SORRY FOR THE LACK OF POSTING, but between getting an article completed for Vintage Guitar magazine, and coordinating with the contractors remodeling Stately Ed Manor (sorry Glenn), the Blog suffered today.

I think we have our first use of the Q-word for the upcoming war in Iraq. It's yet to start, but CNN is already worrying that it could become “another quagmire.”

No word yet on whether or not the Brutal Iraqi Winter^TM will be a factor.

It took a while, but it's nice to see a couple of high-ranking Democrats finally come to their senses:

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle was ablaze with war fever. Daschle said: "This is a time to send Saddam Hussein as clear a message as we know how to send that we will not tolerate the broken promises and the tremendous acceleration of development of weapons that we've seen time and time again in Iraq." [Former] Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, "Month after month, we have given Iraq chance after chance to move from confrontation to cooperation, and we have explored and exhausted every diplomatic action. We will see now whether force can persuade Iraq's misguided leaders to reverse course and to accept at long last the need to abide by the rule of law and the will of the world."

Oh wait, that was in 1998. Nevermind.

THE THIRD WAVE: Dennis Prager writes that the world is facing three possible futures.

My heart's on door number three, but it's definitely got its work cut out for it.

THE FIVE O'CLOCK FOLLIES: Today's Hans Blix headline reads, "Blix: No Sign of Iraq Decision to Disarm"

Yesterday's was: "Blix Says Iraq Signals New Cooperation"

This is the sort of hypocrisy that M*A*S*H poked fun at every week 30 years ago. Why do today's left not care when they see it in repeated? (And yes, I know the answer.)

McCARTHY WITHOUT (too many) APOLOGIES: In a vintage, old-school style G-File (old-school meaning, the kind of stuff he regularly wrote two or three years ago), Jonah Goldberg looks at Joe McCarthy from the vantage point of fifty years of history:

Senator Joe McCarthy was a lout, generally speaking. But he was on the right side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well. If, in some sort of parallel-universe exercise, the same number of (now proven) Soviet-Communist spies, collaborators, sympathizers, and the like were somehow switched to Nazis, and McCarthy went after them with the same vehemence as he went after Reds, Joe McCarthy might well have universities and foundations named after him today. Just imagine if a ring of Nazi party members were found to be working in Hollywood, never mind the State Department, taking money from Berlin to advance the Nazi cause. Does anyone really think "McCarthyism" would still be denounced as an unmitigated evil, often put at the front of the parade of horribles alongside Hitlerism and Stalinism?

Read the whole thing--there's too much good stuff for me to quote here. I suspect that Jonah's largely preaching to the choir, but I love the email that he received about this essay.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"When I opened the Internet cafe, my friends thought I was crazy," said Latifa, 33. "But it's been in business about two months now, and it has already paid for itself."

Kabul has an Internet cafe. Think about that for a few minutes.

(Because of all of the posting I've been doing over these past few months about Iraq, I reflexively typed "Baghdad" at first, instead of Kabul. But with a little luck, hopefully Baghdad will have as equally an open and non-censored place where ordinary people can surf the Web by next year as its neighbor to the east.)

PRE AND POST-WAR: Andrew Sullivan on the morality of ousting Saddam, and what comes afterwards.

NICHOLAS STIX HAS AN INTERESTING essay on the continuing relevance of the Cold War's containment and domino theories.

IT'S JUST A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY REPEATING: Dave Kopel checks out the parallels between the Democratic candidates in 2004, and compares them to their lineup in 1972. Talk about back to the future:

National Journal columnist Chuck Todd suggests that the current Democratic Presidential slate resembles the field from 1972. John Kerry is the "seasoned front-runner" (like Maine Senator Ed Muskie); Gephardt is the labor favorite (like Hubert Humphrey); Dean the darling of the anti-war Left (like McGovern); Lieberman is the lone hawk (like Washington Senator Henry Jackson); Mosley-Braun is the purely symbolic female black candidate (like Shirley Chisholm). But the best parallel is Al Charlatan and George Wallace. Todd delicately writes that "No one thought Wallace could win the Democratic nomination, but everyone in the field believed he would be a key factor in certain primary states." I would put the comparison a little more directly: Like Wallace, Sharpton is an excellent orator and race-baiting demagogue who--despite claiming to fight for the little guy--appeals to the most paranoid and racist instincts of poorly-educated Democratic primary voters, especially in the South and Northeast.

The National Journal forgot to come up with a modern parallel for Sam Yorty--the Democratic Mayor of Los Angeles, whose Presidential campaign attracted no visible support (except for an endorsement from the Manchester Union-Leader). I predict that Dennis Kucinich has everything it takes to be the Sam Yorty of 2004.

More proof that it's Morning in America.

It's also proof that the Democrats are now the party "standing athwart history and yelling stop", as Jonah Goldberg notes in his recent syndicated column:

In 1950, Lionel Trilling famously wrote, "In the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is plain nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation." That may not have been entirely true then, and it may not be entirely fair to say the same of liberalism today, but the comparison is apt.

Liberalism has become reactionary. Its ideas amount to standing pat and breeding fear of change. Al Gore's central budgetary idea was a "lockbox" and his chief priorities were to fight changes to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and affirmative action. The most popular word in the left's vocabulary is "stop": Stop the war, stop free trade, stop biotechnology, stop Bush, stop the world because they want to get off.

As a political conservative, I see nothing wrong with saying stop -if you have a viable alternative to what it is you want to stop. Take the war for example. Most of the anti-war speakers at recent protests took the position that Iraq should comply with the U.N. resolution, but they also opposed war and sanctions. In other words, they oppose just for the sake of opposing.

Just ask Sheryl Crow.

ADVANTAGE ED! Back on Monday, I linked to Peggy Noonan's essay, comparing Clinton and Carter with Ike and Nixon and wrote:

Richard Nixon...continues to grow in stature.

(Which isn't to say that I think Nixon was a great president--just the opposite. But add Noonan's take on how he acted during the Bay of Pigs to his resignation in the face of impeachment, and choice to not fight an ugly protracted and divisive battle after having lost a razor-thin election to Kennedy. Carter, Clinton and Gore continue to make Nixon look classier in retrospect. And that's quite an accomplishment.)

Today on his Web site, Rush Limbaugh writes (or maybe it's a transcript of his radio show):

Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter have actively slammed Bush, to the point where Carter accepted that Nobel Peace Prize knowing it was given to him not for merit, but as a "kick in the leg" to Bush. I want you to read Peggy Noonan's latest Wall Street Journal column contrasting the behavior of two leading "anti-war" executives with what JFK faced after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

That disaster could've been juicy fodder for JFK's 1960 opponent, former Vice President Richard Nixon, or for JFK's predecessor in the big chair, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Instead, Nixon and Ike stood by Kennedy's side, because that meant standing with America. That's the same reason Nixon didn't contest the '60 election vote where dead people voted in Chicago, and he lost by about half a percentage point. The Democrats have sunk below even the man they revile most! Amazing.

(Emphasis mine.) Hey, you heard it hear first, folks, on the EBD network.

STEELERS RELEASE KORDELL STEWART, "the enigmatic quarterback who led them to two AFC title games but perplexed them with his inconsistency", AP reports.

AP adds, "Arizona, New Orleans, Baltimore, Carolina and Chicago might be among the teams interested in signing Stewart", and I believe Dallas's Jerry Jones is also fascinated by Stewart's abilities as well.

GROUND ZERO, TEN YEARS AGO: Today is the tenth anniversary of the first attack on New York's World Trade Center.

Byron York looks at Bill Clinton's response to that bombing, which--although no one would know it at the time--demonstrated his priorities as a newly elected president, just as President Bush's response would demonstrate his.

UPDATE: The Technoptimist has some thoughts--and several links.

THE FRENCH=FREDO:Dennis Miller, speaking about the French, says, "You'd better gas up the dinghy and go fishing with Fredo, because you are dead to me."

I love it.

Andrew Sullivan nails it:

By far the most depressing aspect of the debate over war to disarm Saddam has been how it has swiftly adopted the contours of the culture war. There is a solid and passionate base among many blue-staters that opposes this war at least in part because they oppose George W. Bush.

These photos of Sheryl Crow, happily visiting the troops in a war zone in 1996, prove his point.

They also prove these points, as well.

VOICES OF IRAQIS: Why is the anti-war movement silencing them?

Don't believe the hype surrounding the 2004 Democratic presidential candidates, says Patrick Ruffini.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan says there's one big reason why George W. Bush is smiling when he looks to 2004: Al Sharpton. Sullivan writes:

Suddenly, in American domestic politics, it's the 1980s all over again. Faced with a gung-ho cowboy president, who's cutting taxes and pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, the Democrats have gone wobbly at the top and left at the bottom. Terrified of being on the wrong side of a war on terror, most of the Democratic leadership gave the president a complete pass in waging war against Iraq, leading to their slaughter at the last Congressional elections. Meanwhile, the core of the party has veered left - into the anti-war movement, an increasingly paranoid anti-Bush movement, more and more convinced that America is in the grip of a right-wing political and media cabal.

And then just as the president's ratings drifted upward into the low 60s, things got even worse for the opposition. A new specter now faces the Democrats: Al Sharpton. Sharpton is the inheritor of Jesse Jackson's wing of the Democrats: an African-American street preacher turned racial activist who rose to prominence in the 1980s by championing a young black woman's claims of gang-rape. Those claims turned out to have been fabricated, and in 1987, Sharpton was convicted of defaming one of the alleged rapists. In the 1990s, Sharpton - with his huge girth, dandy clothes and extremely important hair - played New York's racial politics to the hilt. In 1995, he demonized a Jewish shop-keeper in Harlem, helping incite the racially motivated murder of seven of the shop's workers. He has been convicted of tax evasion and non-payment of rent. But his gutter style of racial politics has won him a devoted following and considerable clout in New York City Democratic politics. A a weapon in American politics, race still works. More worrying for the Democrats, Sharpton has shown no compunction in taking his racial grievances out on the party itself - leading to the bitter and complete defeat of the last Democratic candidate for mayor in New York City. He may not have much chance of winning anything outright, in other words. But he's a proven and effective spoiler.

It's waaaaaay too soon to say this with any certainty, but there's a very good chance that it's Morning in America for George W. Bush. Unlike his father, who inherited an astoundingly robust economy that was coming to the end of its (to coin a phrase) seven fat years and whose long overdue, and extremely mild recession occurred just as he was running for reelection, Bush 43's timing could be spot-on perfect: a quick victory in Iraq, followed by overwhelming proof that Hussein really was the Stalin-like tyrant he's been accussed of being all these years, followed by a long overdue rally in the stock market, and several years of growth whose peak coincides perfectly for Bush's reelection, made all the easier because of Al Sharpton's corrosive presence, either in some prominent role with the Democrats, or as Sullivan speculates, a third party, Nader-like spoiler.

This is all pure speculation on my part, and a lot could happen to make 2004 a very, very different scenario. But Bush is in the driver's seat here.

Fortunately, he knows it. And unlike his father, he knows what to do with it.

GREAT LINE: Writing about Dennis Kucinich, one of the many Democrats currently running for president, Eric Olsen says, "If I have to pick a disgraced former mayor from Ohio, I'll take Jerry Springer."

SAME OL' BLIX: Headline on AP: "Blix Says Iraq Signals New Cooperation"

Meanwhile, Iraq moved missiles within range of US forces in Kuwait, prompting this headline: "Western Jets Attack Five Missile Systems in Iraq"

Was that the signal for new cooperation by Iraq?

CONVERSATIONS WITH A MASTER CRAFTSMAN OF MOVIES: My latest review is now up on Blogcritics.

"THAT DECISION IS OURS": I suspect that the quote highlighted by Andrew Sullivan will be all over the Blogosphere on Tuesday:

A senior diplomat from another council member said his government ... was told not to anguish over whether to vote for war. "You are not going to decide whether there is war in Iraq or not," the diplomat said U.S. officials told him. "That decision is ours, and we have already made it. It is already final. The only question now is whether the council will go along with it or not."

Sullivan, (who writes, "that's some brinkmanship". No kiddding!), is the first of what should be lots of people examining that quote's implications.

WELL, THAT DIDN'T LAST TOO LONG, DID IT? Rosie O'Donnell, October, 2001:

Talkshow host and ardent Democratic activist Rosie O'Donnell stunned Los Angeles radio listeners Thursday morning by declaring she's changed her opinion of President Bush.

"I love him now!" O'Donnell told KRLA-AM's Dennis Prager.

O'Donnell said she even got to Yankee Stadium an hour early for a World Series game so that she could videotape Bush!

'I brought a videocamera and my six year old son and no security so that my son could see the president," said O'Donnell.

"We left at 6 o'clock in order to do that. And since September 11, I have had nothing but accolades for the job he has done for this nation... I am in full support of the President."

O'Donnell added: "Honey, I love him now! He is our President. We are at war."

Rosie O'Donnell, February, 2003, via Drudge Report "coming soon" blurb:

ROSIE O'DONNELL SAYS NO TO WAR: 'THIS IS NOT THE AMERICAN WAY... WE ARE NOT THE TERRORISTS. WE DO NOT MEET TERROR WITH MORE TERROR... WAR IS WRONG. KILLING IS WRONG. HAVE WE NOT LEARNED YET?'

The whiplash from these flip-flops can really cause a headache!

MICHAEL MEDVED IS PRAISING TED TURNER. No, really!

IRONY CAN BE PRETTY IRONIC SOMETIMES: Reason's Hit & Run blog notes that "in the wake of Knopf severing ties with the discredited historian, Soft Skull Press will be publishing a revised edition of Arming America in October 2003."

Yes, Michael Bellesiles' new publisher is named Soft Skull.

Perfect.

Peggy Noonan writes that two ex-presidents (two guesses as to who they are) "could learn from Eisenhower and the Bay of Pigs".

And...from Richard Nixon, who continues to grow in stature.

(Which isn't to say that I think Nixon was a great president--just the opposite. But add Noonan's take on how he acted during the Bay of Pigs to his resignation in the face of impeachment, and choice to not fight an ugly protracted and divisive battle after having lost a razor-thin election to Kennedy. Carter, Clinton and Gore continue to make Nixon look classier in retrospect. And that's quite an accomplishment.)

I WAS GOING TO QUOTE select paragraphs from this essay by Mark Goldblatt on antiwar protesters, but everytime I found one that I liked, another paragraph seemed to jump up and say, "quote me too!".

So simply read the whole thing.

DISARMING HISTORY: Joyce Lee Malcolm, writing in Reason examines how "an award-winning scholar twisted the truth about America’s gun culture -- and almost got away with it". A detailed timeline of how Michael Bellesiles was ultimately exposed is also included.

This paragraph is also instructive:

In June 2002, when the soundness of his scholarship had become so suspect that the National Endowment for the Humanities stripped its name from his Newberry Library fellowship, Bellesiles told a British reporter that the move "reawakened the ghosts of McCarthyism." He described it as a "political decision that should send chills through academics everywhere and is clearly intended as a warning to any scholar who dares to work on a controversial topic."

James Lileks, call your office.

Duke University will be launching an Axis of Evil film festival, showing films from Iraq, North Korea and Iran, and rogue states such as Cuba, Syria and Libya. Check out this quote by Ariel Dorfman, a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University:

"I'd urge everyone who believes in cultural dialogue -- and particularly those who don't -- to come and submerge themselves in these works of art from the very places that some in the United States would like to bomb out of sight and out of existence".

Oh--I guess I missed the part where President Bush said he was going to obliterate Cuba with nuclear weapons. (Heck, we may be removing the nukes from many of our missiles.)

And then there's this statement by Negar Mottahedeh, assistant professor of literature at Duke:

We know how Bush sees 'the Axis of Evil.' How does someone from within that Axis see his or her own everyday life?"

Given state-controlled censorship by many of these countries, how do we really know how these filmmakers "see his or her own everyday life?" But they're probably deeply envious of the freedoms that most Americans take for granted, such as the freedom to both make movies and protest your government, and the freedom to make movies free of government interference. And the freedom to keep at least some of the profits from your work.

By the way--nice use of quotation marks by Reuters. And nice of Reuters to list a film series about largely enslaved film makers under their "Oddly Enough" category.

(Link via James Russell.)

WHEN IN DOUBT, BACK THE MAN WITH THE MOUSTACHE. It really is the left's foreign policy, isn't it?

A SIMPLE QUESTION--and a good one--asked by Andrew Sullivan.

The US is considering replacing the nuclear warheads on some Minuteman III missiles with conventional warheads, that could be used to strike states like Iraq and North Korea on short notice:

The weapon would give the United States the ability to attack targets thousands of miles away with precision-guided, conventional high explosives in minutes, military officials said. Because of the missiles' speed, they would be able to pierce current air defenses and avoid putting American pilots at risk, they added.

Replacing nuclear warheads with conventional weapons on some of the nation's globe-girdling missiles is a proposal that is barely on the drawing board. The Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs will begin formally exploring the idea of converting some Minuteman III missiles this fall in a two-year review the military calls an "analysis of alternatives."

But senior Air Force and Pentagon officials are seriously weighing the proposal as part of a larger rethinking of the kind of deterrence and long-range attack weapons the military will need in the security environment that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Now that's my kind of bunker buster!

THE GLORY HOLE: An...err..exciting..feature of the Berkeley campus discussed by Michele Malkin. Nice to see those tuition dollars being spent so wisely.

Ann Coulter looks at Phil Donahue, then and now and writes:

Did people enjoy watching a man with the IQ of the average TV newsreader who passed himself off as Bertrand Russell? Or did they just want to watch something on TV?

We have the answer to that!

In a controlled scientific experiment, Donahue was given his own TV show on MSNBC in the new competitive environment of cable TV. That Boy's ratings are the lowest in primetime TV for any news program. They are so low, Nielsen can barely detect them. One wishes bitterly that MSNBC could give shows to all the other pompous liberal blowhards once forced on the public, like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, so we could see how they'd fare with a little competition. Nielsen would not be able to "See It Now."

* * *

One thing about liberals is they're pesky devils. They'll never quit. And now they are back again looking for the next "liberal alternative" to Rush Limbaugh. They have the money, the business consultants, the radio talent. Now all they need are ideas. There's the rub.

Who is the probable candidate for radio talent?

Al Franken.

No, really! (As Dave Barry might say.)

Jonah Goldberg weighs in on his chances:

What's funny is that Franken's backers are banking on precisely what Franken shockingly didn't know until recently: Conservatives are more entertaining than liberals. Oh, of course it's true that professional — and very funny — entertainers and comedy writers tend to be liberal. But the key here is that they are professional entertainers, not professional liberals. And therein lies all the difference.

Franken is on to something when he says that liberals aren't interested in the sort of demagoguery provided by Limbaugh. That's not because liberals don't like demagoguery. They love demagoguery. They love hatchet jobs, low blows, cheap shots, and character assassination even more than conservatives do (and there are certainly more than a few conservatives into that sort of thing). When every day we hear another comparison between Bush and Hitler; when conservatives are likened to Klansmen, the mentally retarded and the Taliban; when the Democratic party sponsors ads saying that a vote for a Republican is a vote for church burnings, hate crimes, and organized murder; when every Republican economic policy is attributed to personal greed and every foreign policy is attributed to a hodgepodge of sins including, (again) greed ,racism, and vanity; it becomes very difficult to take Franken seriously when he says that his listeners aren't interested in demagoguery.

No, the problem for liberals is that their "movement" extends to virtually every boutique victim group under the sun. I don't just mean blacks, Hispanics, gays, women (roughly two thirds of the population right there), but pretty much anyone with a grievance. Even white guys can join the club if they complain about not getting enough workman's comp or about Gulf War syndrome. Liberalism has become a politics of complaint. In a sense, that's fine because politics is largely about the adjudication of complaints. Lord knows conservatives have plenty of grievances too.

But the problem for liberals is that they are terrified of offending anybody in their own massive Coalition of the Oppressed. That pretty much leaves white Christian men, rich non-liberals, and maybe a handful of right-wing Jews and conservative women. And, I'm sorry Al, there's just not enough material there to be entertaining. Liberals have been feeding off of Whitey for so long they can see their reflections in the bones, they're so picked-clean. If Franken thinks that there are millions of people who want to listen to the same tired and lame laments about white folks every day for three hours, he's nuts.

* * *

Anyway, I guarantee you that if Franken were to make fun of activists from any number of constituencies — gays, Hispanics, blacks, animal-rights activists, environmentalists, fill in the blank — he would be inundated with gripes from his "base" saying "that's not funny!" And because he's such a nice tolerant, Upper West Side liberal, he'd have to listen, apologize, atone. This is one of the main reasons why professional liberals aren't funny: They are terrified of offending anybody even remotely "on their side." (Another reason is that liberals tend to believe they are on a mission to save the world and therefore there's simply no time for joking around.)

One thing's for sure, Al's got his work cut out for him. As Coulter writes, "Among the "alternatives to Rush" that liberals have tried over the years are: former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, former Connecticut Gov. Lowell Weicker, former California Gov. Jerry Brown, former U.S. Sen. (and Monkey Business skipper) Gary Hart, and former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder."

UPDATE: Thomas Sowell also has some thoughts.

THE STRANGE CASE OF SAMI AL-ARIAN: David Frum has the details of his interaction with President Bush, and Andrew Sullivan has a flashback, which, as he notes, "seems less outrageous now, doesn't it?"

OK 80: Happy birthday (well, almost) to Orrin Keepnews, the legendary jazz producer who turns 80 in March. Keepnews "was the first to record legendary artists Bill Evans and Wes Montgomery, and has figured prominently in the careers of Cannonball Adderley, Thelonious Monk, McCoy Tyner, Sonny Rollins, Stanley Clarke and Flora Purim. He started three distinguished jazz labels: Riverside, Milestone, and Landmark", according to this excellent profile by Eric Olsen on Blogcritics.

"OLD, WEIRD AMERICA": Orrin Judd looks at Gods and Generals in two posts here and here. (The astonishing quote above though, is courtesy of Greil Marcus.)

I haven't seen the movie yet, but I did get a kick out of Ted Turner, searching to find an anti-war message in his own film--a film about the war the ended slavery. It's unlikely that this fellow and Ted will ever meet, but they ought to.

UPDATE: Rod Dreher also weighs in (start here, and then scroll down to the post below), along with an excerpt of the Village Voice's not-surprisingly condescending take on the film.

IS THE STATEN ISLAND REFINERY FIRE TERRORISM? Probably not, but Rod Dreher writes about a curious incident right after 9/11 involving someone wanting to photograph American refineries. "Point is, our enemies are watching our refineries. That's why the first thing I thought of when I saw the fire was: 'Terrorism.'"

And Saddam Hussein does have a thing about setting oil refineries ablaze. Dreher adds a comment from friend: "28,000 New Yorkers are now going back into therapy."

LILEKS' MONEY QUOTE:

Playwright Harold Pinter, speaking at last weekend’s rally, said "The US is a nation out of control," and “unless we stop it, it will bring barbarism to the entire world." He said America was "a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics with Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug."

When Blair shows up in the pulpit cleaving the air with a scimitar, let me know. When US television broadcasts a speech with Billy Graham hosting an Excalibur replica from the Franklin Mint Collection, demanding the decapitation of Muslims, let me know. When George Bush grips the podium and beseeches American rock formations to give up the location of non-Christians so we can slit their throats, and it’s carried live on national TV by presidential order, drop me a line.

It takes a particularly rarified variety of idiot to look at a Jew-hating fascist with a small mustache - and decide that his opponent is the Nazi.

of course, for those who have that particular rarification, have we got a bumper sticker for you...

Check out this line by Molly Ivins, by way of Jonah Goldberg:

For those of you who have not read Paris 1919, I recommend it highly. Roosevelt was anti-colonialist. That system was a great evil, a greater horror even than Nazism or Stalinism.

Jonah replies, and he's spot-on, at least in my book:

the suggestion that colonialism was a greater horror than Nazism or Stalinism is so stupid and so repugnant it really must be addressed. Does she know what she's saying? Doesn't she know how many tens of thousands of brave colonial troops fought side by side with the British against the Germans and the Japanese? And whereas there are many defenders of British colonialism - and other colonial regimes - I think she will have to look under a lot of rocks to find defenders of the death camps of the Holocaust. Considering that Nazism and Stalinism represented the very worst kind of colonialism, one wonders what it was about the Raj that Ivins considers worse than Stalin's collectivization or the rape of Poland.

Colonialism worse than the death camps of the Nazis, or the gulags of the Soviets? As I said, it's staggering that someone would write that--let alone think it.

ADVANTAGE DEN BESTE! Back on January 5th, we linked to this post by Steven Den Beste regarding non-nuclear EMP. Compare that to this item on the Drudge Report.

Nice to see even Matt getting scooped from time to time by the Blogosphere.

IRANIAN TROOPS PERISH IN PLANE CRASH: Will anyone blame this crash on Iranian "arrogance"?

UPDATE: James Morrow wonders what Allah thinks about it:

When the Shuttle Columbia burned up on re-entry, many in the enlightened and rational Islamic world credited Allah with orchestrating the disaster.

Now that an Iranian troop transport plane has crashed, killing 302 - including 280 members of the "elite" Revolutionary Guard Corps - I wonder if the big man upstairs will also cop blame in the Islamist world?

Good question.

THREE WORDS. JUST THREE SIMPLE WORDS: Lesbian Japanese monkeys.

What else needs to said?

(No word on what the lesbian love goats think of this, however.)

A review I wrote (which helped kill some time whilst in the Frozen Tundra of Washington, DC) of the Frank Zappa all-instrumental set is up on Blogcritics.

Miss Coulter's comments came in response to a report in The Times on Monday that detailed Republicans' concerns that Mr. Duke's presidential bid would divide their party."He's an unknown quantity; that scares people. What they read about him causes people to cringe because they don't know him."

Miss Coulter said Mr. Duke's Republican critics "need to take a deep breath and exhale."

Sounds pretty scary, huh? But all we did was to swap Donna Brazile's name with Ann Coulter's, and Al Sharpton's with David Duke, from this Washington Times article. (And it's instructive that Brazile's quotes--assuming they're true--indicate that she's willing to work with anyone who will increase black votes to the Democrats, no matter how odious that person is. As Rod Dreher of the conservative National Review wrote in January:

Republicans took a whipping over a gaffe made by Trent Lott, a mere senator, but now the Democrats have to deal with a bona fide black racial demagogue, a man in David Duke's league, blunder bussing onto the national stage as a candidate for his party's nomination. Democratic politicians are scared to death of offending Sharpton, because they don't want to be denounced as racist by a man who can command such media attention.

Or as Peter Beinart of the liberal New Republic recently wrote:

Bull*****ing is the mechanism Sharpton uses to escape unscathed from the moral train wrecks that dot his career. On "Meet the Press" in January, Tim Russert reminded the freshly reinvented presidential candidate of four episodes in his past: His 1987 conviction for defaming a man he accused of raping Tawana Brawley; his 1993 conviction for tax evasion; his 1995 incitement against a Jewish store owner in Harlem, which culminated in the racially motivated murder of seven of the store's employees; and his 2002 eviction from the Empire State Building for failing to pay his rent. Sharpton responded by implying racism and changing the subject: "I think you've got white candidates with worse backgrounds who--." Russert interrupted to ask whom he meant. Sensing a dead end, Sharpton declared, "I'm not getting into name-calling," and changed the subject once again. "If you want to talk about background, talk about how a white male stabbed me at a nonviolent march. I forgave him, testified for him. That's somebody that brings America together," he declared. Russert doggedly returned to his question, asking Sharpton, "Why not apologize for Tawana Brawley?" "To apologize for believing and standing with a woman--I think all of us need to take women's claims more seriously," Sharpton responded indignantly. "No apology for Tawana Brawley?" Russert tried one last time. "No apology for standing up for civil rights," replied Sharpton.

That last answer is particularly revealing. According to Al Sharpton, the behavior of Al Sharpton is synonymous with the cause of civil rights, and therefore any criticism of Al Sharpton is, by definition, an attack on racial justice. By running for president, Sharpton is effectively asking the Democratic Party to bless that proposition. He knows that, by treating him as a legitimate candidate, the party is ratifying his self-coronation as the leader of black America. And, if the Democratic Party and the media accept him as the leader of black America, the post-Martin Luther King Jr., post-Jesse Jackson civil rights movement will become, in effect, whatever Sharpton says it is.

Brazile's response to Beinart's article? "Stop beating him up."

Dreher sums it up best: "Sharpton will make fools of the Democrats.

"Good. They created this monster. They bloody well deserve him."

ADVANTAGE, ED! Back on Friday, February 7th, we wrote:

The black coaches who declined to interview with the Lions seem to have a short memory. If the Lions and Mariucci couldn't have come to terms on a contract, they would have been in the same position as Tampa Bay and Bill Parcells last year. Mariucci--as Parcells did--would spend a year in the TV booth, and the Lions would have been scrambling to find a replacement, and at that point, Denny Green would be a perfect fit.

This weekend, Peter King of Sports Illustrated wrote:

I'm going to say something that is bound to generate a ton of what-an-idiot-you-are e-mail. I welcome said mail.

I think the African-American coaches who were asked to interview with the Detroit Lions but refused because Steve Mariucci had a near-lock on the job made a big mistake.

I'd been thinking this since five black coaches each said no to an interview request from Lions CEO Matt Millen, thus igniting the hot-stove-league firestorm around the issue. I even asked Millen about it, and he said he had tried to make the same argument, the contention being that black coaches know there are 32 white men, the owners of NFL franchises, holding those 32 sacred jobs hostage. To get one of those jobs, you have to break the code. You have to get inside the circle. You can only get inside the circle one way -- by meeting these men, impressing them and convincing them you ought to be in their little club. And even if they don't hire you, you're three percent closer (1/32nd) to your goal than you were. You've met with one of the gatekeepers of these jobs, and hopefully made an impression on him. And when a vacancy occurs somewhere else, the owner with the opening then might call Millen or one of the Fords (Bill Sr., or Jr.) and ask about you.

This was reinforced last week when I talked to Ted Cottrell, the Jets defensive coordinator who was spurned by San Francisco in favor of Dennis Erickson. Now, the prevailing opinion is that Cottrell was just a flunky keeping the seat warm until the Niners found a white coach they liked better. That he was a phony leading candidate. I can say with certainty that this is total horsecrap. Dr. John York, who, with his wife, Denise DeBartolo York, rides herd over the 49ers, was the gatekeeper to this job. San Francisco general manager Terry Donahue would identify the leading candidates, then run the list through York, and the two would decide on a coach together. (Team consultant Bill Walsh was, shall we say, "consulted." But this hire was not his call. He advised both men.)

Had Erickson blown the interview with York and Donahue nine days ago, or had some red flags gone up when Erickson met them, this would have been Cottrell's job. Two separate Niners sources, including York himself, told me this. Three times York dined alone with Cottrell -- breakfast, lunch and dinner -- and they didn't talk about the blue-plate specials. They discussed the nuts and bolts of the job: which coaches Cottrell would want to keep, how he'd fit in the strict front-office setup. "I really, really liked Ted Cottrell," said York, "and I think he's going to make a very good head coach in the league. And I'll tell anyone who asks me that. I will recommend him highly."

Emphasis above mine.

MEDIA BIAS: According to Andrew Sullivan, when it comes to anti-war bias, the American media has nothing on the BBC, or as he's dubbed it, the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation.

YOU FOUGHT IN THE GRITS WAR? No, not really (although I've eaten them, and lived!). But England's Group Captain Mandrake, and Acidman of Georgia are slugging it out even as we speak.

WE REPORT, YOU DECIDE: Those “who took to the streets opposing U.S. policy” this past weekend are a second “world superpower,” MSNBC reporter David Shuster asserted on Monday's Hardball:

Shuster, who provides a set up or background piece for the show each night, insisted: “The size of the demonstrators at least here, at least in Europe, seems to underscore, Chris, that there are now perhaps two world superpowers. There’s the United States and then there are those millions of people who took to the streets opposing U.S. policy.”

Well, that's one take. But Ken Layne, who actually bothered to add up the numbers, and compares them to the number of people who over the weekend ate at McDonalds or "paid about $8 each" to "support a blind lawyer superhero", decides:

to be a bit cruel, the protests attracted about as many people this weekend as the movie "Kangaroo Jack." I'm sorry, but it's true.

Orrin Judd adds:

We should hardly be surprised then that the Western Left--already buffeted by the collapse of communism and socialism as viable alternatives to capitalism, and reeling from the American people's ready acceptance of the idea that 9-11 and after represents a clash between good and evil--has poured into the streets to hysterically proclaim that it's all our own fault, that it's big oil, or fundamentalist Christians, or our arming of Saddam, or our support of the Afghan mujahadeen, or our support of Zionism, or whatever...that has "caused" the conflict. The Left believes it can control the world, can reshape humans, and can create a utopia. Such a dream must die hard and we can't expect its death throes to look pretty. Were they not abetting evil, it might even be possible to pity these folk.

I dunno--I feel a bit of pity for the folks who had to march downwind of this pair. (Or is it a foursome?)

BACK IN CALIFORNIA: Thanks to the perfidy of Mother Nature, my wife and I spent an extended weekend in Washington, DC, holed up in a Marriott while 24 inches or so of snow were dumped onto us. We managed to get out via Dulles this morning, and are now safely back in San Jose.

More to come!

LEAVING THEM BEHIND: Andrew Sullivan writes:

The lesson from this is a simple one: we have to abandon the U.N. as an instrument in world affairs. I'm not saying complete U.S. withdrawal, although I'm beginning to think that now makes a lot of sense. I mean temporary U.S. disengagement. The body is now a joke of immense proportions. If it cannot enforce a resolution it passed only a couple of months ago, it cannot enforce anything. If it cannot read the plain meaning of its own words, it is an absurdist theater piece, not a genuine international body. It isn't in danger of becoming the League of Nations. It now is the League of Nations.

I actually watched a couple of minutes of the UN's Kabuki theater while visiting a friend in New York this morning. When the ambassador from Syria used the discussion regarding Iraq as a launching point against "Israeli racism", it was even more obvious than before that this is a sham.

One advantage of Bush working the UN however, rather than attacking Iraq immediately after Afghanistan, is of course that it allowed the UN, along with France and Germany to be shown as the charlatans they truly are. And--assuming victory in Iraq--that's an incredible quadruple play for Bush.

Speaking of which, as a great man once said..."Let's roll"--and (now that we're done with the UN) the sooner the better.

"WE ARE NOW AT WAR WITH FRANCE", Steven Deste Beste writes.

Read the whole thing (to coin a phrase).

HEADLINES OF MASS DESTRUCTION: How many keyboards did the Associated Press ruin, when they caused people to spew, Danny Thomas-style over this one:

"Iraq Bans Weapons of Mass Destruction"

But since they were supposed to that 12 years ago, didn't they just admit that they're in material breach? Or, like Santa Cruz declaring themselves "a nuclear-free zone", is Saddam simply saying--in only the heartfelt and earnest way that he can--that WMDs are bad for children and other living things?

AXIS OF EVIL: THE NEXT GENERATION: Beijing signs up Albert Speer's son to revamp China's capital for the Olympics. I'm willing to believe that Albert Speer Sr. was a naive young man who was seduced by an artist gone terribly astray. What's his son's excuse?

Robert Harris, call your office!

WITH APOLOGIES TO DAVE BARRY: Blogging has moved to a safe, undisclosed location code named "Foo Fork".

Seriously though, we had arranged this trip to visit friends and relatives several months ago, and decided, despite the shock headlines and wall-to-wall coverage of the cable networks, to go. I can't say I noticed any different tone from the passengers on our flight in, or the people in the mid-town Manhattan restaurant where we had dinner last night (or on the subway to my mother-in-law's appartment this morning).

LES PAUL MEETS BOB METCALFE: Gibson's latest electric guitar has an Ethernet jack.

I gotta do a product review of this!

(Link via Group Captain Mandrake, currently taking part in the Officer Exchange Program with the USAF. I think he's visiting Gen. Turgidson (and maybe even Miss Scott!) in the Pentagon, even as we speak.)

MEET THE NEW COACH OF THE 49ERS: Dennis Erickson, former Seattle Seahawks and Oregon State head coach.

GENTLEMEN, START YOUR FISKINGS: Laura Billings, a columnist with Twin Cities.com has written a piece titled "Stars' views shouldn't be so easily written off".

I'm not an accomplished Fisker, but some of these paragraphs are so easy to refute, with only a minimum of searching on Google, that I figured I'd take a whack at them:

Take for instance the shellacking that singer Sheryl Crow recently got after appearing at the American Music Awards in a T-shirt sequined with the message "War is not the answer.'' As she told reporters, "I think war is based in greed and there are huge karmic retributions that will follow. I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies."

Though Jesus Christ, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. all expressed similar thoughts, they didn't have the misfortune of living in a world with FOX News. Conservative critics were worse to her than music critics, referring to her as a "noted geopolitical strategist" who "probably thinks Saddam Hussein is a New York City cabdriver.''

Gee, I don't remember Christ or Dr. King telling anyone that "the best way to solve problems is to not have enemies", as if by simply being nice, you'll never have enemies along the way. (Besides, by attacking Bush, Crow has made enemies of her own. Shouldn't she have simply been nice and kept her thoughts to herself?

And then there's Billings' sidepocket shot at Fox News. Is CNN really that pacificist? I don't recall their cries of horror when Clinton bombed Kosovo, torched Waco, or snatched Elián Gonzalez at gunpoint. And as the following paragraph from a 1983 review of the film Ghandi indicates, its title subject was once a guy even Fox News could admire:

It is something of an anomaly that Gandhi, held in popular myth to be a pure pacifist (a myth which governments of India have always been at great pains to sustain in the belief that it will reflect credit on India itself, and to which the present movie adheres slavishly), was until fifty not ill-disposed to war at all. As I have already noted, in three wars, no sooner had the bugles sounded than Gandhi not only gave his support, but was clamoring for arms. To form new regiments! To fight! To destroy the enemies of the empire! Regular Indian army units fought in both the Boer War and World War I, but this was not enough for Gandhi. He wanted to raise new troops, even, in the case of the Boer and Kaffir Wars, from the tiny Indian colony in South Africa. British military authorities thought it not really worth the trouble to train such a small body of Indians as soldiers, and were even resistant to training them as an auxiliary medical corps ("stretcher bearers"), but finally yielded to Gandhi's relentless importuning.As first instructed, the Indian Volunteer Corps was not supposed actually to go into combat, but Gandhi, adamant, led his Indian volunteers into the thick of battle. When the British commanding officer was mortally wounded during an engagement in the Kaffir War, Gandhi--though his corps' deputy commander--carried the officer's stretcher himself from the battlefield and for miles over the sun-baked veldt. The British empire's War Medal did not have its name for nothing, and it was generally earned.

Getting back to Ms. Billings, she also writes:

[Barbra] Streisand is continually derided for mixing up Iran and Iraq, and yet no one complains when the president says Iraq was responsible for 9/11. Does anyone remember al-Qaida?

Why yes, we do--probably far more often than Ms. Billings. Where do they get their money? Where do they get their training? Is it that far fetched a connection for Ms. Billings? Besides, even if there's no connection whatsoever, wouldn't removing one murderous dictator from the Middle East make al-Qaida think twice before striking the US again?

This quote is also fun:

But when it comes to understanding the spin doctoring and cynical manipulations that go on in D.C., [Dustin] Hoffman may have more expert standing than he lets on.

Did you ever see him in "Wag the Dog"?

Yes. His character was murdered by the Carville-esque fixer played by Robert DeNiro, precisely because he was a clueless Hollywood producer who didn't understand "the spin doctoring and cynical manipulations that go on in D.C."

As I said, I'm not a veteran Fisker. But those folks who are should have lots of fun marking up Ms. Billings' babble.

THE TAPE: Glenn Reynolds writes, "Personally, I think this is evidence that Osama is dead, and that the CIA is supplying these tapes for purposes of its own. (Not that there's anything wrong with that)."

But it seams that either way, Bush wins. Osama's dead? Then Bush must be doing a pretty good fighting terrorism. After all, Clinton never bothered to kill him.

Osama's alive and in cahoots with Iraq? Yet another reason for regime change there.

REDRUM! REDRUM! Happy Fun Pundit examines what's written on Hans Blix's notes.

MAYBE I SHOULD RETHINK THIS WHOLE REMODELING IDEA: Tim Cavanaugh writes, "you can get a four-bedroom house in Baghdad for $70,000."

PROFILES IN COURAGE: Remember VISA's ad featuring identical NFL twins Tiki and Ronde Barber, and the vacuous blonde salesclerk whose eyes bobbed from left to right to left to left to right to right to left like a Cylon warrior two circuits short of a CPU trying to figure out who was who?

That's what the Times' position on liberating Iraq sounds a bit like, as enunciated by Sulzberger Jr, and explained by Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan notes, "If the president were a Democrat, however, I have few doubts they would have come to some kind of decision by now."

You think?

NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH (and we mean it): The New York Post links to this transcript obtained by The Smoking Gun, graphically detailing Michael Jackson's alleged sexual trysts with a 13-year-old boy.

This is truly horrifying stuff, not the least of which is a quote of Jackson telling the poor kid, "because most people believe something is wrong, doesn't make it so."

This qualifies in my book as the very definition of wrong.

THE PICTURE WAS NOT LOST: Rand Simberg notes that Petr Ginz’s Moon Landscape drawing "was not destroyed in last weekend's Shuttle disaster. Ramon didn't take the original--it was a copy."

RUDY GIULIANI WRITES of an ugly stall by Democrats in the the US Senate.

THE SHARPTON FACTOR: Howard Kurtz writes that Democrats are in a damned-if they-do, damned-if-they-don't position with Al Sharpton:

For a guy who has no chance of winning, Sharpton is having a sizable impact on the calculations of every other Democrat, all of whom will be hunting for minority votes. (Although many middle-class blacks are wary of Sharpton as well. How he does outside New York, especially among blacks, will determine whether he's the next Jesse Jackson or more of a gadfly candidate.)

Sharpton is a smarter politician than most people realize, but he's also a symbol of the kind of divisive racial politics that the Republicans would like to wrap around the neck of the eventual Democratic nominee. So maybe tip-toeing around him isn't the smartest strategy. One GOP strategist says privately that a Democrat with chutzpah could really help himself by pulling a Sister Souljah moment and ripping Reverend Al. (Ex-mayor Rudy Giuliani never gave Sharpton the time of day, but then he wasn't running in any Democratic primaries.)

Orrin Judd also has some thoughts.

I SWEAR I'M NOT MAKING THIS UP! Found via Best of the Web, this is a riot:

Mikhail Gorbachev is teaming up with former US president Bill Clinton and actress Sophia Loren to record a new version of the classic children's musical "Peter and the Wolf."

Retitled "The Wolf and Peter", the remake of Sergei Prokoviev's tale will tell the story from the point of view of the wolf, faced with the encroachments of urbanisation on his dwindling forest habitat.

Why was Gorbachev hired?

Nagano and RNO general director Sergei Markov said they had chosen Gorbachev because, like Clinton, he "has a great ability to communicate."

The remark drew wry comment in the Russian media, which recalled Gorbachev was often derided in office for his southern accent and long, indecipherable sentences stuffed with Communist party jargon.

Asked whether Gorbachev was rehearsing, Polyakov said "Mikhail Sergeyevich does everything impromptu."

Scrappleface, call your office!

NOW THIS IS A BUDGET I'D LIKE TO SEE. Won't happen in my lifetime, though.

FINISHING THE JOB: Great, unexpected line in the middle of Jay Nordlinger's latest Impromptu:

As you undoubtedly know by now, the Israeli astronaut who was killed on the Columbia — Ilan Ramon — was one of the pilots who daringly and bravely took out the Osirak reactor. At his funeral, President Bush reportedly told his children, “I’m going to finish the job your dad started.”

That is especially interesting in light of the fact that the U.S. government joined the rest of the world in condemning the Israeli raid — a raid that almost certainly saved the lives of many.

Maybe it shouldn't have been that unexpected, actually.

THE THEME SONG OF THE UN INSPECTION TEAM: As spotted by Joanne Jacobs.

UPDATE: Scott Ott seams to agree.

DUDE--YOU'RE GETTING BUSTED! The "dude, you're getting a Dell!" dude was arrested recently for possession of marijuana.

No word yet if he was also carrying these matches.

UPDATE: Heard in an online forum: "Hey, I thought pot was considered a Gateway drug..."

WOW--WHAT TIMING! No sooner did I post below comparing the US's upcoming war to liberate Iraq with our earlier efforts in Kosovo, and clicked through some of the links contained within it, did I find this post by Stefan Sharkansky comparing the media's coverage of a Democratic president waging war in 1999 with his Republican counterpart planning to do the same--and for far less shaky reasons--in 2003:

NATO's bombing of Serbia lasted less than three months, and ended with the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo and their replacement by NATO ground troops. Milosevic was ousted less than a year and a half later. Life in Serbia and Kosovo seems to be an improvement, at least, from what was there before the NATO campaign. The liberal media doesn't seem to have learned anything since then to overcome its near evangelical belief in unilateral pacifism. And the [San Francisco] Chronicle has taken a giant step backwards, toward the Progressive's fantasy view of the universe.

Read the whole thing.

EMOTIONS, NOT FACTS: That's what Jonah Goldberg writes is behind the anti-war movement, using Mary McGrory's explanation as to why she's no longer anti-war as a springboard.

"One gets the distinct sense that if Al Gore were in office, they'd have no problems with toppling Saddam", Jonah writes.

Of course.

I'll never forget the conversation I had back around 1999 with an attorney who was an acquaintance of my wife, while we had dinner at a Los Gatos restaurant with another couple and her. A sixty-something hyper-liberal, after she had brought up (God knows how we got on the subject) the importance of liberating Kosovo, I casually mentioned that I didn't see why it was in our national interest to get involved there. She erupted like a volcano with, "We've got to liberate those poor people suffering under Slobodan Milosevic!!!! Don't you understand!!???", Well, no. But I'll bet any amount of money she's against liberating the equally suffering people of Iraq, largely--if not entirely--because of who will get the credit for it.

"BRUTAL IRAQI NEEDLES": Rand Simberg describes some of the unintended consequences slowing down the rush of American and European human shields to Baghdad.

THE RESULTS ARE IN! The results of the First Annual Warblogger Awards, as hosted by Right Wing News, that is.

We were honored that that John Hawkins, RWN's proprietor asked us to be a judge. Frankly, we're still pretty psyched that we were a site of the day there, not too long ago.

Some of the results aren't too surprising. But a lot of them are, at least to me. So click on over, already!

Yesterday evening, I "attended" (it was in my home, but my wife and I did little of the actual planning or preparation) a wake for a close friend of mine. He was buried last week in Tennessee, where he was born, but yesterday was an opportunity for his wife and west coast friends to celebrate his life, and mourn his passing, all too soon at age 40, of a heart ailment and diabetes.

Today, on the other hand, was much more fun. Did you ever read the John Cheever story, The Swimmer, or see the 1968 movie version, which starred a surprisingly buff Burt Lancaster as a middle-aged man reliving his life by swimming from pool to pool on a hot Sunday afternoon in his suburban neighborhood? If you didn't, I'm not surprised, but it's one of those offbeat 1960s films that Bravo reruns from time to time (the other is the Canadian film version of The Fox, with Keir Dullea, minus Gary Lockwood and HAL 9000).

I did my own version of The Swimmer today, and I didn't even get wet. As part of our remodeling project, my wife and I are planning to put in a tub-sized Jacuzzi when we renovate our primary bathroom. Because at 6'2", I'm several inches taller than my wife, and 2/3rds of it are legs, I must have sat in 25 different models in a showroom in Fremont, California today. We think we've found a couple of winners, but we'll need to consult with our plumber.

By the way, is this a great country, or what? Anyone making a middle class income can walk into a warehouse-sized operation filled with a hundred or so Jacuzzis, hot tubs, just plain tubs, and showers, and purchase whichever one strikes his fancy. Try doing that in Iraq, Afghanistan, China, or Cuba.

Regular posting will resume later tonight, or tomorrow.

ARE THE FRENCH BEGINNING TO WOBBLE? Andrew Sullivan spots a thin beam of reality visible in Le Monde.

WELL WORTH SUBSCRIBING TO: Hollywood Foreign Policy Review magazine

(From the folks who brought you...Soldier of Surrender magazine!)

Best of the Web Today reports that at a recent Washington Press Club Foundation congressional dinner:

John McCain, Republican maverick, former POW and Vietnam War hero, cracked in his speech that if "Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people," then, considering the remarks coming out of Tinseltown about Iraq, "Hollywood is a Washington for the simpleminded."

Considering what P.J. O'Rourke once said about the Senate, those are biting remarks indeed.

HERE'S ONE GROUP EAGER FOR A NEW KOREAN WAR.

RACIAL PARODY IN THE NFL: Don Banks of Sports Illustrated shows some common sense regarding the Detroit Lions, and their seeming flaunting of the NFL's Faustian bargain with Johnnie Cochran:

Lions sources say they approached five different black potential candidates and all five declined to interview, saying that the job already appeared to be Mariucci's to lose and they didn't want to take part in any sham interview process. That's fair enough, and it was even a development that was predicted by many once former Vikings head coach Dennis Green declined to interview.

As for Matt Millen, the Lions president/CEO, he was apparently honest enough to admit to each potential candidate that Mariucci was far and away his leading candidate. Millen has nothing to apologize for, since the Mariucci hiring made all kinds of sense for Detroit, and he did say in a news conference after firing Marty Mornhinweg that a variety of candidates would be sought.

The problem is, nobody really believed Millen because of the transparent circumstances of the Lions dumping Mornhinweg only after Mariucci became available, despite a month ago claiming that Mornhinweg's job was safe. The system, it seems, would have "worked" better had Millen been disingenuous enough to convince at least one candidate to go through the interview process believing he was on equal footing with Mariucci.

Fairly or not, sometimes that's the way things work in the real world. Sometimes there's one overwhelming candidate who can't help but turn everybody else's candidacies into nothing but a fallback option. No matter how you spin it. That's what happened this year in Dallas with Bill Parcells, and that's what happened in Detroit with Mariucci.

It's hard for me to understand how the minority watchdog groups are furthering their cause by trying to have it both ways. If minority candidates are asked to be part of the interview process, and decline, they lessen the impact of their voices when they turn around and complain about being left out of the equation. Yes, even if they believe the process was flawed to begin with.

While Banks doesn't connect the dots, right below that is a subhead about all of the money that the Lions had to shell out to land "Mooch":

If you're wondering why Detroit seemingly overpaid Mariucci by giving him a five-year, $25 million annual salary, thus tying him with Washington's Steve Spurrier as the NFL's only $5-million-per-year coaches, it's simple, really.

Think of it as live-in-Detroit money. Mariucci had all the leverage. The Lions had to land him, and couldn't afford to take any chances. Thus they had to make him an overwhelming offer in order for him to get past his family's reservations about leaving the San Francisco bay area that they adored for the cold and gray of Michigan.

The black coaches who declined to interview with the Lions seem to have a short memory. If the Lions and Mariucci couldn't have come to terms on a contract, they would have been in the same position as Tampa Bay and Bill Parcells last year. Mariucci--as Parcells did--would spend a year in the TV booth, and the Lions would have been scrambling to find a replacement, and at that point, Denny Green would be a perfect fit.

They have only themselves to blame for not being interviewed, and Cochran, Jesse Jackson and company should be at least as angry with them, as with the Lions--if not more so.

IS BILL RICHARDSON A SUPPLY-SIDER? He certainly sounds that way, based on his early tax-cutting moves as the new governor of New Mexico.

Gray Davis, take note.

DAVE BARRY EXPLAINS why he lives in South Florida.

MILLER TIME: The Wall Street Journal reports that "not everyone in Hollywood is pro-Saddam."

For our previous coverage of Dennis Miller, click here.

TWO FROM SULLIVAN: I was going to highlight this classic juxtaposition from his Raines Watch department, but I'd be remiss in not pointing out the post below it regarding Pat Tillman.

GLIMMERS OF HOPE FOR THE MEDIA: Tom Brokaw told David Letterman how people in Iraq “are afraid to say anything because the wrong thing gets them not only in trouble, but probably executed":

Brokaw related how when he was in Baghdad in December, a man approached him and in a loud voice praised Saddam Hussein and promised to fight American invaders, but in a quiet voice he expressed hope that the Americans would arrive before Christmas since “we'll be very happy to have them come here as quickly as possible.”

(Apparently, no one told NBC's Ann Curry this, however)

Meanwhile, CBS reporter Bob Simon actually called Tony Benn, a left-wing former member of the British parliament who interviewed Saddam Hussein recently for British TV, "a British lefty". As Brent Baker of the Media Research Center writes, "Now that's the first time I can recall a CBS News reporter using the label 'lefty', especially in a derogatory way."

We bash the media a lot here, so when they get things as important as these are right, we do like to give them compliments as well.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Cal State Fresno is holding a closed conference on radical environmentalism, complete with speakers from eco-terrorist organizations such as Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front.

Arthur Silber has a phone number at Cal State to call to state your opinion...

AN ODE TO DOGMA: Jonah Goldberg wonders why people (very, very dumb people) confuse America with the Soviet Union:

In Saddam's tin-pot Stalinist torture chamber, the nation is a tool for Saddam's will to power. If the inspectors find a cache of chemical weapons, Saddam cannot claim "rogue elements" in his government acted independently and lied to him — because in his government, rogues, mavericks, freethinkers, and independent spirits of any kind are put to death, often after having seen their families murdered first. The only reigning dogma is to please the master and stay alive. Such is the way of all totalitarian regimes, be they Saddamite or Stalinist.

In America, rogues and freethinkers get TV shows, endowed chairs, and attaboys. If you can't see how profound a difference that is, your problem is your own dogma, not America's.

Exactly.

THIS WOULD BE AMUSING TO WATCH: MSNBC is apparently courting Michael Savage. Savage (who's on Bay Area radio during the afternoon drive time) makes Rush Limbaugh sound like Noel Coward.

It's a shame that the mainstream media invariably go after the blowhards for TV, while more nuanced conservative and libertarian speakers remain in print, or radio. Somebody should get Michael Medved back on TV, or get Virginia Postrel, Walter Williams (who was sitting in for Rush today, as I drove to the office) or Nick Schulz a show.

...Or that InstaPundit fellow. Heck, MSNBC's half way home--he's already got his own Web page there!

THE THREE STOOGES: "Rumsfeld puts Germany with Libya and Cuba".

LEGAL TYRANNIES: Duane Freese of Tech Central Station has an excellent piece on the dangers of trial lawyers, and their increasing drag on the economy:

In the 1950s, though, Congress shed a light on the mafia. It can do the same now on the trial bar. America was lucky in the 1990s. High technology was able to bring about vast improvements in productivity and produce a boom. The massive torts at the end of the 1990s, though, may now be one big reason the economy has found it hard for the current recovery to gain traction.

Read the whole thing.

TOTAL RECALL: John Fund and Arnold Steinberg (who has successfully recalled two California politicians) have additional thoughts on the efforts to recall Gray Davis.

PETA is busy writing letters to Yassar Arafat, to stop the killing...of donkeys.

Kerry Doughtery of The Virginian Pilot writes that on January 26, a bomb exploded on the road between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Gush Etzion:

As terror attacks go, this one was minor. Most of us didn't hear about it because, with the exception of one bus passenger treated for shock, no one was injured.

Thank God.

Palestinian terrorists delivered the bomb to its destination by donkey. They strapped explosives and a remote device to the animal and detonated the bomb by cell phone as an Israeli bus passed by.

The donkey, of course, was killed.

You know where this is going, don't you?

That's right. PETA, the group that never before expressed concern about the carnage in Israel, is suddenly outraged.

All because a donkey died.

Never mind that, according to the Israeli embassy, which keeps track of such grim statistics, 729 Israelis have perished in terrorist attacks since September 2000.

It gets worse from there. Leave it to PETA to address Yassar Arafat as "Your excellency."

UPDATE: Reader Chuck Simmins emailed to mention that a famous celebrity also has some thoughts on the limits of mule warfare.

NO WONDER HIS PALMS ARE SO HAIRY: Robert Fisk...Fisks himself.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GIPPER: Ronald Reagan celebrates his 92nd birthday today. For a look at what the 1960s and 1970s were like prior to his election, click here and here. For thoughts on his presidency, click here and here.

"YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT A KILLER I AM!" Did Willie Brown, the mayor of San Francisco, threaten to kill a city supervisor?

Trotsky and Stalin they're not, but this SF Gate article is a riot. Link found via Tim Cavanaugh of Reason, who writes, "people frequently ask why anybody would live in a city with a mostly Maoist Board of Supervisors. It's a good question, but...San Fran is one of the last places in America where they still know how to do politics".

IT WORKED FOR BRUCE WAYNE, who once said, "Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot, so my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts, " and chose to become Batman. This Marine has a different disguise to strike terror into the heart of a truly arch criminal.

CLIFF NOTES: Sgt. Stryker boils Powell at the UN down to its very essense.

RAY RHODES TO COACH SEAHAWKS' DEFENSE: AP reports "The hiring will reunite Rhodes with Seahawks head coach Mike Holmgren. They held the same jobs together in Green Bay from 1992-93".

BLIX HAS FINALLY FOUND ACTUAL WMDS, in a surprisingly remote location.

POST-LIBERATED IRAQ: Bruce Fein has some thoughts, as does Stephen Green (who, along with National Review's The Corner, did real-time blogging of Powell's speech to the League of Nations UN today.

See also this photo and post from September of 2002 by John Bono.

ARE THE MEDIA BIASED? Brent Bozell and Eric Alterman(!) slug it out in two side by side essays on National Review Online. It's too bad the essays are probably written blindly. Alterman stresses the importance of footnotes, and has six of them. It would have been fun to see Bozell respond by saying, Eric, "here are mine".

SAVED BY ILLNESS: Norman Mineta is the Bush cabinet member that Bush fans love to hate. And he was almost fired this fall, until illness struck. Robert Novak writes:

According to high-level administration sources, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta was to follow former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill as the second Cabinet member to be fired by President Bush until illness landed him in Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Mineta, a 71-year-old former congressman from California, is the only Democrat in Bush's Cabinet. He was saved from dismissal when a staph infection followed surgery last August to relieve persistent back pain, hospitalizing him for several weeks. He was operated on again Jan. 24, and remains at Walter Reed at this writing.

Although Transportation officials say Mineta runs the department from his hospital bed, the work is really being done by Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson (a protege and former aide of White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card).

I'm sorry to see him ailing, but after his bungling of airport security post-9/11, I won't be sad to see him step down.

I DOUBT THIS WILL AMOUNT TO MUCH, but Gray Davis is the target of a California recall effort, according to the Washington Times.

NOT EVEN FRANCE CAN ARGUE WITH THIS.

KOBAYASHI MARU: Even if NASA knew that Columbia was damaged as soon as it reached orbit, there was no way to prevent what happened on Saturday, according to this New York Times article, which runs through a variety of scenerios, each of which come up snake-eyes.

I JUST UPDATED the post on the EPA's possible role in the Columbia crash here.

THIS IS CNN: Lead anchor Aaron Brown was caught in a golf tournament, and "did not appear [on TV] until 10 p.m. on Sunday, more than 36 hours after the news of the shuttle catastrophe broke."

Meanwile, in Nacogdoches:

Some of the reporters who have descended on this town of 29,000 people are not shy about throwing their weight around.

Ashleigh Banfield, a well-recognized reporter from MSNBC, berated a desk clerk at a downtown hotel as every room in the region was being rented.

"I have five rooms on the executive floor," she steamed. "I want my reservation honored."

In the men's room of the hotel bar, a guy at a urinal laughed, saying, "These reporters are jerks." He was the only nonreporter relieving himself.

OLD EUROPE: "France is no longer the ally it once was," [Richard] Perle said. And he went on to accuse French President Jacques Chirac of believing "deep in his soul that Saddam Hussein is preferable to any likely successor."

(Perle is a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and now chairman of the Pentagon's Policy Advisory Board.)

I don't know what the proper analogy for France and Germany are. We rebuilt them after World War II, and continue to provide their defense, so, rebellious children? Cranky grandparents? Axis of Weasels? Or maybe just...Old Europe.

UPDATE: Stephen Green writes, "Anyone know the French for 'howling'? Because we're going to be hearing a lot of it.

"THIS COUNTRY IS OUR HOME NOW": My wife had a great moment while getting her nails done today: the manicurist, who immigrated here from Vietnam, was so happy to have had the chance to have visited NYC and the WTC just a few months before the "terrible thing" on 9/11. "I was so lucky to be able to see those buildings. This country is our home now, we love it so much."

INTERESTING CHOICE OF WORDS: Check out the opening paragraph of this AP article, which Matt Drudge linked to:

Warning Iraq that it's "five minutes to midnight," Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix pleaded with the Iraqi government Tuesday to show that it is actively cooperating during his visit this weekend by producing evidence about its weapons programs.

So for Blix, regime change is "midnight"--implying that it will get darker if the US attacks Iraq and replaces the current dictatorship with a democratic--or at least more liberal--regime?

Of course, for the stasist UN, any change, even one for the better, is probably "midnight".

UPDATE: We'd like to think that soon, it will be morning in Iraq (to coin a phrase). And the pieces are rapidly fitting into place to allow that to happen.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: More from Joanne Jacobs, who writes, "Protester's sign at York University in Toronto, where Daniel Pipes spoke under tight security: 'We are here in the name of academic freedom. We don't like what Pipes has to say and it's our right to try and stop him from speaking.'"

Winston Smith, call your office.

CONGRATULATIONS TO PATRICK AND THE FUTURE MRS. RUFFINI! "The nuptials will be taking place in the late spring of 2004. A wedding blog is under active consideration", Patrick writes, adding that apparently it was his stylish and pithy Website that swayed his fiance.

No matter how stylish it is, as someone wrote in his comments section, leave the honeymoon blog "completely off the table"!

"PLETHORIC AND DISTRESSED": Joanne Jacobs, with an assist from Juan Gato, is all over Mark Morford of SFGate.com (The San Francisco Chronicle's Web site) and his turgid "backwards ran the sentences until reeled the mind" prose:

You may think you've encountered bad thinking. You may think you've read bad writing. But never have the two been combined to such mind-rotting effect as in Mark Morford's SFGate column in which he purports to explain why Shrub and "black eyed" Rumsfeld are hoping to kill 500,000 innocents in a "rubbly, pissant, nonthreatening" country. (He's referring to Iraq.)

Doesn't Morford think that the Iraqi people deserve more than to live in a rubbly, pissant, nonthreatening country?

UPDATE: Mike at ColdFury.com also has some thougts.

Follow the links provided by InstaPundit.

UPDATE: And be sure to read this article in the San Jose Mercury News:

In his 1997 report, Katnik noted that the 1997 mission, STS-87, was the first to use a new method of ``foaming'' the tanks, one designed to address NASA's goal of using environmentally friendly products. The shift came as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was ordering many industries to phase out the use of Freon, an aerosol propellant linked to ozone depletion and global warming.

As recently as last September, a retired engineering manager for Lockheed Martin, the contractor that assembles the tanks, told a conference in New Orleans that developing a new foam to meet environmental standards had ``been much more difficult than anticipated.''

The retired Lockheed engineer, who helped design the thermal protection system, said the switch from a foam based on Freon -- also known as CFC-11 -- has ``resulted in unanticipated program impacts, such as foam loss during flight.''

In fact, he noted, the hits to Columbia on that 1997 mission, the same one Katnik studied, forced NASA to replace nearly 11 times more damaged tiles than it had after a previous mission that had used Freon-based foam.

Lockheed spokesman Harry Wadsworth said Monday that the company was referring questions to NASA. ``I cannot talk about any past problems with foam or the history of foam,'' he said. ``We're not talking about the investigation.''

Way to go, Carol Browner (and Bill Clinton).

(Link to Mercury article via Stephen Green, who has more, here.)

THE JOHN KERRY/CHINATOWN CONNECTION, as discovered by Orrin Judd.

MOOCH GOING TO MOTOWN: Steeve Mariucci is set to become the next head coach of the Detroit Lions, according to Len Pasquarelli of ESPN.com, who says, "the Detroit Lions and Steve Mariucci have reached agreement on all of the major components of a five-year contract, and that the deal should be completed Tuesday with an introductory press conference likely Wednesday."

Hopefully Mooch will do better as an ex-Niner than George Seifert did.

UPDATE: Hiring the man who rebuilt the 'Niners into a consistent playoff team after their several years of salary cap hell isn't going to please Johnnie Cochran:

The Lions have only interviewed Mariucci for the job. That has drawn strong criticism from Cochran and civil rights attorney Cyrus Mehri.

The NFL mandates franchises interview minority candidates for head coach and high-ranking front office positions.

"The Lions have seriously threatened to undermine and potentially violate the new NFL minority hiring policy approved by team owners in December," Cochran and Mehri said in a statement.

"Prior to conducting a single interview, general manager Matt Millen essentially crowned Steve Mariucci as the Lions' new head coach. He might well have put up a sign at Lions headquarters reading, 'Head Coaching Vacancy: Minorities Need Not Apply.'"

According to the Detroit Free Press, the Lions approached five minority candidates, including former Minnesota Vikings coach Dennis Green and Pittsburgh Steelers defensive coordinator Tim Lewis, but they were rejected because Mariucci was the obvious front-runner.

Sherman Lewis, who was named the Lions' offensive coordinator last month, denied a report that he interviewed for the job.

The hiring of Mariucci figures to be a popular one with Lions fans. Detroit has not made the playoffs since 1999. Mariucci took the Niners to the postseason four times in six years.

Rich Lowry explained why Cochran seemingly must sign off on all coaching changes in his January 6th column.

PHIL SPECTOR TAKEN INTO CUSTODY IN CONNECTION WITH HOMICIDE, according to this L.A. NBC affiliate article. Spector produced superstar musical acts such as Ike and Tina Turner, the Righteous Brothers the Ronnettes, as well as Let It Be, the last release by the Beatles, and solo albums by George Harrison and John Lennon.

UPDATE: I posted the above infomation on Blogcritics. Eric Olsen has added to it a detailed biography of Spector. Be sure to check it out.

Why not just let robots explore space? James Lileks explains why in typical (he's the real Svengali of style) fashion:

NPR had an interview with one of those people who think we should not send people into space, but rely entirely on robots. As I pulled into the parking lot at the mall he casually asked “what can a man do on Mars that a robot cannot?”

PLANT A F***ING FLAG ON THE PLANET, I shouted at the radio. Pardon my language. But. On a day when seven brave people died while fulfilling their brightest ambitions, this was the wrong day to suggest we all stay tethered to the dirt until the sun grows cold. Are we less than the men who left safe harbors and shouldered through cold oceans? After all, they sailed into the void; we can look up at the night sky and point at where we want to go. There: that bright white orb. We’re going. There: that red coal burning on the horizon. We’re going. And we’re not sending smart toys on our behalf - we’re sending human beings, and one of them will put his boot on the sand and bring the number of worlds we’ve visited to three. And when he plants the flag he will use flesh and sinew and blood and bone to drive it into the ground. His heartbeat will hammer in his ears; his mind will spin a kaleidoscopic medley of all the things he’d thought he’d think at this moment, and he'll grin: I had it wrong. I had no idea what it would truly be like. He’d imagined this moment as oddly private; he'd thought of himself, the red land, the flag in his hand, and he heard music, as though the moment would be fully scored when it happened. But there isn't any music; there's the sound of his breath and the thrum of his pulse. It seems like everyone who ever lived is standing behind him at the other end of a vast dark auditorium, waiting for the flag to stand on the ground of Mars. Then he will say something. He might stumble on a word or two, because he’s only human.

But look what humans have done. Again.

Scott Ott also put the "send in the 'bots" talk into perspective in his own inimitable way.

BLOW BY BLOW: John Hawkins links to this thread on Free Republic.com. One of the "Freepers" started a thread simply to announce that the Shuttle would be visible in the San Francisco area on early Saturday morning as it landed. The thread then moves from lighthearted banter, to the eerie moment when the shuttle is first silent, to the heartsinking reality that it's lost.

ABOUT YESTERDAY: This is going to be very self-indulgent, and I’m posting it as much to remember in six months or a year, some of the details of what yesterday morning felt like.

On Friday, Patrick Ruffini very, very graciously dubbed me "the Svengali of style", but I'm afraid what I posted yesterday was anything but. A friend was visiting us the night before and stayed over, someone who works very, very close to the WTC. The three of us went out to dinner the night before, stayed up late, got up too early the next morning to make sure that flights were made, and at 7:45, I walked into the den, only to be told by wife and grieving friend that the space shuttle Columbia had disintegrated.

There was an instant message window on my computer, which I didn't get a chance to respond to (I think my wife did, however), from "Group Captain Mandrake", the very same person who called to wake us on 9/11. At that point, it's deja vu all over again: my wife and I, in the den, each on our PCs, which face our TV, with its picture in picture activated to watch both Fox News and CNN, and flipping back and forth between the two.

It was fairly obvious to me though, that this was not 9/11 redux: these were seven people who knew the risks they were taking (and space, particularly during launch and reentry is a very, very risky business, and will be for a very long time). There's very little chance--if any--of terrorism involved. Arthur C. Clarke once said the Space Shuttle was like the DC-3 of space--only worse. "It's the DC-1 and 1/2 of space", I recall him telling Playboy in 1986 or '87 (and he's used that line in other interviews). "It's got to work its guts out to get into orbit", he added. And now, over 15 years later, it's just worn out--the design is nearly 30 years old, and the airframes (spaceframes?) of the two remaining orbiters are around twenty years old.

But like 9/11--and the Challenger--this will be another day where everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news. On the morning that Challenger exploded, I was driving through Bristol, Pennsylvania to my afternoon classes at the College of New Jersey (then known less portentously as Trenton State College) in my IROC (it was the 1980s, of course) and flipping back and forth between the Philadelphia rock stations of 93.3 WMMR and 94.1 WYSP. I forget which station from whose DJ I actually heard the news from first, but my first thought was "well, of course the crew got out safely, right?" This was NASA, after all: unparalleled, even with the exception of Apollo 1, for their safety record.

Yesterday, when my wife informed me of Columbia, and I saw the footage, I knew the crew was dead instantly.

This was NASA, after all.

So I sat at the computer, while our friend wept and my wife did lots of consoling, and blogged for dear life. If the stuff I posted yesterday sounded a bit mechanical, with lots of links to other people, but very little commentary, it reflected how my brain was functioning that morning.

Unlike newspapers or all-news channels, Blogs are very wobbly machines, usually run by a single person, or a handful of people, in their spare time, or as an adjunct to their main work. Even if it wasn’t very stylish, hopefully we pointed you to some people whose opinions were far sharper (and far more knowledgeable about the current state of NASA) than mine. If so, I’d like think we did our job, even if it was about unstylish as a train wreck.

Or a shuttle crash.

FALLEN STAR:

(Found via Little Green Footballs, which also has the sad photo of one of the astronaut's helmets, as it was found in a Texas backyard.

INTERNET TELEPHONY IS CALLING YOU--at least if you've read my article in the February Windows & .Net magazine.

SADDAM'S BODYGUARD WARNS OF SECRET ARSENAL. William Tierney, a former UN weapons inspector who has continued to gather information on Saddam's arsenal, said that the information provided by Abu Hamdi Mahmoud (Hussein's former senior bodyguard who has since fled Iraq) is "the smoking gun".

SICK: While Iraq's statement was by far the vilest reaction to come out of Saturday's tragedy, it wasn't the only reaction in poor taste. Check out this headline: "Purported Shuttle Debris Offered on eBay".

Speaking of sick, apparently a fan (or employee) of Howard Stern apparently called CBS, was put through to Dan Rather, clamed that a piece of a piece of shuttle debris had landed in his back yard,but he then realized it was only one of "Ba Ba Booey's" teeth. (Ba Ba Booey is the nickname for Gary Dell'Abate, Stern's sidekick, who does indeed have a prominent set of mandibles).

According to this news article, "Sadly, anchor Dan Rather did not at first recognize the cheap joke. But Rather overall was not at his best, overemotional and salting his comments with readings from poems like Bivouac of the Dead and Tennyson's Locksley Hall."

UPDATE: Eric Lindholm has more on the Howard Stern debacle at Blogcritics.

"THE ZIPPER EFFECT": Glenn Reynolds writes:

it looks like a zipper effect followed by burnthrough and structural damage, leading to the loss of the left wing. They're reporting anomalous heat sensor readings, loss of tire pressure in the main gear on that side, and so on.

The shuttle can tolerate the loss of a tile or two. But when the integrity of the tile cover is breached, tiles can be pulled off one after another -- hence the term "zipper effect." Then enough heat can penetrate through in sufficient quantity to destroy or weaken what's underneath. This is a well-understood possibility, so expect a quick resolution (by the standards of these kinds of things) if the evidence continues to point this way.

And Virginia Postrel adds, "For TV cameras to catch the first pieces breaking off the shuttle, those pieces had to be much larger than mere tiles."

Before I headed out around noon for some errands, I caught someone on TV saying that this flight didn't have a robot arm in the payload bay--so there was no way for the astronauts to inspect for any damage on the bottom of the orbiter caused during liftoff.

UPDATE: Here's an AP article, covering the same basic territory.

MACABRE SYNCHRONICITY: About ten minutes ago, a small brown and gray swallow just flew into the sliding glass door of my patio, hiting it very hard and badly wounding himself. My wife and I, after talking over the options, decided, for better or worse, to put him out of his misery.

What an awful day.

WELL, YOU KNEW THIS ONE WAS COMING: "Iraqis Call Shuttle Disaster God's Vengeance".

Unfortunately (and yes, I know, they're just the messengers), it's via Reuters, the "news agency", and ABCNEWS.com, home of that true friend of Israel, Peter Jennings.

UPDATE: Rod Dreher writes:

Dan Rather quoted a Reuters dispatch, datelined Baghdad, quoting Iraqis saying that the Columbia disaster was a great thing, that Allah was avenging Iraq. It's probably better not to say what one really thinks when hearing that. But consider this: America and Israel both suffered tremendous shock and loss this morning. Yet it is good to think about the incredible technological and scientific progress made by free men and women in America and Israel, and the ways Americans and Israelis have put that progress to use for the betterment of their peoples, and indeed for all mankind. What Islamic country can make the same boast? What good have Iraqi scientists done for their country, and the world? Many of those states put their technology to use building virtually nothing but instruments of death, war and destruction. By their fruits ye shall know them.

THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH.

OF THE CREW OF COLUMBIA, Orrin Judd writes, "you look at that crew--an Israeli, two women, a black pilot, and a native of India--it puts into perspective some of the complaints you hear about what a racist or sexist or whatever society we are. Who would not choose to be their countryman?"

The Brothers Judd also have lots of links to additional information.

STEPHEN GREEN WRITES:

The Space Shuttle fleet? Grounded, I assume, maybe permanently. The International Space Station? I honestly don't know. Can we keep it manned and supplied without the shuttle?

NASA has some serious questions to answer. As I see it, the big issue isn't how today's particular tragedy happened. Instead, we should ask why we're still flying old trucks based on mostly on '60s technology. I know budget cuts are part of the problem, but the bigger problem seems to be a lack of vision at our civilian space agency.

Give us a vision, and chances are we'll give you your budget. Show us a real space-age space plane, and we'll show you the money. Or maybe it's our fault, for not having demanded more.

The Cold War started us into space. The current war couldn't keep us from continuing to go. So we'll bury our dead and move on. Sadder, wiser, more determined.

CNN JUST RAN A STATEMENT FROM EARLIER IN THE WEEK by the Columbia's commander, Col. Rick Husband to commemorate the deaths of the crews of Apollo I and Challenger.

And Fox just interviewed Israel's ambassador to the US, who mentioned this drawing, carried by Col. Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut.

UPDATE: Rod Dreher has some thoughts on that drawing, and its meaning.

GOOGLE NEWS HAS LINKS to articles about the Columbia disaster.

As does Sgt. Stryker, who also has links to live video feeds.

DALE AMON OF SAMIZDATA HAS SOME THOUGHTS:

I suggest there was damage to the TPS on one wing, causing a burn through and structural damage leading to failure of the wing structure when aerodynamic forces built. The shuttle has very high wing loading, so any loss of margin would be disastrous. If one wing fails, the shuttle will immediately roll violently into the direction of the failed wing followed by god only knows what sort of tumble. It would break up into major components almost immediately. That is what we saw on the clip.

There would be very little fuel on board. Only some remnants of RCS fuel, a lot of hypergolics for the APU and perhaps a small left over from the reentry burn. Almost all off this is at the extreme rear in the two lumpy bits either side of the vertical stabilizer.

A second scenario is catastrophic failure of the APU's taking out all the hydraulics just when they are needed the most. With or without structural damage directly caused by such a failure, the shuttle will go into uncontrolled tumble and breakup.

A third scenario is fatigue failure. I don't feel this is likely, but if so we can kiss our manned space access goodbye.

I give almost zero credence to ideas of terrorism being involved. Ten years ago predictions were for the loss of one more shuttle during the space station construction, just by pure probability ("If it's not one damn thing, it's another"). We all prayed we'd continue winning on the dice toss but ultimately knew we'd roll snake eyes.

VIRGINIA POSTREL HAS SOME COMMENTS.

SPACEFLIGHT NOW is doing realtime posting of updates.

SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA is out of communication and lost from radar. Glenn Reynolds is all over the story.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg has some informed speculation on what might have happened. (Keyword however, is speculation, as Simberg himself notes.)