Category: Uncategorized

Israel’s cable companies have received permission to remove CNN from their programming. (Link via Balagan)
Why can’t we do this here? I’d much rather get the BBC than CNN.

Truly compelling article in the London Times this morning. The headline is “Bush on the skids? It’s all a load of baloney”, but the key sentence is down around the middle, in a discussion of how American government works:

The effective secret of America’s success is that Washington is habitually immobilised.

A beautiful paraphrase of Jefferson’s “That government is best which governs least”. (Which I may be paraphrasing somewhat myself, I don’t have the quote in front of me…)

OK, I’ll grant you, it sounds like the FBI/CIA/et alii are stumbling around on Homeland Security issues like a bunch of addled Keystone Kops — but there my agreement with the Professor, et alii, ends.
Case in point: The Civil War. If you were to read the history of the war (and I highly recommend Shelby Foote’s three volumes if you’ve not read Civil War history before — it’s a lot to read but it is eminently readable) and stop just before the Battle of Gettysburg (1-3 July 1863), you would be convinced that the South must have won the Civil War. The North bumbled its way through almost the entire war, including the period after Grant was given the Army of the Potomac. The difference between Grant and his predecessors was that he was willing to face what Lincoln called “the arithmetic”, which meant that he was willing to accept huge casualty lists because he knew that if he inflicted as many casualties as he took, the Army of Northern Virginia (the only serious threat to the Union that the Confederacy ever mounted) would quickly be whittled down to nothing. And in fact, even given the huge casualties the Union absorbed between the time Grant took over and the time he was in front of Petersburg and Richmond, Lee was left with almost nothing to mount a defense. At one point he had one man to every two yards of defensive line, and as time went on leading to the Nine April Days, he had fewer and fewer.
Another case in point: The Second World War. Flatly stated, this country was solidly on the defensive from 7 December 1941 until 6 June 1942 (the Battle of Midway). Many of the same mistakes were made by intelligence services and police forces before Pearl Harbor and before 9/11. The inability of intelligence services to put together random facts to create a whole; the inability of the country to control its borders; the sheer arrogance of thinking we were unassailable by the likes of the Japanese or al-Qaeda…
I don’t know. Gee. I wonder if all these Homeland Security failures are rope-a-dope?

Perhaps you bloggerati who fear the worst about the DHS and blog (quite intriguingly, but perhaps overwrought-ly) about military takeovers (via InstaPundit) and the end of blogging as we know it by 2012 or 2014 ought to read Terry Eastland’s column today over on Jewish World Review.
[UPDATE: I fixed the link to Eastland’s article to point to the permanent page at JWR.]
Some good points here. Lincoln (and Davis, too, but nobody remembers) suspended the right of habeas corpus, there were loyalty prosecutions under Wilson in WWI, and of course, we resettled the Japanese in concentration camps during WWII. Eastland’s point is that we don’t see any of that happening, and none of these restrictions seem to repeat themselves.
Eastland cites an essay by two professors at the University of Chicago Law School which discusses all of this. I won’t link the essay directly, go read Eastland and click on his link to it.

Milton Friedman turns 90 today 🙂

Tony Blankley thinks so. (Link unlikely to be good for long, I’ll try to remember to repost the permanent link if and when I find it.)
I still don’t like it.

This is good too — also from Fednet (see link below):

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “In just 18 months, this administration has unraveled the fiscal discipline it took us eight years to build.” — Sen. Joseph I. LIEBERMAN, D-Conn.

Fiscal discipline? Gesundheit, Senator. If there was any fiscal discipline in the Clinton years it was due to the Republican Congress and not due to anything you had your grubby mitts in.

I hate this man. He is low, mean, disgusting, decrepit, anything but the Southern gentleman he professes to be, and dedicated to one thing and one thing only: bringin’ the pork home to West Virginia. I just happened to look at FedNet a moment ago and…he’s clip of the day! Guess why? Because he can’t talk about funding the DHS without a swipe at Bush/Cheney!

“It is going to require the investment of real money. Your money. It cannot be done with the kind of creative accounting gimmicks that you might expect to find at Halliburton Company and Harken Energy Corporation.”
Senator Byrd (D-WV) speaking on the Senate floor regarding the establishment of a Department of Homeland Security.

How about the kind of creative accounting gimmicks used by Dick Gephardt and Terry McAuliffe? How about Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, etc.? No, you had to pick Harken and Halliburton, didn’t you, you wizened pile of crap?
Why can’t this man just die?

Clinton blames Bush for market mess
Bill Clinton is an unmitigated scumbag waste-of-space despoiler-of-maidenhood breathing-my-oxygen asshole. Get bent, Mr. Impeached Ex-President. Nobody gives a good God-damn about your opinion on anything anymore. And your ugly wife Bruno, too.

P.J. O’Rourke weighs in amongst the pages of The Weekly Standard:

In this period of gloom–with liberals seeking to make hay from capitalist foibles and our own capitalist foibles reduced in value to bales of ditto–it behooves us to look for a moment at the bright side of corporate corruption.
That is, assuming there’s any corruption. It may be semantics. When senators and representatives get together in Congress to fix prices on prescription drugs, they’re national heroes. When pharmaceutical company CEOs get together on the golf course to fix prices on prescription drugs, they’re indicted. . . .
One last cheering thought: Corporate corruption gives al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other Muslim radicals second thoughts about messing with the United States. If we’ll screw our own grandmothers in the stock market, God knows what we’ll do to them.

Methinks we ought to spend a little more time working on that Congressional corruption angle, P.J. You’re slowing down since you got married and had kids. But this is a pretty good piece, if a bit short.