EdDriscoll.com

Posted 4/11/2002 05:19:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
USS CLUELESS TRANSMITTING INSTRUCTIONS TO UNKNOWN ENEMY IN SECRET CODE: What else to make of a post that includes paragraphs such as:

So there's users Alice and Betty and Charlie. Alice's Walsh code is 11110000. Betty's is 11001100. Charlie's is 10101010. 11110000 xor 11110000 is all zeros, a match. But 11110000 xor 11001100 is 00111100, and 11110000 xor 10101010 is 01011010. In each case, half ones and half zeros. (The pattern of 1's and 0's doesn't matter, as you'll see. What's important is how many of each there are.) Alice's receiver runs an accumulator, and it adds for each match (each 0) and subtracts for each non-match (each 1). This requires us to differentiate between chips and bits. A chip is part of a bit. The cell system sends chips at a rate of 1.2288 MHz, but it takes a lot of chips to transmit one bit. Each chip contains a little piece of the information about each bit (hence the name). Right now in most CDMA systems the bit rate per phone is only 9600 per second in voice calls; the rest run 14400 per second. So there are a huge number of chips per bit.

And I'm sure the model playing Lara Croft that's posted further down on the same page has some secret microfilm hidden on her somewhere...

Posted 4/11/2002 04:49:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
BIG APPLE BLOGGING BASH: (Try saying--or typing--that five times fast) For details, click on the link:

If anyone is planning a west coast counterpart, let me know!

Posted 4/11/2002 01:43:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
BEAM ME UP: James Traficant was convicted of taking bribes in an Ohio trial. The Washington Post says:

The nine-term Democrat faced up to 63 years in prison if convicted of all 10 charges he faced, though he would probably receive a much shorter term under federal guidelines. He could be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars. The sentencing date was not immediately set. Traficant, 60, could also be expelled from the House by his colleagues, something that has happened only once since the Civil War.

Posted 4/11/2002 01:24:48 PM by Edward Driscoll
ENRON 101, AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE US AND JAPAN: Good speech by James Glassman, delivered last month to an audience in Tokyo. It's both a quick primer on the Enron scandal (in case you landed here from Mars), and how US free markets are better than Japanese central planning.

Posted 4/11/2002 01:09:22 PM by Edward Driscoll
CONDI RICE, CHEVRON, AND ANGOLA: Did you know Chevron named an oil tanker after Condoleezza Rice? I didn't. I'm not sure what to make of this article in Insight magazine, but I wouldn't be surprised to see several elements from this story resurface if Condi ends up running for VP--or P.

Posted 4/11/2002 12:58:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
RUKEYSER'S REPLACEMENT: The Media Research Center profiles Ray Brady, Louis Rukeyser's replacement on PBS's Wall Street Week, and does not like what it sees. Here's what you'll be missing by tuning out Brady. (Incidentally, for what it's worth, CNBC is putting Rukeyser on opposite Brady.

Posted 4/11/2002 12:46:50 AM by Edward Driscoll
ELIAN UPDATE: The Washington Post is reporting that "The head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered the destruction of an e-mail that could have bolstered the request for asylum filed for Elian Gonzalez during the Cuban boy's stay in Miami, a watchdog group said Wednesday."

A handwritten notation at the bottom of an INS memo dated Dec. 29, 1999, said that Doris Meissner, then the INS commissioner, ordered the memo destroyed the next day. Meissner on Wednesday said she didn't recall ordering that a specific document be destroyed but described a standing policy that no notes be taken or memos disseminated about the boy's case because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Err, wouldn't we want extra documentation because it's a sensitive issue, and one that history might look back upon with questions? More Post:

A copy of the memo survived and was made public Wednesday by the conservative legal group, Judicial Watch. It discussed the possibility that Elian's father at one time sought a visa to move to the United States. It also discussed allegations that the Cuban government had been coercing the father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. If coercion could be shown, the roughly drafted e-mail memo said, INS could "potentially accept the child's asylum's application and advise that there is no prohibition on age to child filing application. As such PA should proceed." "PA" apparently refers to "political asylum."

Is anybody at all surprised by this?

Posted 4/11/2002 12:37:42 AM by Edward Driscoll
HAWAII 5-0 (MPH): Back on January 28, Instapundit had the following entry:

FIGHT THE POWER: Hawaii has installed traffic cameras, and ignited a rebellion:
The response has been swift. Rebellious drivers have snapped up several thousand license covers that illegally obscure plates, owners of automobile-accessory shops say. They have sent angry letters to the local papers urging people not to pay their tickets. Cellphone brigades call morning radio shows to relay the vans' locations, and reports abound of drivers hurling obscene gestures, insults and even trash at the vans. Some officials are even saying that the program may be working too well. "People are now driving too slow," said Carol Costa, a spokeswoman for the City of Honolulu "They're driving in packs so their plates can't be seen by the cameras. There are people who speed around the packs of cars. And the vans, of course, themselves are being targeted by drivers."
"Of course" is right. This is America. We're willing to pull together against terrorists, but not to be Good Germans. Keep that straight, pols, or forget it at your peril.

On Thursday, Matt Drudge linked to the following article, titled Hawaii Halts Use of Traffic Cameras:

HONOLULU - Gov. Ben Cayetano on Wednesday ordered a halt to the use of cameras to catch speeders, a safety measure many Hawaii motorists considered so underhanded they tried to subvert the system. Cayetano said the Legislature was about to repeal the program anyway. "The traffic van cam law is the creation of the Legislature, and if they want to now cancel the program it will be canceled," he said in a statement. The van-mounted cameras, introduced on Oahu two months ago and operated by a private company, were coupled with radar and automatically photographed a speeder's license plate. A ticket was then issued by mail to the car's owner. Some drivers mockingly called them the "talivans." The House late Tuesday tentatively decided to abandon the system, and Cayetano said he would allow the repeal bill to become law without his signature. He maintained, though, that the program's aims were good. "Driving at faster speeds has become a habit for many drivers and explains, at least in part, why there was so much opposition to the traffic van cam," he said.

As I recall, from staying with friends on the big Island in November of 2000, most of the speeds on Hawaiian roads are set ridiculously low. Might that have led to an increase in the speeds of drivers? Nahh...

Posted 4/11/2002 12:19:16 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE NEW, NEW JOURNALISM, REDUX: Catholic Exchange has run my essay on Web logs, which previously ran last month in SpinTech. (And no, that's not me on Thursday's Catholic Exchange home page, it's some other guy frantically yelling into his monitor (probably because Blogger was down). And that's also not me in the photo that accompanies the article, it's the same guy who was yelling into his monitor, who now appears to be very carefully examining the function keys on his keyboard. Or perhaps he's frantically trying to get the Dorito crumbs out his keyboard. I'll never forget taking my old AT&T laptop through the metal detector at Philadelphia International Airport about five years ago, having to open it up, and being told by the rocket scientist of an inspector "Man, you really had a case of the munchies!" Hey, it's not my fault that the Dorito crumbs seem to propagate in the space between letters. Actually, it is. What can I tell you--I did have a serious case of the munchies back then. Fortunately, I eat slightly more sensibly these days. And I rarely have Doritos and Martinis, which I actually did once back in those days. But I digress. I wonder if F. Scott Fitzgerald ever got crumbs in his Adler typewriter? Oops, I digressed again. Where was I? Oh yeah--I do want to apologize for the relative lack of posting today. I spent the afternoon photographing vintage Atari 2600s and related equipment for a future article. (Thanks to Best Electronics in San Jose for the use of their facilities--and especially the use of their 2600s!) And then spent much of the evening cleaning up said photographs, and emailing them out to my editor.

Posted 4/10/2002 01:18:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
DOES 'NET SHORT CIRCUIT ECONOMY? Reuters has an article with the headline:NetTrends: Is the Net Short-Circuiting the Economy?

Many might dismiss that notion, but an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, believes the Internet may be "one of the most important profit-killing innovations" in years -- undercutting business profits as the world's largest economy struggles to emerge from recession. Edward Leamer, author of the widely watched Anderson economic forecast issued quarterly, said while the Internet definitely boosts productivity, it may also be the reason U.S. corporate earnings sank at the end of the 1990s. "The fundamental question is: Where did the profits go?" Leamer said in a recent telephone interview. "My number one hypothesis is it has to do with New Economy tools, both the Internet and communication devices."

My answer to all of this is "so what?". The Internet isn't going away. People aren't going to stop using it. So it's up to businesses to adapt to it, rather than moaning that it's taking away their profits. And complaining that the Internet may be "the reason U.S. corporate earnings sank at the end of the 1990s," discounts the actions of the Federal Reserve in the late 1990s to tighten money supply to fight an imaginary inflation beast, the spike in oil prices during that time, as well as the Clinton-era Justice Department's suit against Microsoft, which sent the Nasdaq cratering.

Posted 4/10/2002 10:08:19 AM by Edward Driscoll
NETANYAHU: "Israel should have expelled Yasser Arafat more than a year ago and now must "destroy" his regime and clean terrorism out of Palestinian-occupied land, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday." That and many more comments by the once and quite possibly future prime minister of Israel here. UPDATE: Howard Feinberg, in his Kesher Talk blog, says that Netanyahu is in Washington today. Howard plans "on catching him at the American Enterprise Institute this evening. If any other DC bloggers are coming, do let me know". Info on Netanyahu's engagement there is on Howard's site. Netanyahu spoke to the US Senate today. Here's a transcript of his speech, via NRO's The Corner Blog.

Posted 4/10/2002 09:45:05 AM by Edward Driscoll
WANT POLITICAL DISCUSSION? AVOID NEWSGROUPS, READS BLOGS! Says this Reuters article. Besides ours, here are a few others to choose from.

Posted 4/10/2002 09:38:34 AM by Edward Driscoll
BLANKLEY SAYS BUSH GETS IT: Tony Blankley, writing in The Washington Times says that Bush hasn't gone wobbly, he's adjusting his performance to play "To An Audience of Fools":

As I understand the last few weeks, Mr. Bush has been winking to us as much as he can. But here's the challenge he faces. Our European and Muslim friends became hysterical over Israel's march into the West Bank. Even though Mr. Bush knows the chance of negotiating a meaningful peace with Yasser Arafat and the suicide bombers is nil, those deluded and frantic friends think there is a chance and have insisted that Mr. Bush make the effort. To make the effort, he had to � temporarily � agree to work with Mr. Arafat and not call him what he is � a terrorist and a protector of terrorists. He also has been compelled to insist that Israel pull back � even though he understands that once the suicide bombers start up again, Israel will have to go in again. If we are disgusted by this idiocy, imagine how the president must feel. We got some sense of his true instincts when he talked to the press at his Crawford Ranch dressed in denim and slouched in his chair. He let Mr. Arafat have it with both barrels. Of course the highest ranking government official down there, other than the president, was a deputy press secretary. When his senior aides in Washington saw that performance they rushed to correctly remind him of his larger � if distasteful � duties. To wit, his Thursday White House remarks with Colin Powell stolidly by his side in which the president announced all the foolishness that is currently afoot with the Powell mission. I am told that Mr. Bush was so reluctant to have to utter those words, that his remarks went through 17 drafts.

Blankley was press secretary and general advisor to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Before that, he worked six years for President Reagan in a variety of positions, including speechwriter, Senior Policy Analyst, and Deputy Director of Planning and Evaluation. So I'd like to think he knows from whence Bush is speaking. But I'd like to see our Texan in the White House speak and shoot a little straighter when it comes to Israel.

Posted 4/10/2002 09:19:26 AM by Edward Driscoll
HAPPY FUN PUNDIT EXPOSES VAST BLOGGING CONSPIRACY: "Meet Garland Renault. Six months ago, he was a law school professor who dabbled in Internet publishing as a hobby. Today, his estimated net worth exceeds that of Bill Gates, and he's firmly in control of an information empire that unabashedly tells you what to think." Lots of very funny stuff in a parody of a Web log written by someone who has accused several bloggers of "war profiteering" and being "flaks for the Republican party."

Posted 4/10/2002 12:11:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT HATH GLENN WROUGHT? On Sunday night, Glenn Reynolds posted a list of all of the blogs of people who were inspired by his site, www.InstaPundit.com Yes, we're on there--and welcome to our second month on the 'Net! If you're new, click here for a very, very silly introduction to EdDriscoll.com here.

Posted 4/9/2002 09:33:26 PM by Edward Driscoll
802.11 ON THE BUS: UC San Diego Unveils World�s First Bus With Mobile, High-Speed Internet Access. Cool!

Posted 4/9/2002 09:27:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
NIXON VERSUS MCGOVERN, 2002: Patrick Ruffini shows that Richard Nixon really is tanned, rested and ready (not to mention alive) in 2002. Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds checks in with George McGovern. Simultaneously, Orrin Judd updates the legacy of Ronald Reagan, which looks better and better every year compared to the boys from '72. Appropos of nothing, while spell checking this post with Blogger Pro, the spellchecker says the correct spelling of "McGovern" is actually "Misgovern". Smart spellchecker.

Posted 4/9/2002 02:42:07 PM by Edward Driscoll
"THE ESSENTIAL BUSH" Lawrence Henry, writing The American Prowler, the online version 2.0 of the old American Spectator, thinks he knows why Bush appears to be wobbly at times. "Like Ronald Reagan, he keeps his eye on a couple of big things. For now, Bush has decided he can accomplish two of those big things. He can defeat terrorism abroad, while, at home, he can regain control of the Senate for Republicans. For the rest, he'll bob and weave, and do his best to avoid consuming conflicts with the Democrat-controlled Senate or the mainstream media."

So when the news turns troublesome, at home and abroad, and the President seems to playing it cute, a little understanding is called for. George W. Bush thinks he knows how to win. So far, it seems that he does. He also knows how not to lose. Contemporary political discourse is dominated by the delusional: campaign finance reform, racial profiling, global warming, second-hand smoke, and all the rest. For a Republican President, it's a Brer Rabbit play, a mug's game, to take on any of these issues without a Republican Senate as backstop. The press would tie him in knots, and the Democrats in the Senate would help. George W. Bush will not kick those Tar Babies. Not now.

Posted 4/9/2002 02:34:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
GRADING THE WAR: Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Schanzer ask Is America Winning? in the New York Post. Makes a good two-parter with Rowan Scarborough's "What's Next?" article in the Washington Times.

Posted 4/9/2002 01:05:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOW THE STEELERS DRAFT: ESPN's magazine explains the secret to the Pittsburgh Steelers' success: draft smart, draft for character, don't waste time on guys who don't have their heads screwed on straight, even though they have blazing stats:

The teams that won that Super Bowl hardware were stocked through the draft. Or, some say, a draft. In 1974, the Steelers chose four future Hall of Famers with their first five picks: Lynn Swann, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth and Mike Webster. "There are a lot of ways to get to the finish line," says Buffalo director of football operations Tom Modrak. "But how do you argue with the Steelers' results? The '74 draft is the gold standard." Until the mid-'60s, the Steelers were like everyone else -- picking guys based on press clippings and word of mouth. (This is the team that cut eventual Hall of Famers Johnny Unitas in 1955 and Len Dawson in 1959.) Then, owner Art Rooney put his son, Art Jr., in charge of creating a methodology to select talent. When future Hall of Fame coach Chuck Noll arrived in Pittsburgh in 1969, he gathered up the Steelers staff and succinctly put the philosophy into words: "I don't care what color, what religion, what school or what state these players are from -- just find me the best athletes. Find them. They have to be smart and they have to be good people." "We really took off after that," says Art Jr., now a de facto VP for the team. "By now, the standard operating procedure we created may seem as boring and basic as breathing, but back then it was revolutionary." Since 1970, the Steelers have drafted eight Hall of Famers, twice as many as any other NFL team.

Posted 4/9/2002 12:53:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
PAGING MICHAEL KINSLEY: Michael Kinsley once noted that a major gaffe only occurs in Washington when someone speaks the truth. So what to make of this AP story, with a headline that reads: "Tax Burden Falls on the Wealthy", and an opening paragraph that says "As a group, Americans whose incomes are in the top 5 percent are footing an increasing share of the national income tax burden. People in the bottom half, on the other hand, are paying only a fraction of the total take"? When searching for the wording for Kinsley's quote, I came upon this article, in NRO's Financial section by Bruce Barlett. It contains an example of an Alan Greenspan "gaffe" that's very reminiscent of AP's:

Labor leader Jerry Wurf complained that Ford's policies favored the rich over the poor. Greenspan replied that, actually, the rich suffered more from stagflation than did the poor. "If you really wanted to examine who, percentage-wise, is hurt the most in their incomes, it is Wall Street brokers," he argued. "I mean, their incomes have gone down the most. So, if you want to get statistical, let's look at what the facts are." The press, Congress, and just about the entire Washington establishment came down on Greenspan like a ton of bricks, and he was quickly forced to recant. "Obviously, the poor are suffering more," he abjured. With support from Ford and a swift apology, Greenspan survived the flap. Ever afterward, he has been much more circumspect in his public, and even private, comments.

Posted 4/9/2002 12:24:57 AM by Edward Driscoll
COMMUTER LANES RANT: Catholic Exchange has republished the commuter lanes rant I wrote for the back page of Sport Z magazine last year. And yes, I really did try to give the appearance of busting a blood vessel when I wrote it. Picture Alec Baldwin in full "let's stone Henry Hyde!!!" mode, except hopefully slightly more literate.

Of course, to the average person, �government� in the U.S. means �elected officials�. But commuter lanes weren�t the result of elected officials. They were the result of faceless bureaucrats in Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation. As Joan Didion describes in her book The White Album, Caltrans introduced commuter lanes in the late 1970s to initially turn the 240,000 cars that traverse the Santa Monica freeway every day into 232,000. Naturally, after screwing up that freeway, Caltrans spent an initial 42 million dollars of taxpayer money to begin the initial screwing of the rest of the state�s freeways. And for that money, what did we get? The main results from commuter lanes are to make the people driving in them feel oh so superior to the single drivers to their right; and to make the people driving alone feel like worthless worms, stuck in traffic thick with constipation, unable to move, while a handful of cars scream past them.

The blurb about the article on Catholic Exchange's home page, which should be up for most of Tuesday (it's changed daily), even has a golden retriever that looks quite a bit like my since-departed Willie (the definitive Wonderdog), who was mentioned in the article. One of the things I tried to do when I wrote it, was to express a libertarian, less government, less bureaucracy point of view, without bludgeoning people over the head with a lecture as to why an over-regulated society is bad. It's not easy to write a piece on why ham-handed social engineering is bad for an automobile magazine, but hopefully my piece did the trick.

Posted 4/8/2002 11:35:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT DOES PETA THINK? Richard Johnson, in The New York Post's Page Six says:

NUTSO actor Billy Bob Thornton wants to wipe the endangered komodo dragon off the face of the earth. "More than anything on this earth, more than any being that exists, they are the creature that represents evil," he says. The "Monster's Ball" star once woke up his wife Angelina Jolie in the middle of the night and insisted they go to a hotel because he'd dreamed their house was infested with the reptiles. "If it were up to me, I'd just go to that island and kill them all," he tells the London Daily Telegraph. "I would just . . . shoot those sons of bitches."

Posted 4/8/2002 10:28:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
IN COLD BLOOD: Superb essay by Amy Standen in Salon on Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. For anybody who hasn't read the book, it's an excellent introduction to both its story, and Capote's then-novel (pun definitely intended) new journalism techniques to capture it.

Capote was a good listener. It's what earned him the confidence of the society ladies in Greenwich, Conn., and Manhattan, and it's what made him a good reporter. His accounts of Smith's small, paradoxical kindnesses to the doomed Clutters, like when he places a pillow under Kenyon's head before putting a gun to his temple, are a hundred times more effective in describing the tumult of emotions in a criminal's mind than an expert's analysis could ever have been. Smith's divided conscience, what allows him to stop Hickock from raping Nancy Clutter, then go on to kill her anyway, and then, later, his infamous recollection of that night, "I really admired Mr. Clutter, right up until the moment I slit his throat," could be no starker from any mouth but Smith's own.

In Cold Blood was the peak of Capote's career--ego run amok, professional suicide, and dissipation would follow in the decade to come (as George Plimpton's exceptionally well edited collection of interviews from Capote's friends and associates explain), but to read In Cold Blood is to see a writer truly live up to the hype that surrounded him.

Posted 4/8/2002 09:03:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
AND STEPHEN GREEN MAKES BETTER LISTS THAN ERIC ALTERMAN: Good list of "Things I Know But Cannot Prove" at VodkaPundit. I only have two items that I can quibble with: 1. Gin (at least decent Tanqueray-quality gin. Gordon's or Kassers gin is another story) is definitely better than Vodka, especially in Martinis. But this is one of those cats/dogs, DC/Marvel, Star Wars/Star Trek, Fender/Gibson arguments over which reasonable people can disagree. 2. I don't think "Glenn Reynolds brutalizes dozens of caffiene-addicted pre-law students into scouring the web for items of interest in some sort of bizarre Internet sweatshop", but given the amount of stuff he posts, you never know. But until proven otherwise, I'm sticking with the belief that he gets his content the old fashioned way--he types it himself.

Posted 4/8/2002 08:23:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
DAN RATHER, IN UN-APPROVED TOGS: This photo, from the Media Research Center current homepage, speaks for itself. Captain Dan The Newsman looks like he just escaped from a UN-peacekeeping mission. At least back in the old days, anchormen in a foreign country wore smart-looking safari jackets, not Michael Dukakis in the tank helmets and flak jackets with TV painted on them in 32-inch high letters.

Posted 4/8/2002 03:21:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
DEPRAVITY IN ACTION: This story about a deaf lesbian couple, who have admitted deliberately creating what one article called "the world's first designer handicapped babies" is making the rounds of "the Blogosphere".

The two women tracked down a deaf sperm donor to ensure that their daughter, who is now five, would inherit the same inherited hearing disability that they both share. The couple were so pleased with the result that they have just had a second child, called Gauvin, using the same technique. Doctors who examined the boy say he is completely deaf in one ear and has only partial hearing in the other.

The words escape me to properly express how truly repelled I am at this concept--and how I can't help but thinking that in this age of celebrating victimization, that they will merely be the first of many "designer handicapped babies" to come.

Posted 4/8/2002 01:57:23 PM by Edward Driscoll
ISRAELI PULLOUT WATCH: Breaking news on Israel's withdrawal: DRUDGE: "Israel to begin limited withdrawal... Israeli army said to begin pulling out from two Palestinian cities within hours, CNN is reporting..." REUTERS: "The radio said Sharon made the decision after consultations with top cabinet ministers and that Israel would announce that its forces were leaving the two cities after completing their mission there to round up militants and weapons." UPDATE: AP says Israelis pullout from two West Bank cities as they launch a pre-dawn invasion of a new town "The movements early Tuesday might signal that Israel is trying to appease the United States, while forging ahead with the original plan to thoroughly search for militants and weapons involved in a recent series of suicide bombings in Israel."

Posted 4/8/2002 01:47:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
MIDDLE EAST=TAMMANNY HALL: Great paragraph (in the middle of lots of other great paragraphs) by James Lileks in today's "Bleat":

It�s like the entire Middle East is one big Tammanny Hall, the individual nations mere boroughs dispensing patronage, favors, lies and haughty denials. When the corruption of a system outpaces the corruption of the people, however, you have a problem - which is why I believe it�s possible for some of these governments to fold like a Yugo in a parking garage collapse.

Posted 4/8/2002 12:51:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
RUNNING THE NUMBERS: John Scalzi has some thoughts on the number of hits blogs get, and why. (Found via VodkaPundit, which also has an interesting debate (with contributions from yours truly) on when the rock group Genesis lost it.

Posted 4/8/2002 12:41:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
AL SHARPTON IN 2004? There's a good article by Edward Blum on Al Sharpton on National Review Online. It mentions Sharpton's 1994 primary challenge to incumbent Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "Although the popular Moynihan easily won, Sharpton garnered eighty percent of the black vote, resulting in 25 percent of all votes cast. This overwhelming black cohesiveness aligned against an icon of the Democratic-left must have stunned every political consultant in the state."

If Sharpton bled 80 percent of the black vote away from Moynihan, he could do the same against Tom Daschle, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry or any of the Democrat leading lights. Throw in a handful of Hispanic and white voters and Sharpton could win or be runner-up in most of the critical primary states. Since the Democrats are likely to frontload their primary-election schedule this cycle, it is not inconceivable for Sharpton to actually win New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. If he doesn't outright win these states, the racial arithmetic earns him a close second.

For anyone who's watched Sharpton's rise since the late 1980s, Tawana Brawley, and his appearances on the old Morton Downey Jr. Show (when I first saw him, back when I was in college), his accumulation of raw power has been impressive, and transformation into a required stop on the Democratic road to the White House has been nothing short of astonishing. Blum explains what he could do with it in 2004.

Posted 4/8/2002 12:36:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
WAVE THE SWORD AND SCREAM: Steven Den Beste says that Saddam Hussein has been "waving his sword so hard that he's lopped off his own foot with it":

Saddam has been trying to get the Arab states to "use oil as a weapon", a forlorn hope, but about the only one he has. Now he's cut Iraqi oil production for 30 days or until Israel stops its attacks. He's trying to shame the other Arab nations into action by being holier-than-thou. And by so doing, he is waving his sword so hard that he's lopped off his own foot with it. One of the reasons Turkey has been leery of a US invasion of Iraq is because of their concern that they'd lose access to Iraqi oil. But now they've lost it anyway. And this shows that even leaving Saddam in power won't guarantee continued access to Iraqi oil. The most important effect of this action will be to make Turkey more likely to permit the US to use Turkish territory to attack Iraq.

Posted 4/7/2002 10:30:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
APPROPRIATE JUXTAPOSITION: At the end of the AP story that Matt Drudge featured on "Two-Headed Snake Sensation in Spain" was a link that read "Next Story: Socialists Win First Hungarian Vote".

Posted 4/7/2002 10:22:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
FAME, FORTUNE AND MARSHMALLOW MERINGUE: Matt Drudge has the skinny on Martha Inc., a new book about Martha Stewart.

Posted 4/7/2002 10:18:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
GOOD QUESTION: Posted anonymously on The Corner on National Review Online:

Here's a story from San Diego about a local Arab-American/Muslim rally for the Palestinian cause. A 14-year-old Arab-American girl is quoted saying that she would consider strapping explosives to her body and becoming a suicide bomber. Others quoted talk about these kamikaze kids being the natural fruit of hopelessness. I'm still waiting for CAIR denouncing this kind of irresponsible talk. If a Christian pro-lifer speaks favorably about murdering others for the sake of saving unborn babies, every pro-life group and Christian church leader in the country quite rightly denounces that person -- and is expected to by the media, vigilant against fanaticism. So why do I get the feeling we are expected to understand when it comes from Muslims? Why do they get a pass?

Posted 4/7/2002 09:53:26 PM by Edward Driscoll
KISSING JESSICA STEIN: A friend of ours invited Nina and I to see Kissing Jessica Stein today. What a fun movie--with the feeling of a hip Gen-X Annie Hall, the sort of film Woody Allen used to make in the 1970s before he went through his early 1980s Bergman phase, his early 1990s Antonioni phase, and his mid-1990s "comedic hooker" (Mighty Aphrodite, Deconstructing Harry, etc.) phase. Given the effortless feel of the movie, I was surprised to see this was only the second film its director has helmed, and that the two leads, Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen wrote the screenplay, and this was one of their first writing efforts. Early on while watching the film, as the story was being set-up, I kept contrasting it to "You've Got Mail", perhaps because "Mail" was the last New York romantic comedy I've seen, and I literally fell asleep watching it, due to "Mail's" distinct lack of energy, flat direction and boring characters. (There's something about Nora Ephron movies that just doesn't work for me. My wife liked "You've Got Mail". She loved "Michael". She may have liked "Sleepless in Seattle". They've all grossed boxcars worth of money. They've all worked faster than Sominex to put me out like a light.) In contrast, "Kissing Jessica Stein" crackled with energy, and was filled with characters that were both identifiable, likable, and funny. Given the nature of the film, (cute, neurotic 20-something heterosexual Jewish girl fails in relationship after relationship until she meets an equally hetero, but more aggressively sexual girl who is talked into placing an ad in the lesbian personals section of The Village Voice by her gay friend) I was curious as to what a publication like National Review would think of the film. Michael Potemra loved it:

Kissing Jessica Stein works very well as a movie because it's not about a canned message; it's about realized, well-acted characters in a well-written story. Westfeldt and Juergensen wrote the script themselves, and deserve much credit for bringing this provocative, entertaining film to the screen. About sex, we have enough � indeed, too many � movies; this is an unusual one, about people and about love.

Unless the subject repulses you, I highly recommend it--it's refreshingly free of hectoring or PC correctness, and pretty damn funny, to boot.

Posted 4/7/2002 09:39:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOLOGRAPHIC DVDS: It sounds way cool, if not the same as the three-dimensional holograms of the 1970s (I seem to recall "Logan's Run" using holograms in one or two scenes), but according to this article on Yahoo! News, "InPhase Technologies, an offshoot of Lucent Technologies ' research arm Bell Labs, will be showing the first commercial holographic video recorder at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show on April 8 in Las Vegas."

The device uses the company's Tapestry technology to hold 100GB of data on a single CD-sized write-once disc as a succession of 1.3MB holograms. That's enough for 20 full-length movies, or 30 minutes of uncompressed high-resolution video. The first product is aimed at professional video editing, effects and archival use, with initial production at the end of 2003 and full manufacturing in 2004.

Posted 4/7/2002 03:34:07 PM by Edward Driscoll
ONLINE GROCERIES GO BACK TO THE FUTURE: With Peapod and Webvan having both gone bust (in one form or another), my wife has taken to shopping online via Albertsons.com, which has the order ready for us at our local Albertson's supermarket. A friendly clerk wheels it out, puts it in the trunk, and off we go, saving a good half hour or more of shopping, waiting in line, etc. It put me in mind of Ike Godsey's General Store from The Waltons TV series, which of course, was set in the 1930s. In the old days, a customer would enter a store and the clerk would fill his or her order, bag it, and carry it out--or, I assume, have it ready for them when they arrived at the store. Alvin Toffler wrote that many trends of The Third Wave are First Wave trends revitalized with high technology. Working at home and custom made goods instead of mass production are two of several examples he gave. This seems like another one. Everything old is new again--or is that the other way around?

Posted 4/7/2002 02:23:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
MULTIPLE MEANINGS ALERT: Punditwatch has this beauty from Cokie Roberts:

The Most Pedestrian, The Most Insightful Cokie Roberts said of the Secretary of State, "Powell has a really tough nut. This is not going to be easy." Later, responding to the Brookings Institution's Shibley Telhami's labeling of an oil embargo being irrational, she said, "Rationality is not the key word in the region."

Posted 4/7/2002 02:15:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
ASTHMA UPDATE: A while back, we mentioned the story that ran in Reason last month about odious school bureaucrats confiscating asthma inhalers from kids. As a follow up, National Review Online has a good article with some possible reasons why asthma is on the rise in children.

Posted 4/7/2002 02:04:09 PM by Edward Driscoll
FEDS SAY 70 PERCENT NOT EXERCISING. Other 30 percent wonder what business is this of the Federal Government?

Posted 4/7/2002 12:36:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
VAST PESTILENTIAL WASTELAND UPDATE: As a follow up to our coverage of the recent "priceless" ANWR videotape, here's the Washington Post, which says:

Warnings On Drilling Reversed One week after a U.S. Geological Survey study warned that caribou "may be particularly sensitive" to oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the agency has completed a quick follow-up report suggesting that the most likely drilling scenarios under consideration should have no impact on caribou.

Nice to see what a box of blank TDKs can accomplish!

Posted 4/7/2002 12:15:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
INSTAPUNDIT, LOADED FOR BEAR: Lots of good stuff by the InstaPundit, including why Saudi Arabia is the key to the war, and "Israel, Iraq, Syria, Iran -- they're all sideshows." Antisemitism on the rise in Canada, French hypocrisy in action, a European donation to the Yassar Arafat Save My Hide--Pleeease Fund, and the latest nominee for the Darwin Award.

Posted 4/7/2002 01:50:54 AM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT'S NEXT? Rowan Scarborough, in The Washington Times, paints the big picture. "President Bush has positioned troops in and around eight nations on three continents to directly take on international terrorists in a global war that will last at least until 2005, the end of his first term." As to what happens next, read Scarborough's article--this is a very, very different battle than Desert Storm--and with much higher stakes for America.

Posted 4/7/2002 01:08:03 AM by Edward Driscoll
LARRY KUDLOW ON THE ROPE-A-DOPE: Writing in The Washington Times, Kudlow keeps up the rope-a-dope theme, comparing Bush's at times seemingly incoherent foreign policy to not just Eisenhower's, but George Washington's as well:

While events swirled about him and the world, the first president of the fledgling republic seemed weak and uncertain, buffeted by contradictory opinions, but after the clouds and rhetoric parted, he looked masterful. It was clear he had kept his head and the peace.

When the dust settles in the Middle East, I certainly hope we'll say the same thing about Bush.