Posted 3/6/2004 08:29:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
I'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT: Every year (right around this time), WorldNetDaily runs a variation or two on a story that the income tax is about to become history. Someday, it will eventually be replaced by a flat or consumption tax--but considering this theme has been kicking around since the heady Contract With America days of 1994, I'm not holding my breath waiting.

Posted 3/6/2004 05:04:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN DEMOCRATS DEFINE LIBERTARIANISM? You get quotes like these, along with a quote like this from last summer, from a then-struggling leftwing candidate for the presidency.

Posted 3/6/2004 03:29:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
DON'T SHARPIE THAT CONTRACT JUST YET: Even though he was traded to Baltimore, Terrell Owens wants to play for Philadelphia this coming season.

Posted 3/6/2004 02:40:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE VEEPSTAKES: Kerry is beginning the long, arduous search for a potential running mate, and has hired an outside consultant to assist.

Posted 3/6/2004 12:01:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
ALLAH IS IN THE HOUSE--and he's scooping Matt Drudge. And so is Michele Catalano.

Posted 3/6/2004 11:37:00 AM by Edward Driscoll
ATTORNEY GENERAL IN HOSPITAL: John Ashcroft hospitalized for pancreatitis.

Posted 3/6/2004 11:35:30 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE MAN CAN'T BUST OUR BANDWIDTH: Like most stories, there's probably more to this than what's on the surface, but Julian Sanchez writes about Patrick Arthur Richard, who:

volunteered his web hosting services to the Macomb, Michigan, sheriff's department for two years. When he decided he couldn't afford to keep doing it gratis, and the department refused to pay, he was hauled off to jail and charged with "extortion," among other felonies.

Be sure to follow the links that Sanchez has posted.

Posted 3/6/2004 11:17:43 AM by Edward Driscoll
MRS. KERRY AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE: Teresa Heinz Kerry has given millions of dollars to fund an anti-war September 11 victim group quoted ("usually without any context", Charles Johnson notes) in nearly every story about President Bush’s new advertisements. Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus notes that the wife of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, "back when she was single", dated Senator John Kerry. And speaking of without any context, Sen. Kerry is giving radio speeches charging that President Bush "shortchanges troops on gear". Naturally, the article on the subject doesn't mention Kerry's own attempts at shortchanging them on gear. UPDATE: A thought: if George W. Bush is "molesting the dead", as this screedy Jimmy Breslin column claims, why is it acceptable for Kerry to be using our soldiers and their welfare, as pawns in his political campaign? And will any paper call him on the double standard? Also, if Kerry is so concerned about their welfare, does this mean that he renounces his Winter Soldier speech, where he declared US soldiers (including himself, presumably) to be war criminals? ANOTHER UPDATE: The Mudville Gazette has some thoughts.

Posted 3/5/2004 03:52:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
INTERESTING SLANT IN NEW YORK TIMES LEAD:

3 American Muslims Convicted of Helping Wage Jihad By JAMES DAO ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 4 — In a victory for the Bush administration's campaign to root out home-grown terrorism, a federal judge convicted three American Muslims on Thursday of conspiring to help a Pakistani group wage "violent jihad" against Indian forces in Kashmir and possibly American troops in Afghanistan.

Why is it only a victory "for the Bush administration's campaign to root out home-grown terrorism"? Does The Times assume that Democrats don't mind home-grown terrorism? Why is this a partisan issue to the Gray Lady? Just curious.

Posted 3/5/2004 03:40:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
NATIONWIDE OUTRAGE AS PRESIDENT USES WAR IMAGERY IN BID FOR RE-ELECTION: Survivors of vicious unprovoked attack on US are furious at the president's lack of sensitivity.

Posted 3/5/2004 02:09:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
"DEMS LEAD IN '04 SMEAR CAMPAIGN...by tons" writes Mort Kondrake, hardly a right-wing ideologue.

Posted 3/5/2004 01:29:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
FREE MARTHA! How long before some budding entrepreneur uploads a "Free Mumia"-style "FREE MARTHA" logo to Cafe Press and creates "Free Martha" T-shirts, bumperstickers, and the like? UPDATE: Muggeridge's Law strikes again--there is no way that a satirist can compete with real life for its pure absurdity: http://www.cafeshops.com/grmartha http://www.cafeshops.com/freemarthashop And a whole bunch more.

Posted 3/5/2004 01:19:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
WE ARE THE NINETIES: Martha Stewart convicted of all counts. No signs yet of angry suburban white homemakers rioting in the streets. While he was off on his prediction at the end of it, there's much truth in this 2002 Jonah Goldberg piece about Martha and the 1990s.

Posted 3/5/2004 01:11:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
WMDs FOUND AS RESULT OF IRAQ INVASION: "Libya Admits 44,000 Pounds of Mustard Gas in Declaration of Chemical Weapons". The domino principle keeps chugging along.

Posted 3/5/2004 01:00:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
THREE-HEADED FROG FOUND: Through his assistant, Waylon Smithers, C. Montgomery Burns, prominent Springfield entrepreneur and CEO of Springfield's nuclear reactor, issued a statement denying that he had anything to do with its appearance. (Via Drudge.)

Posted 3/5/2004 11:54:55 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE LIBERTARIAN FILM FESTIVAL: I'm not sure if I agree with all of the choices, but Tim Cavanaugh and his readers are making a list of films with libertarian themes. I weighed in with a suggestion of my own.

Posted 3/5/2004 11:32:13 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE STAKES: Victor Davis Hanson writes on what's at stake in November:

Just as a presidency of earlier ossified liberals like Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale probably would have led to support of a utopian nuclear freeze and subsequent Russian intimidation of Europe, unilateral cuts in military preparedness, and acquiescence to the Soviet Union, so too the election of John Kerry may well undo much of what has been achieved these last three years as we return to the old, normal way of doing business. With Howard Dean gone, Kerry realizes that suddenly he must move rightward to sound tougher than George Bush. Finally, he seems to understand that every northern liberal Democrat in the last 30 years who ran to the left on national security lost badly — like McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis. And so Mr. Kerry abruptly will have to talk grandly of what he would have done to make us more secure. Yet a better guide is his own record in opposing defense programs, in harboring a chronic suspicion of using American force, and his own contradictory past votes about deployments to the Middle East.

When you consider the president's successes, it's no wonder that the press is trying to prevent him from getting that information out.

Posted 3/5/2004 11:16:42 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE DOMINO PRINCIPLE: It's working in the Middle East, writes Roger L. Simon, who's gutsy enough to admit, "and, boy, did I ever hate it back in the old days of Vietnam".

Posted 3/5/2004 11:07:32 AM by Edward Driscoll
CRUCIFIXION--IT'S NOT JUST FOR ROMANS ANYMORE: Kicking it old school style--very old school style, Saudi Arabia apparently still uses crucifixion as a form of capital punishment.

Posted 3/5/2004 10:58:23 AM by Edward Driscoll
FORTUNATELY, NO SNAIL DARTERS WERE HARMED: Ananova reports, "Acclaimed wetland was result of leaky pipe". (Via GCLM, who writes, "This'll upset Treehuggers & White Light Smokers, Inc.")

Posted 3/5/2004 10:46:53 AM by Edward Driscoll
WELL, IT HASN'T HURT THE MAYOR OF SAN FRANCISCO: Barbra Streisand is refusing to obey the law in California.

Posted 3/5/2004 10:35:38 AM by Edward Driscoll
RUN RALPH RUN! Moving up faster than a souped-up Corvair, everybody's favorite leftist scold is at six percent in the polls. UPDATE: Obviously, I was being silly with the above post. I think Betsy Newmark is closer to reality when she writes, "I bet that his actual vote total will be much less. Many of those people will not go to the polls and there is no guarantee that Nader will even be on the ballot in all 50 states".

Posted 3/5/2004 10:32:25 AM by Edward Driscoll
GREAT QUESTION: The Media Research Center's Brent Baker asks, "Will Media Hold Kerry to Same Standard: No Vietnam in TV Ads?"

Posted 3/4/2004 09:28:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
COMMITTING "A MICRO-AGRESSION": I love this; and suspect a meme has just been born.

Posted 3/4/2004 09:25:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
MORE ON MANUFACTURING "OUTRAGE": Charles Johnson writes:

Notice in all of these headlines: no quotes around “disgusted,” “angered,” “outraged.” Reported as fact. Yet the same wire services carefully surround every reference to “terrorism” with doubt-inducing scare quotes.

Read Charles' commenters, as well.

Posted 3/4/2004 09:20:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
"WHAT LIBERAL FACULTY?": Stefan Beck of The New Criterion's Weblog writes:

So, let's have a look at the record, shall we? Daniel Pipes, taunted and booed at Berkeley. Antonin Scalia, denied "endorsement" by sixteen professors at Amherst. Former terrorist, welcomed with open arms at Dartmouth. And still they ask, "What liberal faculty?"

On the other hand, when you become The Establishment, you give the hipper kids something to rebel against. Which may be why, as Prof. Reynolds writes, the left has lost its teen spirit, especially on campus. And why longtime rock and roll insider and leftwing booster Danny Goldberg is also upset.

Posted 3/4/2004 07:52:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
BEST. PLAN. EVER: Deroy Murdock writes that there's "a glimmer of hope to those who want to see the Twin Towers rise again". I like it. A lot.

Posted 3/4/2004 02:53:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
"RATS!" Robert Moran places the manufactured outrage over the use of 9/11 images in President Bush's commercials into context. At some point, it may just begin to dawn on most Americans that the press won't allow President Bush the benefit of appearing to do anything right this year. And that they may have placed their bet on who they'd prefer to win the election and are actively trying to influence the outcome. If only just a little... UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg writes:

I think these complaints are nonsense squared. A lot more people died during Vietnam than on 9/11 and John Kerry has been running ads with footage from there for months. These families may have a unique relationship to 9/11 but they do not have ownership of that day, politically, culturally or otherwise and it would be absurd if this administration caved on this point, even though I'm sure the media will be delighted to exploit the personal tragedies of these families.

I don't know if it could be done as a TV commercial for the Bush campaign, or as a profile on Fox, but someone should track down a Vietnamese refuge and get his thoughts on Kerry's Winter Soldier speech, and his efforts to cause America to lose the war in Vietnam, thus resulting in millions of unnecessary deaths. Sounds ugly? Hey, no worse than smearing Bush's service record. UPDATE: Hey, great minds think alike. I just came across this post on National Security Blog:

Dan Tran said speaking as a member of Vietnamese Americans Against John Kerry, "On behalf of tens of thousands of Vietnamese-Americans, we are determined to demonstrate against Senator Kerry all across this nation." Dan Tran, a NASA engineer and president of the Vietnam Human Rights Project, said, "John Kerry aided and abetted the communist government in Hanoi and has hindered any human rights progress in Vietnam."

Well, yeah. ANOTHER UPDATE: When I wrote "manufactured outrage" above, I was referring to the press. But "Lt. Smash" writes that they're not the only ones manufacturing outrage at President Bush. I hate to sound like a broken record (and yes, this is very much a rhetorical question), but why isn't the media making these connections?? (Via InstaPundit.)

Posted 3/4/2004 01:32:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA? In a post titled, "George Mitchell, TV News Titan", Tim Graham writes:

Left-wingers FOR YEARS have tried to insist that the executive at the top of the Big Media Company is the most important person in the news flow. See the Eric Alterman "What Liberal Media?" chapter title "You're Only As Liberal As the Man Who Owns You." People who study the news (and work inside news rooms) know that's rarely the case. But by this Alterman conspiracy theory, now that former Sen. George Mitchell is the top dog at Disney, ABC News is now run by the man who ruined the first President Bush with his back-stabbing liberal partisanship! How is it that the lefties are now going to say the reporters are liberal, but their bosses balance them out?

It does rather invalidate the "vast right wing media conspiracy" meme that Al Gore and others on the left tried to float after the 2002 elections.

Posted 3/4/2004 12:52:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
T.O. TRADE MAKES 49ERS D.O.A. THIS SEASON: The Baltimore Ravens acquire receiver Terrell Owens in a trade with the '49ers. And Jeff Garcia is looking at the Browns as his next team. It's going to be a looooong season for San Francisco this year. Skip Bayless, the San Jose Mercury's veteran sportswriter, writes, "If he wants to help 49ers, York should sell them", adding that the 'Niners are in danger of becoming the next Arizona Cardinals, a perennial cellar dweller.

Posted 3/4/2004 12:43:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
LILEKS' NEWHOUSE COLUMN UPDATE: I just updated my post below to include this incredible story by CBS News, "If Anne Frank Only Knew...".

Posted 3/4/2004 12:17:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE "INEXPLICABLE EVENT": Bush calls Kerry and congratulates him on winning the Democratic nomination. David Cohen and some of the commenters on the BrothersJudd Blog have some thoughts.

Posted 3/4/2004 12:11:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
SAME AS IT EVER WAS: CNSNews reports that, "If not for a conservative magazine, the complete investigation into John Kerry's anti-war associate Al Hubbard and Hubbard's fabricated Vietnam War record would not have been published in 1971". Not surprisingly, Kerry's getting a pass this year as well.

Posted 3/4/2004 12:39:20 AM by Edward Driscoll
ADVANTAGE LILEKS, who writes in his latest Newhouse column:

Let's just be blunt: The North Koreans would love to see John Kerry win the election. The mullahs of Iran would love it. The Syrian Ba'athists would sigh with relief. Every enemy of America would take great satisfaction if the electorate rejects the Bush doctrine and scuttles back to hide under the U.N. Security Council's table. It's a hard question, but the right one: Which candidate does our enemy want to lose? George W. Bush.

England's far left Independent today (complete with Robert Fisk ad to the right of the story):

If the human race as a whole, rather than 50 states plus the District of Colombia, could cast a ballot this coming November, John Kerry would surely win the presidency by a landslide. Unfortunately for President Bush-haters around the world, only the 200 million United States citizens of voting age will have that right - and the outcome is anything but sure.

And The Guardian, also from England, picks up the theme:

America's voters have done themselves a great favour. If they had picked Mr Dean, Mr Bush would have made mincemeat of him. By picking Mr Kerry, they have given the Democrats their best chance of recapturing the White House. That is something for Britons to welcome too. Nothing in world politics would make more difference to the rest of us than a change in the White House. The free world has never had a stronger interest in the result of a US election than it has in the defeat of Mr Bush. Senator Kerry carries the hopes not just of millions of Americans but of millions of British well-wishers, not to mention those of nations throughout Europe and the world.

Of course, you could find similar articles at the time about the Republican who was in office in 1984, as well... UPDATE: Speaking of the North Koreans, CBS News reports that North Korea is using The Diary of Anne Frank to teach kids about American(!) Nazis:

Anne's plea for peace is a curious message for these students, because North Korea is constantly preparing for war. Dictator Kim Jong Il spends the country's meager resources maintaining a powerful military. And it turns out that North Korea is using Anne's diary to tell students they must sacrifice for the military -- because war with America is inevitable. “The Americans enjoy war. It excites them. It's part of their nature,” says one student. Here, they teach that today's Nazis are the Americans – and that today's Hitler is George W. Bush. And, to hammer that home, whenever North Korean students refer to President Bush, or to other Americans, they're taught to call them “Nazis,” or “warmongers." “As long as the warmonger Bush and the Nazi Americans live, who are worse than Hitler's fascists, world peace will be impossible to achieve,” says another student.

As James Taranto wrote, "Ever wonder where the Angry Left gets the loony idea that "Bush = Hitler"? Maybe from Pyongyang."

Posted 3/3/2004 11:40:23 PM by Edward Driscoll
KERRY REJECTS HILLARY'S OUTSOURCED ENDORSEMENT: Hillary's rebuttal is a hoot as well. As is this.

Posted 3/3/2004 08:11:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
WOW: One of the dangers of owning a Blog is that you're essentially live without a net. There's no gruff but benign veteran Lou Grant-style editor to say, "Son, are you sure you want to say that?" Or simply redline out potentially offensive language. Or as that sage philosopher, Uncle Ben Parker once said, "With great power, comes great responsibility". And a great chance to do something that causes you to auger the aircraft deep, deep, into the ground when you hit that button labeled "Post & Publish". As this fellow just did. (Via John Hawkins.) UPDATE: Oliver Willis writes, "Sometimes you drink the kool-aid and think blogs can do better than the real world, and then you see that. Sick." Exactly. Michele Catalano and her commenters have some thoughts as well.

Posted 3/3/2004 04:44:26 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULDN'T: Michael Graham looks at the end of John Edward's candidacy.

Posted 3/3/2004 02:36:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
AS HEADS IS TAILS: After decades of suggesting that the Constitution was a living, breathing document, capable of being molded in any direction they wanted it go in, all of a sudden, Democrats, lead by DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe, have become strict constructionists. Try to guess why.

Posted 3/3/2004 02:30:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
UNSAFE AT ANY SCREED: Thomas Sowell debunks the book that began Ralph Nader's career.

Posted 3/3/2004 02:26:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
BUSH'S "WAR BASE" is the subject of a lengthy post on Instapundit.com, complete with the thoughts of a number of the Professor's readers.

Posted 3/3/2004 02:11:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
BUWAHAHAHA!! Put down your Big Gulp or Slurpee, and then look very, very carefully at the photo the Pakistan Tribune has chosen to accompany an otherwise routine article on our efforts to track down Osama bin Laden. It could offer a clue as to where to find him. (Via James Taranto, who has the original photo, in case the PakTribune changes it.)

Posted 3/3/2004 01:15:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
HUGE LOSS DETHRONES 'KING AL', says this New York Post headline:

The Rev. Al Sharpton's abysmal single-digit showing last night in the New York primary left him considering dropping out of the presidential race. Whether he continues or not, the paltry 8 percent of the vote that Sharpton received in his home state is likely to diminish his role as a local political leader, consultants told The Post. He finished third behind John Kerry and John Edwards and couldn't even win his base - losing the African-American vote to Kerry by a double-digit margin, according to exit polls. Sharpton plans to meet with advisors today and decide by the end of the week whether to continue his campaign. "Al Sharpton has failed," said consultant Norman Adler. "He's no longer the king of the African-American vote in New York City." Sharpton fell well short of the 15 percent of the statewide vote that many analysts said he needed to retain credibility.

Does this mean that we'll be spared a repeat of disgusting scenes such as this in 2004? That's progress for the Democrats, although they should never have pandered to Sharpton in the first place.

Posted 3/3/2004 10:54:27 AM by Edward Driscoll
SPEAKING OF "TINY MUMMIES", I guess Tom Wolfe should be glad his piece actually ran. Lucette Lagnado writes how The New Yorker's William Shawn drove the New York Times' Arthur Gelb crazy, to the point where Gelb's 1966 Times profile of Shawn never ran.

Posted 3/3/2004 01:38:15 AM by Edward Driscoll
KEYSHAWN JOHNSON DEAL "IS CLOSE" according to The Dallas Morning News. The former Tampa Bay Buccaneer receiver, who got his start in the NFL with Bill Parcells and the New York Jets could soon be reunited with Parcells's new team, the Dallas Cowboys.

Posted 3/3/2004 01:02:21 AM by Edward Driscoll
CALIFORNIA VOTERS OK PROPS 57 and 58, the centerpieces of Gov. Schwarzenegger's budget plan. Proposition 56, which would have made it easier for the state to raise taxes, was soundly defeated by a margin of 64 percent to 36 percent.

Posted 3/2/2004 11:57:22 PM by Edward Driscoll
MEL GIBSON: FEMINIST? Over the weekend, I mentioned to my wife that somebody could make a pretty good case that The Passion has a feminist slant to it--some of the strongest characters in the film are women: the two Marys, Pilate's Claudia, and Veronica, the woman who wipes Christ's face on His way to the crucifixion. (She's played by an actress who looks a bit like Sofia Coppola, but I can't find her name in any searches. Any clues, folks?) Via this Blog (via Technorati), I discovered that Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online has written just such an article. (I'm not sure what to make the film's androgynous Satan, who looks like a cross between Marilyn Manson and Sinead O'Connor, and is played by this striking looking Italian actress who went the Persis Khambatta route, and shaved her head for the role. Did Mel intend for the devil to be a woman--or merely of indeterminate gender?)

Posted 3/2/2004 10:21:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE PEACEFUL, PEACEFUL WEST: Brian Micklethwait of Samizdata.net writes that the wild wild west was not wild--it was "hard work, trade, tedium, and peace".

Posted 3/2/2004 09:01:04 PM by Edward Driscoll
IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR: Tech Central Station's Stephen Schwartz has a modest proposal in the hunt for Bin Laden:

Bin Laden is a Saudi. Why not interrogate his numerous Saudi relatives about his probable whereabouts?

Read the whole thing.

Posted 3/2/2004 08:56:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
YEEEEARRRRGH!!!! Howard Dean finally wins one: his home state of Vermont. In other Vermont news, life imitates Jonah Goldberg, as Killington has voted to secede from the state and become part of New Hampshire. UPDATE: Tying both topics together, Pejman Yousefzadeh writes, "Yes, I know that Dean is no longer Governor. But this move likely stemmed from policies he implemented in the past, and represents a startling vote of no confidence in the manner in which Vermont conducts its affairs".

Posted 3/2/2004 07:41:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE MAN IN THE WHITE FLANNEL SUIT: Tom Wolfe, who, as anybody who's read this site for a while knows is my favorite author, is 73 today. All of his books are worth seeking out, but I'd recommend particularly Radical Chic, for its backstage look at sixties liberalism at its apogee; The Bonfire of the Vanities to see how Wolfe jumpstarted the dying tradition of the Great American Novel; and Hooking Up, as a definitive look at the major issues preoccupying America right before 9/11. Hooking Up also contains "Tiny Mummies", Wolfe's mid-sixties "murderous gutter journalism" balloon-popping of The New Yorker's pretensions, which put him on the map as a writer to be reckoned with, but remained out of print for almost 35 years. Wolfe's anthology of non-fiction, The New Journalism has been out of print since the mid-1970s, but is well worth seeking out for any budding writer who wants a how-to of Wolfe's techniques, and a great collection of the best non-fiction writers of the 1960s and early 1970s, a golden era of journalism. Last year, R. Emmitt Tyrrell gave us a brief preview of Wolfe's next novel, which will be on a subject Wolfe has wanted to cover since at least the mid-1980s: the American university scene. As Tyrrell wrote:

I never probe too deeply when Tom is at work on a novel. It just does not seem like the right thing to do. But from what he has let slip about this latest work, I suspect the American university is about to suffer a staggering expose. Wolfe will leave his readers not only outraged but laughing -- that is the cruelest cut of all.

I'll be first in line when it hits the streets.

Posted 3/2/2004 07:34:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
OUT OF THE CLOSET: C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" will become a Disney-distributed film. The success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy seems has reminded Hollywood that dead white males have made some pretty good literature over the past couple of millennia or so. UPDATE: Betsy Newmark writes, "Shhh. Don't tell Hollywood about all the Christian symbolism in the Narnia books".

Posted 3/2/2004 07:17:22 PM by Edward Driscoll
FOR A KENTUCKY COLONEL, HE SURE SEEMS FRENCH TO ME: Charles Johnson notes that "several KFC restaurants in Australia have removed bacon from their menus, to avoid offending Muslims". Appeasement seems to be the order of the day with Colonel Sanders. Last year, KFC knuckled under to PETA, which, not surprisingly, has only opened the door to further assaults from PETA and other fringe groups.

Posted 3/2/2004 06:54:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
BUH.......BYE: John Edwards is out. Or as Roger L. Simon humorously put it:

This just in... "God and John Edwards are dead." --Friedrich Nietzsche

Heh.

Posted 3/2/2004 05:14:17 PM by Edward Driscoll
49ERS RELEASE QB JEFF GARCIA, and give Terrell Owens "permission to seek a trade", after T.O.'s agent was late with his paperwork, preventing Owens from becoming a free agent. As Skip Bayless recently wrote, the Niners aren't going anywhere this season. UPDATE: But Garcia may be--Don Banks of Sports Illustrated describes him as "suddenly the top quarterback in this year's free-agent market".

Posted 3/2/2004 03:19:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
USING MP3s FOR WHOLE-HOUSE AUDIO: And now for something completely different: tired of our wall-to-wall politics and Passion coverage? My latest Electronic House newsletter is online, and low-carb to boot!

Posted 3/2/2004 12:04:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
KERRY KEEPS FEEDING SCOTT OTT waaay too much good material.

Posted 3/2/2004 11:48:10 AM by Edward Driscoll
AIRBRUSHING NEWS STORIES: It's not just for the BBC anymore!

Posted 3/2/2004 11:42:56 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE 100 MILLION DOLLAR MAN: AP reports that "Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts Tuesday agreed to a $99.2 million, seven-year contract that includes an NFL-record $34.5 million signing bonus".

Posted 3/2/2004 11:39:34 AM by Edward Driscoll
JAMES LILEKS LOOKS AT THE LATEST IN LOW-CARB FOOD--and drink, too! At the Bay Area's popular Max's Cafe chain, whose food is yuppified Jewish deli fair, (and GC Mandrake's favorite stop after a 12 hour flight from London to SFO), they've recently started selling low carb desserts--low carb cheesecake and low carb chocolate cake. Our waitress on Sunday simply rolled her eyes when she described them to us, and with that in mind, we avoided them like the politically correct plague they are.

Posted 3/2/2004 11:17:37 AM by Edward Driscoll
ONE OF THE BENEFITS OF A REPUBLICAN-LED SENATE is that it will stand-up for the controversial issues where the opinions of the majority of working Americans differ from the liberal elites of both coasts. Such as this vote today. [/Sarcasm] Bush would be very, very wise to veto this mess, if he wishes to keep his base fired up. UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds writes, "More likely the bill will just die". ANOTHER UPDATE: If I'm reading this article correctly, it's dead, Jim. ONE MORE UPDATE: "Back to square one on protecting the gun makers from abusive litigation. But look out, Sens. Schumer and Feinstein. Unless you're able to work some kind of miracle between now and September, the Clinton gun ban will sunset. The world will not come to an end, crime will not skyrocket, and the nation will see that that particular gun control law was worth nothing". ONE MORE, ONE MORE UPDATE: "Despite it being the single most important day of the primary season, both John Kerry-Who-BTW-Served-In-Vietnam and John Edwards shuttled in for the vote. The pro-gun control votes they cast today are the first votes either has actually bothered to participate in so far this year".

Posted 3/2/2004 11:14:33 AM by Edward Driscoll
KERRY WAFFLES ON GOD AND LIBERALISM: During Sunday's debate, Kerry was pitched softball questions about whether God is on the side of the US, and whether or not he's a liberal, and he waffled, hemmed and hawwed, and tried to have both sides of the argument (gee, there's a shocker). These are the sorts of the questions that Bill Clinton could have batted out of the park, and sounded presidential doing so. But instead, for Kerry, who, by the way, served in Vietnam, it's not 1968 all over again, it's 1988: Kerry sounds much like Dukakis flip-flopping over whether he was a liberal, and the waffle that sunk him--when Bernard Shaw of CNN asked him about what he'd do if his wife was murdered.

Posted 3/2/2004 04:48:54 AM by Edward Driscoll
JESUS IS A VIKINGS FAN: "When I was on the cross, I was thinking about the Minnesota Vikings," James Caviezel said. Caviezel recently played the title role in a recent film you may have read a little about. His brother-in-law is the Vikings' offensive coordinator. It speaks volumes that Caviezel is a football fan--somehow I don't think many in Hollywood are crazy about the Red States' favorite sport.

Posted 3/1/2004 09:20:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
MARK STEYN, IN ENGLAND'S SPECTATOR:

If Gore or Kerry had been in the White House on September 11, I’m certain the Taleban would still be in power, and Afghanistan would still be a playground of terror camps. Oh, to be sure, there’d have been sanctions and Security Council resolutions and some arrests of associates in the US, but the broad context of 9/11 would have been different: it would have been a ‘tragedy’, not an act of war; mounds of teddy bears, not regime change. For that critical, liberating distinction we have to thank Don Rumsfeld and George W. Bush. According to Rowan Scarborough’s new book Rumsfeld’s War, at one o’clock that afternoon, as the Pentagon still burned and after he’d helped with the injured, the Defence Secretary told the President, ‘This is not a criminal action. This is war.’ November’s election is a referendum on Rumsfeld’s judgment that day. After Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto said that he feared all he’d done was wake a sleeping giant. But it’s been two years now. If you figure it’s time the sleeping giant resumed his slumbers, Kerry’s your man.

RTWT.

Posted 3/1/2004 03:16:27 PM by Edward Driscoll

Welcome To Our Second Anniversary! On March 1st, 2002, EdDriscoll.com, a radical new experiment in Internet self-publishing, not to mention self-promotion, was born. And the Internet hasn't been the same since. OK, actually, it wasn't that radical a new experiment, and the Internet would probably get along just fine without us. Unlike some of the folks who've parlayed Weblogs into steady writing gigs, I was a freelance journalist who came to the Web after publishing numerous "dead tree" articles. Obviously, Glenn Reynolds' InstaPundit was the chief model for our site, and its look. As I've written before, I had seen Virginia Postrel's Weblog, but prior to 9/11, hadn't really thought it as such--to me, it was an E-Zine, and I didn't want to manually FTP up new pages every day. At the time, the term "Weblog" meant to me lame diaries about what their authors had done that day--and I doubted that the world really cared which shopping mall I had last been in. James Lileks' brilliant writing is the exception that proves the rule: very, very few authors, whether they're on the Web or dead tree, have the textual chops to make daily personal details interesting. But I had read Glenn's Weblog in early September of 2001, when I discovered it doing a Google vanity search (he had linked to one of my first NRO pieces). It was the combination of seeing the Blogger logo then on his site, and then my frequent reading of it, Postrel's, Sgt. Stryker's and Joanne Jacobs' in the dark days immediately after 9/11 that caused me to put all the pieces together in my head: Weblogs could comment on the news, express a different slant from what Big Media wanted to say about a topic, and allow anyone to have his or her personal daily editorial page. And since the media usually does a terrible job at covering a war, Weblogs gained a large new audience as they had a field day pointing out the biases and errors of the media. This seemed like pretty cool stuff to me. At the time, I was still using a lame CompuServe email address that took forever to spell out whenever I did an interview. In early 2002, when I discovered that the EdDriscoll.com URL was available, I immediately grabbed it, if only for an email address with a professional sound to it, and then figured that Blogger's templates would allow a decent looking site to go up fairly painlessly, even with my limited HTML skills. A further bit of luck was on my side: my good friend, "Group Captain Mandrake" (whom you may know from his Across The Atlantic Weblog), was not only visiting Sillicon Valley for a few weeks in early 2002, but even more fortunately, he was staying in my house. So his HTML knowledge and general Internet chops were a Godsend. (And it worked out nicely for him as well, as my efforts here quickly inspired him to launch his own blog. In a way, just as InstaPundit has launched a surfeit of Weblogs, this site has given birth to at least one spin-off of its own.) Shortly before I launched the site, I did an article for the late, lamented SpinTech site, (and since republished by Catholic Exchange) interviewing some of the elite of the Blogosphere: the afore mentioned Reynolds, Jacobs, and Paul Palubicki, who back then was still going exclusively by his nom de Air Force, Sgt. Stryker. I think holds up fairly well as a good snapshot of the days immediately after 9/11, and what was coalescing in mind as I put the ideas for this site together. I had also interviewed Virginia Postrel, Orrin Judd of the Brothers Judd, and had recently come off of a fun stint posting articles for the launch of National Review Online's Financial column. Fortunately, many of the people I interviewed before the site was launched were happy to link to it once I established my beachhead, Deep Space Nine, Delta House (call it what you will) on the 'Net, and many others have since linked as well. And we were able to hit the ground running--and typing. And typing. And typing some more... All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Weblogs are astonishingly easy to start--and as CNN recently tried not to say, about seven million people have done just that. (And not all inspired by InstaPundit!) But it can be difficult for many people to keep them going, and I definitely miss some of the sites who were around before I started and have since fallen by the wayside, such as Protein Wisdom, Patrick Ruffini, and others. But as we go into year number three, I'm still here and still having fun. Writing a Weblog is very different than writing a magazine article or a book. The difference between longform articles and chapters and short posts full of HTML code that link and comment on someone else's reporting is almost a right brain/left brain equation. But the two formats work nicely together--there's no doubt that this Blog has lead to numerous additional paid articles, and it's allowed me to expand, discuss and update those articles as well. It's also lead directly to our regular gigs at Tech Central Station and Blogcritics, and we'd like to thank Nick Schulz and Eric Olsen, respectively, for letting me hang my fedora there as well. So Rush may have half his brain tied behind his back, but I'm using both sides of mine, and plan to continue for some time to come. Thanks for sticking around and making it all possible!

Posted 3/1/2004 02:00:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
"RAISING THE VOLUME" Jonah Goldberg surveys the frontlines of America's culture wars, while Stanley Kurtz looks at one possible conclusion to them.

Posted 3/1/2004 11:27:30 AM by Edward Driscoll
IS THE BLOGOSPHERE HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL? A friend sent me a CNN article with the depressing headline, "Study: Very few bloggers on Net":

Despite the potential of turning every Internet user into a publisher, relatively few have created Web journals called blogs and even fewer do so with regularity, a new study finds. Some bloggers indeed update their journals often, in some cases several times a day. But it's clearly a minority who are taking advantage of the blog and its potential to steer the online discourse with personal musings about news events and daily life. The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Sunday, found that somewhere between 2 percent and 7 percent of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs.

But let's look at a few more numbers, shall we? According to these fellows, the number of adult Internet users in the US is 146 million people. And if we average the CNN figures to five percent of those users, that means that there are 7,300,000 Weblogs in the US alone. And that's a lot of Weblogs! I can see how CNN wouldn't like the idea of Weblogs to become any more popular than they already are--since the very best of them have beaten the pants off of CNN when it comes to accurately and fairly editorializing and explaining the news. And unlike CNN, most Weblogs haven't admitted to being in bed with Saddam Hussein. This article sounds a bit like the way CNN reports the same unemployment figures depending upon which party is in the White House--something that was noticed by an Australian blogger. UPDATE: Scott Ott puts it all into perspective.

Posted 2/29/2004 09:39:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
IS MEL GIBSON A HOLOCAUST DENIER? His dad has certainly been described that way, but I don't believe in guilt by association. Men as diverse as Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan have had awful fathers, but that doesn't mean that their sins get automatically passed down to their sons. But David Frum has some disturbing quotes by Gibson about the Holocaust. As Frum writes, both Peggy Noonan and Diane Sawyer pitched him softball questions about the subject, "to give him an easy chance to show that he does not share his father’s disdain for the murdered Jews of Europe. Yet Gibson declined to avail himself of these chances. I can’t help wondering why." Me neither. And while I take many things printed by Fleet Street with a large grain of salt, these quotes of Gibson in The Telegraph (by way of Andrew Sullivan) are equally disturbing. Jami Bernard of The New York Daily News is having to deal with an enormous backlash as a result of her negative review of The Passion, and her comments that The Passion "is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II". My own take, and my wife's, are much more sympathetic to the movie. But Gibson's comments are very, very disturbing. UPDATE: As is this. ANOTHER UPDATE: William Safire also has some thoughts.

Posted 2/29/2004 02:22:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE FRISCO FIASCO: Skip Bayless writes the 49ers are in heap big trouble this coming season:

It has come to this for the once-proud 49ers: Management needs to keep Terrible Owens for one more year to distract fans from the mess it has made. Before Terrell Owens fell back into its hapless lap, management had basically decided to concede next season. Anything above 8-8 would be lucky gravy. Anything below would be taking salary-cap medicine. Really, 2003 was a Super Bowl-or-bust season. Management, sitting on a time bomb of dumb contracts, convinced itself its team had as good a shot as any. But the wildly erratic performance of Owens and quarterback Jeff Garcia, coupled with a defense that, on the road, couldn't stop a chicken from crossing the road, added up to 7-9.

I wouldn't look for any immediate miracles from Norv Turner in Oakland, either.

Posted 2/29/2004 10:41:26 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE DEAN MACHINE COMES CLEAN: Howard Kurtz looks at the in-fighting behind the scenes of the Dean Campaign and writes that Dean's team concluded that he really did not want to be president. Roger L. Simon links back to a post he wrote on December 22nd, and says, "You Read It Here First, Folks!". Pejman Yousefzadeh writes that "it raises an interesting question":

Is it possible that such doubts might plague even the Kerry campaign--despite its successes? I doubt that it would plague the Bush campaign--Bush has had four years to think about running again--but of course, one never knows.

Such doubts certainly seemed to plague his father's reelection campaign (I remember my father telling me at the time, "I get the feeling that if Bush wins, he'll obviously serve another four years. But he just doesn't seem that eager to actually win".) But I'd like think, as Pejman does, that Bush #41's son doesn't have them.