Archive for 2007

WWL TV projects a Bobby Jindal win in the Louisiana governor’s race.

RIOTS IN AMSTERDAM.

I THINK THE WORD YOU’RE LOOKING FOR IS . . . well, never mind: “And yet maybe Krugman is not really an economist.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES: “Every now and then, we are tempted to double-check that the Democrats actually won control of Congress last year. It was particularly hard to tell this week.”

It’ll be even harder to tell who’s in charge if Hillary’s elected! Like President Cheney, only with hair . . . .

NEAL GABLER acts classy.

A BIG STRAW-POLL WIN FOR MIKE HUCKABEE. But reportedly, Rudy was well-received too. More on Rudy here.

Our podcast interview with Huckabee can be found here. I found him quite straightforward and likable, notwithstanding our disagreements on social issues. We haven’t interviewed Rudy yet, but we’d like to.

UPDATE: Rob Port says that conservatives shouldn’t back Huckabee because he’s a nanny-stater. Yep. That’s why libertarians don’t, too.

More nanny-state related criticism of Huckabee can be found here: “There’s little doubt that Huckabee is a ‘big government’ guy when it comes to taxes.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: More on Rudy from Jennifer Rubin.

MORE: Heh.

GEE, DO YOU THINK? “Maybe we’re winning in Iraq.”

But we’re not done yet. Michael Yon emails:

Am in Baghdad and there is still fighting where I am. Heard two separate IEDs go off against American vehicles this afternoon. Both were just down the road. Minor injuries except for a soldier who lost a foot, but the vehicles were badly damaged. (Both strikes were by EFP.)

Iraq is improving but there are still some very bad spots.

Absolutely. Still, it’s hardly the siege of Khe Sanh. And check out this Baghdad photo essay from Greyhawk.

EARLIER THIS WEEK, BUSH SAID HE WAS STILL RELEVANT.

But searching him on Google News just now, I’m not so sure:

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UPDATE: No, this isn’t a photoshop. Google News was briefly returning this result for everything I searched, so I saved a screenshot.

Here’s another:

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DALLAS MORNING NEWS: ” Anyone who doubts journalists’ decency and good sense need only to have seen Fox 4’s Rebecca Aguilar in action this week to have their worst impressions confirmed. . . . Although Channel 4 pulled the video from its Web site, you still may find a copy floating around the Internet. Search for ‘reporter ambushes senior citizen.'”

UPDATE: Of course, this isn’t very impressive either.

INSTAPUNDIT’S ISTANBUL CORRESPONDENT, CLAIRE BERLINSKI, EMAILS: “For what it’s worth, there have been jet fighters flying over the Bosphorus all night, rattling the windows and alarming my cats. Someone really wants to impress upon the citizens of Istanbul that they have a lot of loud, scary planes. I dare say it’s not the Israelis dumping the odd fuel tank, either.”

UPDATE: Protesting Turkish incursion talk in Kurdistan.

MORE PROBLEMS WITH THE CLINTON CAMPAIGN’S FUNDRAISING, along with this complaint:

The saddest thing about all this is that no one has a very strong incentive to do the legwork on researching it. The campaigns don’t want to know if their donors are shady, as we saw in the willful blindness towards Norman Hsu. Hillary’s rivals have an incentive, of course, but there must be fundraising skeletons in Obama’s and Edwards’s closets too, just as there must be plenty on the GOP side. That makes it a game of mutually assured destruction among the oppo research teams and no one wants to play that game. The media doesn’t have a grand incentive either, the LA Times’s laudable example notwithstanding, because investigations like these are resource-intensive while basically amounting to fishing expeditions, with little guarantee of finding any wrongdoing. Plus, once you investigate one campaign, you open yourself up to charges of bias by not investigating them all. The best hope is the FEC, but does the FEC have the time and personnel — and political will, given the inevitable feeble claims of anti-Asian racism that are bubbling up here — to do spot checks like this? I’m asking honestly; I don’t know the answer. And if the answer is yes, why aren’t they doing it?

Because all this stuff is just a game to fool the rubes?

NANCY PELOSI REBUKES PETE STARK: WHY? “When you’re down to your last 11%, you stop digging.”

Stark’s remarks were bad enough that even the lefty blogosphere had to clean things up.

UPDATE: A comparison.

MARK STEYN: “Societies in the early stages of decline can be very agreeable – and often more agreeable than societies trying to cope with prosperity and rapid growth. . . . Civilized decline can be so charming you don’t notice it’s about to accelerate into uncivilized decline.”

I remember Poul Anderson making the same point in one of his Dominic Flandry stories.

STEPHEN FLYNN LOOKS AT five disasters that are coming soon if we don’t address crumbling infrastructure. Problem is, the political rewards for fixing old stuff are far inferior to the political rewards for building new stuff — even if the old stuff is stuff we need, and the new stuff is showy pork.

BENAZIR BHUTTO speaks.

PROBABLY NOT: “Is there anything more macabre, stupid and campy in the modern political confusion than a nationalist Serbian Nazi?”