Wizblog

Recommended 5/8

Joseph Loconte says the U.N. is complicit in the humanitarian disaster in Burma.

Is the Earth running out of oil? A post at Fabius Maximus (via IP) and an article by Vasko Kohlmayer at FrontPage both advise holding off on the doomsday preparations.

Global warmists are scrambling to explain recent cooling and its projected continuation...at American Thinker.

At Contentions, thoughts on the presidential race by Peter Wehner, Daniel Casse, and Abe Greenwald.

Gateway Pundit has a graphic image of "The No Zone", a map of the U.S. territories and coastline ruled off limits to oil exploration and drilling by Democrats in Congress. McCain would be wise to make this a signature issue in the campaign.

The tens of thousands of dead in Burma are not even in the ground yet, and Al Gore is already exploiting the carnage for his own self-enriching crusade. (Via EU Referendum) UPDATE 5/9: More from Marc Sheppard at American Thinker

On Spinelessness

Sam Harris laments Western self-censorship and delusional denial of Islamic goals. They're not exactly original insights, but it is refreshing to see them published at a leftist site like HuffPo. A sample...

The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.

There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for "racism" and "Islamophobia."

Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often called "a chilling effect" on our exercise of free speech.

---

The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is simply not open to dispute. It's not that critics of religion like myself speculate that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every opportunity and to deny it is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and religious apology. (via LGF)

It brings to mind recent work by Bruce Bawer and Andy McCarthy

Recession of '08

Gerard Baker in the TimesOnline:

Well, it’s early days, to be fair, but so far the Great Depression 2008 is shaping up to be a Great Disappointment. Not so much The Grapes of Wrath as Raisins of Mild Inconvenience.

The evidence is starting to accumulate that the economic downturn may have bottomed out sometime in the first quarter.

UPDATE 5/8: Larry Elder weighs in. And here's Tom Blumer's piece at PJM...plus a week-old article from Tom on the same theme.

Is Ozzie History?

I'm sensing one of those "I wanted to spend more time with my family" press conferences pretty soon.

White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen might have been able to survive saying this about the owner of the club he works for as part of a profanity-laced tirade on a radio show Sunday...

"We are the [bleep] of Chicago. We're the Chicago [bleep]. We have the worst owner [Jerry Reinsdorf]. The guy's got seven [bleeping] rings, and he's the [bleeping] horse[bleep] owner."

(hey, it was taken out of context...)

...but he probably can't also call a well-known reporter "a (bleeping) fag" and keep his job these days, even if, as Ozzie explained, "In my country, you call someone something like that and it is not the same as it is in this country."

For some time now it has seemed like Ozzie Guillen was trying to get fired. This should do it.

Now I wonder if some curious journalist will walk up to Victor Martinez or Miguel Cabrera and ask him what it means when someone calls him "a (bleeping) fag" in Venezuela.

UPDATE 5/6: Guillen soldiers on. Another day, another embarrassing episode. Reinsdorf does allow that he'd like Ozzie to clean up the language....in order to better communicate his message. But already way too much energy spent here on the White Sox.

Carrots' Rights

Wesley J. Smith (via Dr. Sanity)

You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the "dignity" of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called "plant rights" is being seriously debated.

A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring "account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms." No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, "The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants," is enough to short circuit the brain.

A "clear majority" of the panel adopted what it called a "biocentric" moral view, meaning that "living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive." Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim "absolute ownership" over plants and, moreover, that "individual plants have an inherent worth." This means that "we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily."

---

...Switzerland's enshrining of "plant dignity" is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

Smith says the immorality is in worrying about "plants rights" while people are malnourished or starving in great numbers. This biocentrism also threatens genetic engineering of crops, undertaken to help prevent that starving and malnutrition. Which doesn't trouble you in the slightest if you're of the "humans are the AIDS of the Earth" school.

I'm wondering what the ethics panel makes of the determined global effort to cut down on the plant kingdom's naturally occurring, life sustaining gas. Where's the plant dignity there?

Dismembering 1968

City Journal is featuring six of its editors' reflections on 1968. Christopher Hitchens, Kay Hymowitz, Guy Sorman, Stefan Kanfer, Sol Stern, and Harry Stein contribute. I've pulled a couple of excerpts to get you to click over.

Hitchens on his visit to Cuba:

Cuba was an unusually good vantage point for the 1968 phenomenon since it advertised itself as a new beginning for socialism that would avoid the drabness and conformity of the Eastern bloc. I was able to test this proposition in practice and in two ways. At a “cultural seminar,” I heard the distinguished Cuban film director Santiago Álvarez say that any form of criticism was allowed in Cuba, except direct criticism of Fidel Castro. This seemed a rather large exception, but when I tried to be funny about it (so often a mistake in revolutionary circles), I had my first experience of being denounced, in unsmiling tones, for “counterrevolutionary” tendencies. It was a slight surprise to find that people really talked like that.

Guy Sorman:

What did it mean to be 20 in May ’68? First and foremost, it meant rejecting all forms of authority—teachers, parents, bosses, those who governed, the older generation. Apart from a few personal targets—General Charles de Gaulle and the pope—we directed our recriminations against the abstract principle of authority and those who legitimized it. Political parties, the state (personified by the grandfatherly figure of de Gaulle), the army, the unions, the church, the university: all were put in the dock.

Some historical precedents haunted us. We remembered that the French Revolution was the work of 20-year-old boys. So, too, were the Romanticism of the 1820s and the surrealist revolution of the 1920s. History does repeat itself. After long periods of confinement under tight social, economic, and military strictures, a new generation gets up and says: “Enough! No more!” Just as in 1789 and 1830, the young in 1968 didn’t want the same life that their parents had. For one thing, we wanted to work less.

Stefan Kanfer on the protests at Columbia:

The time was right for rebellion: it was a benign spring, and there were “issues.” The students made the most of them, breaking windows, trampling any flowers within reach of their sneakers—jackboots would have been too warm for the weather—occupying offices, destroying papers, and, in general, making a major ruckus. So major, in fact, that Columbia authorities summoned the police. Hordes of outsiders began to arrive, among them leftist critic Dwight MacDonald, who announced that a friend had beseeched him, “You must come up right away. It’s a revolution. You may never get another chance to see one.” Like many another superannuated radical, MacDonald was unable to distinguish a revolt from a tantrum.

No Holds Barred

Saw this at Ace. Priceless.

WSJ's "Windfall Profits For Dummies"

A year ago when Exxon's quarterly profits were announced, Hillary Clinton was famously quoted as saying "I want take those profits and put them into an alternative energy fund...", presuming as statists do, not only that government could more wisely put that money to use, but that it is entitled to confiscate other people's money in the first place if it chooses to.

Now Barack Obama and a growing chorus of others are proposing to tax the "excess profits" of the oil companies. What is especially galling is that they suggest this will help to reduce gasoline prices. As usual, history offers these people no guide to formulating policy. And the WSJ reminds us that we've been here before...

You may also be wondering how a higher tax on energy will lower gas prices. Normally, when you tax something, you get less of it, but Mr. Obama seems to think he can repeal the laws of economics. We tried this windfall profits scheme in 1980. It backfired. The Congressional Research Service found in a 1990 analysis that the tax reduced domestic oil production by 3% to 6% and increased oil imports from OPEC by 8% to 16%. Mr. Obama nonetheless pledges to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, which he says "costs America $800 million a day." Someone should tell him that oil imports would soar if his tax plan becomes law. The biggest beneficiaries would be OPEC oil ministers.

There's another policy contradiction here. Exxon is now under attack for buying back $2 billion of its own stock rather than adding to the more than $21 billion it is likely to invest in energy research and exploration this year. But hold on. If oil companies believe their earnings from exploring for new oil will be expropriated by government – and an excise tax on profits is pure expropriation – they will surely invest less, not more. A profits tax is a sure formula to keep the future price of gas higher.

Exxon's profits are soaring with the recent oil price spike, but the energy industry's earnings aren't as outsized as the politicians seem to think. Thomson Financial calculates that profits from the oil and natural gas industry over the past year were 8.3% of investment, while the all-industry average is 7.8%. And this was a boom year for oil. An analysis by the Cato Institute's Jerry Taylor finds that between 1970 and 2003 (which includes peak and valley years for earnings) the oil and gas business was "less profitable than the rest of the U.S. economy." These are hardly robber barons.

This tiff over gas and oil taxes only highlights the intellectual policy confusion – or perhaps we should say cynicism – of our politicians. They want lower prices but don't want more production to increase supply. They want oil "independence" but they've declared off limits most of the big sources of domestic oil that could replace foreign imports. They want Americans to use less oil to reduce greenhouse gases but they protest higher oil prices that reduce demand. They want more oil company investment but they want to confiscate the profits from that investment. And these folks want to be President?

McCarthy With Rush

Andy McCarthy talks about Willful Blindness with Rush Limbaugh. In this excerpt, McCarthy is asked by Rush if we are still taking Islamic terror seriously...

MCCARTHY: We're taking it less seriously. I think there was a time right after 9/11, probably I put it at about 18 months -- probably into the Iraq operation, so longer than that -- that I think we really were taking it seriously. We certainly changed our enforcement methods. The Justice Department still had a role, but it was much more subordinate. The military was out front, which it needed to be in that phase, but there was a realization that it needed to be a wholesale government approach. But when I read things like what we've heard in the last few days about how we're getting guidance inside the government about purging our lexicon and saying things like jihadism and mujahideen and the like and --

RUSH: Wait. Wait, wait, wait! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Who's getting what? Guidance? Who in the government is sending this out to who?

MCCARTHY: Well, the reporting that's come out since -- I guess it was about April 24th -- is that the internal syncing at least in parts of the administration -- and this is something the State Department's pushed for a long time -- is that we make a mistake call jihadism, jihadism; because there are all kinds of jihad, not just forceable jihad. This is how the thinking goes. And, by the way, while there may be all kinds of jihad, jihad is a military concept. That's how it grew up. That's the reason there is a Muslim world in the first place. But secondly the idea is that when you call them jihadists, you are somehow emboldening them as if what they were relying on is how we regard them rather than how they see themselves. And that you also --

RUSH: So what are we supposed to call 'em?

MCCARTHY: Well, I'm down to thinking -- as I wrote in a piece in National Review a couple years ago, I think maybe -- we should just call it "Mabel" or something. Because it seems like everything that you say that touches on this... We're so intimidated by the idea that there's a religious label on this and everybody is so afraid of their shadow to talk about it, that whenever you say what is obvious -- which is that you can't take the "Islam" out of Islamic terror and that the main cause of this is not democracy or lack of democracy; or, you know, ancient hatreds or the economy, poverty, or whatever our excuse is this week. This is driven by doctrine. You know, we have poor people all over the world. They're not all committing terrorism.

In a related piece, McCarthy takes issue with the New York Sun's choice of Laurie Mylroie to review Willful Blindness. Much of Mylroie's thinking about Islamic terror has been publicly discredited, and McCarthy calls her "studiously uninformed about the jihadist threat."

UPDATE 5/6: Laurie Mylroie replies to McCarthy

Truth About Tuskegee

Jonah Goldberg:

‘Based on this Tuskegee experiment ... I believe our government is capable of doing anything.” So said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright when asked if he stood by his claim that “the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

The infamous Tuskegee experiment is the Medusa’s head of black left-wing paranoia. Whenever someone laments the fact that anywhere from 10 percent to 33 percent of African Americans believe the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill blacks, someone will say, “That’s not so crazy when you consider what happened at Tuskegee.”

But it is crazy. And it’s dishonest.

Wright says the U.S. government “purposely infected African-American men with syphilis.” This is a lie, and no knowledgeable historian says otherwise. And yet, this untruth pops up routinely.

---

...what the U.S. did at Tuskegee was indeed bad, very bad. But it didn’t do what these people say it did.

What Next...A Cover Shot?

Gene Menez at SI.com says Ohio State's Chris Wells is the man to beat in the 2008 Heisman campaign. That sounds about right. The Bucks will be ranked in the top three in the preseason, and September 13 at USC will give the whole nation an early look at him. It may come down to how he performs on the L.A. Coliseum stage.

The 2009 Buckeye recruiting class is about half full, and I have a piece up today at TheClevelandFan.com on how it's going.

"Everyone Understands It Now"

Charles Krauthammer revisits Obama's Philadelphia race speech. I think of Krauthammer as the closest thing we've got to a Michael Kelly these days. A plain dealer and a great writer.

Guess it's time to disown Granny...

Karcher Group is tkg.com

I want to congratulate my friends at The Karcher Group, the outstanding web development, web hosting and SEO company in North Canton, who are celebrating their 10th anniversary in business.

As part of the celebration, the company is launching their new domain at tkg.com as of 4/30, and they're also using their web migration as a teaching moment for other businesses facing similar challenges......(cause teaching businesses about the web is what these guys do, see?)

It was news to me, but apparently getting a three-letter domain is a pretty big deal, since all possible three-letter combination domains were spoken for a while ago. So Geoff K. and his team are pretty pumped about landing tkg.com, even though it didn't come cheap. So best of luck for the next ten years, Geoff. Maybe I'll have you guys upgrade me from the MT defaults one of these days.

Myth-busting

New at Commentary: 1948, Israel, and the Palestinians - The True Story, by Efraim Karsh.

Karsh sets out to recount in detail the background and history of the exodus of Arab Palestinians from their homeland. It's a useful corrective for the common perception that they were "dispossessed" by the Jews in the years leading up to Israel's founding in 1948, and in the war that ensued. Do read it all.

Planning Durban II

There are two new commentaries up on the preparations and agenda-setting for the U.N. confab known as "Durban II", which is ostensibly a conference on combating racism, but if it resembles the first Durban gathering, will be an anti-Israel and anti-American hatefest, and an attempt to redefine freedom of speech as a license for Islamophobia.

Joseph Klein

Planning for the “Durban II” conference against racism, scheduled for 2009, is proceeding right along. Following a number of procedural meetings, the first “substantive” session of the Durban Review Preparatory Committee commenced in Geneva on April 21, 2008. The world’s leading human rights abusing countries are running rough-shod over the agenda. They are planning to set up Israel in particular for non-stop blood libel. They also intend to hold the Western democracies publicly accountable for what the planners brand as the twin ‘crimes’ of Islamophobic racism and religious defamation.

So far, the United States, Canada and Israel have announced their intention to boycott the conference, except in the unlikely event that the Durban II planners shift course in a far more positive direction. The U.S. will also withhold a portion of its funding for the United Nations budget, equivalent to its share of the budget going to pay for the conference planning.

Anne Bayefsky:

The Organization of the Islamic Conference has spent years dominating U.N. proceedings, and Durban II — the centerpiece of the U.N.’s alleged “anti-racism” crusade — is their progeny. By the end of the week, it was with genuine exasperation that the Egyptian representative coined a new word: “Durbanophobia.” A couple of days ago he came up with Arabophobia. And we already know about the worldwide plot hatched in the Oval Office, Downing Street, and the basements of evil Danish publishers, called Islamophobia. Now there is a plot against a harmless group of diplomats who just want to hang out together and shmooze about human rights.

In contrast to attempts to speak about anti-Semitism, nobody thought to interrupt Iran’s declaration that it plays a leadership role in the battle against discrimination. Did you know that the state whose president has advocated modern-day genocide by wiping out Israel “is fully committed to eradicate any policy based on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance and has actively struggled against this phenomena at national, regional and international levels”? In fact, “in order to promote access of all people to social justice and to eliminate discrimination” Iran has just created “a special committee to deal with cases of discrimination.” Presumably, the women stoned for alleged adultery, and the homosexuals hanged and strung up on cranes in public places need not apply.

Browns Draft

There was too much going on last weekend for me to pay much attention to the Browns draft, but over at TheClevelandFan.com, Bob Fergus and Hiko had my back with some good info and commentary.

The PD Browns blog has the names of some free agent signings by the team. The one name that jumps out at me there is Tony Temple, a running back from Missouri. He looked awfully good in a couple of games I watched this past season.

UPDATE 4/30: Just up at TheClevelandFan.com this evening is my new article on baseball free agency, which features my silly notion that the highest dollar offer might not necessarily be the best one for the player.

Wright Stuff

One of the more interesting of the 312 articles I saw today on Rev. Wright was this one by Cliff Kincaid of AIM, who traces Rev. Wright's inflammatory claim of a government program to use AIDS against black people to a crank author, forged documents, and a report by Dan Rather.

Other Wright stuff that's worth a look would include roundups by Tom Maguire and Instapundit, and opinion columns by George Will, Jonah Goldberg, James Lewis, Dennis Prager , and Dean Barnett.

Hot Air has video of Obama's second attempt at distancing himself from the Reverend...plus numerous updates. That this press conference by Obama was widely predicted and said to be absolutely necessary for the candidate makes it somewhat less effective as a damage-control device. Obama's contention that the Reverend Wright we saw yesterday was not the same man he listened to in the pulpit for 20 years is unconvincing to me, although his denunciation of Wright was more clear this time around. It had to be.

Bawer On Cultural Surrender

It's been linked everywhere in the blogosphere for two days, and rightly so. Don't miss reading An Anatomy of Surrender by Bruce Bawer, writing at City Journal.

Recommended Bloggage 4/25

Ed Morrissey on the Nanny State

Jim Geraghty at The Campaign Spot on Obama's response to the Ayers question.

Claudia Rosett - What do Libya, Iran, Cuba, Russia and Pakistan All Have in Common?

At Brussels Journal, John Laughland recounts his visit to Moscow

At Contentions, Gordon Chang on the U.N. and the global food crisis.

EU Referendum on the state of the eurozone economy

Rich Lowry with a Gotcha! moment on Yglesias.

John Hawkins notices that we aren't hearing the "chickenhawk" argument much anymore.

Gateway Pundit on the Pelosi gasoline price reduction plan.

Climate Miscellany

Iain Murrray's new book, The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About--Because They Helped Cause Them merits a plug even though I haven't read it yet. I have read Murray's blog items and articles for years, as well many of his other contributions to the dialogue on climate issues, so I'm sure the book will be compelling.

Murray previews one of the seven in a piece at NRO today. And here's a NY Post review of the Murray book. Kevin Hassett makes some similar arguments about misguided environmental policies, this time on ethanol. UPDATE 4/25: Murray has a pretty good preview of his book up at American Spectator.

A WSJ op-ed says the administration will force Congress to consider costs as well as benefits if there is to be a global warming bill.

Investors Business Daily notes the passing of the torch to China as the world's biggest polluter...with a bullet.

Benny Peiser - Climate Blowback

Henry Payne at Planet Gore on Time's disrespectful cover. More here.

K-Lo does Q&A with Lawrence Solomon on the occasion of the release of his book "The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud *And those who are too fearful to do so".

The Amazon page for The Deniers has a listing of some of his subjects, as supplied by the publisher. See them after the jump...

Draft Withdrawal

Browns fans will be sitting on their hands...or something...on the first day of the NFL Draft. This is to make them feel better. (hat tip to Jack H.)

These three YouTube videos of the Monday Night Football Game in 1979 between the Browns and the Cowboys might be of interest to any NFL fan, what with the Hall of Famers like Staubach, Dorsett and Randy White playing for the 'Boys, and Howard Cosell doing his thing.

But Browns fans will definitely dig it. (Hint: Browns kick Cowboy ass.) The videos feature the MNF intro and then highlights of the first quarter, after which the game was essentially over anyway. Lots of nostalgia here for some big names in the orange hats. It was near the end of the line for Browns standouts Clarence Scott and Jerry Sherk, but young stars like Ozzie Newsome, Clay Matthews and Mike Pruitt were just emerging at that time.

It was a veteran group overall, with guys like Brian Sipe, Greg Pruitt, Thom Darden and Dave Logan in their primes, and role players Ron Bolton, Reggie Rucker and Lyle Alzado filling out the team. I believe it's Gifford who at one point says "these Browns can move the ball on anybody." I remember this game as sort of Ozzie Newsome's national coming out party. The final was 26-7.

Here are the links. Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

Or click "Continue..." below for the embeds.

OSU Spring Game 2008

I'm very pleased to have begun an association with the web site TheClevelandFan.com as a contributor. My first piece for the site is a report on yesterday's Spring Game at Ohio State, which went up this morning, and can be seen here.

I'll be writing on any and all local sports teams and issues, with some focus on OSU-related stuff. My thanks to site proprietor Rich Swerbinsky for the opportunity. I've been promoting his site here for months, because I believe he and his staff are filling a sports information void in this market that has long gone ignored by traditional media organs. It is exciting to now be a small part of that project.

UPDATE 4/24: ESPN.com has a feature on the 2008 Bucks. The site suggests that the Buckeyes are "the Buffalo Bills of the BCS." I realize that memories can be short in sports, but it has only been a bit over five years since Ohio State won the national championship. This from a network that referred to USC as a "dynasty" when they won one in a row!

Recommended 4/18

Charles Krauthammer on post-nonproliferation - Living with the Unthinkable

Michael Totten - Hope For Iraq's Meanest City

At No Left Turns, video of one of the greatest plays in baseball history.

Rachel Neuwirth - The Expulsion Libel: 1948 Arab "Exodus" Reconsidered. See also Noah Pollak at Contentions

Emmett Tyrrell - Jimmy Carter Amok. More on Carter from Bret Stephens at the WSJ - Jimmy's World

Ta-Nehisi Coates writing at Atlantic.com, on the audacity of Bill Cosby's conservatism; "This is How We Lost to the White Man"

Quotable:

If he wants to see bitter, he should try taking away their guns. - "The Week" - National Review

Politicians Gone Wild

I had to post this video of highlights from Dick Cheney's remarks at the Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner. He gets off some pretty good lines, and the stone-faced looks in the left-leaning audience are alone worth the time to watch. By the way, if you didn't catch the non-story a few days ago about the image reflected in Cheney's sunglasses in a photo of him, take a look at this before viewing the video. It'll help you get a couple of the jokes that would otherwise leave you saying "Huh?"

Mitt Romney also pokes fun at himself in his own version of the Top Ten List...

C.C.'s Blues

C.C. Sabathia's early season meltdown continued tonight, and the Indians are playing like a team without a leader. As horrendous as the Tigers start was, they have pulled even with the strangely lackluster Tribe. The Tigers are finally finding their hitting strokes, an outcome dreaded by Tribe fans for days now, as they looked down the schedule and saw the resurgent Tigers coming, and then glanced out to the Indians' unsettled bullpen, and to their shell-shocked ace starter.

My thoughts are with Sabathia, who must be wrestling with all sorts of personal, competitive issues, in addition to the pressure of the contract year hanging over him. He is carrying around the weight of the missed opportunity in a home start in Game Five of the 2007 ALCS to put the Indians into the World Series. That's heavy stuff. He's coming back from a season in which he led the majors in innings pitched. That's heavy wear and tear. He's trying to lead his team to another playoff. Did I mention the nine figure free agent contract that everyone says is in the bag for him, but that he doesn't have yet?

Sabathia cut off negotiations with the Indians when the season started, using the well-intended rationale that this would prevent him from being distracted by the contract situation. Only he knows if that has worked or not. For his sake, I'm hoping he figures out soon just what the distraction is.

UPDATE 4/17: Call it scratch for the itch...salve for the burn...whatever. The Indians badly needed a game like this tonight. The luck of the draw meant I was in the customary seat in Sec. 259, watching the Indians hit like they haven't since the opening series, as they rocked the Tigers 11-1 on a balmy evening in Cleveland.

Wedge had called a rare closed-door meeting before the game, presumably to remind the team that before they can play well they must pull their heads out of their asses, where they had been stuck for most of the last two weeks. It seems to have worked. This looked like the team we watched in 2007.

McCarthy Interview

Andy McCarthy's book Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad, was officially released this week, and today he answers questions from Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO. Such as...

Lopez: What’s the most devastating lesson from 15 years ago we still haven’t learned?

McCarthy: That the primary cause of Islamic terrorism is Muslim doctrine, and that we are not fighting a tiny, rag-tag collection of fringe lunatics who have somehow “hijacked” the “true Islam.”

Mark Steyn reminds us of Toynbee’s observation that civilizations die from suicide rather than murder, and our mulish refusal to look at what we’re up against is case in point. It’s really a frightful commentary on the low regard we have for ourselves: that we don’t think we are capable of soberly assessing the Islamic challenge without smearing all Muslims as terrorists — as if, in the scheme of things, it’s more important to shield the tender sensibilities of Muslims than fulfill our duty to protect American lives.

The stubborn fact is: Islamic doctrine is supremacist, chauvinist, and rife with calls to violence against non-Muslims. That doesn’t mean that these are the only elements of Islam. Nor does it mean that all Muslims, or even most, have any interest in acting on those elements. But moderate Muslims, no matter how great a majority of the faithful they may be, do not make Islam moderate. Islam is the font from which springs what we call fundamentalist Islam, radical Islam, militant Islam, political Islam, Islamo-fascism, or whatever we are calling it this week to avoid any hint that Islam has anything to do with the problem.

There are many different interpretations of Islam, of course. The one that truly threatens us — let’s call it fundamentalist Islam, since I think that’s closest to accurate — is not a fringe ideology. It is a comprehensive social system, with political, legal, and theological prescriptions. It is 14 centuries old; has in its history won the fealty of rich and poor, educated and illiterate, etc.; cuts across divides like Sunni-versus-Shiite; and today boasts hundreds of millions of adherents — not a majority of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims, but an influential, dynamic minority.

Lots more good stuff in the interview, and the book is terrific. I'd put it right up next to Wright's The Looming Tower as must-read accounts of the formative years of al Qaeda, and the exportation to America of the radical Islamic jihad. McCarthy brings an insider perspective to the story as the prosecutor who put the "blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman and assassin Sayyid Nosair in prison for life for acts of terror on American soil, and it makes for riveting reading.

More on Willful Blindness here.

More Bitters

Lots more pixels devoted to Barack Obama today.

Noemie Emery

Hugh Hewitt

George Will

Peter Wehner

Mickey Kaus

Thomas Sowell

Nothing for me to add after that lineup.

UPDATE: 4/15: Except James Taranto and Rich Lowry

Learning What Obama Believes

So here's the Barack Obama quote, from remarks to a group of wealthy liberal San Francisco supporters, that has sparked a media and blogosphere kerfuffle...

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Let's see. Past government failure - to provide new jobs apparently - has made small town Pennsylvania people embrace their prejudices and fears and hatreds, and "cling" to their guns? Their faith serves them as a way to "explain their frustrations" and deal with the bitterness caused by the under-performance of the federal government in their lives?

I'm not sure whether it's the condescension, the bizarre detachment from American culture, or the economic theory implicit in the statement that is the most striking. The bemoaning of the bitter Pennsylvanians' "anti-trade sentiment" is especially galling, given the candidate's protectionist campaign through the Midwest, dishonest though it was.

Obama really does have no clue about Americans and their guns, does he? Like that they've been clinging to them since 1776...and before. And I guess that clinging to religion habit is also something not just born of bitterness, but presumably curable by enlightened government action. Can he really think this way?

There's a piece at the HuffPo by Mayhill Fowler, who is learning things about Pennsylvanians while covering the campaign there. She allows that "his frank words about Pennsylvania may not have translated very clearly."

That's the problem. Obama has a different message for Californians than he does for Pennsylvanians. It needs to be translated depending on the audience. The "anti-trade sentiment" thing is mind-boggling. If anything it reveals for a broader audience that Obama's anti-NAFTA stance in Ohio and the industrial Midwest has been cynical and contrived.

I imagine Obama to be genuinely concerned about the plight of some people in Midwestern towns hurt by some de-industrialization two or three decades ago. What concerns me is that he thinks it should be the province of the federal government to see to it that those people have a job in a factory in their town again...doubtless manufacturing something Green. Either that, or he doesn't believe it, but he's willing to tell some rural rubes in flyover country that he does, because that's what he thinks they want to hear. Neither inspires hope.

The message is that he'll deliver on that promised regeneration (I must have forgotten this) that the last two Presidents couldn't accomplish. The fact is lots of those Midwestern towns have regenerated... and they're the ones who successfully attracted new manufacturing and service industries with tax incentives, good local leadership and private sector investment, to go along with their skilled and unskilled labor pools. But enough about what works. We're talking politics here.

So here's a sample of what the pundits are saying...

The New Pamphleteers

They said 2008 would be the first YouTube election. Of course it's impossible to predict the effect it will have on the outcome, but the rhetoric is sure getting cranked up. Viral video doesn't require a 527 organization. I think Thomas Paine would be proud. This one on Obama is getting lots of blog play today.

Pelosi Does Pique

In the Washington Post today, the editors criticize Speaker Pelosi for putting off a vote on the trade agreement with Colombia, and for acting more out of pique than principle.

The year 2008 may enter history as the time when the Democratic Party lost its way on trade. Already, the party's presidential candidates have engaged in an unseemly contest to adopt the most protectionist posture, suggesting that, if elected, they might pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared her intention to change the procedural rules governing the proposed trade promotion agreement with Colombia. President Bush submitted the pact to Congress on Tuesday for a vote within the next 90 legislative days, as required by the "fast-track" authority under which the U.S. negotiated the deal with Colombia. Ms. Pelosi says she'll ask the House to undo that rule.

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...political turf-staking, and the Democrats' decreasingly credible claims of a death-squad campaign against Colombia's trade unionists, constitutes all that's left of the case against the agreement. Economically, it should be a no-brainer -- especially at a time of rising U.S. joblessness. At the moment, Colombian exports to the United States already enjoy preferences. The trade agreement would make those permanent, but it would also give U.S. firms free access to Colombia for the first time, thus creating U.S. jobs. Politically, too, the agreement is in the American interest, as a reward to a friendly, democratic government that has made tremendous strides on human rights, despite harassment from Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.

Naked partisanship on parade.

Rather's Suit Gutted

CBS termed it a "setback" for Dan Rather, but it sounds more like the case has been "cored".

A Manhattan judge has dismissed portions of a lawsuit Dan Rather has filed against CBS and Viacom.

Judicial Hearing Officer Ira Gammerman on Thursday allowed the lawsuit to go foward, but struck down the parts of the suit that name Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone, CBS President Leslie Moonves and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward.

A lawyer for the defendants, lead outside counsel James Quinn, said the judge's ruling eliminated Rather's core complaints of fraud and breach of good faith and fair dealing.

It is a report by CBS News after all, but somehow the words "forged documents" didn't find their way into the story. Instead it is said that "questions arose about the story", and that "an independent review for the network determined the story was neither fair nor accurate."

I naturally navigated to LGF to see what Charles Johnson had to say...which led to Hot Air.

McCain Polling Well In Ohio

Rasmussen Reports:

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in Ohio shows John McCain leading Barack Obama 47% to 40%. He also leads Hillary Clinton 47% to 42%. Last month, McCain led both Democrats by six percentage points.

Another report has McCain gaining nationally as well, pulling even with either Democrat.

We'll try not to get overconfident.

Grins

All in one place, The 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time. Heavy on SNL and Monty Python....not that there's anything wrong with that.

(via C&S)

How Awful Is It?

Davis Freddoso with a little perspective on the current negative labor indicators.

Karsenty Decision Near

Nidra Poller has been following the court proceedings in the appeal of the defamation case brought against Philippe Karsenty by France2 TV and Charles Enderlin, in what has come to be known as "the al Dura affair."

Related:

Lots of al Dura background and links here

Best Indians Trades

Rich Swerbinsky, proprietor of TheClevelandFan.com, has ranked The 16 Greatest Trades in Cleveland Indians History.

Getting Sizemore, Cliff Lee and Brandon Phillips for Colon is a popular one lately, but at least Colon was a productive starter for several years after the trade. They got Omar Vizquel for two nobodies, and he won eight Gold Gloves here. Hall of Famer.

Swerb picks the trade that brought Tris Speaker to Cleveland in 1916 as the best deal ever. No argument here.

Saddam and EIJ

Stephen Hayes reporting....Saddam's ties to Islamic terror organizations documented...stop me if you've heard this one.

Not What They Supposed

Four months after the start of the Iraq war, two former senior Clinton administration national security officials took to the pages of the New York Times to demand accountability for the Bush administration's claims about Iraq and terrorism. Or, as they put it in their opening sentence, "Iraq's supposed links to terrorists."

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon wrote that the Bush administration's assertions about Iraqi support for terrorism were "suspect" and demanded scrutiny. One sure way to know the truth about Iraq and terrorism, they argued, was to consult the mountain of evidence the regime left behind as its leaders fled in front of American forces. "Military and intelligence officials need only comb through the files of Iraq's intelligence agency and a handful of other government ministries," and we would have our answers.

Well, we have our answers. They came in the 1,600-page Pentagon study released on March 13 and entitled Iraqi Perspectives Project, Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents, produced after a review of some 600,000 documents unearthed in postwar Iraq. And it is a devastating indictment of the U.S. intelligence community's analysis of Iraq, the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policy, and the arguments of anyone who would use the word "supposed" to describe Iraq's links to terrorists.

Hayes puts the findings of the Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP) up against the words of Clinton administration analysts, and lets the contrast do the talking. It goes without saying that the document exploitation (DOCEX) effort will continue to yield new information going forward. Three and a half years after the invasion, in late 2006, only an estimated 3% of the captured Iraqi regime documents had been exploited. It's hard to imagine they've even cracked 10% by now. In other words, stay tuned.

For now though, we have a document proving that an agreement existed between Saddam's Iraq and Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) a terrorist organization led by Ayman al-Zawahari, current right hand to bin Laden, and al Qaeda's top theologian, to finance and help conduct terrorist commando operations against the Egyptian regime and "hostile alliance governments."

If it's not a "smoking gun", it's damn close, and perhaps it's enough to convince all but the BDS sufferers among us that Saddam was in the Islamist terrorism business as early as 1990. Check out the Hayes article and see much more of his stuff at the link below.

Related:

Saddam - al Qaeda article archive

Climate Change is Redundant - Part XCVII

The Vanities of the Warmists - Jon Caruthers

Chris Horner with Dim Bulbs at the Planet Gore blog, asking: "Would the NYT and WaPo stop decrying the U.S.'s environmental record if we were to do what Europe does — increase emissions while making, and breaking, unenforceable promises?"

Warming links from Iain Murray

Al Gore in his own words, at Climate Skeptic.

Sarkozy in London

Nicholas Sarkozy's remarks during his visit to London included a statement of heartfelt thanks to Great Britain for their courage and sacrifice on France's behalf in two world wars, going to lengths rare among post-war French heads of state. The ironies abound in Sarkozy's visit and message, according to Michael Huntsman at Brussels Journal . Among them is Sarkozy's praise for a hard-won parliamentary system that Great Britain has now all but given away. (Sarkozy's remarks in italics)

…it is an exceptional honour to address members of both Houses of the British Parliament. It is indeed here, within these walls, that modern political life was born. Without this Parliament, would parliamentary democracy have ever existed in the world? Hasn’t this parliamentary practice, begun in this place, become the best guarantee against tyranny?

I wonder if he realised quite what he was saying. If we contemplate two facts: (1) that 70-80% of the laws which now enter into force in the United Kingdom every year emanate not from the elected representatives of the British people but from an unelected and wholly unrepresentative coterie of foreign civil servants; and (2) that with the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon Britain shall yield up almost all that remains of its sovereignty to that same group who will thus acquire almost unlimited power to impose the Brussels Diktat upon British laws, is it not then right to assert that the ‘best guarantee against tyranny’ of which he spoke has been recklessly and casually thrown away? And has not thus Parliamentary Democracy, so long in the evolution, been in a few short years ruthlessly stifled?

For we should be under no illusion but that what we understand by Parliamentary Democracy, which is indeed a formidable (though not impervious) bulwark against tyranny and which we have now effectively abandoned, has been replaced by a formidable Euro-theocracy. And from them tyranny we shall have, the tyranny of laws to which neither Her Majesty’s Government nor the British Parliament has assented as more and more ‘competences’ are given up to the thrall of Qualified Majority Voting.

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...how ironic that a foreign President should come to praise Britian at the very moment of its eclipse.

Lots more.

Barry From 17,000 ft.

This a few weeks old, but I just saw it for the first time. (thanks, Judy)

Dave Barry's colonoscopy.

If you've had one, it's a laugh. If you're over 50 and you haven't, it's a public service announcement...and a laugh.

Congress: First....Wake Up!

Where was the Washington Post with this when Bush was trying to get some traction with Social Security reform three years ago?

The Future of Entitlements

The federal budget is on an autopilot course to ruin. Spending on the three big entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- grows automatically, consuming a large and growing share of the budget with benefits that flow mostly to the elderly. Meantime, there is almost no public discussion about the trade-offs involved: Would the money be better spent on education, homeland security, defense or infrastructure? Even before the baby boomers retire, more than four dollars out of every ten go to these programs; if health-care spending increases at the current rate, within 40 years Medicare and Medicaid alone will amount to as large a share of the economy as the entire federal budget comprises today.

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Last week an impressive and ideologically diverse collection of economists and budget experts proposed an intriguing mechanism for forcing lawmakers -- and the next president -- to focus on the problem. The group, whose members come from think tanks ranging from the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute to the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, would take Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid off autopilot growth and require lawmakers to set 30-year budgets. These would be reviewed every five years to determine whether the costs are set to remain within the allotted limits. If not, there would be automatic adjustments -- the experts' paper doesn't specify what those would be -- unless lawmakers acted to override this trigger.

It's a start. Yes, slapping Congress up side the head, and demanding some sort of accountability from them on the issue would be a start. As one of the budget experts, Alice Rivlin is quoted as saying, the status quo is not an option.

Those built in benefit increases, which are tied to the Consumer Price Index rather then the inflation rate, ought to be fair game for review, as should allowing citizens to invest some of their own retirement dollars, rather than have the government just spend them out of the general fund every year like any other tax dollar it collects. But any talk of reducing the rate of increase in benefits can expect to be spun by Democrats as a cut in Social Security, and thus off the table. And allowing a portion of citizens' Social Security taxes to be held in private retirement accounts, as a way to insure that at least some of their retirement dollars are actually being saved, has already been ruled out by Obama as a reform option to be considered in a Democratic administration. What you don't hear much of from Democrats is talk of the only other two remaining options...raising payroll tax rates...again...or raising the retirement age...again.

A Report from Heritage.org has some of the numbers in their own plan for a fix:

In the coming decades, the cost of these programs will leap from 8.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 18.6 percent of GDP—an increase of 10.2 percent of GDP. Without reform, this increased cost would require raising taxes by the current equiva­lent of $12,072 per household or eliminating every other government program. Funding all of the prom­ised benefits with income taxes would require rais­ing the 35 percent income tax bracket to at least 77 percent and raising the 25 percent tax bracket to at least 55 percent.

Although aware of this coming crisis, Members of Congress have largely ignored it because all of the possible reforms are considered politically risky. Yet delays only increase the pain of the ultimate reforms, which are becoming about $1 trillion more expensive annually. Furthermore, many believe that Americans ages 55 and over should be exempt from any reforms. One-third of all baby boomers have already crossed that threshold, and at 4 million per year, all of them will have crossed it by 2019.

What appears to be brewing is a younger generation that will take a look at its aging baby-boomer population and say "screw you...you got us into this." And they'll be right. More from Heritage...

Entitlement reform is more than just an economic issue. Americans need to decide whether they want a future in which older Americans have an automatic claim on one-fifth of the future income of their grandchildren—who will be raising their own chil­dren and paying off their home mortgages. Under the current system, retirees will spend one-third of their adult lives in taxpayer-funded retirement while national security, education, health research, and antipoverty programs fight for the few remain­ing tax dollars.

Read the whole sobering thing.

Having lacked the political capital to make a dent in the status quo on Social Security, and having signed the prescription drug plan into law, George Bush can only be said to have failed overall to stem the tide of irresponsible entitlement growth, which has been presided over by baby-boomer politicians of both parties.

Congress must learn that they had better grab onto that 'third rail', or we'll shock them right out of their seats. If only. I have no reason to think they'll get any pressure from an Obama White House to steer us away from the cliff. McCain's record on entitlement reform is "mixed". Obama, of course, has no record to speak of, but he suggests that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire (raising your other income taxes) and raising the income ceiling for Social Security withholding will solve the problem. It won't even come close.

UPDATE 4/7: Just discovered this informative post by Tom Blumer at Bizzy Blog, which includes a helpful chart demonstrating how the large Social Security surpluses over the last dozen years have helped mask larger deficits, and how the declining revenues and rising outlays will catch up to us sooner than most people think.