NORWEGIANS NON-GRATA? Sounds right to me.

WHEN I BEGAN READING THIS I thought Jonathan was talking about the situation at SFSU. But no, he's not. I'd kind of made the connection before, but when you read his piece after reading about the SFSU situation, all kinds of little neurons start connecting. I especially like the last paragraph.

Reading the two together also underscores why we need to take back our universities.

IF YOU LOVED BOOKS as a child, and have trouble getting rid of them as an adult, this will touch a chord. It did with me, as I sit surrounded by books that take up almost more room in my apartment than any other single thing.

READ IT AND WEEP.

OLD PRESIDENTS CLUB II: Just like I said before, Old Presidents need to have their traveling priviledges revoked unless specifically asked to go somewhere. And I'm not the only one who thinks so - it's nice to have validation from the likes of the National Review. I especially liked this article from USA Today, which confirmed what I thought - that Jimmy Carter is highly annoying (apparently he was to Clinton too), and that Clinton is using his presidency to eat well all over the world:

...they [Bush administration] are annoyed by former president Jimmy Carter's trip to Cuba, which began Sunday with a red-carpet reception. Bush officials see the visit, the first by a sitting or former U.S. president since the 1959 revolution, as a public-relations boon for Fidel Castro and a forum for Carter to espouse closer economic and diplomatic ties with Cuba -- views that conflict with administration policy.

Unlike officials who are appointed by and beholden to the current president, former presidents have no obligation to toe the administration line, of course. They often have their own political agendas and policy views. And they can command attention at home and abroad to have them heard.
All that is precisely why presidents are more likely to see their predecessors as mischief-makers than mediators. The fear: Former presidents will send mixed messages to foreign leaders, blunder into sensitive issues, take credit if something is achieved and perhaps even contribute to an impression that the current president can't manage things by himself.

…Since Clinton left office 16 months ago, he has visited 30 countries on six continents. He lunched last Wednesday in New York with former South African president Nelson Mandela; he leaves Saturday on a trip with stops in Japan, China, Singapore, Brunei and New Zealand.

…Clinton says he's careful to avoid criticizing Bush or complicating his job -- in part, aides say, because he remembers how irked he was as president when Carter injected himself into conflicts in North Korea and elsewhere. Since leaving office, Carter has won wide praise for monitoring elections, mediating disputes and addressing problems of poverty and human rights.

But he also has riled officials in the last administration and the current one. An op-ed column he wrote in The New York Times suggested Bush hadn't done enough to stem the violence in the Mideast.

Then there's Cuba.

Yes, then there's Cuba, and you know what I think about that.

Somebody put Carter in an Old Presidents' Home and throw away the key.

Links via The Weigh In.

THE POWER OF THE BLOG: This blog is now the first entry for anyone googling "susanna" and for anyone googling "cornett". If you google "susanna cornett", it's all over the place. But don't do it. I get "susanna cornett" google searches hitting my site pretty much daily, and it gives me a little bit of a weird feeling. Just who out there wants to know about me who doesn't already know about this site? Except, of course, for my friend Ben who refuses to either bookmark it or remember the web address, so each time he wants to read it he googles my name. But I know he's not reading it daily. So whence the googles?

At least it's better than getting hit for the google search "gym girl toes and bare feet photo page".

NO PALESTINIAN STATE? The Likud votes, Sharon is dissed, Netanyahu makes inroads. Damian Penny and Tal G in Israel comment.

IT'S NOT A DIPLOMATIC MISSION! IT'S A...WELL...DIPLOMATIC MISSION: I posted below about ex-prez Jimmy Carter and his jaunt to sunny Cuba, trading on his ex-prez status and mucking about when he should stay home. The article emphasized the trip as a "private" mission, and Tony Adragna defended Carter in the comments to my post. Carter arrived yesterday. Let's take a stroll through the NY Times coverage this weekend, and then you explain to me just how it's a non-diplomatic mission by a private, philanthropic citizen:

One:

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, on an historic visit to Cuba to try to patch up four decades of feuding with the United States, met on Sunday with the top echelons of the island's communist government.

Two:

Former President Jimmy Carter arrives in Cuba on Sunday as the most prominent American political figure to venture across the chasm between two nations separated by 90 miles and 43 years of Communist rule.

While no major policy breakthroughs are expected during his five-day visit, which is billed as a private one, many here hope that Mr. Carter's presence will advance their efforts for change.

Three:

"We are eager to personally see your achievements in education, health and culture," Mr. Carter said. "We also appreciate the opportunity to meet with President Castro, other members of the government and representatives of religious and other groups." Mr. Castro said Mr. Carter was free to meet with any dissidents he wished...

Bush administration officials said when they approved the visit that they hoped Mr. Carter would use the opportunity to promote human rights and democracy. A spokesman for Mr. Carter said at the time that administration officials had not tried to dissuade him nor had they asked him to carry specific messages

Those who favor more open relations with Cuba praised Mr. Carter's visit as an effort to start a new dialogue. The trip was denounced by others though, as a sop to Mr. Castro, whose country is facing economic problems and international criticism for its human rights record.

Four:

FORMER President Jimmy Carter is to board a Havana-bound jet today to continue a mission started a quarter-century ago ...

[Julia E. Sweig, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations] said, the insistence of the hard-liners within the Carter administration that Mr. Castro make a concession before continuing negotiations leaves her with a sense of "lost opportunity."

"Cuba will always provide a rationale for taking a hard line if we are going to look for one," she said. "But we were never as close as we were then."

...No one close to Mr. Carter wants to discuss what he hopes to accomplish with this five-day visit. Mr. Carter, who is going to Cuba at Mr. Castro's invitation, has said he opposes America's embargo. [Bernardo Benes, a prominent Miami banker who worked with Carter on his Cuban efforts during his presidency] said all anyone can do is hope that two elder statesmen can finally agree on some fundamental issues that may improve the quality of life for the people of Cuba.

But fortunately, Carter reassures us this is not a diplomatic visit:

Carter, the first former or sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928, has emphasized this is a private visit and that he will not be negotiating with the Cuban government.

I'm sure there's no connection to this:

President Bush is expected to spell out his own Cuba policy on May 20 in Miami at a ceremony celebrating the centennial of the founding of the Cuban republic.

I'm sure, really, it's a sunny vacation, a visit between old friends, and an opportunity for Carter to buy a few cigars. Just a quiet, private visit to check out the country.

Glad the media weren't notified. Gives the "private" label some credibility.

GIRLS WITH GUNS show men up. Really. There's proof.

NO MORAL EQUIVALENCE on Saudi television.

UPDATE: And a good catch by Desert Pundit.

What's that saying about giving someone enough rope?

CARTOON EQUIVALENCE: An interesting view of the Israeli/Palestinian situation, which Matt Haughey at A Whole Lotta Nothing says is the "the best critique of the Israel/Palestine conflict I've seen".

So, Matt, if this is a good analysis, then what is the best response? I would be curious to know how you would settle it. When neither side is more at fault, and both sides are equal agitators, you have to answer these questions:

1) Who has standing to end the conflict? Does it have to be an internal group or can it be an external group? (I'm assuming here that you don't really anticipate that Godman will crush both and save the world from having to make that decision.)
2) If it's external, how do you make that decision? How can you adjudge that a mediator/resolver is neutral? You can't assume an entity IS neutral just because the entity itself makes that claim (as in the case of, say, the UN). There needs to be clear criteria.
3) Once the decision is made, who gets to enforce it on the combatants? How aggressive/forceful can that entity be in ending it?
4) If no external entity has standing, then how does it end? Would it ultimately be, might makes right?
5) If it is might makes right, then isn't that what was already happening? Why would we hold back Israel?

I think it unlikely that most of those claiming moral equivalence actually believe it. But it would be useful to see what resolution they would propose from that perspective.

I'M CONFUSED. Why would gay college students agitate for mixed-gender housing? How is it heterosexist not to have it, and even if it is, why would they care? It seems to me that if you're gay, same-sex housing meets all your criteria. Puzzling...

Now if the frat boys were wanting to mix it up with the sorority floors, I might understand.

YOU MEAN THEY KILLED PEOPLE? The European countries who volunteered (yes, volunteered) to take the 13 terrorists exiled after leaving the Church of the Nativity are now reacting with shock and horror that these men actually killed people. Who knew?

Well, actually, Israel knew. Now they will too.

The EU didn't want Israel to grab that tiger by the tail, so Israel said, fine, if we let go they roam your lands.

How do you like your new mankillers, EU?

(Read LGF, Den Beste, DPM and InstaPundit for The Full Fisking.)

NO ONE'S LISTENING? Don't bomb mailboxes - blog.

ARE WE COPING TOO FAST? It seems Justin Weitz (link below) was prescient, at least about what the NY Times is thinking. This article looks at the role of media, most specifically television, in the country's recovery from 9/11, including discussions about how media should approach it. This was particularly interesting:

At a conference last fall of cable television executives, a psychiatrist, Bert Pepper, called on programmers to consider the effects of traumatic visual stimuli as they plan their schedules. "Do the programs help educate people about actual risks?" he said in an interview. "Or for the sake of marketing do they want to exaggerate the risk and increase the distress people continue to feel?"

Television overdramatizing to win market share? Of course not. Wouldn't happen.

The latest round of commemorative shows begins tonight with "Telling Nicholas" on HBO. I don't know that I could watch it; since I don't have HBO, I won't find out whether I would. But it's unsettling to think of the invasions in privacy and taste that we will likely see in the four months leading to the one year anniversary of 9/11.

IT'S ALL THE INTERNET'S FAULT: Thomas Friedman says Middle East Muslims are believing nasty things about America and the Israelis because of unfiltered Internet, and their own general stupidity about its unfettered nature and technology in general. It's an odd, worried, disconnected column, starting with an Indian journalist railing about Fox News, and ending with a fear that it's too late for one-on-one diplomacy.

Mr. Friedman... sir... it's not the Internet. People in the United States don't automatically believe everything on the Internet because we have a free press and a mix of ideas and access to all manner of viewpoints and sources of facts. If those people lived in a place with similar freedoms, and were taught to read and reason for themselves, I bet they'd be less likely to believe whatever came off The Internet. And people were hating and finding others to hate along with them long before telephones, even, or television, or Internet. Yeah, it's easier to form coalitions of hate, but also coalitions of truth. And the cure isn't diplomacy.

It's democracy.

MORE MONEY TO FIGHT AIDS: The Senate is getting behind the effort to tackle AIDS in Africa, and given the level of the problem there it's probably a good thing. I just worry though that the money will be diverted into the management of the organizations, the pockets of local officials and generally everywhere but into medicine for those who need it. And the spread of AIDS in Africa is not just about health conditions, but social conditions as well, and there is resistance to dealing with the social contexts that increase the likelihood of its spread. AIDS has never been treated the same as other contagious illnesses because of those same social contexts. None of us want children to suffer, or countries to teeter constantly on the edge of anarchy because of a preventable disease. But it doesn't help either situation to tie our own hands in addressing it for fear of offending people with agendas beyond tackling it in the most direct and effective ways possible.

ISRAEL BACKS DOWN? I'm not quite sure how to react to the postponement or maybe even abandonment of retaliation for the 15 dead from last week's suicide bomb attack. It's being hailed by the Arabs as a chance for diplomacy to work, and anything hailed by the Arabs is a frightening prospect. The article has this amusing note:

Israeli commentators said a Gaza sweep could have caused friction with Washington

I suspect the Israeli commentators here are NY Times reporters, editorial staff and cocktail buddies, with the possible addition of the increasingly disappointing Colin Powell.

However, one thing is true - Israel has stepped back from a righteous retaliation, in the name of diplomacy, so now we'll see the truth of the Palestinian and Arab claims of wanting peace.

IS 9/11 FADING? The American Kaiser's Justin Weitz looks at where America is in its stages of grief and recovery. I'm not sure I agree with him that the level that it's faded is a good thing, but I do agree that now is a lot different from then.

Just yesterday I was walking from my car to my apartment building, and saw a low-flying plane banking overhead. I'm in the flight path for Newark International, which is where two of the 9/11 planes came from. For just a moment, I considered whether that plane was so low that maybe, just maybe, it was headed toward a building. I think that almost instinctual fear will be with me for a very long time.

And I don't know that it's a bad thing.

THAT HATEFUL OLD ASHCROFT! Scutum Sobieski at Regurgablog dismantles a Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial whining about John Ashcroft, that mean old man trying to put guns in every pocket by finally recognizing that the Constitution means what it says.

SO WHAT SHOULD WOMEN PLAY? Quana X. Jones can't really think of a women's sport worth his time (ok, that's an extrapolation, but see if you agree), and he doesn't like basketball at all! His Eristic blog is cool, and his webblog oversight committee bovinishly compelling, but anyone who doesn't think men's college basketball, and especially the University of Kentucky Wildcats, is amazing and worthy of adulation... well... He's a Texan. Need I say more?

UPDATE: Yikes! While I was in the midst of posting the above, Quana was ripping a journalist a new one for defending the Saudis. He ripped so hard I think the journalist's entire immediate family and ancestors three generations back got a wakeup call. Not for those with delicate sensibilities:

Warning: I have been extremely frank in my comments on this article. Sometimes it is more than a matter of 'excusing my French'. I apologize to sensibilities in advance. I'm not going to change it. If certain four letter words and/or sexual comments offend you, please skip this jeremiad.

So if you're feeling brave, check it out.

UPDATE 2: Spoons busts the same piece. Great minds and all that. But can't have too much of that good thing, can you?

UPDATE 3: And the slams just keep coming. Solly Ezekiel at Gedankenpundit has another take on the piece, different enough from the other two to be worth your time.

WARNING: MASSACRE IMMINENT – Fifteen Israelis died this week, blown to bits by a Palestinian suicide bomber. Israel is going to retaliate. The Chicago Sun-Times does not talk about funerals of those who died, or the fears of the Israelis as the bombing starts again. No, it talks about this:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip--Residents here hoarded food and thronged bakeries Friday, while Palestinian gunmen patrolled streets and blocked camp entrances with mounds of rubble ahead of an anticipated Israeli military strike.

Be sure and get some of that canned milk, too, this may take a while and we don't want you to, you know, get hungry while you're waiting for a break to send more suicide bombers into Israel. Regular milk might spoil. We don't want your health to suffer.

After a passing reference to the Israeli deaths as context for the retaliation, we see this:

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, replying to a question about a possible incursion into Gaza, accused Israel of committing crimes against Palestinians. ''Our people are steadfast and will continue with all their power to defend our holy cities, Christian and Muslim places,'' he said at his West Bank headquarters.

We know what that means, Yassar - more suicide bombings.

And then the article goes into a long discussion of the standoff at the Church of the Nativity, which could, but doesn’t, say this:

73 Palestinian policemen and civilians were set free just in time to load their guns and strap on some dynamite for the next round.

Then the article reveals the continued delusion of the president:

President Bush said the end of the Bethlehem siege was a welcome sign and ''should advance the prospects for resuming a political peace process.''

We learn that even the Palestinians left before the obnoxious foreigners, four of them unfortunately Americans:

By midmorning, all Palestinians had left the church, but the standoff was not over. Ten foreigners, who had slipped into the church May 2 in a show of solidarity with the Palestinians, refused to come out--demanding a lawyer and insisting on holding a news conference.

Israeli riot police later entered the compound and removed them by force, with the approval of exasperated priests. The 10, including four Americans, were detained ahead of deportation.

I think the Americans should go straight from the airport into jail.

We then learn that Israel will limit it’s strikes to terrorist enclaves, that the head of Hamas is unconcerned (why should he be concerned? The world is either explicitly or implicitly on his side), and that Gaza actually used to be in Israel but the Israelis gave it up in an effort toward peace (huh, you mean the Israelis are serious about peace? Then...if THEY are... who isn'.....oh). And then, finally, we learn the sad and shocking news:

Gaza is one of the world's most densely populated areas, and many think that invading the strip on a scale similar to Israel's sweep through the West Bank last month in search of militants would result in high casualties among civilians and Israeli troops.

Apparently it is "a massacre waiting to happen", only this time the Israeli troops will not escape unscathed (um, they did last time?).

And who are the “many” who think that?

You can bet the four Americans who refused to leave the Church of the Nativity without holding a press conference are among the “many”, and so are the ones who predicted “the brutal Afghan winter”, and found a massacre in Jenin. I’m suspecting that, in the final analysis, we’ll learn that this “belief” was just as accurate as the other two. But that won't stop the predicting, or the spinning of the retaliation even before it's begun.

And Israeli somehow always comes out the bad guy.

THE OLD PRESIDENTS CLUB should have their speech and traveling priviledges revoked if they keep doing stunts like this. I used to have some sense of Jimmy Carter as ineffectual but fairly innocuous and at any rate humble. But I'm coming to see him more as a man arrogant in his self-righteous efforts to reshape the world as he sees fit, regardless of its impact on official US policy. As much as I did and do detest Bill Clinton, I would never have advocated George Bush 1 going to other countries on his own behest mucking about in foreign policy during the Clinton administration. It weakens the country's focus and makes us appear foolish in the eyes of a world already too prepared to criticize and mock. Carter has no official standing, and I personally think the White House should say so publically and explicitly. Then take away his passport.

SUCH TALENT: Dan at HappyFunPundit both deconstructs how juxtaposition makes lies seem like truths, and then astonishingly segues right into an original, evocative poem. All in the context of a post on Palestine.

How does he do it?

HOW TO RUIN A SATURDAY: My landlord informed me last night, fairly late (around 9) that this morning (around 9) the bug spray guy was going to come in, because someone in an apartment two floors below thinks he saw two roaches. I haven't seen any. So I have to pull everything out of the shelves in my kitchen, move it to another room, wait for them to spray, leave while it works, then wash all the dishes and put them back on the shelves. I really really find that whole process annoying.

It also means that until my kitchen is reassembled, posting will likely be low to non-existent. Sorry.

UPDATE: It was a good news/bad news thing. The good news was - I didn't have to dismantle my kitchen after all because they have this new process of putting bait in corners and under shelves, so nothing has to be moved or washed. The bad news is - I had already about halfway dismantled. Oh, well. Good exercise, right?

WHAT IS AN UNBORN CHILD if you can't say "unborn child" or "fetus"?

On Law&Order SVU tonight, they needed to get DNA after an abortion from the aborted fetus. So the police officer said:

"We need tissue from the products of conception."

I wonder how long they had to think to come up with that.

The power of words. Creating (or carefully avoiding creating) images. Think about it.

ARE WE FOOLS? A bus blows up in Jerusalem in 1995, killing, among others, an American citizen. The Palestinian suicide bomber is given a state funeral, with dancing and a 21-gun salute, when his body is returned by the Israelis in 2000. Meanwhile, the United States offers a reward for information leading to the conviction of those responsible.

David Tell, who’s article in The Weekly Standard details this, says:

Arafat must think we Americans are fools.

He then meticulously follows the path of money from the Saudis to the family of this same suicide bomber:

The Saudi royal family, according to its own internal records, has just recently paid a hefty cash prize for the murder of a U.S. citizen.

The Saudis, too, must think we Americans are fools.

David, they cannot just think it, they have confirmation through the impunity allotted their own actions.

Surely it would behoove our president to disabuse them of this notion?

Yes. So, surely it behooves us to let him know he must.

Soon.

UPDATE: Brian Sinclair at The Daily Babble has a different take on this.

THOSE WHO REMEMBER: The Angry Clam, on top of the Berkeley beat as usual, points out an op-ed in today's The Daily Cal by an avowed and known Holocaust revisionist (TAC says "denier"), which says the Jews use selective memory in laying claim to land that living memory would give to the Palestinians. He makes this good point:

I also wonder what the campus Jewish community is going to do in response to this. My guess is angry letters and lobbying... Let's not forget what people from the MSU and SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] did when they were confronted with [a cartoon from Sept. 18 depicting two of the 9/11 terrorists in hell]. These people decided to lay siege to the Daily Californian offices and demand an apology. When that was not forthcoming, there was a large picket of the building and website hacking attempts. The Daily Cal remained unbowed, so the battle went to the ASUC senate where it was proposed that the rent for the paper's offices be hiked. The rent-hike proposal too was defeated. Finally, members of SJP...took it upon themselves to steal an entire press run of the paper. How much do you want to bet that Jewish students, who are right to be quite irked, do not resort to any of these actions?

Interesting how it is always the same story, just a different address, isn't it?

BIAS IN THE HARD SCIENCES? Say it ain't so! Bryan Preston at JunkYardBlog reports that it is.

I WOULD LINK TO RABBIT, but I have this and no one told me to.

IF YOU LIKE CROSSWORDS, here's one at Goliard blog on capitalism.

SCHOOL EXAMS DANGEROUS TO FAMILY MEMBERS: Accounting-blog called my attention to this 1990 study, which I think needs to be replicated with more recent data, and possibly made into a platform of the PTA.

RILYA ISN’T PRECIOUS DOE: I’ve posted before about the little five year old girl from Florida who went missing from her home in January 2001 and hasn’t been seen since. Tests were done to see if she was the little girl found beheaded in Kansas City last year; today we learn she wasn’t.

So where’s Rilya?

Florida's Department of Children & Families lost track of Rilya in January 2001. Geralyn Graham, who claims to be her grandmother, and Pamela Graham say Rilya was removed from their home by a woman who said she was a DCF worker and was never returned. DCF skipped required monthly visits and reported her missing April 25.

We don’t know if the person who took Rilya was a DCF worker, although we do know that the caseworker was horribly negligent in following Rilya’s case. We don’t know that Graham is really her grandmother. In fact, given the Grahams’ history, we don’t even really know that Rilya was taken by a DCF worker:

Geralyn Graham and her sister, Pamela Graham, both gave deceptive responses in a polygraph test administered earlier in the investigation, Miami-Dade County police spokesman Ed Munn said. Police would not disclose the questions, citing the ongoing criminal investigation.

"We can't take anybody at their word," said police director Carlos Alvarez.

Rilya was given as an infant to another family, with unfortunate results:

Rilya moved in with Graham after being removed from the home of Pamela Kendrick in April 2000. State officials had investigated allegations of abuse there in 1998 involving other children, but the inquiry was dropped, according to records…

"I was with her for the first three years of her life," Kendrick said in an interview Thursday with The Associated Press. "I made it possible that she could have a normal life, because I cared for her as my own."

“Caring for her as my own” is no comfort from someone accused of abuse. If, of course, the abuse really happened. We don’t know; we can’t quite trust DCF now, can we?

So just who did Rilya go to live with, when she was placed with the Grahams?

Court records in the Alamo case show that Geralyn Graham had at least 14 aliases, six driver's licenses and five Social Security numbers.

A psychologist concluded in another lawsuit that Geralyn Graham had suffered dementia, hallucinations and memory problems following the accident. Graham had sued Alamo Rent-A-Car in August 1996 for $2.5 million for injuries suffered when her sister ran over her with a rented van.

In an Aug. 12, 1997, video deposition in the Alamo lawsuit, Geralyn Graham said she does not remember her old jobs, being arrested in Tennessee for food stamp fraud or being married.

So, a 3-year-old child was given to a woman who forget she was married, who was arrested for food stamp fraud, who sued Alamo because her sister ran over her in Alamo’s van, who had a string of aliases, drivers’ licenses and Social Security numbers. This woman is now claiming that Rilya was essentially kidnapped, but she didn’t raise a stink about it for over a year.

If that was your child, wouldn’t you be sitting in the governor’s office about 10 minutes after getting the brush-off from DCF?

In the photos of Rilya, she is smiling so sweetly as only a little child can, and you just want to hug her. But you can’t. Because we don’t know where she is. Was she taken by DCF, placed elsewhere and the records lost? Was she taken by an imposter and kept, or killed? Was she taken at all? Is it possible that one of the Grahams hurt her, or someone associated with her did, and knowing the incompetence of her case worker they made up a story?

I don’t hold out much hope for Rilya; it’s been too long, and too many people in this world prey on children. But we need to dig and dig and dig until we know precisely what happened, because this will teach us what went wrong so we can fix it. Government can’t cover up its mistakes and make them go away. This is a child, not an “oops”. Maybe it was the juxtaposition of a lot of human error resulting in one huge tragedy. But we need to know.

For the sake of all the children who find themselves without champions, sucked into the family services government machines all over the nation, we must keep asking:

Where’s Rilya?

SADDAM REFERENDUM: Myria at It Can't Rain All The Time reveals the ballot options on the upcoming referendum on whether Saddam should stay in power.

GIVE THE ARABS WHAT THEY WANT: There is

…a growing sentiment that Arabs should distance themselves from the United States, and they want their governments to do likewise.

Excellent. Fine. Great. Pack your bags and go home, or pack our bags and send us out of your country. This is what it would do:

Purchases of American goods generated by 300 million Arabs form such a small part of American exports that even a widespread boycott would not cause much of a blip. Most trade consists of big ticket items like airplanes, with total American exports to the Middle East amounting to $20 billion in 2000, just 2.5 percent of America's total exports.

However, there are a few problems for the Arab countries:

…said Kholood Khatami, a 25-year-old Saudi journalist, “…I'm boycotting. Of course, there are some things you cannot avoid — technology and software is all American."

Khatami, be a man of conviction. Turn off that computer. Go back to your abacus. Don’t let the evil US mar your shores in any way.

Meanwhile, we should start drilling offshore, in Alaska, in Russia, in those old fields that are, amazingly, refilling. Let’s take our oil money out of the Middle East, and let the Arabs have what they want.

Just for the record, I’ve no interest in overwhelming the Arab culture with Western culture. And I also think that Americans of Arabian descent are just that - Americans. This is not about trashing Arabs as a people. But I think any nation that is actively working to harm the United States and its citizens should be withdrawn from physically and commercially. Period.

MAKE UP YOUR MIND: When speaking today of the terrorist bombing in Dagestan, Russia, that killed 34 people – 12 children – during a parade, Bush said the right thing:

President Bush said today … in a statement. "Terrorism and the killing of innocents can never be condoned or justified."

This is in direct contrast to what he said yesterday regarding Arafat, who is a terrorist:

Mr. Bush said that, despite reports in Israel, he had never indicated…[that] his administration was trying to move Mr. Arafat out of power.

"…my opinion is that Mr. Arafat has let the Palestinian people down. He hasn't led. And as a result, the Palestinians suffer and my heart breaks for the Palestinian moms and dads who wonder whether or not their children are going to be able to get a good education and whether or not there's going to be a job available for their children."

Or whether they will blow themselves up at the behest of Hamas or one of Arafat’s other terrorist organizations. “Let’s see… I could go to college… I could get a job… I could blow myself up. Looks like I’ll go with what’s behind Door Number 3, Monty!”

I still think GW is so much better than Algore that it’s not even a contest. But right now he’s no where near the leader I’d hoped for.

Maybe he should take lessons from the Dagestan leader:

The chairman of the Dagestan state council, Magomedali Magomedov, said the terrorists "must be destroyed as traitors who are not letting humanity live."

"It's very hard to call those who committed this act of vandalism people," he said. "They are subject to liquidation."

A TREE RISES IN SANTA CRUZ: Locals object to tree. Some online observers (well, one) think it may have responded to junk email with stunning success. Owner thinks everyone should get a grip (note what owner does for a living).

Children giggle.

Meanwhile, local psychologists report an increase in appearance anxiety amongst Santa Cruz men.

Arboreal bobbitization possible.

(Link via A Long View).

GOOD JOB, GUYS. But aim better next time.

THE LAST WORD ON MEDIA BIAS. Well, from Zonitics' Edward Boyd, anyway. He does an amazing job of researching, presenting and discussing the truth of left-right labeling in the media, originally reported by Nunberg in The American Prospect. Bravo, Edward.

Do we need to Google-bomb Nunberg so Zonitics' answer comes up high on any googling of Nunberg?

Link via Instapundit.

A VERY ODD THING I DO: When shopping for toilet paper, I'm always confused by the many choices: One ply, two ply, single roll, double roll, triple roll, four pak, six pack, 9 pak.

So I spend five minutes - and this is almost every shopping trip that includes TP - comparing cost per square foot, factoring in the one or two ply difference.

And wind up, usually, buying the two-ply Charmin six-pak.

Which saves me a dollar, maybe, over the other choices.

Then, of course, I go home and throw out the fresh basil I keep buying because I'm going to make homemade pesto again, someday, when I have time. Fresh basil, btw, is $2/bunch here.

I also hate math.

So what odd things do you do?

A ONE-DAY WEATHER FORECAST, according to my Snapple lid ("Real Fact" #65), "requires about 10 billion mathematical calculations".

Is that why it's usually wrong?

That margin of error thing, you know.

SMILE FOR THE MINNEBOMBER: You won't believe how the pipe bomber chose the locations.

Link via Ipse Dixit.

TRUTH BEYOND HORROR: Botox, hair implants, breast augmentation, artificial "beestung" lips, liposuction, on and on and on... I thought we were fashion obsessed, and placed too much emphasis on appearance in jobs, dating and just being friends. But this goes beyond vain and solidly into movie-style horror.

Link via Ye Old Blogge.

BYPASS ARAFAT: Adragna's Middle East solution.

SAUDI ARABIA AND CAT LITTER? USS Clueless finds the connection.

NEW (to me) BLOG SIGHTING: A C Douglas deconstructs the Arab/Israeli solution, takes down Jimmy Carter and in between has time to slice up attitudes about modern culture. Excellent reading, and I'm glad I found him. Check him out, if only for the cartoon of himself in the upper right corner. He's going on the blogroll.

THIS PAST WEEKEND, the 16-year-old son of a couple I know slightly in Kentucky was killed in a car accident. I had never met him, but his father is a preacher who lives what he preaches, and his mother was devoted to raising their four sons. I asked my brother, who went to the visitation, how they were doing. He said the mother said, “We’ll get through this”. Implicit in that, I knew, was, “With God’s help.”

I can’t say I know how they feel; I have no clue about the depths of sorrow losing a child must bring. But it has brought my wandering heart closer to home again, thinking about it. And then today I came across several excellent posts by friends and fellow travelers online, who are thinking about the world, faith, and the struggle we all have to put it together. I was especially moved by Tony Woodlief’s piece, where he said:

But [the words of a quoted Bible verse] don't promise that we will understand the purpose of a suffering in our lifetimes, or, should we discern the purpose, that we will judge it worthwhile. "All things work together for good." Notice that this does not tell us that every single thing by itself will produce good, nor that any resulting good will be manifest in the weeks or months following the affliction. The words instead describe a totality that many of us cannot see or understand, at least not here. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts..."

Tony is much more eloquent than I, and his words made me think about my own favorite passages, the ones that I say to myself when life seems hard, unfair, not what I planned, or too painful to bear; when the balances seem out of sync, and not likely to right themselves. This is the first, my always answer to “it’s not fair”:

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going. I returned and saw under the sun that--
The race is not to the swift,
Nor the battle to the strong,
Nor bread to the wise,
Nor riches to men of understanding
Nor favor to men of skill;
But time and chance happen to them all.
--Ecclesiastes 9:10-11

The companion verse, for me, is:

No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.
--I Corinthians 10:13

I've written several closing paragraphs, but they all sound too preachy, or chirper, or annoyingly pious. So that's it. Food for thought on a rainy Thursday.

And my prayers are with Ben's family.

BEST PHOTO OF ARAFAT SO FAR.

GOODBYE, SGT. STRYKER. We'll miss you. I'm sorry you felt you needed to go. Best of luck always.

UPDATE: Wellll.... apparently the Sarge is gone but not his Wizard of Oz-like behind-the-curtain persona. For which we are all thankful.

OUTLAW CARS AND ALCOHOL: Bob Herbert uses statistics out of context and shows an odd conservative bent in his diatribe against John Ashcroft and the Justice Department's support of the Second Amendment in his NY Times column today.

First the stats. He informs us that 28,874 Americans were killed with guns in 1999. He doesn't explain the context, or break it down. How many were homicides? How many accidents? How many were actually homeowners protecting their homes, or the police protecting us all? If cold, hard numbers are sufficient reason, then let's outlaw cars: that same year, 41,471 people died in the US in car accidents, and it (not a gun) was the leading case of death for those between the ages of 6 to 27. Let's also outlaw alcohol: In 15,794 of those accidents, alcohol was involved. And while I don't have the statistics right here, I can assure you, based on my knowledge from criminal justice studies and teaching, that alcohol was involved in many of those gun deaths, and it's also involved in beating deaths, drowning deaths, on and on. Bare numbers are a starting place, not a stand-alone argument.

Now, that odd little conservatism. The term "conservative" doesn't mean "puritanical" or "gun rights" or "anti-abortion" or "no taxes". What it means is this: believing that there is value in institutions and approaches that have proven successful in the past, that we shouldn't change something just for the sake of change, that sometimes tradition is compelling in and of itself and needs very strong reasons to change. The other philosophies have become attached to "conservative" because they are views adhering to "traditional values" or "original source" (like, say, the Constitution).

Herbert says this little gem:

...when the Justice Department, in a pair of briefs filed with the court, rejected the long-held view of the court, the Justice Department itself and most legal scholars that the Second Amendment protects only the right of state-organized militias to own firearms. Under that interpretation, anchored by a Supreme Court ruling in 1939, Congress and local governmental authorities have great freedom to regulate the possession and use of firearms by individuals.

Herbert is sliding into a pure conservatism by arguing that, because the ruling stood for many years, it is ipso facto accurate. By this reasoning, Herbert is also saying that, for instance, the Dred Scott decision should have stood, rather than being overturned by the passage of the 13th (and 14th) Amendment. Or that Roe v. Wade should not have been allowed, since it went against the preponderance of court decisions, laws and public views for generations. I doubt seriously that Herbert believes Dred Scott should stand, or Roe v. Wade should be overturned. But you can't make the argument that the length of time one interpretation has stood is a sufficient reason not to change it, without accepting that it must then perforce be a sufficient reason in other contexts (i.e. Scott and R v W). Herbert is just thoughtlessly garnering arguments without considering their broader implications.

And speaking of thoughtless, just who are those "most legal scholars" he mentions? Must have been a skewed survey. I'd like to see his stats on that, too.

The rest of the column has about the same level of reasoning and reasonableness, so there's no need to waste time taking it down point by point. Herbert doesn't like guns. He'll use any means to advance his preference. He is an empty airbag. And DailyPundit thinks so too.

(The stats site I give is apparently a bit of an ambulance chaser site, but the numbers they give are similar to the CDC's numbers for 1996, so are credible. I just wanted to use the same year as Herbert used, and that was the best I could do quickly.)

ROCK ON, STEVE: I've been meaning to write about my rock collection for a while now, but with my rocky work schedule it just didn't mesh. I think today's the day.

It all started when I discovered this lovely quartz rock my mother had, and I wanted to see if I could find one. Over the years, I found fossil rocks, marble rocks, rock heads and, occasionally, pop rocks, but no really hard quartz rocks. And hard rock was what I wanted. I once even bought a rock record (Rock N Roll Heaven), but since it had curse words in it my mom broke it and threw it away (true story) so I was stuck singing Barry Manilow in the living room with the lights off (the better to imagine the crowds swaying). My skid through all kinds of rock proved fruitless - although, speaking of fruit, I did for a while collect stones. But they don't have quite the...cachet of real rock. I even went to a rock concert, only to discover that Shawn Cassidy was not true rock, just a red wiggling blur from the nosebleed seats, spouting bubblegum.

One Christmas, my mom tried to help by getting me a quartz watch. But that wasn't quite getting it either.

Finally, when I left a job several years ago, my favorite boss gifted me with...a quartz rock. I was ecstatic! Smooth bottom, lovely amethyst on top, it fit all my requirements. Since that time, the quartz rock has stayed with me, reminding me that when you keep searching, don't give up, someday your dreams will come true.

(If this makes absolutely no sense to you, you're not the only one, but HappyFunPundit can probably clue you in. BTW, Steve, I think my score just went up by 17. And this was not done to achieve a goal, no sir, it is a completely straightforward story of my heartwrenching lifelong search, thus innocent of any intent to introduce bias into your count. Nyah.)

THOUGHTS ON CRIME AND SENTENCING from a former New York State judge. The post is from February (I just came across it), and His Honor could use a little editing, but it's a good look inside the system. One excerpt:

...being soft on crime is not the same thing as using your discretion, in the right case.

He thinks mandatory sentences are more about the politicians and less about the criminals, and to a large degree I think he's right. At the same time, when the rehabilitative part of the system is so messed up, at least they're off the streets if they're in jail. A difficult balance.

WHEN A GUN'S TO YOUR HEAD, your character shows.

SOMEDAY, WE'LL ALL BE OLD. And, maybe, odd.

GOODBYE, X-FILES.

TOO GOOD TO CHOOSE: Media Minded has a raft of great posts today - I'm so glad he's back! So go on over and check it out, including an update on the journalism school where two administrators were forced to step down for "racist" attitudes.

(And btw, MM - thanks)

RADICAL CHEERLEADERS - hairy but happy.

(also at HappyFunPundit, the happy, fun site)

GOOD CATCH on the media bias, Steve, but...me and Quadrophenia?

FUNNY BECOMES NOT FUNNY: Michael Novak in NRO suggests an alternative for Catholics: The New (York Times) Catholic Church. Pretty funny, at least at first. However, to in any way equate what Cardinal Law is going through to what Christ went through is blasphemy. Cardinal Law might be villified beyond his deserts, but he is just a man, and he is also unquestionably complicit in the abuse of many children by dent of not preventing it. And the Catholic Church hierarchy is as well, for blinking at such horror for decades. Poke fun at the NYT, object to ugly characterizations of the Catholic Church when they aren't true, but don't equate man to Christ.

CIVIL WAR POST has been removed.

AN EXERCISE IN BIAS: InstaProf sends us today to Adam Curry's website to read the truth about Pim Fortuyn; it's an excellent overview, and you should read it too. I noticed toward the end that Curry began going off about something he calls The Big Lie, with digs about television coverage in general. For context, understand that Curry makes his living in media and that he for years was an MTV vj. Here's a section from near the end:

The Big Lie is all around us. It lives in the sense of security we have about our lives and surroundings.

Just as the US was shaken to the bone over the possibility of attcks on US soil. Now nuclear threats loom.

But the Big Lie also lives at the office and in schools. The news reports we're out of a recsssion, yet thousands lose their jobs.

The principal ensures your child is 'safe' in the hallways of school.

The business community found the Big Lie in the Anderson and Enron scandals.

The catholic church is in the middle of disaster recovery from The Big Lie.

Kinda scary, but your eye tends to skim through and, for most of you, likely it will be dismissed. Or so you think. However, it's made a connection in your head with some Big Conspiracy (because what else could it be, if all these disparate things are a part of it?) that includes the US government, your place of business, your children's schools, even the churches. You don't necessarily recognize it, but that's part of the charm.

This morning I was listening to the Art Bell radio talk show as I drove to work; a guest host and guest "expert" were discussing how the government knows that we are in grave biological and nuclear danger from terrorists, and even from the chemicals we excrete into what eventually becomes the water table, but we're not being told and we're not protected. When you disconnect your reasoning, it all sounds amazingly plausible. But if you know about Art Bell, you know his reputation for conspiracy theories, belief in aliens, and things of that nature. So you discount it. I think, however, that it still kind of sits in your mind waiting for another connection. Maybe other pieces from The Big Lie?

Curry identifies The Big Lie as the media:

We clamour to media as our security blanket. We want to feel safe and secure.

So how does this mechanism work? He links to the site of what appears to be a rather left-wing advocacy group seeking, in part, to disconnect people from their televisions. The specific article he links is The Zen TV Experiment. First, though, look at what he says in an earlier post about this experiment (which basically involves a conscious analysis of television techniques for creating story):

If you read me regularly you know how I feel about the trickery used in television. What is rewarded as 'art' is the equivalent of chewing gum for your brain. The metaphor really fits, if you think you're sitting in front of the tube and are relaxed, then you are sorely mistaken. Your brain is working quite hard on putting the images and sounds into some sort of logical flow.

When you see two actors talking at a kitchen table, plotting to do something and the next scene show the same two actors driving in a car, your brain fills in the missing pieces. TV makers have perfected this technique through 50 years of experience. They know exactly when to cut away from the first scene to the next, what music and 'tension curve' is needed to coax the viewer's brain into the task of filling in the blanks...

OK, I hear you thinking, who controls this evil machine Adam describes? How does one plan and execute the use of television for your own personal agenda?

Simple: Money

It's the rocket fuel of the industry. Money buys airtime. Airtime buys marketshare, marketshare buys mindshare. Once you own a share of someone's mind, you're in...

Soft money donations get people elected. Most of that money is spent on media, repetitive commercials and messages created by the same television professionals using the same tricks they play to sell you everything from zit-cream to life insurance...

I read the Zen article, and I find that it is actually an excellent deconstruction of how television creates story:

During usual viewing, however, our eyes do not see what is actually there because our narrative-trained mind overrides our eyes. We don't see with our eyes, we see with our programming, and we are programmed to see stories. TV programs are made so that we don't notice the "technical events," the details -- so that we don't pay attention. We are programmed to be unaware of the programming, the non-narrative structure and possibilities of that structure...

The problem is not that TV presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that TV presents all subject matter as entertaining. This transcends TV and spills over into our post-TV life experiences. TV trains us to orient toward and tune in to the entertainment quality of any experience, event, person. We look for that which is entertaining about any phenomenon rather than qualities of depth, social significance, spiritual resonance, beauty, etc. In this sense TV doesn't imitate life, but social life now aspires to imitate TV.

This has tremendous merit, and I was excited to read it - it partially quantifies a lot of what I've been thinking about media and policing, in terms of how media creates story with regards to policing, and then policing has to react to that. And I would recommend trying The Zen Experiment yourself, to help you see whether you're critically watching television, and if you understand how story is created. One of the most important statements is this:

In doing the TET, we notice the discrete segments of independent footage that are presented with a rapid-fire quality. As we watch, we, the "passive" viewers, apparently put together, synthesize and integrate the scenes: we link, we knit, we chain, we retain the past and anticipate the future. We methodically weave them all together into a coherent narrative. A high-speed filling-in-the-blanks and connecting-the-dots occurs.

This is a crucial point in understanding how media bias occurs; it's not that it is explicit, but rather that many times it is implicit in the structure, the word usage, the story selection, the photo selection - an admission made tangentially by the NY Times in this apology.

And that brings us back to Curry. He spends a lot of time and ink trashing television for its slight of hand, but he employs the same mechanism in his own writing. Look at the unsubstantiated inferences he makes about The Big Lie and who's involved. One of the difficulties in combating media bias is that the practitioners can rarely see their own practice of it.

I do agree with Curry and Adbusters that the point is not to turn off all media and all outside voices. The point is to be a conscious and logical consumer of information, using your own internal hermeneutic to arrive at The Big Truth through wide reading, an open mind and a refusal to "connect the dots" without support for doing so other than juxtaposition or isolation of detail.

INTOLERANCE IN ACADEME: Christina Hoff Sommers points out the overwhelming bias toward conservative professors in the nation’s universities, chilling to me as a doctoral student planning to teach on the university level. I am very conservative both politically and religiously, and that comes out clearly when I teach. I think this discrimination against conservatives isn’t just inappropriate, but actually damaging, as does Richard Redding, a professor of psychology at Villanova University, writing in a recent issue of American Psychologist:

Redding asks, rhetorically: "Do we want a professional world where our liberal world view prevents us from considering valuable strengths of conservative approaches to social problems ... where conservatives are reluctant to enter the profession and we tacitly discriminate against them if they do? That, in fact, is the academic world we now have...."

We are closing out a whole range of ideas, and that is always to the detriment of the whole – if the preponderance of professors were conservative in ideology, I would (as a conservative) be pushing for liberal representation. Sommers calls on John Stuart Mill to explain why that approach is necessary regardless of who has dominance:

The classical liberalism articulated by John Stuart Mill in his book "On Liberty" is no longer alive on campuses, having died of the very disease Mr. Mill warned of when he pointed out that ideas not freely and openly debated become "dead dogmas." Mill insisted that the intellectually free person must put himself in the "mental position of those who think differently" adding that dissident ideas are best understood "by hear[ing] them from persons who actually believe them."

I make it very clear to my students that I am conservative and approach all topics from my own ideology. And I make sure they understand that everyone does the same, and generally they have assignments that require them to look at issues from competing perspectives. The goal is not neutrality, but intellectual honesty and the willingness to hear out an argument that is presented clearly, with supporting studies or observations and with good faith. Any system that cuts out half that process is neither healthy nor admirable, and all its conclusions are suspect - I include religion as well as academics in this. That isn't to say you don't eventually reach a point where your foundational concepts have been repeatedly tried and held up through the fire of discourse. But even then you should be open to letting others hear the disputive position and consider its merits (this is also why I think intelligent design - not biblical creationism, but the scientific possibility and support for intelligent design - should be taught in schools.) We don't learn the process of argumentation and reasoning through logic without competing ideas.

(Link from Campus Nonsense via Conservative Economist.)

NO-SPIN-ZONE SPINS RADIO STARTUP: Bill O'Reilly's syndicator paid stations to take his show, according to Drudge; apparently the reason was marketing - so they could say this:

The Radio Factor With Bill O'Reilly is the Biggest Launch in the History of Talk Radio; To Air On a Record 205 Radio Stations Nationwide

The Washington Post takes O'Reilly's launch as an opportunity to whine about the lack of liberal talk show hosts; they take the usual pot-shots at Rush Limbaugh, and the lack of nuance (i.e. lack of sophistication, education, etc) amongst radio talk show listeners.

Interestingly, WaPo shifts back and forth between radio and television in pulling out its support:

The proliferation of conservative talk may, however, be as much about marketing as politics. The audience for broadcast news tends to be older (the average viewer of all-news cable TV is about 55 years old). As a rule, older people tend to be conservative. Ergo, a market niche.

But is that who listens to the radio programs? I listen to a lot of talk radio - daily, from the time I wake up until the time I go to bed at night, if the radio's on it's on WABC talk radio - and it seems from the callers, at any rate, that the demographic is much younger overall. Of course, that's anecdotal, but it's still more information about the actual radio audience than the WaPo article gives.

Some of the comments in the article are just laughable:

A few liberals and centrists -- Michael Kinsley, Paul Begala, James Carville -- do appear regularly on TV. But typically, they tend to be "canceled out" by a conservative in a "Crossfire"-style format, says Steve Rendall, a senior analyst at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a self-described progressive media watchdog group.

First, I don't see any centrists on that list of three. Second, more than a "few" liberals appear regularly - my list would include all three network anchors, and 75%+ of television reporters, anchors and commentators. Katie Couric is not a liberal? The Today Show is not a talk show? Please. It's not identified as a political show, sure, but if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, sounds like a duck... And while it's obvious that "progressive" means "liberal" in the article, still it's rather cute not to identify the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting organization as "flaming liberal". Just in case you aren't sure, here's the announcement from their recent 15th anniversary celebration:

FAIR celebrated its 15th anniversary at New York's Town Hall on January 22nd. FAIR founder Jeff Cohen, former CounterSpin host Laura Flanders and TV talk show host Phil Donahue were on hand to pay tribute to FAIR.

MIT professor Noam Chomsky, a pioneer in the field of media analysis and criticism, was our guest speaker for the evening.

Clinton is likely a little too conservative for these guys. And to say that Begala and Carville are "canceled out" by the conservatives on Crossfire... talk about victim complex.

It's weird, albeit not surprising, seeing this whining, especially when there's no acknowledgement of the dominant liberal media bias. They do make an effort, but let the person involved spin her way out:

Besides, [O'Reilly] adds, dangling new bait, "[National Public Radio] is all left, top to bottom. That's where the left goes. . . . They listen to Diane Rehm."

Rehm, the host of an NPR-distributed show out of WAMU-FM in Washington, replies: "If a liberal is a talk radio host who represents more than just one view, then I am indeed a liberal. . . . I've never felt there's just one way and one way only. [Some hosts] espouse one view over and over again, whereas our message is far more confusing because we're open to ideas and let you make up your own mind."

Did you all stand for Rehm's rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic? I don't know that I've ever listened to Rehm, so I won't comment on her show. But her quote is quite sanctimonious.

And now O'Reilly is coming out of the box having already emptied his slogan of any meaning other than puffery.

Competition is a good thing; I encourage it. However, O'Reilly is going to crash and burn. The man has no sense of humor about himself; he has no self-deprecation. That's what really kills the liberal talk shows - they take themselves far too seriously - and that's what will kill O'Reilly's.

(Thanks to Henry Hanks at Croooow blog for the heads up on this article.)

UPDATE: Instapundit Glenn Reynolds highlights Rehm's quote too, and adds a bit of insight from when he was a guest on her show.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Glenn has had a couple of responses to his earlier post, and his post on them is well worth the effort. I think his conclusion is an excellent summary of the whole problem:

...it's the unacknowledged but obvious bias of NPR that sticks in most people's throats.

STILL SEEKING RILYA: Officials are waiting on a DNA match to determine if the little five-year-old girl who went missing in Florida in January 2001 is the beheaded child found in Missouri in April 2001. Meanwhile, her caretakers and the caseworker supposedly overseeing her care for the state have both shut down, and the state is opening an investigation. It's being called an "isolated incident", but there's just no excuse for this kind of egregious dereliction of duty.

PICK YOUR DEATH SITE: Two suicide bombings in Israel, one in Pakistan.

Nine French citizens died in the Pakistani blast; the other deaths were a Pakistani bus driver and the bomber. Of the 34 injured, 16 were French. I hope this brings the terrorism closer to home for the EU. Innocents - innocence - dying. It has to stop.

The only people who should be dying are the people who bring these deaths to innocents.

MINNEBOMBER ARRESTED.

SECOND AMENDMENT JOINS THE REST OF THE CONSTITUTION: Ipse Dixit has pertinent commentary.

EXPLOSION OF PALESTINIAN PEACE KILLS 15: It has to have been peace, right? Because they promised, right? It couldn't have been a suicide bomber. It couldn't have been evidence that Palestinians can't be trusted. It was just someone getting too exuberant over the vision of peace. Just blew up with joy.

Right?

TODAY AT THE WTC - photos from a Kiwi at Ground Zero.

MINNEBOMBER? Don't Be A Shamed suggests several names for the mailbox bomber being chased right now in Texas.

THE FORMER CIVIL WAR POST: Well, I have been called on the carpet and for good reason. One of the sites linked on this post originally I did not check out beyond the actual page linked, and when I did at a friend's recommendation, I found it was beyond awful. As those of you know who read me regularly, that's not me. For those of you who went there, I'm sorry. For those of you who did not, and are reading this, you don't need to know. I'll be more careful in the future.

I still think Kinen's comment about traitors was unfair, and the Civil War was less about slavery and more about approaches to life and governance. But since I can't sit down with each reader to explain, and I've likely already blotted my book with some good readers, I'm taking the whole thing down. I guess I'm with John - I won't touch on the War of Northern Aggression again for a while.

UPDATE: However, others have, somewhat. There's lively exchanges in the Comments section, which will remain, and Fritz Schrank has a oddly modern image of Jeff Davis.

UPDATE: Midwest Conservative Journal adds thoughtful comments to the Civil War discussion.

THE PhD COMMITTEE HAS SPOKEN: And the verdict is, via cell phone from my dean's car: revise and resubmit by May 15. The core proposal needs tightening and better focus, and the title is misleading (at least I'm staying true to my journalism roots).

It wasn't "completely redo". So that's a happy thing.

More details as they become available.

YEP: Stephen Hayes at The Weekly Standard explains why Stephanopolous hosting This Week isn't a problem, and many mainstream journalists are:

The griping about Stephanopolous obscures the real problem: left-leaning reporters who inject their biases into stories for unsuspecting readers and viewers. The fact that anyone paying even casual attention to politics over the past decade will remember Stephanopolous as a Clintonite is an advantage. Everything he says will be viewed through that prism.

As I've said until you're sick unto death over it, the problem isn't biased media, it's media that are biased, deny it and try to convince their audience they're neutral. Hayes also asks the right question:

The larger question for conservatives is this: Where is your faith in the market? If Stephanopolous is as bad as conservatives predict he will be, the show's ratings will plummet and he'll be canned as quickly as he was hired.

Hope springs eternal.

We won't discuss that commentator selection (Donaldson, Roberts, Stephanopolous) is another point of bias. I vote for Walter Williams to replace Stephanopolous when he crashes and burns.

(yes, this is the cliche edition of cut on the bias.)

MARK STEYN announces the first British Press Award for Total Fantasy.

WHY ITALY? WHY NOT...FRANCE? Thirteen of the gunmen holed up in the Church of the Nativity will be deported as part of the agreement to end the siege, and the negotiators offered them Italy (wine, women, song) as the option. As long as Saddam is in power, and the Saudis keep holding those telethons, they should live pretty well. But... Italy wasn't consulted! And they don't want them!

Negotiators had named Italy as their destination, but the Italian Foreign Ministry insisted that it had not been consulted or received any request to take them in.

The ministry said it "never received any information from the parties about the process of the negotiations, nor were any requests advanced in the past few days from these parties."

A statement added, "The issue of the acceptance in Italy of Palestinian citizens has never been posed, and up to the point that we have reached, it cannot be proposed."

...An Israeli Army spokesman, Olivier Rafowicz, said in Bethlehem: "We have reached an understanding to resolve the Church of the Nativity crisis. The implementation is being delayed because no country is willing to accept the terrorists."

What a perfect opportunity for France to step forward and show itself the loving, multi-cultural world power it is, to show its belief that the Palestinians aren't terrorists, by taking these men into its bountiful bosom. You know, put your country where your endlessly running mouth is.

The whole article is a wonderful expression of NY Times and/or Palestinian doublespeak. Take a look at a few excerpts:

This afternoon Israeli troops erected metal detectors and four large white panels near the low-slung "Gate of Humility" — the basilica's main entrance — apparently to keep those emerging from the view of journalists watching from rooftops overlooking Manger Square.

This is very funny. I can think, offhand, of four or five reasons for these precautions by Israelis, none of which involve blocking off journalists. But, on the other hand, I can also think of a variety of reasons for blocking off the journalists, collectively, that have nothing to do with a commitment to cutting off accurate, necessary information to the world at large and more to do with this:\

Inside the besieged church, one of the top wanted men, Abdullah Daoud, the head of Palestinian intelligence in Bethlehem, said he and 12 others had agreed to go into exile.

"If nothing goes wrong, I export to be deported to Italy with my colleagues this afternoon," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

And we see again the journalists acting as if war is a sport, and every team member in both locker rooms needs a chance at the microphone. Of course, as I'm sure the media reasons, neither side would seek to manipulate information or use the media for its own ends. At least, the Palestinians wouldn't.

The two sides were arguing over whether the exile of the 13 would be permanent or temporary, with the Israelis seeking to make it permanent and the Palestinians demanding that it be for six months. Mr. Arafat was also said to be searching for a politically palatable label for the deportations, which he had resisted.

One Palestinian official said that when leaders of Mr. Arafat's Fatah faction complained to him about the possibility of deportations, he replied: "We have no deportation. It can be a six-month scholarship."

Sadly, it won't be a scholarship to Italy.

Back to the NY Times:

Both sides also had an interest in trying to manage the ending of the siege and the withdrawal of Israeli forces, each important symbolically.

Ok, so far so good. Both have an interest in managing the scenario. But then who's right to manage is supported by the Times? Here is the rest of the article - you tell me:

Palestinian officials said the roughly 80 people inside the church whom Israel does not consider a security threat should not have to leave the church under Israeli supervision and wanted the Israeli military to withdraw from Bethlehem first.

Such a departure would allow Palestinians who have been in the church for more than a month, and with almost no food for three weeks, to step into Manger Square in the company of Bethlehem residents — a potentially powerful display of solidarity.

But Palestinian officials said Israel had proposed spending 48 hours in Bethlehem after the siege ends. On Monday night, an official involved in the negotiations said all the people in the church would be taken out at the same time, an exit that would more closely follow Israel's preference.

I don't really think I need to comment, other than to point out that maybe the 80 non-security threats could also be known as "hostages". Could be the reason Israel wants them out separately. But we wouldn't want to prejudice by the words we use, now would we?

[NOTE: I can't find the flight school lawsuit link right now, but I know I saw it. I'll keep looking. Any help is appreciated.]
UPDATE: I couldn't find the link again, so I removed the section about it.

DISTRACTION AGAIN TODAY: I have a morning meeting, and I still don't know what the PhD committee decided on my core area proposal, so I'm vastly distracted this morning and barely able to read, much less post. I'll be putting up little things here and there, but it's unlikely there'll be anything long until tonight.

BACK PAGE: Or should that be, Page back? Anyway, The Last Page strings together a series of posts about her trip to the Carolinas and the two ceremonies of life and death that punctuated it. Start with the link and work your way up. Page, what happened to the marginally froo-froo, ethereal dress?

ARE YOU RACIST? Most likely, says Samizdata's Brian Micklethwait - and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

UNEMPLOYABLES? Natalie Solent has an excellent post on poverty, welfare and where the class divide is developing.

GO GET'EM, LEE ANN! Spinster.com eats up the Southern-hating Brit of Olive Garden fame, who this time is chomping on Mississippi.

WHY THE SAUDIS COULDN'T WIN A REAL WAR. They could, however, launch a fairly competent "funniest home videos".

I SAY BIAS, YOU SAY BULL: San Francisco Chronicle journalists Debra Saunders, a conservative, and Stephanie Salter, a liberal, go at it in columns published in the Chronicle yesterday. Fascinating.

Saunders identifies story selection as the primary location of bias, and gives excellent examples - worth the article themselves. But then she adds:

About the only journalists who won't admit that the news media are filled with liberals are lefties whose big beef is that the media are liberal instead of ultra-left.

Salter then proves that Saunders is right in more ways than one. She laughs at the concept of liberalism in mainstream media, pointing out all the “real liberals” at “alternative, left-wing news Web sites and periodicals ranging from mediawhoresonline.com to the Nation” [can you say, “ultra liberal”?]. She pokes at the capitalistic, money-grubbing bent of the powers in media. She devotes ink to the research American Prospect's Geoffrey Nunberg did on how many times the terms “liberal” and “conservative” were used in specific media outlets. Nunberg found that actually the media is biased in favor of conservatives, a conclusion that has been soundly debunked in the blogosphere. But Salter proves Saunders’ point definitively with this phrase:

…moderate Democratic [Senator] U.S. Dianne Feinstein

I rest Saunders’s case.

(Links via Romenesko).

JOURNALISTS SAY “NO COMMENT”: The two top administrators of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Iowa State University have been relieved of their duties, but retained as faculty. The reason headlined by Romenesko, and the Ames Tribune, is racism – three junior faculty are leaving, and two of them are minorities.

The text of the article is a little clearer; the university provost said:

…the problems at the school are broader than racism. The school has a structure that pitted senior faculty against the department chair and junior faculty against senior faculty, he said.

"As far as I could tell John Eighmey [the head of the school] did everything he could to make the department as open and welcoming of a place as he could," [Provost] Richmond said.

So where’s the racism? Nobody’s talking. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but the spin creates that impression without any real support. And then, from this journalism school, we have this:

Dick Haws, an associate professor of journalism…said faculty members were advised not to talk to the media because it would look bad for the department.

Now, just how crucified would, say, the business department or the sports teams be if they said the same thing?

I love journalism.

FEMINISTS THEN AND NOW: Ann Marlowe in Salon makes a case for why women shouldn't allow men to "pay" for them:

Transfers of money are more powerfully charged in our culture, and as long as we construe gender as being about the flow of funds from men to women, in some deep but inescapable way all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns.

I think Ms. Marlowe needs to unwad her panties and get a life. Ann, honey, it's lunch. Just because your sense of worth is tied up in parsing your way through life doesn't mean all women are prostitutes who don't follow your example. This is the Maureen Dowd School of Bitter Feminism.

I prefer feminism as defined by the high school Suburban Princess who writes the charming Life as a Vole.

Even if it doesn't go over well at a Catholic school.

LOW POSTing today. Work is very busy, and I didn't get going this morning in time for my usual blogging. Likely I'll post during lunch, and then tonight. But if you weren't on over the weekend, there's still a bunch to read.

CARVALA CUTTHROATS: DailyPundit Bill Quick agrees with me. Mostly.

DEVIL IN DETAILS: FoxNews' PC Watch has details from the CAIR report that anti-Muslim threats increased in the US last year; they include a woman who thinks low fluid levels in her car's engine which caused the engine to seize is a result of anti-Muslim sentiment at her local garage. It's near the middle of the list, under "One Man's Abuse..." The other items are funny too.

SUBWAY HUMOR: I understand the concern, but it's still funny.

VAST RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY EXPOSED: Some of you may have seen this before, but today I discovered the site dedicated to tracking and exposing the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy: Media Transparency. It's absolutely amazing; webmaster Rob Levine dedicated apparently large amounts of time and money investigating various non-profit organizations and how they have (supposedly) interconnected to form this huge financial system to support conservative initiatives, publications, think tanks, faith based groups, etc, all over the country.

This may not be new to some of you, but it's very new to me. And, actually, pretty funny. Another Oliver Stone acolyte at work. Here's an excerpt:

For more than three decades, conservative strategists have mounted an extraordinary effort to reshape politics and public policy priorities at the national, state and local level. Although this effort has often been described as a "war of ideas", it has involved far more than scholarly debate within the halls of academe.

Indeed, waging the war of ideas has required the development of a vast and interconnected institutional apparatus. Since the 1960s, conservative forces have shaped public consciousness and influenced elite opinion, recruited and trained new leaders, mobilized core constituencies, and applied significant rightward pressure on mainstream institutions, such as Congress, state legislatures, colleges and universities, the federal judiciary and philanthropy itself.

Media Transparency is a subsite of Cursor.org, in the Twin Cities. It's been around a while, so I'm sure there are stories to tell about its proprietor and its antics. So, I'm all ears.

And, if the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is watching, that's two n's and no z's in the first name, no e after the t's in the last. Any amount is fine.

THIS IS A BIT MUCH. I mean, really.

BENNETT DISBELIEVES: I just heard Bill Bennett interviewed on Glenn Beck’s radio program, on WABC 770 in NYC. Bennett isn’t buying the rope-a-dope concept at all; he thinks current attitudes in the Bush administration are “muddying” the moral clarity that Bush had last fall, and that Bennett thought Bush had regained early last week. He said he didn’t like the visit to Crawford by the Saudi prince, and he called the efforts by the UN to investigate the Jenin site “hypocrisy”. He said the UN didn’t investigate the suicide bombers to see if there was PLO involvement, which he said of course there was, so this effort was clearly biased. He said, I don’t know what this draw is to move to the middle.

Bennett said Americans should be much less concerned about moral equivalence, and more concerned about the fact that we were bombed, and how we feel about it.

Bennett also doesn’t think the Israeli/Palestinian fighting is distracting or diverting attention from Iraq, or lessening either the ability or likelihood of our “toppling” that terrorist regime. He thinks the fact that Israel has made such a strong showing, and is our ally, actually opens the door for an attack on Iraq, and puts the United States in a stronger position.

Interesting interview. I was in my car when I heard it so I couldn’t get exact quotes, or take notes to remember more. But it gave me new insights. I have a lot of respect for Bennett, and certainly he knows more than I do about this situation.

Bennett has a new book out called Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. Here is the review at National Review.

BAD NEWS IS THE ONLY NEWS? David Nieporent at Jumping to Conclusions notes a bit of good news that made it into the NY Times - buried, but there. Have I mentioned before that omission is as much a bias issue as inclusion or skewing?

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE: James D. Miller at Conservative Economist has an excellent suggestion for the NY Times.

GUNS, BRITS AND COPS: Interesting thoughts from firearms instructor James Rummel on his Handbasket blog.

THERE'S A HONEY of a new blog poking its head out of the jar down the way. It's bearly started, and its permalinks list looks suspiciously like a cut-and-paste from the Blogfather's template, but who am I to complain since I'm on it. Check it out.

CAN YOU SPELL "ARROGANCE"? One of the drumbeats we heard regularly from the American and European press after 9/11 was "We need to understand what we've done to cause this! If we've become the focus of such negative behavior, there must be a just cause!" It's a light the journalists apparently refuse to shine on themselves.

Last Monday's print edition of Editor & Publisher, a journalism industry newspaper, carried an article about apparent efforts to shut down the press even in and by democratic countries; it was posted on their website Friday. This was in celebration of World Press Freedom Day.

The article shows amazing arrogance. Or, given what we know of the elite press, maybe not so amazing.

No liberty so defines the fault lines of our conflicted world as freedom of the press. Newspapers, radio, and TV now bring the world to houses and hovels with an unprecedented immediacy and impact. Even as nations, rebels, and criminals have stockpiled weapons that would terrify Moloch, tyrants and thugs still quail before the power of the word.

I agree that freedom of the press is essential to freedom of people, and for civil rights. No argument there. Although I can see soft men who've never faced harder times than deciding what to drink at the Press Club feeling the surge of righteousness and warrior spirit at the term "power of the word". "WE ARE POWERFUL! YES! I'll have the vodka and tonic, please."

And so the enemies of the press use methods both modern and medieval to lash out at journalists, sometimes literally. Just two weeks ago in Tabriz, Iran, authorities shut down the weekly newspaper Shams-e-Tabriz and sentenced its publisher, Ali Hamed Imam, to seven months in jail -- and 74 lashes for "insulting leaders of the regime." The murderers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl videotaped their butchery with the same sort of camcorder toted around by Americans in T-shirts and shorts padding through Disney World.

This is pretty awful, and I'm not quite sure what imagery they were going for to juxtapose Pearl's death with Disney World. Maybe a poke at ABC? Or just to start the segue from totalitarian regimes to the United States as oppressor.

The assault on the press is hardly confined to the Islamic world. The press faces nearly daily violence and intimidation in Asia, in Africa, and in eastern Europe.

Edging closer... we don't feel that connection to the Islamic world, they say... but how do you like seeing it in Asia? Now Africa? Now eastern Europe? Drumbeat moving closer...

But perhaps we should be far more chilled by what is happening in those nations that claim to love liberty. Israel, the Middle East's only truly free nation, has arrested and roughed up Palestinian reporters without justification.

Ah-ha! Now we get to it. Israel is guilty of third world intimidation methods, and for the same reason - suppression of honest reporting by Palestinians! Of course the Palestinian journalists could not have another agenda, because journalists are given a pill when they become journalists that from thenceforth prevents lying, misrepresentation and, of course, collaboration with the enemies of those whom they are purporting to cover. What is the context, when did this happen, what justification did the Israelis give? We don't know. It's flatly stated. Good reporting, yes? Just what you'd expect from an article on journalism written by journalists at a newspaper for journalists.

In case you didn't realize, what we just saw here was guilt by association. Because we see the Israeli "roughing up" following the atrocities listed before, we are to assume that the Israeli behavior is just as wrong for just the same reasons. Realize here that I'm not saying the Israelis were right and the Palestinians wrong in the instances referred to - I don't know. And you don't either. Because we aren't given enough information, we're just given conclusions.

It gets better.

On April 5, the Israel Defense Forces felt free to fire rubber bullets and stun grenades at a group of 25 mostly U.S. reporters waiting for the visit of U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni's visit to Yasser Arafat's Ramallah compound.

And there you go. When a group of mostly U.S. reporters gets in the line of fire in a war, when they are actually changing the nature of a confrontation by their presence, when they refuse to go away when told by the combatants in control to do so, they are shocked when force is used to remove them. What about our press badges! They are a magic shield! Well, baby, press badges don't deflect bullets and apparently are no guarantee of good sense.

The United States, too, has caught this contagion: Several times during the fighting in Afghanistan, American soldiers pointed weapons at American journalists to thwart their reporting.

There's your point. The journalists were thwarted! I usually associate "thwarted" with a small child who isn't getting his way. Apparently that is the same meaning the journalists have for it. So we've moved the horrors of journalistic oppression from the Islamic world right into that bastion of press freedom, the United States. And in all of this, there is no discussion of what the journalists' behavior meant in the full context of the battles being fought. No effort to see that perhaps having 25 journalists with their busy little cameras and their intrusive microphones and their shouted questions and their assumption of immunity from harm might actually result in the deaths of soldiers, journalists or both. And given the quality of reporting on, say, the Jenin "massacre", or the fact that journalists helped fugitives escape Arafat's compound, the soldiers could be forgiven for assuming that having the journalists around was a bad thing, not a protection of democracy.

Interesting as well that the article does not mention that an American journalist was shot by a Palestinian gunman.

Then we land firmly in the United States, within our own borders.

Let's remember that Vanessa Leggett, a novice journalist protecting the rights of all reporters to shield confidential sources, was spending her 52nd day as a prisoner in the Federal Detention Center in Houston when Islamist fanatics dressed in the business-casual attire of Corporate America steered passenger airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Leggett spent half a year in jail -- and now that she is out, the U.S. Supreme Court shows no interest in her case.

I agree that the incarceration of Leggett was pathetic and wrong. I fail to see, however, that her case covers any wartime journalist with glory. The situations are vastly different, and using this case to support the contention that wartime correspondents are suffering government crackdown is ridiculous, and the sign of a mind that thinks Oliver Stone is a crack historian.

The failure in all of this is the journalists, not the soldiers. I'm not saying that there aren't any instances where journalists were improperly treated. Certainly Daniel Pearl gave his life, and from all accounts was a fine journalist. But a war is not Entertainment Tonight, and Arafat's compound is not Jackie O's summer home. The journalists would do well to understand that it is their arrogance, their condescension and their overwhelming sense that THEY are the most important part of any story that has undermined their credibility world wide and that will keep their cries of "foul!" from gaining any purchase among the people. If they were reporting accurately, behaving responsibly and showing even a tiny, itsy, molecular-sized respect for the intelligence of their audience, they might find the situation was different.

I think Ernie Pyle would be ashamed to see what war-time journalism has become.

CAN'T YOU SMELL THAT SMELL! This is old news, but I hadn't heard of it until yesterday afternoon via a radio talk show. Any opportunity to make a buck no matter how ridiculous, right? I don't know if they still make it, though. I couldn't find it on the home page.

WHAT DO DOMESTIC GUN OWNERSHIP and eating potato chips have in common? Find out.

THIS IS A FRIGHTENING WAY to start your week. And you thought your family was bad!

CATHOLIC SCANDAL EXCHANGE: Tony Adragna responded via email on Monday to my post on the Catholic church scandal that is on my writings page. I've been slow to post it, mainly because I meant to respond with the post, but it's up now. I'll let you know when I respond to it.

UPDATE: Apparently the link wasn't working originally. This should; it's at the top. If you're reading this sometime way long after May 5, then you might have to scroll down for it. But then, if it's long after May 5, where have you been all this time?

SYNCHRONICITY: There must be some symbolism in a Saudi-owned horse named "War Emblem" winning the Kentucky Derby. This year of all years.

It was a beautiful run. It always is. I might find the pseudo-Southernism of the Derby a bit trying, but I love the horses, and the almost musical grace of their running.

SCROLL DOWN: Don't miss the update to the post on the Israeli/Palestinian dead. Reader Matt Johnson did a yeoman's job figuring out what the percentage of civilians vs fighters is. Not definitive, but the best I've seen. Check it out.

BEYOND THE PAGEANTRY: Today is the Kentucky Derby. I usually try to watch it on television, but despite having lived in the Louisville area for 4 years and just two miles from Churchill Downs for one of those, I’ve never seen it in person.

What I have seen is the media coverage, the Louisville hype, the stars streaming in, the way everything shuts down. The year I lived on Fourth Street, which is the straight shot from downtown’s posh hotels to the Downs, I sat on the front steps of my apartment building and watched the stretch limos go by. They closed the street so only the A list could use it. The people inside probably don’t come to Louisville except at Derby time, and they hang out with the same friends at The Brown Hotel that they spend time with in Saratoga or New York City, Miami Beach or Los Angeles. They climb into a stretch limo, drive down a street of lovely old renovated Victorian homes, past the University of Louisville, and into the eye of the pageantry. They drink mint juleps, wear gaudy hats, laugh at the antics of men in Colonel Sanders garb, and have A Southern Experience.

Because, after all, the Kentucky Derby is the quintessential southern experience… isn’t it?

I’ve lived in eight places in Kentucky, from Murray to Manchester, two of those places in or near Louisville. In my judgment, the Kentucky Derby isn’t a Southern Experience, it’s a Horse Racing Experience, a Party Experience, a Commercial Experience. There's even a Louisville Experience. And that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great party; not my kind of party, but anything that gave rise to Derby Pie can’t be all bad. But I’m tired of it being described as a Southern thing, merely because it happens in Kentucky. It’s a chance for the local economy to ring up millions in sales and advertising value, and everyone to get tanked. The same thing happens on the other two legs of the Triple Crown; they just don’t wear hats the size of an umbrella, serve mint juleps or use fake southern accents at those venues.

The “literary” version of the Kentucky Derby belongs to Hunter S. Thompson, in his The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. The 1970 essay holds up surprisingly well today, despite the mentions of Cambodia and Kent State. This image is juxtaposed in many people’s minds with the list of stars who are there, and who attended whose pre-Derby Party the night before. The Derby is big in Lexington too, where I also used to live, because that’s where most of the state’s horse farms are, and where Derby winners tend to live out their stud years. The pre-Derby parties are legend, with articles for weeks beforehand about what local hostesses will wear, and what this year’s theme will be. And many “little folk” get together on Derby Day for a barbeque or a tented garden party, complete with – yes – mint juleps. Even in some cases non-alcoholic ones.

I’ve been to a few of those backyard parties, and they’re fun. But I am annoyed for Kentucky that the opportunity for class, history and fun degenerates into money grubbing, self-mocking displays and fawning over celebrities who say things like this:

Former Seinfeld star and current KFC pitchman Jason Alexander said, "I didn't know there were this many people in Kentucky. I thought there were only cows and chickens."

Hahaha.

I know I’m being curmudgeonly about this. There really is something for everyone at the Derby celebrations, and it’s probably no better or worse than other festivals – the Mardi Gras in New Orleans comes immediately to mind. And I’m glad that Kentucky is associated in the minds of many with beautiful horses, great food and a fantastic world-class pageantry. But it’s an overlay. It’s a part of Kentucky because it evolved there, but today’s Kentucky Derby is no more a Southern celebration than the Beverly Hillbillies was a documentary on Appalachia.

WHAT ARE THE NUMBERS? I've heard a lot about how many have died in the current intifada, how the Palestinians have lost more than the Israelis. Jak of Jak's View from Vancouver had this to say:

From the beginning of the renewed Intifada on 29th September, 2000, until now (9:00am PDT May 3rd, 2002), the total number of Palestinians killed is 1,457. In the same period, 463 Israelis were killed. This year so far, 546 Palestinians and 214 Israelis have been killed.

Well, I want to know - how many of those were combatants? My response (in part) to Jak, in the Comments section:

Compare apples and apples. Say "X number of Palestinian civilians and Y number of Israeli civilians were killed" if you want equivalence. And make sure the Palestinians you list ARE civilians, and not un-uniformed fighters (like, say, a suicide bomber).

Jak again:

How can we compare, susanna? Is a 10-year old Palestinian throwing a stone at an invading heavily-armed soldier a fighter or a civilian when he is shot dead?

Are the wife and children of Palestinian gunmen civilians or fighters when they are blown up in their car by missiles from helicopters aimed at the gunman?

Your definitions or mine?

And me again:

If you'll give the source of your data, I'll check it out. FYI, anecdotal information is not statistically sound; I did not claim that no Palestinian civilians died, so giving several *very sad* examples is not compelling. I'm not even saying you're wrong. I'm questioning your use of undefined, aggregate data to make a point when data disaggregated along combatant/civilian lines could tell a very different story. As for definitions, I'd be satisfied with an international definition of "combatant" and "non-combatant", if you'd like to take the time to put this on solid ground instead of using shocking stories.

I, of course, had a few other little things to say, which you can read if you go look at his comments section. But those are the argument parts.

So I ask you. Do we have that data? Is it possible to know who were combatants and who were not? And in this intifada, how do we define combatant, especially when that little boy could have been been wearing dynamite, or throwing grenades instead of rocks?

I don't know the answer. Do you?

UPDATE: Reader Matt Johnson in Atlanta, GA, sends this excellent response:

I have also spent a lot of time looking for the information you asked for:

So I ask you. Do we have that data? Is it possible to know who were combatants and who were not? And in this intifada, how do we define combatant, especially when that little boy could have been been wearing dynamite, or throwing grenades instead of rocks?

As for the exact numbers you are looking for, it is rather difficult to find the data. I did find a couple of websites that 'answered' the question to my satisfaction, however. Since whether or not men/boys are combatants seems to be arguable out to infinity, I just looked for websites that have the number of women/girls killed. This can give us a proxy for how much targetting of civilians each side does. This was easy to find for Palestinians, harder to find for Israelis. I think it is safe to say that the vast majority of women and girls killed are non-combatants, especially for the time frames of the two sites I found. It should be noted that some of the Israeli women (but likely very few) may be IDF, and it is unlikely that any of the Palestinian women (in the timeframe given) were combatants. (Women didn't achieve the 'right to blow themselves up' in Palestine until shortly after this period, I think, though the struggle for gender equality is long and hard in Arab-controlled areas. Yes, Virginia, there is a Sarcasm Clause.) Time frames are difficult to match up, but I did my best:

For the Palestinian female dead, we have:

From Sept. 28 2000 - Oct 31 2001

Total number of Palestinians killed: 800

Number of Men and Boys* killed: 761

Number of Palestinian Women and Girls killed: 39

*The article calls 18-year-old men 'boys', a characterization I would dispute

Less than 5% of the Palestinians killed by Israelis are women or girls. You can see by the rest of the statistics that the website clearly has a pro-Palestinian view, so I think it is safe to say that if there were more girls and women killed during the time period, they would be listed here.

For the Israeli female dead, we have:

From Oct 2000 - Present (Practically the exact same start date, but not the same ending date.)

I counted at least 90 women and girls killed by Palestinians on this page. (I stopped counting because some of the pictures aren't very good and I can't tell the difference between some male/female Israeli names.)

Many (all?) of the pictures have dates, so it should be possible to get a near-exact count of women and girls. It should be possible to do a much better job than I did with this comparison (with near-identical time intervals) for anyone who's interested. The 39 vs. 90 was enough for me. (Even with the different time scale) Or you can compare the 5% to the near 20% female (thus most likely civilian) casualties. I would try to do a better job, but this website crashes my browser.

(NOTE: This is unedited except I cut out the URLs he sent in the text and instead gave them as links where appropriate. Everything he sent is included.)

NEWS FLASH: BELLESILES EVEN WRONGER THAN ORIGINALLY THOUGHT. NATION SHOCKED.

(ok, I know I posted it as something else originally. I like this better. It's my blog.)

RESURRECTION?

The IDF released a videotape Thursday showing the apparently staged funeral of a Palestinian in the Jenin refugee camp…the film shows someone who is supposedly dead - and on the way to burial - falling off his stretcher and then running away.

And what do the Palestinians claim?

…the footage showed wanted Palestinians fleeing.

Okay. So either the Palestinians are faking funerals to fool the UN, or they’re faking funerals to help killers escape. Take your pick. Either way, that’s a lot of “civilian” complicity, isn’t it? And what if, say, two or three or 10 terrorists were interspersed in the crowd, and the Israelis fired on the group? Wouldn’t they be pilloried for shooting at civilians?

We know Jak would take that tack. Right, Diane?

I like Happy Fun Pundit’s report best. It even puts it in context.

REGENCIES ARE BEST: After following a link from the always cutting-edge Tony Woodlief, I came across this post at Curmudgeonry, by Jordana Adams:

CONFESSIONAL: I'll admit it. I like to read romance novels. After undergraduate and graduate degrees in German literature, I like to read fluff books where everyone ends up happy and alive in the end. When I read, I like to escape reality and I also like delving into my favorite period of history -- Britain around the turn of the 19th century. So a recent IWF Hotflash on Harlequin's new line of romance novels, Red Dress Ink, caught my eye. But this new, "modern" genre of romance novels, "aimed at the modern gal more likely to hit the town in a push-up bra and a G-string than a chastity belt," definitely isn't for me. Then again, I've never been able to relate to Sex And The City either. I just hope my Regency novels won't start disappearing off the shelves of bookstores any time soon -- that would depress me almost as much as reading too much Kafka in one sitting.

Jordana, me too, me too, me too. Straight down the line (well, no degrees in German, but I had three semesters of it. Guten tag! der Kugelschreiber!). I think we need to talk.

Even if I only read one Kafka story. But it was in real, untranslated German, does that count?

SHOOTOUT IN THE OK COCKPIT: Pilots wanting guns in the cockpit. Flight attendants sobbing, "what about usssssss...!!!!" Nonvoting member of Congress stridently invoking gun control propaganda in a steady underlying drumbeat.

Is this a movie yet?

It's a serious subject, but the apparent circus going on around it in Congress is all about special interest groups and not about honest planning, evaluation of risk and identifying the ultimate goal - keeping the most people alive. The pilots have signed a petition saying, we need guns in the cockpit. The flight attendant union says, only if you either give us stun guns or promise to come out of the cockpit to defend us if there's a problem. Various experts are piling on saying it is or isn't a good thing. My favorite is the gun control mouth, D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton:

"We know guns in the homes are more likely to be used for killing relatives and for suicide," she said. "We have to consider guns in the cockpit might be used for more than the purpose intended."

Actually, Eleanor, they're most likely to be used for sport hunting and for show/collection, but we hate to interrupt your fantasy. And if a pilot is intent on suicide, he has a MUCH BIGGER weapon at his disposal. Remember? He's in a plane.

There are some legitimate issues and concerns here, but it requires an honest assessment of the dangers and how to respond. No one needs to have guns just because it will make him or her feel better; it needs to be a part of an overall approach. As we've seen, passengers and flight attendants are going to leap into the breach when efforts are made to hijack a plane; unless someone has a bomb that he just detonates with no warning, at least some attempt will be made to stop him. But that's not the picture the flight attendants draw:

"...said Jeff Zack, spokesman for the Association of Flight Attendants[,] "If there are no tools or training for flight attendants to protect themselves and passengers, what we end up with is planes getting to their destination with a bunch of dead people in the back."

Well, Jeff my love, if the hijackers get into the cockpit what you're going to end up with is the people in the back just as dead, and possibly a lot of innocent people sitting in their offices reading their email will wind up dead too. Think of someone other than yourself, ok?

There are some valid complaints, among the most serious that the cockpit isn't secure anyway so giving pilots guns could be dangerous just because hijackers could get in there and get them. If we're going to go all out for security, then the pilots need to basically be sealed in their cockpits, with their own restroom facilities and food for the trip inside. I don't know how you'd have to reconfigure the plane for that, but if you couldn't, you'd need to change procedure so if a pilot steps out, the cockpit is sealed behind him.

And what about the air marshalls? Aren't we going to start having them in the planes as a deterrent and rescue operation? They'll have guns.

Here's my plan, developed just right now but still more reasoned than what appears to be emerging from Congress:

1) Give pilots guns. Evaluate danger to the individual models of the planes, and adjust calibre accordingly.
2) Seal pilots in their cockpits in whatever method works.
3) Train flight attendants in negotiation and non-lethal methods of responding to threats. Any actively damaging implement, such as a stun gun, could be taken from them and used against them or the passengers. Do not give flight attendants anything but knowledge.
4) It has to be assumed that any hijackers would hold the passengers and attendants hostage, trying to compel compliance from the pilots. It must be established that as soon as a hijacking is attempted, pilots will seek clearance to land at the nearest airport and will not in any way comply with hijacker demands.
5) Include in the flight attendants' inflight chat about seatbelts and life vests, a little instruction on how to use the blanket and pillow provided, or any implement to hand, to subdue someone who is threatening the safety of the passengers. Even if someone dies in the process, throw books, purses, apples, whatever, because the hijackers can't overpower everyone, all they can do is grab a few and use our fear that those people will be hurt as a means to get acquiescence. Needed realization: they may want everyone dead. Refusing to pile on won't save anyone. Everyone piling on at once may save everyone.
6) Evaluate the airline's liability in the instance of likely false alarms where someone is attacked for pulling off his shoe. Reassess program and include benchmarks for concluding that the plane is threatened.
7) Include air marshals randomly on flights. I'm not sure if they should be made known to the pilots, the flight attendants, both or neither. My instinct is, don't tell anyone, because the knowledge could change behavior to a less self-protective mode.
8) Don't let the costs for this burgeon out of control.

And that's my early morning assessment of inflight safety. I'm flying at the end of the month, and I anticipate feeling safe. I also will take a nice big book to attack someone with, and I have a standing decision to be aggressive if I need to be in protecting myself or others.

Too bad they won't let me bring my knitting needles.

UPDATE: For more insight, check out DPM and Den Beste.

INAPPROPRIATE RETURN: Moira Breen is back, and all gussied up in new threads. She celebrates her return with this insightful look at Arafat's unheralded "release" and the Church of the Nativity.

Moira, looking good from here.

KILL YOUR TV is back from the dead! Celebrations held worldwide! Film at 11!

WHY LIBERTARIANS should not be sent to prevent someone from committing suicide.

LET'S GO TO THE PATIO, DEAR: Martin Devon, our accomplished and erudite Patio Pundit, has many posts of interest and amazement, as well as a deeplink to the D(e)M(o)N newspaper, which he neglected to tell me about so he's just now getting linked for it. He says he's tired of posting about Israel, and explains why, which is interesting as he always is, but I'm glad he posted this even though it breaks your heart to read.

SEE SEA Cs: Gulfport thieves can't be charged with armed robbery. (Link via Max Power.)

WHOLE LOTTA SHAKIN' GOIN' ON. Film at 11 (or maybe not). Interest dancing across blogosphere.

NO WATERMELONS, but lots of sense, this time in looking at evolution as theory, not fact. And he's an agnostic, so stop with the preconceptions already.

BILL CLINTON: MYSELF - a preview of his talk show, courtesy of (who else) HappyFunPundit. Go for the show, stay for the rest. Very cool.

FALLING THROUGH THE CRACKS is not about high school girls in thongs. Would be funny if it was, though.

EVERY WORD SHE WRITES: Sting would write a song about The Last Page, if he knew her. She's threatening not to post again until Monday, but she wrote a LOT today, which makes us happy because everything she writes is funny or wise or clever or, often, all three. I suggest reading a post at a time, maybe two, each day, until she gets back to it on Monday, so the wait won't seem so long or so devoid of her wit.

(Page, I'll take that in twenties, used bills, non-sequential numbers.)

HONOR DUE: While we spend time thinking about what memorial should go at the WTC site, we should take some time to think about the crash site of Flight 93. Joe Katzman at Winds of Change (link via Random Jottings) has a poignant posting reminding us of who those passengers were, and how much honor from us they are due. Yesterday, through what linkings I can't remember, I came across this site about Flight 93 and cried about 9/11 for the first time in a few weeks. Spend some time there today.

Memorials are an essential part of remembering history. My family always made historical sites - from presidents' homes to battlefields - a part of our vacation meanderings. When I visit war memorials, I try to take the time to read the plaques, to focus on at least some of the names and try to imagine the lives they left behind - for me. We can't forget that. I am living in this country, which for all its flaws is the best and greatest the world has ever seen, because of those people who's names are engraved on thousands of monuments throughout the country. Gettysburg comes to mind, and the myriad state and unit memorials in the battlefield near Chickamauga, GA. The Vietnam War Memorial is overwhelming, but necessary, as is the memorial by Andrzej Pitynski at Exchange Place, in Jersey City - a soldier, his hands bound behind him, in that startled death-moment when someone stabs him in the back with a bayonet. That commemorates a different war, in a different land, but always for the same hope - freedom and democracy.

In an office where I work, there is a large photo of this statue with the World Trade Towers reaching tall behind it, just across the river. The imagery is chilling:

...(T)here is the local monument at Exchange Place to Katyn Forest Massacre of 1940. It was erected to commemorate the execution of Polish army officers by the USSR during the period of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The area is a historically Polish neighborhood, so this theme was a reasonable choice. The monument itself is not. At 25 feet tall, including the plinth, it features a huge statue of a cavalry officer with a bayonet thrust through his back and out his chest. This sculpture dominates one of the world's great urban vistas: the Exchange Place plaza in the new financial district opens on the Hudson River and looks directly across to the World Financial Center and to what had been the World Trade Center. On 911 and for days thereafter, that image of a man being stabbed in the back dominated the thunderhead of smoke billowing up from the Center. The juxtaposition of bronze grievance and fiery malice was a vision from a damned world.

Katzman includes this quote:

"You do not know what freedom is," Herodotus reports a Greek saying to a Persian. "If you did, you would fight for it with bare hands if you had no weapons."

Remember again Flight 93 and the day those Americans showed the world what they were made of. And then think about how we will tell generations to come, in a way that will bring tears to their eyes, and resolve to their hearts.

UPDATE: Links to photos of the Katyn memorial, with and w/o the WTC towers, in the Comments section courtesy of lakefxdan.

SLIGHT OF HAND? I listened to Rush on my lunch hour today talking about a column by Jim Hoagland in today's Washington Post, which is an "inside Ariel Sharon's head" rumination on what the Israeli and US actions in the last couple of months have been. Rush thinks the column is not Hoagland creating conversations in his mind, but a rhetorical tool to bring together actual interviews with Sharon, Kissinger and officials in the State Department without quoting any of them. That's a pretty interesting theory, certainly illuminating if it's true. And while Rush said he believed it, he also said he couldn't say with 100% certainty that it was true. Worth reading, in any case. Rush is still buying the Bush rope-a-dope as well.

This situation is so complex that sometimes I just turn off the computer, the radio, the television and the telephone, and go read something that never happened, couldn't happen, where everyone is happy, life turns out well, and we all have a good time on the way. Usually accompanied by chocolate.

I recommend (pick your category): David Eddings' The Belgariad and The Mallorean series; Stephanie Laurens' Bar Cynster series; Lucy Maude Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series; Weis & Hickman's Dragonlance series (not the Legends); Piers Anthony's Xanth; Dean Koontz; Stephen King; Tami Hoag and Patricia Cornwell's early works; Anne Perry. If you're of a more literary turn, try Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns, any fiction by Wendell Berry or Russell Kirk, or Beowulf (bring tissues).

If you MUST go nonfiction, try these: The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson; Raising Demons by Shirley Jackson; The Compleat I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken; Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein or The Design Inference by William Dembski. All of them will give you a nice sense of order in the world, by the time you're done.

Because, in the long run, this too shall pass, and we will have our part in it. We'll do what we must do better if sometimes we step back to regain our perspective.

ROPE-A-DOPE DALLAS? Bryan Preston at JunkYardBlog sees something deeper in the DMN's deeplink blustering.

TROY AIKMAN PASSES DEEP AGAIN as Mark Byron joins Deeplink Dallas Day.

ARE WE HAVING FUN? Tony Woodlief puts Sand in the Gears of the Dallas Morning News with his deeplink. And while you're there, read the rest of his blog. Classic.

BRAIN DEAD MORNING - not sure if it has any connection to Deeplink Dallas Day, but I can't seem to formulate any lengthy discussions of anything. So I will point you to a variety of interesting and worthy information, which I recommend you check out, while I go take a nap.

PASSING: Asparagirl and ZenFlea talk about their Jewishness in a time where there's reason to fear. You'll have to scroll down a bit for ZenFlea's, but it's worth it.

HULK FOR ISRAEL: Meryl Yourish has a super-hero solution to the Israeli conflict.

NEW BLOG: Justin Sodano is in a linking frenzy as he gets off the ground with his new blog, The Weigh In. It's worth going to if only because his URL begins with "jsoda".

ANARCHY IN ARIZONA: Desert Pundit pithily pummels a group of smelly students.

AMERICAN ICON IN TROUBLE: Sneaking Suspicions reports from Philadelphia. I'll have the swirl, Fritz.

UPDATE: I changed the link on Zenflea's post, because Eve The Owner sent me the link to the posting at a dedicated site. However, I encourage you to go to the rest of her site and read around; she has a great post about choosing majors and getting advanced degrees (for obvious reasons a topic of fascination for me), and some other good stuff too. Just an all-round great site to permalink, which I think I will. Her wedding photos are fun too!

I'M WAITING TO SEE what Instapundit and the other lawyer-bloggers think of this article. My response is typically hawkish, but then as an individual rights advocate I'm torn... glad I'm not the judge.

UPDATE: Well, that clarifies things!

LILEKS FOR SECTY OF STATE: This short screed says exactly what I think about Israel/Palestine, only he's better at it and knows more. Scroll past the discussion of concrete steps to read the screed, but come back to the steps later. Very funny.

DD #3: TEXAS COLLEGE COSTS GO UP 63% - but that's still not as expensive as New Jersey's. Wouldn't you know I'd pick the most expensive state in the nation to live and go to school in. Intellectual brilliance has always been a trait of mine.

DD #2: WRESTLING STUDENTS IN KENTUCKY DIE, and not from an arm lock. Sad. It happened at the University of Kentucky.

Weird that Dallas had this, and Lexington's newspaper didn't. Well, on the other hand, given the quality of the Lexington Herald-Leader, maybe it's not surprising after all.

UPDATE: The Lexington H-L finally has the story, but it's not on the front page, not even a headline; it's under "breaking news", two clicks from the front, and the story is an AP news release. Now, the H-L offices are MAYBE two miles from UK's campus, right down Main Street, turn left on Upper, and in a few blocks there you are. How difficult is it to send a reporter to the scene? To even CALL THE POLICE for information? Useless, useless. It's an important story; I'd say most of the students at UK have family and friends in the Lexington area, and it's incumbent on the local paper to get information out as fully and quickly as possible. It is NOT incumbent on the H-L to have their front page on the website given over to the Kentucky Derby. I think we need to rename the Herald Leader - henceforth it will be the Lexington Hardly-Local.

STATE TAKES GIRL, LOSES HER: The Florida Department of Children and Families took 5-year-old Rilya Wilson from her grandmother 15 months ago - and they don't know where she is now.

Rilya's grandmother, Geralyn Graham, has told police that a woman claiming to be a Children & Families worker took the child from her house in January 2001, and that two other people identifying themselves as agency employees later visited and indicated they knew the girl had been removed. The state agency says it has no record of the visits, and no idea where Rilya is.

They think the child is dead. It seems likely.

This is scary because Florida is one of those states that is particularly sure that it can raise your children better than you. They're aggressive about taking children out of the home, and reluctant to give them back. A friend of mine was investigated once and it was a nightmare. And now this?

How do you lose a child?

Heads will roll, should roll, but that won't bring back Rilya. Maybe Florida should reconsider where children are safer - at home, or lost in their system.

DD #1: HAGGARD HAGGARD OVER THEFT:

Country music icon Merle Haggard won a court order Wednesday to stop an eBay auction of some of his original music – a tape of unreleased music allegedly swiped from his tour bus and offered for $325,000 by a Texas concert promoter.

Did this guy think Haggard wouldn't find out?

IT'S DEEPLINK DALLAS DAY! Declared yesterday, in support of BarkingDogs.org, today is the day as many bloggers as we can commandeer will be blogging stories deep in the Dallas Morning News website. Here is the reason why. So far, DailyPundit and Ipse Dixit have done so; Mark Byron is gearing up to do so. Go check them out, and be sure to follow their links. If you're a blogger who's deeplinked Dallas today, let me know and I'll tell everyone here too.

Is this fun or what?

By the way, if we all get in trouble for this (we're hoping!) Dodd at Ipse Dixit got sworn in as an attorney in Kentucky yesterday, so he's the real deal and we'll get him to represent us. And he promises to leave the dueling pistols at home. But what about the swords?

THOUGHTFUL ANALYSIS of a country not living to its potential, from Norwegian blogger Bjørn Stærk. He's speaking of his country, but at times he could be speaking of ours:

Our nanny state has created irresponsible citizens, whiners instead of builders.

It's short. Read it all.

WHY I WANT TO BE A ROMANCE WRITER, or at least own stock in Harlequin Romance.

They’re the best at marketing.

I started reading little Harlequin romances when I was 10, because my sister would read them and smile, or laugh out loud, or get all weepy, then refuse to tell me why. They cost 60 cents then. Now they’re $3.99. But that’s not the reason I want to write them.

I read in cycles. I may read 10 romances – or mysteries or science fiction or action or bestsellers or or or – in a row, and then not pick one up for months. For me, romances fall basically into two categories: read it all or read just the good parts, when the plot won’t support more attention. Sad to say, the majority of romances these days merit only a “good parts” read which is why I buy them mostly in used book stores. A wonderful Saturday morning for me is spent curled up under a blanket while it’s raining outside, a stack of “good parts” books at the ready, Enya on the stereo, a sleeve of saltines and a glass of orange juice (I never said I was normal) close to hand.

Always in that stack of books are ones by Diana Palmer, who has been a favorite for many years. All her heroes are tough but wounded inside, all her heroines are feisty and vulnerable, but she does great good parts. She’s a favorite of a lot of women, so how she is packaged by the romance industry is illustrative.

She started as a “little book” writer – one of those who does the numbered books of a certain line, like Harlequin or Silhouette (now owned by the same company), where six or so are published a month. Over the years, she’s written dozens of these. A few years ago she went “big book”, publishing several thick romances that cost more and ostensibly have a more complex plot (rarely true, but whatever. More good parts.). She’s done a few short stories and things. Mainly what she’s done is become an industry.

First they reissued her older titles under a “classics” line, which is to say I now would pay $3.99 to get something that originally sold for about $1.50. Then they packaged the ones that took place in the same town with interconnecting characters (a big marketing tool in romanceland) into books with three reprints per book. Then they packaged other books of hers in sets of three with new authors, so you’d buy it for the Palmer and stay to read the others, maybe finding new authors you’d then go out and buy. You have to be careful though, and check the publication dates – a lot of times, the Palmer book will be from 1992, say, and the other two from 2002. The cover would coyly say something like, “Classic Palmer with two sizzling new reads!” The latest is just hilarious – Harlequin is now taking its back list, editing a 180-page story down to about 30 pages, putting 5 such abridged versions into one book, and sell it for $5. “5 for 5!” They made a good parts version!

I don’t know of another genre that could get by with this, and I’m not sure why they do. The “good parts” abridgements are pretty choppy, but hold together ok which begs the question – why was it 180 pages to begin with? Shouldn’t have been, is the usual answer.

And that’s why I want to be a romance writer. There’s never an end to ways to repackage for more money. Somebody in marketing is making millions.

(And if you care, my current “read it all” authors are Stephanie Laurens and Julia Quinn.)

THE ANSWER IS YES.

Thanks to Shiloh Bucher for the link. Free registration required to view. All previous contracts voided. As is. No refunds.

MEDIAMINDED ON THE RAMPAGE:

You'd think the mass murder of civilians on our soil by fanatics sworn to destroy our nation would finally force the American media to question whether it was proper to continue viewing U.S. military policy through the lens of Vietnam. You'd be wrong.

And he's a journalist! Gives us heart that at least some in the media "get it" - read it all. MM, think you could open a j-school?

Ok, just kidding.

DEEPLINK DALLAS DAY: I'm declaring tomorrow as Deeplink Dallas Day in honor of BarkingDogs.org. If you don't know why, the Professor has the scoop. All bloggers, tomorrow we must each find an article somewhere in the Dallas Morning News website other than the front page, and link it. Also link BarkingDogs. I'll do my part, will you?

I'D LIKE TO THANK MY THERAPIST... Matt Welch is against awards for bloggers, but it may be too late.

I'M ORDERING SEVERAL OF THESE to send to leaders of various Middle Eastern countries. Like, Iraq. And hats. I'm sending hats.

THE RIGHT QUESTIONS ABOUT MEDIA BIAS: Daily Pundit William Quick asks - and answers - them.

NEWSDAY IS GULLIBLE too, printing the info from CAIR without any comments about its likely validity. Thanks to reader Mark Garbowski, who sent me the link. Mark finds it odd that the LA Times doesn't have it since Newsday and the Times are owned by the same people. If anyone finds it in the LA Times, let me know and I'll check it out.

ONE MORE THING before I go - industrious criminals:

The man and woman who robbed a Monroe [Washington state] Starbucks yesterday morning apparently weren't satisfied with what they found in the safe. After cleaning it out, they worked the store's drive-up window for about a half-hour, pocketing the cash, Monroe police say…

In all, 18 to 25 cars pulled up while the robbers worked. There was no indication customers thought anything was amiss, O'Neil said.

But "we heard that he makes a crummy cup of coffee," she said of the male robber.

Ahhh, Starbucks. Criminally good.

THIS BLOG IS TAKING A BREAK while the blogger figures out how to reset the default for her browser. Because I know how much it will amuse those of you more techie than me, I will tell you how I got to this place.

When I switched to Verizon DSL as my ISP, Netscape was the default browser. I managed to get so I only got IE instead (don't ask me how, it's been two months and who remembers?), but I still got the Netscape "do you want ME to be your default browser? Huh? Huh? PLEASE?!" little window each time. Inadvertently this weekend I clicked the "yes" box, and then suddenly everytime I clicked something on my button bar or my links lists Netscape would open. Do you KNOW how awful Netscape is?? I'd have to close it and then drag the link to my IE address window. That quickly got old, so I whined to a materials scientist friend who is a techie researcher type. He suggested I uninstall Netscape, so I did. And now when I click on a link, I get a window saying it can't find a browser.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

But never fear. I'll get this figured out. Or you'll hear about me on the evening news.

UPDATE: I RULE! I reinstalled Internet Explorer, complete with security patches, and now all the links and clicks and buttons work. Finally.

THE CAIR REPORT is available in full here. And the data is from self-reports to CAIR. Any takers that the data is statistically sound?

GULLIBILITY WATCH: After posting about the CAIR report below, I decided to see if any newspapers or news services reported it. I went to the NY Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Seattle Times, the Detroit Free Press, the Boston Globe, the Tampa Tribune, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and FoxNews. I looked at the news wires Reuters, AP and UPI.

The Tampa Trib was the only one who bit, but they swallowed it whole:

American Muslims Targeted After Sept. 11, Study Finds

A man named Mohammed who was kept from boarding his flight at Tampa International Airport.

A Muslim woman who was strip-searched by airport security personnel in Fort Lauderdale after she refused to remove her head scarf.

Another Muslim woman who works at a company in Bradenton and was told by her boss that she would have to hide her head scarf under a wig.

All were examples detailed in a report released Tuesday by a Washington-based Muslim advocacy group showing a threefold jump nationwide last year in bias-motivated harassment of and violence against Muslims.

The rest of the article gives numbers, percentages, allegations, explanations as to why this is happening - all without a single effort to explain how the information was gathered, what the statitistical soundness of the study was, or if anyone disagrees or challenges the information. Pretty shoddy reporting from the Trib. Apparently reporter Birusk Tugan doesn't read The Weekly Standard, or understand the concept of "factual" or "balanced". There is this little caveat at the end, though:

The report added, however, that ``incidents reported to CAIR may not represent the full scope of bias encountered by American Muslims, simply because many people do not report their experiences.''

I get it. The numbers are likely low. Good job, Birusk, you're right on top of things.

HONESTY INTERNATIONAL, also known as CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), has released a report about treatment of Muslims in the US post 9/11:

The number of "anti-Muslim incidents" nearly tripled during the 12-month period ending in March 2002...

The report stressed that the individual freedoms of nearly 60,000 US Muslims were "negatively impacted by government policies" instituted after the Sept. 11 attacks...

Interesting. Where did their data come from? It doesn't say, nor does it give statistics, margin of error or any sign of basis in reality. There is, however, a survey on their website. And we know how trustworthy CAIR surveys are.

As for the bulk of the 60,000 negatively impacted,

It also includes 50,000 other people who donated money to Muslim relief organizations that were declared illegal and shut down by the US government after Sept. 11.

Ahhhh... so these people can no longer donate to Muslim relief organizations so they're harmed? Wait... they have phones, don't they? Then they can just call at the next telethon-for-terror.

And all this awful mistreatment has happened when Muslims aren't even implicated in the attacks! In fact, no one is!

...Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper quoted Robert Muller, director of the FBI, as saying US officials have not yet gathered any evidence on how the terrorists carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, despite the massive investigations carried out by the FBI.

"The hijackers did not leave any written evidence. We have not found even a single paper related to the Sept. 11 attacks during our investigations either in the United States or in Afghanistan," he said.

Yeah. We don't know how it happened. We don't know who planned it, who carried it out, why it was done. No evidence. Nada.

Pretty sad.

We're still coming for you, though, House of Saud. You can't hide behind the skirts of your religion, or the advertising money I provided you by driving my car.

Survey that.

IT'S A ROUGH LIFE:

At least Australian heiress, socialite and former housekeeper Rose Porteous thinks so:

"When the going gets tough the tough get going but this time the tough is not just going to get going but the tough is going to enjoy the toughness."

THE WTC IS STILL GONE. The Manhattan skyline was silhouetted beautifully against the sky as I drove down the hill from Bergen Avenue on Montgomery in Jersey City, heading toward Jersey Avenue in Jersey City. I always loved driving there because the World Trade Towers seemed so close and the skyline so amazing. Today, what I noticed was that the Towers are still gone.

Still gone.

Still hurts.

WHEN YOU HAVE NO ABSOLUTES, nothing is absolutely wrong. In that type of setting, all it takes is continual exposure to an idea, apparently reasonable people espousing it, and a lack of moral standards based on absolutes for an idea to gain increasing purchase. The moral equivalence pervasive in our society continues to open the door to more and more behaviors once deemed inexcusable – such as pedophilia. That’s the social mood the NY Times tries to take advantage of, in this time of scandal over abusive Catholic priests, in this article offering implicit support for the views of a professor who supports sex between adults and children (it isn't defined what age "child" covers):

[Prof. Harris] Mirkin argued that the notion of the innocent child was a social construct, that all intergenerational sex should not be lumped into one ugly pile and that the panic over pedophilia fit a pattern of public response to female sexuality and homosexuality, both of which were once considered deviant.

Mirkin claims his article is about opening “dialogue” about social taboos, and disconnecting “moral panic” from the cost/benefit analysis society makes of sex between teenagers/children and adults. He even tries to establish that "innocence" is neither a useful designation or a necessary one for children.

"Though Americans consider intergenerational sex to be evil, it has been permissible or obligatory in many cultures and periods of history," he wrote.

So has slavery, abuse of women and murderous totalitarianism, but I don’t see many defending those constructs. The NY Times and others are conflating the good – freedom of speech, openness about sexuality and its impact on people and society – with the bad – sex between adults and children. And I don’t think Mirkin’s fantasy about making it as a 12 year old with a woman on his paper route is compelling evidence that sexual activity between adults and children could be a good thing.

The article is mainly about how the Missouri state legislature is punishing Mirkin’s university for his “ideas” by cutting its budget $100,000. It’s a gesture and everyone knows it. The legislature is making it clear they despise his stance on pedophilia; Mirkin and his supporters are making it a free speech issue complicated by people with closed minds. The NY Times is on Mirkin’s side.

The ability to explore the moral, social, physical and intellectual impact of ideas and behavior is a cornerstone of a free society. That doesn’t mean that disagreeing with a particular idea, and trying to show its moral bankruptcy, is the result of a closed mind. This article pulls out most of the stops used to engineer societal agreement in modern times in an effort to equate our moral disgust with closeminded puritanism – which our society has already identified as anathema. The cues are numerous (my interpretation in parentheses):

Prof. Harris Mirkin could not have devised a better test for his controversial theory of sexual politics. (You nitwits are showing that he’s right.)

In 1999, Dr. Mirkin published an article in an obscure academic journal likening the "moral panic" surrounding pedophilia to the outrage of previous generations over feminism and homosexuality. (This behavior is just the latest taboo to come out of the closet; it has the same legitimacy as these other, now accepted, behaviors.)

As the expanding sexual abuse scandal engulfs the Roman Catholic Church, Dr. Mirkin has become an object of outrage. (The problem is really the church, not Mirkin; he’s a misunderstood innocent bystander.)

Dr. Mirkin, 65, said through a sly smile: "The article is meant to be subversive; the article is meant to make people think…” (We’re sophisticated, we understand the truth here. It’s those brain-dead moral absolutists who are the problem – we know they don’t think.)

Dr. Mirkin is being celebrated as a hero for academic freedom. (Or at least, should be. [The article is strangely devoid of any true celebration other than other academics.])

The chancellor here, Martha W. Gilliland, issued a strong statement supporting "the right to hold unpopular views”… (We’re attaching this construct to a known value, “free speech”, without passing judgment on its content. Of course, we would neither offer support or withhold judgment if the construct was, say, that feminism hurts society or that racial preferences harm minorities.)

"Today's heresy often becomes tomorrow's orthodoxy." (We’re on the leading edge, here, too bad you’re in a “moral panic”. We’ll be seen as pioneers and morally brave when pedophilia is a normal part of society, sometime in the future.)

For the record, Dr. Mirkin, who has grandchildren 2 and 7, said he had never had sexual contact with a child. Incest and rape, he said, are always wrong. He agreed that priests and teachers who touched children sexually were abusing their authority. (See? He’s a good guy, he’s managed to be around young children without molesting them, and he agrees with you pat pat that the priests are awful.)

But he questioned whether some people accusing priests these days were making up stories in search of a payday… (The claims of harm from the intergenerational sex are just exploitation of the system for money; if we looked closer we’d see that in most cases the sexual activity was a healthy part of growing up.)

…he said he believed that much of what was called molestation was really harmless touching. He said he resented that teachers were leery of hugging children for fear they might be accused of abuse. (Let’s trot out the fears that everyone has, that expressing genuine and non-sexual affection for children will be mistaken for inappropriate advances with abusive intent. Let’s soften the edges of pedophilia by making it something any of us could be accused of, just for loving physical contact.)

"This particular issue is distasteful. I don't even like to think about it," said [Chancellor] Gilliland (Would that be pedophilia, ma’am?) "We got out of the Dark Ages when we said we can challenge belief, we can investigate." (Ahhh… no, the distaste is reserved for those who would stifle debate, not those who would bugger or fondle children.)

"I don't think it's something where we should just clamp our heads in horror," he said of pedophilia. "In 1900, everybody assumed that masturbation had grave physical consequences; that didn't make it true." (That’s right, we’ll compare pedophilia with something we know everyone does, as a moral equivalent that is unrecognized as such just because we’re in a “moral panic” and unable to see clearly.)

"These things that you're sure of," he added, "you really ought to check out and test." (Because, obviously, if you check out and test pedophilia, you’ll find that it is in fact a good thing for society, for the 12 year old paper boy and who knows who else.)

I don’t advocate shutting Mirkin down. But I do advocate mocking him at every turn, showing his efforts at taking child sex into the mainstream for what they are, and exposing his intellectualization and moral condescension as tools for accomplishing his goal. And I advocate castigating the New York Times for being willingly involved – either as a credulous sycophant at the altar of “science”, or a knowing conspirator with no moral compass.

REPUBLICAN WOMAN AS PRESIDENT? Dodd at Ipse Dixit makes a great case for it; be sure to read the comments because the debate continues in there.

EUSELESS: Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission, berated Britain on Monday for its apparent preference for the United States over the European Union. British officials, meanwhile, said he is full of it, the EU is a bloody mess, and somebody on that side of the pond had better be friends with the US to save Europe's sorry hide.

Sounds about right to me.

FROM INSIDE THE COLLAR: Catholic priest Thomas Buffer thoughtfully and poignantly describes what it’s like to be an honorable priest during the current Catholic scandal. And most priests are honorable, which we should not forget or ignore. Buffer also gently but clearly takes down the media for their often shallow, shrill coverage, which has done much harm beyond what was done by the scandal itself.

Naturally I especially enjoyed his surgical evisceration of Maureen Dowd:

…Dowd is the Old Testament prophet, hurling thunderbolts of righteous rage. She makes Dr. Laura sound like Mr. Rogers. In her column “Father Knows Best” of March 20, Dowd manages to lump together, as a single criminal class, the rulers of Saudi Arabia, the Catholic priesthood, Afghan warlords, the Taliban, and the “boy’s club running Enron.” Funny, I never felt I had much in common with the rulers of Saudi Arabia, who will not even allow a Catholic priest to say Mass in their country. But Dowd explains that all these groups are wicked because they are dominated by dominating men. Having no need for scholarly backup, she relies on her own experience of having grown up Catholic.

The good priest shows her and others for what they are, and gives interesting commentary on the state of our society in the process. Excellent.

TALES OF THE SERIOUSLY ODD:

A reporter who wrote a story about a diesel spill in his newspaper's building has been charged with failing to notify the fire department about the accident...

[Deseret News reporter Jerry] Spangler wrote a story critical of his newspaper and its building managers after diesel fumes circulated throughout the nine-story tower's ventilation system. The spill was caused by a supplier who mistakenly pumped 400 gallons of diesel fuel into a tank that already was full. The delivery was meant for a building next door.

Spangler interviewed a state environmental quality official, who told Spangler to report the spill by calling 911. Spangler said he told his supervisors of the spill, wrote his story, and went home...

How do you sit in a building full of diesel fumes, interview a state official about it, write a story and go home, without making sure the authorities come to fix the problem? What part of "Call 911" didn't he get? Obviously a man who takes his journalistic observer role seriously.

SOMETIMES TECHNOLOGY IS NOT GOOD. Since I have DSL, I can take calls while online. One of my favorite things is my hands-free telephone, which has a headset like the ones used by order-takers at your local Taco Bell, only mine has a cord. It makes washing dishes bearable. Tonight, I was surfing while talking to my sister on the telephone, using the headset. My brother logged onto MSN IM, and I started talking to him too. Then my cell phone rang - it was my mom. So I have a phone to each ear, my mom is saying "Do you want me to call back? What are you doing?", my sister is saying, "Put mom up to the phone, see if I can say hi! to her!" and my brother is typing away making rude comments about my sister.

It was nearly enough to send me screaming into the night.

SUPREMELY RIGHT: Disabled workers aren't entitled to a position more suited to their disability if it means someone with greater seniority is done out of the job, the Supreme Court ruled today. It was a 5-4 ruling, but two of the dissenters - Scalia and Thomas - were against it because they didn't think it gave the employers as much protection as it should. Not surprisingly, Souter and Ginsberg thought the ruling unfairly restrictive of the Americans With Disabilities Act, the law under consideration.

The LA Times voted with Souter and Ginsberg:

Companies' seniority policies almost always trump the demands of disabled employees, the Supreme Court ruled...

Such policies obviously being in place for the sole purpose of abusing already disabled employees.

When choice jobs go to those with the most seniority, employers do not have to upend that system to accommodate a disabled worker...the divided court ruled.

In fact, they can likely kick the disabled employee in the teeth and toss them down the stairs without repercussions.

The court has ruled for employers and against a disabled employee each time it has examined the scope of the ADA in the workplace. Today's decision is no exception, although the court did not give employers everything they wanted.

Although they probably had to grind their teeth to resist it.

I agree that people with disabilities should be employed to the fullest possible extent of their physical ability and talent. I encourage efforts to make sidewalks and public buildings handicap accessible. However, hurting your back is not sufficient qualification for a promotion, and the integrity of a merit system cannot be destroyed out of sympathy. If a person who has seniority, is qualified and is physically capable of a job isn't promoted because of a non-related disability, then that's a problem. But disability alone shouldn't lift you above the rest.

THIS IS NOT VERY COMFORTING, given the recent train accidents.

SEND A FEMALE JEWISH AMBASSADOR TO SAUDI ARABIA, says Conservative Economist James D. Miller. Wish I'd thought of that.

ANOTHER KIND OF MEDIA BIAS, which journalists tend to discount but which is a big reason why many of them went into the profession, and what often keeps them there, is: The Big Story. The rush of being In The Know. Jack Dunphy in NRO gives it a glancing blow in his article about why the Blake case is no OJ, no matter how much the media wishes it was:

...the Simpson trial was the Big Show, and for a reporter who covered it it must have been like an addict's first hit from the crack pipe: a high so intense that it can never be equaled, yet against all reason he continues to seek the euphoria of that first indescribable rush. And that hydra-headed creature we call "The Media" is still in search of the sublime buzz it got way back in '95, when for nearly nine months it was almost as much a star as Mr. Simpson himself but without the accompanying risk of life imprisonment.

The journalists can make all the noise they want about how they are providing what the public wants, but they are often in the business of creating as well as satisfying their market.

GLAD TO KNOW YOU’RE UNBIASED: You just have to laugh, sometimes, at how many journalists just don’t get it. Matt Welch, who always gets it and is always fun when he gets to talking about journalism (or anything else, for that matter), gives an insider look at a book fair panel discussion where excessive self-congratulations were exchanged amongst journalistic mavens. One comment in particular caught my eye:

[Journalism professor Ann Louise] Bardach bemoaned that kids nowadays get into journalism for the wrong reasons (money and fame, dontcha know), unlike her generation, which wanted “to change the world.”

Look at that carefully. Bardach would likely be amongst the first to get huffy if someone told her that journalists are biased. But what is bias? A preferred direction of thought. What is Bardach saying here? Her generation of journalists wanted “to change the world”. Now, do you think they wanted to change the world just for the sake of change? That any change would have been acceptable? First, a desire for change in and of itself is antithetical to the concept of neutrality – “we just report, ma’am”. Second, a preferred direction of change implies an ideological preference, thus, bias. Hmmmm…

Hoist on her own petard.

Also, don’t miss Welch’s analysis of the LA Times’s “It was a dark and stormy night” writing style. Priceless.

TIPS FOR ALLEVIATING DRIVING BOREDOM:

0-10 mph (traffic jam) or traffic lights: Reading anything, crocheting (quilting requires too much concentration)

10-45 mph (light traffic): Reading popular fiction and magazines; allows for frequent looking up

45-65 mph (light traffic): Reading popular fiction, only in paperback. Magazines and hardbacks too difficult to handle and still maintain proper grip of the wheel at this speed; "important" fiction and non-fiction require too much attention.

65 mph + (any traffic): Car dancing with loud music, preferably with windows down. Especially fun in West Virginia with “he done me wrong” songs. Reading at these speeds should be done only when you're the only one on the road and you're almost done with a chapter you just have to finish and the nearest rest area is still 40 miles away.

THE SHOPPING PAGE: Somewhere in a boutique in Washington, DC... The Last Page succumbs resentfully to a friend-of-the-bride dress, with the hapless help of a Him. I love The Last Page. That girl has talent. And now a new dress. That she kind of likes, despite herself.

She even manages to explain the deeper meaning of this blog's name, all fully in context. That girl's talented.

But then you knew that already. Go read. Now. I'll wait.

CHARITABLE CONTRIBUTIONS have been down since 9/11 because so many gave to the funds for those victims and families of victims, but articles like this show why that trend may continue rather than reverse: The United Way of Washington not only has apparently been mismanaging and misusing funds, but the management is trying to hide it. This on top of the Catholic Church scandal, and revelations of misuse of funds by international relief agencies as well as clear ideological preferences and goals accompanying their "relief" decisions. Any non-profit agency (excluding churches) which receives tax-exempt status should have to reveal what percent of its funds are used for administrative costs, and I as a donor wouldn't contribute to those with a huge, money-guzzling infrastructure.

LOCAL ENFORCEMENT OF IMMIGRATION LAWS is meeting opposition from...local law enforcement. I need to spend more time with this, but it seems bizarre to me. The situation is this: Currently illegal immigration is considered a civil matter, and those in violation can only be apprehended by the INS except in cases where local law enforcement (state, county or parish, and municipal) has entered into an agreement with the federal govt to enforce the immigration laws. Local law enforcement is resisting taking on this role for two reasons - budget and philosophy. I would understand the budget issue if they were required to proactively enforce the law. But they wouldn't - it would just be another set of violations they could toss in the mix. It wouldn't necessarily even be a "must arrest" situation - i.e. they would have the discretion to decide whether to arrest for that violation. The other reason given is that it would impede the local police from having good relations with the local illegal immigrant community. Huh?

I've never quite gotten the illegal immigrant situation in this country, and I've known illegal immigrants personally whom I liked a lot. And I thought they should have gotten here legally. I've seen a lot of pointing fingers and sage nodding on blogs lately talking about the growing immigrant populations in Europe and what a dangerous change they have wrought there. So why isn't there any pointing and nodding going on here? I think it likely that the majority of illegal immigrants in the US are hard-working people who want a better life and came here to earn it, not to live off the fat of the land at my expense (even though more often than I appreciate that winds up happening). I'm not against immigration per se; that would be rather hypocritical given that my family too were immigrants, way back when. But we need a clearly articulated, reasoned approach to immigration, we need to enforce it and we need local law enforcement empowered to help with that. If it's not a must-arrest situation, a good local law enforcement department is going to be able to do its job without spending all its time and good will hauling away illegal immigrants. But this situation was crying out for attention before 9/11, and post-9/11 we should see that it's even more important.

I also don't get this tension between the Justice Department and the White House. Bush is CEO and President of the country, and Ashcroft is Vice-President of Justice in this organizational structure. He serves at the pleasure of Bush. End of story. And I thought Karen Hughes wasn't gone yet - so why the leaks from the White House? Sounds suspicious to me.

MORE ON CATHOLICS and the priest sexual abuse issue. I posted a comment on QuasiPundit's site in response to a post by Tony Adragna, and he has responded. My response to his response (I know, it waxes ridiculous after a while) is posted on my writings page, because it is very long and also not precisely the type of thing I cover here. If you go read, you might want to read his original post, my response and his response first.

KEEPING ABREAST OF BARBARA BUSH, the Abigail Adams of our generation. At least she's got a sense of humor. I wonder if the reporter got fired?

HE GOT HIS TICKET PUNCHED, and both Tony Woodlief and his professors lived to tell about it, although it was a close thing, a few times.

JUST WHEN I NEEDED TO KNOW, I found a Blogtionary to explain those little bloggish words that keep popping up that I don't know but am afraid I'll sound silly and downright clueless if I ask - like, for instance, meme. What's a meme? A self-referring stutter? Someone can't spell memo? Short for memorex? Who knew? Certainly not me. But I have been saved by Dave Worley and his Blogtionary:

meme: An idea considered as a replicator, esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase `meme complex' denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. Coined by Richard Dawkins (see source2) SOURCE1 - SOURCE2

Meme, by the way, has apparently spawned a whole discipline called memetics. I have just revealed the depth of my uneducated ignorance by admitting I didn't know about it, but any sacrifice of ego is worth it for the benefit of my readers. As for finding out what Source 1 and Source 2 are, you need to go check out the Blogtionary. But then, you needed to check it out anyway. So go, already!

STINK BOMBS, BORING BOMBS, MONEY-MONGERING BOMBS: HappyFunPundit has a rundown of possible directions for military weapon research.

GOOD, BAD, UGLY: The killings at a school in Germany has brought out the good, bad, and ugly:

GOOD:

The rampage apparently ended when a teacher ripped off Steinhaeuser's mask and pushed him into a classroom, police spokesman Achim Kellner said. Startled, Steinhaeuser locked himself in the room, then shot himself some time later as police commandos entered the school.

BAD:

Authorities believe Steinhaeuser's motive was revenge: The gun enthusiast was angry over being kicked out of school recently after faking a doctor's note in an attempt to avoid final exams, Kellner said.

UGLY:

"So-called 'American conditions' have reached us. We cannot let these excesses of violence become a part of our daily life," said Konrad Freiberg, the head of Germany's police union.

The teacher should – and probably will – be hailed as a hero. That was an act of bravery and selflessness. On the other hand, Steinhaeuser (photo here) was a self-absorbed, lazy young man tragically taking his own inadequacies out on others. I'm glad he's dead. Finally, Freiberg needs to seriously get a life. “American conditions” didn’t cause this behavior; more “American conditions” would make their country a better place.

And the only impact “gun enthusiast” has on this horrible massacre is in the choice of weapons and the success of the killer’s evil intent.

THIS JUST IN: SEATTLE IS STUPID - Racial preferences are under fire all over the country, and with good reason. Apparently a Seattle school district is amongst the battlefields, and the combatants are, well, showing their colors:

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has issued an injunction to stop the Seattle School District from using race as a tiebreaker in student assignments while the district challenges a legal ruling last week that held its policy illegal.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit ruled last week that the district's use of race as a factor in school assignments violates state Initiative 200, which was passed by voters in 1998 and prohibits racial preferences in public-school admissions, hiring and contracting.

Okay, sounds like the voters were heard, and the courts are upholding the law. Straightforward enough.

But the school district had said that in the absence of a direct court order, it would continue using the tiebreaker. Race is one factor used in determining which students are assigned to the district's most popular but racially imbalanced schools.

Nice example for the kiddos - disobey the law even when it's been voted on by the community, and totally in absence of any numbers showing support for the cries of discrimination. Notice that the articles says the schools are "racially imbalanced", but offers no evidence.

Of course, facts, law and democracy are immaterial to these social engineers:

The ruling was seen by many in the district as a blow to attempts to keep Seattle schools integrated.

District Superintendent Joseph Olchefske denounced the ruling, saying racial diversity is a "core value" for the district.

The 9th Circuit ruling also led popular Ballard High School Principal David Engle to resign Thursday, saying Ballard High's ethnically diverse student body would become "mono-cultural" as a result of the ruling.

In announcing his resignation, Engle invoked the memory of civil-rights activist Rosa Parks and encouraged students to act on their own moral convictions.

Still no facts, still no support. All emotion and crying buckets of horrified tears. Oh, wait, here is a little bit of data:

But Seattle attorney Harry Korrell, representing Ballard High parents who challenged the district's policy, said that calling upon "images of the old South" is little more than "posturing to scare people that the consequences of the ruling will be dreadful."

"Using the tiebreaker, Ballard is 43 percent nonwhite. If you take out the tiebreaker, it drops to 40 percent. Is that a segregated school?" Korrell asked.

Okay, I grant that the data comes from the "opposition" (or, er, the ones wanting to uphold the law). However, it's data, it's checkable, and it's totally unchallenged at least as far as this article goes. I hope this omission is journalistic incompetence, but I suspect it isn't completely. But then, why let facts spoil a good liberal chest-pounding celebration?

PUNISHMENT OR REHABILITATION? Competing ideologies of crime consequences in America will be played out this week in California. Leslie Van Houten, a Charles Manson follower in the group that killed the LaBiancas in the late 1960s, is up for parole. According to attorneys, she is fully rehabilitated and thus should be released:

Van Houten's lawyers portray her record behind bars as that of a model prisoner, noting that she has obtained a bachelor's degree, tutored other inmates, made quilts for homeless women and served as a leader in anti-drug programs and other self-help groups.

According to the state, her crimes outweigh any other consideration:

While Charles (Tex) Watson stabbed Leno LaBianca, Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel held Rosemary LaBianca in another room, placing a pillowcase over her head. Watson then stabbed Rosemary LaBianca with a bayonet, and gave Van Houten a knife and ordered her to "do something," court documents show. Van Houten testified that she stabbed the victim 14 to 16 times in the back, but believed she was already dead...

...at her last hearing, in June 2000...the [parole] board concluded that Van Houten would pose "an unreasonable risk of danger to society" if released and called her offense "especially cruel and callous." Members added that Van Houten "needs additional time to gain . . . further insight into her involvement in this crime."

Are we a rehabilitative society? A punitive one? A mix? In practice, our court and correctional systems are a crazy quilt of responses to crime; even though in the broader perspective more serious crimes seem to receive more serious responses, a lot of factors - including notoriety - play a role. In a purely rehabilitative model, Van Houten would likely have been released a decade or more ago. In a purely retributive model, she'd never see the light again as a free woman. A mix is not a bad thing, but in our system the percent of each model in operation on any one day vacillates wildly. Given that, her attorneys make a valid point:

The "one apparently insurmountable obstacle" blocking her parole, her lawyers argue, is "that she was part of the Manson 'Family.' "

...said Van Houten's attorney, Christie Webb[,] "She's an individual entitled to consideration outside of the mythology that has grown up around this case."

That's true. But I'm retributive, myself. Keep her in.

INSTITUTIONALIZED LYING: Anti-Semitism is increasingly becoming almost a tenet of faith in the Muslim world, according to this NY Times article. It's very chilling; although I've seen before all the pieces mentioned here, put together it's frightening. It is becoming a war of religions, as much as some try to disconnect religion from politics. In Islam, religion and politics are inextricably linked.

Again, the NY Times bizarrely included this article in its Arts section. Some editor is clearly spending Friday afternoons at the corner bar.

FOUR DEAD IN NEVADA after a shooting at a casino there; it happened this morning during an annual motorcycle club gathering. Eight injured, 100 arrested, bridges over the Colorado closed.

AND THE BEAT GOES ON: One or two gunmen apparently entered two Israeli homes and shot the occupants, two at least while they slept. Four people died, six were injured. And this article does not show any sign of public outrage; were it Israelis sneaking into Palestinian homes, I think you would. You have to wait till the 11th paragraph to even find out the circumstances, after reading about Jenin in three of those paragraphs:

Israeli media said two gunmen had entered a house in Adora and fired on a sleeping couple before moving to another house and opening fire.

The article gives the appearance of trying to be even-handed, with both sides quoted repeatedly. But the tone leans toward skeptical overall, and favorable to the Palestinians in the final analysis. One thing that is odd to me is the omissions; I’ve not followed this as closely as some, because I just get angry and feel helpless and I can’t do anything about it. I have to let it go occasionally to keep any level of perspective. But even with that, I know enough to realize that there is information this article doesn’t use that would mitigate what is said. An example is the references to Jenin; we learn that the UN is sending in a “fact-finding” team, we learn that it was the site of the “fiercest fighting” and that the Israelis “say” that many of the attackers come from Jenin. We learn that the Palestinians claim that “hundreds” of civilians died in homes “flattened” by tank fire and bulldozers, while the Israelis claim that 48 “mostly fighters” died.

What is missing? The most significant is any discussion of the reality of the Palestinian claim of dead vs. the Israeli claim. Nowhere near 100 bodies, much less many hundreds, have been found. How hard would it be, in a city that size, where the area damaged was mostly homes, to find out a close approximation of the number? Not very, if everyone was interested in truth; we knew pretty quickly a ball-park figure for the WTC deaths, even in the midst of that far greater devastation and death. Why wouldn’t we know, then, about Jenin? Could it be that the Palestinians are blocking any honest effort at making that determination?

Next, look at this sentence:

Palestinians say hundreds of civilians may have died in the Jenin camp, many in homes flattened by tank fire and bulldozers.(emphasis mine)

Notice the last phrase; does it to you, as it did to me, sound like hapless people innocently trapped in their homes while the Israeli army heedlessly mowed them down? Of course it did, without any kind of context provided. A few days ago several blogs, including this one, linked an article in Al-Ahram where an engineer in Jenin told how the houses had been booby trapped with bombs. How else do you neutralize such death traps unless it is from the safety of heavy machinery? The engineer also said that the people of Jenin, including the children, knew of the bombs. So if they knew the bombs were there, isn’t it logical that the Israelis would come? Wasn’t that the purpose – to bring them there to die? What prevented the people from leaving the homes when the Israelis came?

A good friend of mine, a smart man, one who has lived all over the world, who has a PhD in science, who is not one to be prejudiced, thinks the Palestinians are the ones who are the victims in this war. He reads what I read and he sees a beleaguered people finally saying “enough” – and that beleaguered people is the Palestinians. We’ve argued about this a few times, but we’ve gotten nowhere. We’re both scientists, we’re both compelled by data. The problem here is, the data is so tainted and there is no one we can trust. That is where journalism has failed us so completely in this.

I’m not so naïve as to believe that the information from the Israelis is unmarked by self-interest and a need to shape public opinion. I know the information from the Palestinians is tainted. The journalists are supposed to be the ones who ask the right questions, who put it all together, who do the heavy lifting in the field so we see behind the rhetoric. I’m not asking for unbiased; you know I never ask that. What I’m asking is that journalists collect information, check it, triangulate it, dig deeper, have some integrity and honesty and persistence. Instead, we have this miasma of conflicting emotions swimming with disconnected facts that rarely get resolved into truth – and when it does, we won’t know it when we see it, because it has no structure to connect it to.

But it makes good TV, doesn’t it?

UPDATE: NOT THAT WE'RE SURPRISED, but this article linked from iWon talks about the Palestinians disguised as Israeli soldiers killing the Israeli settlers, but the photo accompanying it is of a Palestinian man in his house damaged during the Israeli attacks. So do we want to take bets on whether a photo of a dead Israeli would have accompanied an article on Israelis moving in on Jenin?

CNN CONSPIRING TO SLANT NEWS? Shocking, but so Bryan Preston reports on JunkYardBlog, along with other evidence of media bias.

R.I.P. QUALITY JOURNALISM: The Last Page proves that IT’s gain is journalism’s tragic loss in this finely crafted piece about why quality journalism is dead and likely to stay that way. It is an excellent look inside what working for a newspaper really is like, how decisions are made, and why stupid things wind up on your doorstep every morning. Page is not only insightful and engaging, her writing is a pleasure to read.

My journalism experience was in the trenches of weeklies and tiny dailies; no big city dailies for me, at least as a full-time journalist. I did freelance for the Louisville Courier-Journal for a bit while in grad school at U of L. Page is so right that many newspapers snap up new eager journalists, suck them dry and care very little when they float away, empty. I think it takes both a certain personality and a good deal of fortunate circumstances to succeed in journalism and still be a person with self-respect and integrity.

Page mentions that she began at a paper paying $18,000/yr in 1997; when I left journalism in 1987, I was making $14,500. And that was a nice pay increase from where I started. At one newspaper, we were provided manual typewriters – I kid you not – for writing our articles. I brought in my own electric typewriter until we got computers a year later. I covered local government, police, water company meetings, school boards, sports, traffic accidents and Eagle Scout ceremonies. I took my own photographs – actually won an award for one – and usually also developed the film and printed the photos. When the Challenger exploded, I was in a darkroom in a rural Kentucky town, using a plastic screen to put those little dots on my photographs so they would print properly in the newspaper; I will always smell photographic chemicals when I think of the Challenger. I wrote hard news, soft news, filler news and columns. I designed pages and used an X-acto knife to edit on the paste-up page, cutting out typos and getting wax all over my hands – wax was used to stick the typeset text columns and photos onto the page (it’s all done by computers now). I learned that a thesaurus is your friend when writing headlines, and your readers don’t always appreciate a sense of humor.

My time on the front lines of journalism was hard, fun, stressful but ultimately worth it; if you read Page’s post you’ll understand why I don’t want to go there again.

TAX FREEDOM DAY tomorrow. Ipse Dixit tells us about it, and adds a challenge to the Democrats. Make my day!

I’M CONSIDERING QUITTING BLOGGING at least long enough to get email begging me not to. Meanwhile, I’m very happy that Media Minded made his way back into the fold, and that Sgt. Stryker lasted about, what was it, two or three days? without blogging. Okay, okay, I’m a realist. I’ll be blogging until the next obsession comes along, and probably even then I’ll find time to harangue at least intermittently. (Of course, if you wanted to email encouragement I wouldn’t delete it unread.)

MM, welcome back, for whatever time you can spare us. Cool sunglasses, btw.

LIFE OF A BLOGGER: Some days it's just too much.

DEATH TO EXECUTIONS? The highest court in New York State, the Court of Appeals, will soon be considering a death penalty case that could have broader implications for the implementation of the death penalty in the state. Those against the death penalty are hoping the justices will use this opportunity to strike down the state’s law for a variety of reasons, including finding it discriminatory and cruel and unusual punishment.

The death penalty is facing challenge from another court as well, also in New York:

A federal judge Thursday said he was prepared to declare the federal death penalty unconstitutional on the grounds that too many condemned inmates turn out to be innocent.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff said he would throw out the federal death penalty in the case of two men charged with drug and murder conspiracy unless the government can explain the number of wrongful convictions that wind up on death row.
He gave the government a final opportunity to present arguments before he issues a final ruling after May 31.

Citing post-conviction DNA testing that has freed 12 condemned inmates since 1985, Rakoff said that the possibility of an innocent person being executed would be ``difficult to square with basic constitutional guarantees, let alone simple justice.''

Consideration of the death penalty has two parts, in my judgment. First are the general moral and constitutional questions: Is it right? Is it constitutional? Next come implementation issues: Is it discriminatory? Is it cruel? Does our process have too high a rate of error? It’s a hierarchical decision-making process. If you decide it’s wrong, the rest of the questions are immaterial. Ditto constitutional. But you can decide that it is a morally and constitutionally appropriate penalty in our country and still believe that the way it is currently implemented is so flawed as to require its suspension until safeguards can be put in place to lessen those problems. Too often those of us who believe it is right (and I do) allow ourselves to be backed into a corner where we feel we have to aggressively support its implementation or find ourselves outmaneuvered on the “is it right” front.

Agreeing that too many innocent people are dying is not the same as saying it’s wrong to execute a guilty person.

REPENTANCE, REDEMPTION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: The biggest discussion on the religious front right now is what to do with priests who committed sexual abuse years ago and have apparently not engaged in it recently. The Catholic bishops are uncertain, and I’ve heard public opinions ranging from, “How could they let a pedophile stay on no matter how long ago it was?” to “What about repentance and forgiveness?” In fact, whenever someone has done something truly awful, later realizes it and asks for forgiveness, a certain group always cries for consequences to be suspended because of the repentance. A good case in point is Karla Faye Tucker, who committed a heinous murder, was sentenced to death, converted to Christianity in prison and then sought clemency as a result of her change in behavior. From what I saw, it seemed likely that her conversion was genuine. She was executed in 1998.

So what’s the answer? Should forgiveness automatically imply a suspension of earthly consequences?

I think the answer in the Bible – in both words and context - is clearly “no”. Forgiveness, while it has implications in this life, is about eternity. Some behaviors are so damaging to others in this life that even someone who is repentant can rightly be kept from having the opportunity again. One example is when one person in a marriage is sexually unfaithful; the other person may forgive, in a spiritual sense, when the unfaithful partner is truly sorry, but that doesn’t mean the trust in the relationship can be regained. Giving forgiveness doesn’t obligate the innocent partner to take the unfaithful partner back. Neither does it prevent reconciliation; only the injured can make that determination.

The case of sexual abuse is even more serious in this instance because a forgiveness that includes a restoration of full privileges puts vulnerable children at risk and undermines confidence in spiritual leaders. It’s important to note here that while Catholic priests are the center of this particular storm, religious leaders of all faiths, of either sex, are in a position of trust with children that could easily be abused. The potential for harm both to children and to trust in religious leaders dictates that the strongest measures be taken to ensure purity: All the priests who can be proven to have committed abuse – by a legal standard, even though the case may now be beyond statutory limits – must be removed. In an organization with the size, wealth and power of the Catholic church, any priests removed who have truly shown a change in behavior can find other duties that do not involve the trust and leadership role of a priest. Those whose crimes are still within the statutory limits should be turned over to the authorities and the Catholic church should cooperate fully.

Forgiveness and suspension of consequences are separate processes, and extending the first does not necessarily mean extending the second. The Catholic church needs to send the clear message that protecting children is more important than protecting the careers of priests, even those with long and mostly illustrious careers.

IT’S A GREAT IDEA, BUT:

An anti-affirmative action activist in California is on a crusade to make the government color blind.

Ward Connerly, who helped end affirmative action at the University of California and in the state’s hiring practices, now wants state officials to stop collecting racial data entirely at taxpayers’ expense.

"In my view, government should not be asking, ‘What is your race?’ any more than, ‘What is your religion or what is your sexual orientation?’" he said.

The “balance” provided in the article was quotes from people who are for affirmative action and who see this lessening of data collection as undermining their ability to track “progress” in that area. That’s an ideological objection, just as this is an ideological proposal. What I want to know is, to what extent will we “stop collecting…at taxpayers’ expense” ? There are legitimate reasons, especially medical but also, in my judgment, sociological, why it’s important to have that kind of information. Ideologically, I’m totally behind the “color blind” concept. But we have to be careful that we don’t overreact by asserting that race has no impact on any decisions the government, or society, needs to make. For example, there are medical conditions which are more prevalent in some populations than others. It’s important in understanding those conditions that we separate out whether it’s race, culture or geography that’s have an impact, so we can go about resolving whatever the problem is.

On the other hand, the task of picking which race or ethnicity each person is has become more difficult through mixing of groups. That’s not a bad thing, but I think we need to restructure how we ask those questions. Maybe a better question would be, what was the race of your parents? Or even go as far back as grandparents. How do you answer “what race” if one set of grandparents were native American/African-American, and the other set was Italian/Asian?

Often researchers will use data sets collected for other reasons as the basis for their analysis; the census data is a hugely rich source of data for a wide range of analyses having nothing to do with the original purpose of the census. Government data sets are particularly rich for the exact reason that they collect so much. We need to assess the range of purposes for a data set before we start limiting the richness of the data.

We can always make the computer colorblind for specific selection tasks (like hiring), rather than eschewing collection of ethnic data altogether.

BECAUSE I CAN, I've started posting some of my poetry - older stuff, for now - on a new site, inside my mind. I'm no Emily Dickinson, but it keeps my mind busy.

WELCH ON BLOGGING: For those of you who didn’t read it yesterday, here’s the link to Matt Welch's discussion of newspapers, blogging and the Internet. Excellent.

NUN TOO TRUTHFUL: A Russian Orthodox nun who also just happens to be George Stephanopoulos' sister has been taking time away from her duties as teacher at a school for Palestinian girls to report second-hand information about Israeli atrocities:

"I'm not spreading propaganda," George Stephanopoulos' orthodox-nun sister vows, but Israeli soldiers last week "defecated" on the floors of a West Bank medical clinic they raided.

However, her track record is not strong:

An e-mail alert she dispatched 10 days ago about Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian girls was later deemed apocryphal, the priest told WorldNetDaily. Stephanopoulos was the victim of a Palestinian boy's e-mail hoax...

Nearly all of Mother Maria's reporting comes from Palestinian sources. She has not herself witnessed the alleged Israeli atrocities.

Sources say she has also been urging family members to make their bank accounts available to officials of the Nigerian government who want to give them millions of dollars.

(Okay, I made that last bit up.)

Thanks to DailyPundit for the link.

JOURNALISM PROFESSORS SHOW LIBERAL BIAS. In other news, it is revealed that Ronald Reagan was a conservative.

TAKING IT TO PAKISTAN: US military has been conducting covert operations in Pakistan in recent weeks, according to the Washington Post.

Just in recent weeks? If we've not been doing this for recent months, then we're stupid.

SAUDI GOVT CRACKS ON PRESS: Apparently after the fire in Mecca where the young girls died because the religious police kept them from leaving the burning school, the "Saudi" Arabian press became more vocal and actually criticized the government. That lasted a matter of weeks:

...a couple of weeks after the burst of openness, the government yanked the leash and the kingdom's newspapers reverted to their old, docile form.

And what does this flow of media look like in "Saudi" Arabia?

The main sources of news for most Saudis are satellite channels, such as the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera. Satellite dishes, though illegal, are widespread. The Internet is another source of news for Saudis, but their government heavily censors it -- about half a million sites, many of them pornographic or maintained by the opposition, are blocked on any given day.

The press restrictions are part of wider controls on all forms of literature, public artistic expression, and academic subjects.

The authorities prohibit the study of evolution, Freud, Marx, Western music, and Western philosophy, and prohibit the criticism of Islam or the ruling family.

I complain and fume about the political leanings of most American media, about the shallow coverage that is often the order of the day, and the race to entertain rather than inform. It's flawed, just as our democracy is flawed. But for all that, we have an absolutely amazing media compared to anything else in the world, with thousands of journalists who truly are dedicated to "getting the word out". Even when we complain, we know that eventually the "truth", whatever that is, will be spoken by someone and we just need to figure out who it is. In "Saudi" Arabia, as other places in the world, the "truth" is actively suppressed.

I think we need to send the military, but just to protect the media. Let the Saudi ruling family try to maintain power in the face of endless "Entertainment Tonight" features on their lifestyles, Court TV's incessant airing of their justice system, the religious police followed for a few weeks by a "COPS in Arabia!" film crew. Sic thousands of little journalism students full of themselves and their right to any and all information on every public official in every little camel watering hole in the country. Let Maureen Dowd look down her nose daily at the Saudi princes ("Abdullah took me aside the other day and said, 'I wanted to add you to my list of wives but I knew you'd soon have them forming a sex labor union'. I said, no, this is one case I'd preach abstinence."). Get King Fahd on an airing of "Crossfire" and let Carville eviscerate him in public. Let the Defense Minister try a Rumsfeld on a pool of piranha political journalists. Let Peggy Noonan gently and with mesmerizing prose show that the emperor has no clothes, and it's surely an ugly sight.

We'd soon have a bloodless coup.

BURNED OUT STARS OUTSIDE HOLLYWOOD? Scientists announced yesterday that some cooling stars are at least 13 billion years old; no information was available about whether this is older or younger than Barbra Streisand. Our own Bryan Preston of JunkYardBlog was orchestrator of the press conference where all this was announced, and he has some pertinent comments about what happens when journalists (or at least headline writers) try to think without assistance.

IF I WAS A FEMINIST I would complain that my boss gave me roses today in celebration of Administrative Professional's Day (was that invented by Hallmark?). If I was a Feminist, I would say, "I am not an administrative assistant or a secretary! I am a Real Professional! I demand respect! Take these roses and shove them somewhere!"

However, since I am not a Feminist, I do not have to look for Oppression behind every flower, and I do not have to be Offended or make the assumption that he is an Obviously Condescending Male who thinks that because I am Woman I am Clerical, and that Clerical is Inferior.

Since I am not a Feminist, I can accept the roses as a much deserved thank you for a Job Well Done, and I can be graciously appreciative.

They are very pretty roses.

CNN REGAINS CREDIBILITY: After a slide in the ratings, CNN - long known for thoughtful, unbiased hard news coverage - accomplished a coup in the reporting world and earned an exclusive on one of the most hard-hitting stories aired in recent memory:

The Robert Blake murder case may not rival O.J. Simpson's in television attention, but it's already caused a surprising ratings bump for CNN and a flareup of tensions in cable's hottest rivalry.

CNN had its biggest prime-time audiences of the year last Thursday after the former "Baretta" actor was charged with shooting his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, to death last May outside a Los Angeles restaurant...

CNN paid the airfare for Bakley's sister, Margerry, from her Knoxville, Tenn., home to Los Angeles, and guarded her against advances from other reporters Monday. CNN featured Bakley interviews on Paula Zahn's morning show, its "Talkback Live" daytime show and "Larry King Live."

FoxNews, an upstart yet surprisingly resilient competitor, cried foul and retaliated with a unique perspective of its own:

Shepard Smith, a Fox anchor, made an on-air reference Tuesday to another network having "bought and paid for" access to Margerry Bakley.

CNN said it doesn't pay for interviews but that - like other networks - it helps with travel for interview subjects.

"I'm sure (competitors) would have done it if they could have gotten her," Ryan said.

...Smith brought Denise Brown, sister of Simpson's slain wife, Nicole, on for an interview to discuss the Blake case.

The FoxNews audience was happy to learn that the network had a proper perspective on the factors to be considered in determining newsworthiness when deciding that it wouldn't cover the story as intensely as the OJ case:

The Blake case is about "a guy who ... played a tough guy and a woman you wouldn't want to be near," he [Shepard Smith] said. "I'm not sure it sells."

In a startling turn of events, Dan Rather got it right:

Broadcast networks have done nothing special to mark Blake's arrest; the case merited a 20-second voiceover report by Dan Rather on the "CBS Evening News," for instance.

Some sources, however, suspect that the reticence is due more to the unavailability of Margerry Bakley and Denise Brown than a philosophical aversion to celebrity crime coverage.

In other news, unnamed industry insiders indicate that Rather will host a debate between a Marie Claire editor and a really hot IEF in a bustier on the impact of terrorism on lipstick sales.

"Buy Tropical Mango Freeze all-day shine or the terrorists will have won" will be the slogan of the debate's sponsor, an as-yet unrevealed cosmetics manufacturer.

PAST SIN MAY BE OK: American cardinals of the Catholic Church have apparently decided that sexual abuse in the future is a no-no, but if you did it already, well, you know, we hadn't made it clear it was wrong and all, so hey! it's okay, man, don't worry.

American cardinals meeting with Pope John Paul II reached consensus on a "one-strike-you're-out" policy that would dismiss any priest involved in a future sex abuse case, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick indicated Wednesday.

The Washington archbishop said, however, that there were still some questions about whether a similar tough policy should be applied to cases that occurred in the past and have now come to light.

Next up: American cardinals to decide that murder by priests is ok as long as it happened prior to this conference; future murder by priests will be frowned upon, and the priest responsible may be transferred to duties involving inanimate objects only or, if murder involved mutilation, dismemberment or multiple victims, encouraged to resign. Authorities to be notified only if body cannot be hidden or melted with lye (a la last Sunday's Law & Order).

NEWSFLASH: NPR BIASED: On my way to work this morning I listened to a piece on the devastation in Palestine as a result of the Israeli incursion. Here's what the website has up about it; the audio isn't up yet, but likely will be later:

Palestinian Damage

NPR's Anne Garrels reports on an international donors conference that opens today in Oslo to discuss humanitarian aid for Palestinians. Palestinian officials say that the need is great in the wake of Israel's three-week offensive in the West Bank. (4:48)

This doesn't begin to give the gist of what Garrels' report was about. She sounded tight-lipped and angry, apparently at the damage done, and the entire piece was on all the infrastructure damage, on how the children were frightened, how Arafat when he was "released" would find that the Palestine he had to govern had no infrastructure to govern with. There was no discussion of the Israeli deaths that occurred as a result of Palestinian activities, nor the deaths of Israeli soldiers. She estimated the damage in dollars to each of several cities - no commensurate estimate of damage in Israeli commerce, never mind lives lost - and she listed a variety of other "impacts", such as the number of people who were out of work.

I think the media do have a responsibility to cover the impact of this conflict on the Palestinians, but I want the information to be accurate and in context. This piece was at the very least misleading by not providing context. For example, the figure on how many Palestinians are unemployed did not say how many were unemployed prior to the latest Israeli incursion, or what the average unemployment has been over the years. Without that context, we have no way of judging whether the current level is a little higher or a lot higher; the implication was that it is a lot higher due to the incursion. While it could have been just bad journalism, it seemed to me to be a very biased piece served up for the purpose of encouraging support for millions of dollars in aid to Palestine through this international donors conference. I recommend you listen to it, when it is posted on the Web, and judge for yourself.

And by the way, I looked up "incursion" because I suddenly realized that is the word I had heard mainly in the media, and I wondered if it had ramifications that I didn't realize. I wanted to know before I used it here. The first definition is: An aggressive entrance into foreign territory; a raid or invasion. I think it fits, as long as we don't assume "invasion" means an unjustified offensive.

GRITTY TALE: As a southerner, I'm a major advocate of corn in just about any form: on the cob, fried, boiled, grilled, baked; in soup, stews, chili; made into cornbread, hominy, grits, mush (or its more fashionable cousin, polenta). I came across this commentary and article on the subject of grits - also known as The Food Of Gods - on the NPR website. Check it out, and if you want one of the best foods known to mankind, make the Garlic Cheese Grits. Back home, that makes it onto the menu for everything from breakfast to Thanksgiving dinner.

PINK COLLAR GHETTO? Geneva Overholser laments the lack of women at the top of media management in the Columbia Journalism Review:

…after some strong progress in the 1980s, women's rise to the top reaches of the field had stalled, so that "women today fill about thirty percent of senior management jobs, the same as several years ago." As for the highest positions -- president, publisher, and ceo -- a survey of 137 newspapers with a circulation over 85,000 showed only 8 percent held by women. Moreover, the study cited retention problems with women and various "ceilings" that they seemed to be hitting (becoming managing editors, for example, but not top editors).

She recognizes that women are increasingly dominating journalism, but points out that it’s only at the lower levels:

Certainly, women now increasingly dominate the (low-salaried) entry ranks. But in the choicest assignments -- and at the top -- they are scarce. Indeed, the industry begins to look disturbingly like one of those "pink color" ghettos -- a trade shunned by men, except for those who run it.

Overholser is playing that one-note feminist plaint we hear so often – women are underrepresented in numbers at the top, compared to their preponderance at the bottom, so there must be discrimination happening. This conclusion is based solely on numbers; no one’s done a scientifically sound study on what’s happening. As a former reporter, I can attest that the life of a journalist, at least until you get to the lofty heights, is not conducive to family life. Maybe what we’re seeing is women exercising the “choice” among the options in life that the feminists initially claimed was their goal. And now the feminists are complaining.

How shocking.

BLOGGER IS GETTING ON MY NERVES! It's been down repeatedly over the last few days, and it just phantom-posted an entry - I hit "post & publish", it appeared in the "current" section of the posting page, I went to see if it showed up on the site... and it didn't. And when I got back to the posting page, it was gone from there too. Yes, I had written it in Word but erased it because it appeared to have posted. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

FASHION AND WAR - HAPPY TOGETHER: The women's fashion magazine Marie Claire is up for high praise today in the LA Times for it's savvy mix of news and lipstick:

Marie Claire is the title that women's rights activists often mention when they talk about what publication has done the most to interest women in feminist causes over the past few years...Marie Claire looks no different from any of the lip-glossy women's titles. But if you scan the cover of each issue, skimming down the current issue's pitch for articles such as "Men Confess: What Makes Him Commit--or Not" and the usual "sexy swimsuit" roundup, you'll find a cover line that seems out of place. It's a Day-Glo green banner that reads, in color-me-radical language "World Campaign: Stop War Criminals From Walking Free," a tease for the page Seymour now turns, exposing an ad for pills that purport to "Increase Breast Size ... Guaranteed!"

...After Sept. 11, scores of readers wrote in that they were the only women they knew who were well-versed about the Taliban, thanks to the magazine's previous coverage.

Marie Claire is proud of its dual focus, but they try to listen to their readers too:

Seymour...says they're not exactly looking for a movement rag, just a smarter beauty magazine.

"They're saying, 'Don't throw it in my face--I don't want to look like an intellectual egghead freak,'" Seymour says.

Some feminists are philosophical:

Though some feminists recognize the duality, it doesn't faze them. "A willing reader can handle reading about women in Afghanistan and still have the quick tips for firming up for before bathing suit season," says Jennifer Baumgardner, co-author of "Manifesta," a book about young women and feminism.

Some, like Andrea Dworkin, author of "Heartbreak: The Political Memoirs of a Feminist Militant", are less so:

There's something about being assimilated by beauty culture that is nothing but hostility to women," she says. "And I don't know why they need it."

This IEF (intellectual egghead freak) found the link via Romenesko.

UPDATE: While this IEF has not been assimilated into the beauty culture, due to a chronic inability to grow long nails and an aversion to eyebrow tweezers, I wish to make it clear that I think many women can be both an IEF and quite lovely. For an example, please see Virginia Postrel.

BOBBY KNIGHT: LOSER - The erstwhile Indiana coach continues his kind, loving and put-others-first ways.

INSIDER GRADING: Apparently at least one newspaper is being accused of bias from inside its own gates (see post below for media whining about readers complaining). The New York Observer's Off The Record column reports this:

Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez is calling out the paper for what he deems a pro-Israel bias in the paper’s Middle East coverage.

In an April 10 memo obtained by The Observer, Mr. Gonzalez writes: "I am making a plea to the editors and my colleagues on the news staff to stop the unbalanced, anti-Palestinian coverage that has been filling our newspaper every day for the past two weeks."

And what does he base this on?

Mr. Gonzalez then tries to prove his point. He says the paper ignored humanitarian criticism of Israel by the International Red Cross. He chides the paper for putting more emphasis on, and showing more sympathy for, Israeli casualties, and faults the News for not reporting the beefs of international news organizations who have been barred from Palestinian refugee camps.

"With all respect," Mr. Gonzalez goes on to write, "to those of you who feel strong emotional or religious attachment to Israel’s plight, our newspaper’s overall coverage is doing an enormous disservice to our readers and to journalistic principles by not presenting both sides fairly."

I've not followed the Daily News coverage, so I can't say whether Mr. Gonzalez is correct. But I think he needs to check into the veracity of the International Red Cross before he uses them as a source, and perhaps look into why journalists might be held back from entrance into some areas.

NEWSPAPERS ON THE WAR FRONT: Newspapers around the country are finding that their coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is getting angry response from their readers, according to this article in Editor & Publisher. This quote gets at the general attitude of the media in response:

"It's scary, this idea that one group or another could turn on journalists," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Many people, she added, have probably given up on the idea of peace and become terrified -- "and one of the easiest things to react to is the media."

I think Ms. Dalglish is rather naive if she truly finds it shocking that people are going to react negatively to journalists when they perceive the coverage of such a divisive issue as biased. This is not a matter of how often the words "liberal" and "conservative" are used, although that's important in a discussion of ideological bias. This issue is a matter of life and death, literally, to many people, and the United States is a primary player in the situation. The main disseminators of information about the situation are the print, broadcast and Internet mainstream media, for all that we bloggers and others give important commentary on events. There is already a perception in this country that the media are biased, and you've seen here and on other blogs how the media has often seemed to "take sides" based on the preponderance of its coverage of the conflict. The US media has long had the protection of a free society, and this kind of relatively mild objection (given what journalists in other countries face) seems to have sent them in a tailspin.

I think they should "listen to the American street" and look more closely at their coverage. Is it possible that they are being used by one side or the other, that they're not carefully checking information before publishing it (see: Jenin), that they're responding to the need for speed rather than holding out for thoughful accuracy? If they do that analysis, and determine that they are doing the very best possible job, then they need to stop whining and keep filing their articles. Wartime journalism is not for the fainthearted.

And that throw-away comment on "given up on the idea of peace" is a good example of why people might get angry.

CONSERVATIVE MISNOMER: Matthew Hoy has a nice takedown of today’s Paul Krugman column in the NY Times, but I have to take issue with part of it:

…"conservative Republican" is becoming a misnomer. Republicans were the ones pushing to change welfare, they want to privatize Social Security, add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare -- these are all changes. Conservatives, by definition, want to hold tight to the status quo.

First, an agreement – “conservative Republican”, in its true definition, is becoming an misnomer. However, apparently unlike Hoy, I think this is a bad thing. That leads to the disagreement – the definition of conservative is not holding to the status quo in the manner Hoy seems to indicate, i.e. an intractable unwillingness to change regardless of the situation. Even Webster’s says conservatism is about “preferring gradual development to abrupt change” – that’s not intractability.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m concerned about the blurring of the two parties in the middle, with each reaching for the same undecided market share while thinking their historical base would remain fast. The conservatism evidenced by that arm of the Republican party is not