Posted 9/13/2003 02:41:17 PM by Edward Driscoll
SUE ME, SUE YOU BLUES: The Beatles' Apple label is suing Apple Computer's iTunes in a trademark suit. Reuters reports that The Beatles' Apple "did not elaborate on the penalties it is seeking, but said the computer maker violated a 1991 agreement specifying that it could use the Apple trademark for computer products only."

Posted 9/13/2003 02:37:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
INDIANA'S GOVERNOR DEAD: Democrat Frank O'Bannon was 73.

Posted 9/13/2003 01:51:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE ACCIDENTAL RADICAL: Just added Jonathan Rauch's "Accidental Radical" essay to the "Internet's Greatest Hits" section of our links page, which is basically a collection of essays, both humorous and serious, that I've referred back to on numerous occasions. Rauch's essay does a brilliant job of explaining the "strategery" and the seemingly contradictory strains of the Bush administration, and placing them in perspective. Needless to say, it's well worth reading.

Posted 9/13/2003 01:01:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
LOOK HOW FAR WE HAVEN'T COME: Pejman Yousefzadeh has a photograph taken ten years ago today that, as he writes, "used to symbolize hope. Now, it just looks ridiculous". UPDATE: David Frum writes, "Here’s a question: Why is there still a Palestinian Authority?"

Posted 9/13/2003 11:54:30 AM by Edward Driscoll
SUSPECTED ECO-TERRORIST ARRESTED, according to AP, which reports:

A 25-year-old man was arrested Friday by FBI agents for investigation of arson and vandalism that caused $1 million in damages last month at a Hummer dealership, police said. Joshua Thomas Connole, of Pomona, was arrested at home about 12:30 a.m., said Cpl. Rudy Lopez, a West Covina police spokesman. Connole's roommate, Emily Lutz, 25, said he was a peace activist who has protested the war in Iraq and actions of the Bush administration. She told the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Saturday's newspaper that Connole and Lutz belonged to the Regen Co-op, a housing cooperative. "There are about a dozen of us who live together, and we're trying to promote communal living, environmental sustainability and social justice," she said. "We do demonstrations, we have workshops, we attend informational meetings and we attend protests."

And if Connole is found guilty, destroy perfectly legal automobile dealers, as well.

Posted 9/13/2003 10:03:42 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE JESSE JACKSON, NORMA DESMOND CONNECTION explored by Shelby Steele in a devastating essay in the Wall Street Journal. Read the whole thing.

Posted 9/12/2003 05:02:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
ORWELL'S LIST: Timothy Garton Ash writes about George Orwell's 1949 list of 38 writers and journalists, whom Orwell had concluded "are crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way and should not be trusted as propagandists." Ash writes:

In February 1949, George Orwell was lying in a sanatorium in the Cotswolds, very ill with the TB that would kill him within a year. That winter, he had worn himself out in a last effort to retype the whole manuscript of 1984, his bleak warning of what might happen if Britain succumbed to totalitarianism. He was lonely, despairing of his own wasted health, at the age of just forty-five, and deeply pessimistic about the advance of Russian communism, whose cruelty and treacherousness he had personally experienced, nearly at the cost of his own life in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. The communists had just taken over Czechoslovakia, in the Prague coup of February 1948, and they were now blockading West Berlin, trying to strangle the city into submission. He thought there was a war on, a "cold war," and he feared that the Western nations were losing it. One reason we were losing, he thought, was that public opinion had been blinded to the true nature of Soviet communism. In part, this blinding was the product of understandable gratitude for the Soviet Union's immense role in defeating Nazism. However, it was also the work of a poisonous array of naive and sentimental admirers of the Soviet system, declared Communist Party (CP) members, covert ("crypto-") communists, and paid Soviet spies. It was these people, he suspected, who had made it so difficult for him to get his anti-Soviet fable Animal Farm published in the last year of the last war.

More's the pity that having decided to fight (in their own way, as journalists) against the Soviet Union, both Orwell and Whittaker Chambers each died fearing they were on the losing side of the battle. (Link via Reason's "Hit & Run" Blog.)

Posted 9/12/2003 04:42:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
STANLEY CROUCH, writing in the New York Daily News, says "Only wartime tactics will secure U.S. now". Since you're reading our Website, your first reaction is likely to be some variation on "Duh!". (Picture a headline like that in 1943 London. Pretty difficult to imagine, huh?) But unfortunately, Crouch's opinion is one that is all too rarely heard in the Big Apple's newspapers, with the exception of The Post.

Posted 9/12/2003 01:26:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE REUTERS CANDIDATE: Reading between the lines, you just know that Howard Dean really digs the Hamas:

Dean has been under fire for suggesting the United States should not take sides in the Middle East conflict and Israel should get out of disputed territories of the West Bank. While he has insisted that he backs U.S. policy supporting Israel, statements made on Wednesday about Hamas raise new questions. "There is a war going on in the Middle East, and members of Hamas are soldiers in that war," Dean said Wednesday. Dean condemned terrorism but his description of Hamas--designated by the United States as a terrorist group--as "soldiers in a war" conflicts with U.S. policy. The European Union also approved last week the designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Sort of makes essays like this pretty easy to understand, doesn't it? UPDATE: In a related article, Jim Geraghty asks, "Will campaigning Democrats talk about terrorism beyond this week"? UPDATE: Charles Johnson and the readers of Little Green Footballs have some thoughts on Dean's statement.

Posted 9/12/2003 11:33:08 AM by Edward Driscoll
REUTERS: Ricki Hollander asks, is it a "news agency or political advocacy group", when it comes to the Middle East? Regular readers of this Blog should know by now what we think about that topic.

Posted 9/12/2003 10:23:37 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE MAN IN BLACK: Johnny Cash dies as well, at age 71.

Posted 9/12/2003 02:49:59 AM by Edward Driscoll
OCTOBER 31st WILL BE the last flight of the Concorde. Forbes has details.

Posted 9/12/2003 02:16:02 AM by Edward Driscoll
JOHN RITTER DEAD AT AGE 54: Ironically, as I posted on Monday, I saw him the day before at Disneyland. The Washington Post article doesn't give any details about how he died, but he didn't appear in ill-health there. I only glanced up at the Jumbotron, but he certainly looked and sounded like the same old John Ritter. I hated Three's Company, but Ritter appeared to be a genuinely nice guy--and of course, his father was a legend in country music. UPDATE: Apparently, Ritter died of a massive heart attack after taping the most recent episode of 8 Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter, his ABC comedy series.

Posted 9/11/2003 08:59:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE PHONE CALL: Reading the chats that John Hawkins found (see post directly below this one), brought back to me how 9/11 started for Nina and I, with "a sudden Proustian rush", as Woody Allen once quipped. At about 6:45 am that terrible day, when we were both still fast asleep, the phone rang. A friend of ours from England (who would later become known to many of you as "Group Captain Mandrake") was on the other end calling from England, where it was 2:45 in the afternoon:

GC: Sorry to wake you up at this time. Nina: [yawning] Hi, what's up? GC: Turn on your TV. Nina: What station? GC: Any station, it doesn't matter!

Like JFK's assassination, the failed assassination on President Reagan, and the Challenger and Columbia disasters, everyone will be able to immediately answer "where were you on 9/11", for the rest of their lives--no matter how much the media wants to move on.

Posted 9/11/2003 08:45:29 PM by Edward Driscoll
COMMENTS FROM 9/11, AS IT HAPPENED, via John Hawkins.

Posted 9/11/2003 07:02:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
FINAL INSTRUCTIONS: Charles Johnson links to Mohammed Atta's final instructions--an astonishing perversion of religion.

Posted 9/11/2003 06:52:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
READ THE WHOLE THING: Victor Davis Hanson on "The Great Divide".

Posted 9/11/2003 01:19:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE COPPERHEAD CONJUNCTION: James Taranto writes:

"Everything may have changed on Sept. 11 two years ago, but not necessarily in the ways one would have expected. American politics is the most striking case in point. Given the bipartisan unity that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on America, one had reason to hope for a revival of the early Cold War adage that 'politics stops at the water's edge.' And indeed, except for the lunatic fringes of the Democratic left, this seemed to be the case for better than a year after the attack. The turning point seems to have been the 2002 election. Having lost control of the Senate, the Democrats lost control of themselves. The party is now dominated by 21st-century Copperheads who exult in every setback and refuse to acknowledge any success--all because they have convinced themselves that it is the 'Bush administration,' rather than their country, that is fighting the war."

James Lileks describes the moment that you know you're about to face one of these "21st-century Copperheads" (in print or on the 'Net at least):

Two years later I take a certain grim comfort in some people’s disinterest in the war; if you’d told me two years ago that people would be piling on the President and bitching about slow progress in Iraq, I would have known in a second that the nation hadn’t suffered another attack. When the precise location of Madonna’s tongue is big news, you can bet the hospitals aren’t full of smallpox victims. Of course some people are impatient with those who still recall the shock of 9/11; the same people were crowding the message boards of internet sites on the afternoon of the attacks, eager to blame everyone but the hijackers. They hate this nation. In their hearts, they hate humanity. They would rather cheer the perfect devils than come to the aid of a compromised angel. They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers - and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word: But. And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming. I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t. Which is why this war will be long.

Lawrence F. Kaplan puts it this way: are you a September 10th American, or a September 11th American? UPDATE: Orrin Judd has some thoughts on Kaplan's essay. ANOTHER UPDATE: So does Andrew Sullivan.

Posted 9/11/2003 12:56:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
STEPHEN GREEN WRITES:

Now go on and let yourself relive that day, just a little. Remember the first reports that "a small plane" had crashed into the World Trade Center. Firemen who didn't just run into a burning building, they ran up into collapsing skyscrapers. Grounded planes. The stock exchanges, closed. The doubt, the fear, the "what will they do next?" And the realization: Oh my God, we're at war. War in the Old Testament sense, when the barbarians came to rape and to slaughter. Relive, too, the days after. The wall of inkjet "have you seen. . .?" photos. You, me, your friends, crying over obituaries in The New York Times. Widows grieving at Ground Zero, who breathed – breathed in – their husbands' ashes. Remember, too, our just vengeance. Our president told us, "I hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." And they do hear us, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. They hear us, not because we used our weapons to murder their civilians, but to bring down their tyrants. From our loss, we gave them hope. The loss felt in Baghdad and Kabul is that of Sisyphus without his stone. The sound they hear is the ring of freedom. And they hear us, even if only a whisper, in Syria, in Iran, and – yes – they hear us in Saudi Arabia, too. Maybe defiance will prove as irresistible an export as Levi's, Coke, and MTV. Two years later, I'm still angry – and I hope you are, too. But are we terrorized? Hell, no.

Posted 9/11/2003 12:05:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
UTTERLY CHILLING: Stephen Den Beste coolly and logically describes the suicide (or homicide--call 'em what you prefer) bombing methods of the Hamas in military terms, and places them in perspective along with the '93 and 2001 attacks against the WTC, and the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing of '95:

If they could do it, Hamas would certainly use a higher-intensity campaign. If they had the means to make several successful attacks per day, they'd be doing so. If they had better weapons, they wouldn't be using the ones they are. Terrorist war is war on a shoestring, and in the last year the Hamas shoestring has gotten a lot shorter. And Israel's targeted assassinations have hurt them badly, which is why they're squealing and making dire threats. But their threats are meaningless; all threats amount to making the claim that we could be doing a lot worse than we are, but we've been holding back until now. There's no reason to believe that they are holding back. Having made this threat, they may well launch a token attack or two against Israeli residential areas (most likely against settlements in Gaza). But they won't keep doing so, because such attacks won't turn out to be as effective as the ones they have been making until now. All of the Arab/Islamic terrorist groups have shown themselves to be utterly ruthless and merciless. And because of that, in every case if they're making threats it's an indication of weakness. al Qaeda is the same way, and has made dire threats against the US and issued dire warnings to us many times since 9/11, but without actually launching any attacks at all. For instance, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, al Qaeda claimed to have some unreasonably huge number of "sleeper cells" in the US, primed and waiting for orders, who would unleash hell on us if we actually invaded. There are advantages and disadvantages to being utterly ruthless. It gives you more flexibility for planning if you don't consider any kind of attack to be off-limits. But it also leaves you no ability to escalate as a means of deterrence, and gives your enemies little incentive to be anything other than ruthless in return. Hamas cannot use threats to make Israel stop trying to kill its leaders, because Israel's leaders don't believe anything Hamas says, either about escalation or about truces.

Speaking of escalation, why is Israel showing Arafat mercy?

Posted 9/11/2003 11:23:07 AM by Edward Driscoll
MODERNITY: Great line by Mackubin Thomas Owens in National Review Online: "9/11 revealed an emerging geopolitical reality: that the world's most important fault line is not between the rich and the poor, but between those who accept modernity and those who reject it." The rest of the piece is worth reading as well.

Posted 9/11/2003 01:57:00 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE CASE FOR ANGER: Andrew Sullivan gets it exactly right:

On this anniversary, the tritest thing to feel is mere grief. Not that grief isn't justified. But grief is a natural response to unforeseen tragedy, to random events, to things beyond human control. And what happened two years ago today wasn't merely tragedy. It was a conscious atrocity, an act of war. The free West was attacked by a pathological ideology that still holds a whole region of the world in its grip. And the very forces that tried to destroy us then are still trying to destroy us - as that grotesque videotape yesterday only underlined. Any attempt to hide that fact, minimize it, gloss over it, or complicate it into vagueness is an insult to memory.

Exactly right.

Posted 9/11/2003 01:51:29 AM by Edward Driscoll
DESECRATING THE GRAVES: Michele Malkin writes:

Across the nation, public officials will strike somber poses and shed television-friendly tears and bow their blow-dried heads in memory of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks. They'll hold hands, light candles, and pass around a plateful of platitudes: "Never forget," they'll intone. "Let's roll," they'll thunder. "God bless America," they'll warble in perfect harmony. They'll assure us they are committed to fighting terror and securing our borders and doing whatever it takes to protect the homeland from another horrific mass murder at the hands of freedom-hating fanatics. And then? And then, from Washington state to Washington, D.C., they'll go back to work, roll up their sleeves, and spit on the graves of the September 11 dead.

How? Read the whole thing.

Posted 9/11/2003 01:20:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
TWO YEARS LATER: For lots of 9/11-related links, here's what I posted last year on the first anniversary of September 11, 2001. Here's the Tech Central Station piece I wrote on how Moody's, located just a block or so away from 9/11 experienced the crisis. Here's my interview with Alvin Toffler from the week after. Here's a piece I wrote for National Review Online on the day the financial markets reopened. And here's the piece I wrote about what it was like for my wife and I on 9/11. It will be business as usual for most of the television networks today. (And it's business as usual for much of the far left as well today, apparently.) But it's important to remember, not only the death and destruction in Manhattan and Washington on 9/11/01, but just how black the nation as a whole felt--and that horrible feeling of not knowing what would come next. Fortunately, we now know what came next. America woke up from a decade of slumber--and our eyes were clear and wide.

Posted 9/10/2003 01:02:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
ROLL TIDE! John Berthoud of the National Taxpayers Union writes that Alabamans struck a blow against elitism this week. UPDATE: Scott Ott "reports", "Now that Alabama voters have rejected a $1.2 billion tax hike, the Governor has been placed on methadone therapy for withdrawal symptoms."

Posted 9/10/2003 11:20:13 AM by Edward Driscoll
CALIFORNIA ROUND-UP: Glenn Reynolds has links to a variety of California items, including this classic:

The California Senate voted 19-2 on Tuesday to demand an apology from Democratic Gov. Gray Davis for what many regard as an ethnic slur made against Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Bill Lockyer, call your office!

Posted 9/10/2003 11:08:09 AM by Edward Driscoll
DID AIRLINE DEREGULATION FAIL? Paul Craig Roberts analyzes the airlines' burn rates (of money, not JP-4 jet engine fuel), and predicts massive consolidation is coming. "You think you hate air travel now? Just wait", he says.

Posted 9/10/2003 10:51:40 AM by Edward Driscoll
OVERHEARD AT THE DEBATE: A reader of Stephen Green's VodkaPundit Weblog asks, "Al Sharpton is the voice of reason tonight. What does that tell you about the field?" Pretty much everything you need to know, actually. But if not, Steve blogged the debate in realtime, so visit his home page, and keep scrolling down. Glenn Reynolds also has some interesting links. And I'm sure James Taranto will, as well. UPDATE: Michael Graham, the author of the hilarious Redneck Nation, says that the winner of last night's debate was...Bruce Springsteen!

Posted 9/10/2003 10:25:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
EDWARD TELLER, DEAD AT 95: Between Teller and Leni Riefenstahl, as Rod Dreher wrote, "farewell, 20th century".

Posted 9/9/2003 08:08:26 PM by Edward Driscoll
NOT A BAD IDEA: Thomas Sowell suggests that Republicans should consider a Contract with Black America in 2004.

Posted 9/9/2003 06:59:46 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE WONDERFUL, HORRIBLE LIFE OF LENI RIEFENSTAHL is over, at age 101. Jesse Walker has some thoughts on her life as a propagandist.

Posted 9/9/2003 04:18:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
FULL GABARDINE JACKET: Brent Bozell exclaims, "Enough Vietnam Analogies" from TV newscasters:

1. We lost 58,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. Our casualties in Iraq now aren't on the same planet as the losses in that war. 2. We didn't liberate Vietnam from communist dictatorship and then have trouble reorganizing it along peaceful and democratic lines. If we were in Month Six and still struggling to depose Saddam Hussein--while losing thousands of lives in the process--the comparison would be more realistic. In Vietnam, we withdrew in defeat and left with the whole country united under tyranny and concentration camps. In Iraq, we liberated the entire country from tyranny and torture chambers in three weeks. The anchors are now anxious to make us forget this. 3. In Vietnam, anti-war activists and anchormen could more plausibly argue (though still incorrectly) that the complete consolidation of communism halfway around the world was not a threat to the domestic security of the United States. Since September 11, are these same anti-war activists and anchormen finding it reasonable to assume that America faces no threat, and the proper response to world terrorism and the states that sponsor it is once again withdrawal and negotiated humiliation? The only Vietnam analogy that works is the comparison in press coverage. As in Vietnam, the press is eager to discredit American military action, to discourage American support at home for military action, to disintegrate the noble cause of the fight, and to bury any victory under a tidal wave of gloom.

As I noted back on February 27th, almost three weeks before fighting actually broke out in Iraq, CNN actually used the Q-word to describe the upcoming war. As good as Bozell's essay is, I'd argue that there's another Vietnam analogy that works: the protestors of this war, like television anchormen, are also stuck in 1968. UPDATE: No sooner did I post this, I read this article by John O'Sullivan, in which he argues that Vietnam, properly understood, wasn't a quagmire:

What of the significance of Vietnam as a local skirmish in the Cold War? Here we have the testimony of Asia's principal elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, First minister of Singapore. He has pointed out that the American intervention in the war halted the onward march of Communism southwards for 15 years--roughly from 1960 to 1975. In that crucial period, the new ex-colonial states of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, maybe India itself, took advantage of this incidental American protection to develop their economies from poor agricultural and trading post economies into modern industrial and information societies. By the time the war was over and North Vietnamese tanks were surging into Saigon, these countries were prosperous NICs (i.e. newly industrializing countries), more or less immune to the Communist virus and capable of resisting external attack. Nor does the story end with the safety of Singapore. In the late 1980s, when the Soviet politburo was debating perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev cited its success--tiny Singapore, exported more in value than the vast Soviet Union--as demonstrating the need to dismantle the socialist command economy. (At the exact same moment, Hanoi was embarking on its own hesitant liberalization. Coincidence?) If Lee Kuan Yew is to be believed, then, the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was a major factor is achieving the West's overall victory in the Cold War. It held the line while freedom and prosperity were established in non-Communist Asia--and that provided the rest of the world, including the evil empire itself, with a "demonstration effect" of how freedom led to prosperity.

Incidentally, Stephen Hayward made that argument as well. But be sure to read the rest of Sullivan's piece--he does a remarkable job of placing Vietnam in perspective. Speaking of Vietnam, but apropos of nothing in Sullivan's article, this is as good a place as any to hang an observation: it says much about how things work in the "red states" of America, that of the stars of Full Metal Jacket, Lee Ermey is a folk hero. And Matthew Modine has largely dropped off the cultural radar.

Posted 9/9/2003 03:52:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE RETURN OF OPUS: Cartoonist Berke Breathed is returning to cartooning, with a Sunday-only strip.

Posted 9/9/2003 01:22:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
JOHN PODHORETZ WRITES, "President Bush's subdued, powerful and totally straightforward 19-minute address from the White House was a clear message to his critics: Play time is over."

Posted 9/9/2003 11:13:43 AM by Edward Driscoll
MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL RATINGS up four percent in season debut: And no wonder--terrific matchup and game last night. But who was that dueting with Hank Williams Jr? Britney Spears? Williams' "Are You Ready For Some FootBALLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!" song is barely tolerable as a solo. It's awfully painful as a duo.

Posted 9/8/2003 09:17:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE MAN FROM "THE KLAN WITH A TAN" (to borrow a phrase from Glenn Reynolds) gets a hand from the man from the original Klan: In post titled, "Unfair, But Very Funny", Orrin Judd notes that former Grand Wizard Tom Metzger of the California Klan has announced his backing of Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante in the upcoming recall election. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!

Posted 9/8/2003 07:14:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
I--I CAN REMEMBER, STANDING, BY THE WALL: As I said earlier, I visited the Reagan Library in Simi Valley on Saturday. One of the highlights of the trip was seeing a portion of the Berlin Wall--its shape is rather reminiscent of the proportions of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but instead of a uniform black, it's covered with some sort of flower-power design on what I assume was the West German side, and nothing but a large spray-painted "E" on the East German side. My wife was in conferences all day, so I drove up there from Anaheim alone (with an earlier presidential moment of my own--my rented Lincoln was almost run into by a guy whose vanity tags read "HARDING"). I asked a fellow who was there with his wife and young daughters if he could take a shot of me in front of the wall. I think he was surprised that I didn't smile, but how do you smile in front of a slab where so many people died trying to obtain their freedom? I'll try to post some additional photos of the library, but in the meantime, here's the plaque in front of the wall, and photo of the West German side of the wall without my mug in the shot. And here's what was the East German side of the wall. Obviously, there are chunks of the Berlin Wall scattered all over the planet (and you can buy little bits of it as a memento--as I did in the library's gift shop.) But the Reagan Library is a perfect place for this memorial--as nobody fought harder than President Reagan to bring the wall down. The sad thing is, more and more it looks Europe hasn't learned the lessons of that period, or why it was built. As Steven Den Beste has noted in several posts, a united Europe should be an economic powerhouse. Instead, socialism killed 10,000 people this past summer in France--and is stifling Germany's economy as well.

Posted 9/8/2003 02:15:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
GRAY DAVIS' CALIFORNIA ADVENTURE: Virginia Postrel has some thoughts on California's budget crisis, as well as a potential solution.

Posted 9/8/2003 11:06:02 AM by Edward Driscoll
DISNEY'S CALIFORNIA ADVENTURE: We were in Anaheim for the annual California State Bar Convention (my wife's an attorney), which alternates between southern and northern California. Friday night and for much of Sunday, we toured Disneyland, or as Nina likes to call it, "Dizzy Land". She wanted to tour Disney's California Adventure, an addition to the park which opened only a few years ago. I agreed reluctantly--I thought if Disney wanted to really recreate the California Adventure, this part of the park should be filled with lawyers, government employees, social workers, and tax auditors (actually, it probably was this past weekend...). Instead, what Disney has installed is a typically Disney-esque sanitary look at the history of California--there's a stationary California Zephyr streamliner selling food and gifts, a "Taste Pilot's Restaurant" with a handsome recreation of Chuck Yeager's X-1 zooming off the roof of it, a Santa Cruz-like amusement park (now with two-thirds less drug-addled hippies stuck in a 1960s causality loop!) and other such fare. Lots of Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and Mamas and Poppas music--and even the odd Bing Crosby song(!) about California. Because Disney is owned by ABC (or is it the other way around?), ABC was promoting its fall television lineup, and several of its celebrities there--talking on a stage, with an enormous Jumbotron TV to project them into the park. Dennis Franz was scheduled to be there, as was Jim Belushi and his blues band. On our way out of the California Adventure and into Disney proper, I saw John Ritter on the screen, using--for the first and last time I hope--the word "fart" on the giant Jumbotron. (He had been asked what he, Suzanne Summers and Joyce DeWitt would do in a Three's Company reunion by someone attending the park by a poor, confused soul who thinks that would a good thing. Fabulously out-of-date, Ritter suggested that Summers and DeWitt would need "a lot of EST" to work things out.) In order to ferry the celebrities from L.A. to Anaheim, ABC employed an enormous fleet of stretch limos. I don't think I had ever seen more black automobiles this side of Don Corleone's funeral. Lots of those limos were actually luxury black SUVs--and not an electric hybrid in sight! (Imagine that!) Next time a celebrity starts complaining about your Chevy Suburban or Toyota Land Cruiser, just remember how this person probably gets around--and smile and his Disneyland-sized hypocrisy. (Continued in post below.)

Posted 9/8/2003 11:04:19 AM by Edward Driscoll
DISNEY'S CALIFORNIA ADVENTURE II: Dizzy Land is right--as I wandered in a sun-baked haze through Disney's California Adventure, I started riffing with my wife about how much fun David Letterman could have in a Top Ten List about this place....

From the home office in Anaheim, California.... The Top Ten Rejected Attractions at Disney's California Adventure! [Paul Schaffer's drummer plays obligatory drum roll] Number 10.....Annie Sprinkle's Wet & Wild Water Sports! Number 9......Gray Davis' Recall Rollercoaster! Number 8......David Crosby's House of Heroin! Number 7......Michael Jackson's Pedophilic Playhouse! Number 6......Scratch & Sniff Animatronic Johnny Depp! Number 5......Cruz Bustamante's MEChA Mania! Number 4......John Walker Lindh's Taliban Toboggan! Number 3......Robert Maplethorpe's San Francisco Safari! Number 2......Ron Jeremy's Drop The Chalupa!* And the number one rejected attraction at Disney's California Adventure.... Ride The Rolling Blackout! [/Paul Schaffer drumroll] We'll be right back after this brief commercial time out! *I have no idea what this means. But it sounded appropriately sleazy, and got a big chuckle from my wife when I was free-associating in the park, so I thought I'd include in this list.

Posted 9/8/2003 01:18:15 AM by Edward Driscoll
CALIFORNIA SENATE BILL 2: John Fund writes that it's a doozy:

Liberal lawmakers, fearing that a Republican might win the governor's mansion, are scrambling to pass as many bills as Gov. Gray Davis can sign before the recall. One bill would give Indian tribes the power to stop development on private land within five miles of a sacred tribal site; the potential for abusive shakedowns of developers should be obvious to anyone. Another bill would water down legislative term limits. A couple of bills awaiting action smell like such blatant attempts to enrich contributors that Gov. Davis may have to shy away from them. The worst idea before the Legislature is Senate Bill 2, written by John Burton of San Francisco, the liberal president of the state Senate. It would compel businesses with more than 20 workers to pay almost all health insurance costs for employees--even part-time workers--and their dependents. Companies would have to pay at least 95% of health-care costs for low-income workers, and 80% for everyone else. Jill Stewart, a columnist and former Los Angeles Times reporter, describes the measure as "closer to socialism than anything I've seen heading for approval in 20 years." This bill would create a powerful incentive businesses to stay below the 20-employee limit by stunting their own growth, or drop below the limit by laying off workers. Ms. Stewart reports the bill was ghostwritten by the Service Employees International Union, a major Democratic contributor. The real beneficiary of the bill may not be the unions, but rather the Indian tribes. The Western Political Report says the bill was rewritten over the weekend and also includes a whopping cigarette-tax increase to $2.37 a pack, up from 87 cents. California's new tax would be the highest in the country outside New York City, creating a massive incentive to buy tax-free cigarettes from Indian stores or their Internet sites. Normally a bill that raises taxes would require a two-thirds vote of both houses of the Legislature, giving minority Republicans leverage in slowing down the legislation. But Democrats plan to make SB 2 "revenue neutral" by adding a tax credit for employers who will suffer from the costs of mandated health care for their employees. Under that arrangement, the bill could pass with a simple majority. Some Republicans promise to take the issue to court, but that fight would take years to resolve.

The California economy is just beginning to crawl out of the mess that Davis either created or exacerbated (depending upon who you talk to). If Davis is dumb enough to sign this bill, it will only ensure that California's economy really goes into the tank.

Posted 9/8/2003 12:49:05 AM by Edward Driscoll
DEATH WISH: Paul Greenberg uses Charles Bronson's obituary to remind us just how bad the 1970s really were:

Back in the 1970s, that most depressing of decades, Charles Bronson found himself at the center of a debate over political correctness--long before there was a phrase for it. He became a cult hero because of one movie, "Death Wish." The New York Times' always decent movie reviewer, Vincent Canby, hated the story line of "Death Wish": A nice, liberal architect turns into a killer seeking vengeance after his wife is killed and his daughter raped. Whereupon he starts wiping out the city's muggers, making the audience cheer. To Mr. Canby, this was the vilest heresy. And he wasn't having any of it. He called it "a despicable movie, one that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers." As it happens, the country was ready for some simplified answers: Enforce the laws, even and especially the minor ones, before the vandals and muggers grew into killers and rapists. Lock 'em up. Rudy Giuliani, a tough prosecutor, became a tougher mayor in New York, succeeding a long series of nice, ineffective ditherers who had largely given in to urban terror. Suddenly the laws were being enforced--with, yes, a vengeance. And it worked. The same attitude could be detected when the issue was the national defense or international diplomacy. And things began to change in this country, and in the world. It was morning in America again, as if we had awakened from our stupor and remembered who we were.

Read the whole thing. UPDATE: Jesse Walker also has some thoughts in a similar vein. UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: The comments section on Reason's "Hit & Run" blog about this article are quite interesting as well.

Posted 9/8/2003 12:44:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
I'M BACK: Spent the weekend in Anaheim, including trips to Disneyland and a certain presidential library in Simi Valley. Details to follow on Monday after my brain starts functioning again. Quick note for weary travelers: the Anaheim Marriott has outrageously overpriced, but surprisingly tasty Maker's Mark Manhattans available from room service. Unfortunately though, to get there from San Jose, you need to fly American's "American Eagle" commuter flight service, which consists of a fleet of 1/72 scale polystyrene Monogram airplane models. Hey, if it's Mattel, it's swell! (Actually, it isn't--but like I said, more to follow later.)