The case for Miers

Made by one Brad DeLong:

I'm going to come out in favor of the U.S. Senate advising and consenting to the nomination of Harriet Miers to be a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

She is a hard working, intelligent, savvy lawyer with a strange fixation on George W. Bush. She has had the experience of making her way as a career woman in late-twentieth century America, which cannot help but have given her a considerable education in what's what and where's where. Back her up with good, moderate clerks and she will do fine.

She will be, I think, likely to be vastly better as a judge than the alternative--which is some "originalist" who doesn't get that James Madison wrote:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

because he didn't want any judges, ever, anywhere in the United States to argue: "You don't have that right because you can't show it to me written down in the Constitution."

The Neo-Nazi answer to Smoosh

For some reason, this story about 13-year-old Olsen-twin lookalikes who play in a white supremacist band is getting a lot of attention in blogland.

Duo Considered the Olsen Twins of the White Nationalist Movement [Ed.-That's a sentence I never thought I'd read.]

Oct. 20, 2005 — - Thirteen-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede have one album out, another on the way, a music video, and lots of fans.

They may remind you another famous pair of singers, the Olsen Twins, and the girls say they like that. [Ed.-Are the Olsen twins singers?] But unlike the Olsens, who built a media empire on their fun-loving, squeaky-clean image, Lamb and Lynx are cultivating a much darker personna. They are white nationalists and use their talents to preach a message of hate.

Known as "Prussian Blue" -- a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes -- the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

"We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," said Lynx. "We want our people to stay white ... we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."

Lynx and Lamb have been nurtured on racist beliefs since birth by their mother April. "They need to have the background to understand why certain things are happening," said April, a stay-at-home mom who no longer lives with the twins' father. "I'm going to give them, give them my opinion just like any, any parent would."

April home-schools the girls, teaching them her own unique perspective on everything from current to historical events. In addition, April's father surrounds the family with symbols of his beliefs -- specifically the Nazi swastika. It appears on his belt buckle, on the side of his pick-up truck and he's even registered it as his cattle brand with the Bureau of Livestock Identification.

"Because it's provocative," explains April of the cattle brand, "to him he thinks it's important as a symbol of freedom of speech that he can use it as his cattle brand."

..."It really breaks my heart to see those two girls spewing out that kind of garbage," said Ted Shaw, civil rights advocate and president of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund -- though Shaw points out that the girls aren't espousing their own opinions but ones they're being taught.

On that point, April Gaede and Ted Shaw apparently agree.

"Well, all children pretty much espouse their parents' attitudes," she said. "We're white nationalists and of course that's a part of our life and I'm going to share that part of my life with my children."

...

Last month, the girls were scheduled to perform at the local county fair in their hometown. But when some people in the community protested, Prussian Blue was removed from the line-up.

But even before that, April had decided that Bakersfield was not "white" enough, so she sold her home, and hopes that she and the girls can find an all-white community in the Pacific Northwest.

Is there any reason why the state of California should not remove these girls from their parents' custody? Is what they're doing to these kids any less harmful than if they were beating them?

Terminology

Armando insists on calling the Iraq war the "Iraq Debacle":

...there has been a pretty hot exchange going on between the Liberal Iraq Debacle Hawks (I use the word Debacle instead of War because I think it is important that we be clear that what they advocated for is a Debacle, whether they thought it would be one or not.) and those who opposed the Iraq conflict.

I don't mean to pick nits, but Iraq isn't a "debacle" (=df. "A total, often ludicrous failure"); it's a fucking crime, a wholly unprovoked slaughter.

I mean, there's perhaps a case to be made that Iraq is a debacle - though I am not sure that it qualifies as a "failure," at least not yet, and at least not relative to the administration's goals there, which are not at all impeded by 2000 dead soldiers and countless dead civilians - but that's not what is primarily objectionable about it, at least not to those of us who aren't "war pragmatists" (read: apologists for US imperialism and war crimes). Even if Iraq had gone swimmingly for the Bush administration, it would still have been wrong, and it would still have been the duty of morally responsible people everywhere to oppose it.

Contingency plans?

According to the Washington Times (via AMERICAblog), the administration is making them vis-a-vis the Miers nomination:

The White House has begun making contingency plans for the withdrawal of Harriet Miers as President Bush's choice to fill a seat on the Supreme Court, conservative sources said yesterday.

"White House senior staff are starting to ask outside people, saying, 'We're not discussing pulling out her nomination, but if we were to, do you have any advice as to how we should do it?' " a conservative Republican with ties to the White House told The Washington Times.

The White House denied making such calls.

"Absolutely not true," White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.

But the conservative political consultant said that he had received such a query from Sara Taylor, director of the Office of White House Political Affairs.

Miss Taylor denied making any such calls.

A second Republican, who is the leader of a conservative interest group and has ties to the White House, confirmed that calls are being made to a select group of conservative activists who are not employed by the government.

"The political people in the White House are very worried about how she will do in the hearings," the second conservative leader said. "I think they have finally awakened."

(...)

Just who in the White House may have asked Miss Taylor to seek advice from outside about the best way to drop Miss Miers' nomination without causing excessive embarrassment to the president or to her was unclear.

Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove no longer appears to fill the role as chief political strategist in the White House, a role he has filled from the start of the first Bush term. Mr. Rove's clear leadership hand went missing some time ago, Republican insiders say, when speculation grew that he might face indictment in the CIA leak investigation led by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

The eruption of conservative disapproval over the choice of Miss Miers surprised the president and others in the White House but not Mr. Rove, the insiders say. They say he has shown, in most instances, a keen sensitivity to the complex concerns of various interests on the political right that, until the Miers nomination, had been pretty much in lock step with Mr. Bush, even when they privately disagreed with him.

Republican insiders said the choice of Miss Miers, who has had no judicial experience, over a list of sitting judges with records of having written opinions on constitutional matters and who are conservative in their political views, probably was made by Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.

Some White House aides privately acknowledge astonishment at the administration's response.

"Who would have believed the wheels would be coming off this early in the second term, and with our own people firing at us?" a White House aide confided yesterday.

I'm still not sure if a Miers withdrawal would be good or not. My worry: given a second chance, the White House will make sure to appoint someone who will make conservatives happy - and that's bad news for the rest of us.

You had to piss on our parade...

Billmon gives a hearing to John Dean (yes, that John Dean) regarding l'affaire Plame; Dean thinks that our "Fitzmas" present might just be a big lump of coal:

It is difficult to envision Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuting anyone, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, who believed they were acting for reasons of national security. While hindsight may find their judgment was wrong, and there is no question their tactics were very heavy-handed and dangerous, I am not certain that they were acting from other than what they believed to be reasons of national security. They were selling a war they felt needed to be undertaken.

In short, I cannot imagine any of them being indicted, unless they were acting for reasons other than national security. Because national security is such a gray area of the law, come next week, I can see this entire investigation coming to a remarkable anti-climax, as Fitzgerald closes down his Washington office and returns to Chicago.

Billmon thinks Dean's opinion is worth listening to, but respectfully disagrees:

[Dean] puts a lot of weight on the enormous latitude the law and the criminal justice system have traditionally given the executive branch in national security matters. Unless it can be shown that Cheney et. al. acted in pursuit of some private, venal motive, Dean argues, Fitzgerald may decide his writ simply doesn't extend to an affair that is, after all, deeply entangled with the conduct of foreign policy and the prosecution (no pun intended) of the war in Iraq.

In other words, instead of blowing sky high, the volcano may simply snore loudly, roll over, and go back to sleep. And as Dean points out, since all the testimony Fitzgerald has collected is covered by the grand jury secrecy laws, we may never know what he found.

One can easily imagine the howls of protest on the left, and the smug satisfaction on the right, should this come to pass. It would be particularly bitter finale for those of us who all along have regarded the Plame outing as a proxy for the more fundamental crimes committed along the march to war in Iraq.

Unlike some ... I've never had more than a forlorn hope that Fitzgerald would delve into the Niger forgeries, the Chalabi connection, the Office of Special Plans, the Downing Street Memos or any of the other investigative leads into the heart of the neocon conspiracy ... But, like most hardcore Cheney administration haters, I've been content with the busting-Al-Capone-for-tax-evasion metaphor...

Dean, however, seems to think it will take an exceptionally flagrant example of "tax evasion" to persuade Fitzgerald to go after the White House conspirators on cover-up charges.

We'll see. But I think Dean is wrong this time, even though he's right to warn against the overheated rumors now chasing each other through both Left and Right Blogostan. I think Fitzgerald is poised to indict, and while the list of defendants may be short -- Rove, Libby plus a few lower-level munchkins -- I think the charges will be both broad and numerous, including unauthorized disclosure of classified information, theft of government property, conspiracy, obstruction and some combination of perjury and/or false statement charges. I wouldn't even be surprised if the Intelligence Identities Protection Act rears its serpentine head after all -- depending on the means, motives and opportunities of Bob Novak's second source.

Everyone thought Saddam had WMD

Except those who didn't.

Christmas must die

The war on Christmas is worse than I thought, says John Gibson. But then, I didn't really think it was that bad, so I guess that's not really saying much.

You know, Tom DeLay has kind of a nice smile

The Bugman's been booked - fingerprinted and all. His mug shot is probably the most pleasant-looking one I've ever seen:

Joe at AMERICAblog seems disappointed in it. He was expecting maybe ...

??

I feel dirty

As Brad did when he found himself in agreement with me, so now do I upon finding myself in agreement with ...

...ugh, I can barely even say it...

Jonah Goldberg.

*shivers*

Referring to the notion that conservative opposition to the Miers nomination is based on elitism, the doughy pantload writes:

I actually think this is a profoundly significant signal in the ongoing -- and at times somewhat lamentable -- transformation of the GOP into a populist party. For example, I've written many times about how liberals don't understand that Fox News' popularity has had less to do with conservatism and more to do with populism than they are prepared to see. Liberals think they're the party of the people, so they tend not to understand populism when it comes from non-liberal quarters. But it is Fox's anti-elitism which pulls in the ratings more than its conservatism. This has been hard to see in the past because Fox's anti-elitism has generally been aimed at liberal institutions -- the New York Times, the ACLU, Harvard, etc.

If there is one thing I could bash into the head of every Democratic campaign manager, it would be that, in Neil's words, "the candidate with more populist flava is the winner." DLCers like Marshall Wittman who insist that the Democratic Party must reject populism in order to win elections are so goddamned stupid that they can't see what even Jonah Fucking Goldberg understands - i.e., that the GOP owes its success to the fact that it has managed to position itself, in the minds of a sufficient number of voters, as the party of populism. Doughy Pantload is absolutely right that O'Reilly et al are popular because they are seen as populists, fighting for the little guy.

Now, it should go without saying that the GOP isn't really interested in looking out for the little guy; their populism is phony through and through. But they've managed to convince enough people that they are the only thing standing between THE LIBERAL ELITES who want to outlaw Christianity, confiscate their hunting rifles, and pass out condoms to kindergarteners. This is the basis for their success. It's bullshit, but it works.

Not only is it possible, contra the DLC, to win with populism, populism is the only way to win. No one ever won an election because they were seen as looking out for the interests of elites. The GOP knows this, and they're playing the Democrats for chumps.

"Intelligent Design" akin to astrology

And that's according to ID's defenders!

D'oh

Well, another disappointing end for the Birdnals. The Curse of Keith Hernandez lives on.

Oh well. My only consolation is that on the off chance that David Lewis was right, there is a world out there where the Cardinals are headed to the World Series. Would have been nice if that world could have been the one I live in, but I guess I'll have to settle for being happy for my other-world counterpart.

There are some important lessons to be learned from this series. Foremost among them: the characteristics that make a great regular-season team do not necessarily make a great playoff team. Now that baseball's postseason looks more like hockey's than it does the traditional regular-season-then-World-Series setup, with three rounds of playoffs, it just doesn't make sense to focus on the things that produce 100-win seasons (solid pitching, quality hitters from 1-8, good defense).

The wiser strategy would be to build your team around what would be best in a seven-game series (namely, a couple of pitchers capable of shutting down even the best line-ups, and let the offense take care of itself), and then try to win enough regular-season games to earn a wild-card berth in the playoffs. If Houston wins the Series this year, that will be four straight years that a wild-card team has ended up as world champions, and I don't think that's an accident.

The Cardinals are in danger of becoming the NL Central's answer to the Atlanta Braves: perennial qualifiers for the post-season who can never quite close the deal (Atlanta has won 14 consecutive division titles, but has only a single World Series championship to show for it (which admittedly is more than the Cardinals have had over the same time period)). Their NLCS rotation of Carpenter, Mulder, Morris, and Suppan was pretty damn good, but it just doesn't compare to Petitte-Clemens-Oswalt-Backe. "Good pitching beats good hitting" is probably the oldest baseball cliche, but cliches are cliches for a reason, and the Cardinals learned this one the hard way.

Forgotten casualties

Well, war is hell:

War's toll on troops revealed in survey: More than 1 in 4 require medical or mental treatment after coming home

More than one in four U.S. troops have come home from Iraq with health problems that require medical or mental health treatment, according to the Pentagon's first detailed screening of servicemembers leaving a war zone.

Almost 1,700 servicemembers returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom this year said they harbored thoughts of hurting themselves or might be better off dead.  More than 250 said they had such thoughts "a lot." Nearly 20,000 reported nightmares or unwanted war recollections; more than 3,700 admitted having concerns that they might "hurt or lose control" with someone else.

Overall, since the war began, about 28 percent of Iraq veterans -- roughly 50,000 troops this year alone -- returned with ailments ranging from lingering battle wounds to toothaches, from suicidal thoughts to strained marriages. The figure dwarfs the often-quoted Iraq casualty count: 1,980 American troops dead and 15,220 wounded through Tuesday.

Reactionary and proud of it

Conservative blogger Karol Sheinin (via The Blogometer):

 

"Bush haters make people like me Bush lovers. While we have our problems with the man, the unserious left makes sure that we are constantly on the defensive about him. A Republican will say 'I don't like the Miers pick' or 'I think his spending has gotten completely out of hand.' A Bush-hater will reply 'yeah, that's what you get for voting for that idiot chimp, who went to war to profit his Halliburton buddies and take away our Democracy'. So, of course Republicans start defending him against these idiotic attacks and disregard the fact that there is so much they dislike about the Bush presidency."

 

 

That makes sense.

Is America more conservative? part 2

Another thing to keep in mind is that the vast majority of people don't have any real political orientation.  At most, they might have a laundry list of positions on various issues, but the likelihood of these positions demonstrating any kind of unifying principle(s) is very small.  We tend to lose sight of this, I think, in part because such folks tend not to be represented in blogland and the NY Times Op-Ed page (with the possible exception of Maureen Dowd!).  But it's worth remembering that for the most part, the people aren't any more conservative than they were twenty years ago - but nor are they more liberal.  They might be voting Republican more often than they used to, but in my opinion this is a function not of ideology but of marketing - i.e., for whatever reason, the GOP has managed to sell itself as the preferable brand.  Reagan was a more appealing candidate than Mondale, Clinton more appealing than Bush I, Bush II more appealing than Kerry, etc.  The reasons why each of these candidates were more appealing than their opponent vary, but in general they have little to do with political philosophy. 

 

My own theory is that in presidential elections, the cooler guy always wins - that is, whichever candidate is perceived by the electorate as "cool" is the one who wins.  Think about it: Bush II the frat boy/cowboy was seen as cooler than the awkward Kerry and the over-earnest Gore; Clinton was cooler than Bush I; Reagan cooler than Carter and Mondale; etc.  Now, George H.W. Bush might seem to be the exception here, because absolutely no one thinks that Pappy Bush is cool.  But, keep in mind that his opponent was Dukakis, who is possibly the most uncool person on the planet.  Bush was cooler just by default.  Perhaps the theory should be amended: whomever is seen as more cool, or, in the event that neither candidate is cool, whomever is seen as less uncool, wins.

 

The upshot is that presidential elections are basically just a really expensive version of high school class president elections.  Yeah, this isn't really an original observation, but I don't think that most of us have fully appreciated (and internalized) its truth.  When it comes to presidential politics, at least, personality dwarfs politics when it comes to the factors that decide the outcomes of the elections.

Is America more conservative?

Atrios:

On the Colbert Report Lesley Stahl just claimed, as a matter of fact, that the country has shifted to the Right since the beginning of the Reagan years. The country being presumably, the consensus of public opnion.

That's what they believe. I see no actual evidence of it.

I don't see any evidence of that either, and in fact I see evidence to the contrary. Something that is staggering to think about is that Ronald Reagan won re-election with 525 electoral votes to Mondale's 13, 49 states to Mondale's one. A Republican winning with that kind of landslide is inconceivable in 2005; strange for a nation that has supposedly become more conservative.

It's also worth noting that Bush didn't win re-election by campaigning unabashedly as a conservative. The 2004 Bush campaign didn't have much to say about privatizing Social Security, or cutting government programs, or restricting abortion, etc. etc. The GOP seems to recognize that its electoral success depends in part on playing down the party's conservativism.

What has changed, though, is the orientation of the media and other opinion-making elites. This is due, in my opinion, to an extraordinarily successful effort by the Right to use the media to its advantage by any means necessary, as well as the institutional conservativism that is to be expected from a corporate-dominated press. This, I think, is what is behind Stahl's comment: when members of the punditocracy say "the country," they mean the people they see at parties in D.C. "The country" hasn't really moved to the right, but perhaps the Beltway cocktail party scene has.

Iraq is the new Florida

Time Magazine reports on allegations of "irregularities" in the recent vote on the proposed Iraq constitution:

Stealing Votes in Iraq? Allegations of ballot-stuffing may have irreversibly tainted the outcome in Sunni eyes

All across Iraq, the numbers seemed fantastic: More than 90 percent of voters in many Shi'ite and Kurdish provinces were reported to have voted for the proposed constitution in Saturday's referendum. In Anbar, a robustly Sunni region, the numbers were equally high against it. And in the swing provinces of Diyala and Nineveh, the numbers simply looked implausible.

For Iraqis who'd seen Saddam Hussein, "re-elected" on Oct. 15, 2002 with 100 percent of the vote, there may have been something oddly familiar in the news from the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, shortly after the polls closed on Saturday, that 99 percent of voters in some provinces in the Shi'ite south had approved the charter.

...

It is in Mosul, in Nineveh Province, that the Sunnis may have their best reason to cry foul. Early numbers from the Associated Press — which aren't endorsed by the Electoral Commission — showed almost twice as many "yes" votes for the constitution as the total number of voters in January's elections for the National Assembly, meaning that every new voter and then some voted for the constitution. Nineveh is generally considered a majority Sunni province, and Mosul was the hometown of many of Iraq's generals and other officers before the 2003 invasion.

"Mosul doesn't make any sense," said Mutlaq.

U.S. soldiers stationed in Mosul told TIME that District Election Officers had moved polling sites that day, confusing voters. In one case, they claimed, an official had moved a polling site to his office at another school two miles from the old site without informing anyone. There were also reports of election officials separating the vote tally sheets from the ballot boxes, allowing them to be marked separately — and possibly fraudulently.

"It wouldn't surprise me if the election was rigged," said a U.S. Army officer in Mosul who requested anonymity and who worked on security arrangements for the poll with Iraqi security and election officials. "I don't even trust our election process."

Not happening

From the AP:

Iran Wants Saddam Charged for 1980-88 War

Iran has asked the court trying Saddam Hussein for war crimes to charge the former Iraqi dictator with crimes from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, including the alleged use of chemical weapons, an Iranian judiciary spokesman said Tuesday.

Jamal Karimirad said the petition was filed through diplomatic channels Tuesday to the Baghdad court where Saddam goes on trial Wednesday.

"The invasion of Iran in 1980 was definitely one of the crimes committed by Saddam. We want the court to investigate the charges brought by Iranian people," Karimirad told a press conference.

Iran wants the court to include Saddam's invasion of Iran in the list of charges, Karimirad said.

Problem is, the US is implicated up to its eyeballs in Saddam's war on Iran.

Which Iran, of course, fully realizes. The possibility of Saddam calling on Donald Rumsfeld as a character witness might not be just a joke if Saddam is put on trial for Iran.

Conservativism is a mental illness!

You already knew that, of course. But Blake at The Next Left links to an article about a study - undertaken with funding by the US government, no less! - which "has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in 'fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity'." This isn't exactly timely, since the study was done about two years ago, but I missed it the first time around.

A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality".

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.

One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the aversion to shades of grey and the need for "closure" could explain the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that contradicted its beliefs about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Mmmm...Kool-aid

Sean Hannity: Iraq is Bush's biggest success.

(HT: bgtruth.)

Let's play "Who's the snitch?"

Apparently there is a "senior administration official" cooperating with Pat Fitzgerald's Plame investigation. Kevin Drum wants to know who it is. Possibilities suggested by his readers include:

Colin Powell
Mary Matalin
Ari Fleischer
John Ashcroft
Barney the dog
Jennifer Millerwise
Karl Rove
Someone we've never heard of
Andy Card
George H.W. Bush
Mark Felt
George Tenet
Laura Bush
Robert Zoellick
Dick Cheney

There is a God

His name is Albert Pujols.

Brown v. Hackett

David Sirota has a couple of nice posts in support of Sherrod Brown, who will be running in the Democratic primary for one of Ohio's Senate seats against Paul Hackett, the centrist Dem and Iraq war veteran who has inexplicably become a favorite of the liberal blogosphere:

No one argues that Sherrod Brown has been anything but one of the most aggressive, effective and tenacious progressive champions in the U.S. House. As I have written before, unlike many candidates, Brown has not just "talked tough," he's actually taken the tough votes for our side, even taking on his own party on the most fundamental issues like "free" trade in order to fight for the cause. In today's corporate-owned politics, there are extremely few chances to put someone like that in the U.S. Senate. But we have one now in Brown.

(...)

Sherrod Brown now has a concise explanation of his candidacy on his website. It goes into some detail about why he originally said he would not run, and now - THANKFULLY - he is answering the call to run for the Senate.

Here is the excerpt:

"Due to personal and professional obligations, I was unable to enter the race earlier this year. For the first half of 2005, I devoted my entire professional life to leading the bipartisan effort against the Central American Free Trade Agreement. I also walked my daughter down the aisle at her wedding and sent two more daughters off to college."

Anyone calling themselves "progressive" who would hold this against Brown - and then use it to negate his longtime leadership as one of the few progressive voices in Congress - is pretty suspect, plain and simple. He was leading the fight on one of the most important economic issues, and had family issues that led him to believe he couldn't be a candidate. Things changed. That's the end of it, so everyone trying laughably to make a big deal out of it, take some advice: stop crying, get ahold of yourselves, and get ready first for Democratic Senate nominee Sherrod Brown and then ultimately U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) - a true progressive champion in the Senate.

Look, I realize that Hackett is a war veteran and all, but in case anyone was sleeping through 2004, being a war veteran is simply not that much of a political advantage. I am frankly quite disturbed by hostility toward Brown, and the adulation of Hackett, that is coming out of our side of blogland. David Sirota, at least (and as usual), has his priorities in the right place.

Make me puke

Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit) writes a book:

An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

It's 272 whole pages. That's a lot of 'Heh's and 'Indeed's.

Chomsky is champ

The man ranks first - "by a mile" - in Foreign Policy's poll of the top "public intellectuals."

 

Link.

NASCAR and racism

Steve Gilliard links to an interesting article suggesting that the appeal of NASCAR is the fact that the sport is basically an all-white affair.

Rove says he'll resign if indicted

From Time.com:

Karl Rove has a plan, as always. Even before testifying last week for the fourth time before a grand jury probing the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, Bush senior adviser Rove and others at the White House had concluded that if indicted he would immediately resign or possibly go on unpaid leave, several legal and Administration sources familiar with the thinking told TIME.

Resignation is the much more likely scenario, they say. The same would apply to I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the Vice President's chief of staff, who also faces a possible indictment. A former White House official says Rove's break with Bush would have to be clean—no "giving advice from the sidelines"—for the sake of the Administration.

Severing his ties would allow Rove—who as deputy chief of staff runs a vast swath of the West Wing—to fight aggressively "any bull___ charges," says a source close to Rove, like allegations that he was part of a broad conspiracy to discredit Plame's husband Joseph Wilson. Rove's defense: whatever he did fell far short of that.

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald appears to be seriously weighing a perjury charge for Rove's failure to tell grand jurors that he talked to TIME correspondent Matthew Cooper about Plame, according to a person close to Rove. Rove corrected himself in a later grand jury session. If charged with perjury, he will maintain he simply didn't recall the conversation with Cooper and told Fitzgerald as soon as he did.

Verbal sprawl

Matt has a proposal: for every word added to the dictionary, one must be removed.

Sure, dour wordaholics like Orwell tend to frown upon such linguistic pruning, but such an act may very well be necessary if our language is to be kept agile and vibrant. So, with this in mind, I have put together a list of words that, for the sake of the English language, should probably be disposed of.