Island Passage

As you age, you realize that many of your childhood dreams will never come true. You'll never be as strong as Superman, you'll never be as rich as Bill Gates, and you'll never be as clever as Dick Cavett : Years later, as a guest on the Tonight Show, [Johnny] Carson told Cavett that his favorite joke Cavett wrote for him during his days as a writer was the humorous caption to a newspaper photo of Aristotle Onassis looking at the home of Buster Keaton which he was considering purchasing. Cavett wrote: "Aristotle Contemplating the Home of Buster."

I was driving home Thursday night and, while waiting in the ferry line, I found my CD of the movie soundtrack of My Fair Lady in the door bin. I hadn't listened to it for a year or so, so I popped it in and turned up the volume. I can think of no-one who approaches the lyric genius of Alan Jay Lerner (and Oscar Hammerstein [except, perhaps, Howard Ashman ]). I was especially struck by how wonderful were the non-romantic songs in MFL . For example, "I'm and Ordinary Man," in which Higgins is recounts the bliss of bachelorhood: I'm an ordinary man, Who desires nothing more Than an ordinary chance, To live exactly as he likes, And do precisely what he wants... An average man am I, of no eccentric whim, Who likes to live his life, free of strife, doing whatever he thinks is best for him, Well... just an ordinary man... But... Let a woman in your life, And patience hasn't got a chance, She will beg you for advice, your reply will be concise, And she will listen ...

Peg' O My Heart has this observation on our New Gilded Age: The gap between rich and poor is great, and there is plenty of want, and also confusion. What the superrich do for a living now often seems utterly incomprehensible, and has for at least a generation. There is no word for it, only an image. There's a big pile of coins on a table. The rich shove their hands in, raise them, and as the coins sift through their fingers it makes . . . a bigger pile of coins. Then they sift through it again and the pile gets bigger again. A general rule: If you are told what someone does for a living and it makes sense to you--orthodontist, store owner, professor--that means he's not rich. But if it's a man in a suit who does something that takes him five sentences to explain and still you walk away confused, and castigating yourself as to why you couldn't understand the central facts of the acquisition of wealth in the age you live in--well, chances are you just talked to a bi...

Noted with only this comment: Jake lived only because of the love and dedication of Mary Flood. Good, human, Mary. Good Human. Click on the image to see a slideshow . Sept. 11 rescue dog with cancer dies NEW YORK - A black Labrador that burrowed through smoking debris after Sept. 11 and flooded rubble after Hurricane Katrina in search of survivors has died after developing cancer. Owner Mary Flood had 12-year-old Jake put to sleep Wednesday after a last stroll through the fields and a dip in the creek near their home in Oakley, Utah . Flood said Jake had been in pain, shaking with a 105-degree fever as he lay on the lawn... ...Flood adopted Jake as a 10-month-old puppy. He had been abandoned on a street with a broken leg and a dislocated hip. "But against all odds he became a world-class rescue dog," said Flood, a member of Utah Task Force 1, a federal search-and-rescue team that looked for human remains a...

Bumped into this image at National Review Online . Ha!

With all of the to-do over the Heinlein Centennial , the Wall Street Journal has a nice tribute by Taylor Dinerman available on-line. Mr. Dinerman writes: "The list of technologies, concepts and events that he anticipated in his fiction is long and varied. In his 1951 juvenile novel, "Between Planets," he described cellphones. In 1940, even before the Manhattan Project had begun, he chronicled, in the short story "Blowups Happen," the destruction of a graphite-regulated nuclear reactor similar to the one at Chernobyl. And in his 1961 masterpiece, "Stranger in a Strange Land," Heinlein--decades before Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to the White House--introduced the idea that a president's wife might try to guide his actions based on the advice of her astrologer. One of Heinlein's best known "inventions" is the water bed, though he never took out a patent... [One of Heinlein's characters says] "The power to tax, once conceded,...

Alas, the print business has been hard, lately. All of the great metropolitan dailies have been suffering with dropping readership. The New York Times has tracked more and more liberal to try and staunch it's loss of paying customers. It seems as though that collection of tubes, the Internets, is claiming yet another victim . The Weekly World News: Weekly World News, the tabloid that for 28 years has chronicled sightings of Elvis, extraterrestrial activity and the exploits of Bat Boy, is no more. Its publisher said Tuesday it would put out its last issue next month, maintaining only a Web presence. The Constant Reader knows of my near squeamish fascination with the Weekly World News. One of WWN's writers, Bob Greenberger, did not return a telephone call seeking comment, but he wrote on his blog that the paper's staff was alerted of the closure Friday. "The reasons given make no sense," he wrote. "We're stunned and shell-shocked." I don't know wh...

Anyone who understands the meaning of the word debate knows that what are heralded as " Candidate's Debates " are anything but. They are really more of a joint press conference where the point isn't to exchange ideas or test ideas against one another, but to provide a pulpit for a recital of sound bites and stump-speech homilies to the media. (Any real give-and-take occurs later in the spin rooms.) This Monday, the Democratic Party is holding a debate with the most foolish of premises: that one-shot questions from average folks will penetrate the hard shells of candidate's handlers, PR flacks and advisers, and will actually provoke them to say something honest and unguarded. Stephen Green, the Vodkapundit , has submitted his hard-hitting, no-holds-barred question. In fact, he's zeroed in on what's been keeping me awake at nights as I contemplate the question "Who will next steer this mighty ship of state?"

The Bald Eagle may be rescued from endangered status , but that doesn't mean that Bald is Beautiful electorally. The Economist points out that Fred Thompson has one underreported handicap: Americans haven't elected a bald man since I was a boy--Dwight Eisenhower. To illustrate how Americans prefer a hirsute chief executive, they provide comparison images of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. By all means--click on over to a disturbing rogue's gallery .

Here they are, the Wholey Trinity of Democratic front-runners, Barak, Hillary!, and John. " Polls conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life show that Americans believe the Democrats to be less friendly to faith than they had been even a few years ago. Yet a donkey with a halo over his head graces the cover of Time magazine this week and the story inside chronicles "How the Democrats Got Religion." From faith working groups to faith breakfasts, Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are all participating in what strategist Mike McCurry tells Time is "a Great Awakening in the Democratic Party." -- Wall Street Journal Is this the end of the Republican lock on Evangelicals? " Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, is probably less than excited by such initiatives. She recently said in a speech, "I don't want a progressive evangelical movement any more than I want the conservative one we have right now." I ...

I wonder these days how many people know the first verse of the national anthem? I wonder how many people know that The Star-Spangled Banner has four verses? I know, friends and neighbors, because I once sang all four verses to get out of a tight spot. I was a young fellow, and a trainee at the U.S. Army Signal School's Ceremonial Unit. The unit was run like a kind of fraternity with several weeks of initiation where the pledge's lives were made miserable by the older team members. A common punishment was to order the trainees to drop for endless pushups. (I left the unit a year later with arms like Popeye.) One particular fellow, PFC Peake, had made it his mission to make me spend as much time as possible doing pushups. After three weeks I knew that the situation couldn't go on. I knew that we were headed for a showdown. And so I began to memorize the entire national anthem. Sure enough, a few days later I walked into the unit's dayroom and into a circle of older te...

...Living for today. You don't have to be a dreamer, because these people seem to exist. They are called the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN). They are described in this New Yorker article : ...They playfully tossed my name back and forth among themselves, altering it slightly with each reiteration, until it became an unrecognizable syllable. They never uttered it again, but instead gave me a lilting Pirahã name: Kaaxáoi , that of a Pirahã man, from a village downriver, whom they thought I resembled. “That’s completely consistent with my main thesis about the tribe,” Everett told me later. “They reject everything from outside their world. They just don’t want it, and it’s been that way since the day the Brazilians first found them in this jungle in the seventeen-hundreds.” But his [Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor's] work remained relatively obscure until early in 2005, when he posted on his Web site an article titled “ Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition ...

This guy has his ex-wife and former girlfriends campaigning for him. This makes Karl Rove's mid-control ray-gun look like a Pez dispenser. IN the battle for the women’s vote, Fred Thompson has a secret weapon against Hillary Clinton - the legions of former girlfriends who still adore him and who want him to be president. The Hollywood actor and former Tennessee senator racked up an impressive list of conquests during his swinging bachelor days in the 1990s, but he appears to have achieved the impossible and kept their friendship and respect. Lorrie Morgan, a country singer who dated Thompson and considered marrying him in the mid1990s, told The Sunday Times: “I couldn’t think of a bad word to say about Fred if somebody put a gun to my head...." ...he was also able to reassure them that he was on excellent terms with his first wife and home-town sweetheart Sarah Knestrick, whom he married in Tennessee at 17 and divorced 26 years later. Thompson said he had just spoken to...

Hard on the heels of reviews that Rattatouille is the best Pixar-Disney film since Monsters, Inc. , comes news about their 2008 release: WALL * E . You know, I'd have bad deja-vu about Short Circuit , but so far it seems that Pixar won't let themselves release a dog.

The Constant Reader knows of my dismay when Churches leave the realm of bearing witness to the Good News and enter the realm of trying to get on the Nightly News. This dismay is illustrated in the following snark from National Review Online's Planet Gore blog . Stephen Hawking Opposes Designated Hitter Rule [ Jim Manzi ] Apparently the Southern Baptist Convention has just approved a statement that questions the role of humans in creating global warming, and has come out against government-mandated limits on carbon emissions. I assume this is at least in part a response to the National Council of Churches June 7 th statement that the unequivocal role of human activity in creating global warming demands, among other things, legislation to reduce US carbon emissions by 15 – 20 percent by 2020. In related news, NASA has released a statement affirming the Trinitarian nature of God, and the Modern Language Association has published a new Global Climate Modeling textbook — presu...

Few reading this blog (with the exception of Mrs. Panjandrum) remembers Jeff. Jeff was my best friend in High School and my first years of college. We were opposites in many ways but shared the alienation of being outsiders to the popular crowds at school. We were Marching Band geeks. We both had crushes on Joyce Wright. Jeff was one of the few people I knew at my own wedding. That was the last time I saw him. We were a Mutt and Jeff team (and Jeff often pointed out that he was, after all, Jeff .) I was tall and thin, Jeff was short and round. While I looked at the world like a wounded puppy dog, Jeff affected and air of sophisticated cynicism. I was Art Carney , Jeff was Jackie Gleason . Gleason is tremendous; if you’re my age you grew up with Gleason as the TV variety show fellow with the away-we-go schtick . You learned about the Honeymooners later, at which point your appreciation expanded greatly. Gleason had that same skill Roscoe Arbuckle possessed in such amazing quantities: l...

I'm so far behind these guys, I'm embarrassed. From Reason Magazine 's Hit & Run blog , quoting Shawn Macomber : Poor John Edwards. His personality cult is all personality and no cult. One imagines Kim Jong-il sitting in an undisclosed hermetically sealed room somewhere in Pyongyang lecturing an audience of apparatchiks. "Can you believe this Edwards guy?" he squawks, lifting his sunglasses to show his own wide-eyed shock. "Is his ego out of control or what?"

Sometimes the real world outstrips my poor ability of mocking. via Best of the Web : Lard Have Mercy The New York Times reports that China is in the midst of "an acute shortage of pork," which is affecting the international economy: Steep increases for pork loins and bacon are the most tangible sign that after a decade in which prices have fluctuated but not moved significantly upward, inflation is creeping back into China. In response to this pressure at home, Chinese companies are starting to raise prices for exports, removing what has been a brake on inflation in the West... Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited the pork counter at a supermarket in Xian in central China on May 26 and called for local governments to pay pig farmers to increase production. The commerce ministry has raised the possibility of distributing pork from China's strategic pork reserves . Strategic pork reserves? Let's hope the U.S. Congress doesn't get any ideas.

And shame on those that gave this bad man a pulpit to pound : He wasn't an Army Ranger. He didn't earn a Purple Heart. He didn't witness war crimes in Iraq. The truth about Jesse Macbeth? He's a fraud, and he's now facing prison. Macbeth, 23, pleaded guilty in a Seattle federal courtroom Thursday to making false statements to the Department of Veterans Affairs and altering his discharge papers. Kicked out of boot camp after 44 days, Macbeth instead portrayed himself as a decorated soldier who served in both Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and was discharged due to post-traumatic stress disorder... For several years beginning in 2003, Macbeth became a star of the anti-war movement by claiming he saw and participated in war crimes in Iraq. He gave interviews to news reporters and was popular in blogs and the alternative media. In a video that was widely distributed on the Internet, a frail Macbeth dressed in camouflage told of killing hun...

At Rio Fashion Week :

Charles Krauthammer gives two-and-a-half cheers for our seemingly endless political primaries: In Britain, Canada, and other civilized places, national elections are often called, run, and concluded within six weeks. In America, election campaigns go on forever. While we can grow weary of the endless stumping, it does serve a purpose: The final function of the endless campaign, and perhaps the most psychologically important, is to satisfy the American instinct for egalitarianism. We have turned the presidential campaign into a pleasingly degrading ordeal — pleasing, that is, to the electorate. The modern presidential campaign is meant to be physically exhausting and spiritually humbling almost to the point of humiliation. Candidates spend two years and more on bended knee begging for money, votes, and a handshake in a diner. Why do we inflict such cruel and unusual punishment? Because our winner is not just chief magistrate but king. True, the kingship is temporary, but its glories an...

Actually, no. But it would have been a lot more fun this way. Japanese contestants try to say a tongue twister under "duress." http://www.glumbert.com/media/tonguetwister Or, why I'll never appear on a Japanese Game Show, Part XIII In other commentary: ...a key constituency among Democratic primary voters in 2008 will be insane people.

How do you settle marital disputes?

Peggy Noonan writes on the " Weeping Reagan " Time magazine cover: Could I be correct that they only front-page weeping Republicans, and only laud conservatives when they're dead? Peg o' My heart, you are completely correct. Old, dead Republicans are kind of wonderful : Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. Oops... Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor. Hey! Time passes. The 1980s are the 21st century's 1950s.

Dean Barnett reflects on living with a progressive illness in wake of the news about John and Elizabeth Edwards: THROUGH THE YEARS, I’VE COME TO VIEW SERIOUS and progressive illness as an ever constricting circle with oneself at the center. The interior of the circle represents the contents of one’s life. As the circle gets smaller, things that were inside get forced out. Some of these things are dearly missed; other items that were once thought precious get forced to the exterior and turn out to go surprisingly unlamented. At the innermost point of the circle are the things that really matter: Family, faith, love. These things stay with you until the day that you die. At the very end, because the circle has shrunk down to its center, they’re all you have left. But as we approach that end, we finally realize that all along they were what mattered most. As a consequence, life often remains beautiful and worthwhile right up until the end. I have dealt with the passing of siblings, cous...

Please don't ask me about global warming. This program should be required viewing in all schools.

We've all heard the jape: "The lottery is a tax on doing poorly in high school math class;" or Annie Libowitz's line, "Your odds of winning the lottery are almost the same whether or not you buy a ticket." Benedict Carey has a smart essay over at the New York Times about why people play the lottery. Here's the line that gave me the "Aha!" moment: “The people who denigrate lottery players are like 10-year-olds who are disgusted by the idea of sex: they are numb to its pleasures, so they say it’s not rational,” said Lloyd Cohen, a professor of law at George Mason University and author of an economic analysis, “Lotteries, Liberty and Legislatures,” who is himself a gambler and a card counter. Dr. Cohen argues that lottery tickets are not an investment but a disposable consumer purchase , which changes the equation radically. Like a throwaway lifestyle magazine, lottery tickets engage transforming fantasies: a wine cellar, a pool, a vision of trop...

Years (the early 1980s) ago I worked with a chap who had written a pretty cool software package that would do some interesting mathematics stuff, freeing users from some pencil-and-paper drudgery. He was pretty honked about people giving copies of his code to their friends, denying him the royalties. I asked him what he thought was at the heart of this crime (for crime it was), and he said: "Anonymity. If people could rob banks with the anonymity that they swipe my hard work, this country's economy would collapse tomorrow." The older I get, the more I agree with him. That made this comment from Greg Gutfield resonate strongly with me: “After a few years of blogging, I've hit on one essential truth: there are millions of cowards willing to say things about you online that they'd never say to you in a bar...Blogging has created a chorus line of cowards." -Greg Gutfield

Several bloggers have posted this video by the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace of their attempts to block a shipment of military equipment from the Port of Tacoma to Iraq. The opening seconds of the video have someone (perhaps the camera operator?) chanting "No justice, no peace," so lifelessly that it sounds like a George A. Romero movie.

InstaPunk proposed an experiment : "I propose an exercise to be perfomed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months' worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin's infamous '7 Dirty Words.'" Patrick Ishmael at Bit Bucket responds : And this is what I found, using what I deemed -- through a mix of TTLB and 2006's Weblog Award lists -- to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. I couldn't account for the 6-month time period, and I even gave the Lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. But it didn't make much of a difference. So how much more does the Left use Carlin's "seven words" versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1. Yowsers. But this was obvious to anybody who reads the blogs. (Not to denigrate Mr. Ishmael's work, it was sm...

It looks as though Newt's refusing to announce that he is a candidate is crazy like a fox. Just as the Hillary-Obama dustup was settling down, John McCain puts his foot in his mouth . Meanwhile, Newt delivers " a scathing and often hilarious " speech at New York’s Cooper Union. Newt is avoiding: Bringing his (unofficial) campaign under F.E.C. financing guidelines. Being the in the focus of the media microscope for gaffes. Wearing everyone out with the same old stump speech. If the primary campaigns on the right become even half as vicious as the ones on the left, he is going to look pretty good in September.

Holy smokes, this is funny . The constant reader knows that my minivan (Orinoco) is without bumperstickers . This will change. I printed out a few of these and I'm going to wear them proudly.

I've been a fan of Stewart Brand for many years. Though I was never a hippie, I was a computer hobbyist back in the 1970s and a believer in space habitats in the early 1980s , so I regularly enjoyed the free-for-all in the pages of CoEvolution Quarterly . One of the great things about Mr. Brand, one of the things that makes him a hero, is summed up in this statement : “Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they’re wrong, it’s really good for the commonweal. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we’d have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought.” How refreshing!

A level-headed internet voice on the political left? Great Scot! This could cause a rupture in the space-time continuum! The blogger bomb-throwing may be good for inflaming the activist base, and, as they demonstrated in the 2006 Lieberman-Lamont Senate primary race in Connecticut, for occasionally blowing up the opposition. It’s not bad for bullying your friends, either, as the liberal blogosphere did last week in pressuring Edwards to not fire the two bloggers who penned the offensive anti-religious posts. But the typical blog mix of insults and incitements is just not an effective strategy for persuading people outside of your circle of belief – be they moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans, or the swelling number of independents – to join your cause. In fact, it’s far more likely to alienate than propagate them. Something else most liberal bloggers fail to appreciate – we as Democrats can’t afford to repel those middle of the road, largely non-partisan voters. The Iraq war n...

There is something perversely satisfying about this video of Washington State Senator Patty Murray being heckled, harassed, and served with an "arrest warrant" by antiwar activists. It reminds me of this quote from A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now : “New Anger is a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted....If in your anger you reduce your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange, real politics comes to an end....Whoever embraces New Anger is bound to find that, at least in the political realm, he has traded the possibility of real influence for the momentary satisfactions of self-expression.” Calling Patty Murray a war criminal pretty much embodies this concept. But the fact that she and her colleagues played to these people and used these people during their political campaigns is sweet, sweet schadenfreude. Like my Mama always says, "You lie down with dogs, ...

I am a big fan of James Cameron. Or I was. Until today. I think that Aliens is the best stand-up science fiction shooter in the history of the Solar system. It rocks . "Just tell me one thing, Burke. You're going out there to destroy them, right? Not to study. Not to bring back. But to wipe them out." But now he's turned from being the man who created The Abyss into Geraldo Rivera . Sic transit gloria mundi .

(via Jane Gault ) Because I find the traditional "Left vs. Right" typology describing the political spectrum simple-minded to the point of imbecility, I am curious of new ways to slice and dice the electorate. The Pew Research Center for People and the Press has a test in which that they try to get beyond "left-right." Having been trained by years of schooling and of being pestered by Mrs. Islander to take those "test your man" quizzes in women's magazines I stepped up to bat. So how does this test classify me? Enterpriser Based on your answers to the questionnaire, you most closely resemble survey respondents within the Enterpriser typology group. This does not mean that you necessarily fit every group characteristic or agree with the group on all issues. Enterprisers represent 9 percent of the American public, and 10 percent of registered voters. Basic Description As in previous studies conducted in 1987, 1994 and 1999, this extremely partis...

I am embarrassed to note that that old toe-biter, Dick Morris has a gushy column in The Hill devoted to my personal favorite , Newt Gingrich . Enter Newt. Hungry for new ideas and desperate after losing Congress, Republican voters seem to be rallying to the only real genius in the race — the former Speaker. The statute of limitations seems to have expired on his personal scandals and Gingrich is striking a responsive chord among conservatives. If only it were so, Dick! I would pay good money to see Newt step into the debate.

The Washington Post has an article by Harold Meyerson drawing yet another parallel between the election of 1972 and 2008. Even I, who have been drawing many parallels between the anti-war movements of the 1960s and the 2000s had not gotten to that point. A specter was haunting Hillary Clinton as she campaigned in New Hampshire this weekend: the specter of Ed Muskie. As the ancient or merely studious among us will recall, the Democratic senator from Maine, who'd been Hubert Humphrey's running mate in 1968, entered his party's presidential contest in 1972 as the front-runner. His prospects were dashed in the New Hampshire snows, however. As popular memory has it, an indignant Muskie started crying while refuting a silly attack on him (though whether he was genuinely upset or merely sniffling during a frigid outdoor news conference was never authoritatively resolved). Muskie's more serious problem, however, was the Vietnam War, which he opposed. His opposition, though, ha...

Is it possible that a Vancouver, Canada company has produced a quantum computer decades ahead of schedule? Or is 2007's version of Cold Fusion ? A pointer to this ABC.com story sent me over to the company's website . I guess we'll find out February 13th. Why is this so important? A couple of reasons spring to mind: If this is a real product, these goes encryption standards! Some meteorologists and climate scientists feel that failures of prediction aren't due to system complexity (chaos), but poor models. Putting bad models on a quantum computer will just turn out bad answers faster. This may encourage better modeling. Want to read more about just what the heck Quantum Computing is? Meet Mr. Wiki .

As we enter this amped-up, early kick-off campaign season, we are going to be hearing that evergreen complaint against "attack ads." Not from me. Andrew Ferguson points out : "The difference between a positive ad and a negative ad is that the negative ad has a fact in it." (Thanks to Jim Geraghty .)

Following up to my previous post about the Edward's campaign's misstep: Apparently the affair has upset some on the Christian Left . I really feel for these people--especially those that have been laboring for years in the fields of social justice. "We're completely invisible to this debate," said Eduardo Penalver, a Cornell University law professor who writes for the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal . He said he was dissatisfied with the Edwards campaign's response. "As a constituency, the Christian left isn't taken all that seriously," Penalver said. "We have gone so far to rebuild that coalition [between Democrats and religious Christians] and something like this sets it back," said Brian O'Dwyer, a New York lawyer and Irish-American leader who chairs the National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council , a Democratic Party group. O'Dwyer said Edwards should have fired the bloggers. "It's not only wrong morally – it...

I was surprised when some low-level yutz in the Washington State Democratic Party decided that Christians weren't a constituency worth worrying about . But at least the Dem Pols at the state level have the decency to be ashamed . But when a National Candidate blows it... I assume that the Constant Reader has been hearing about John Edward's campaign retaining the blogging services of Amanda Marcotte ( Pandragon ) and Melissa McEwan ( Shakespeare's Sister ). This whole thing has been examined and dissected on many , many sites . The latest word from the Edward campaign site is that John Edwards has made the decision to keep them: The tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte's and Melissa McEwan's posts personally offended me. It's not how I talk to people, and it's not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that kind of intolerant language will not be permitted from anyone on my camp...

It's only February 2007 and this race has already pulled outta Oddburg and taken the interstate for Bizzaro Springs, CA. Chuck Norris has come out for Newt Gingrich . First of all, I make no secret of my fondness for Newt, and I have every respect for Chuck Norris and his roundhouse kick . But Holy Tamale, Chuck is quoting a 1790 sermon by Rev. Daniel Fosters ! Chuck, I didn't know that you were familiar with the 18th century Great Awakening. I feel as I did when I was a small boy and wandered into a hall of mirrors.

Via James Toranto: ...So she's going to end the war and give health insurance to everyone--all in the last 11 days of January! Okey dokey, artichokey . ...My daily newspaper recently included, in a diatribe against Hillary Clinton, that she often says -- I hope you'll forgive me for repeating this expletive -- "okey-dokey artichokey." Hey, what's wrong with "okey-dokey artichokey"? First of all, this is the only endearing thing I (for one) have ever heard about Mrs. Clinton. Whether it is superlatives from the left or brickbats from the right, she is usually described in the warm glowing terms one reserves for a sci-fi movie's android. She is either the most brilliant mass of protoplasm ever gathered together in one organism, or else the most evil being since Lucifer voluntarily resigned from Heaven, citing creative conflicts over the future direction of the cosmos. But there's something likable about someone who says "okey-dokey articho...

I cried. Like a little baby, I cried. The Vader Sessions Like he says: "Someone clearly has a lot of time on his hands, but at least he's putting it to good use."

Duck Season!

Very cool. About 40 years too late for me; yet very cool. ( Via Alarm-Alarm ) An article in the New York Times Magazine about conservative Christian Colleges hosting dances on campus. Mark Oppenheimer writes as a very thoughtful outsider. When confronted by the question, "Didn't these people preach hellfire against dancing ?" he makes this insightful comment: If you want to know why J.B.U. students didn’t dance until now, it makes more sense to look out your window at Siloam Springs than to look down at the Bible on your desk. The Bible doesn’t say you can’t dance. For that matter, it doesn’t say that you can’t drink or can’t smoke. The rules against these vices are what evangelicals call “prudential” rather than scriptural: they don’t have the force of commandment, but you follow them just to be careful. These rules arose as part of a Protestant subculture so determined to eradicate sin that it began to interdict behaviors that might be baby steps on the road to perdit...

Yes, I'm a fan of Newt Gingrich. Not because I think he is has a snowball's chance of being elected in 2008, but because he is such a colorful idea generator. Newt's response to the question, "Are you running in 2008?", is to say that he's more excited to be generating ideas than to be campaigning. If in September 2007 there is no clear leader in the Republican primaries and his ideas have won a following, he will consider entering the race. What wonderful sophistry! As though a mighty army of nerds and wonks will rise up, bear him on their shoulders down Pennsylvania Avenue, and install him in the White House by acclamation. Although, when given the choice between a old-line demagogue and Newt Gingrich, boy wizard, give me Newt. But as Daniel Drezner points out : Gingrich intrigues me -- he's far more complex and interesting a thinker than the nineties stereotype of him suggested. And if Hillary Clinton can remake herself as someone who's learned fr...

Those Scots . Samurai sword terror as five stabbed FOUR teenagers were among at least five people stabbed in a street battle linked to gangland wars in north Glasgow. Samurai swords and knives were used by youths as young as 15 as the Milton area erupted into violence. As someone who is engaged in a serious study of Japanese Swordsmanship , I find myself torn between curiosity, amusement, and disgust. What kind of swords are they using? There are at least five different kinds that can be called "samurai swords." The one people are most familiar with is the katana , so I'm guessing that's what they are using. Where are they getting these things? But I should not be surprised. I was walking by a tobacco store the other day and saw several sets of swords on display. I walked in and confirmed that they were junk, created to be put on display (and not looked at too closely.) But even a scrap of metal can be sharpened to a razor edge and be very dangerous. How are they affo...

I clicked over to this to see if someone was trying to muscle into Robert Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky territory. Instead, it's the story of a guy who wants to build his own spaceship and how the government tries to stop him So it's Rocket Ship Galileo . Lots of big, wide shots, heartwarming athems building, and Virgina Madsen. I'll be see it.

In the Wall Street Journal's opinion page, Peggy Noonan comments on the funeral of former President Gerald Ford: The Marines snap their salutes and bear the flag-draped coffin up the marble steps and we hear the old hymns--"Going Home," "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," "The Navy Hymn": "Oh hear us when we cry to thee / For those in peril on the sea." We don't hear these songs much in modern life, only at formal occasions like this. We lock them in a closet until a state funeral, and then they come out and we realize how much they meant, and how much we miss them. Man, do I miss those hymns. The best of them contain a great theology lesson in verse form. Ms Noonan ends her essay with a scene from the House of Representatives: Time moves, life moves, we grow older together. And now a new era begins, and with another great ceremony. As I write, a new Democratic speaker of the House is about to be sworn in. The great hall of the House is ful...