Bush pledges to ask others' advice on Iraq
Actual headline, "ask others' advice."

Hey, you've always been my friend, right? So there's this girl, see, cute and charming and funny. We've gone out a couple of times. I'm crazy for her and I think she likes me to. It's just... well, she might have nuclear capabilities, and Jimmy passed me a note in gym class saying there's a rumor how this girl gassed a bunch of Kurds. So what I'm wondering is...

Update on Barr
Point well taken (in the comments on the Houston story) about Bob Barr and civil liberties. I'll miss that. I wish Dick Armey had more to say about homeland security and less to say about foreign policy.

Sobering Thought
Odds that Harvard makes Ms. McKinney an IOP Fellow? If they pulled that, I think I'd come to Boston to protest it in person.

Buh bye.

And yeah, him too.

I suspect the opposition to them both is quite bi-partisan, aside from their being so embarrassing that they made their respective parties look terrible.

Hmm, I know somebody who's so partisan that he actually wanted Gary Condit to win his Democratic primary, given that Condit would then likely lose to his GOP opponent. I can't agree with that reasoning, even when Congress is this close. Don't ever root for a bad candidate to win the nomination, even the other party's, lest the nutball foil your expectations and actually win.

Blood Libel
If you follows the Middle East really closely, you know that one way some Muslim extremists whip up hatred of Israel/Judaism is to recycle some old blood libels about Jews drinking other people's blood and so on, the usual crap.

How do I know they're false? Well, c'mon, common sense...

The problem here is the flip side:
Charles Johnson points out this Islamic extremist chat session;

Larry Miller here on Arab emergency room patients cheering the dead Jews at an Israeli hospital;

Last but not least, the heartrending story about the gay Palestinian, which I kept meaning to blog but now have misplaced. Oh, here it is.

All seem almost impossible to believe but (as far as I know) are true.

Sitting in a Tree...
Anyone else think Dan Savage has a massive, conflicting crush on Ann Coulter? That's his third mention of her in a month. Well, maybe six weeks.

For the record, as far as I can tell I don't. I sense that part of her appeal is (meant to be?) physical/telegenic, but there are at least a half-dozen female pundits I'd prefer.

The World Doesn't Owe You
"Put yourself in the position of a large, able-bodied adult who has been put out on the street and rendered completely destitute by 20 years of free- market economics."
--some San Francisco crackpot

Two things:
1. Only 20 years of a free market? I hadn't realized that the Carter administration was socialist. I guess my right-wing elders were correct on this point?

2. If you're a large, able-bodied adult, then by definition the free market doesn't "render" you anything. It, in and of itself, neither helps nor hurts you. You either take advantage of the opportunities you get, or you create opportunities for yourself, or you sit around doing nothing and letting f*ckheads like this validate your self-pity.

A similar point applies to the reparations movement but I'm too busy to find a reasonable link.

Norah!!
If this doesn't lead me to update my blog template links, nothing will. I love Norah Vincent! (By which I mean I love her writing. I guess I never actually met her.)

Um redux
No comment. Go to town with this one.

Um
Did we suddenly become a police state while I wasn't looking?

So there's a lot of complaints lately about civil liberties violations, both real and perceived. I have mixed emotion about the level of complaint. In general it's good to be vigilant about our liberty and draw as much attention as possible to things that threaten it. But then there's a choose-our-battles situation. When real, serious abuses happen -- like this one -- people need to hear about it, repeatedly, and the people responsible for it fired, slapped upside the head, whatever it takes.

Fix Time: One Month
Ugly news from Joanne Jacobs about computers at schools. (Note: Jacobs also the source of the "converting to Christianity" story.)

How would Pascal's Wager apply here?
Six Guantanamo detainees have converted to Christianity.