“IT WAS MY UNDERSTANDING that there would be no math.”

LIFE IMITATES ALLAHPUNDIT: Again.

RON BAILEY offers thoughts on longevity, and its critics.

LORIE BYRD writes that this ad by “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” is “the most devastating political ad I have ever seen – bar none.”

Yeah, I’d say that’s right. And Kerry played right into this with all the stuff about Vietnam and medals.

UPDATE: More reflections from personal experience, here. And more thoughts here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Duff urges caution. Well, there’s plenty of time before the election to find out what’s going on. I suppose that the criticism of Kerry’s war record might turn out to be as bogus as the criticism of Bush’s National Guard service.

Meanwhile, here’s more on the subject from Collin Levey in the Seattle Times.

MORE: Skepticism about the ad here. And Polipundit thinks it’s too harsh to be effective — and he’s soliciting your comments.

STILL MORE: John McCain is condemning the ad.

On the other hand, Hugh Hewitt (whose permalinks are busted again — what’s up with that?) wants parity, and sees a double standard:

This story deserves as much coverage as Bush’s air guard service received.

The ad deserves as much coverage as the independent expenditure committee ads from the left receive.

The book should get as much attention as the flood of books from the left have received.

In fact, since Kerry made his Vietnam service the centerpiece of his acceptance speech –from “reporting for duty” through the close– this story in all its ramifications deserves far more attention than has been paid to the Bush air guard story, the other ads, and those other books.

As they say, developing. . . .

FORGET CATBLOGGING: Now it’s bratblogging!

PROF. BAINBRIDGE RESPONDS TO KERRY’S DEFENDERS on the “how liberal is John Kerry?” question.

Unlike (apparently) a lot of people, I don’t think it’s bad to be liberal. But I guess you’d expect me to say that, as a liberal blogger myself.

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Chris Lawrence weighs in with a discussion of liberal-ranking methodology. In his email, he calls it “drearily technical, but hopefully accessible.” I don’t think it’s dreary, but then as a law professor my dreariness threshold may be higher than normal. Hey, let’s rank me on that! [I think the blog does that already. — Ed. Good point.]

More here, in a paper by three political scientists devoted to the question of whether Kerry really is the most liberal member of the Senate or not. (Short answer: Not really.)

BRIAN DOHERTY’S NEW BOOK, This is Burning Man, which I mentioned a while back, is now out. He’s also set up a snazzy new website.

IT’S TIME FOR CONGRESS TO GET BACK TO WORK! Amen.

DANIEL DREZNER WONDERS “What the f#$% is going on at the FBI?”

Yeah, I’ve been wondering that for a while.

SOMEBODY PLEASE help Justin Katz get a job.

BETTER ALL THE TIME: Don’t miss The Speculist’s roundup of good news that you would otherwise almost certainly miss.

HERE’S AN ARTICLE from my local alt-weekly on Snapped, a new series on Oxygen that features the Insta-Wife as a regular. You can see a brief preview here, if you’re interested.

UPDATE: In answer to some readers’ questions: No, I haven’t gotten to meet Laura San Giacomo yet. And yes, I’m disappointed about that.

ATRIOS HAS BEEN UNMASKED as Duncan Black. Now, I think, Duncan Black has been unmasked as Emily Litella. Wrong t-shirt? “Never mind!”

In truth, I have no particular position on pan-Africanism, though as someone with African relatives I’ll note that most Americans who talk about that stuff have quite literally no idea what they’re talking about. Perhaps one day I’ll collect some amusing anecdotes on the topic. (And apologies to Tom Maguire for stepping on the punchline.)

UPDATE: More thoughts on diversity here. Though to “ROYGBIV” I’d have to say that “ROFLMAO” is a more appropriate response to Duncan’s post.

Or maybe just “heh.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Steve Gifford emails:

I’ve just glanced at the comment thread re your t-shirt and it is one of the most hysterical, and at the same time disturbing, things I have ever read. I would hope that the claims that wearing such a shirt made you a white supremacist were intended as a satire on the insistence of the American left on labelling every act by a person, but I half think some of them are serious. Shouldn’t someone be helping these people get the psychiatric help they need?

Actually, they’ve fallen victim to Karl Rove’s insidiously clever “Blogpaper” strategy, in which vast reserves of potential activism are siphoned off into pointless hatred toward an obscure law professor who maintains a personal website. I think he has provocateurs over there keeping them stirred up.

At least, I hope so. That something like that could grow on its own is too disturbing to contemplate. . .

I don’t which is more embarrassing for Black, here — the comments of his critics, or the comments of his supporters? Make up your own mind.

But hey, anybody can write a blog post that doesn’t work out. It’s no big deal.

Though I do wonder what Black meant about “blaming the victims of genocide.” But since he doesn’t provide a link, it beats me. Could he be talking about this piece? That would be absurd — which, I suppose, would fit the rest of his post. . . .

MORE: Well, I’m embarrassed that I didn’t figure this out for myself. It all makes sense, now . . .

KERRY THE “MOST LIBERAL SENATOR?” Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler thinks that the press is giving Republicans a free ride on this issue. He’s probably right about that — though he’d be more persuasive if he’d provide a list of senators that he thinks are to the left of Kerry.

UPDATE: A different take on the just how liberal is John Kerry question, from Stephen Bainbridge, who compares Kerry’s record with Paul Wellstone’s. “So if Kerry and Wellstone were so close in score, did that make Kerry a ‘Wellstone liberal’ or Wellstone a ‘Kerry liberal’? Either way, they were both pretty far out of the mainstream.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Kastellec rises to the challenge, sending this:

I’m taking up your challenge to see how many senators are more liberal than Kerry. The following are NOMINATE ratings compiled by Professor Keith Poole (available at Link, along with a description of how they are calculated). While the method use to calculate them is complicated, they are basically measures of liberalism-conservatism based on a Congressman’s entire career, not just on one Congress as the flawed National Journal ratings are. Because they incorporate all nonunaminous vote and are not biased by absention, NOMINATE scores are considered far superior to interest group ratings.

The scores range from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most liberal). Below are ratings for all the senators of the 107th Congress (sorry for the poor formating), ranking from most liberal to most conservative. You can see that 15 Democrats are to the left of Kerry, which means that while he is by no means a conservative Democrat, he is not on the fringe of the party, and is clearly not the most liberal senator. Edwards, meannwhile, is well toward the moderate wing of the party, belying claims of his liberal extremism.

Click “more” for, er, more.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oliver Willis — earning his pay from David Brock — sends this link, and this one, too. Gosh, you’d think that being “liberal” was bad or something!

And I still think Oliver belongs on TV.

(more…)

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is up. It’s bloggerific!

TERROR-WARNING UPDATE: Greg Djerejian says it’s not just a “rowback,” it’s a “walkback” at the New York Times and Washington Post regarding their coverage of the terror warning data:

Again, why is Bush being assailed, almost daily, as a scurrilous purveyor of half-truths and/or Big Lies? Because that’s a judicious read on the merits–or because the Democrats are now increasingly playing politics with the terror alert issue?

They should be very careful here (as Kerry, sensing this, has been of late). It’s a strategy (most recently floated by Dean on Wolf’s Blitzer show) that will back-fire on them in a big way. After all, it reinforces the image that the Democrats don’t take national (or homeland) security seriously enough. And, believe me, that’s not an image the Dems wanna stoke.

No, it’s not.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: “People support abortion rights out of fear. They support gay marriage out of love.”

NANODYNAMISM AND NANOTIMIDITY: My TechCentralStation column is up.

ERIC MULLER is guest-blogging over at The Volokh Conspiracy, where he’s promised to post serial criticism of Michelle Malkin’s new book. Muller knows much more about the historical aspects of the book than I do, though what really interests me is today’s dysfunctional immigration system — which, as I mentioned below, seems mostly to inconvenience honest people while remaining porous to terrorists and criminals.

There’s a connection, of course — I think that Malkin’s right to say that reaction to the wrongs (well, I think they were wrongs) of the Japanese internment of World War Two is limiting our ability to do the rather mild things that we need to do now. (A couple of readers hysterically emailed wondering if Malkin, was advocating “interning all Muslims,” or even if I was. Uh, no. But fingerprinting people at the border hardly counts as internment, despite what people sometimes say.) Still, I’m afraid that the historical argument about the rights and wrongs of what happened over 60 years ago will hijack the discussion of what to do today. That could turn out to be expensive.

UPDATE: Malkin’s talking about the present day in this piece, in which she praises anti-terror efforts by Charles Schumer. And she responds to some criticism by Muller here. I hope we’ll see a fruitful dialogue, though again I’m far more interested in what we should be doing now than in revisiting the past, worthy as such efforts might be.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader David Kern emails:

Regarding your comment that you are much more interested in a debate about present day protection than rehashing Japanese internment:

While they may be competely separate issues, they have become inseparably connected in the political conscience. As a student at Columbia Law, every single argument I hear against profiling starts with condemning the Japanese internment as both an unnecessary and unbalanced response to a non-existent threat. It doesn’t take a lot of additional preprogramming to eliminate profiling as an acceptable action under any circumstances.

No discussion of our current options exists because the present historical understanding of internment is a silver bullet for the enemies of profiling. In political terms, it simply plays great and makes the issue untouchable for realists requiring a moderate appeal. Without something to address these arguments, little headway in the current, more important discussion is possible. A reasoned argument that adds interpretation of these past events could open discussions about what kind of trade-offs we currently face and how, if at all, we can effectively target high-risk groups while dispersing the costs of security to the general population. Regardless of the final answers, this seems a project very worthy of attention.

Yeah. I agree. I’m not at all convinced that ethnic profiling is the way to go — and I seem to recall Bruce Schneier making some cogent arguments along that line a while back — but I definitely agree that the history regarding internment is often used as a way of shutting off debate. And Eric Muller thinks so, too:

I’ll note a part of the book where I think Michelle is quite right. In her introduction (pages xiii to xxxv), or at least in certain parts of it, she makes the case that the civil liberties Left and representatives of the Japanese American community have not helped anyone think clearly about the Roosevelt Adminisration’s policies by attacking each step of the Bush Administration’s domestic antiterrorism policy since 9/11 as a reprise of the worst mistakes of WWII. This was one of the two main points I made in my article “Inference or Impact? Racial Profiling and the Internment’s True Legacy,” which Michelle graciously cites in her book.

A big part of what drove Michelle to write this book was her disgust with people on the left who have never met an antiterrorism policy they like, and who have trotted out the scary specter of the incarceration of Japanese Americans at every opportunity. In “Inference or Impact,” I worried about the Chicken Little effect of repeatedly claiming a replay of the WWII experience of Japanese Americans–that it might lead people to minimize the reality of that experience. Michelle is doing that in this book, and in at least a small way, I think the civil liberties left has some of its own rhetoric to blame. David Cole didn’t force Michelle Malkin to write this book, mind you. But maybe some of David’s rhetoric helped her build her head of steam.

He’s still not a fan, but this is an important point. (And I should note that I think well of David Cole, too, with whom I’ve worked in the past on some of these issues, though I do think he’s been somewhat alarmist). It’s been very difficult to have any kind of reasonable discussion of these issues in the nearly three years since September 11, and I think that has cost us dearly in terms of security. I’m also afraid that if we have another major terror attack, we won’t have that debate then, either.

MORE: These scurrilous photoshops of Malkin — one showing her in front of a bunch of concentration-camp inmates, quite a few others frankly racist (is Ed Cone endorsing these? Surely not) — prove Malkin’s, and Muller’s, and Kern’s, points about the Left’s desire to shut off debate here and about its willingness to call names rather than engage in argument. That’s a loser’s strategy, in more than one way.

The one about my hair, on the other hand, is kind of funny — though dollars to donuts the guy who did it is bald. . . .

STILL MORE: Muller has another post that seems to make Malkin’s thesis regarding MAGIC intercepts as the basis for federal action look shaky — though it doesn’t make FDR look very good, either:

In particular, there is no evidence that President Roosevelt ever saw or was briefed on the MAGIC excerpts the author mentions, let alone that he was decisively influenced by them. As I detail at great length in my book “By Order of the President,” throughout the 1930s Roosevelt expressed suspicions of Japanese Americans, irrespective of citizenship, and sought to keep the community under surveillance. As early as 1936, he already approved plans to arrest suspicious Japanese Americans in Hawaii if war broke out. As of early 1941, before FDR could have received any MAGIC excerpts, the Justice Department and the military had already put together lists of aliens to be taken into custody (the so-called ABC lists). These were not based on suspicion of individual activities, but of the suspected individuals’ position in Japanese communities. Roosevelt continued to believe in a threat despite receiving reports of overwhelming community loyalty from the FBI and his own agents, reports he called “nothing much new.”

More politicized intelligence, in an Administration dead-set on a pre-determined policy!

MORE THAN JUST A GEEK: Ed Morrissey thinks that the press has dropped the ball in reporting on the capture of Al Qaeda operative Naeem Noor Khan.

BLOGS IN HIGH PLACES: Heh.

MARK STEYN:

I scoffed at Edwards’s “two Americas” riff when he was peddling it in New Hampshire, because its notion that there’s the toffs in their mansions and the great unwashed in their Dickensian workhouses and ne’er the twain shall meet seemed complete bunk.

On reflection, I now see there might indeed be something to the idea of a remote privileged class hermetically sealed off from the masses. Unfortunately, John Kerry seems to be the best living exemplar of it. . . .

The tonal disconnect is only going to get worse between now and November.

I disagree. All that Kerry needs to do to stay in the race is to offer straight, credible talk on the war. More on that here.

FRITZ SCHRANCK saw Burning Annie recently, and liked it as much as I did.

Check out the trailers, here.

HERE’S WHAT THEY SAID about Dale Earnhardt:

When it came to going fast and turning left, no one could call Dale Earnhardt a chicken. Simply, he was The Intimidator.

Now it looks as if he might become a role model for Democrats:

They Report, We Intimidate

The Boston Democratic convention featured a rich side menu of interesting seminars. One of the most controversial was a workshop for new Democratic campaign press secretaries that sounded like a call to arms in its advice on how to deal with the new media universe.

Lecturers urged press secretaries to confront what one warned was “media that are no longer tilted in your direction.” Bullying was openly encouraged. “When it comes to the media,” suggested Democratic strategist James Carville, “intimidation works.” “Challenge them,” added David Brock of Media Matters, a new liberal group set up to criticize conservative media outlets. Democrats used to rail at the likes of Reed Irvine and his conservative group Accuracy in Media, accusing them of nitpicking at media stories and ginning up public complaints against them. No more. It will be interesting to see what, if any, “intimidation” success stories the Democrats will be touting in coming months.

–John Fund

I suspect that if a Republican were reported to have said this, it would be bigger news. Hey, the intimidation must already be working!

But actually, the most revealing bit is the part about media “no longer tilted in your direction.” It’s not media bias that’s bothering these guys. It’s the fear that it may slip away.

UPDATE: Is it already happening? Here’s what the reporter whom Teresa Heinz told to “shove it” reports:

“I hope you burn in hell,” read one e-mail. “You’re a (expletive) Nazi,” went another. “Teresa should have told you to go (expletive) yourself,” another friendly e-mailer offered. And these were among the milder communiques; those that included death threats will be forwarded to the senders’ respective hometown police departments.

One of my daughters back in Pittsburgh was brought to tears by a caller to our house. The clever woman identified herself as a Washington reporter seeking to interview me but then embarked on a filthy tirade. It seems a member of the Heinz Kerry Civility Enforcement Patrol posted our home address and telephone number on the response part of my convention blog.

So far, it doesn’t seem to be working on this guy: “That said, and as I shove off from Boston, I’m still waiting for the answer to my question of Sunday night last.”

WHY I CAN’T WIN: Read the update to this post.