McCain's Non-Bounce

Ahmadinejad To Visit Ground Zero?

UPDATE: Nope.

Archiving For the 21st Century

Of course, the Bush administration has its own solutions for this...

"Rick Warren Belongs In Prison"

Attention-grabbing subject line in an e-mail this morning from Jim Wallis's Sojourners magazine, referring to the "systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries" (according to the New York Times) taking place now in federal prisons.

Every Day is Constitution Day

From a Ron Paul campaign e-mail I just received: "For Ron Paul every day is Constitution Day."

Nice.

Republican Becomes First To Qualify For Public Financing

"Fast Wine"

You can almost hear the chorus of thuds as fainting traditionalists strike the ground.

Chemerinsky Bounced -- What Liberal Academia?

Led Zeppelin Confirms Reunion

It's A No-Go For Boyarsky: Another Blogging Casualty?

What Does a 9 Year Old Orthodox Yeshiva Student Do When Faced With Porn?

It's the Future of the Republic, Stupid

Has the AKP become the "natural party of government" in Turkey? (Or is it the military -- and the politicians are just caretakers?)

Clinton Calls For "Undivided Jerusalem"

Pandering? You decide.

Who Runs What in Gaza?

A good resource on the current situation in Gaza... I guess they're still a few years away from having 311.

Probing Mearsheimer/Walt on the Iraq War

After some very blah introductory grafs, Ron Kampeas of JTA correctly pinpoints the biggest misapprehension in Mearsheimer/Walt -- namely The Lobby's role in the origins of the Iraq war:

It is on the subject of the Iraq war -- specifically the effort to assign blame to Jerusalem and Jewish organizations -- that the authors go off the rails. On this question, I asked Mearsheimer and Walt particularly about their focus on Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary who was an architect of the war.

Why, I wondered, no mention of Wolfowitz's many writings on the general idea of pre-emptive action, his efforts as the lead U.S. official shepherding democracy into the Philippines and Indonesia in the 1980s?

And what about his 2003 endorsement of the Geneva agreements positing Israel's return to pre-1967 lines, made explicitly because he believed the Israel-Palestinian issue had to be solved if Iraq was to succeed? (To say the lobby was less than enthusiastic about the Geneva agreements would be an understatement.) Were these not more germane to understanding his commitment to war with Iraq than rumors of his commitment to Israel?

Mearsheimer responded: "We're not making the argument that they were monomaniacal, that the United States had to invade Iraq for Israeli benefits."

Yet absent other evidence of the Bush administration's commitment to invade Iraq, that is exactly how their book comes across. The writers assemble quotes from leaders in Jerusalem to show that while Israel "did not initiate the campaign for war against Iraq," it "did join forces with the neoconservatives to help sell the war to the Bush administration and the American people."

The idea that Israel joined with neoconservatives to "sell" Bush on Iraq posits an inversion of how Washington operates -- especially under this administration. Bush's proxies made it clear to Jewish leaders -- and just about everyone else -- in the first days of the administration that the tradition of joining forces on areas of agreement and agreeing to disagree on all else was null: You either signed on with the whole Bush agenda or you were frozen out.

And so, as 2002 wore into 2003, every interest group in this town that needed access to an immensely popular president -- the media, the Democrats and, yes, Jewish and pro-Israel groups -- signed on more or less to the White House policy that arched over all others: invading Iraq.

Read the whole thing.

Why Do Monkeys Pee on Themselves?

"All That Is Alive Merely Evaporates"

But the real reason to love this doomsday weapon is that it's "environmentally-friendly."

Candidate Challenges Election Results While DJ Plays "Let It Be"

A Suggestion for How to Remember 9/11

It seems to me that this is a nice solution (maybe re-formulation is a better word) to all the questions about if and how to memorialize 9/11...

Coulter Compares Herself To Jesus

According to an e-mail I received today from People for the American Way, Ann Coulter shared the following views in a recent speech at Xavier University:

*"Liberals don't recognize the existence of evil, the closest thing to it in their vocabulary is Wal-Mart."

*"The fact that liberals are godless is not even a controversial point anymore."

*"Democrats believe public restrooms are only for snorting coke."

*"Terrorists are Democrats with more gumption."

Apparently, after her talk, she was asked how she could justify her attacks as a Christian. She defended her hatemongering by saying that Jesus also used sarcasm and jokes to get his message across.

It's a maaaannnn, baby!

Brief Litany of 9/11 Tastelessness

Giuliani was surprisingly tasteful... but Joe Lieberman, appearing on Fox News -- what else is new? -- and grinding his partisan axe across the WTC ashes, alas, was not. And I felt a pang of revulsion and shame when the camera swept across the row of state flags at the WTC site and I noticed one of the handful of Southern state flags (I don't know which one) that incorporates the Stars & Bars... such is the weak constitution of a liberal, I suppose.

UPDATE: More tastelessness.

Xenu For Thompson '08

Bruce Bartlett shows again why he's my favorite conservative...