The Smallness of Jimmah Carter

Betsy summarizes Bob Greene's C-Span appearance. It would seem that Carter's flaws permeate every moment of his life.

Al Gore's Externalities

Post later today on the extraordinary hypocrisy of Algore and his WSJ op-ed on the shortcomings of business and modern economics (it's all about the externalities). Externalities are costs borne by someone else. While Al and his friends want to point to pollution as the externality produced by business, readers need to remember that no one has produced externalities on the scale achieved by Al and his buddies.

Does illegal immigratiion REDUCE the unemployment rate?!

Econopundit looks at the graph. Hmmm.

A small and pathetic man

The Anchoress documents another instance of the smallness of Bill Clinton. Factually wrong. Devoid of integrity. Utterly without class.

Loser.

Times blames Bush for Clinton deficits

This is just pitiful journalism. (h/t Vodkapundit).

Davidson player nominated for national award

Brendan Winters has been named a finalist for the Hilton Award.

AP: believe terrorists' claims, doubt US Army

This is just pathetic.

Dismantling MSM's defense of criticism of Iraq coverage

Cori Dauber points out the straw man used by the MSM to defend their coverage:

Don't Blame the Press, Ever, For Anything

The fact that Iraq is a violent place is being used by the press as blanket defense for every aspect of their coverage. Essentially they make two arguments: it's so violent that many reporters have died, so if there are any problems, it's because it's so hard to cover well -- whatever we can do, we do -- and there's so much violence, how can you possibly be thinking at this point it matters if we cover the opening of another school or hospital?

She points out that the problem with the first argument is that it fails to address the central point of the terrorism -- to affect coverage by the news media. The failure of the media to acknowledge that terrorists are using them results in slanted coverage. The second is simply a blatant straw man.

The whole post is worth reading.

The brilliance of a Hollywood "scholar"

Some people are beyond despicable.

The foolishness of Molly Ivins

Betsy has a post on Molly Ivins and her silly claim that only reporters are qualified to write opinion pieces. My thoughts are posted in a comment to Betsy's post.

Who coached that mess?!

Memphis-UCLA was the sorriest excuse for organized basketball I have ever seen. I've seen a lot of pickup games with better fundamentals, more teamwork, and better decision-making. Calipari and Howland were horrible.

Just goes to show that recruiting really is 90% of college coaching. Great talent can get you into the top 10 nationally, even if you can't coach a lick.

Read Mark Steyn

Always good advice, but this makes so much sense even a liberal with advanced BDS would be compelled to agree with it.

Liberals use fascist tactics to silence WaPo blogger

Read all the sick, disgusting details here.

"Civil War" in Iraq

Krauthammer points out that Iraq is a civil war. By definition, the fighting by some Iraqis (backed by many fighters and money from other countries) against the vast majority of Iraqis is a civil war. Of course, by the same definition, the domestic terrorists of the marxist revolutionary Weather Underground and the United States were locked in a "civil war" in the sixties and seventies.

The whole point about the use of the term "civil war" is about context. The MSM uses the term to communicate the idea of a completely chaotic land which is totally immersed in violence and death. "Civil War" is used to convey the same idea of the Balkans -- tribes divided by a blood fued which will endure for centuries; a fight to the death which the USA is crazy to get involved in.

My objection to the use of the term "civil war" is not definitional. It is all about the context in which the term is used by the MSM.

Countering the media

Dr. Sanity asks how we counter the bias and extreme partisanship of the MSM. Despite all the alternative sources of news, the vast majority of Americans still get their news from the MSM.

As I have written before, it is past time for conservatives and the GOP to actively pursue the two most successful strategies of the 2004 campaign: 1) ads by 527s and 2) e-mail networks. Yes, it sucks that we have to pay to do the job the MSM should do if they were honest. But they aren't. We can cry or we can act. I say it is time to start the fund-raising and prepare the ads. Use the strategy employed by the Swift Vets. Buy a few spots. Use an internet web site to push the message and assist supporters who can e-mail the video and audio spots to friends and family. Feed friendly bloggers.

A note on e-mail. It is the one part of the internet that just about everyone uses every day. Relatively few read blogs, but everybody reads e-mails from friends and family. The formal e-mail networks constructed by the GOP was extremely successful, not only in organizing the rank and file, but also getting the message out. The informal spread of information by e-mail may have been even more effective. Swing voters who would never listen to conservative talk radio or read a blog still read e-mails with a joke or a funny conservative political cartoon sent along by someone they know.

There are a lot of very good reasons why the White House cannot take the lead on pushing the good news on Iraq, the economy, Katrina, etc. It is about time we stopped relying on Dubya to do all the heavy lifting. Don't you think he has enough on his plate?

Bloggin' about our outrage with the MSM ain't enough. Form the 527s, open the wallets, prep the ads, get the message out. The road to success has already been blazed. All we have to do is follow the map.

Russian ambassador -- $1.5 million for US military info?

Details from Iraqi documents described here.

Our incredibly impressive president

Jack Cashill looks at the incredible progress the nation has made since 2000:

To put the Bush presidency in perspective, one need only reflect back on the state of the world in the year 2000.

On Easter Saturday of that year, the Clinton Justice Department displayed its zeal for civil liberties by seizing Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint and shipping the boy back to Castro. Beginning in May 2000, Nasdaq tanked harder than any major American market ever – yes, including the stock market crash of 1929. In June 2000, Mohamed Atta casually entered the United States and began plotting his evil mischief.


In June 2000, California endured the first of its rolling blackouts. That same June the World Bank paid off Enron for still another Clinton-Enron deal gone sour, this one in Java. In September of 2000, Palestinians turned thumbs down on Pax Clintonia and launched an intifada. In October 2000, al-Qaida blew up the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, once again with impunity.

In January 2001, President Clinton put the cherry on his eight-year sundae of corruption by pardoning fugitive Marc Rich and a host of other scalawags. So outrageous were the pardons that they moved even Sen. Chuck Schumer to denounce them as a "mockery" of justice. Six weeks later, the United States lapsed into recession. This was the Washington that George Bush inherited – minus, of course, the "Ws" on White House keypads, spitefully snatched by the outgoing administration. Needless to say, the events of September 11 almost unraveled an economy already under siege.

Hillary's favorite thug

Last week Mickey Kaus noted this story by Thomas Lipscomb about the connections between Hillary Clinton and the private investigator famous for his thuggish intimidation tactics. Lipscomb writes:

Numerous unbiased accounts of the Clintons have repeatedly stressed the importance of Hillary’s role in having the good sense to understand the danger the “bimbo eruptions” represented to her blasé husband and to deal with them before they got out of hand. And there were a lot of strange occurrences surrounding the Paula Jones case, Kathleen Willey’s dead cat and the alleged Brodderick rape case. Did the current front-running Democratic Presidential contender Hillary Clinton hire or direct any or all of Anthony Pellicano’s activities in her particular known area of interest?

You have to totally lack journalistic curiosity or be brain dead to miss an opportunity like this. And those are the more attractive possibilities. After all, if reporters continue to dance around such an obvious matter with a Presidential election looming every time another Pellicano story comes up, one would think an editor somewhere would set them straight. So far none have. Do a Lexis search for all the Pellicano stories in MSM. Now do a Google search on Pellicano and Hillary Clinton. Try to match them. Sad, isn’t it?

It isn't about the bias. It is about the active partisanship.

Why no questions about Ron Brown's death?

Jack Cashill raises some very disturbing questions about Ron Brown's death.

Think about this. Three military pathologists and a forensic photographer had risked their careers to expose a likely bullet hole in Brown's head, the destruction of the head X-rays, the apparent "lead snowstorm" in a photograph of those X-rays, and a hasty burial without benefit of autopsy or forensic testing. And yet, none of this interested these reporters enough to even request the Air Force's report on the "inexplicable" crash of a plane carrying an embattled Commerce secretary in a war-torn region.

I've read about most of this before, but as I think about it now, I get really angry. I can think of only two possibilities here. Either the facts are as described by Cashill or they are not. If they are as he sets them out, every decent person in this country should be screaming his head off and demanding an accounting. If they are not, they should be properly debunked.

In either case, doesn't this situation demand resolution?

Boyd's influence in first Iraq war

I was watching the TV a week or two back and caught the last few minutes of a documentary on John Boyd on the military channel. It was apparently part of a series on legendary pilots. I wrote briefly about John Boyd's OODA loops a year ago. A book on the subject can be found here.

I was amazed to hear at the end of the show that Boyd had influenced Dick Cheney and that Cheney rejected the original plan of attack for the first Gulf War. The famous "left hook" plan was the result of Cheney's demand for a new plan that employed Boyd's principles.

Imagine Hillary answering questions

Bush deserves a lot of credit for agreeing to answer questions yesterday under the terms he did. There is simply no way that Hillary Clinton could agree to do that. Under effective questioning, her political career would completely disintegrate.

Plame and CIA "secrecy"

Just One Minute has a good rundown on what came out about the inept CIA and what it tells us about Ms. Plame. The CIA has become a joke. Put it out of its misery and start over.

Corruption standards at the Times could hurt Hillary

The Captain points out how badly the Times has stretched trying to tie the White House to Abramoff. This is interesting because of what it could mean to Hillary's run for the White House. As we saw with the Times' demands for an investigation of the Plame "leaks", they do a poor job of imagining how precedents can bite back.

If this ridiculously tenuous connection to Bush is supposed to "prove" corruption, what are we to conclude from the evidence of corruption during the Clinton administration? While the examples are numerous, the payoff to Webb Hubbell should suffice.

After Hubbell reached a plea agreement which required him to cooperate with prosecutors, he spent a week at the White House during which Clinton aides called supporters all over the country to line up cash gifts for him. Eventually, the Clintons lined up almost a million dollars in payments to Hubbell for which he did nothing substantive. Webb had the most financially lucrative year of his life after being indicted and pleading guilty to a felony.

Using the Times' current standards for determing corruption, the conclusion is inescapable that both of the Clintons are personally guilty of obstruction of justice beyond a reasonable doubt.

Bruce Bartlett -- Clinton over Bush?!

Mary Katharine at Hugh Hewitt quotes Bruce Bartlett thusly: "If Bush were running today against Bill Clinton, I'd vote for Clinton."

If this quote is accurate, I have completely lost all respect for Bruce Bartlett. Not just because such a vote would show an appalling lack of judgment on the importance of national security in determining how to vote for president, but also because such a vote is only possible when someone applauds a breathtaking level of moral and ethical corruption and criminality.

No one with any moral and ethical integrity could vote for Bill Clinton in such a matchup. No one with integrity. Period.

Jumble of thoughts

I have a lot of ideas for blogging without the time to do them justice. A quick list:

Michael Barone has had some interesting posts and columns lately which raise some good points and inspire some worthwhile tangents.

Ben Stein notes that the Academy awards had not a single mention of the troops.

Isn't it curious that movie makers think that they can provide honest insight into the politics of the present by lying about the past?

An op-ed in the WSJ on Saddam's trial makes me think of natural law. Apparently, Saddam is saying that, as president, everything he did was lawful. Where is the crime?, he asks. If we instinctively recognize that an inherent moral code should supercede a legal structure which is immoral, isn't that a recognition of the role of natural law?

And finally, we have reached the point where the news is so inaccurate that it is caausing professionals in a variety of fields to screw up. This one will get blogged eventually. In finance, political science, history, retail, etc., those who blindly accept the news from the MSM are making decisions which are radically different from those who get their info elsewhere.

Will we get to the point where reliance on the NY Times or CBS for factual data will be considered negligence per se?

Help!

Blogger tells me that I am not authorized to view my blog. Assuming this gets posted, does anyone know how to fix this? If so, please e-mail me at twominuteoffense@yahoo.com. Thanks.

Cats Win! Cats Win! Cats Win!

My wife and I have just returned from a trip to Charleston where we watched the Davidson College Wildcats win the Southern Conference Tournament and secure a berth in the NCAA basketball tournament. The Cats won the final over Chattanooga by 25 and I was nervous until Boris Meno's thunderous dunk in the closing minutes made even the most remote chance of a collapse evaporate.

Brendan Winters was the star yesterday with an incredible game. What a story. The son of Brian Winters, an All-American and All-Pro, no one wanted him after his high school in Denver. Brian called an old friend, Bob McKillop (Davidson's coach) and assured him that Brendan could develop into a player capable of helping someone at the major college level. Just as important, Brendan had an academic record of sufficient quality to be admitted to Davidson. McKillop had no more scholarships that year, so Brendan went to prep school for a year before coming to DC four years ago.

Last year, Winters was voted conference player of the year. This year, he's been nominated for All-American. Not bad for a kid no one wanted.

The elder Winters is a head coach in the WNBA. Thus, he rarely has seen his son play in person. Yesterday afternoon, I watched from the stands as Winters came back to the bench after completing the interview for TV. It wasn't hard to read his lips. "Where's my dad? Where's my dad?", he asked several people. Someone pointed to a section of the crowd. Finally, he located his dad and climbed in for a father-son hug that had me choked up in the upper deck.

ESPN's Sports Center had highlights of the Davidson win this morning. They had a shot of Coach McKillop hugging his son, senior guard Matt, after the game yesterday. Matt was named to the all-tournament team, too. I think I detected a tear in his dad's eyes, too.

More on OU bomber

Mork Tapscott connects the latest dots. He also links to this rundown of what we know:

Ok, lets look at the facts here:

* Roommate was a Pakistani

* Hinrich had been seen at the local Mosque, same Mosque that the 20th hijacker,
Zacarias Moussaoui, attended.

* Hinrich attempted to buy a large amount of Ammonium Nitrate from a local feed store days earlier

* Evidence that Hinrich was attempting to make a Fragmentation bomb, which is mainly used by suicide bombers to kill other people.

* It has been reported but not confirmed that Hinrich attempted to get into the stadium twice but was turned away

* Radical Muslim material was found in his apartment

And now add the fact this bomb expert believes he did not intend to detonate the bomb where he did and you have the making of a classic suicide bomber.