Momentum is building against Janet Reno’s bid for the Democrat nomination for Florida governor. Reality is considered a major factor.

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As he does most every week, excellent Washington reporting by Howard Fineman in Newsweek.

What you get from Fineman that you won’t from the New York Times is an honest look at the strengths and weaknesses of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Fineman is what Washington correspondents should be, but rarely are.

Also from DC, interesting Presidential polling data from Fox News/Opinion Dyamics.

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I’m re-posting here something I wrote late last night, just to make sure plenty of people read it. What I found made my blood boil, and it should yours, too.

How The Left Was Evil

Tom Tomorrow, writing on the Enron Mess, concludes with: “Villainy, fraud, sex, death and a stonewalling White House. You think this thing is just going to blow over? Excuse me while I wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes.” [Italics mine]

Let’s get this straight. Tom gets a good giggle — no, a tear-inducing belly laugh — out of what he thinks is a murder. Think I’m exaggerating? Read this snippet from the same post: “We’ve got at least one mysterious death–the apparent suicide of a former Enron executive who, from all reports, had nothing to hide, but was expected to be a major whistleblower in the case. ”

Yeah, Tom doesn’t have the stones to come right out and say it, but he clearly implies murder, coroner’s report to the contrary. And he thinks murder is pretty damn funny when it furthers his objective of embarrassing the President.

Remember the video of Osama laughing at the deaths of 2,800 Americans when those deaths furthered his political objectives? Is his mindset really that different from Mr. Tomorrow’s?

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Why I Love Arizona, Other Than The Phrase “But It’s a Dry Heat”
City Officials in Lake Havagoodtime… er, Havasu, Arizona want to take custody of a two ton statue of Lady Margaret Thatcher. The Brits built the thing, but it can’t go up in the House of Commons until the Iron Lady has been dead five years. And if she has her way, that will be four years and 364 days after Hell freezes over.

Roadtrip to Arizona with me, anyone?

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But Has She Ever Downed That Stuff With Vodka?
Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s daughter Noelle was busted today for prescription fraud. Let’s see… she’s got political connections, a great tan, is a babe, and can get me endless Vicodin. What am I doing in Colorado again?

One of these days, my fiance is going to kick my ass.

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The lovely and talented Kathy Kinsey of On The Third Hand is getting into the blogverse business. And quite nicely, too. But then again, I’ve always been partial to women who sing about me.

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All Your George Are Belongening To Us
You’ve got to read The Chronicles of George. Whether you are or are not a techweasel, this is funny, funny stuff. I damn near wet myself.

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How The Left Was Evil

Tom Tomorrow, writing on the Enron Mess, concludes with: “Villainy, fraud, sex, death and a stonewalling White House. You think this thing is just going to blow over? Excuse me while I wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes.” [Italics mine]

Let’s get this straight. Tom gets a good giggle — no, a tear-inducing belly laugh — out of what he thinks is a murder. Think I’m exaggerating? Read this snippet from the same post: “We’ve got at least one mysterious death–the apparent suicide of a former Enron executive who, from all reports, had nothing to hide, but was expected to be a major whistleblower in the case. ”

Yeah, Tom doesn’t have the stones to come right out and say it, but he clearly implies murder, coroner’s report to the contrary. And he thinks murder is pretty damn funny when it furthers his objective of embarrassing the President.

Remember the video of Osama laughing at the deaths of 2,800 Americans when those deaths furthered his political objectives? Is his mindset really that different from Mr. Tomorrow’s?

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One of my favorite subjects of scorn, those bastards at the FDA, are still being bastards according to drug companies in this Wall Street Journal Story.

In no surprise to anyone who watches the industry, the FDA bastards have slowed down the drug “approval” process. So it takes longer — and costs more money — to get life-saving, life-prolonging, life-improving drugs to market. All in the name of protecting the helpless consumer from the all-evil, predatory, malicious drug industry.

Now, let’s look at this rationally for once. Executives at drug companies owe their livelihoods to saving your life. If the drugs don’t work, they don’t get sold. If the drugs are deadly, the drug companies get sued into the Stone age. FDA bastards owe their livelihoods to avoiding bad headlines. One case of one drug hurting one person can ruin a bureaucrat’s entire career, so it pays for him to delay making a decision. But the poor slob who died because a better drug wasn’t yet approved doesn’t make the headlines at all — it’s not news when a drug that’s not on the market doesn’t do a job it hasn’t been approved for yet. You’ve never seen in the paper, “Air Traffic Controller Forgets to Tell Airplane It’s Safe to Land, Plane Lands Safely.”

Says Fred Hanssan of Pharmacia in the WSJ story, “We are now beginning to see some new innovations that are approved earlier in Europe than in the U.S. This drug lag is not good.” That’s right, folks — the Brusselscrats are jumping ahead of us in medicine. It’s a good thing we don’t have an FCA to approve new computer chips — we’d be blogging on 386s. New 386s.

FULL DISCLOSURE: VodkaPundit lost his father to a blood clot. At the time, the FDA bastards were keeping a superior blood-thinning agent off the market. The drug in question had been proven 99% safe, but those bastards at the FDA still chose to sit on their hands and wait for more data.

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In a post last week, VodkaPundit made some rather un-PC remarks about the, uh, amplitude of brilliant LS contributor Natalija Radic‘s chestal region. In fact, I did so at the disparagement of her legs. New photographic evidence refutes my prior statement, and an apology is in order.

Natalija, I’m sorry. I was wrong — you have amazing legs.

And for the record, my just-as-sweetly-shaped fiance now says she hates you.

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OK, Jonah Goldberg is off the hook today for his brilliant G-File post this afternoon. Sometimes, that man just nails it.

UPDATE: You might be wondering what hook Jonah got off of today. Well. We libertarians, even the small-l variety, distrust the G-File Man because he simply (and on purpose) refuses to understand, or even properly describe, our beliefs. And we get especially wary when he uses the word “libertarian” in his stories — it automatically increases the sensitivity of our Cringometers. Anyway, today Jonah wrote a great bit and managed to use the L-word without me feeling any sudden need to throw my mouse at the screen.

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Will Warren, the poet laureate of the blogscene, has done it again. Take that, Jonah Goldberg!

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Random Thought
The “civilized” world — you know, those useless Belgians and whatnots — is upset about our prisoners at Gitmo not because of how we’re treating them. They’re mad because they know that if those were our people, we’d have successfully rescued them by now in some daring around-the-world raid. And because no country in Europe has half that ability.

So in all seriousness, allow VodkaPundit to say “Neener.”

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VodkaPundit has long admired the Bush family’s devotion to their friends. But the time has come for CIA head George Tenet to go.

Really, September 11 was reason enough to sack Tenet, but check out this new revelation from the Washington Post, courtesy of Best of the Web:

“This has bin Laden all over it,” Tenet said to Boren. “I’ve got to go.”

“I wonder,” Tenet was overheard to say, “if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.” He was referring to Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been detained in August after attracting suspicion when he sought training at a Minnesota flight school.

Keep in mind, this was minutes after the WTC attack. In other words, the very top guy at the CIA knew personally of the Moussaoui case, but did nothing about it. Not a goddamn thing.

If we can hold accountable the former Afghan government for hosting al Qaeda, then we can — must — hold accountable those in our government who missed their chance to stop the attack.

Heads must roll, Mr. President.

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I know it is Glenn Reynolds’ sacred duty to scoop all other bloggers all the time, but did InstaPundit have to beat VodkaPundit on this story?

MSNBC reports that alcohol may ward off Alzeimers. If that’s the case, why can’t I ever remember where I left my drink?

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Fight the Fascists at Home, Too
Just when you thought AG John Ashcroft couldn’t get more annoying or useless, he’s ordered “nude” statues at the Justice Department covered. For months, I’ve said the only reason worth watching an Ashcroft press conference is the off chance of catching sight of a lone aluminum breast. And literally, that’s all there is to see. But Pompous John of the Bible Belt is tired of being associated with a really well-formed, presumably very firm breast.

So he ordered drapes for it.

Do I have to remind him, too, that there’s a damned war on?

UPDATE: Shall we start a pool over how long it will take before my first Google hit using the keywords, “Ashcroft,” “firm,” and “breast?”

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“Ecuador Plane Missing with 92 People on Board,” Enron executives questioned.

OK, so I made up the second part.

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Can’t We Put Aside Stupid Agendas And Just Think Department
Bill Safire has his usual well-reported and well-reasoned take on the whole POW/unlawful combatant flap over at the State Department.

The solution is simple: al Qaeda officers are unlawful combatants and may legally be shot out of spite. But no matter how much we’d be in our rights to do so, we should not shoot them — they’re too valuable as intelligence sources. al Qaeda foot soldiers, on the other hand (pun intended) are pretty much like enlisted guys everywhere — powerless, uninformed, just following orders. Treat them as POWs and look nice to the idiots over in Europe.

Officer = unlawful combatant, little guy = POW.

Got that?

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Screw You, Too, NYT
An unsigned NYT editorial lambasts Bush for doing little for the environment. First, maybe they ought to blame Clinton for all that dust in Manhattan the last four months. Second…

…the environment? People, there’s a war on.

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Over on Strategy Page, Steven Cole files this report on the Russian Navy. Oh boy, the Russians laid down the keel of the first of ten tiny little ships?

This isn’t the yawner you think it is. In fact, it’s as vital to your future almost as much as it is to Russia’s.

For much of the last sixty years, Russia has been trying to play the superpower game. But they were sadly underequipped. You know the reason: An economy just too damn small to support power projection. Hell, even during the heady days of the ’70s, when Soviet power was apparently at its apex, they couldn’t properly project real power any further than Magdeburg, East Germany.

Sure, their diplomats were scoring points all over Africa. They even rented out the Cuban Army to fight in Angola (in an odd historical twist, one of our big oil companies, Unocal, I think, was helping to finance the Marxists in that war. And the South Africans were good guys. Go figure. Anyway…).

Real power projection requires a blue water navy. That means big ships, especially aircraft carriers. Carriers allow you to bomb anyone, anywhere, and on fairly short notice. While our Air Force was still struggling to set up one base in Kraplekistan, hte Navy was already pounding targets in Kabul. The Soviets tried to build a carrier, but the best they could do was a ski-jump looking thing that launched obsolete-at-the-time YAK-38s. Sad, really. It made the Charles de Gaulle look fearsome. The only things that kept the Soviets in the superpower game were a shitload of SS-18s and -25s, and Eighth Guards Tank Army sitting opposite the Fulda Gap. 8th GTA is now disbanded and the nuclear-tipped missiles are either rusting away or were negotiated away.

So what’s the big deal about the Russian Navy ordering ten little corvettes for coastal patrol duty? Easy — ten tiny ships aren’t one big one. The Russians have finally recognized that, at least for the middle term, they’re out of the game. That implies that they also see that they can either play the game our way, or remain backwards, broke, and broken.

And it looks like for the first time in a long time, the Russians are doing something right. I hope so — they’ve suffered enough.

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It took longer than I’d hoped, but James Taranto of Best of the Web has finally posted his readers suggestions for new silly lawsuits. Oh, and some Simpsons humor, too. Check it out.

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Never Put Off Until Tomorrow What Can Be Put Off Until The Day After Tomorrow
I keep forgetting to permalink the mighty USS Clueless. The good captain Steve, who has a truly fine first name, helms an excellent ship. Bookmark him.

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It’s Worse Than I Thought
My latest Google hit came off the search for “Connie,” “Chung,” and “hottie.” You people are as bad as me. I love you all.

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Maybe I Was Wrong After All
Yowza. The Telegraph UK just fogged up my monitor with a hot little report on Enron. Says, “office affairs were rampant, divorce among senior executives an epidemic, and stories of couples steaming up glass-walled offices after late-night meetings were the talk of Houston.”

I’ve been saying all along that this, ahem, affair would play out worse for the Republicans — but now it’s sounding more like Clinton redux.

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Oldest Joke Department
TV “psychic” Miss Cleo has been ordered to stop calling unhappy customers, pressuring them into paying disputed bills. OK, everyone say it with me: You’d think she’d have seen this coming.

The Borscht Belt will never die.

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One Last Sunday Post Department
David Carr at Libertarian Samizdata has a brilliant reply to my “Congruent Forces” piece from Thursday.

My favorite bit: “These are the values breathed into America by the great English and Scottish enlightenment and it is why Americans like Stephen Green rightly call us The Mother Country, for the ‘American Revolution’ was not so much a revolution as a Civil War between the rebels trying to champion those ideas and their imperial rulers whose persistant continental wars had so wounded them.”

Carr argues in the same vein that Britons are being systematically denied their heritage of liberty by Europhiles and New Labour. For some real lyricism far sweeter than anything I wrote, check out his concluding paragraph. Just read the whole thing.

The Rams are up 10-3. I’m going back to the game now.

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I usually refuse to post on weekends, but this site deserves to be linked immediately. A raised glass to Next Right!

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play with the cat and watch the Rams.

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