or I could be under-informed, but otherwise it seems that if there is a case to be made for US democratic aid to Cuba in wake of Castro's death we must explain why we aren't preparing similar aid for other nations.

Brilliant piece by Michelle Cottle in The New Republic:

It's not that Franken and Company balance the punditry scales by being as shrill and combative as Hannity or O'Reilly. It's that they help with a basic redefinition of what Hannity and O'Reilly really are. To be seen publicly mud wrestling with an "SNL" alum rather than, say, NPR or the Gray Lady, puts O'Reilly in precisely the proper perspective. Perhaps the only thing more helpful would be an actual mud-wrestling match between Ann Coulter and Janeane Garofalo--televised on Fox, naturally. Sure, it might add to the atmosphere of political incivility in this country. But at least it would be an honest portrayal of the brand of "political debate" that flame-throwing conservative showmen have been engaging in for years now.

My money's on Janeane to defeat the chain smoking Coulter, adams apple and all.

The Daily Ablution reveals how Europe is not meeting its' own greenhouse gas goals.

...and OxBlog has plenty of them. Two particularly good puns:

Q: Why do anarchists only drink herbal tea?

A: Because they don't believe in proper tea.


Q: Why do the French only make their omelettes with one egg?

A: Because "un oeuf" is enough.

The top two "contagious" stories right now on Blogdex:

1) CBS News/60 Minutes - Bush Sought 'Way' to Invade Iraq?

2) BBC - Suspect shells examined in Iraq.

I wonder if anyone who links to the first article noticed the second article?

Or scroll down to article 20) U.S. Says It Has Proof of Sales to Iraq. Where's the outrage for the civilians harmed or killed because the Iraqi army used a Russian device to throw our munitions off course?

Also be sure to never leave your car keys near a convention of computer geeks:

For relaxation, campers drank microbrews, tossed Frisbees, and disassembled a Toyota Prius, then put it back together again (it was a rental). Clearly, this was not your average technology conference.

Gregg Easterbrook makes a convincing case against the Moon Base and Mars exploration, a subject he covered before.

I haven't read Paul O'Neill's book. I won't read Paul O'Neill's book. I can tell you, however, that a lot of other people who aren't going to read that book are going to tell us that we should listen to what Paul O'Neill says, now that he's saying negative things about Bush. Well, let's roll the tape back to when he was Treasury Secretary. I recall that Slate had a regular feature called "The O'Neill Death Watch". This is what Timothy Noah said about O'Neill:

The general dissatisfaction with O'Neill has reached some sort of crescendo in the aftermath of his highly public humiliation at the hands of the Senate Finance Committee, which called in O'Neill's Democratic predecessor, Robert Rubin, to join Alan Greenspan last week in a closed-door briefing to which O'Neill wasn't invited. Ouch, babe! A few days later, the Wall Street Journal, a publication whose news staff is usually reluctant to alienate any sitting Treasury secretary, said on its front page that O'Neill is "often criticized for lacking sufficient credibility with financial markets." Double ouch! Today, the New York Times follows up with a story by Joseph Kahn arguing that O'Neill has little influence over the Bush administration's economic policy (a point the Journal piece, which ran yesterday, also argued). This is a highly unusual, some would say untenable, situation for a Treasury secretary to find himself in.

The criticism is not exclusive to Noah. He noted that both National Review and the New Republic called for his resignation, and that neither the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were high on him. It seemed that while he was working for Bush, no one had a good word for him. I wonder what's changed since then?