 | ||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||
| Hello Richard Ryan, We wanted to let you know that your order has shipped. If you ordered multiple items, you may receive separate shipments with no additional shipping charges. An invoice for your shipped products will be emailed to you shortly. Visit Best regards, | Order Number: Order Date: | |||||||||||||
Shipment Information | ||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||
| Shipment Date: | Estimated Delivered By: | Shipping Address: | ||||||||||||
| Carrier Name: | Tracking Number(s): | |||||||||||||
| All shipments except those delivered by the U.S. Postal Service require a signature on receipt. The name of your carrier is listed with the shipment information above. Tracking information may not be immediately available. U.S. Postal Service and other carriers may not provide tracking information. If you have questions about this shipment, please read | ||||||||||||||
Shipment Details | ||||||||||||||
Product Name | Product Number | Qty | Subtotal | |||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||
REFURB IPOD W/CLICK WHEEL 40GB W/DOCUSA | F9268LL/A | 1 | $219.00 | |||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||
Additional Information | ||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||
| For order status and answers to questions, please visit Get the latest news right from the source. Subscribe to Apple's free newsletters and find out about the latest products from Apple and its partners, plus special deals and much more. | Purchase Order Number: | |||||||||||||
Delivery Time Frames | ||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||
Please do not reply to this email message. | ||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||
| You can also order from the Apple Store by calling 1-800-MY-APPLE (1-800-692-7753). | ||||||||||||||
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Monday, March 27, 2006
Saturday, March 25, 2006
(saw this via Froggy Ruminations)
Tiger Woods Visits Naval Special Warfare
Blackanthem Military News, CORONADO, Calif., February 01, 2006 13:35
| |
| Pro golfer Tiger Woods viewing a static display of various SEAL weaponry. Tiger was in San Diego for the Buick Invitational Golf Tournament and spent the afternoon learning about the Special Operations Community. Photo courtesy of U.S. Navy |
Pro golfer Tiger Woods visited the men and women of Naval Special Warfare Jan. 23 to tour their facilities and learn more about their mission.
Woods was in town for the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines, in which he is the defending champion, and wanted to see some of the Navy’s champion SEALs and Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen (SWCC). The visit gave him a glimpse into the training and capabilities of the Navy’s finest warriors.
Woods learned about SEAL training and the various weapons they use, and then addressed Sailors who were preparing to enter the SEAL training program.
"If I hand’t been in golf, I would have been here with you guys" said Woods. "When I was younger, I always dreamed of being a Navy SEAL."
The class responded with the traditional Naval Special Warfare "Hooyah!" cheer.
"My mom was Asian, so she was disciplined," Woods said. "My father, being former military, was also very disciplined. I was very lucky," said Woods. "I wouldn’t have had the discipline to succeed in my sport if not for my upbringing."
Woods’ visit concluded with a demonstration of the high-speed boats used by the SWCC operators.
"I really admire what you’re doing for your country," Woods said, "and that you’re going to be out there protecting our freedom."
By Petty Officer 3rd Class Christopher Menzie / Naval Special Warfare Public Affairs
Instead of indoctrinating students in moral relativism, our schools should be reminding them why our troops are in Iraq and Afghanistan. We could do with an occasional reminder ourselves.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord.
And may perpetual light shine upon them.
May the souls of the faithfully departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.
Amen.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Here is another good story from yesterday's Journal. Everyone agrees that we should be good stewards of the environment. In fact, stewarding the environment is a conservative, not a liberal, principle. What this story shows is how liberalism has twisted environmental stewardship. 1. Environmental preservation is not to be intelligently or prudently balanced against other, equally valid concerns, like property rights -- it must trump all other concerns. 2. In advancing their agenda, liberals are willing to ignore facts, promote lies, and destroy anyone who opposes them.
Of Mice and Men
A tiny rodent is the hottest political issue in Colorado.
BY STEPHEN MOORE
Thursday, March 23, 2006 12:01 a.m.
DENVER--Here in Colorado, the hottest political issue of the day may not be the war in Iraq or the out-of-control federal budget, but rather the plight of a tiny mouse. Back in 1998, a frisky eight-inch rodent known as the Preble's meadow jumping mouse gained protective status under the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA). What has Coloradans hot under the collar is that some 31,000 acres of local government and privately owned land in the state and stretching into Wyoming--an area larger than the District of Columbia--was essentially quarantined from all development so as not to disrupt the mouse's natural habitat. Even the Fish and Wildlife Service concedes that the cost to these land owners could reach $183 million.
What we have here is arguably the most contentious dispute over the economic impact of the ESA since the famous early-'90s clash between the timber industry and the environmentalist lobby over the "endangered" listing of the spotted owl in the Northwest. That dispute eventually forced the closure of nearly 200 mills and the loss of thousands of jobs. Last week the war over the fate of the Preble's mouse escalated when a coalition of enraged homeowners, developers and farmers petitioned the Department of the Interior to have the mouse immediately delisted as "endangered" because of reliance on faulty data.
The property-rights coalition would seem to have a fairly persuasive case based on the latest research on the mouse. It turns out that not only is the mouse not endangered, but it isn't even a unique species.
The man who is almost singlehandedly responsible for exposing the truth about the Preble's mouse is Rob Roy Ramey, a biologist and lifelong conservationist, who used to serve as a curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Mr. Ramey's research--published last year in the peer-reviewed journal Animal Conservation--concluded that the Preble's mouse "is not a valid subspecies based on physical features and genetics." The scientist who conducted the original research classifying Preble's as unique now agrees with Mr. Ramey's assessment. Even scientists who defend extending the mouse's "endangered" status admit that it is 99.5% genetically similar to other strains of mice.
Nor is the mouse on the road to extinction. "The more people look for these mice, the more they find. Every time scientists do a new count, we find more of the Preble's mouse," Mr. Ramey says. It's now been found inhabiting twice as many distinct areas as once thought. These are mice, after all, and the one thing rodents are proficient at is breeding. The full species of the meadow jumping mouse, far from being rare, can be found over half the land area of North America.
"The federal government has effectively shut off tens of millions of dollars of economic development," complains coalition spokesman Kent Holsinger, "based on saving a species that we now know doesn't even exist." But green groups and Department of Interior bureaucrats, who regard the ESA as a sacred pact--the modern-day equivalent of Noah's Ark, as former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt called it--pledge to fight any change in status.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Ramey has been accused of being "dishonest," a "whore for industry" and a "shill for the Bush administration." Under intense political pressure from environmental activists, he was removed from his curator's job at the museum. "I've been nearly stampeded by a herd of agitated elephants in Africa and suspended from some of the highest cliffs in North America, but nothing prepared me for the viciousness of the attacks from the environmentalist lobby," he tells me.
Meanwhile, the Preble's mouse continues to impose huge costs on local communities. One water district in Colorado was recently required to build two tunnels for the mice under a man-made pond to spare the critters the inconvenience of having to scurry around it. Regulators even asked local officials if it would be feasible to grow grass in the tunnels for the mice, which was only slightly less absurd than padding the mouse thoroughfares with red carpet. The extra cost to the water project to make it mouse-friendly? More than $1 million. The Fish and Wildlife Service also has the authority to assess penalties on property owners if they even inadvertently spoil mouse habitat. Owners can even be fined if their cats do what cats do: chase and apprehend mice.
Because of preposterous regulations like there, many land owners resort to extreme measures. A comprehensive 2003 survey found that more than one in four land owners impacted by the Preble's mouse regulation "admitted to actively degrading habitat following the species listing in 1998." This is often precisely what happens in these situations: Because most of 1,500 or so species that have been listed as threatened since 1972 are anything but, people have no respect for the designation and attempt to force the species away from their land. For truly endangered species, the ESA is a disaster.
Many of these land owners have been so strong-armed by federal bureaucrats that they have come to believe--with good reason--that the original and widely supported intent of the ESA has been subverted into a back-door means to slam the brakes on economic development. "It's a cost-free way for the government and the greens to impose land-use control on property owners," says R.J. Smith, an ESA expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Therein lies the crux of the problem. The law tries to achieve the societal policy goal of saving species from extinction by imposing all of the costs on a hapless few. House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo has sensibly proposed reforms that allow land owners to get fair compensation from the government if their land is depressed in value due to a wetlands or endangered species designation. That seems equitable: If society wants to preserve habitat for the common good, then the cost should be borne by all taxpayers, not individual land owners, who would no longer regard endangered species as an economic plague on their property.
If anything good can come out of the Preble's mouse fiasco in Colorado, it will be that it has awakened Congress to the reality that the ESA isn't just failing property owners but the very irreplaceable species it was designed to protect.
Mr. Moore is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
The story thus far.
Thursday, March 23, 2006 12:01 a.m.
Something is very wrong at our elite universities. Last month Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard; today Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi will speak by video to a conference at Columbia University that his regime is cosponsoring. (Columbia won't answer questions about how much funding it got from Libya or what implied strings were attached.) Then there's Yale, which for three weeks has refused to make any comment or defense beyond a vague 144-word statement about its decision to admit Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi--a former ambassador-at-large of the murderous Afghan Taliban--as a special student.
The three backers of the foundation that, along with Yale, is subsidizing Mr. Hashemi's tuition have told the Yale Daily News that they are withdrawing their support. But the university remains mute and paralyzed. "The intelligentsia haven't told Yalies what to think yet, because even they haven't made up their minds," says Daniel Gelernter, a Yale freshman whose father is a Yale professor. He clearly has: He calls the Taliban "an evil and macabre terrorist group. . . . The fact that Hashemi didn't do actual killing does not absolve him. Goebbels didn't shoot anyone either."
Universities are places where free inquiry, debate and information sharing are supposed to be guiding lights. In reality, the ivory towers too often now resemble dark castles, which raise their drawbridges at the first hint of criticism or scrutiny. Never has the moat separating elite universities from the rest of America been wider than in the case of Yale's Taliban Man.
In justifying its grant of a place to Mr. Hashemi, Yale has cited his approval by the State Department. And Yale's sole official statement says it hopes "his courses help him understand the broader context for the conflicts that led to the creation of the Taliban and to its fall. . . . Universities are places that must strive to increase understanding." That justification is unsettling to two women who will join voices at Yale tonight. Natalie Healy lost her Navy SEAL son Dan in Afghanistan last year when a Taliban rocket hit his helicopter. Ms. Healy, who notes that her son had four children of his own, is appalled at Yale's new student. "Lots of people could benefit from a Yale education, so why reward this man who was part of the group that killed Dan?" she told me. "I want to tell [Yale President] Richard Levin that his not allowing ROTC on campus is one thing, but welcoming a former member of the Taliban is deeply insulting to families who have children fighting them right now."
Ten days ago Ms. Healy met Malalai Joya, a member of Afghanistan's parliament, when she spoke near her home in Exeter, N.H. Tonight, Ms. Joya will speak at Yale on behalf of the Afghan Women's Mission. She is appalled that many people have forgotten the crimes of the Taliban, and was surprised to hear that Mr. Hashemi, who, like her, is 27 years old, is attending Yale. "He should apologize to my people and expose what he and others did under the Taliban," she told me. "He knew very well what criminal acts they committed; he was not too young to know. It would be better if he faced a court of justice than be a student at Yale University."
Mr. Hashemi probably won't be attending Ms. Joya's lecture tonight. He has dodged reporters for three weeks, ever since his presence at Yale was revealed in a cover story in the New York Times Magazine. Some claim he has fully repented his Taliban past, but in his sole recent interview--with the Times of London--he acknowledged he'd done poorly in his class "Terrorism: Past, Present and Future," attributing that to his disgust with the textbooks: "They would say the Taliban were the same as al Qaeda." At the same time, Mr. Hashemi won't explain an essay he wrote late last year in which he called Israel "an American al Qaeda" aimed at the Arab world. When asked about the Taliban's public executions in Kabul's soccer stadium, he quipped: "There were also executions happening in Texas." [RFR: This is a great example of moral equivalence which the "Yale Taliban" used to his advantage. Rather than addressing the Taliban's execution, he turns the tables by citing executions in Texas as if they were equivalent, thus silencing any criticism. But are they equivalent? Without knowing anything of the specifics of either execution, we can still surmise enough facts to show how bogus this response was. Regarding the Taliban execution, based on what we know of how they operated, this woman was probably killed for some "crime" such as learning to read; teaching others to read; perhaps being caught without wearing a veil; maybe even because she was raped. Raped? you may ask. Yes, in many Muslim countries, rape victims are executed because they must have done something to provoke the rape. Whatever her "crime", it's likely she was denounced by someone, given a cursory interrogation, then driven to the stadium and shot.
Regarding the Texas execution. Even though I am opposed to capital punishment, it is not because I feel that these criminals are not bad people. To get the death penalty, even in Texas, the criminal must have really committed a pretty heinous crime. In addition, he was caught and brought to trial, was represented by an attorney, and only convicted (with multiple appeals) when his guilt was established *beyond a reasonable doubt*.
Yes, Taliban dirtbag, we have executions in Texas. So, what's your point?
Given his record as a Taliban apologist, Mr. Hashemi has told friends he is stunned Yale didn't look more closely into his curriculum vitae. "I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay," he told the New York Times. So how did he end up in the Ivy League? Questions start at the State Department's door. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee's border security panel, has asked the State Department and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to explain exactly how Mr. Hashemi got an F-1 student visa. Yale's decision tree is clearer. Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions until he took the same post at Stanford last year, told the New York Times that Yale had another foreigner of Mr. Hashemi's caliber apply but "we lost him to Harvard" and "I didn't want that to happen again." Mr. Shaw won't return phone calls now, but emails he's exchanged with others offer insights into his thinking.
The day after the New York Times profile appeared, Haym Benaroya, a professor at Rutgers, wrote to Mr. Shaw expressing disbelief that Mr. Hashemi, who has a fourth-grade education and a high school equivalency certificate, could be at Yale. Mr. Shaw replied that he indeed had "non-traditional roots [and] very little formal education but personal accomplishments that had significant impact." Mr. Benaroya was stupefied; did Mr. Shaw mean accomplishments that had a "positive impact, not terroristic and totalitarian impact"? Mr. Shaw responded: "Correct, and potential to make a positive difference in seeking ways towards peace and democracy. An education is a way toward understanding the complex nuances of world politics."
Back in the early 1990s, when he was dean of Yale College, Yale history professor Don Kagan warned about what he called the university's "mutual massage" between value-neutral professors and soft-minded students. He is even more critical now: "The range of debate on campus is more narrow than ever today, and the Taliban incident is a wake-up call that moral relativism is totally unexamined here. The ability of students to even think clearly about patriotism and values is being undermined by faculty members who believe that at heart every problem has a U.S. origin." [What a tragedy. Yale is considered one of our countries elite institutions of higher learning. However, instead of teaching students critical thinking, their heads are stuffed full of moral relativistic mush. Consequently, they can't tell right from wrong, good from evil. What's more disturbing, is they're taught by their professors that they shouldn't make such distinctions.] Mr. Kagan isn't optimistic that Yale will respond to outside pressure. "They have a $15 billion endowment, and I know Yale's governing board is handpicked to lick the boots of the president," he told me. "The only way Yale officials can be embarrassed is if a major donor publicly declares he is no longer giving to them. Otherwise, they simply don't care what the outside world thinks."
But there may be one other source of worry for Yale. Mr. Hashemi told the New York Times that he will apply next month for sophomore status in Yale's full-degree program starting next fall. An admissions official told me Yale's plan all along was to do just that if his grades were acceptable. But next week, Yale will mail out 19,300 rejection letters to those who applied to be in its class of 2010. "I can't imagine it'll be easy for Yale to convince those it rejects that the Taliban student isn't taking a place they could have had," a former Yale administrator told me.
Former Yale president Benno Schmidt says admitting Mr. Hashemi is an exercise in "amorality and cynicism." He told me that "diversity simply cannot be allowed to trump all moral considerations." It's not as if Yale can't muster moral indignation. Yale is divesting from Sudan, responding to pressure from student activists and labor unions. But when it comes to a former Taliban official, there is a desire to move on.
A case in point is Amy Aaland, executive director of Yale's Slifka Center for Jewish Life, where Mr. Hashemi takes his meals (Kosher complies with Islamic dietary laws). When I asked her if any of the revelations about his past disturb her, she noted that he was "very, very young" when he had been a Taliban official, and that "it's not like the Taliban attacked this country." I asked about the Taliban's decree in May 2001 that all non-Muslims--chiefly Hindus--had to wear yellow badges. The order, reminiscent of the Nazis, was met with global censure. A reporter then in Kabul recalls Mr. Hashemi had no trouble defending the decree as a protection for minorities against punishment by the religious police "until I pointed out it also required non-Muslims to move out of housing they shared with Muslims within three days; he didn't have a coherent response to that." Ms. Aaland absorbed all that I told her, and replied: "I don't expect learning to happen overnight." She still thought that "just living here, [Mr. Hashemi] can learn values and ideals from our society."
There is a line beyond which tolerance and political correctness become willful blindness. Eli Muller, a reporter for the Yale Daily News, was stunned back in 2000 when the lies of another Taliban spokesman who visited Yale "went nearly unchallenged." He concluded that the "moral overconfidence of Yale students makes them subject to manipulation by people who are genuinely evil." Today, you can say that about more than just some naïve students. You can add the administrators who abdicated their moral responsibility and admitted Mr. Hashemi.
Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Now don't get me wrong, I like rock and roll music a lot. However, one of the things about rock celebrities, as with other Hollywood and other media celebrities, is that they are perpetual adolescents. And part of that infantalism is that they won't -- in fact, can't -- grow up. They need to be young, trendy, rebellious, etc. It's what they've based their careers on, and if they move on they run the risk that they won't be perceived as cool anymore. (There's also the real possibility that if they tried to do something different with their music it would become readily apparent that they didn't have any real talent to begin with.)
The point I'm trying to make is -- would someone please tell Mick Jagger he's not a teenager anymore. Gently break the news to him that he's not even young anymore -- he's an old man! For crying out loud, when is this fossil going to realize it's time to hang it up and move on!
Sunday, March 19, 2006
From The American Thinker blog:
Sudoku and Other Diversions
March 19th, 2006
My wife, having been told by friends in Europe that Sudoku, the Japanese [1] number-grid puzzle, was all the rage there, asked me to find some Sudokus and teach her how to solve them. A Google search disclosed a website with billions of Sudoku puzzles, a Wikipedia article with the puzzle’s history and mathematics, and dozens of other sites which (as the little girl wrote in her book report) “told me more than I wanted to know.”
I tried a few Sudokus and found that they could be solved by logical inference without any guesswork. My wife caught on to the method quickly and is now happily puzzling away.
But the wonder is that she—and the world—are interested in such logic puzzles at all. In trying to figure out why, I remembered a Caltech colleague who, at the height of the Cold War, developed a classic anxiety syndrome: high blood pressure, insomnia, and all the rest. His doctor concluded that the source of his anxiety was his newspaper and restricted his reading to the classified ads and the crossword puzzle. He claimed that the classifieds were the most optimistic thing in the paper: all those beautiful homes and cars going for a song, all those interesting and lucrative job openings, and (on the very next page) a bevy of wonderfully qualified applicants ready to fill those jobs—in short, a happy world, very different from the one in the front pages.
And the crossword puzzle? It worked out—with every letter in its proper place. And if you didn’t know how to make it come out properly, they told you the next day. It was a small island of order and symmetry in a chaotic world.
I suspect Sudoku serves the same purpose. It gives you the illusory feeling that you know how to solve the problems in your life. If you can make the numbers in the Sudoku grid come out even, then maybe you can do the same with your bank statement and tax return. Walter Kerr, in his profound Decline of Pleasure, attributed this healing quality to art. But since most of us have lost interest in art, or at least in the unsettling enigmas of contemporary art, we have to make do with puzzles. The austere symmetry of logic can provide a similar soothing pleasure, which is why Archbishop Fénelon warned his seminarians to “be on guard against the enchantments and diabolical attractions of geometry.”
But Sudoku, and other logic puzzles like it, may have the far more important purpose of teaching logic to the masses. Our school system seems to have abandoned all attempts at that [2]. As George Will recently pointed out, they are more concerned with teaching students to “promote social justice” and “perform their identities.” Fortunately, a certain percentage of young people manage to teach themselves basic logical skills. To this end, puzzles like Sudoku may succeed where our education system has failed.
I therefore propose Sudoku as Step One in a three-step program to prepare American Thinker readers for interpreting MSM articles and columns. After a few weeks of Sudoku have purified and organized you thinking, go on to Step Two, the cryptic crosswords that so delight the British, but are most masterfully exemplified by American compilers such as Cox and Rathvon. These are like ordinary crossword puzzles except that the definitions include puns or anagrams cunningly crafted to mislead the reader. Thus “pretty girl in crimson and rose” defines “rebelled”—“pretty girl” is “belle,” “crimson” is “red,” and “rose” defines “rebelled—thus, “RE(BELLE)D.” It may well be that the popularity of cryptics in Britain has helped to make its politicians so adroitly evasive and its voters so cynical.
When Sudoku has trained you to spot logical contradictions and cryptics have taught you to see through evasions and deceptive phrasing, you are ready for Step Three.—the game of “Spin.” The object of this game is to read a MSM article or column and separate the truth from what the writer is trying to make you believe. An easy example is two recent columns commenting on the Academy Awards. The writers had very little good to say about the proceedings, They accused the Academy voters of not having fairly watched all the films, invented farfetched explanations for the success of Crash, and shared a petulant dislike for almost every aspect of the ceremony.
I showed this to my wife and asked her to play “Spin” with it. Her Sudoku training paid off; within five minutes she had correctly solved the puzzle: “They’re sore that Brokeback Mountain didn’t win and are trying to get even.”
So take up a copy of New York Times or Time and play “Spin.” Though we can no longer rely on MSM reporters and columnists to tell us the unbiased truth, we can at least make them a source of innocent merriment, as the Mikado would say.
Notes
[1] Actually invented by American architect-puzzlemaster Howard Garns in 1979. Just like American artists and musicians a century ago, the game had to travel abroad and adopt a foreign name before it could return home in triumph.
[2] The school boards have their own equivalent of Sudoku therapy. Having failed miserably to teach students logic or language or mathematics or science, they have, as Sam Weller put it, “…took to building, which is a medical term for being incurable.” The school boards may fail to teach students to pass statewide exams but at least they can point with pride to the impressive buildings they’ve erected with our money.
Paul Shlichta is a research scientist.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Friday, March 17, 2006
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Thomas Sowell provides something that is all too rare in American today -- plain spoken, common sense. Here's a recent column via Townhall.
Myths of rich and poor
By Thomas Sowell
Feb 8, 2006
There is a fundamental difference between seeking the truth and scoring points. In politics, the truth is strictly optional and that also seems to be true in parts of the media.
Much of what is said about the incomes of Americans is said to score points. For example, it has been repeated endlessly that the average American family's income has not increased significantly for decades and that real wages are actually going down, not up.
That is great stuff for scoring points. You can just imagine the words and the music: The economy is stagnating, the American Dream has become a nightmare, our best days are behind us, etc.
The fact that the conclusions are totally false has not cramped anyone's style. Best-selling authors reap the profits of doom by writing such stuff. Politicians show how compassionate they are by promising to rescue us from economic disaster. Those who want to show how hip they are by disdaining American society get their jollies by scoring such points.
A book titled "Myths of Rich and Poor" by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm exposes such nonsense for the fraud that it is.
Despite the statistics that show real wages going downhill over time, somehow Americans are consuming more than ever and have a larger net worth than ever.
As of 1970, for example, only about a third of American homes had both central heating and air conditioning, while more than four-fifths had both in the 1990s. Moreover, the homes themselves were more than one-third larger.
Just over one-fourth of American households had a dishwasher in 1970 but more than half did by the 1990s. Only 34 percent of households had color television in 1970 but 98 percent did in the 1990s.
How could this be, with lower real wages? Were we just going deeper and deeper into debt? Actually the net worth of Americans more than doubled during those same years.
Was there some kind of economic Houdini who could perform such magic?
No. Actually a lot of the point-scoring rhetoric involves misleading statistics. Wages are only part of total compensation -- and increasing proportions of that total compensation is taken in the form of fringe benefits. Total compensation has been going up while average real wages have been going down.
Even the decline of real wages has to be taken with a grain of salt. Real wages are calculated by taking the money wages and adjusting for changes in the consumer price index.
Only an economist can get excited by the consumer price index. Other people's eyes are more likely to glaze over when the term is mentioned. However, an inaccurate consumer price index is part of the reason for the appearance of declining real wages.
When the consumer price index says that inflation is 3 percent a year, it may really be more like 2 percent or 1.5 percent. As anyone who has had to pay off a mortgage knows, a difference of a percentage point can add up to real money over a period of decades.
Economists' estimates of how much the consumer price index exaggerates inflation range from an estimate of one percentage point by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan to an estimate of 1.5 percent by Michael Boskin, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President.
Even if we take the lower estimate of one percentage point, over a period of 25 years, that under-estimates the real income of the average American by nearly $9,000. In other words, a working couple will have their real income under-estimated by nearly 18 grand, using the consumer price index to correct for inflation.
No wonder the income statistics look so bad, even while the standard of living is rising and Americans have a higher net worth than before. Nothing is easier than to turn reality upside down, especially if you are just trying to score points, instead of getting at the truth.
My comment on this book has been reprinted on its cover: "Cox and Alm deserve a medal for bringing some sanity to a subject where insanity is the norm."
If making a whole society's rising prosperity look like a disastrous decline is not insane, what is?
Lorica of Saint Patrick
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through a belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation.
I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth and His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion and His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection and His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.
I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In obedience of angels,
In service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In preachings of the apostles,
In faiths of confessors,
In innocence of virgins,
In deeds of righteous men.
I arise today
Through the strength of heaven;
Light of the sun,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of the wind,
Depth of the sea,
Stability of the earth,
Firmness of the rock.
I arise today
Through God's strength to pilot me;
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's way to lie before me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's hosts to save me
From snares of the devil,
From temptations of vices,
From every one who desires me ill,
Afar and anear,
Alone or in a mulitude.
I summon today all these powers between me and evil,
Against every cruel merciless power that opposes my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of women and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man's body and soul.
Christ shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that reward may come to me in abundance.
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Christ in the eye that sees me,
Christ in the ear that hears me.
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through a belief in the Threeness,
Through a confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation
St. Patrick (ca. 377)
Monday, March 13, 2006
Got the spark for this from a great Catholic blog FUMARE. They have a "Word for the Day" feature that they work into posts. I have had a similar idea for a while, but different as well.
When I hear a cool word, I write it down and look it up. I have a collection of these words now and will post them occassionally along with their definition. This is done as a public service for my readers. :-)
Friday, March 10, 2006
In case you missed the Oscars last Sunday night, here are the highlights:
- Best song went to a musical tribute to the overseers of human sex slaves, an occupation known as "pimping";
- best picture went to a movie about racism in Los Angeles;
- best supporting actor went to the movie about how oil companies murder people; and
- best supporting actress went to the movie about how pharmaceutical companies murder people.
Curiously missing from Oscar night's festivities was any reference, even in passing, to the 150,000 brave Americans currently risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On behalf of red state America, let me be the first to say: "Screw you, Hollywood."
Although I must tell you, overall, this Academy Awards ceremony was a major strategic retreat by Hollywood. Despite all their Bolshevik bluster about how Democratic politicians won't stand up to Republicans, the Hollywood left is as scared of decent patriotic Americans as the Democrats are.
"Brokeback Mountain" did not win best picture, "Munich" won nothing, and the Palestinian suicide bombers movie won nothing. There was no angry self-righteousness from Vanessa Redgrave against "Zionist hooligans," or from Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon for the Haitian boat people. There was no Bush-bashing. There was no Michael Moore. The host was not Whoopi Goldberg, so that's a big fat reward to every man, woman and child in America right there.
This may have been the most American Oscars yet, if America consisted of beautiful airheads in $50,000 dresses. And that was just the guys in "Brokeback Mountain."
I believe this marks the first time in Oscars history that an award recipient shouted, "Thank you, Jesus!" upon receiving his award. Admittedly, this was the only part of the speech that didn't have to be bleeped and it was for a song titled, "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," but it's still a step forward.
Jon Stewart, this year's host, was very funny – but not quite as funny as the fact that the audience didn't get the jokes. (There were a lot of actors in the audience.) Apparently, the one comedy bit capable of bringing down a house of actors is: Ben Stiller hopping around in a green unitard.
However liberal Stewart is personally, his best jokes are always mildly conservative.
He twitted the Hollywood audience, saying:
I have to say it is a little shocking to see all these big names here, these huge stars. The Oscars is really, I guess, the one night of the year where you can see all your favorite stars without having to donate any money to the Democratic Party.
Actually, between George Clooney's posturing and the ode to pimpdom winning "best song," I think Oscar night was more of a fund-raiser for the Republican Party.
George Clooney made the only stand for liberal Hollywood, smugly declaring:
We are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while. I think it's probably a good thing. We're the ones who talked about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular ... [T]his group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters. I'm proud ... to be part of this community, and proud to be out of touch.
Forget about Hollywood being ahead of the big issues: Hollywood has never even been on time for the big issues. This is why, for example, in the middle of an epic war with Islamic fascists, Hollywood is still making movies about the Nazis. Now and then, just for variety, they tackle a more current topic, like the Jim Crow era.
Even on AIDS – which is something you'd expect people like Clooney to know something about – Hollywood was about seven years behind. Wait, no – bad choice of words. Even on AIDS, Hollywood got caught with its pants down. Still no good. On AIDS, Hollywood got it right in the end. Oh, dear ... Note to self: Must hire two more interns to screen hate mail.
The point is: The Hollywood set didn't start wearing AIDS ribbons to the Oscars until 1992:
- 10 years after the New York Times described AIDS;
- seven years after AIDS was the cover story on Life magazine;
- seven years after AIDS was in People magazine;
- five years after Oprah did a show on AIDS.
Only recently has George Clooney heard about segregation. (He's against it.) But he still can't nail down the details of something that ended nearly half a century ago.
Contrary to Clooney's impassioned speech, no theaters ever forced black people to sit in the back. If you were trying to oppress people, you would make them sit in the front, which are the worst seats in the house. Or you'd just make them watch a George Clooney movie.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
I saw this movie the other day and one part of it struck me and I've been thinking about it for a couple of days. I'd have to categorize it as a part of the "Blame America First" mentality.
Here's what I'm talking about: As "Kyle" (the lead character played by Jodie Foster) starts to freak out over her missing daughter, she suddenly *recalls* seeing a couple of men who she thought were looking in her apartment window the night before and now thinks a couple of Arab/Muslim men on the plane were those same men. Therefore, they must be the ones who've kidnapped her daughter.
On one level this is just a simple plot device intended to increase the suspense and throw viewers "off the scent". From that perspective -- all well and good. But, there's more going on here.
The Arabs aren't the men in the window and have nothing to do with the bad guys who've kidnapped Kyle's daughter. Thus, we're presented with a couple of clean cut, mild-mannered businessmen who've been minding their own business, but have now been falsely accused and embarrassed in front of dozens of people for simply being Arab.
Get it? Westerners are racists who automatically believe every Arab male is a potential terrorist/criminal. But, in case you didn't get it, while Kyle is confronting the men and they are protesting their innocence, another passenger suddenly stands up and shouts something like "Yeah, sure, why should we believe you!".
This is done just in case we haven't been sufficiently bludgeoned with the message: the passenger is a big, overweight, sweaty fellow with a Southern accent. Let there be no mistake -- the Arabs are polite, articulate -- and justifiably outraged by the unwarranted accusation. On the other hand, the Westerners are rude, oafish, racists. (Of course, however, since Jody Foster can't really be a racist, it's necessary to insert an unattractive, dislikable throw-away character -- like a fat, big-mouthed redneck -- into the script to conveniently transfer the audience's moral indignation and disapproval to.)
What is it with Hollywood? Just 4+ years after 9/11, they're trying to make us feel guilty for being suspicious of Arab men on airplanes. I'm sorry, did I miss something?
Of course, I don't believe that every Arab is a terrorist or a criminal. But guess what -- every one of the 9/11 hijackers was a Muslim!! Despite Hollywood's PC attempts to condition us, we should not feel guilty for being just a little more suspicious of 4 Arab men on an airplane than we would be for, say, an elderly couple, a mother and small child, a middle-aged businessman, etc.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
A tearful, joyous surprise
At his 80th birthday party, Holocaust survivor meets soldier who liberated him
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERMarch 6, 2006
When Lou Dunst was a teenager, imprisoned in a series of Nazi concentration camps, he begged God: “Please let me live – if for nothing else than to tell my story.”
 EARNIE GRAFTON / Union-Tribune Lou Dunst (right) hugged Bob Persinger, the man who liberated him and some 18,000 other prisoners more than 60 years ago from the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria. |
His is a gripping tale, full of heartache and suspense. But the story always lacked a satisfactory ending.
Until yesterday. During a surprise birthday luncheon for Dunst in the ballroom of the Doubletree Hotel in Mission Valley, retired Superior Court Judge Norbert Ehrenfreund recounted the tale of Dunst's liberation to more than 170 family members and friends.
“The fact that Lou is here today, alive and well, celebrating his 80th birthday, is nothing short of a miracle,” Ehrenfreund said.
But the miracles didn't stop there.
 Dunst collection U.S. soldiers and German POWs posed atop the "Lady Luck," the first tank to enter the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria. |
A gasp rose from the crowd as the silver-haired Persinger, now 82, walked to the stage and fell into Dunst's arms. “Thank you for saving our lives,” Dunst said between sobs. “God bless you!”
They had never met before yesterday, but their lives have been intertwined for more than 60 years. On May 6, 1945, lifelong bonds were forged between a Holocaust survivor and a tank commander – without either man's knowledge.
“I never saw him,” Persinger said.
“I was delirious,” Dunst said. “I didn't know what was happening.” That morning, in fact, Dunst was literally at death's door. A 19-year-old Ukrainian Jew in a Nazi concentration camp in Austria, he had crawled onto a pile of corpses outside the crematorium to perish. But that afternoon, Staff Sgt. Persinger drove his tank “Lucky Lady” through the camp's gates, liberating Dunst and the rest of Ebensee's 18,000 prisoners.
Persinger, then 21, had witnessed the terrors of combat at St. Lo and the Battle of the Bulge. But he had never seen anything like the nightmare of Ebensee, a notorious sub-camp of the massive Mauthausen facility.
 Bob Persinger |  Lou Dunst |
“I had seen men killed, some of them close buddies,” Persinger told more than 170 guests at Dunst's birthday luncheon. “But this was a different style of death.”
Yesterday's reunion capped an emotional surprise party for Dunst, whose actual birthday is Saturday. Estelle Dunst, who introduced herself as “Lou's pushy wife,” spent more than a year organizing the event with military efficiency. Many guests belong to the New Life Club, a San Diego outfit for Holocaust survivors that Lou Dunst serves as treasurer.
“I turned 80 last week and I'm the baby,” said Gussie Zaks, the club's president.
As the years pass and their numbers dwindle, there's increasing concern that these tales of inhumanity and survival are being lost. Many people want to ignore this unpleasant topic.
“Sometimes we hear people say, 'Enough with the Holocaust,' ” Zaks said. “No, never enough.”
 Dunst collection As a prisoner at the Mauthausen concentration camp, Lou Dunst was forced to run up these steps to the camp's infamous rock quarry where the Nazis worked thousands of prisoners to death. |
 Dunst collection Lou Dunst prayed at a memorial outside the Mauthausen concentration camp during a 2003 visit to Austria. Ebensee was a satellite camp of the massive Mauthausen facility. |
“I'm glad to do this,” he said yesterday. “We hope this will never be forgotten. Never again.”
But even the healthiest Holocaust survivors experience gaps in their memories, holes in their tales. For most of his life, Dunst did not know the names of his liberators, only that they were part of Gen. George S. Patton's Third Army.
In 2001, though, a Louisiana businessman and an Italian historian met on a train between Rome and Florence. Italo Tibaldi, the historian, was also a survivor of Ebensee. Talking to his new American friend, Timothy Anderson, Tibaldi bemoaned the fact that he had been unable to thank any of his saviors.
Anderson, who runs a physicians billing company in Lafayette, La., accepted the challenge and found the families of three Ebensee liberators. One of the men had died in Detroit. The second was living in New Jersey, but in the final stages of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases.
The third? Bob Persinger of Loves Park, Ill., was alive and well and ready to help.
Two years ago, Anderson met Lou and Estelle Dunst at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Estelle, already planning her husband's 80th birthday party, contacted Bob and Arlene Persinger. The rest, as they say, is history.
For the Dunst family, history can be a sad topic. Lou's hometown began and ended the 20th century as a Ukrainian village. But in the 1940s, Jasina was taken over by Hungary, then by Nazi Germany and finally by the Soviet Union. In 1944, the village's Jewish population was forcibly removed from their homes and interned in a ghetto, then shipped to Auschwitz. Dunst's mother, Priva, was sent to her death by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazis' Angel of Death. His father, Marcus, died in another camp.
Incredibly, all three of the children – Lou; his brother, Irving; and his sister, Rusena – survived the war. The brothers were always imprisoned together, and Lou insists Irving risked his own life to ensure his brother's survival.
“When I talk to him about it, he says forget it, it's nothing,” Lou Dunst said. “Today it is nothing – then it was life.”
On May 6, 1945, it was Irving who directed the liberators to his brother's skeletal form and insisted the boy could be saved.
Bob Persinger doesn't remember this scene. He remembers half-dead prisoners singing and cheering, and the way he was whipsawed between elation and horror: “They were celebrating like you wouldn't believe, they were so happy. So were we, but on the other hand, we were crying.”
There were tears again yesterday, and again mixed emotions. Joy, yes, but also the sense that this lifelong bond involves a lifelong responsibility.
“Be healthy,” Irving Dunst told Persinger, “and be able to tell this to other people. Because, from you, they are more able to believe it.”
Sunday, March 05, 2006
March 3, 2006
Oscars for Osama
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- Nothing tells you more about Hollywood than what it chooses to honor. Nominated for best foreign film is “Paradise Now,” a sympathetic portrayal of two suicide bombers. Nominated for best picture is “Munich,” a sympathetic portrayal of yesterday’s fashion in barbarism: homicide terrorism.
But until you see “Syriana,” nominated for best screenplay (and George Clooney, for best supporting actor) you have no idea how self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood.
“Syriana’s” script has, of course, the classic liberal tropes such as this stage direction: “The Deputy National Security Advisor, MARILYN RICHARDS, 40’s, sculpted hair, with the soul of a seventy year-old white, Republican male, is in charge” (Page 21). Or this piece of over-the-top, Gordon Gekko Republican-speak, placed in the mouth of a Texas oilman: “Corruption is our protection. Corruption is what keeps us safe and warm. ... Corruption ... is how we win” (Page 93).
But that’s run-of-the-mill Hollywood. The true distinction of “Syriana’s” script is the near-incomprehensible plot -- a muddled mix of story lines about a corrupt Kazakhstan oil deal, a succession struggle in an oil-rich Arab kingdom and a giant Texas oil company that pulls the strings at the CIA and, naturally, everywhere else -- amid which, only two things are absolutely clear and coherent: the movie’s one political hero and one pure soul.
The political hero is the Arab prince who wants to end corruption, inequality and oppression in his country. As he tells his tribal elders, he intends to modernize his country by bringing the rule of law, market efficiency, women’s rights and democracy.
What do you think happens to him? He, his beautiful wife and beautiful children are murdered, incinerated, by a remote-controlled missile, fired from CIA headquarters in Langley, no less -- at the very moment that (this passes for subtle cross-cutting film editing) his evil younger brother, the corrupt rival to the throne and puppet of the oil company, is being hailed at a suitably garish “oilman of the year” celebration populated by fat and ugly Americans.
What is grotesque about this moment of plot clarity is that the overwhelmingly obvious critique of actual U.S. policy in the real Middle East today is its excess of Wilsonian idealism in trying to find and promote -- against a tide of tyranny, intolerance and fanaticism -- local leaders like the Good Prince. Who in the greater Middle East is closest to “Syriana’s” modernizing, democratizing paragon? Without a doubt, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a man of exemplary -- and quite nonfictional -- personal integrity, physical courage and democratic temperament. Hundreds of brave American (and allied NATO) soldiers have died protecting him and the democratic system they established to allow him to govern. On the very night the Oscars will be honoring “Syriana,” American soldiers will be fighting, some perhaps dying, in defense of precisely the kind of tolerant, modernizing Muslim leader that “Syriana” shows America slaughtering.
It gets worse. The most pernicious element in the movie is the character who is at the moral heart of the film: the physically beautiful, modest, caring, generous Pakistani who becomes a beautiful, modest, caring, generous ... suicide bomber. In his final act, the Pure One, dressed in the purest white robes, takes his explosives-laden little motorboat head first into his target. It is a replay of the real-life boat that plunged into the USS Cole in 2000, killing 17 American sailors, except that in “Syriana’s” version, the target is another symbol of American imperialism in the Persian Gulf -- a newly opened liquefied natural gas terminal.
The explosion, which would have the force of a nuclear bomb, constitutes the moral high point of the movie, the moment of climactic cleansing, as the Pure One clad in white merges with the great white mass of the huge terminal wall, at which point the screen goes pure white. And reverently silent.
In my naivete, I used to think that Hollywood had achieved its nadir with Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” a film that taught a generation of Americans that President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and the FBI in collaboration with Lyndon Johnson. But at least it was for domestic consumption, an internal affair of only marginal interest to other countries. “Syriana,” however, is meant for export, carrying the most vicious and pernicious mendacities about America to a receptive world.
Most liberalism is angst- and guilt-ridden, seeing moral equivalence everywhere. “Syriana” is of a different species entirely -- a pathological variety that burns with the certainty of its malign anti-Americanism. Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction.
© 2006, Washington Post Writers Group
'Long war' is breaking down into tedium
March 5, 2006
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
I had to sign a tedious business contract the other day. They wanted my corporation number -- fair enough -- plus my Social Security number -- well, if you insist -- and also my driver's license number -- hang on, what's the deal with that?
Well, we e-mailed over a query and they e-mailed back that it was a requirement of the Patriot Act. So we asked where exactly in the Patriot Act could this particular requirement be found and, after a bit of a delay, we got an answer.
And on discovering that there was no mention of driver's licenses in that particular subsection, I wrote back that we have a policy of reporting all erroneous invocations of the Patriot Act to the Department of Homeland Security on the grounds that such invocations weaken the rationale for the act, and thereby undermine public support for genuine anti-terrorism measures and thus constitute a threat to America's national security.
And about 10 minutes after that the guy sent back an e-mail saying he didn't need the driver's license number after all.
I'd be interested to know how much of this bureaucratic opportunism is going on. A couple of weeks earlier, I went to the bank to deposit a U.S. dollar check drawn on a Canadian financial institution, and the clerk announced that for security reasons checks drawn on Canadian banks now had to be sent away for collection and I'd have access to the funds in a couple of weeks. This was, she explained, a requirement of -- ta-da -- the Patriot Act. And, amazingly, that turned out not to be anywhere in the act either.
Any day now, my little girl will wake up, look under the pillow and find a note from the Tooth Fairy explaining that before processing of financial remuneration for said tooth can commence, the Patriot Act requires the petitioning child to supply a federal taxpayer identification number and computer-readable photo card with retinal scan.
I don't have a problem with the Patriot Act per se, so much as the awesome powers claimed on its behalf by everybody from car salesmen to the agriculture official who demanded proof from my maple-sugaring neighbor that his sap lines were secure against terrorism. Which is a hard thing to prove. You may think you've secured them against terrorism, and one morning you wake up to a loud explosion and the TV's showing breaking news of people howling in agony as boiling syrup rains down from the skies. Apparently, there's a big problem with al-Qaida putting anthrax in the maple supply. You don't notice it on your pancake because it blends in with the confectioners' sugar.
My worry is that on the home front the war is falling prey to lack-of-mission creep -- that, in the absence of any real urgency and direction, the "long war" (to use the administration's new and unsatisfactory term) is degenerating into nothing but bureaucratic tedium, media doom-mongering and erratic ad hoc oppositionism. To be sure, all these have been present since Day One: The press have been insisting Iraq is teetering on the brink of civil war for three years and yet, despite the urgings of CNN and the BBC, those layabout Iraqis stubbornly refuse to get on with it. They're happy to teeter for another three years, no matter how many "experts" stamp their foot and pout their lips and say "I want my civil war now." The New York Times ran a headline after the big bombing: "More Clashes Shake Iraq; Political Talks Are In Ruins." The "political talks" resumed the day after publication. The "ruins" were rebuilt after 48 hours.
The quagmire isn't in Iraq but at home. For five years, beginning with the designation of "war on terror," the president's public presentation has been consistent: Islam is a great religion, religion of peace, marvelous stuff, White House Ramadan Banquet the highlight of the calendar, but, sadly, every barrel has one or two bad apples, even Islam believe it or not, and once we've hunted those down we'll join the newly liberated peace-loving Muslim democracies in a global alliance of peace-loving peaceful persons. Most sentient beings have been aware that there is, to put it mildly, a large element of evasion about this basic narrative, but only now is it being explicitly rejected by all sides. William F. Buckley and George Will have more or less respectfully detached themselves from the insane idealism of shoving liberty and democracy down people's throats whether they want it or not. And, on the ports deal with Dubai, a number of other commentators I respect plus a stampede of largely ignorant weathervane pols have denounced the administration for endangering American security on the eastern seaboard. I can't see that: The only change is that instead of being American stevedores employed by a British company they'll now be American stevedores employed by a United Arab Emirates company.
But what I find interesting is the underlying argument: At heart, what Hillary Clinton and Co. are doing is dismissing as a Bush fiction the idea of "friendly" Arab "allies" in the war of terror. They're not necessarily wrong. Even the "friendliest" Arab regimes tend to be a bunch of duplicitous shysters: King Hussein sided with Saddam in the Gulf war, Mubarak and the House of Saud are the cause of much of our present woes. I would be perfectly prepared to consider a raft of measures insisting that, for the duration of the war, there'll be restrictions on access to the United States by certain countries. As I've argued for some years, it's absurd that the Saudis are allowed to continue with their financial and ideological subversion of everything from American think-tanks to mosques to prison chaplaincy programs (and, I'll bet, without providing driver's license numbers).
However, I think we should do that as a conscious policy decision, rather than as reflex piecemeal oppositionism. What Democrats seem to be doing with Dubai Ports World, whether they realize it or not, is tapping in to a general public skepticism (to put it politely) about the entire Muslim world. In that sense, the ports deal is the American equivalent of the Danish cartoon jihad: increasing numbers of Europeans -- if not yet their political class -- are fed up with switching on the TV and seeing Muslim men jumping up and down and threatening death followed by commentators patiently explaining that the "vast majority" of Muslims are, of course, impeccably "moderate." So what? There were millions of "moderate" Germans in the 1930s, and a fat lot of good they did us or them.
Despite being portrayed as a swaggering arrogant neocon warmongering cowboy, President Bush has, in fact, been circumspect to a fault for five years. But the equivocal constrained rhetoric is insufficient to a "long war." And from all sides, more and more people are calling its bluff.
©Mark Steyn, 2006