Saturday, April 7, 2007

07 Apr 2007 10:12 pm

Race and Sex and Swingers

A dispatch from a heterosexual subculture.

07 Apr 2007 08:08 pm

Email of the Day

A reader writes:

I understand your point in reponse to Sam Harris: if humans are genetically predisposed to faith, and if faith provides so many benefits to the individual and to society, why try and eliminate faith, why not let everyone believe what they want? It’s a much more manageable project than trying to deny faith to the masses anyway.

But I just can't buy into that argument. I translate that as saying: let’s pass out the security blankets, pick the one you want, and we don’t care what’s really true.

Example: God created man out of dirt? The female gender of the human species was created from a bone? Please. You know the list of these types of Christian idiocies is long indeed. Christians must take responsibility for what their holy book specifically claims is the truth. You seem quite happy to pick and choose what you want to take literally (the stuff that specifically makes you feel good), and what you want to believe is just metaphor (all the ridiculous stuff that no right-thinking person could ever believe). How can the Christian religion be said to embody any kind of integrity when all of their followers indulge in these personal pick-and-choose shenanigans?

Also, this nebulous 'God is Love' argument is old and well-worn, and doesn't mesh with the specific claims made by Christianity. I don’t disagree with the statement, but I am saying that Christianity is claiming much more than just that, a lot more.

I think it is time to end this debate between you and Sam. It has ended up where it was always been headed: in the inability of the believer to rationally answer even very basic and glaringly obvious rational questions about their faith, and instead, to descriptively wallow in their personal love affair with their particular belief system despite all the irrationality, obscenity, and contradictory evidence offered by their magic holy book.

And a happy Easter to you too.

07 Apr 2007 07:12 pm

Face of the Day

A member of the Britannia Coconutters waits his turn to dance boundary to boundary in Bacup, on April 7, 2007 in Lancashire, northern England. Every Easter Saturday for over a hundred years the men have performed pagan dances to welcome Spring and ward off evil Winter spirits. The Coconutters derive their name from the time when coal miners would wear coconut shells on their knees for protection in the pits. Their blackened faces are to disguise them from evil spirits after the dance has finished and also reflects the coal mining traditions. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

07 Apr 2007 06:01 pm

Coulter on Darfur

Here's what Mickey Kaus's good friend believes:

These people can't even wrap up genocide. We've been hearing about this slaughter in Darfur forever - and they still haven't finished. The aggressors are moving like termites across that country. It's like genocide by committee. Who's running this holocaust in Darfur, FEMA?

07 Apr 2007 05:29 pm

The View From Your Window

San Francisco, 6.30 pm.

07 Apr 2007 04:21 pm

Criminalizing Christanity

Somehow, I think James Dobson won't be too alarmed by this instance.

07 Apr 2007 02:48 pm

The Decline of Violence

It may not feel that way most of the time, but the data are geting clearer. As so often, Steven Pinker is a reliable and fascinating guide to the oh-so-marginally increasing civilization of mankind. (Hat tip: 3Quarks.)

07 Apr 2007 02:24 pm

Easter Snow

Freshly green leaves dusted with snow out of my window at around 7 am today. Have a blessed triduum.

07 Apr 2007 02:13 pm

Blogfight Quote of the Day

"Whaa? Marcotte seems to be pulling in signals from outer space. Just flat out nutty, Amanda. Or did you even read this post?" - Althouse on Marcotte on headscarves on speakers of the House.

07 Apr 2007 01:55 pm

Inevitable

An Iranian diplomat set free last Tuesday claims he was tortured by the CIA in captivity. Who is going to believe the CIA's denials? Who, at this point, should?

07 Apr 2007 01:51 pm

Look Familiar?

DVD-burning in Islamabad. The practice of theocrats everywhere: destroy freedom of speech and music and art with violence. Especially fire. The file caption for the photo tells you most of what you need to know:

Students at an Islamic madrassa burn thousands of movie DVDs, videos and music CDs April 6, 2007 at the Lal Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan. The event, reminiscent of the early days of the Taliban in Afghanistan, took place within two kilometers of the Pakistani presidential palace, as well as the heavily-fortified U.S. embassy. Thousands of Pakistani soldiers and paramilitary troops were deployed to the capitol in the previous week, and many believe a confrontation between government troops and the students is imminent. Clerics at the mosque, known as the most radical in Islamabad, want Pakistan to adopt a Taliban-style government. They maintain that movies and music are un-Islamic.

Today's news is that Musharraf is holding back.
 
(Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

07 Apr 2007 01:09 pm

Democrats and the Drug War

I bang on about this issue all the time. So do many libertarians and liberals. But what happens when politicians have to deal with the issue? In many ways, the Democrats who know better and still pander to drug-war insanity on marijuana are worse than the authoritarians on the right. Arianna is right to huff. Clinton, Obama and Spitzer are all missing in action - and will be for the foreseeable future. Only a Republican can call off the drug war, it seems. And none will.

07 Apr 2007 01:03 pm

We Win

When Disneyland has same-sex fairy-tale weddings, the culture war is over, right?

07 Apr 2007 01:02 pm

Product Mortality

The life-spans of most products are declining as human life-spans lengthen. The wonder of capitalism.

07 Apr 2007 12:59 pm

A Threat to Web Radio?

David Byrne sounds an alarm.

07 Apr 2007 06:07 am

South Park And Life

Cartman reincarnated as a sleep-free Wii hippie.

Friday, April 6, 2007

06 Apr 2007 09:10 pm

Email of the Day

A reader writes:

Oh my god! I think I just had the first realization of loss of the moral high ground! I was reading this story of the detainees:

"And after the 15 marines and sailors were seized they were subjected to random interrogation and rough handling, and faced constant psychological pressure, they said."

I found myself thinking thank God they got away so easily and then I realized that I was comparing their treatment to Abu Graib - my frame of reference was the horrible treatment meted out by America - not some far away dictatorship! And this is supposed to be the land of the Miranda law - the irony has me stumped.

The one silver lining of this humiliation is that finally - finally! - some have begun to absorb what the Bush detention policy has led to. I'm not done with McCarthy, by the way. His profound ignorance of the Geneva Conventions has finally been exposed - by him. Stay tuned.

06 Apr 2007 07:28 pm

The Logic of Cheney, Ctd.

A reader (along with many others) writes:

You have a perceptive analysis of Cheney's comments, but your conclusion is extremely disappointing. The Bush administration has turned the U.S. into a rogue nation sowing pain and suffering across the globe that will take generations to fully recover from. The amount of damage the administration can do in the next year and a half is incalculable. To say that the Democrats, having been given power by the people to correct our course, should instead give up and be the same kind of enablers to these two power-addicted men as the Republicans were, is, to be frank, infuriating to me.

If you have no stomach for one of the clearest moral struggles to come along in a generation, then please be quiet and let other public figures step in who are willing to get their hands dirty fighting these dangerous and immoral men in the trenches of Washington. Either Bush and Cheney should be impeached immediately, or the provisions for impeachment should be removed from the Constitution.

I have stomach for a fight. But I see no point in fighting battles you cannot win. The hard truth is: the Congress will not defund the troops until the fall at the earliest, if ever. The decision will and should at that point be the Republicans'. If they believe that the surge has been successful enough to merit continued support for Bush's policy, then they will vote for the funding. If they don't, they won't. Without them, there's no chance for a veto over-ride. But with them, it will be Republicans who end this war, and the responsibility for the failure will be evident. Any attempt till then to monkey around with funding will play right into Cheney's hands and make an end or new phase to the war less, rather than more, likely.

The moral cost is great: American lives lost for a policy that will still almost certainly fail. I do not deny that and I respect those who believe it trumps these other calculations. But the moral cost of immediate withdrawal is also great: possible genocide and mass-murder that will dwarf even the tens (and possibly hundreds) of thousands of Iraqis killed so far. On reflection, I should have been more precise: the Democrats should support funding this war as long as the critical swing-vote Republicans do. Meanwhile, they should make clear they differ with the president; in fact, they should make that case even more clearly. But they would be fools to cut off the troops. Fools. There is also a tiny chance that things may go for the better in Iraq. The Democrats should not be in the business of hoping for defeat. They should be in the business first of showing how Bush and Cheney have made defeat almost inevitable in Iraq - and a far greater defeat in the wider war more and more likely.

Then fight them in 2008. With everything you've got.

06 Apr 2007 06:37 pm

Rivera vs O'Reilly

I never thought I would be on Geraldo's side. But what you see in O'Reilly's near-violent hatred of "the other" is exactly what Geraldo says it is: a distraction and in its emotional force, a disgrace.

06 Apr 2007 06:18 pm

McCain Retracts

He "misspoke" about his walk in Baghdad.

06 Apr 2007 05:46 pm

The British Hostages

They were blindfolded and experienced a "mock execution." This interrogation tactic is disgusting, unlawful and in violation of the Geneva Accords. It has also been practiced in several recorded incidents by the United States military under the command of George W. Bush, after he signed a memo allowing suspension of baseline Geneva Protections in the war on terror. Unlike detainees held by the U.S.., however, the Brits were not apparently subjected to other "coercive interrogation." In that respect, Ahmadinejad in this case has upheld a higher moral standard than the American president with respect to detainees. Those are the facts. The moral bright line between them and us has been horribly blurred - by president George W. Bush and his enablers in the torture regime. Advantage: the enemy.

06 Apr 2007 05:13 pm

Darkness Over All The Land

A Christian reflects on Good Friday and the question of torture.

06 Apr 2007 04:52 pm

Conservatism and Non-Violence

A friend wrote me recently about my book, "The Conservative Soul," and had many trenchant criticisms. But one in particular struck home, and I've been thinking about it ever since. Today is a good day to air it - because what Good Friday is ultimately about, to my mind, is non-violence. That's why I felt so passionately about Mel Gibson's attempt to depict Christ's passion as primarily about the violence inflicted by others on Jesus. In fact, it is and was primarily about Jesus' decision to accept the violence without resistance because he wanted to show that only non-violence can ever truly, deeply defeat violence. Gibson never gave us the Gospel teaching to make sense of this, which is why the film failed so profoundly as a Christian movie.

Complete non-violence is a religious teaching, not a political one. I am not a pacifist. But a Christian grappling with politics will nonetheless, I think, seek a system where violence is minimized, and a free space is given for faithful non-violence to flourish. That's why the civil rights movement was, in my view, a religious movement at its core, and was never better illustrated than by the choice of its participants to submit non-violently to the hatred and fear directed toward them, to resist it but not to counter it with more of the same.

For me, Christianity can lead to a certain form of political conservatism, one dedicated to law and tradition and civility and conversation, not tyranny and ideology and warfare and violence. This conservatism is just as accessible to atheists as well - and was perhaps best expressed by Hobbes. It will require an effective monopoly of violence by the state, but will henceforth do everything to restrain its manifestation in the civil and international sphere. But my friend made the case better in his email, and suggested a line of inquiry well worth pursuing. I reprint it here, as a point of reflection on today of all days:

First, to me the book came across as essentially about a religious conservative disposition. Nothing wrong with that, and don't get me wrong, I liked the sections on religion. They were informative and helped in my own thinking about god and faith. But it has to be said that because there is lot about religion, the book might seem less relevant to the secular reader, someone who wants to completely divorce politics from questions of faith. It seemed to me that you began talking about fundamentalist religion to make a point about the 'politics of faith' of the theoconservatives. That made the point well, But the 'politics of skepticism' sections also had a religious tinge to them. So there is less on offer for the secular reader. I don’t think this was your intent but I could see some people concluding that conservatism is only possible, or even synonymous, with religion. Since there are atheist conservatives, I felt that the book could have offered more for someone who doesn't believe in god but who knows from practical point of view, or who has arrived at the conclusion philosophically, that human change does not and cannot take place ideologically, that it is always contingent. I suppose a theoretical discussion about contingency would have gone beyond what you were trying to achieve, but for readers hungry for more theory, I think it left some things unexplored. This was probably a difficult line for you to draw.

In my view this is more important to conservatives than they want to recognize. It’s easy to say that conservatism is an anti-theoretical political sensibility, and Oakeshott certainly made that plain enough. However, Oakeshott was never completely satisfied with that either – he was a theorist and in my view his conservatism was based as much in his philosophical views as in his disposition. This probably goes against other readers of Oakeshott but I think at least Paul Franco would agree with me that Oakeshott’s strict divide between theory and practice cannot be maintained in his own writings.

My own view is that for conservatives to get their 'soul' back (a good word, by the way), they are going to have to think about at least one theoretical problem, the one that Oakeshott spent so much time on: authority. The Left has no use for political authority and that is their mistake. But the American conservative is equally blind. Americans generally do not worry about authority but opt instead to use entirely a vocabulary of power. Which is just to say that the peculiar problem in America is that all politics are politics of faith. There are no true politics of skepticism.

So my second point is that American conservatives face this difficulty and yet it is not really dealt with in your book. I think it would have really given the book more teeth to challenge theo- or neo-conservatives with the claim that their idea of politics is not authoritative. This is, to be fair, implied in the discussion of religion, but I think it needed to come out explicitly. In the end there can be no freedom without authority and American conservatives (like Margaret Thatcher) have lost sight of this. Perhaps we disagree about her, so that’s one to talk about. (Actually I found myself agreeing with you on some points about Thatcher, and that irritated me since I thought I had made up my mind about her).

The third point is the most important. Your book says nothing about the problem of violence. This may sound strange to mention, but against the backdrop of this idiotic war, it must be a question for conservatives how they stand on both the morality and political viability of military action. This is a many-pronged issue: a conservative is likely to be something of an isolationist, and he certainly would not think that democracy can be built in a day in a far away land by use of tanks and bombs. But apart from these policy problems, there is the question of whether violence should ever be chosen as a solution to political problems.

As I see it the conservative disposition has a necessary starting point in non-violence. Just as it rejects a "violence of ideas" endemic in ideology, conservatism must, even more so, reject physical violence as a solution to political or social problems. Revolutions are always fraudulent, war is the breakdown of politics. And conservatives believe in politics. War may be necessary, but when it supervenes all the stuff described in On Being Conservative, politics quickly goes out the window.

When the shame of this war really hits home for Americans, it will consist in the recollection that the best they could think of, their "Americanism," amounted to little more than the desire to drop bombs and "get their own back." Can anyone look at those 3,000 American dead, the 20,000 or so wounded, and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian dead and say to themselves that was conservatism in action?

I submit this is not because of failed policy or poorly executed military operations. It is because the venture was radical in its proposition that good things can come from violence. They rarely can. So the general worry for conservatives should be the speed and alacrity with which they chose violence both with respect to Iraq, and with respect to detainees - the problem of torture. This is what people outside America are concerned about, the image of a nation for which violence was chosen so easily and willingly, for whom it might be again. Just where is the conservatism, the idea of a conversational politics, if violence is the solution?

I am quite certain, by the way, that Oakeshott was against violence except in the last resort. The violence thing worries me most. A guy like President Bush doesn't worry about such things because he is "righteous" in the eyes of his god. But a conservative should.

06 Apr 2007 03:00 pm

Face Of The Day

06 Apr 2007 02:27 pm

Stable But Homosexual

An Onion classic that for some reason, I relate to. Or am I being "emotion-wrought"?

06 Apr 2007 12:15 pm

The Logic of Cheney

Reading the transcript from Limbaugh's show, one realizes what Cheney's vision of the future is: a Middle East permanently occupied by American forces, because any withdrawal anywhere means a victory for the terrorists everywhere. Money quote:

[The Democrats] seem to think that we can withdraw from Iraq and walk away from it. They ignore the lessons of the past. Remember what happened in Afghanistan. We'd been involved in Afghanistan in the eighties, supporting the Mujahideen against the Soviets and prevailed. We won. Everybody walked away, and in the nineties, Afghanistan became a safe haven for terrorists, an area for training camps where Al-Qaeda trained 20,000 terrorists in the late nineties, and the base from which they launched attacks on the United States on 9/11. So those are very real problems, and to advocate withdrawal from Iraq at this point, it seems to me, simply would play right into the hands of Al-Qaeda.

So what would be the feasible conditions for withdrawal? I see none. Even if we were to "win," as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Cheney sees that as a reason to stay. If there is any chance of "losing," we also have to stay. The same logic applies to Pakistan were Musharraf to fall. And Saudi Arabia if that autocracy were to collapse. If the criterion is now space for Islamist terrorists to return, then we don't so much have mission creep as mission explosion. We're talking empire here - for ever. At least that's the logical conclusion of Cheney's control-fixation. And, of course, as these occupations create more terrorists, Cheney uses that as more reason to keep fighting. There is no end to this strategy - just permanent war, occupation and terror.

And domestically, you can see Cheney outfitting the executive office with extraordinary powers to fit this unending imperial project. He sees the presidency as a permanent war-maker and guardian of domestic security: able to arrest citizens at will without charging them, legally empowered to torture them if necessary, wiretap phones without warrant, and eager to treat all opposition as a form of treason against the troops. Hence his aspersions about "the motive" for wanting a redeployment out of the catastrophe Cheney has created in Iraq. Isn't the motive obvious? We have created a disaster, and we need to find some way forward. Nowhere in the interview is it assumed or even thought that the administration has any responsibility for the possibility of defeat we now face in Iraq. It is all the Democrats' fault. Because the Democrats have been running this war for the past four years.

This will be their line, and it is why, in my view, the Democrats should give the president everything he asks for in Iraq until the day he leaves office. They should explain in advance that his intransigence is the reason the troops are still in Iraq; and that because they cannot over-ride a veto, they will simply let him demonstrate his intransigence to America and the world. This is his war, not America's, at this point. He wants all the control and now wants to - typically - shuck off part of the responsibility. He needs to be made to own all of it. If he, by some miracle, succeeds, fine. We all win. If he loses, it will be his loss alone. And the Republican party needs to be made to own their president and his war as well - or to come up with a candidate who will challenge the Bush-Cheney strategy. The Democratic anti-war base has nowhere to go, and they should be ignored on the funding issue. The Dems need to play this with coolness and calm - and not into Cheney's and Limbaugh's hands. Give them what they wish for. Deny them the wedge issue they want. And hold them accountable.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

06 Apr 2007 11:43 am

Krauthammer: Bush Traded Hostages

What other inference can one draw from his column, where he also rightly bemoans the humiliation of Britain? Money quote:

The quid pro quos were not terribly subtle. An Iranian "diplomat" who had been held for two months in Iraq is suddenly released. Equally suddenly, Iran is granted access to the five Iranian "consular officials" -- Revolutionary Guards who had been training Shiite militias to kill Americans and others -- whom the United States had arrested in Irbil in January. There may have been other concessions we will never hear about. But the salient point is that American action is what got this unstuck.

Charles is not without his sources in the upper regions of the Bush administration. Tehran and London say no deal was done. Charles says there was. Who made it? Cheney? Bush? If so, the Bush administration just caved to Iran and traded hostages for hostages. Big news. Who will ask the president who authorized it?

06 Apr 2007 11:34 am

The View From Your Window

Bangor, Maine, 7 am, yesterday.

06 Apr 2007 11:12 am

The Other War

It is waged by the federal government in ways both irrational and cruel and fathomlessly stupid. I mean, of course, the war on medical marijuana. I know it's easy to laugh about pot-smoking, and laughter is certainly appropriate in many instances. But when the harmless substance is needed by the very sick, I don't find many reasons to laugh at a government's assault on the health of its own citizens. Here is yet another enraging instance of government over-reach. Even when states have sane policies on the matter - and, yes, I do believe that restricting access to medical marijuana has not a single, solitary rational reason behind it - the Bush administration seems determined to persecute the sick. If this is compassionate conservatism, then please give me the callous variety.

06 Apr 2007 10:43 am

Neocon Grief

It comes in five stages, apparently:

1. Denial: "The media doesn’t show the good news in Iraq."

2. Anger: "The treasonous far-left-liberals and their media lapdogs are making us lose in Iraq."

3. Bargaining: "If we send x-thousand more troops to Iraq, victory will be ours."

4. Depression: "Did you catch 300 yet? [munch-munch-burp] God, it made me hate liberals even more. [channels flipping] They wouldn’t last a day in ancient Sparta."

5. Advanced Literary Theory: "The hegemonic binary of 'success' and 'failure' traumatizes the (re)interpretive possibilities of an ethos of jouissance regarding the War in Iraq."

The nerd humor continues here. The RedState object of derision is here. And, yes, I laughed. Before I cried.

06 Apr 2007 10:40 am

White House Sex

Eeww.

06 Apr 2007 09:34 am

Gifted Are the Poor

A scientific study finds that wealth is inversely correlated with intelligence in determining how best to spend a small amount of money. (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution.)

06 Apr 2007 08:25 am

It's the Church, Stupid

Why people are leaving institutional religion behind. On the other hand, I also see this guy's point:

I can't stand outside and throw stones. The very things that pain and disappoint me in the church exist in myself, and I don't like them there either. Often I feel like a hypocrite among hypocrites - all of us pretending to live something we are constantly contradicting.

06 Apr 2007 07:22 am

The Politics of Cancer

A swipe at Edwards and a defense. Count me among the latter.

Thursday, April 5, 2007

05 Apr 2007 11:17 pm

Email of the Day

A reader writes:

Do you think God knows that you won't have very good answers to the points Sam Harris brings up at the end of his last reply?

05 Apr 2007 09:39 pm

Anatomy of a Blog

A scholarly study of a day's rants at Ace of Spades, one of the more conspicuously drooling froth-monsters of the bloggy right. Money quote:

The blogosphere is a gold mine for writers. I don't mean you can make a ton of money doing this -- I mean it in a figurative sense, which is the only sense in which most writers, online or off, will ever see much gold of any sort. That is, you can observe certain human behaviors under glass -- the glass of your monitor, in this case -- in much the same way Ibsen used to observe the behaviors of that scorpion her kept in a beer mug on his desk.

Let us follow the tail-swishings of one Ace O. Spades ...

Mr. Fish, let me introduce you to Mr Barrel.
 

05 Apr 2007 08:10 pm

Bike Power!

A reader writes:

Agree with you entirely about the perils of biking as transportation in a major city. At least DC is relatively bike friendly, I average about one near miss a week in Dallas, and the vast majority of my commute is on a limited access bike path, so it's probably about one near miss every 10 miles. Like you, I've been doored (and broken a rib), have lost a couple of wheels to people who suddenly turn into me, and have a twelve stitch scar on my head from some jerk that ran a red light (that did convince me of the wisdom of the helmet).

I'll admit to frequently having a bad attitude when I ride, but it's defense, not offense.

As a side note, Lifson's complaint about Critical Mass is just wrong. He claims it just assembles randomly at any possible time. Anyone who's ridden in a major metro area knows that it always assembles on the last Friday of the month at around 6. It's eminently avoidable, just like we bikers avoid all kinds of intersections because they're dangerous. The only reason so many drivers get caught is because they assume they own the road and are totally oblivious toward anyone else on those roads. If you've ridden in a Critical Mass (and if you haven't, you should), you know that it's totally liberating to be, even for an hour, the dominant form of transportation on city streets.

On the other hand:

05 Apr 2007 07:07 pm

The View From Your Window

Fitchburg, Massachusetts, 9 am today.

05 Apr 2007 07:05 pm

The Conservative Soul

A review by a friend.

05 Apr 2007 06:52 pm

Go Vlog Yourself

An orgy of blog video narcissism! And why the hell not? Althouse vlogs herself watching Idol. Scott McLemee vlogs himself watching Althouse vlog herself. Tim Lambert vlogs his dog watching vlogs. Matt Yglesias produces a critique of pure vlogging. Julian Sanchez vlogs vlogs. Megan resists. Drum dissents. Garance agrees with Drum. Drezner tweaks. I thank God for interns.

Now go vlog yourself.

05 Apr 2007 06:35 pm

Displaying Faith

Or lack of it. A dispatch from the car bumper-sticker wars.

05 Apr 2007 05:47 pm

Britain's Humiliation

I can't see how the recent fiasco with Iran can be viewed as anything else. The sailors were obviously unprepared for captivity, insufficiently defended and hapless propaganda tools for Ahmadinejad. At the same time, after they had been captured, what option did Blair really have? The UN would not have supported ratcheting up confrontation with Iran; the EU left Britain in the lurch; the war in Iraq is deeply unpopular in Britain and full-scale confrontation with Iran right now would have prompted a collapse in the British government. I'm dubious of Blair's statement that the release was accomplished

"without any deal, without any negotiation, without any side agreement of any nature whatsoever,"

but I cannot know for sure. What we can know is that Iran is currently proving to the world just how much it has gained by the disaster of the Bush Iraq policy. Tehran knows that Washington cannot go to war with Iran because the American people and the Congress will oppose it. Tehran also knows that America is stuck in Iraq, prey to every bomb Iran can throw at it and to Shiite militias over which Iran has considerable sway. This is a microcosm of where we are. And for the time being, diplomacy is our only effective way forward.

(Photo: Bertrand Langlois/AFP/Getty.)

05 Apr 2007 05:20 pm

Quote for the Day

"Imbeciles like Ann Coulter play to the basest instincts of the conservative movement to give the president a blank check to grab whatever power he wishes... Neither party has shown the courage to assert the power of Congress as a coequal branch of government. Congress should be telling the president it's not OK to detain people without trials, to grab people off the streets and 'render' them to other countries to be tortured, to listen in to our telephone conversations, and to issue signing statements that nullify laws he doesn't like," - Bruce Fein, of the Liberty Coalition. Vive la resistance.

05 Apr 2007 04:57 pm

The Clinton Problem

Zogby digs deeper.

05 Apr 2007 04:38 pm

Those Inscrutable Japanese

And other proven stereotypes.

05 Apr 2007 04:28 pm

Sentence of the Day

"In an interview with ABC radio, Vice President Cheney said he did not know if the sailors had been released because of a quid pro quo arrangement," - New York Sun. Did not know?

05 Apr 2007 04:26 pm

Bike Power

A contretemps in San Francisco led to this dyspeptic post at the paleocon American Thinker. Money quote:

My complaint is with the bad attitude way too many bicyclists have toward others. I am certain there are drivers who scare the wits out of them and endanger their lives. But that is no reason to give into a self-righteous fury at all drivers.

That's a complaint? Of course, we bicyclists shouldn't express fury at all drivers. Just most of them. But, of course, my own experience is that the "bad attitude" invariably lies with those in cars. Many American drivers (it's different in Europe) simply act as if cyclists have no right to be on the road at all. You get "doored" all the time, cut off, pushed into curbs, and, my pet peeve, prevented even from crossing streets by cars sitting plonk in the way trying to get into oncoming traffic. After my testosterone shots, it's a wonder I don't go Cheney on these people.  Especially those in their smug, huge SUVs.

05 Apr 2007 04:00 pm

Face of the Day

A girl looks at policemen as supporters of the pro-Russian government shout as they block President Viktor Yushchenko's office in Kiev 04 April 2007. Thousands of protesters massed in Kiev 03 April 2007, chanting, singing and waving flags in defiance of President Viktor Yushchenko's order to dissolve the parliament. By Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty.

05 Apr 2007 03:42 pm

New Hampshire's Marriage Compromise

Two words: "spousal unions." When New Hampshire's House votes overwhelmingly to give gay couples and only gay couples all the rights and responsibilities of civil marriage while calling it something else, the debate has moved on to new ground. New Hampshire would be the sixth state to give gay couples every benefit of marriage without the m-word. But "spousal union" is new language.

05 Apr 2007 03:36 pm

LGF and WaPo

Nancy Pelosi has finally brought them together.