The Home of Existentialism

Not being satisfied with the pace of depopulation through birth control, the French are also committing suicide in large numbers. A lot of Americans commit suicide too, but our population is still growing.

The Home of Existentialism

Not being satisfied with the pace of depopulation through birth control, the French are also committing suicide in large numbers. A lot of Americans commit suicide too, but our population is still growing.

The Home of Existentialism

Not being satisfied with the pace of depopulation through birth control, the French are also committing suicide in large numbers. A lot of Americans commit suicide too, but our population is still growing.

The Democrats' New Idea

Ask George McGovern what to do. Predictably he calls Iraq a hell hole and urged the immediate withdrawal of troops. And even weirder, he suggested a "Muslim Brotherhood" force with troops from various Muslim nations to impose peace in Iraq. I don't think he knows anything about the roots of terrorism or the differences between Sunnis and Shias or the record of Arab Armies against Western ones in recent years. The only thing they know how to do well is stage terrorist attacks IEDs and suicide bombers. I suspect that he'd get something more like this.

McGovern was a bomber pilot in WWII, but he still doesn't seem to understand that the military today are volunteers, not draftees. He and the Democrats are so blinded by their ideology and desire for power and spending more on their socialist dreams that they fail to see how they're being played by the terrorists. This isn't appeasement, because they don't even seem willing to seek anything in trade for our national honor. Osama's initial assessment of us seems to be spot on at this point.

The more blame should fall on the Republicans for blowing this election through confusion, cowardice and seeking to retain power throught pork. Bush has done what he has had to do. Just as Reagan felt impelled to

The interview of Staff Sgt. Dave Bellavia and Staff Sgt. Peter Milinkovic on Fox's Special Report by Jim Angle made me want to weep for our men and women who don't want to abandon their mission, and for the Iraqis who have trusted us twice, only to have us desert them after they've tried to trust us.

I believe that turmoil is inevitable, and that we cannot avoid it by withdrawing and moving closer to the Europeans who can't even maintain their own populations without immigrants. Turkey doesn't need to get into the E.U. In a few years, it will accomplish what it was unable to do at the gates of Vienna, and it will do so at the invitation of the current inhabitants.

If anybody is reading this, take the poll.

"Candygram for Mr. Mongo!"

Local government in Patna, India sends a group of singing eunuchs around to local shops to encourage them to pay their municipal taxes.

Wow, that was quick!

Pelosi's rules don't sound all that conciliatory. Big surprise.

"violence like waterfalls"

Hosni Mubarak warns that Saddam's execution "will transform (Iraq) into blood pools and lead to a deepening of the sectarian and ethnic conflicts".

Who knows whether more severe violence can be avoided? From the beginning this all depended on the Iraqi people, and how much they want a stable system that allows for both sects to live together. If they aren't ready to fight against corruption, outside groups operating there, and for guaranteed rights, they may slide back into chaos. You can lead a horse to water.

It's a noble thing to deliver the captives and oppressed, and what they do with freedom doesn't tarnish that. Whatever we do now, the overthrow of Saddam and his sons, and the opportunity of ordinary people to vote have changed the region forever.

Maybe we should just serve notice that any regime which stages a coup or seeks to reverse the changes we've made will be targeted. Then leave and watch.

Terrorist Logic

After Israeli tank shells went astray and killed 18 or 19 people in some apartments in Gaza, Palestinian leaders have called off a truce, which hadn't been honored anyway, threatening to send more suicide bombers against Israel.

Longest serving SecDef deserves better.

Mark Steyn takes issue with the firing of Rumsfeld. I think it stinks.

The Old Bipartisanship Plea

This editorial reeks of "now that we've kneed you in the groin and you're rolling around in pain, can we go back to regular Queensbury Rules?"

There are a number of things that could have tipped this the other way. Yes, the Republicans fumbled a lot, but the misrepresentation of the war on terrorism by the media is the hardest to take. The blatant hostility of the news media toward George Bush is second.

Now, it seems, they want to call off the charges of sleazy corruption and start with a clean slate. Congressman Jefferson, of Cold Cash fame, is due for a runoff election, and I'll bet the Times would like that to go away.

Happy Ramadan!

The Religion of Peace:

THREE Christian high school girls were beheaded as a Ramadan "trophy" by Indonesian militants who conceived the idea after a visit to Philippines jihadists, a court heard yesterday.

The girls' severed heads were dumped in plastic bags in their village in Indonesia's strife-torn Central Sulawesi province, along with a handwritten note threatening more such attacks.

The note read: "Wanted: 100 more Christian heads, teenaged or adult, male or female; blood shall be answered with blood, soul with soul, head with head."

Popular Mechanics political?

PM is becoming the voice of reality, as the old media disintegrates. As my current science magazines become more PC, it seems to take up the slack. If you think that hydrogen is ready to go, for example, you need to read this report. It's not really that PM has become political as that everything else in the media has begun to follow liberal politics and environmentalist myths.

Hubris

Has America put its head in the sand?

In the most expensive mid-term election in U.S. history, leading national Democrats are conspicuous by their silence on the defining issue of our era: the war on terrorism. Instead of laying out their plans in detail for voters to assess, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi have in recent weeks stepped back into the shadows and watched as President Bush has endured blow after blow from the mainstream media and other precincts of America’s almost-uniformly liberal and Democrat elites. When they should be proclaiming at least one great idea, these critics offer only a corrosive “Blame America, Blame Bush” litany of bitterness.

The result is Americans know too little of what Democrats will do should Tuesday’s voting return them to majority status in either or both chambers of Congress. In making Bush the focus of the campaign, however, Reid, Pelosi and company still cannot avoid this stark fact: America is under attack here at home and abroad by Islamic facists who killed thousands of us on Sept. 11 and who intend the deaths of millions more of us in the future.

The problem with a democracy and a free press

James Q. Wilson on why he's not upset by close elections:

Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90% of the public do not want us out right now.

Between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed the successes. About 40% of the stories reported terrorist attacks; scarcely any reported the triumphs of American soldiers and Marines. The few positive stories about progress in Iraq were just a small fraction of all the broadcasts.

When the Center for Media and Public Affairs made a nonpartisan evaluation of network news broadcasts, it found that during the active war against Saddam Hussein, 51% of the reports about the conflict were negative. Six months after the land battle ended, 77% were negative; in the 2004 general election, 89% were negative; by the spring of 2006, 94% were negative. This decline in media support was much faster than during Korea or Vietnam.

The founders supported freedom of the press because it was one way to assure robust debate. They assumed that there would never be the kind of monopoly of opinion that there is in the media today.

Any more Ronald Reagans out there?

Instapundit: "Is Schwarzenegger a model for Republican success?"

Well, sure, but how many movie action heroes can you find to run and then line up dorks like Gray Davis and Phil Angelides for him to run against?

Blue Dog Democrats

On the local news, Jim Matheson, my congressman, declined to celebrate with the rest of his party. He called himself a blue dog democrat and suggested that the new house majority doesn't mean a liberal majority.

One thing that surprised me is the talk about how Democrats have been out of power for so long they won't know how to wield power. They've been out for 12 years, but they were the majority for as long as I can remember before that. I never did have the feeling that the Republicans really were accustomed to being the majority. I said early on that they were mistaken to run away from Bush. Basically, I saw the problem as 6 years of pounding by the news media more partisan and negative than I have ever seen them. The war has been portrayed so consistently as a disaster for us, that I can't imagine that there will ever be a war we can win. By undercutting support here, the media have handed the terrorists a huge victory they could never have won in the field.

I don't know any Republican who has talked about this election without admitting that they probably didn't deserve to win, but electign Democrats doesn't make any sense either. I think that's still the feeling among most people, but they felt that the Republicans need to be smacked hard. Too much scandal. Too much lobbying. Too many pictures of Tom Delay. Too much criticism of the war from the media, despite the protests from those who are there that it wasn't being reported fairly.

I've never quite understood what it is that changes the national mood like this, but it's pretty clear that there are so many narrow elections that they can just as easily swing back to Republican as they did to Democrat.

What's next? Species?

New York may be trying to overrule nature.

Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery.
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Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent.

What if you only "discovered" your new gender when you are in your 40s? Or like Anne Heche, you declare as a lesbian and then realize you were wrong? There isn't any real evidence to support this. People prefer to think they have been improperly assigned at birth, but I think it reflects their neurosis more than their actual sexuality. Gender is really a grammatical term, not a biological one. But it has now become popular to disregard biology in favor of psychology, or imagination. I'd like a little more evidence.

I voted early

Elections always make me feel left out. I live in safe Democrat district where the Republican didn't have enough money to air ads until the last week. Utah as a whole is conservative. We've had some Democrat senators in the past, but politics have become more polarized and unless the Republicans put up really bad candidates, which they sometimes do, statewide races go to the them. There are two pockets of Democrats in the state, Carbon County and parts of Salt Lake County.

So I'm boycotting the TV reports. I'll wait for morning.

This sucks!

Democrats seeking extension of voting hours practically screams cheating. In 2000, they filed in state courts and got them to order recounts. Since then they demanded electronic voting machines, then started accusing tampering with the machines. In Washington State, they won the governorship through a court-ordered recount and a hand full of newly discovered votes in the most heavily Democrat districts.

They've been encouraging non-citizens to vote for years.

Courts are not supposed to be involved in deciding winners in elections. Unless specific illegal activity is alleged and appears substantial, they should butt out. Judges don't have to be fair. They can be as partisan as they like, especially when the judges themselves are elected. That's why this practice of running to the nearest friendly judge needs to be stopped.

Nearly always, when they do this, it's a Democrat majority district. It's harder to cheat if you don't know how many votes you need to come up with. Getting an extension solves that difficulty.

The FBI is investigating reports of phone callers falsely telling people their voiting places have been changed. It's not clear who benefits by this. Both sides are blaming the other.

A last minute shift?

It's too good to hope for, but an number of conbloggers are noting a shift in trends toward Republicans in the most recent polls. Poll after poll suggests the Dem's lead is shrinking. It's happened before as the last minute undecideds break for one side.

I'd like to believe it . . . So I will. Get ready for the fury of the leftists scorned.

Times Select free for one week.

What a gift!

"TimesSelect Free Access Week makes one of the Web's richest resources available to all," said Vivian Schiller, senior vice president, general manager, NYTimes.com. "From the influential opinion of our award-winning Op-Ed columnists, such as Maureen Dowd and Nicholas. D. Kristof, [italics mine] to online-only columnists, such as Maira Kalman and Judith Warner, TimesSelect provides a world of viewpoints that encourage dialogue on today's most pressing matters."

"We believe strongly that visitors to TimesSelect during Philips's presentation of Free Access Week will share our vision that innovative products simplify life," said Eric Plaskonos, vice president, brand management, Philips Consumer Electronics.

Wow! A "world of opinions" all the way from Maureen Dowd to Frank Rich to Bob Herbert! Be still, my heart.

Saddam gets the noose

Pajamas Media has a roundup. This marks a Shiite victory, showing that they really do run the show. The Sunnis have only three choices: 1. Leave Iraq; 2. Agree to a Shiite dominated federal government with some local self-determination; 3. Fight on and seek help from Sunni states. If the last case, Iran would surely come to the aid of the Shia, but Iraqi Shiites don't view themselves as Persians and would not be likely to want an Iranian style revolution. Muqtada al Sadr may see himself as the Khomeini of Iraq, but he's no Ayatollah. The U.S. will want to preserve civil order, but if the whole region turns into a sectarian battle zone, we might have to decide whether preserving order is worth the price, more boots on the ground, or not.