RAGING COW UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis offers some advice to the Dr Pepper marketers. I’ll bet they wind up wishing they’d taken it.

It’s good advice for other folks, too.

EMBARRASSING, IF TRUE:

Yesterday Williams’s communications director, Tony Bullock, told us he thinks he knows why McLaughlin slammed the mayor: Immediately after the blizzard, city officials didn’t grant the TV host preferential treatment when minions for “Dr. McLaughlin,” as they refer to their boss, repeatedly phoned and demanded that a snowplow be deployed to McLaughlin’s residential street in the pricey Massachusetts Avenue Heights neighborhood.

And I guess it’s true, because McLaughlin isn’t denying it. (Via Romenesko).

UPDATE: Reader Gary Imhoff emails that it’s not true:

You should know better than to believe DC’s Mayor Tony Williams or his press secretary, Tony Bullock. Actually, McLaughlin was out of town when the snowstorm hit, and he didn’t call to try to get his street plowed. Neither did Matthew Faraci, the producer of McLaughlin One-on-One, whom Bullock unprofessionally derired as “McLaughlin’s chief twit.” McLaughlin’s driver did call because the street was snowed in for days and never plowed. But the Mayor and spokesmen for his administration had told citizens to call for service and report if their street hadn’t been plowed, and now the mayor is deriding a citizen for taking the administration’s position seriously and calling for service.

The principle Mayor Williams is stating, which is consistent with his positions in the past is that Washington’s residents have no right to complain about bad service from his administration if they personally receive bad service.

I know the above facts because my wife, Dorothy Brizill, was a guest on the McLaughlin One-on-One show about which the mayor is complaining. Dorothy was invited on One-on-One because she is the executive director of DCWatch, which is a good government watchdog group.

Hmm. Okay. Seems like McLaughlin should’ve said this himself, though.

PORPHYROGENITUS has moved to a new bloghome. Drop by, say hello, and adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

I NOTICE THAT AIMEE DEEP’S BLOG is featuring more and more photos of attractive, scantily clad women.

This isn’t a complaint, or anything.

VIA DAVE WINER I find this story from Wired News, containing the following hard-to-argue-with assertion:

“When your medical records are indexed in Google, something’s wrong.”

Yep.

STEFAN SHARKANSKY emails:

Remember Diablogger’s story last week about the lefty professor from Germany who ridiculed him for being uninformed because he didn’t read the German press? Well I read the German press, and I do find all kinds of good stuff you don’t get in US newspapers — like this interview where an Iraqi civilian says that the French and German anti-war position doesn’t make any sense…

Imagine that.

FAUX-RILLA MEDIA: My new TechCentralStation column is up. It’s inspired by the “Raging Cow” blogger-promotion scheme. There’s an amusing graphic.

Get behind The Cow! (Nope, that slogan just doesn’t work. . . .)

INTERESTING PIECE on America’s military future:

The shrillness of the debate about French and German opposition to war on Iraq has concealed the change in fundamental American strategic thinking that lies at its heart. The Pentagon is returning the US to its traditional role as a maritime power. In that strategy, western Europe, indeed Europe as a whole, will matter less than it has done.

This seems right to me.

AUSTRALIA’S INTERNET LAWS ARE BASICALLY USELESS, according to this report:

Following a survey on Monday showing 84 per cent of boys aged between 16 and 17 were exposed to pornography on the internet, the Australia Institute on Tuesday released a second report saying Australian regulatory authorities had manifestly failed.

Australia Institute executive director Clive Hamilton said the survey results showed the present system of internet regulation managed by the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) was next to useless.

“It is inexplicable why the ABA and the minister for communications say they have the problem under control,” Dr Hamilton said.

Oh, probably because they’re bureaucrats. This is no surprise, of course, and ought to serve as a reminder that similar proposals for Internet regulation in the United States are likely to prove equally useless.

CASTRO IS WILLING TO MEDIATE IN KOREA? Don’t call us, Fidel. . . .

RADLEY BALKO OFFERS “something you don’t get from InstaPundit.” Yep.

GAWKER AND GIZMODO are looking for interns. A very cool job for the right person, and you’d get to work with cool folks.

THERE’S LOTS OF INTERESTING STUFF OVER AT RANTBURG. And yeah, I know, I could say that most days.

DOES GEORGE TENET know about this?

YALE WORKERS are on strike. Lily Malcolm, who files a first-hand report, is “underwhelmed.”

They had a strike when I was going to law school there. When the janitors left, the students took over cleaning the bathrooms in the dorms. They were much, much, much cleaner during the strike than they were before or after.

I DON’T LIKE THIS STORY ONE BIT:

Election.com, a struggling Garden City start-up scheduled to provide online absentee ballots for U.S. military personnel in the 2004 federal election, has quietly sold controlling power to an investment group with ties to unnamed Saudi nationals, according to company correspondence.

In a letter sent to a select group of well-heeled Election.com investors Jan. 21, the online voting and voter registration company disclosed that the investment group Osan Ltd. paid $1.2 million to acquire 20 million preferred shares to control 51.6 percent of the voting power.

In a Newsday interview in October, Charles Smith, a representative of Osan who sits on Election.com’s board, declined to name the Saudi Arabian investors with a stake in the company, other than to say they were “passive” and part of a larger group that included Americans and Europeans. Smith didn’t return phone calls Wednesday.

There could be less to this than meets the eye, I suppose, but as I believe I mentioned, I don’t like it one bit. (Via Welch, who got it from Kleiman, who got it from Yglesias who — or is that backwards? Oh, hell, I’m stopping here.)

UPDATE: Okay, one more thought. Bush’s Achilles’ heel is his close relationship to the Saudis. Democrats haven’t done much with this, and I don’t understand why.

To be clear, I don’t have any particular reason to think that there’s a Bush connection here. I just wonder why the Democrats aren’t doing more with this issue.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here are the results of some research into Election.com.

ANDREW SULLIVAN AND BILL QUICK have had “pledge weeks.” Tim Blair, on the other hand, is having pledge day. Give till it helps.

JUDGING BY THIS REPORT, the war has already started:

Several thousand allied special forces, including more than 300 SAS personnel, are already operating inside Iraq.

This suggests that, despite efforts to secure a United Nations resolution backing force, the war has begun.

Defence sources said last night that two SAS Sabre squadrons – about 240 men – plus more than 100 support troops were engaged in various parts of Iraq.

The scale of the operations in the south and west is unprecedented. British special forces did not enter Iraq during the 1991 Gulf war until the ground offensive began.

Interesting, if true. And, if true, proof that Tom Holsinger was right when he wrote back in December that “America’s conquest of Iraq will be a gradual process, not an event.”

I’m inclined to believe it myself, but as I’ve said before, the disinformation is likely flowing fast and furious at the moment, meaning that all reports should be viewed with more (even) than the usual skepticism.

CHINA’S SPACE PROGRAM: Slow, steady, and, apparently, ambitious:

China has revealed further details of its plans to explore the Moon – the first unmanned probe could be launched by 2005, say officials. They also hinted that the motivation for the missions is to mine the Moon’s resources. . . .

Furthermore, Luan Enjie, director of China National Space Administration, hinted that China would be interesting in exploiting rare resources found on the Moon’s surface.

“The prospect for the development and utilisation of the lunar potential mineral and energy resources provide resource reserves for the sustainable development of human society,” he told the newspaper.

Hmm. I wonder if China will look for technologies that might provide a great leap forward in this department. To, er, coin a phrase. Well, there’s this quote from James Oberg:

Oberg adds that China has set itself a number of ambitious goals. “As with their manned programme, they don’t intend to recreate the US and Russian programmes,” he says. “They intend to go to the head of the queue in terms of capabilities.”

Food for thought.

MORE SUPPORT for Steven Den Beste’s theory that the French are trying to prop up Saddam for fear of what we’ll learn about their dealings with him once he falls:

Here’s what Saddam said:

As for financiers, industrialists and above all those responsible for military industry, the question must be put to French politicians: Who did not benefit from these business contracts and relationships with Iraq? . . . With respect to the politicians, one need only refer back to the declarations of all the political parties of France, Right and Left. All were happy to brag about their friendship with Iraq and to refer to common interests. From Mr. Chirac [now the center-right president] to Mr. Chevenement [the socialist former defense minister] . . . politicians and economic leaders were in open competition to spend time with us and flatter us. We have now grasped the reality of the situation [of France’s support for the 1991 Gulf War, a betrayal in Saddam’s eyes]. If the trickery continues, we will be forced to unmask them, all of them, before the French public.

Author-journalists Claude Angeli and Stéphanie Mesnier had prompted this response by asking Saddam about financial ties between his regime and French industrialists and politicians, specifically inquiring: “Has Iraq financially supported French politicians and political parties?”

Sounds like blackmail to me.

THERE ARE MORE BLOGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH, than are dreamt of in the Blogosphere. Here’s a webring of Knoxville-area blogs, most of which I’ve never read. They’re of the daily-diary variety for the most part. Different from the political part of the blogosphere, but more numerous.

DAVID DUKE was hounded out of Richmond:

Originally promoted on Duke’s Web page as a major policy address on the potential war with Iraq — Duke opposes the war, predictably arguing that it is the product of a conspiracy among the Sharon government, American Jews and the American government — the speech was supposed to have been Duke’s swan song.

No major hotels were willing to rent him a conference room, so he wound up at a Quality Inn that was, to his horror, owned by an Indian. Meryl Yourish has the scoop on what she calls his “feeble last hurrah.”

MORE BLOOD-BLOGGING. Did I mention the free cookie?

JESSE WALKER IS ACCUSING ME of “smearing” the Catholic church. I think that Jesse’s post is somewhat unfair, for reasons I’ve answered in the comments. But just because Jesse’s post seems unfair to me doesn’t mean that the issue is. The question is, why do I think that the Church is displaying antisemitism here?

Basically, it’s because it seems that the Church sides against Israel, and with Arab terrorists and dictators, at every opportunity. Now there could be other explanations for that, I guess. I posited a couple over in the comments to this post of Tacitus’s, but here they are again:

If you want to be charitable, you can argue that they’re pandering because they (1) want to distinguish Christians in Arab countries from Jews; and (2) think that, long-term, Jerusalem is likely to be in Arab hands. I’m skeptical, though. I think a lot of them probably *are* antisemites. The Vatican has been too consistently anti-Israel to explain it other ways.

Note that these alternative theories, which Tacitus thinks are more persuasive explanations than antisemitism, don’t make the Church look better, really: they merely suggest that it’s willing to sacrifice moral principle for the sake of expediency rather than for the sake of prejudice. Is that better? Not much, if at all.

Alisa says that we have to understand the Catholic church as a European institution run by Europeans, though I’m not so sure that gets rid of the anti-semitism charge. Perhaps — as another comment in the Tacitus thread suggests — it’s enough to say that the Church isn’t any more anti-semitic than the rest of Europe, though that’s not much of a defense, these days.

But what really set people off was this picture. And, Walker’s rather misleading characterization notwithstanding (he puts it this way: “A cardinal has been photographed with Yasser Arafat. Got that? A church leader posed with a political opponent of a state run by Jews, therefore his church is anti-Semitic.”), it’s not just a picture. It’s a picture of Cardinal Etchegaray, representative of the Church in full Church regalia, holding up joined hands with Arafat, terrorist murderer, at a press photo opportunity.

Now here’s my question: Is it even imaginable that he would do the same thing with Ariel Sharon, elected leader of a democratic country?

I don’t think that it is. But why? I think that the reason is anti-semitism — or, perhaps, if you want to bend over backwards, pandering to anti-semitism. If it’s not that, and if Etchegaray really thinks that Arafat is less objectionable on a moral level than Sharon, then what does that say about the moral judgment of the Vatican?

Nothing admirable, as far as I’m concerned.

Walker asks if it’s possible to criticize Israel without being anti-semitic. Sure. It’s possible. But when you criticize Israel while — literally — holding hands with terrorists, well, you shouldn’t complain if people doubt that that’s how things are.

UPDATE: Reader Christopher Badeaux emails:

I doubt you could care less, but at least one of your readers and writers might: The Church hasn’t come out against war in Iraq *ex cathedra*. What that means is that the Pope, the College of Cardinals, and my Aunt Lulu could all say, “War in Iraq is wrong and bad,” and Catholics can — and I’d argue should — in good conscience dissent without risking excommunication. (What that further means is that, if as you suggest the Vatican is on another long bout of anti-Semitism, it’s a bout of anti-Semitism that the Church has been very careful not to make binding on the faithful — which sounds like weak anti-Semitism to me.) I’ll spare you the Catholic doctrine and cut to the chase:

I’d rather have a Pope (Vicar of Christ, and all that) calling for calm and peace than one calling for blood — even if the call for blood is, as I believe, ultimately just.

Well, I understand that nobody’s speaking ex cathedra here — this is more about politics than doctrine. (Jesse Walker does use the term “ex cathedra,” but he’s talking about me. Which is silly. I never speak ex cathedra — these are my opinions, and while I may sometimes feel that people who disagree with me can go to hell, I don’t mean it literally, and I don’t think anyone takes it that way.)

I guess that my problem is that when Arafat and his ilk call for blood, it doesn’t seem to bother the Church all that much. You can call that double-standard anti-semitism, and I think it is, or you can call it something else, but either way it stinks.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Rick Meyer emails:

One of the items that convinced me that the Catholic church sides with the Muslims was last year when the IDF had blocked Arafat in his compound and the group of Muslims took hostages in a standoff in the Church of the Nativity.

During the entire standoff, I don’t remember once hearing the Pope or some other church leader condemning the Muslims for taking control of one of the most revered of all Christian sites, which btw is considered a War Crime under the UN’s rules for these things.

I think its pretty safe to say that had the roles been reversed the church would have felt free to at least criticize the Israelis.

Yes, and that’s the context for the original post and photo, of course. Meanwhile blogger-on-hiatus Chris “Spoons” Kanis emails:

I’m an ex-Catholic largely because of the official Church’s shameful record of kissing up to dictators, tyrants, and terrorists. Unfortunately, some (hopefully few) individual Catholics prefer to dismiss all critics as bigots, rather than to ask whether there might be a moral failing in their Church.

Glad (but not surprised) to see that you’re not letting cries of bigotry stop you from calling a spade a spade.

I think that this stuff generates such a response because, well, it’s true. And sometimes the truth hurts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Micael O’Ronain sends something interesting:

I believe that you analysis of the situation between the Jews and the Vatican is not going deep enough. Yes, the Vatican is anti-Semitic but the reason that they are anti-Semitic is because they are anti-Capitalist. At its core values, Christianity was and still is a collectivist philosophy. For most of its two-thousand year history, the Catholic Church has done everything it can to suppress the emergence of Capitalism and and is still doing it, even today. The reason why Jews had such a predominant position in European banking was because Christians were forbidden to engage in usury (i.e. Banking) by the Vatican.

Ask yourself the the following question: why are the conservatives in the Church of Rome and the liberals in the Church of England all marching shoulder to shoulder with the Communists, Socialist and Fascists in support of Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat? The answer is that they all hate Capitalism and the center of the global Capitalism is the United States. The Jews have the misfortune of being in the middle.

Now this seems to have a lot of explanatory power, and it’s certainly different from classical antisemitism. On the other hand, Israel is far more Euro-socialist than the United States (Is Israel really more capitalist than, say, France? Not obviously). So if Israel is suffering from “anti-capitalism,” isn’t it because of stereotypes of Jews as capitalists, as much as from reality? And aren’t those stereotypes, well, you know, anti-semitic?

Meanwhile Meryl Yourish offers a lot of rather concrete reasons why one might suspect the Vatican of antisemitism. Excerpt:

The Vatican did not establish full diplomatic relations with Israel until 1997, nearly fifty years after Israel’s birth.

The Pope said that Israel was “desecrating Christian holy sites” when the IDF surrounded the Church of Nativity during its takeover by Palestinian terrorists, yet didn’t mention later how the church really was desecrated—by those selfsame terrorists.

When Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past was revealed, the Pope didn’t let that stop him from honoring the man that no one else in the world would meet with.

The Vatican signed an accord with the Palestinians condemning any “unilateral action” on Jerusalem by Israel. No such accord was signed with Israel when Jordan ruled Jerusalem, threw out all the Jews, forbade Jews to visit the Western Wall, and descrated Jewish holy sites and graveyards.

Yeah, he issued a document condemning the Holocaust. But it took a long time, said some things that made you wonder if he really meant it, and didn’t stop him from allowing crosses to spring up over Jewish remains in Auschwitz, or the beatification of Edith Stein, or other acts that show he doesn’t really seem to give a damn about what Jews think.

There’s more, and she’s got links. I thought that most people in the blogosphere knew all this stuff, but maybe not.

ONE MORE: Christopher Johnson emails:

Dear Glenn, Although I’m a conservative Protestant, I generally agree with you on your assessment of anti-Semitism and the Catholic church. I would mitigate it somewhat by saying that all the mainline churches have been disgraceful regarding Israel and I don’t even think the Vatican is the worst offender in this area. I think the Anglicans beat them out. I’m getting to the point where I can write Anglican pronouncements on the Middle East in my sleep.

I think they write them that way, too. . . And you’re right, the Catholic Church isn’t the worst. But its position — as today’s dispatch of a Papal envoy to the White House illustrates — is somewhat unique, as is its history. Meanwhile The Grille says I’m wrong, and that the real problem is that the Church no longer believes in the existence of evil.

Finally, reader Mark Cameron emails:

As a Catholic who is pro-Israel and, with reservations, pro-war with Iraq, I understand (and share) your frustration with the Vatican’s cosy dealings with tyrants, and particularly Arab dictators. However, the accusation of anti-Semitism is, I believe, unfounded. I think you have to separate Vatican diplomacy which, I agree, is quite unbalanced and anti-Israel, from Catholic theology towards Judaism, which has seen remarkable changes in the past forty or so years. Since Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate (1965), the Church has unequivocally condemned anti-Semitism. Even before then, the Church had moved to remove anti-Semitic remnants from the liturgy and had distanced itself from priests (like Fr. Coughlin and Feeney in America) who published anti-Semitic materials.

Pope John Paul II, in particular, has been a genuine friend of the Jewish people. His oldest childhood friend, Jerzy Kluger, was a Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the first to visit a synagogue, the first to recognize Israel, and the first to talk of Jews as “our elder brothers in faith”. . . .

All of this being said, the Vatican has problems with the State of Israel for several reasons. First, there is the presence of a Christian minority in the Palestinian territories which has not been particularly well treated by Israel – or by Palestinian Muslims, for that matter, but Israel is the dominant power. Second, some of the holiest sites of Christianity, including the Holy Sepulchre, are in East Jerusalem. The Catholic Church has long advocated that the holy sites of Jerusalem be placed under international administration.

Furthermore, the Church has a long tradition of maintaining cordial relations with dictators of all stripes – East European Communists, South American military juntas, and Arab dictators alike – in order to prevent persecution of Christian minorities and to allow freedom of action for the Church. Over the centuries, the Vatican has come to believe that accomodating with brutal governments in order to allow Catholic churches, schools, and hospitals to stay open is a worthwhile bargain. This pragmatic approach may not be admirable, but perhaps it is worthwhile to keep the Church present as an independent outpost in the midst of tyranny. A denunciation of the regime will last for a week or two in the media, but may result in the Church being cut off from access to millions of people for whom their faith and its institions are their only lifeline.

Finally, undoubtedly many Vatican diplomats in the Secretariat of State are very much representative of “Old Europe”, including a romanticism towards the Arabs, and these attitudes may colour their thoughts and actions towards Israel.

This combination of longstanding diplomatic difficulties with Israel, a generally accomodationist position towards dictators in order to preserve religious rights, and an “Old European” Arabist diplomatic corps, may add up to policies which are so harshly anti-Israel as to seem anti-Semitic. But if this accusation can be justly directed towards Vatican diplomats, I think it is unjust to accuse this Pope or modern Catholic theology of retaining an anti-Semitic tinge when they have made such enormous strides to reverse them.

Well, yes. Actually, I think this post matches my own feelings pretty well, and it makes me wonder if, in some of the earlier discussions, I and my critics haven’t been talking past one another. Though there have been a few minor signs that theological antisemitism is stirring again (and as far as I know, more outside the Catholic Church than within it), my complaints really have to do with the Vatican’s foreign policy. I think that John Paul II tried to build bridges to the Jewish community — but I don’t think he’s really running things anymore, at least where the Vatican’s diplomatic efforts are concerned. And those are what have offended me.

HOW NOT TO MAKE NIGHTCLUBS SAFER:

Things between the city and club owners have gotten so bad that some owners are even reluctant to dial 911—not because, pace Public Enemy, it’s a joke but because they’re issued a “disorderly premise” violation every time they seek assistance. “Very often you do everything in your power not to call 911,” says Rodrigue. “What could be more dangerous than that?” One owner says he got a violation after he called cops to stop a man from beating his girlfriend with a pay-phone receiver.

And you can’t just blame Nurse Bloomberg for this one, as it was the same under Giuliani. Not very smart.