MICKEY KAUS says that I’m a “cutting-edge, tech-savvy Web entrepreneur.” Hmm. To be an entrepreneur, don’t I need to, you know, make money? Oh, wait, he said “Web entrepreneur.” Never mind.
Archive for 2002
November 5, 2002
PAPA’S GOT A BRAND NEW BLOG. John Bono, to be precise.
THE STANFORD/STALIN/WTC BOMBING CONNECTION: You’d think this was exaggerated, but it’s not.
DRUDGE is reporting that Jeb Bush has been re-elected.
UPDATE: Jay Caruso calls this an “embarrassing loss” for Terry McAuliffe.
TURNOUT: Polls sure seemed crowded here. And that’s the report I’m getting via email from a lot of places.
UPDATE: The mysterious Tacitus reports from the electioneering front lines.
ANOTHER UPDATE: I don’t think it’s driven by results yet, but TNR is sounding pretty thoroughly defeatist.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Michele has exit poll results. And Nikita Demosthenes has first hand reports of the Maryland voting machine snafu.
RETURN OF THE ISI: More bad news about Pakistan:
The U.S. State Department praised the Pakistani elections as “an important milestone in the ongoing transition to democracy.” One of the Bush administration’s ranking national security officials confided privately, “better to have the crazies in than out of government.”
But the reality is, that to call Pakistan an ally in the war against terrorism has become an oxymoron. Rehman and his cohort Sami ul-Haq were the tutors to most of Taliban’s top leadership. Two years ago, Omar and bin Laden delivered joint commencement addresses at the University for the Education of Truth — one of Pakistan’s principal Islamic seminaries or madrasas — in the township of Akora Khattak near the border city of Peshawar. Then, Pakistani and Afghan mujahedin or holy warriors came and went as they pleased across the porous frontier.
Now Taliban cadres are free again to come and go without fear of arrest. Because the Oct. 10 elections also gave control of the regional governments of two of Pakistan’s four provinces — Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan — to those who guard the friends of the prophet. The entire length of the Pak-Afghan frontier is now once again the dominion of anti-American religious extremists. . . .
Some 300 ISI officers who had been working with Taliban prior to 9/11 and were transferred to regular army units have now been returned to the intelligence agency. NWFP and Baluchistan are once again privileged sanctuaries for al Qaida — a clear and present danger for president Bush’s war on terror.
Hmm. I’m not as pessimistic as this analysis, yet, but it’s a reason to keep our relations with India close. In a worst-case scenario, it may take a U.S. / Indian effort to clean out Pakistan and Afghanistan. Though if Saudi Arabia is neutralized the rest will probably take care of itself, and if Saudi Arabia isn’t neutralized then successes elsewhere won’t matter. Saud Delenda Est!
IT’S ALWAYS A MISTAKE to make too much of these experiments, whether they “succeed” or “fail” — but a laser that can shoot down an artillery shell in flight is a big deal.
NICK DENTON DEBUNKS THE POST-POSTELECTION SPIN: And if that’s not a reason to love the blogosphere, I don’t know what is. Excerpt:
One prediction about the mid-terms: within a day of the results the commentators will be saying the elections demonstrate the divide in the US. A country, split down the middle. Ignore them. The precision of the results will have less to do with public opinion than the skill of modern politicians in positioning themselves close to the median of their constituencies.
Yep. Meanwhile Orrin Judd is already handicapping the 2004 elections.
If that’s too far ahead for you, there’s always Patrick Ruffini’s exit poll, which looks to be about as accurate as the VNS. . . .
WELL, IT’S NOT THE PINK PISTOLS, but it’s a move in the right direction:
On the morning of Friday, Oct. 25, two men, Fidel Serrano, 23, and Martin Hernandez, 21, were arrested for battery and the commission of a hate crime, after they tried to attack a gay man outside a West Hollywood bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. The man, who has not been identified, fought back when Serrano and Hernandez jumped from their car and began hitting him in the face and head with their hands. In a surprise move, the victim struck Serrano, knocking him to the ground.
Serrano and Hernandez jumped back in their car and tried to flee, but were stopped by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputies less than a block from the attack.
It’s amazing how much less people enjoy this kind of thing when the victims fight back.
HOWIE CARR REPORTS VOTER FRAUD AND PRESS INTIMIDATION IN BOSTON and he’s got video on this link. There were multiple people in the voting booth, and they sure looked to me like they had something to hide.
JUST GOT A PHONE CALL a little while ago from a friend I haven’t seen in nearly 20 years, who found me via InstaPundit. I like it when that happens.
MY PREDICTION of voting-machine problems is looking pretty good.
YET ANOTHER REASON FOR PAPER BALLOTS: This is downright scary.
FRENCH AUTHORITIES HAVE ARRESTED men said to be behind the Tunisia synagogue bombing. They’re thought to be affiliated with Al Qaeda.
I’M GOING TO BE ON KNRC RADIO, DENVER in about an hour (3:35 pm eastern time) talking about the advantages of paper ballots. You can stream live audio here.
BLACKFACE UPDATE: Eugene Volokh is sharply criticizing the University of Tennessee’s administration over its response to the blackface incident last week, and all I can say is that he’s right to do so. (Of course he’s right — he’s a famous authority on the First Amendment. I have his text sitting on my desk now.) Suggesting that the University needs to create a “speech code” — of the sort that were stylish ten years ago and that have repeatedly been found unconstitutional — is absurd. Here’s what Volokh says in another post on the University’s statements here:
I think the University certainly has the right, and sometimes the moral obligation, to speak out against speech that it finds offensive. But here it seems to be threatening administrative punishment — the message seems to be that if people engage in speech that is “racial[ly] insensitiv[e],” the University may take action (for instance, by refusing to reinstate the organization) unless the speakers prove their “commitment to uphold our expectations for civility, ethnic diversity and racial harmony.” Speakers who have dissenting views about what is racially insensitive (not just racists, but those who believe — rightly or wrongly — that it’s OK for white people to dress up as the Jackson Five), or about what should constitute “racial harmony” or respect for “ethnic diversity” or “civility,” had apparently better watch out. . . .
Not a word about free speech, and not a word acknowledging that students might have the right to express dissenting and even offensive views.
I’m very unhappy that the University’s first instinct here was to respond in a punitive fashion. It has always been a point of pride to me that the University of Tennessee has been largely free of PC absurdities. It’s doubly embarrassing to me that this stuff is appearing just as the rest of the world seems to be waking up to how wrong such behavior is.
WHAT WOULD BUGS BUNNY DO? Dave Trowbridge and Dale Amon are reviving a thought from last year. And it’s a good thing.
SCIENCE FICTION PIONEER ANDRE NORTON (real name: Alice Mary Norton — her mother is the Mary Norton who wrote The Borrowers) is rather ill and could use some cheering up. Here’s an email from Mercedes Lackey:
After being sworn to secrecy, I have just been permitted to release this information. One of the seminal authors of our field, Andre Norton, is gravely ill. She was admitted to the hospital last Monday for surgery, and is still there. More to the point, her spirits have sunk to a life-threatening low. She needs to know just how highly regarded she is in our community, and she needs to know now.
“We” are keeping the location of the hospital and room “secret”, because she cannot have visitors and we don’t want to overwhelm her with autograph-hounds when she needs to be getting stronger, not being disturbed—this is already a problem as word of her illness has percolated into the local community in Tennessee. The hospital in question will deny that she is there.
Please send cards and letters to:
Andre Norton
114 Eventide Drive
Murfreesboro TN 37130
If you wish to send flowers, you may also send them to this address, but direct the florist to leave them on the porch if no one is home. Andre’s two friends who are caring for her will make sure they are brought to her, but they are spending most of the time at the hospital, and so may not be there. (If this gets to be a problem, arrangements will be made for frequent pick-up!) Please do not send food, as she is on a liquids-only diet.
You may send e-cards to:
Andre Norton
E-mail Address:
Again, her friends will make sure she gets to see them.
I read a lot of her stuff when I was young, and I imagine that many of you did too.
ELECTION REFORM: Iain Murray sends this link to an article he wrote in 2000 whose suggestions overlap to some degree with the observations in my TechCentralStation column today.
It occurs to me that one problem with election reform is that we tend to discuss this issue on and just after election day — the very time when that discussion is least likely to lead to any actual legislation.
HOW STUPID IS THE FBI? Earlier I ran reports, gleaned from gun-related chatboards, that the FBI was calling up gun owners and harassing them. Now I find this story, reporting that the FBI was “miffed” when one of the people it called responded appropriately:
So, when FBI Special Agent Greg Metzger and his partner arrived at Brown’s home for their scheduled meeting, they were greeted by Brown and his wife, Mary, along with reporters and photographers from various media outlets.
As Brown described the situation, the agents were “a little bit miffed.”
“They were not happy,” he observed. “They just were not interested in being around any cameras.”
The agents asked Brown to step outside the home, away from the television crew, to talk.
“Can we, uh … come here,” one of the agents said to Brown. Obliging, Brown stepped away from the door to speak with the agents, but still within view of the camera.
Brown began recapping the agreement he had made with Special Agent Metzger. But when one of the agents realized Brown was wearing a wireless microphone, he stopped the conversation short.
“Do you have a microphone on?” the agent asked as he reached toward the microphone clipped to Brown’s shirt. Brown backed away and continued talking, but the agent interrupted him again.
“Can you do me a favor?” the agent asked. “Can you take the apparatus off that you have on? I’d like to speak to you privately.”
Brown complied, but only after summoning his wife to serve as a witness to the conversation with the agents. Out of the camera’s view, and believing they could not be heard, the agents challenged Brown about the presence of the media.
“They were belligerent, at that point, with me. They weren’t threatening me or pushing me around or touching me or anything like that, but their mannerisms and attitude quickly became offended and belligerent,” Brown recalled. “I was thinking to myself, ‘See, this is what I was afraid would happen if you guys came into my house, especially if I was alone.'” . . .
During that conversation, the agents reportedly admitted that they had seized other rifles, allegedly with permission, to compare them to the ballistic evidence gathered from the crime scenes.
“They said, from some people, they do ‘request’ to take the gun with them and do ‘ballistic fingerprinting,’ as they call it,” Brown recalled. “I just did not want to have my gun disappear.”
Pratt believes the agents “developed an attitude,” because Brown challenged their attempts to violate his constitutional rights. . . .
Mary Brown believed the agents were attempting to agitate her husband, hoping he would say or do something to justify their confiscation of his rifle.
“I could tell that they were doing it on purpose and I didn’t like what they were doing to you,” she told her husband. “So, I decided to just jump right in.”
The agents left the couple’s property, as they were ordered to do.
Okay, how stupid do you have to be to call — as apparently was done — thousands of people and expect it not to be noticed? Especially when those people are gun owners, who tend to be more vigorous in asserting their rights, and harder to intimidate. Haven’t these guys heard of the Internet?
Meanwhile — as I wrote at the time — the whole project was an obvious exercise in futility. Had they, through some stroke of luck, actually managed to reach the sniper they just would have tipped him off. But, of course, they were following the “angry white male gun owner” profile and had it all wrong anyway. Result: FBI agents wasted their time, the FBI’s credibility suffered yet another blow, and the next time FBI agents ask for cooperation from otherwise-patriotic people, they’re less likely to get it because people won’t trust them. And, based on this behavior, they’ll be right not to.
People should be fired for this. But it’s just one more among a long, long list of things that people at the FBI should be fired for, but won’t be.
Go here and here for my earlier posts on this subject. And don’t miss this item on teams of guns-drawn FBI agents swooping on people who dare to open the lid on their cable modems. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.
BILL QUICK HAS AN UPDATED LIST OF LINKS to bloggers who are covering their home-state elections. Very cool.
Here in Tennessee, I just heard a commercial from Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Bredesen attacking the Tennessee Department of Transportation’s roadbuilding program. Given that entity’s tendency toward lots of projects that are finished slowly, it’s a good target. The Libertarian candidates are doing saturation commercials on talk radio, too, and their commercials are pretty good — though they’re hitting late enough that I don’t know how much they’ll accomplish. It suggests that their fundraising is doing better this time around, though.
LILEKS HAS HIS TAKE on yesterday’s Norm Coleman / Walter Mondale debate. Excerpt:
I’m not kidding. Pitched a question about getting broadband to rural areas, that’s what he says. One word was noticeably absent in Mondale’s reply: INTERNET. Or, for that matter, Fiber, or broadband, or any other aspect of that amusing diversion we call the Web. . . .
To me, this was the most important moment of the debate – not because it concerned a particular issue, but because it showed who inhabits the current century. Fritz just didn’t get it – which means he’s likely to have a nice steak dinner with The Other White Meat, Fritz Hollings, and sign on to some Disney-paid bill to install copyright protection at the hardware level. Then all the suburban yups who voted for Fritz because, well, you know, Paul and all that, will find himself putting a CD in his computer to rip tunes for personal use – and the disk will be spat out. Or he’ll pop in a DVD he got from a friend, and have to get a new DVD driver with security certificates that establish him as the True Legitimate Owner of the disc – enter your access code now, please, and wait while we access the Warner Brothers / Suncoast database to ensure you are the rightful owner. And the guy will sit there and think: hey, how did this happen?
Yep.
“APPEAL THREATENS TO REVEAL SCALE OF FRENCH CORRUPTION:
Defendants in a corruption appeal trial that began yesterday are threatening to blow the whistle on the alleged shady dealings of successive French governments in selling arms and negotiating oil rights in Asia and Africa.
The most complex and the most colourful corruption saga in recent French history resumed yesterday with the start of an appeal by the former foreign minister Roland Dumas, 80, against a conviction and six months’ jail sentence for influence peddling.
Four other defendants in the case of the alleged pillaging of the Elf-Aquitaine oil company in the 1980s and early 1990s – including Christine Deviers-Joncour, 55, the former mistress of M. Dumas and self-styled “Whore of the Republic” – are also appealing against the convictions and jail sentences handed down 18 months ago.
Given the obstreperous behavior of the French lately, I think that U.S. intelligence agencies should start leaking information on this stuff to the press.
UPDATE: A reader writes: “This explains the French behavior – Saddam is threatening to reveal his payments to Chirac if he supports the war…”