Disintegrator

New Address For Disintegrator

2005-02-19T13:22:00.000-05:00

I have given up on Blogger and switched to using Movable Type. Thus, Disintegrator can now be found at http://www.disintegrator.net. Please update your links accordingly.

This Blogspot site will remain here for some time for trackback/archival purposes.

Disintegrator Broken

2005-02-16T22:07:00.000-05:00

Blogger broke my blog on Tuesday and can't seem to fix it. Please go to the new Disintegrator page from now on.

Blogger Problems

2005-02-15T12:08:00.000-05:00

Blogger is having issues, which is why Disintegrator looks a mess. Hoping they get it fixed soon.

Blogger Bugs

2005-02-15T10:56:00.000-05:00

Blogger is having technical issues today, so blogging will be light.

Pope-a-Dope

2005-02-15T09:16:00.000-05:00

Inspired by Martini Pundit...

The Pope pulled through his recent hospitalization, much to the the chagrin of Las Vegas books...

With odds against the pope?s survival set as high as 12-1, Las Vegas? biggest sports books took a massive financial hit last weekend when the ailing pontiff pulled off a huge upset against his heavily favored archrival, death.

?No question, it?s a catastrophic loss,? said Bally?s sports book director Tony Silvestro. ?You?ve got a frail and gaunt 84-year-old man with massive health problems and he finally gets the flu. It?s like a gift from God for oddsmakers. I?ve never been more confident of a betting line.?

Death opened as a whopping 16-1 favorite, but early betting on the pope gradually lowered the line to 12-1. A few lower-tier casinos dropped the line until it began attracting equal dollars from death and pope bettors, but the normally cautious big casinos felt death?s victory was such a sure thing that they allowed themselves to become overextended.

There's something darkly humorous about people in Las Vegas betting against the Pope. How'd you like to have to answer for that at the Pearly Gates?

St. Peter: It says here that you put five large on JP2 going down early.
Me: Well, yeah, but the Pats didn't cover the spread and I was behind.
St. Peter: You will be put to the flame. E! A! G! L! E! S! EAGLES!

Anyhow, word on the street is that the Pope is in stable health, albeit very frail. The images of the Pope that are common today, slumping in his chair and mumbling inaudibly, are at odds with the images of his early papacy. John Paul was an avid skier and outdoorsman, as Lisa Ann Auerbach points out in "Pope on a Rope Tow"...

Pope John Paul II is widely known and revered by millions the world over as the spiritual guide and shepherd of the Roman Catholic Church. What is less well known is his history as a trailblazing two-planker. The Man in White ripped the Polish pow from the time the papacy was just a gleam in his eye until his mature years as the toast of the Vatican. In his younger days, JP2 was known as a megahiker, an avid kayaker, and a camper nonpareil. He preached in the woods, ate watery pudding for sustenance while surfing the backcountry, and repeatedly lost his prayer book in the wild. When asked, "Is it befitting a cardinal to ski?" his reply was, "What is unbefitting a cardinal is to ski badly."

JP2's term - twenty seven years - is the third-longest in the history of the Catholic Church, and he was the first Italian selected in over four and a half centuries. Rumors of his impending death to the contrary, he continues to defy (and impoverish) oddsmakers and has outlived just about everyone ever selected alongside him in a dead pool.

Five days after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, and while the attention of the world was focused on that tragedy, Mother Teresa quietly slipped out of life's back door. I believe that she chose that moment as a good time to go, sensing an opportunity to depart when her death would not become a spectacle. I always thought it was a classy exit, and in keeping with her character.

Part of me wonders if John Paul isn't waiting for a similar opportunity; leaning back on the ropes, letting Death punch himself out, and waiting for a moment of his own choosing. I'd like to think so. If anyone can take Death the distance, it's John Paul II.

You can bet on it.

The Most Busted Name In News

2005-02-14T08:14:00.000-05:00

Hat tip to BradBlog for spotting this one...

In a February 12^th piece entitled "North Korea rallies support for Kim", CNN ran this photo, captioned "An aerial photo of North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear plant outside of Pyongyang." It's the third image in the slideshow on the left side of the page.

Three days earlier, CNN ran a piece called "Kay, Carter urge caution on Iran" which featured this photo, captioned as "Satellite image of a suspected Iranian nuclear-related facility."

Now, I'm no expert on nuclear facility design, but what are the odds that nuclear facilities in two different nations would be laid out in identical fashion, down to the color of the terrain?

BradBlog looks at this and sees conspiracy...

Who is the source for these photos? Was it the same person in both instances? Were they supplied by someone who may have an interest in ginning-up fears over the two so-far unconquered players in Bush's "Axis of Evil"?

Or will it be another CNN staffer who steps forward again to take the fall for this one?

And finally, a question that has been asked all too frequently here over the past year: What the hell has happened to the media in this country? Are there simply no national media organizations left who know how to do the job of reporting accurately, responsibly and in such a way that doesn't send us to war again due to their utter failure to do their jobs correctly?! (Yes, Judith Miller of The New York Times, we're talking to you...but you're not the only one).

Now, where Brad sees government conspiracy, I see media incompetence. Brad seems to think that Bush's cronies fed these photos to the media to drum up support for the war, and CNN fell for it. I think that some CNN staffer looked at two photos that weren't identical and assumed they were of different facilities. If I put on my "I hate the media" hat, I could be convinced that some staffer intentionally cropped the photo to make one appear different from the other; perhaps because no photo of the real facility could be found.

What's funny about this is that regardless of whether Brad is correct or I am, CNN comes out looking like dopes. CNN wants to be "the most trusted name in news" but doesn't appear to spend much time fact-checking the information they're dispensing as news.

This is no scandal, to be sure, but it's an example of how sloppy the mainstream media can be.

Eason Jordan Resigns

2005-02-12T11:45:00.000-05:00

Eason Jordan's slander against the U.S. military appears to have caught up with him.

The red-faced news chief of CNN, Eason Jordan, resigned yesterday after making outrageous claims that American troops deliberately tracked down and killed certain journalists in Iraq.

Jordan put his foot in his mouth two weeks ago during a panel discussion at a world economic summit in Davos, Switzerland.

He startled his listeners when he said he believed that several journalists who were killed by coalition forces in Iraq had been deliberately targeted.

This story's been percolating in the blogosphere ever since Mister Jordan initially made his remarks. It went under the radar of the mainstream media for quite some time until Howard Kurtz broke the silence in his Washington Post column. CNN tried to spin his statements, and the organization that hosted the event refused to release a videotape of his remarks.

Mister Jordan was probably just trying to score a few points with what he thought was an audience that would be receptive to such remarks. Indeed, some of the people who were at the event said that some members of the foreign press congratulated Mr. Jordan for his "bravery". In pandering to the audience in the room, Mister Jordan apparently never considered that someone might repeat his comments to a wider audience.

I think it's important to differentiate between what Mr. Jordan did and the dustup over Ward Churchill. It's appropriate that Mr. Jordan step down as head of CNN, because he presented his assertions as facts - he claimed to have specific knowledge of the U.S. military deliberately targeting journalists. A news organization's primary currency is credibility, and Mr. Jordan damaged his organizations credibility. Ward Churchill, on the other hand, was expressing an opinion. It was a repugnant opinion, to be sure, but I think that universities should be places where you hear opinions that don't necessarily dovetail with your own (it would be nice conservative opinions were given a warmer reception on campuses, but that is a rant for another time).

In short, Mr. Jordan lied, while Mr. Churchill merely said something that I disagree with. I don't hold either of them in high regard, but I will begrudgingly defend the latter while gleefully kicking the former down the stairs.

*boot*

World Press Photo Contest

2005-02-11T10:47:00.000-05:00

World Press Photo has announced the winners of its annual photo contest.

Some of these images are not easy to look at, but I encourage you to examine them all.

Another Bite of Sausage

2005-02-11T09:47:00.000-05:00

There is an old quote that warns against watching politics or sausage being made. The same warning should apply to opinion polls; I worked in market research for a decade and it left me with an inherent distrust of opinion polls.

Still, when The Economist publishes one, I tend to suspend my disbelief. Being the best damn magazine on the planet carries a certain weight with me.

The survey in question is on American social attitudes. It seems to suggest that America is not lurching to the right, as some folks would have us believe:

The data is graphed a bit differently from most of the other presentations of such data I have seen, and it took me a moment to get my head around the visual representation. The two most interesting points are pointed out in the Economist piece:

By a huge 42-19% margin, Americans think they are more liberal than their parents. And this is borne out by most of the questions in panel 3. Set alongside the replies to an identical set of questions asked by Gallup in 1995-97, Americans seem less supportive of the death penalty and more tolerant of both marijuana and homosexuals. On economic issues, they look less favourably on trade unions, but the number who think they pay too much tax has dropped from 66% to 56%.
...
For some conservatives, these numbers may cause a fear which coincidentally provides their movement with much of its impetus: that, though they are winning elections, they are losing at least some of the culture wars. After all, gay marriage was not even a political issue ten years ago.

If we throw caution to the wind for a moment and take these numbers at face value, it presents a vexing paradox: Americans have moved to the left in the past ten years, yet the Republicans have secured control in a majority of state legislatures, governorships, the House, the Senate, and have won the Presidency twice.

I suspect that the answer is that there will always be a group of voters who vote against their general sociopolitical preference if there is an issue of significant importance at stake. In this most recent election, national security was probably that fulcrum; I don't think that John Kerry successfully made the case that he would be as hawkish on national security as many would like him to be.

In any event, general attitudes seem to be sliding leftwards over time. This should appear as a silver lining to those liberals watching with trepidation as the Republican stormfront thunders forward. Winning hearts and minds today means winning elections tomorrow.

Just One Thing...

2005-02-11T08:06:00.000-05:00

Blogging will be light today, but I couldn't resist passing this along...

Citizens United has rented a billboard near where the Oscars will be taking place:

The billboard includes the text "4 More Years ... Thank You Hollywood!" It features pictures of Michael Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, Ben Affleck, Chevy Chase, Martin Sheen, Barbra Streisand and Sean Penn.

A Correction

2005-02-10T10:40:00.000-05:00

Several days ago, the blogosphere voiced it's dismay over the story of an unemployed woman in German who was faced with the choice of working in a brothel or losing her unemployment benefits.

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners who must pay tax and employee health insurance were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

Not true, says Snopes, the internet premiere debunker of urban legends. Snopes details where the story originated and how it got mangled.

We were initially skeptical about the literal truth of the version reported in the English press, however, because the issue seemed to have received scant attention in the German press. In fact, the origin of this story was evidently an 18 December 2004 article published in the Berlin newspaper Tageszeitung (also known as TAZ) which did not report that women in Germany must accept employment in brothels or face cuts in their unemployment benefits. (Although it claimed there had been "isolated cases" of such, it did not provide any source or documentation to back up that statement.)

The Tageszeitung merely presented the concept of brothel employment as a technical possibility under current law; it did not provide any actual cases of women losing their benefits over this issue. The article also quoted representatives from employment agencies as saying that while it might be possible for employment agencies to offer jobs as prostitutes to "long-term unemployed" women, they (the agencies) could not require anyone to work in a brothel. (The agencies noted that brothels used "other recruitment channels" anyway.)

I'm relieved to hear that it isn't happening, but I'm disappointed that my BS filters are so poorly calibrated that I didn't immediately recognize this story as hogwash. The Telegraph was the first English-language publication to carry the story, and I made the mistake of assuming that they wouldn't run with a story about a government program that was patently and completely false.

I stand corrected.

Hat tip to Big Sexy Kyle Beckley...

Border Patrol, Shmorder Patrol

2005-02-10T08:43:00.000-05:00

The San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday on President Bush's shameful retreat from the promise of 10,000 border agents required by the National Intelligence Reform Act.

Officially approved by Bush on Dec. 17 after extensive bickering in Congress, the National Intelligence Reform Act included the requirement to add 10,000 border patrol agents in the five years beginning with 2006. Roughly 80 percent of the agents were to patrol the southern U.S. border from Texas to California, along which thousands of people cross into the United States illegally every year.

But Bush's proposed 2006 budget, revealed Monday, funds only 210 new border agents.

The shrunken increase reflects the lack of money for an army of border guards and the capacity to train them, officials said.

The problem is not, as the Chronicle so generously puts it, a "lack of money." Rather, it is a misplacement of priorities. Perhaps we could get more people on the borders of our country if we weren't spending $100 million on the Polish military:

President Bush told President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland on Wednesday that he would ask Congress for $100 million to modernize the Polish military, part of a program of support for a new NATO ally that has more than 2,000 soldiers in Iraq.

The $100 million for military modernization was hinted at by the new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, during a brief stopover in Warsaw a week ago. "I don't get to write the checks in the American system," Mr. Bush cautioned. "The government - the Congress does that. But I get to put out requests."

Mr. Kwasniewski said the money was not a quid pro quo for Poland's troop presence in Iraq. But clearly, returning home with financial commitments from Mr. Bush will help him in a parliamentary debate about how long to remain in Iraq, at a time when opinion polls show that a clear majority of Poles want an end to the troops presence.

Of course, rooting out ludicrous budget items like the $100,000 for the Punxsutawney Phil Groundhog Weather Museum would probably shake loose quite a bit of money for border patrol agents as well.

President Bush, never one to forget Poland, is right to do what he can to help our allies. But there are times and situations in which America and her security must come first. Immigration in general is one of the weak points of this administration, and this latest development further serves to underline just how big the President's blind spot is on this issue.

One For the Gipper

2005-02-10T08:02:00.000-05:00

RightPundit reminds us that yesterday was the first day of issue for the Ronald Reagan stamp pictured below:

I first started taking an interest in politics in the early years of Ronald Reagan's first term. Though I was far too young to have a sophisticated understanding of politics, I enjoyed listening to Ronald Reagan speak. He talked simply, directly, and confidently. In middle school, I was a fan of Ronald Reagan much in the same way that kids are fans of sports teams or rock stars.

It was Reagan that turned me on to politics, an interest that is with me to this day as this blog will attest. While I disagree with some of my conservative colleagues that Reagan's face should be on Mount Rushmore, I believe that Reagan was a very good president. I think he would not be displeased with the picture on the stamp.

Damning With Faint Praise

2005-02-09T14:19:00.000-05:00

A short piece in the Village Voice describes how Democrats are having a hard time getting...excited...about Howard Dean's impending coronation as DNC chair...

Democratic pols are trying to get it up for Howard Dean, but they are very confused when the former Vermont governor and presidential candidate says he "admires" Newt Gingrich more than Bill Clinton, and that Christian-right big Ralph Reed "created a real success" with the right, and how "Clinton led the Dems into complacency and defeat."

Check out these stellar endorsements from big names in the party.

Nancy Pelosi: "We look forward to whoever the members of the DNC choose."

Joe Lieberman: "He wasn't my first choice....if it's Howard, I'll go along."

John Kerry: "He's going to be a spokesman in certain ways. Obviously the chairman has to go to the Jefferson-Jackson dinners and other things."

Then there's this piece in The Hill, where House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) suggests that Dean not talk about policy matters.

“I don’t believe it is the party chair’s role to set the policy of the party. That is the role of the elected officials,” Hoyer told reporters yesterday.

“I think his job as party chairman is to ensure the party is organized well and ready to, in every district, contest the Republicans, every congressional district in America, every county and state and city in America, and that we raise sufficient finances to compete effectively.”

Acknowledging that he had some policy disagreements with the former presidential candidate, Hoyer nevertheless congratulated Dean on his impending election.

The excitement is palpable.

Empowering Parents to Snoop

2005-02-09T09:41:00.000-05:00

Via Overlawyered...

The mother of a 14-year-old girl was concerned about a phone call that the girl got from her 17-year-old boyfriend, so she listened in on another line. The boyfriend talked about a robbery he had been involved with, and the mother called the police.

In December, the Washington Supreme Court threw out the boy's conviction because the mother's eavesdropping violated her daughter's privacy.

This judicial nonsense is being addressed by the Washington legislature:

Parents would be allowed to eavesdrop on their children's phone conversations or intercept their mail under a bill that went before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday.

The law is being proposed in the wake of a recent state Supreme Court ruling that a mother violated Washington's privacy law by eavesdropping on her daughter's phone conversations.

Under House Bill 1178, a parent would not break the law by snooping on a child's phone calls and information a parent gleaned from the intercepted communications also could be used in court. Some critics have expressed concern about the bill.

Who could possibly oppose such a notion? Why, Democrats, of course.

House Judiciary Committee Chairwoman Patricia Lantz (D-Gig Harbor) said that "We have a right of privacy that ought not be taken from a child unless you meet an extremely high burden, that the parents' violation of that right meets some greater good. How are we going to measure that?"

Committee Vice-Chair Brendan Williams (D-Olypmpia) questioned the need for parents to record their children's conversations, asking "Is that part of good parenting, part of a healthy family? Is it not a sign perhaps that the parent-child relationship is irretrievably broken some way?"

Then again, many Democrats oppose requiring minors to notify their parents before obtaining an abortion. If nothing else, we can admire them for being consistent in their position that parents have no business raising their own children.

What strikes me as "irretrievably broken" is the notion that parents have no business prying into their children's lives. Parental snooping is a tradition as time-honored as that of teenage boys shoving Playboy under their mattresses. Kids don't always tell their parents what they're up to, and it's a parent's responsibility to know. Parents should raise their children to be honest, trustworthy, and to keep their nose out of trouble. Blindly assuming that you've been successful in this regard is naivete' that borders on negligence.

Ronald Reagan said "Trust - but verify." He was talking about nuclear arms reductions, but it's sage advice for parents as well.

A New Source of Stem Cells?

2005-02-09T08:58:00.000-05:00

Via The Corner...

The Toronto Star reports that researchers have found a new and fairly abundant source of stem cells.

The source: a region of the umbilical cord that holds an abundant supply of connective-tissue stem cells the basic building blocks for the body's bone, fat and ligament tissues.

Known as mesenchymal cells, the bone-building brand of stem cells is the progenitor of all the body's connective tissues, which also include cartilage and some muscles.

They can be found in concentrations of about one in 10,000 cells in the bone marrow of young children, and one in 100,000 in adult marrow.

But in the umbilical cord jelly now being mined by the UofT team, the concentration is one in 300. Known as Wharton's Jelly, it surrounds the three umbilical cord blood vessels connecting the fetus and mother. The jelly helps prevent the vessels from kinking much like a garden hose might as the embryo floats about the womb.

The U of T team used donated cords from full-term pregnancies.

Obviously, the potential of these cells remains to be determined. Still, it's an encouraging sign that a plentiful source of these cells appears to be available and that harvesting them won't require the destruction of embryos.

Although I can't help but wonder if Kansas State University didn't beat them to the punch.

Flight 93 Memorial Finalists

2005-02-08T08:58:00.000-05:00

Via BlackFive...

The finalists have been selected for the Flight 93 National Memorial. There are five designs online for viewing, and I agree with BlackFive that design #4, "The Crescent of Embrace", is the best of the bunch. But take a look and decide for yourself.

I still haven't been to Somerset, but I think that I should like to go there before a memorial begins construction. I'd like to be able to remember it how it is today.

Sweet Sweet Litigation

2005-02-08T08:17:00.000-05:00

I was on the Atkins diet for a while, and while I was on it I stopped using sugar in my coffee and started using Splenda. To me, and apparently to many other Americans, Splenda tastes better than sugar. Well, the sugar industry can't have that - the U.S. Sugar Association is suing Splenda's manufacturer.

This latest lawsuit, filed in December, hinges on deceptive and/or misleading representations, made by the sweetener firm in advertisements and marketing terminology to consumers, says the association.

Merisant, the US maker of tabletop sweetener Equal and NutraSweet and a competitor to Splenda, alleged in November that the products marketing slogan, made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar, had mislead consumers into thinking the artificial sweetener was natural.

But McNeil Nutritionals asserts that sucralose starts off as pure cane sugar, and is then chemically altered in the manufacturing process to create a new compound with zero calories and 600 times sweeter than sugar.

The Sugar Association's website points out that Splenda is "created with chlorine and other chemicals" without mentioning that table salt is also created with chlorine. But, since salt doesn't compete with sugar, this isn't important.

Time was that sugar substitutes only competed with each other for market share, because none of them were particularly good. Sucralose, the sweetener in Splenda, is very good; so good that it's used in over 3,500 products and is cutting into sugar's market share. Hence, the lawsuit.

A Splenda spokesperson, had this to say: "From our perspective, whatever the outcome of the litigation, sucralose will still be made from sugar, and still taste like sugar."

Senators Confirms Eason Remarks

2005-02-07T18:27:00.000-05:00

Via Michelle Malkin...

Eason Jordan's accusation that the U.S. military is assassinating journalists was heard by two people whose credibility is not in doubt: Senators Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd.

I guess we won't need that transcript after all.

Who Said It?

2005-02-07T11:33:00.000-05:00

Now here's a gem of a quote from 2002...

If you don't like privatizing Social Security and I don't like it very much, but you want to do something to try to increase the rate of return, what are your options? Well one thing you could do is to give people one or two percent of the payroll tax, with the same options that Federal employees have with their retirement accounts; where you have three mutual funds that almost always perform as well or better than the market and a fourth option to buy government bonds, so you get the guaranteed social security return and a hundred percent safety just like you have with Social Security.

Why, that's President Clinton, addressing the Democratic Leadership Council on December 3^rd, 2002. Not a bad idea, Bill. Maybe someone will pick it up and run with it!

The full text of President Clinton's comments are at The Clinton Foundation.

Shut Up and Shovel the Money

2005-02-07T08:29:00.000-05:00

Yahoo's political piece entitled Some Dems nervous as Dean resurges" has some interesting tidbits from ranking Democrats. Specifically, they seem to have some misgivings with regard to Howard Dean being the public face of the party:

"We're not looking for a spokesperson in the chairmanship," 2004 nominee John Kerry said on NBC.

Terry McAuliffe, current DNC chairman, says he gave Dean a two-hour presentation on what a party chairman does. "Your job is to raise money and do the mechanics," he said in an interview. "It is not your job ... to set policy."

In recent TV appearances, Dean offered his opinion on two Cabinet votes and disagreed with Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada on whether Antonin Scalia would be tolerable as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Reid later noted his constituency is "much larger" than the 447-member DNC. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, said she thinks Dean "would take his lead from us."

While any political organization would be happy to have Dean's organizing ability, fundraising credentials and zealous supporters, all of these wonderful things come at a price - Dean's mouth. It's not clear to me that Dean would be willing to play the role in the manner that folks like Pelosi and Kerry seem to want him to - behind the scenes shovelling cash into the furnace.

Dean knows that his rise to national prominence has been the result of the cult of personality that sprang up around him in the run-up to the Democratic primaries. That cult requires regular red meat in the form of policy pronouncements and withering attacks on business-as-usual. If Dean takes a back seat to Reid and Pelosi - or allows that perception to take hold - the Uruk'Hai that emerged from the bowels of the earth to wage war in his name are likely to return to the depths from whence they came, waiting for the summons of yet another white-haired old man promising to re-make the world.

Link Whorage

2005-02-07T08:12:00.000-05:00

As you may or may not already be aware, members of the Watcher's Council hold a vote every week on what they consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around... per the Watcher's instructions, I am submitting "Retreat" for consideration in the upcoming nominations process.

Here is the most recent winning council post, here is the most recent winning non-council post, here is the list of results for the latest vote, and here is the initial posting of all the nominees that were voted on.

Retreat

2005-02-07T07:40:00.000-05:00

Inspired by a post by RightThinkingGirl...

The International Herald Tribune revisits a notion that got a lot of play in the days immediately after the election: packing up and moving to Canada.

In the Niagara of liberal angst just after Bush's victory on Nov. 2, the Canadian government's immigration Web site reported a surge in inquiries from the United States, to about 115,000 a day from 20,000.

"The number of U.S. citizens who are actually submitting Canadian immigration papers and making concrete plans is about three or four times higher than normal," said Linda Mark, an immigration lawyer in Vancouver.

"We're still not talking about a huge movement of people," said David Cohen, an immigration lawyer in Montreal. "In 2003, the last year where full statistics are available, there were something like 6,000 U.S. citizens who received permanent resident status in Canada. So even if we do go up threefold this year, we're only talking about 18,000 people."

In the emotional days after the election, when people I consider friends were calling me a Nazi because I voted for Bush, my response to this was "Don't let the border hit you in the ass on the way out!" With the passage of time and the soothing of some of the raw nerve endings, my take on this is markedly different.

There are some on the right who seem to think that liberalism is indistinguishable in any form from socialism or communism. I don't think that's true. To me, liberalism in it's truest sense is the notion that we owe something to more than ourselves; the idea that a certain degree of sacrifice for the benefit of others is not only moral and just, but necessary for the survival of a moral and just state. This is not the sort of ethos that reasonable people can disagree with unless they've read too much Ayn Rand.

It is with this notion of liberalism in mind that I don't take any joy in seeing liberals fleeing the country, even if it is in terribly small numbers. To me, packing up and leaving the country is the height of selfishness - the very antithesis of liberalism. Where is the sacrifice for the greater good in retreat?

Now, despite what the BUSHITLER crowd would have us think, our country is not on the road to fascism. We're not rounding up people into camps, and tanks don't roll through the streets unless it's Chicago and a local team has won a championship. The people selling their Volvos and heading to the Great White North are not fleeing oppression or persecution.

So what are they running from?

To me, it looks like they're trying to escape one of the linchpin of liberalism: obligation. Proponents of liberalism will often talk of our obligation to help our fellow man. Welfare, unemployment, and affirmative action - with reasonable boundaries - are all examples of society's attempts to live up to this obligation. Funding these notions with public money spreads the obligation to every taxpayer, and rightly so; we all benefit from reductions in poverty and advances against injustice, so we should all foot part of the bill.

This idea of liberals running away to Canada is like arguing that we should split the dinner check evenly and then running out without paying. It's the notion that sacrifice for the common good is noble and just so long as it's not you doing the sacrificing. For what it's worth, I don't think that this sort hypocrisy is common among rank-and-file liberals (although some of my fellow conservative bloggers would disagree on that point). To the degree that it is happening, liberals who are taking their money and running to Canada are doing their brothers-in-arms a disservice.

Shame on them.

A Monday Morning Chuckle

2005-02-07T07:29:00.000-05:00

Of course, I'm already chuckling about the Eagles losing the Superbowl. But still...

Cookie Girl Update

2005-02-06T09:55:00.000-05:00

At this point, everyone has probably heard about the two girls who made cookies for their neighbor and got sued for their trouble. I sent an email to the family of one of the girls to express my support last week, and I received this reply today.

In regard to the outpouring of sympathy and support for my daughter Taylor and Lindsey. I want the express to you a heart felt thanks and sincere appreciation that you, and so much of America and Canada, have shown them. This alone more than makes up for the stress and worry they have experienced the past six months as well as the big disappointment of the trail ruling.

For any letters or anything else that you wish them to receive we have set up a post office box for them. It is:

Taylor Ostergaard
Lindsey Zellitti
P.O. BOX 2528
Durango, CO 81302

We're not out of the woods yet as we understand there may be another case building against our families on this.

Be sure and include your address and e-mail address as they hope to return a Thank you and I would like to send a short Bio,/History of each of these girls so that you again might understand how great they are. We so appreciate the extended gesture of friendship to each of you and truly hope that this finds you healthy. May your smiles be many and come easily. If you're ever in Durango, give us a holler.

Sincerely Yours
Richard F. and Jill Ostergaard

Another case? The email offers no details as to the particulars of what that case might be, but I'm going to speculate that is has something to do with this woman's reputation being ruined in her hometown. Never mind that she ruined it herself.

Anyhow, if anyone is interested in helping out this family, I encourage you to send a small donation ($5, $10) to their post office box:

Taylor Ostergaard
Lindsey Zellitti
P.O. BOX 2528
Durango, CO 81302

Why donate? Well, I can think of two reasons:

They've already incurred legal expenses for their good deed, and it looks as though more may be on the horizon.
This rotten woman obviously wanted to punish these girls. Nothing would circumvent that desire more than to have these girls actually reap some benefit from the entire episode.

There's no indication that these girls did anything other than try to perpretrate a random act of kindness. If the case is as it appears to be, this woman should be ashamed of herself.

And so should her lawyer.