JIM HENLEY OFFERS some thoughts on the managerial class: “This has everything to do with why the white working class is not as reliably liberal as liberals think it should be.” (Via Megan McArdle).
Archive for February, 2004
February 23, 2004
WHERE THE STEINBRENNER-DEAN STORY came from.
I’VE MENTIONED DAVID BARON’S BOOK, The Beast in the Garden, about resurgent cougars in Colorado, before. (Here is an earlier post). Now The New York Times has an article about cougar sightings in upstate New York, one somewhat reminiscent of this article by Joe Tarr on cougar sightings in the Smokies.
I’m a bit skeptical of these reports, but if they’re not back now they’ll likely be reappearing sooner or later.
ALL OF AMERICA IS A FREE-SPEECH ZONE, which is why I find this crushing of dissent offensive:
Protesters at this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Boston may be confined to a cozy triangle of land off Haymarket Square, blocked off from the FleetCenter and convention delegates by a maze of Central Artery service roads, MBTA train tracks, and a temporary parking lot holding scores of buses and media trucks
Under a preliminary plan floated by convention organizers, the “free-speech zone” would be a small plot bounded by Green Line tracks and North Washington Street, in an area that until recently was given over to the elevated artery. The zone would hold as few as 400 of the several thousand protesters who are expected in Boston in late July.
As I’ve said here before, reasonable security precautions are fine, but efforts to move protesters out of sight are not.
ARABS WHO BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY deserve better treatment than this story describes.
MICKEY KAUS wants to know when Kerry will release his military records:
I give Kerry points for his Vietnam service. But since it (along with some plug-n-play Shrum rhetoric) is almost the entirety of his campaign for president, can it really be true that he hasn’t authorized release of his military records? Does he think this is a defensible position? … Hello, Edwards!
Maybe Edwards could raise the issue while guest-hosting the Hugh Hewitt show!
UPDATE: Kerry’s already getting heat from Vietnam vets about his records. I suppose that they’ll probably turn out to be as innocuous as Bush’s records, but people are bound to wonder why he’s keeping them secret, especially after so much noise was made about Bush. [Later: Here’s a Snopes item debunking claims that Kerry’s medals are “fishy.”]
MICHAEL LEDEEN has a column on the Iranian elections. He’s quite hard on the low quality of media coverage, something also noted by Stephen Green.
Last year the President took a large political step, with political risk, when he put enough pressure on the Palestinian side for them to come forward with somebody who could be seen as a peacemaker, the new Prime Minister Abu Mazen. And we went to Aqaba. The President stood there with the new Prime Minister, King Abdullah of Jordan and with Prime Minister Sharon, and everybody committed to the roadmap and the President’s vision.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work because the Palestinians were unable — and I put the blame squarely on Mr. Arafat — Arafat was not willing to provide authority to Abu Mazen to take control of the security organizations and to go after terrorism and speak out against terrorism — not to start a civil war of the Palestinian communities and the Palestinian Authority, but to start moving against terrorism.
“Was not willing to provide authority” is putting it rather politely. (Emphasis added.)
KEN LAYNE AND THE CORVIDS’ new CD Fought Down gets another good review: “a very good set of the kind of pure rock ‘n’ roll hardly anyone plays anymore.” (Via Bill Quick, who rather strongly suggests that you buy it.)
THIS STORY seems to illustrate two things. First, that the “domino effect” from the invasion of Iraq is paying big dividends, and second that the IAEA process doesn’t work:
Libya succeeded in making weapons-grade plutonium before announcing it would abandon its efforts to build a nuclear bomb, United Nations inspectors said yesterday. . . .
Libya had been able to buy many of the components needed to build a centrifuge to enrich uranium from the nuclear “supermarket” operated by the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
The IAEA report confirmed that Libya had also bought enriched uranium. This was flown to Libya from Pakistan, said a police report citing the alleged chief financier of the nuclear black market, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir.
Fortunately, fear did what international arms control couldn’t.
I GATHER EXPERT OPINION ON HOW THE WAR IS GOING, over at GlennReynolds.com.
THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS offers a collection of business and economic insights from all sorts of bloggers.
DAN AYKROYD: Bush now, Hillary later!
I think Hillary may feel the same way. . . .
PITCHING SOFTBALLS TO KERRY AT CNN: I think that many of today’s journalists, like Judy Woodruff, feel a certain generational antiwar solidarity, so they give him a pass on these things. But by doing so, they simply demonstrate their bias, and highlight his problems:
The press has not pressed Mr. Kerry to explain those charges. A case in point was his interview with CNN’s Judy Woodruff last Thursday. Near the end of the conversation, she raised the issue, asking: “It’s been reported that, well you’re aware of this, Vietnam veterans upset with the fact that when you came back from the war … you were accusing American troops of war crimes.”
Mr. Kerry responded with a falsehood followed by a quick shift, “I was accusing American leaders of abandoning the troops. And if you read what I said, it is very clearly an indictment of leadership … I’ve always fought for the soldiers.”
Even if Mrs. Woodruff had not read Mr. Kerry’s testimony — and it is widely available — surely she or her producer had seen the day’s work of the most widely-read political columnist in Washington, her CNN co-worker Robert Novak. In his Thursday column, “Kerry and Hanoi Jane,” Mr. Novak repeated Mr. Kerry’s statements to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and also pointed out that Mr. Kerry was the New England representative to an executive committee meeting of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, at which plans were made to sponsor “war crimes testimony” at the United Nations. A follow-up question beckoned.
Instead, Mrs. Woodruff gave Mr. Kerry a pass.
As with Kerry himself, if they thought his stands then were worthy of praise now, they’d be praising them — instead of concealing them.
February 22, 2004
I SPENT THE AFTERNOON AT THE LIBRARY, doing actual research involving actual books. I also walked around campus for a while, because the weather was pretty nice for February: sunny, and nearly 60. Students were walking around in shorts and t-shirts, trying to pretend it was spring, and the weather made it almost plausible.
That’s one thing I like about Knoxville. It can get cold here, but even a bad winter has a few breaks like this one that remind you that it isn’t permanent. One of the things I disliked about living in places like New Haven or Cambridge was that winter seemed to settle in forever.
One thing that I always find amusing about the change of seasons is the way different students react to it. Some stick to shorts and t-shirts until December, then break them out again at the least provocation. Others dress in down starting in November, and don’t give it up until April.
The weather will go to hell again tomorrow, if the forecast holds, with rain and thirtyish temperatures. But at least we got a break. And, as you can see, I managed to walk around campus a bit before and after my research.
UPDATE: Large image formerly at top removed out of mercy to dialup users; still visible here if you’re interested.
OIL-TRUST UPDATE:
WASHINGTON–Former Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond said Saturday that President George Bush should make an Alaska-like dividend for Iraqis a central element of his re-election campaign. . . .
He noted that Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, at his request, proposed to President Bush that the U.S. push for an Alaska-style dividend program after the Iraq war.
“Ted, incidentally, wrote me back after that and said ‘I talked to the president. He’s very much interested. Stay tuned,'” Hammond said.
Interesting.
WAS THE GUARDIAN the victim of a cruel practical joke?
UPDATE: Tim Blair has more, including a link to the “suppressed” report, in handy PDF format. . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Phil Bowermaster notes that although The Guardian looks bad here, the Global Business Network doesn’t deserve the blame for The Guardian’s gullibility and alarmism.
ED CONE REPORTS on John Edwards’ Internet operation.
HAITIPUNDIT has lots of news on goings-on in Haiti (pretty much all bad), and links to John Engel, who’s blogging from Haiti. One observation: “The conflict is incredibly complex. The rebels for the most part, are baddies. In my opinion, Aristide and his regime are also baddies.”
JUAN COLE is starting a project to translate American political thought into Arabic. As one Cranky Professor observes:
I can’t imagine a better thing for intellectuals to do than pay semi-employed Iraquis with good English to translate (the translator should indeed be a native speaker of the destination language).
Cole has more on his project here.
“DUBIOUS ACCOUNTING” AT THE PEW CHARITABLE TRUSTS: The entire nonprofit sector is ripe for scrutiny.
Read this, too.
STEPHEN GREEN says that CNN muffed it in its coverage of the Iranian elections.
HERE’S RALPH NADER’S CAMPAIGN WEBSITE — but there’s no blog. Come on, Ralph — this is the 21st century!
THE LANCET has retracted a study on autism and vaccination:
Editor Dr. Richard Horton said Dr. Andrew Wakefield and a team of British scientists who conducted the study on the triple measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine didn’t reveal that they were being paid by a legal-aid service looking into whether families could sue over the immunizations.
Horton called it a “fatal conflict of interest.”
More importantly, the study has been discredited by other research. Still, this should put paid to the notion that drug companies are the only source of conflicts of interest where this sort of thing is concerned. If more people get sick because this study has led to fewer vaccinations (as seems to be the case) should the scientists and the legal-aid people be liable? (Via Howard Lovy).