Andrew Marcus (with video camera), Juliette Ochieng (aka baldilocks) and I will be covering the immigration demonstration in LA tomorrow for Pajamas Media. If you are a blogger or just a concerned citizen who would like to help us, we will be rendezvousing in the lobby of the New Otani Hotel (120 S. Los Angeles St.) at 8:30AM. Bring your digital camera and/or tape recorder. Spanish speakers especially welcome.

16 Comments

I’m on PJ duty again today and another great story popped up, this one from France via one of my favorite blogs – L’Ombre de l’Olivier. Apparently our good friends de Villepin and Chirac (by extension) have been up to some not unexpected dirty tricks to tarnish rival Nicolas Sarkozy – actually to make Sarko seem like a criminal. This is the kind of nasty corruption game we don’t even begin to play and (if you can make your way through its spy novel ins and outs) easily outdistances our own scandals. The French are, of course, more blasé (their word, after all) about these things, but not, ultimately, for their own good. Check out the links at the PJ post – amusing reading now that le Carré has gone off the deep end.

UPDATE: Meandering around the L’Ombre de l’Olivier for this post, I noticed another entry with photos of a 20-30 century old olive tree. Worth a look.

MORE: Fausta had an extensive post on this scandal – “The Clearstream Affair”- on Friday.

5 Comments

First, subscriptions down… then the Hiltzik Affair… now this.

UPDATE: Apparently, spelling is also causing a problem. From reader Joel Engel…

FOR THE RECORD
April 25, 2006

Ernest Hemingway: The author’s last name was misspelled as Hemmingway in a Sunday Calendar article about Andy Garcia.

2 Comments

Doing my duty at PJ today, I also came across Dan Drezner’s post on John McCain’s opening speech at the Brussels Forum. It seems the Arizona Senator buried his lede, adding as an aside that we would probably be dealing with the WoT for the rest of the century.

Whoa…. This century is only six years old. My daughter was born in 1998. If McCain’s right ( and I am afraid he is), that means she will be confronting this horror until she’s roughly a 102. (Talk about getting a dad depressed. ) Kind of puts the ultimate kibosh on Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” doesn’t it, not to mention adds a soupcon of skepticism to one’s evaluation of his recent attack on his former neocon friends. The problem for the neocons these days is that everyone seems to be picking on them, although they are the only ones who ever came up with an idea of how to solve this mess in the first place. Right or wrong they’ve made an attempt (had a theory). No one else really has.

Which is why part of me would like to see the Democrats elected in ’08. If McCain’s correct about the time frame and we are engaged in a reupped Hundred Years War with Islamism, all our political parties (and ones unknown) better be prepared to deal with it. The frivolously hostile Bush bashing persona of a vast portion of the Democratic Party must be replaced by some serious foreign policy thinking. They literally have to grow up and, sometimes, in order to grow up you have to be thrust into the middle of the process, have responsibility.

Ironically, in the midst of writing this brief post, a delivery man appeared at my door with a copy of my pal John Podhoretz’s new book about Hillary – Can She Be Stopped? I picked it up and, like everything John writes, it’s compulsively readable. He makes the case against Hillary as well as anybody could. Still… and I’m sure John would agree with this… no one knows the state of our world next week, let alone the first Tuesday in November 2007. So if Hillary is ultimately the one to swear on the Bible before John Roberts (the nightmare vision in John’s introduction), I sincerely hope she realizes her first and by far most important mission is the preservation of Western Civilization as we know it. I believe and hope for that more than I could possibly care whether she or anyone is a Democrat or a Republican.

20 Comments

… and not an atheist… otherwise I’d be among America’s new betes noires, according to what I’ve been reading across the blogosphere. I’m on weekend duty at PJ and discovered that this morning’s number one Technorati search is Rabbi Marc Gellman for his Newsweek column categorizing atheists as “angry.” Well, as I said, I’m an agnostic, so I can’t speak for atheists. But as one of that namby-pamby crew that can’t make up its mind – even after reading St. Thomas – about the Big Question, I have to say that, yes, sometimes I am “angry.” I’m particularly angry at self-satisfied pontificators who pick on minorities.

58 Comments

The second podcast is up at PJM and guess who’s in it! [Not your buddy Brother Ledeen?-ed. Yes, him. I hope he didn't commit any espionage this time. No Niger forgeries... We're clean as a whistle.]

Comments

Glenn Greenwald has a post today in which he quite graciously acknowledges my apology to Kos of yesterday. (Thank you, Glenn). He also goes on to make a well-reasoned, well-written case for the necessity of lumping people into broad political categories. This is, of course, the conventional wisdom and I don’t think I need to rehearse the argument here. You can click to Glenn for that, but for the most part, you already know it.

That argument, however, turns me and I think a substantial (perhaps even a majority) percentage of the American public into “non-people.” We just don’t think that way. We are Political Hybrids.

Now I don’t just mean by that centrist, I mean actual hybrids with passionate feelings about a variety of issues that cross lines. And a hybrid, of course, could cross those lines in a variety of ways. Since I see this site is being visited today by many who have not been here before, I will risk boring some people and give a quick tour d’horizon of my views (with the obvious caveat that I am just one guy – though there are others who share my constellation).

Woman’s right to choose – favor
Gay marriage – favor (neither presidential candidate did)
Stem cell reserach – favor
Death penalty – oppose (except in rare case of political mass murderers like Hitler, Saddam whose
supporters could release from jail)
National health insurance – basically favor – don’t think anyone has come up with good system yet
Global warming – agnostic, don’t know enough
Energy – completely favor conservation and alternative source research
General economics and taxation – I’m with Chairman Deng Tsiao Peng on this (“I don’t care whether a cat is black or white, only if catches mice.”). Show me what works and I’m with you. The ideological arguments are way too 19th Century on this one.
Immigration – I’m with Bush here (in other words more liberal, in the conventional sense, than most Dems and Republicans, ).
War on Terror – as everyone knows, I favor (in part because it seems in harmony with my views above- confusing, huh?)

Anyway, had enough? I know I have. But my point is this – with all due respect Glenn Greenwald’s approach encourages the worst in us and certainly the worst in the Internet. We are, I hope, sophisticated people capable of sophisticated argument – not simply generalization and attack. The Internet can be a great tool for that, for seeing and understanding, not for lumping. Maybe I am an optimist fighting pathetically against the stream, but polarized thought is a form of lobotomy that I will continue to oppose.

UPDATE: ShrinkWrapped comments.

SEE ALSO:QandO

MORE: Dan is getting impatient with the length of this discussion. Can we blame him?

99 Comments

I am not feeling particularly well, but I am going to try to brave the crowds for the opening night of the film tonight. It’s interesting that it currently gets an extremely high 94% on Rotten Tomatoes’ tomatometer of critical approval. No matter where you are on the political spectrum this film seems to be succeeding – a rather remarkable achievement in these polarized times.

10 Comments

Well, with Jacques, you bet it’s probably his own back he wants to watch. But in any case he’s got a plan afoot to finance the PA through the World Bank, not surprisingly funneling the dough through Abbas’ familiar hands (been there – and gone – before). What’s consistent about the French way of doing business (high and low ) is the easy acceptance of corruption that frustrates us anglosaxons. It’s as if everyone in France has agreed to be on the dole from the top to the bottom of society – and to distribute the largesse to minions like Abbas no matter what their record of “redistribution.” Great as long as it works – but talk about deficit spending.

3 Comments

Don’t even go there with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s president said today of any such action by the Security Council: “The Iranian nation won’t give a damn about such useless resolutions.”

He’s probably right about that.

4 Comments