Christmas or Winter Holiday?

Writing for Slate, Michelle Goldberg says that Christmas is doing just fine and implies that anyone who thinks the holiday is under attack is buying into a conspiracy theory - either one from 1958 put forth by the John Birch Society or an older one ascribed to by Henry Ford. The John Birch theory was that the UN was going to replace all of the signs fo Christmas with secular UN symbols. Ford worried about the influence of the International Jew.

[...] one can in fact offer Christmas greetings without legal counsel. Christmas trees are permitted in public schools. (They're considered secular symbols.) Nativity scenes are allowed on public property, although if the government erects one, it has to be part of a larger display that also includes other, secular signs of the holiday season, or displays referring to other religions. (The operative Supreme Court precedent is 1984's Lynch v. Donnelly, where the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a city-sponsored Christmas display including a crèche, reindeer, a Christmas tree, candy-striped poles and a banner that read "Seasons Greetings" was permissible. "The display is sponsored by the city to celebrate the Holiday and to depict the origins of that Holiday," the majority wrote. "These are legitimate secular purposes.") Students are allowed to distribute religious holiday cards and literature in school. If the administration tries to stop them, the ACLU will step in to defend the students' free-speech rights, as they did in 2003 when teenagers in Massachusetts were suspended for passing out candy canes with Christian messages.

In fact, there is no war on Christmas. What there is, rather, is a burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union. It's a myth that can be self-fulfilling, as school board members and local politicians believe the false conservative claim that they can't celebrate Christmas without getting sued by the ACLU and thus jettison beloved traditions, enraging citizens and perpetuating a potent culture-war meme. This in turn furthers the myth of an anti-Christmas conspiracy.

In fact, if you search the ACLU's web site for "Christmas" you find several press releases about the ACLU standing up for people's rights to celebrate.

Goldberg goes on to say:

In order to prove this conspiracy, Gibson, O'Reilly and others like them gather anecdotes from around the country of officials putting petty restrictions on the speech of aggrieved Christians. Some of these are exaggerated, some legitimate, but none support their paranoid claims of a vast secular-humanist conspiracy.

So is it all overstated? Just a few incidents pulled from across the country? I don't think so. Here is Columbus, Ohio both the official city and state trees are "Holiday Trees". Here is the official press release for the City's tree lighting.

By tradition, the busy elves at Columbus Recreation and Parks annually produce the City Hall Holiday Display and Tree Lighting Ceremony for the citizens of Columbus. City Hall Square is aglow with thousands of miniature white lights that accentuate the city’s holiday tree and seasonal display. The ceremony features a performance from the Columbus Children’s Choir, and culminates with the Mayor, City Council, and friends throwing the “official” switch, signaling Santa Claus' grand arrival.

Join Columbus City Officials at 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday, November 29, at City Hall as they kick off the holiday season with the lighting of the City Hall Holiday Tree. This annual tradition unites Columbus residents in recognition of the season of giving and celebrates the efforts of the Columbus business community to make downtown your family's destination for the holidays. City Hall is located at Broad and Front Streets with parking nearby

So in Columbus, at least, it is a "Holiday Tree". The state house banished Christmas years ago. I remember an attempt at bringing people downtown in the mid-1990s. They had a stage show, displays, and light effects that projected a train onto the state house while projecting candles onto the pillars. A candle was as close as they got to any traditional Christmas symbol and the word itself was never spoken.

Even further back my sister-in-law, a Columbus school teacher, said that they had been told not to call it a "Christmas break". She said that the teachers were singing "We wish you a merry winter holiday...".

When she was in grade school, my daughter came home with a song about Chirstmas and Hanukah being the same, "they're both the winter holiday".

As Goldberg points out, none of this is required. Public officials simply think that they have to act this way. They think so because the ACLU does in fact try to eliminate a lot of Christmas trapings from public life. The Canada Free Press says:

The good news is that the ACLU has backed down and has lost some of its legal cases to eliminate "Christmas" from our vocabulary. In August of this year, the Bossier Parish School District in Louisiana shut down an ACLU attack, and in July a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously ruled that a woman who brought a suit against Christmas displays in Cranston, Rhode Island, had no standing to bring her claim. There are a score of other victories that the ADF has had throughout the nation.

None of these cases appear on the ACLU's own web site search. They cherry picked cases that make themselves look good and hide the others. Remember, this is an organization that has at least one full time employee devoted to removing religious symbols from municipal seals.

Then there is the corporate policy of stores such as Walmart and Target where employees are instructed to tell shoppers "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Walmart went a bit too far with this earlier this year when a search for "Christmas" on its web page informed you that you were being redirected to their "holiday page".

With the news media hitting us over the head with updates on "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday", you would think that the stores might want to remind you why you are giving them so much of your money.

With local examples so easy to find, an individual can be excused for thinking that there is some sort of attack on Christmas. Is it a conspiracy?

In order to qualify as a conspiracy the attack has to be planned and coordinated. I don't think that either condition exists.

What is happening instead is two separate but intertwined trends. The first is that there is an effort by secular liberals to remove religion from public spaces as much as possible. This includes the ACLU attacks on any sort of religious item in a municipal Christmas display. It also includes a genuine effort to be inclusive to non-Christians.

Mainly, though, it revolved around an attempt to emulate European-style secularism. In modern Europe any public display of religion is considered bad taste. The French claim that there, everyone is Catholic and no one believes (somehow this slogan misses the 10% muslum population).

These people ARE attacking parts of Christmas. It is not coordinated and most of them would deny that it is an attack.

The other trend at work is people trying to keep a low profile. In the Christmas version of zero-tollerance, they have decided that it is easest to eliminate all references to Christmas. This probably accounts for most of the assault on Christmas with the multi-culturists coming in second.

How ironic that it is people who are attempting to offend no one are offending lots of people.

On the bright side, Washington, DC just changed their tree back to a Christmas tree.

Christmas or Winter Holiday?

Writing for Slate, Michelle Goldberg says that Christmas is doing just fine and implies that anyone who thinks the holiday is under attack is buying into a conspiracy theory - either one from 1958 put forth by the John Birch Society or an older one ascribed to by Henry Ford. The John Birch theory was that the UN was going to replace all of the signs fo Christmas with secular UN symbols. Ford worried about the influence of the International Jew.

[...] one can in fact offer Christmas greetings without legal counsel. Christmas trees are permitted in public schools. (They're considered secular symbols.) Nativity scenes are allowed on public property, although if the government erects one, it has to be part of a larger display that also includes other, secular signs of the holiday season, or displays referring to other religions. (The operative Supreme Court precedent is 1984's Lynch v. Donnelly, where the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a city-sponsored Christmas display including a crèche, reindeer, a Christmas tree, candy-striped poles and a banner that read "Seasons Greetings" was permissible. "The display is sponsored by the city to celebrate the Holiday and to depict the origins of that Holiday," the majority wrote. "These are legitimate secular purposes.") Students are allowed to distribute religious holiday cards and literature in school. If the administration tries to stop them, the ACLU will step in to defend the students' free-speech rights, as they did in 2003 when teenagers in Massachusetts were suspended for passing out candy canes with Christian messages.

In fact, there is no war on Christmas. What there is, rather, is a burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union. It's a myth that can be self-fulfilling, as school board members and local politicians believe the false conservative claim that they can't celebrate Christmas without getting sued by the ACLU and thus jettison beloved traditions, enraging citizens and perpetuating a potent culture-war meme. This in turn furthers the myth of an anti-Christmas conspiracy.

In fact, if you search the ACLU's web site for "Christmas" you find several press releases about the ACLU standing up for people's rights to celebrate.

Goldberg goes on to say:

In order to prove this conspiracy, Gibson, O'Reilly and others like them gather anecdotes from around the country of officials putting petty restrictions on the speech of aggrieved Christians. Some of these are exaggerated, some legitimate, but none support their paranoid claims of a vast secular-humanist conspiracy.

So is it all overstated? Just a few incidents pulled from across the country? I don't think so. Here is Columbus, Ohio both the official city and state trees are "Holiday Trees". Here is the official press release for the City's tree lighting.

By tradition, the busy elves at Columbus Recreation and Parks annually produce the City Hall Holiday Display and Tree Lighting Ceremony for the citizens of Columbus. City Hall Square is aglow with thousands of miniature white lights that accentuate the city’s holiday tree and seasonal display. The ceremony features a performance from the Columbus Children’s Choir, and culminates with the Mayor, City Council, and friends throwing the “official” switch, signaling Santa Claus' grand arrival.

Join Columbus City Officials at 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday, November 29, at City Hall as they kick off the holiday season with the lighting of the City Hall Holiday Tree. This annual tradition unites Columbus residents in recognition of the season of giving and celebrates the efforts of the Columbus business community to make downtown your family's destination for the holidays. City Hall is located at Broad and Front Streets with parking nearby

So in Columbus, at least, it is a "Holiday Tree". The state house banished Christmas years ago. I remember an attempt at bringing people downtown in the mid-1990s. They had a stage show, displays, and light effects that projected a train onto the state house while projecting candles onto the pillars. A candle was as close as they got to any traditional Christmas symbol and the word itself was never spoken.

Even further back my sister-in-law, a Columbus school teacher, said that they had been told not to call it a "Christmas break". She said that the teachers were singing "We wish you a merry winter holiday...".

When she was in grade school, my daughter came home with a song about Chirstmas and Hanukah being the same, "they're both the winter holiday".

As Goldberg points out, none of this is required. Public officials simply think that they have to act this way. They think so because the ACLU does in fact try to eliminate a lot of Christmas trapings from public life. The Canada Free Press says:

The good news is that the ACLU has backed down and has lost some of its legal cases to eliminate "Christmas" from our vocabulary. In August of this year, the Bossier Parish School District in Louisiana shut down an ACLU attack, and in July a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously ruled that a woman who brought a suit against Christmas displays in Cranston, Rhode Island, had no standing to bring her claim. There are a score of other victories that the ADF has had throughout the nation.

None of these cases appear on the ACLU's own web site search. They cherry picked cases that make themselves look good and hide the others. Remember, this is an organization that has at least one full time employee devoted to removing religious symbols from municipal seals.

Then there is the corporate policy of stores such as Walmart and Target where employees are instructed to tell shoppers "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Walmart went a bit too far with this earlier this year when a search for "Christmas" on its web page informed you that you were being redirected to their "holiday page".

With the news media hitting us over the head with updates on "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday", you would think that the stores might want to remind you why you are giving them so much of your money.

With local examples so easy to find, an individual can be excused for thinking that there is some sort of attack on Christmas. Is it a conspiracy?

In order to qualify as a conspiracy the attack has to be planned and coordinated. I don't think that either condition exists.

What is happening instead is two separate but intertwined trends. The first is that there is an effort by secular liberals to remove religion from public spaces as much as possible. This includes the ACLU attacks on any sort of religious item in a municipal Christmas display. It also includes a genuine effort to be inclusive to non-Christians.

Mainly, though, it revolved around an attempt to emulate European-style secularism. In modern Europe any public display of religion is considered bad taste. The French claim that there, everyone is Catholic and no one believes (somehow this slogan misses the 10% muslum population).

These people are attacking parts of Christmas. It is not coordinated and most of them would deny that it is an attack.

The other trend at work is people trying to keep a low profile. In the Christmas version of zero-tollerance, they have decided that it is easest to eliminate all references to Christmas. This probably accounts for most of the assault on Christmas with the multi-culturists coming in second.

How ironic that it is people who are attempting to offend no one are offending lots of people.

On the bright side, Washington, DC just changed their tree back to a Christmas tree.

Christmas or Holiday?

Writing for Slate, Michelle Goldberg says that Christmas is doing just fine and implies that anyone who thinks the holiday is under attack is buying into a conspiracy theory - either one from 1958 put forth by the John Birch Society or an older one ascribed to by Henry Ford. The John Birch theory was that the UN was going to replace all of the signs fo Christmas with secular UN symbols. Ford worried about the influence of the International Jew.

[...] one can in fact offer Christmas greetings without legal counsel. Christmas trees are permitted in public schools. (They're considered secular symbols.) Nativity scenes are allowed on public property, although if the government erects one, it has to be part of a larger display that also includes other, secular signs of the holiday season, or displays referring to other religions. (The operative Supreme Court precedent is 1984's Lynch v. Donnelly, where the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a city-sponsored Christmas display including a crèche, reindeer, a Christmas tree, candy-striped poles and a banner that read "Seasons Greetings" was permissible. "The display is sponsored by the city to celebrate the Holiday and to depict the origins of that Holiday," the majority wrote. "These are legitimate secular purposes.") Students are allowed to distribute religious holiday cards and literature in school. If the administration tries to stop them, the ACLU will step in to defend the students' free-speech rights, as they did in 2003 when teenagers in Massachusetts were suspended for passing out candy canes with Christian messages.

In fact, there is no war on Christmas. What there is, rather, is a burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union. It's a myth that can be self-fulfilling, as school board members and local politicians believe the false conservative claim that they can't celebrate Christmas without getting sued by the ACLU and thus jettison beloved traditions, enraging citizens and perpetuating a potent culture-war meme. This in turn furthers the myth of an anti-Christmas conspiracy.

In fact, if you search the ACLU's web site for "Christmas" you find several press releases about the ACLU standing up for people's rights to celebrate.

Goldberg goes on to say:

In order to prove this conspiracy, Gibson, O'Reilly and others like them gather anecdotes from around the country of officials putting petty restrictions on the speech of aggrieved Christians. Some of these are exaggerated, some legitimate, but none support their paranoid claims of a vast secular-humanist conspiracy.

So is it all overstated? Just a few incidents pulled from across the country? I don't think so. Here is Columbus, Ohio both the official city and state trees are "Holiday Trees". Here is the official press release for the City's tree lighting.

By tradition, the busy elves at Columbus Recreation and Parks annually produce the City Hall Holiday Display and Tree Lighting Ceremony for the citizens of Columbus. City Hall Square is aglow with thousands of miniature white lights that accentuate the city’s holiday tree and seasonal display. The ceremony features a performance from the Columbus Children’s Choir, and culminates with the Mayor, City Council, and friends throwing the “official” switch, signaling Santa Claus' grand arrival.

Join Columbus City Officials at 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday, November 29, at City Hall as they kick off the holiday season with the lighting of the City Hall Holiday Tree. This annual tradition unites Columbus residents in recognition of the season of giving and celebrates the efforts of the Columbus business community to make downtown your family's destination for the holidays. City Hall is located at Broad and Front Streets with parking nearby

So in Columbus, at least, it is a "Holiday Tree". The state house banished Christmas years ago. I remember an attempt at bringing people downtown in the mid-1990s. They had a stage show, displays, and light effects that projected a train onto the state house while projecting candles onto the pillars. A candle was as close as they got to any traditional Christmas symbol and the word itself was never spoken.

Even further back my sister-in-law, a Columbus school teacher, said that they had been told not to call it a "Christmas break". She said that the teachers were singing "We wish you a merry winter holiday...".

When she was in grade school, my daughter came home with a song about Chirstmas and Hanukah being the same, "they're both the winter holiday".

As Goldberg points out, none of this is required. Public officials simply think that they have to act this way. They think so because the ACLU does in fact try to eliminate a lot of Christmas trapings from public life. The Canada Free Press says:

The good news is that the ACLU has backed down and has lost some of its legal cases to eliminate "Christmas" from our vocabulary. In August of this year, the Bossier Parish School District in Louisiana shut down an ACLU attack, and in July a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously ruled that a woman who brought a suit against Christmas displays in Cranston, Rhode Island, had no standing to bring her claim. There are a score of other victories that the ADF has had throughout the nation.

None of these cases appear on the ACLU's own web site search. They cherry picked cases that make themselves look good and hide the others. Remember, this is an organization that has at least one full time employee devoted to removing religious symbols from municipal seals.

Then there is the corporate policy of stores such as Walmart and Target where employees are instructed to tell shoppers "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Walmart went a bit too far with this earlier this year when a search for "Christmas" on its web page informed you that you were being redirected to their "holiday page".

With the news media hitting us over the head with updates on "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday", you would think that the stores might want to remind you why you are giving them so much of your money.

With local examples so easy to find, an individual can be excused for thinking that there is some sort of attack on Christmas. Is it a conspiracy?

In order to qualify as a conspiracy the attack has to be planned and coordinated. I don't think that either condition exists.

What is happening instead is two separate but intertwined trends. The first is that there is an effort by secular liberals to remove religion from public spaces as much as possible. This includes the ACLU attacks on any sort of religious item in a municipal Christmas display. It also includes a genuine effort to be inclusive to non-Christians.

Mainly, though, it revolved around an attempt to emulate European-style secularism. In modern Europe any public display of religion is considered bad taste. The French claim that there, everyone is Catholic and no one believes (somehow this slogan misses the 10% muslum population).

These people are attacking parts of Christmas. It is not coordinated and most of them would deny that it is an attack.

The other trend at work is people trying to keep a low profile. In the Christmas version of zero-tollerance, they have decided that it is easest to eliminate all references to Christmas. This probably accounts for most of the assault on Christmas with the multi-culturists coming in second.

How ironic that it is people who are attempting to offend no one are offending lots of people.

On the bright side, Washington, DC just changed their tree back to a Christmas tree.

Drip Drip Drip

It seems like everyday something bad happened in Iraq and made the front page. I never see good news, at least not as a headline. Last week some prominent Sunnis indicated that they want to stop fighting and join the government. That was a major story on MSNBC for about an hour then it was removed and appended at the end of a story about the most recent bombing.

I know that several operations have been conducted against insurgents but none of them has been covered since the original one a year ago. Here are accounts of a few recent operations.

The road to the Bagdad airport is finally safe. It made the news constantly when it was dangerous but no one has bothered to report that it is now safe. It gets mentioned in passing. This gem is in the middle of a Fareed Zakaria piece about Iraq in general:

To understand the change, look at the airport road to Baghdad. For two years, when reporters would ask how it was possible that the mightiest military in history could not secure a five-kilometer stretch of road, the military responded with long, jargon-filled lectures on the inherent weakness of long supply lines and the complex nature of Baghdad's urban topography. Then one day this summer the military was ordered to secure the road and use more troops if necessary. Presto. Using Iraqi forces, the road was secured. Similar strategies have made cities like Najaf, Mosul, Tall Afar and even Fallujah much safer today than they were a year ago.

No wonder public opinion keeps turning against the war.

I don't think that the MSM is specifically trying to turn the nation against the war. I think that they are trying to be fair in a very warped way.

When the war first began everyone had embedded reporters who fed back enthusiastic stories about their experiences with the military. Then came the backlash. The stories were true but they were not the whole story. Critics of the war complained that stories of military success do not address larger questions about the validity of the war.

So the reporting we are seeing now is a reaction to that critisism. The MSM does not want to be seen as cheering for the Bush administration so positive stories are ignored or buried at the end of negative stories. Every death, be it American or Iraqi, is front page news.

It is a constant drip of one bad thing after another. With no good news, the idea of a quagmire seems more and more likely.

Other reporting is being slanted. When I heard the first reports about Murtha's call to cut and run I was given the impression that he had been for the war and had switched position. In fact, he was never for the war. His miltary history and general conservative voting pattern was given but his positions on the war were glossed over. In fact, he was always against it. The only new part was his call to bring the troops home immediately.

Strangely, Bush's plan all along has been to build a stable, democratic government in Iraq and to bring home American troops as Iraqis can replace them. Suddenly this is being seen as a compromise.

A little honest reporting would be nice.

What Did New Orleans Do to Us?

From MSNBC.com:

New Orleans Times-Picayune writer Jarvis DeBerry opened his column Tuesday morning asking, “I wonder what New Orleans did to the rest of the country that makes them hate us so?”

“It's very insulting and condescending,” says DeBerry, “to suggest that New Orleans, because of our geography, is somehow not worth the effort that would be put into San Francisco, Miami or Chicago or Boston or any other great city.”

This is a childish statement. A child breaks his toy and asks for a new one. When the parent says no he starts crying, "You don't love me."

New Orleans is broken and they want the rest of the country to buy them a new city. That gives us a lot of say in the process and that's what they did to us - they asked for our money.

If a city is knocked down by an earthquake then the building codes are amended before replacements go up making the new buildings less suseptable to future events. The same is true for most flood plains. Once your house is flooded out you can collect flood insurance but you have to rebuild elsewhere (this isn't enforced often enough but that's another post). But New Orleans wants to do it just the same. The only difference is that they want us to build a bigger wall around the city.

Rebuilding is expensive. It is also expensive to build a levee that can handle anything. This is why they under-built the existing levees - bigger ones cost too much. Then there is maintenance on the levees. That adds millions per year in upkeep costs.

Plus there are the floodwalls along the canals. In retrospect these were a collosal mistake but current proposals are to repalce them with ones that have deeper pilings. This may or may not help. Since one major breech was caused by a barge hitting the wall, deeper pilings may not be much of a guarentee.

And all of this so that new houses can be built 25 feet below the water level on land that is sinking.

As long as it is someone else's money, I don't care. They can assume the risk and take the loss if there is more flooding. Once my money is involved, though, I get a say.

I've only seen a small portion of New Orleans - mainly the French Quarter and the Garden District. I have no attachment to the 9th Ward so to me, it is an obvious choice - move to higher ground.

That's not hate. It's just common sense.

New Orleans is Doomed (Maybe)

60 Minutes aired a segment on New Orleans that included some quotes from Tim Kusky, a professor of earth sciences at St. Louis University and a flood control expert. Kusky says that the Mississippi Delta is eroding so fast that the coastline will pass New Orleans before the end of the century leaving the city as a bowl in an ocean. His advise is to move the city.

“Because New Orleans is going to be 15 to 18 feet below sea level, sitting off the coast of North America surrounded by a 50- to 100-foot-tall levee system to protect the city,” explains Kusky.

He says the city will be completely surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico just 90 years from now.

“That’s the projection, because we are losing land on the Mississippi Delta at a rate of 25 to 30 square miles per year. That’s two acres per hour that are sinking below sea level,” says Kusky.

Note - locally a football game ran over and pre-empted the broadcast but the essentials are here.

Not everyone agrees. The Times-Picayune, which has a vested interest, has a story on its website that quotes rival scientists as disagreeing.

In an interview Monday, Kusky said his projection of the city becoming an island was “based on a statement made by the director of the U.S. Geological Survey” in 2000.

But University of Texas at Austin geology Professor Charles G. Groat, who was then director of the U.S. Geological Survey, flatly disagreed with Kusky’s conclusions.

Groat said Kusky relied on “an off-hand comment that has often been repeated” that was included in a University of New Orleans magazine piece that compared New Orleans to Atlantis.

“No, no, no,” Groat said of Kusky’s island image. “You’ve got a lot of things between the city of New Orleans and the edge of the sea, and they’re not going away.”

There are other things going on, also. The Mississippi naturally changes course regularly. The Army Corps of Engineers keeps changing it back. Otherwise, the Port of New Orleans would have been left landlocked decades ago.

In addition, in an effort to keep the river from silting up they built a channel that funels the river silt into the Gulf. This is a major cause for the erosion of the Delta. The natural silt that would replenish it no longer reaches it.

Some people have suggested a massive effort to restore the Delta or at least to slow the erosion. The problem is that this is means letting nature direct the river again and we are back to the river wandering.

All of this is in the future. In the present we have a city that only has minimal protection from major weather events. The levees are fairly solid but the floodwalls that line the canals are a disaster. It appears that they were built on unsuitable ground and were not properly monitored.

This was done because it was politically easier to build narrow walls than to build wide levees in residential neighborhoods. The floodwalls are not as strong, the ground they sit on turns marshy, and sub-surface water barriers were not effective.

Similarly, the 9th Ward exists in the first place because if was politically easier to build below the water level than to tell people to go elsewhere.

The same politics are pushing for New Orleans to be rebuilt just as it was. The problem is that this will cost a fortune. Politics in Washington may trump local politics.

I've said before, I think that many of New Orlean's poor would be better off elsewhere. New Orleans was just too poor for its population. Unemployment and crime were far higher than in the rest of the country.

To an outsider, it makes little sense to rebuild houses in a flood zone so that the residents can go back to living in poverty.

But you can't say this in New Orleans without someone calling you a racist.

Ohio's "Stolen" Election

On November 8, 2005, Ohio's state issue 1 passed and issues 2-5 failed. Issue 1 authorized the state to issue bonds and spend the money promoting jobs and technology. Issues 2-5 were voter reform measures being pushed by Democrats and MoveOn.org.

According to a recent article in the Columbus Free Press (and picked up by a poster for the Huffington Blog), the election was fixed. All of the issues actually passed. Their reasoning? A Columbus Dispatch poll published November 9 showed all of the issues passing and the Dispatch polls have a history of being the most accurate polls in Ohio.

What happened? According to Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, the state installed new voting machines in 44 counties (around half the state) and these were all controlled by Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell using hidden controls planted by the manufacturer, Diebold.

Their proof? The Dispatch poll.

And thus the possible explanations for the staggering defeats of Issues Two through Five boil down to two: either the Dispatch polling---dead accurate for Issue One---was wildly wrong beyond all possible statistical margin of error for Issues 2-5, or the electronic machines on which Ohio and much of the nation conduct their elections were hacked by someone wanting to change the vote count.

Before we pronounce democracy as we know it dead, we need to examine the other possibility, that the Dispatch poll could have been wrong.

To do this, you need to know some background information on how the Dispatch poll works and how the campaigns were conducted. Fitrakis and Wasserman neglected to provide this. They simple take it as a given that the poll is always correct.

First, the Dispatch poll is mainly a mail-in poll. Most pollsters reject mail polls as inaccurate. The dispatch defends their methodology because the act of having to fill out and mail a poll tends to select only people who will actually vote. Also, their track record normally speaks for itself. Despite using a methodology that is considered dated and inaccurate, they are usually the most accurate poll in the state. No one has ever been able to fully explain it, not even the Dispatch.

The important thing here is that mail polls are slow. Phone polls are usually conducted over a day or two but a mail poll takes between ten to twenty days. That means that a large portion of the poll was being conducted early in October.

This is important because of how the campaign on issues 2-5 was conducted. The pro-passage people started getting their message out early. The first yard signs went up Labor Day weekend. TV ads started in late September.

In contrast, the anti-campaign was slow to organize. Their yard signs didn't go up until mid-October with their TV ads following.

Newspaper endorsements are usually handed out in reverse order. The most important races are endorsed last. The state issues were the only state-wide races so they came out in late October. No Ohio newspaper endorsed all of the issues and some, like the Dispatch, rejected 2-5 completely. This was featured in the last-minute anti ads.

The timing here is critical and unusual. For much of the period that the Dispatch was conducting its poll the pro-issue campaign was the only one running. Then at the last minute an effective anti-passage campaign was waged, after much of the Dispatch poll had been conducted.

There is an old truism that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In this case, Fitrakis and Wasserman are claiming that the entire voting system of Ohio has been compromised but all they offer is a single poll. They did not make any effort to break down the poll results with the actual results and find a correlation with counties that got new voting machines. They didn't even quote any other polls nor did they examine the Dispatch poll methodology for possible errors.

That's because these two men are conspiracy mongers. Everywhere they look they see conspiracies. They knew as soon as the election results were posted that there must be a conspiracy involved. They looked for supporting evidence but they didn't look for opposing evidence nor did they examine their supporting evidence very closely.

Walmart & Christmas

Over the weekend a friend mentioned a controversy going on with Walmart. It seems that the Catholic League has a couple of objections to Walmart's policy of referring to Christmas as "the holidays". They instruct employees to wish customers "Happy Holidays" and if you do a search on "Christmas" on their web site it tells you that you are being re-directed to their holiday page. This does not happen if you search on Hanukkah or Kwanzaa. They complained and got this email reply.

Walmart is a world wide organization and must remain conscious of this. The majority of the world still has different practices other than "Christmas" which is an ancient tradition that has its roots in Siberian shamanism. The colors associated with "Christmas" red and white are actually a representation of the aminita mascera mushroom. Santa is also borrowed from the Caucuses, mistletoe from the Celts, yule log from the Goths, the time from the Visigoth and the tree from the worship of Baal. It is a wide wide world.

When they complained to Walmart headquarters, they got this reply from someone named Kirby:

"As a retailer, we recognize some of our customers may be shopping for Chanukah or Kwanza gifts during this time of year and we certainly want these customers in our stores and to feel welcome, just as we do those buying for Christmas. As an employer, we recognize the significance of the Christmas holiday among our family of associates and close our stores in observance, the only day during the year that we are closed."

The Catholic League called for a boycott. This has been resolved. Kirby was fired and the Walmart web site no longer re-directs you.

My friend was upset at the treatment that Kirby received since she felt that he was fired for telling the truth.

There are several issues here. First, should Kirby have been fired? Yes. Low level employees are never allowed to make up their own press releases on behalf of the company. The fact that this led to a boycott shows why.

Second point - is Walmart's "holiday" policy a good one? No, for several reasons. This is a company whose owners have made a selling point of their own Christianity. They refuse to carry some magazines and CDs and dictate a milder content for others on the basis of their faith. Customers know that they are dealing with a Christian company and should have come to terms with that.

Also, to most Christians, Christmas and Easter are the big two holidays. Hanukkah is a minor holiday. Kwanzaa is not a religious holiday at all. There is no reason that an African-American cannot celebrate both. Something like 99% of American-born blacks are Christian so even those who celebrate Kwanzaa should not be offended by a clerk wishing them a merry Christmas.

At the same time, Walmart is already pushing Christmas down our throats. The displays have been up since late October. There is no reason for an employee to be wishing anyone anything in November when all of the holidays in question are in late December.

My recommendation would be to give the regular "Thank you for shopping at Walmart" to anyone who was not specifically buying holiday-related merchandise and even then, wait until December.

Third Point - was the Catholic League justified in being upset? Yes. You just don't tell a religious leader that one of his major holidays is a bunch of pagan rituals.

Final Point - how much Kirby's history of Christmas was true? Not much. The date of Christmas came directly from the Roman Saturnalia. Any relationship with Siberia would be pretty strained. The main Christmas colors are red and green, not red and white. Red and green have roots in druidic beliefs but were incorporated into Christian symbolism as referring to Jesus and Mary by the middle ages. Red and white as Christmas colors come from candy canes. These were white until the 20th century when technology allowed them to be painted like a barber's pole The red there goes back to when barbers were also surgeons.

Santa is an American invention although he was inspired by St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children and Holland (so Dutch children got treats on St. Nicholas Day). Mistletoe and yule logs are pagan but are also very tiny parts of Christmas. When was the last time you burned a true yule log - one big enough to burn for twelve days?

The funny thing is that in relating all of this, Kirby was making a case for how universal Christmas is.

Lying About Lying

Since the CIA leak investigation didn't produce much, Democrats took up the strategy of claiming that Bush lied. We hear it from them again and again. Bush lied. He distorted and cherry-picked intelligence. A well-written answer for that is here. The main point is that too many Democrats also said that Saddam was re-arming.

The current Democratic response is to say that Congress didn't have access to all intelligence. They only got a summary. While true, it does not explain why the Clinton administration was saying the same things as Bush.

So why are they doing this? The obvious reason is that they hope to cripple Bush politically. Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on why democrats who voted for the war have signed on to the Bush Lied campaign.

Because, as I've noted, Democratic politicians voted for the war, but their activist donor base opposes it. They're boxed in, and claiming that they were misled seems like a way for them to explain away the contradiction while going on the offensive against Bush.

But there is more to it than that. Yes, some democratic leaders in Congress seem to be forced to take this route but they are just going along with the MoveOn/Sheehan/Moore wing. These people really believe it.

Look at all of the things that this group accuses Bush of doing. While numerous sources are on record as saying that Saddam was re-arming, Bush knew otherwise then pushed the war, anyway.

According to these people, Bush decided to go to war with Iraq around 9/13/2001. Some even say that he decided to go to war sometime in 1999 in order to raise political capital. This is only one of the reasons given for the war. The real reason - that given Iraq's sponsorship of terrorism and use of WMDs, Saddam was too dangerous to stay in power in a post-9/11 world - is never even considered.

Instead we are told that Bush wanted to raise political capital, that he wanted to enrich Halliburton, that he was seeking revenge for a plot to kill his daddy, that he wanted to clean up the blot on his daddy's record (leaving Saddam in power), or that it was a private feud between the Bushes and Saddam.

These people look at everything that Bush does in the worst possible light. His tax cuts were not to stimulate the economy, they were just to benefit the rich (and no one but the rich). Standard reviews of new environmental actions are portrayed as rolling back existing regulations. I look at Bush's growing deficit and attribute it to a moderate who doesn't want to cause the pain that tight fiscal controls would induce. The anti-Bush crowd claims that he is trying to cripple the government's future by running up the deficit.

And world-wide terrorism is a response to Bush. Nevermind that planning for 9/11 started in 1998 or earlier.

Dr. Sanity has a good piece on this. It is his opinion that democrats are afraid of terrorists and are projecting their fears onto Bush as a defense mechanism.

Bush becomes the "criminal mastermind", so devious, so evil, that everything he says is a "lie", everything he does is part of a vast global conspiracy. His family has intimate ties to Bin Laden and the Saudis; He is trying to enrich his oil business friends; He is trying to avenge the insult to his father by getting rid of Saddam; He plans world domination etc. etc. I could go on an on, but you get the point.

There is probably something to this. He goes on to say:

What is most funny is that these psychologically naiive individuals simultaneously think of Bush as this "criminal mastermind"--a genius of evil; and also as a complete moron who isn't capable of uttering a sentence without making a hash of it; or that his brain is controlled by the equally evil Karl Rove.

That is why the CIA leak was so important to them. They were convinced that Rove would be arrested (preferably "frog-marched" out of the White House) and Bush would be denied his brain. Some of the more delusional also hoped that the probe would go onto include the entire run-up to the war but the big prize was always Rove. Don't forget that prominent democrats demanded his resignation as soon as Libby was arrested.

Dr. Sanity calls for democrats to act like adults and recognize the real threat. Too bad it's not going to happen. The democrats have already started their counter-attack. It boils down to ignoring any statements about Saddam made by the Clinton administration and insist that Bush manipulated what information Congress had access to. This may help the democrats but it hurts the country.

How Bad Was the Election?

The story I keep seeing on the news: Republicans lost two governor's races and all of Schwarzenegger's ballot initiatives lost. Bush's unpopularity is dragging down Republicans in general.

Here's a completely different spin;

Voters in California and Ohio voted down ballot initiatives seen as benefiting the minority party (in California they would have helped Republicans, in Ohio they would have helped Democrats). Ohio, a crucial swing-state, voted down issues two to one issues introduced in the wake of 2004's hard-fought election.

In other news, Democrats kept control of two governor's offices.

Sure looks different when you put it that way, doesn't it? Granted Ohio doesn't have a move star governor, but it is considered a swing state. If the issues had gone the other way I am sure that it would have been reported. After all, it could have affected control of Congress.

The MSM wrote their narrative before the first votes were cast. The election was yet another referendum on Bush so the only things that were reported were events that fit this narrative.

Believing Their Own Spin

At one point, Saddam had WMDs. These included poison gas, weaponized Anthrax, and a nuclear program that was close to producing atomic weaponry. After the Gulf war, he agreed to destroy these and UN weapons inspectors monitored his progress. Saddam kept making it harder for the inspectors to do their jobs, finally expelling them in 1998. It was universally assumed that this meant that he was re-arming. (Actually, he was trying to build long-range missiles which were also denied to him by the cease-fire agreement.)

When the Bush administration was making its case for war, they identified a number of reasons that Saddam should be overthrown but they decided to push the WMDs as the primary case (the Downing Street Memo referred to this a "fixing on WMDs".) At the time most prominent Democrats agreed. John Kerry told about going to the CIA and being personally assured that Saddam had WMDs.

The world assumed that Saddam had WMDs but the world was wrong. Saddam was convinced that the only thing that kept him safe from Iran was the threat of WMDs so he hinted that he still had them. Also, some expatriates from Iraq told stories about WMDs in order to incite an invasion.

The Democrats know this. They should have read the same reports that I have.

Yes, Bush said that Saddam had WMDs and Bush was wrong. But being wrong and lying are two different things. If Bush lied then so did Clinton, Gore, and Tony Blair, and a host of others.

Partly because of Joseph Wilson's op-ed column (the one that started the Plame leak investigation), the Bush-haters have been insisting that Bush knew that there were no WMDs and lied about it to the world. They've said this so often that they started believing it.

Many Bush-haters were expecting that the Plame investigation wouldn't stop with who leaked Plame's name. They expected it to continue into the entire WMD issue. When this did not happen, Democrats went ballistic. That is why they shut down the Senate last week. The Democrats were demanding a new investigation, one that would show that Bush lied.

They should be careful. They are not going to get what they want - a declaration that Bush lied, that he ordered reports to be changed, and that he created the forged niger/yellowcake document. It will not happen. The most that they can get is an admission that Bush believed some reports over others. Along the way all of the major Democrats will get tarred right along with Bush. That can't help anyone.

The whole "Bush lied" mantra is being used to try to de-legitamize the war. If they can show that we should not have started it then they can whip up support for an immediate withdrawal. That would be a disaster for Iraq which will degenerate into a nasty civil war, for the US which will lose all claim to superpower status, and for the world. The beneficiaries will be militant Islam which will be able to claim victory over the world's most powerful nation and the America-haters.

I doubt that most of the people chanting "Bush lied" have thought things through all the way. They are too busy calculating how to turn the country against Bush in time for the 2006 congressional elections.

It used to be that politics stopped at the border. No matter what internal politics were going on, polititians were united once the country went to war. The Democrats may soon find out why this was true. If they succeed in pulling down the Bush administration they will be faced with an enemy that they strengthened.

Dirty Tricks?

In a recent column, Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit) said:

What was the CIA thinking sending Joseph Wilson on a secret mission to look into nuclear weapons matters without swearing him to secrecy? It's almost as if the Agency -- whose director, George Tenet, had told President Bush that the case for WMD was a "slam dunk" -- actually wanted the mission to produce a hostile Op-Ed in the New York Times. Either that or they're just idiots, but either way it seems that some people at the CIA should be losing their jobs.

It is hard to believe that Wilson was not sworn to secrecy, or at least that he had to send any public statements to the CIA for approval. Not only was Wilson sent to Niger by the CIA, his wife works for them. Plus, as a former ambassador, he should know something about keeping secrets.

It is assumed that he felt so strongly about Bush's "falsehoods" that he had to go public but we now know that the report he turned in did not match his op-ed column.

The left has been totally accepting of Wilson and the CIA recently. This is because the CIA in general and Wilson in specific have been undercutting Bush. Still, it wasn't that long ago that the left thought that the CIA was worse than the KGB. There are still people who believe that the CIA is behind most of the world's drug trade. According to some theories, Crack was introduced into the US just to kill off minorities. The left has gone from blaming the world's ills on the CIA to supporting them unquestioningly.

So no one is looking critically at the CIA. The right is used to trusting them (at least somewhat) and the left has gotten over its hatred of them.

Still, the CIA's operations used to be know as dirty tricks.

Now, what if Wilson did pass his op-ed column past his wife's superiors? At the time, Wilson was maintaining that he had been sent by the Vice-President's office. That would inevitably lead to the following conversation:

Reporter: Is it true that you send Ambassador Wilson to Niger?
Vice-President Cheney: No, he was sent by the CIA.
Reporter: Why did they send him?
VP Cheney: His wife recommended him.
Reporter: What does she have to do with it?
VP Cheney: She works for the CIA.

You can substitute Karl Rove or Scooter Libby's names. It makes no difference. The important thing is that Wilson's column was bound to raise questions that would lead to the White House leaking Plame's identity. If the CIA approved the column ahead of time they should have seen this coming. They may even have been counting on it.

That would be a dirty trick.

Expectations and Reality

I checked the Huffington Post earlier today after the Scooter Libby indictments were announced. They are ecstatic, convinced that the trial will include a full investigation into the reasons for invading Iraq. They are sure that Bush knew that Iraq had disposed its WMDs and that the entire case was forged.

They base a lot of this on Joseph Wilson. He's the one who started the whole mess when he wrote an op-ed column claiming that the Vice-President's office sent him to Niger to investigate reports of Iraq trying to buy Uranium yellowcake. Wilson said that his report indicated that this never happened. What's more, he knew as soon as he saw the final report that it was wrong.

Robert Novak wrote a column stating that Wilson had not been sent by the Vice-President, he was sent by the CIA at the recommendation of his wife, a CIA employee. Wilson responded by complaining that his wife was a covert operative and that Novak had ruined her career and put her life in danger. He wrote a book on this, claiming that the administration was ruining his wife as a warning to others. The leak investigation came out of these complaints.

The left lapped it up. Wilson became a hero. Kerry signed him up as a foreign affairs advisor and hosted Wilson's web site.

Then reality caught up with Wilson. It seems that he had been less than honest. He was sent by the CIA instead of the Vice-President and his wife had recommended him for the position. His report indicated that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake and he had never seen the final report since he did not have security clearance for it.

His wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA employee but she was no longer doing covert foreign assignments. Moreover, it is possible that someone who read Novak's column might have looked up his wife's name and blown her cover but it is not that likely. By going public, Wilson made sure that the world knew who his wife was. Then they did a photo spread for Vanity Fair so everyone knew what she looks like (she wore a scarf and sunglasses as a disguise).

The left seems stuck on 2003. They do not admit that Wilson lied about the yellowcake nor do they recognize that Saddam is known to have had WMDs at one point - he even used them. There was no need for Bush to fake evidence.

Similarly, it is very unlikely that a trial of Libby will go beyond the leak investigation.

In many ways the left's reaction to Wilson is the same as to the forged TANG documents last year. In both cases, the evidence was too good to examine closely. The left needed them to be true so they didn't look too carefully. In both cases, even after the proof turned out to be wrong they refuse to admit it.

The guys over at Huffington have pinned their hopes on the wrong person. Wilson is a dead end and nothing involving his can lead to the investigation they want nor would that lead to the results they desire.

Back to the 19th Century

To hear most activists, all we need to do to stop global warming is buy hybrid cars instead of SUVs. Here is a more realistic account of what life will be like by 2020 in England if proposed programs are implemented.

IF you enjoy long hot baths while sipping chilled white wine, you may be in for a disappointment.

[...] Fridge-freezers may be banished and replaced with cold room pantries, and energy consumption could be rationed, as food was in the post-war years.
Innovations such as patio heaters, plasma televisions and electric toothbrushes would become labeled as antisocial in the energy-saving age, as would owning more than one car. According to the forecast, domestic central heating may also have to be heavily regulated

All of this will happen unless Britians immediately cut back energy use 20%.

Keep in mind that the standard of living in England lagged significantly behind the US through much of the 20th century. This article refers to central heating as being post-war but my first house had central heat and it was built in 1910. Neither that house nor my current one (1920) had anything like a "cold room pantry". Going back to room-heaters and cold-rooms would mean a jump of more than a century for most people.

The problem with the debate on global warming is that warming is presented in the most simplistic and alarmist terms (sometimes in cute flash animations). Solutions are presented as either cheap or money-creating. Critics are dismissed as oil company stooges.

The facts are: 1) Moderate warming has been occurring since the mid-19th century. 2) There is a great deal of evidence that the world was in a cold-spell from the 14th through the mid-19th centuries so some warming is expected. 3) Some component of the detected warming may have been human caused but no one has come up with a viable model to distinguish between natural and human-induced warming. 4) Warming will have to increase a great deal before any of the horror stories can happen. 5) There are significant benefits to a warmer world such as a longer growing season. These are never discussed or even acknowledged. 6) The costs of trying to reduce carbon emissions are enormous - far greater than world leaders let on. 7) The Kyoto protocols were never meant to stop global warming, they were only introduced as a first step with the real cuts coming later. Even with its modest cuts, Kyoto has been a colossal failure with most signatories being out of compliance.

The problem is that Green activists seized on warming as being a bad thing and use it to further their agenda. Currently, any time anything happens in the world, it is ascribed to global warming somehow. If we don't cut through all of the hysteria soon we may find ourselves living in conditions our grandparents were glad to leave behind.

Been Left so Long it Looks Like Center to Me

Eric Alterman wrote a couple of columns recently about the polerization of American politics - here and here. What got him started is the book Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy which maintains that Republicans have moved to the fringe right while Democrats are unchanged. This ties in with What's the Matter With What's the Matter With Kansas? which holds that Republicans exploit fringe issues in order to mask the real issues.

Alterman also quotes a poll showing that Americans align with Democrats on all of the important issues.

In a May survey published by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 65 percent of respondents said they favor providing health insurance to all Americans, even if it means raising taxes, and 86 percent said they favor raising the minimum wage. Seventy-seven percent said they believe the country "should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.'' A September Gallup Poll finds that 59 percent consider the Iraq War a mistake and 63 percent agree that US forces should be partially or completely withdrawn.

If this is so, then why do Republicans hold the majority, not only on the federal level, but also in most state and city governments? Obviously, either Republicans are inhumanly good at exploiting fringe issues or there is something wrong with Alterman's arguments.

One problem is that the parties are not defined by a few issues. Few people are single-issue voters. Most people vote for the people they trust, not the people who promise them the most. This is the flaw in What's the Matter With Kansas. It starts with the assumption that Democrats have the average workingman's best interests at heart and Republicans don't. By assuming that a few hot-button issues define the race (mainly universal insurance), the Democrats cannot understand why voters would turn them down.

Another problem is that there are a lot more big issues than the ones Alterman quotes and many of these do draw single-issue voters. Gun control is high on this list and Democrats are on the wrong end of that one. In fact Democrats are so dismissive of this issue that they seldom recognize it.

Then there is the way that the questions are worded. The one-line questions are pretty simplistic. There are trade-offs on all issues. Would 65% of Americans still agree if you asked "would you support universal health insurance even if it meant that your taxes would rise and the quality of your health care would decline?" What about this one, "the country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment even if it means losing your own job or home?" (A lot of people assume "whatever it takes means that other people will pay.)

Then there is what the fringe issues tell us about a candidate. Gay marriage is often given as an example of a fringe issue. It does not affect most Americans and it is used as a wedge issue, but... it also says a lot about how a candidate views his constituency. Traditionally the family is the heart of American life but the family unit has been under assault for decades. To people who believe in the family, gay marriage is yet one more attempt at devaluing the family. Candidates who support gay marriage are advertising that they have a different value set. On top of that, it indicates that the candidate is willing to make society-wide changes on the basis of tiny special-interest groups.

As for polarization, which party has moved? To me, it is the Democrats. Issues that once used to be limited to fringe elements are now mainstream. Members of Congress have asserted that President Bush caused September 11 in order to push his agenda. If an elected Republican had said something like that, he would have been censured by his own party. Al Gore, the 2000 standard bearer, repeatedly compares Bush to Hitler. Weeks after releasing a movie asserting that Afghanistan was only invaded so that an oil pipeline could be built and pronouncing Islamic terrorists to be freedom fighters, Michael Moore was given a place of honor at the Democratic National Convention.

Democrats are increasingly intolerant of average Americans. Instead of upholding Americans' right to worship, the ACLU has been trying to eliminate religion from public space. Howard Dean has announced that his base is the "Merlot Democrats". When your base is wine-drinking elitist you have left the middle.

The Republicans are having real problems right now. Katrina was a public relations disaster. Bush has a rebellion on his hands over the Supreme Court and spending. The Top Republican Congressional leaders have been implicated in criminal activity (although it is likely that both will be found innocent). The Plame leak investigation continues.

The problem for the Democrats is that public relations are not acting like a teeter-totter. Public perception of the Democrats has not gone up as the Republicans have gone down. Some of this is because people like Alterman keep telling the Democrats that their problems are not internal, they are just the victim of Karl Rove's dirty campaigning. For all their problems, the Republicans are still more in touch with the majority of Americans.

Telling Comment

Eric Alterman was reviewing the DVD collection of the 1950s Superman series. He led with this:

Those were the days, huh, when the “American way” was synonymous with “truth and justice.” Well of course, it never was. But it was a whole hellova lot more credible than under Messrs. Bush and Cheney.

He can't pass up an opertunity to denigrate Bush or America. The "Well of course, it never was." part is a nice summary of what he thinks of America, past and present. I would like to know if any country ever lived up to his high expectations (and why he hasn't moved there).

What's wrong with Walmart?

Last week Leno showed the premiere of a new animation by JibJab. They made some amazingly even-handed animations during last year's election. There was nothing even-handed about this. It was an attack on Walmart (under the name of "Big Boxmart".

It opens in a sweatshop in China making products ("crap") for Walmart. It then jumps to an American with a beer-belly going shopping, maxing out his credit cards on crap (they used that word a lot) that he didn't need. The next day his job was moved to China and he was stuck working at Walmart until death. Apparently it would have been ok for him to buy crap if it had been American made crap.

JibJab may have been a light-hearted cheap-shot but PBS's Frontline looked at the issue in detail (it was actually a repeat episode). After showing talking heads arguing facts over off-shoring, they closed with a segment on RCA, the last American TV manufacturer. The head of RCA said that he could compete with anyone on an even basis but Chinese TVs were being dumped in the US market and (horrors!) Walmart sided against him.

Lots of things were not said in this segment. The issue of dumping was passed over pretty quickly. Were TVs being dumped? Was there proof? How big an effect did this have on the market? These questions were not answered.

Something else that was unadressed is the whole question of why we were down to one US TV manufacturer? This takes a long view. When I first started paying attention to TV prices (around 1970) you could get a 13" black and white TV for around $100. A similar TV now costs $30. $100 will get you a 19" color TV (at Walmart). For $120, you can get a 13" TV with a built-in DVD player.

Figure in 35 years of inflation and today's TVs cost less than the profit margin on a 1970s TV. No one cares about who made the TV. You know it will work and have a good picture so buyers look for the most features in their price-range. TVs have become commodities.

For as long as I can remember, American manufacturers have had problems competing in commodities. Profits are razor thin and things like fluctuations in exchange rates can make all the difference.

That's why Americans don't make TVs any longer and why Walmart is full of Chinese goods. We go to Walmart for commodities. Frontline should have asked why Chinese companies can sell to Walmart cheaper than American companies.

But Walmart is not unique in this. I don't think that any of their competitors are any different, so why the fuss.

The Chinese angle is a recent twist to the anti-Walmart campaign. Other complaints are that their pay is too low and that they drive mom-and-pop businesses out of business.

I am always confused about these complaints. The mom-and-pop hardware store largely vanished decades ago, driven out by K-Mart, Sear Hardware, and other Walmart competitors. What's more, mom and pop may make a decent living from their hardware store but they usually pay minimum to their few employees. Walmart's average is nearly $10/hour plus benefits.

Why didn't anyone protest K-Mart back when they were the #1 retailer?

Granted Walmart is bigger and better than any of their competition. They are big enough to make unreasonable demands on suppliers and they are one of the top retailers of groceries, DVDs, music, magazines, and toys. To many on the left, big business is always bad. Big business equals big oppressors.

Again, that doesn't explain the lack of an anti-K-Mart or anti-Target campaign. So what is it?

I'm guessing that it is religion. The Walton family wears their religion on their sleeves. They refuse to carry soft-core skin magazines such as Maxim and they have forced alternate, cleaned-up versions of some CDs.

The left is secular and tends to be scared of anyone with a hint of Christianity.

I could be wrong about this. I've never seen anyone admit it in public, but I don't think so. As I have pointed out, no one ever complains about Walmart's competitors.

Trashing Condi

Moreen Dowd recently wrote a sneering column about Bush promoting unqualified women. One of her examples was Condoleeza Rice. Why was she incompetent? Because she didn't stop 9/11.

This has become a reflexive reaction among the left to Condi. She should have stopped the plot. After all, she was the security advisor. If she had just paid attention to the August memo "Bin Laden determined to strike inside the US" she would have deduced everything else.

Ok, at some level the person on top does take responsibility for what happens on her watch, but is this critisism justified?

Let's look at Richard Clark. He was the person in charge of monitoring Al Qaida during both the Clinton and early Bush administrations. While it was Rice's job to evaluate all threats to the US, it was his job to watch Bin Laden. If Rice didn't know about 9/11, it is because Clark didn't know about it to tell her.

Clark has an excuse. He blames everything on Bush. He claimed that Bush didn't shake the trees. Clinton was supposed to have asked all of his cabinet members constantly what they had done to stop terrorism. They in turn, asked the people below them. Eventually it got down to the guards at the Canadian boarder who recognized the millennium Bomber and arrested him. If Bush had just done as Clinton had done, 9/11 would not have happened.

Clark's account does not match what really happened. The boarder guard in question was never given any instructions about terrorists. He was looking for drug smugglers. When he saw someone who was visibly nervous he searched the man's car and found a bomb instead of drugs.

So Bush is off the hook. Shaking the trees didn't stop bombers, tight boarder control did. That puts Clark back on the hook.

So who cares? Clark left government service years ago while Rice is Secretary of State.

Except, Clark was also an advisor to John Kerry. Had Kerry won the election, Clark would certainly have gotten the job of National Security Advisor. This was a campaign point for Kerry. Everyone knew that the man who missed 9/11 would be given a high post on the Kerry administration.

So why no outrage? Why didn't any of Condi's many critics say anything? Because they don't really believe what they are saying. It's just an excuse.

Rethinking Colin Powell

In a recent column, Thomas Friedman once again attacked President Bush for attacking Iraq with too few troops. You would think that a smart man like Friedman would know why Bush didn't use more troops - he doesn't have them. An article last year in Slate did the math. Once you subtract the Navy and Air Force and allow for troop rotation and personnel needed to keep bases open, you only have around 80,000 troops left to constitute an occupation force. In order to boost the numbers to the 100,000-150,000 that we have had, Bush had to call up the reserves and short other areas.

Of course, Bush cannot stand up and tell the world that we don't have enough troops to occupy a 2nd rate, broken-down country like Iraq. Our reputation as a super power would be gone forever if he did. But we aren't really a super power any longer, at least not in terms of available troops.

We used to have a lot more troops. Under Reagan we had enough troops to fight two wars at once with enough left over to slow a Soviet invasion of Germany until more troops could be brought in.

After the end of the Cold War, Bush I cut the army back to enough troops to fight a single war. This was cut further under Clinton who assured that we only needed enough troops to fight one war at a time.

It would be easy to blame Bush I and Clinton for leaving the military cupboard bare but I blame Colin Powell and the infamous Powell Doctrine. While this is not how he phrased it, the Powell Doctrine boils down to the maxim that we should not get into a war with anyone unless we can crush them quickly then leave. He held that the American people are not able to sustain support for a war that lasts longer than a few weeks and that we should not stick around to put things back together. Further, we would rely on high-tech, low-risk attacks so that American troops were at lower risk than in training. Prior to 9/11, we bombed countries into submission then turned them over to the UN or NATO. With Iraq, we bombed them, ran over them with tanks, then established UN sanctions.

After the Gulf War, everyone was sold on the Powell Doctrine. That was how all future wars would be fought. We did not need a big occupying force because we would never occupy anyone. Bush I and Clinton bought it. It meant that they could cut the military and balance the budget.

September 11 changed our world view-point. We could no longer avoid fights just because they would get messy.

So here we are. We can vaporize anyone in the world. We can probably overthrow anyone short of China or Russia. But we cannot occupy them.

neither can anyone else. The few countries with larger militaries than we have (China, for example) do not have the supply lines needed to invade a distant enemy to say nothing about occupying them.

Ever since the USSR exploded their first atomic bomb, it was obvious that all-out wars between super powers were a thing of the past. Smaller regional conflicts are still possible and, as the world's remaining super power, we keep getting called in to stop the conflicts but, thanks to the Powell Doctrine, we are very limited on what we can actually accomplish.

Pointed Prizes

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2005 went to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency. I'm underwhelmed.

Maybe I'm not as innocent as I used to be but it seems like the Peace Prize has gotten so political as to render it meaningless. In 1992 the committee wanted to send a message about how evil Christopher Columbus and the Europeans were so they made a point of giving awards to Native Americans. They gave one to Jimmy (malaise) Carter as a pointed comment to George Bush of how they think an American president should ask. Now, with Iran and Korea pushing ahead with their nuclear programs, they give the award to the person who is supposed to stop this from happening. And they say that Bush rewards failure.

At least they didn't give it to the victims of nuclear weapons.

The Singularity is Coming, or Is It?

There has been a lot of buzz about a new book by Ray Kurzweil predicting "The Singularity". Here is one example. Here is another. This one goes into detail.

Basically, when the Singularity comes, humanity will merge with self-aware computers to become god-like. Normal humans will find themselves obsolete.

I'm not worried for a couple of reasons.

First, Kurzweil is predicting based on current trends. One of these is Moore's Law which says that the complexity of computer chips doubles every 18 months. Kurzweil uses this to predict how complex computers will be in 40 years.

The thing is, Moore's Law is actually Moore's Observation. Moore, a top engineer at HP at the time, observed in the 1970s how fast compuer complexity increased. This became self-fulfilling when the marketing people at Intel got ahold of it. Currenty Intel executives are convinced that their stock will drop precipitously if they fall behind Moore's Law so they throw enourmous resources at maintaining this rate. This means that rather than being a hard and fast law, it is a marketing concept.

Eventually Moore's Law will run into physics. To see what I mean, look at flight.

The Wright Brothers first flew in 1903. Their flight was nothing more than an extended hop. They realized this and kept it secret for nearly two years. By 1905 they had an airplane that could stay in the air for a half hour (until it ran out of fuel) and was fully controlable. It could fly at speeds of nearly 40 miles an hour.

Fifteen years later planes could fly reach speeds of over 100 miles per hour. By WWII jets were invented and the speed of sound was broken in 1947. The SR71 Blackhawk first flew in 1964. It could fly at mach 3.3 (three times the speed of sound).

So we went from 40 mph to 2,175 mph in sixty years. If we extropolate from there then we should have planes that can fly 10,000 mph or faster but the SR71 continues to be the fastest plane built. Flight ran into the laws of physics. Friction is a real problem at these speeds, both as drag and as heat.

This is happening with computers. Computer complexity is increased by making finer etching in silicon but we are approaching the limits. You cannot etch smaller than an atom.

Speed is another issue. Clock speeds keep increasing but there are limits here, also. We already hit the limits of memory. While engineers put more memory on a chip they have not made it ru any faster in some time. There are tricks for getting around thisbut they are tricks and they have their own limits.

So the idea of Moore's Law continuing for the next 40 years is unlikely.

The next problem with Kurzweil's predictions is self-aware computers. He assues that once computers are powerful enough they will be self-aware.There is no reason to think this. We think in ways that are very different from the way computers work. While scientists are researching exactly how we think, we do not know when this will be solved or how computers will need to be changed to simulate thought.

Kurzweil makes a lot of other predeictions dealing with genetics ond other sciences but I doubt that he is any closer with them.

Floodwalls Built on Sand

NBC aired a report saying that there were questions about the strength of the floodwalls lining the 17th Street Canal when they were built ten yeas ago. You can read a print version here.

A 1998 ruling, by an administrative judge for the Corps' Board of Contract Appeals, shows that the contractor, Pittman Construction, told the Corps that the soil and the foundation for the walls were “not of sufficient strength, rigidity and stability” to build on.

For the last month the left has been blaming Bush personally for the levee failure saying that he cut funds that would have shored up the levees (although the levees did not fail, the floodwalls did).

Since Bill Clinton was president when the floodwalls were built I guess he must have been personally responsible instead. Clinton and political consultant James Carvell must have known all about the problem with the walls (actually, Carvell might have since this is his turf). Did they knowingly allow defective floodgates to be built out of racism or were they hoping that the walls would break during a Republican administration?

No, I don't take any of this seriously but I can make as good a case against Clinton as the left has been making against Bush. Maybe they should appologize. (ha!)

Cindy's Smiles

Stories vary on the attendance at last weekend's anti-war protests - everything from 2,000 to 250,000. The most widely carried wire service report quoted the organizer as saying that they met the goal of 100,000. This is meaningless since organizers always say that they met their targets. Regardless, it is obvious that they were short of the estimated million who protested at the start of the war.

The Instapundit pointed out that there is no real anti-war movement. No major politicians showed up and the protests are led by the anti-American left. Christopher Hitchens points out that they are not anti-war, they are anti-American.

Never the less, Cindy Sheehan had a bit of fun hugging Jesse Jackson from the rear. Check out her smile here.

Cindy has been doing a lot of smiling recently. Two days later she was still smiling when she was arrested for blocking the sidewalk.

Why was she smiling? She says that she was having fun plus:

There is another and more important reason that I was smiling. I had not genuinely smiled since Casey was killed in Iraq. I thought my hope was buried along with my son and I was in a pit of hopeless despair. Camp Casey gave me back my hope because America came out in huge numbers to support us and they raised their voices with ours in unison to take our country back and to hold this administration accountable for the lies and mistakes that are killing tens of thousands of innocent people. There were hundreds of thousands of regular Americans who came out to protest the war and Bush's policies this past Saturday. Hundreds of faithful Americans turned out for our interfaith religious service Sunday night next to the Washington Monument. The so-called religious right doesn't have a monopoly on God. I am so pleased that the people of America are becoming active participants in Democracy and America is ready to put their money where their collective mouths are: to bring our troops home and hold BushCo accountable. It is a wonderful thing to be doing something that makes a difference and it is a wonderful and miraculous thing to have my hope back. That is why I am smiling.

She hasn't smiled since Casey died? What was that goofy expression on her face when she pressed herself against Jackson?

Regardless, I think that the real reason that she was smiling was that she managed to attract a camera again. Her Saturday protest totally failed at getting press. It seems that everyone was paying attention to Hurricane Rita instead of Cindy. Cindy has this to say:

Now about Hurricane Rita: I woke up on Saturday morning filled with excitement. I knew that the rally and march were going to be amazing events and I was thrilled to be a part of them. I switched on the TV and turned on CNN and for 2 hours, I watched one of their reporters in front of the same downed tree and it wasn't even raining. I knew that there was a hurricane and it was damaging. At the point of the news cycle though, I thought CNN could be covering other news. 40 soldiers have been killed this month so far in Iraq and countless Iraqis have been killed. The war is still going on and the news has been dominated by hurricanes and the terrible aftermaths. I actually think the mainstream media has been doing a good job of pointing out the dropped balls in the Gulf States. However, CNN and other mainstream news outlets ALWAYS report other news besides the illegal occupation of Iraq.

[...] I was also disappointed that that tragedy superseded the protest coverage. Wolf Blitzer called our protests: Insignificant.

Saturday was the most important event in peace history in decades. The numbers were underreported and the wonderful energy was unreported by the mainstream media. With the MSM there will always be something more important than covering the atrocity of Iraq: Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson, Terry Schiavo, The Runaway Bride, etc. It is time we hold our media accountable, too. Balanced coverage of all issues and some investigative reporting would be extremely refreshing.

I am sorry for what seemed to be an insensitive remark about the people who were affected by Rita, but that was not my intention. I am very aware that the failed policies of the Bush administration have all put us in the same boat, so to speak, and we need to take responsibility for righting the wrongs here in our country and in Iraq.

To Cindy, everything has to be about her. If the MSM chooses to pay attention to a major storm instead of her protest then she wants to hold it accountable. And I'm at a loss at why she thinks that Bush is responsible for Rita.

Wolf Blitzer was right. The protests were insignificant. Cindy managed to rally her base but her support never went beyond that and she is 14 minutes and 59 seconds into her fifteen minutes of fame. Even a second arrest is unlikely to be very well covered.

Actually, I wouldn't have bothered writing about it if it wasn't for her smile.

Manufactured News

In the days after Katrina we were treated to daily reports of how quickly a city can sink into depravity. As the world looked on, we wondered how America could come to this? Of course, some were quick to respond that racism was somehow to blame.

If you were paying close attention you noticed that all of the reports came from one place - New Orleans. No where else was reporting this kind of lawlessness or violence. This raised a new question: what was different about New Orleans?

One difference was the level of reporting. Most of the hurricane's devastation was ignored in favor of shots of flooded streets. In the rush to find new stories, reporters repeated nearly anything that they were told, especially if it came from an authority figure.

Which is the second difference. Most city authorities try to downplay reports that make their city look bad. Not Mayor Nagin. Early on he was quoted as saying that the death toll would be 10,000 or more. What was his source for this? He made it up. As time went on, he found that he could get on Oprah by repeating the worst stories he had heard. On Sept. 6 he was on Oprah and told the world about piles of dead bodies and babies being raped at the Superdome. Police Chief Compass, who was also on Oprah, added more details about general lawlessness including alledging that the Ritz-Carlton hotel had been taken over by armed thugs and his own daughter had been raped there. Nothing of the kind happened.

The official murder count for the week of flooding was four - a typical week for New Orleans.

Articles about the misinformation have appeared but it is too late. America has been given a black eye. A lot of the foreign press including the BBC exaggerated the already-false stories. Any follow-up they do will be buried. The world now thinks of America as one storm away from barbarians.

Probably this is part of why Chief Compass resigned.

Congressional hearings began this week on what went wrong. I wonder how closely they will look at the stream of mis-information and its source. Mayor Nagin might get another national TV interview yet.

The Democrats Roberts Problem

John Roberts is well-qualified for the post of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. By all expectations he will be more moderate than Justice Renquist which will move the court slightly to the center. During his hearing Roberts came near to promising that he would respect the precedent of RoeVsWade. Nothing in his background is controversial which was implicitly acknowledged when the Democrats demanded privledged documents.

Given all of this, there is no valid reason to oppose Roberts' confirmation. Democrats should go ahead and vote him in and thank the stars that Bush didn't nominate Scalia or Thomas for Chief Justice. Most Democrats in the Senate know this.

But this response has the far left really upset. Posters on Huffington and elsewhere want a real fight. They want blood. Groups such as MoveOn are egging them on. One column on Huffington wanted to know what good an opposition party is if it doesn't oppose? Another complains that the Democrats always promise to fight the next battle but not the current one.

None of these people give any good reasons for opposing Roberts. The implication is that anyone Bush nominates must be unacceptable just because Bush nominated him.

This creates a big problem for Senate Democrats. If they don't fight Roberts then they anger the left wing that is spoiling for a battle.

On the other hand, if they oppose Roberts then they lose the public relations battle with the rest of the country. After all, if they oppose Roberts they will oppose anyone Bush nominates.

As the winner of the election, Bush gets to nominate justices. This is not a surprise - it was a campaign issue. That means that Bush gets to change the makeup of the court and with a Republican majority in the Senate it means that any qualified nominee should be confirmed.

If the Senate Democrats give in to the extremist wing then they are handing Bush a PR win in the fight to replace O'Connor. If they don't they risk offending MoveOn, Soros, and a vocal minority.

Just as with Cindy Sheehan's anti-war crusade, the anti-Roberts push will alienate moderate (electable) Democrats from the radical left.

The Democrat's Cindy Problem - part II

If I was a congressional Democrat, chances are that I would be hoping for Cindy Sheehan's anti-war campaign to flame out and blow away. After failing to talk with President Bush, she now announced that she expects every member of Congress to meet with her to answer these "simple" questions:

• President Bush has said that brave Americans like my son Casey have died for a "noble cause." What is that "noble cause "?
• How many more lives are we as a country willing to sacrifice in Iraq?
• How many are you personally willing to sacrifice?
• What are you specifically doing to bring our sons and daughters home from this needless war?

The catch here is that Cindy has already decided what answers are acceptable so even members of Congress who meet with here can end up on her Hall of Fame and Shame. In fact, a meeting can end up looking worse than refusing to meet. Dianne Feinstein had an aid meet with Cindy. This earned Feinstein an entry detailing how rude the aid was and why Cindy rejected Feinstein's responses. Compare this long entry with the one-sentence entries for DeLay and Hastert.

By most measures Dianne Feinstein is one of Congress's more liberal members and a frequent critic of President Bush. That is not enough for Cindy. She gives negative marks to anyone who does not endorse her position of "bring the troops home now".

Likely 2008 candidate, Hillary Clinton has scheduled a meeting with Cindy. It is hard to see how this can go well. Either Hillary will endorse Cindy's position and apologies for her pro-war votes or Cindy will denounce her. While this will help Hillary position herself as a moderate, the moderates are not paying attention right now. It is the anti-war, anti-Bush, Howard Dean faction that is watching and they already dislike Hillary. This could turn into white-hot hatred if Hillary is not careful.

Cindy has a big anti-war rally scheduled for this weekend. The best thing that could happen for Hillary would be if Hurricane Rita takes up all of the media's attention. Since Katrina, Cindy's road show has been starved for ink. The only mention they got in weeks was when the NYPD shut them down for not having a permit (there has been speculation that they didn't get a permit in order to get coverage). If Cindy is not able to generate any further coverage her supporters will move on elsewhere.

That still doesn't address a central problem that the Democrats have had since McGovern - no one trusts them to keep the country safe. Prior to McGovern there were a lot of hawks in the Democratic Party and the anti-war people were non-aligned. While it makes sense to pick up a big voting block like the anti-war crowd, they are not the majority. When Americans feel threatened they turn away from the party of peace and appeasement. The only two democrats elected since McGovern ran during times when Americans felt safe enough that economics were the main issue.

At some point the Democrats will have to eject their anti-war wing, especially the Cindy Sheehan fanatics. They are too unrealistic to ever be trusted with the country and they drag the party down with them.

Katrina Myths

This article should put to rest any rumors that the Bush administration was responsible for the levy failures that flooded New Orleans.

Louisiana's top hurricane experts have rejected the official explanations for the floodwall collapses that inundated much of New Orleans, concluding that Hurricane Katrina's storm surges were much smaller than authorities have suggested and that the city's flood-protection system should have kept most of the city dry.

[...] But with the help of complex computer models and stark visual evidence, scientists and engineers at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have concluded that Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would make faulty design, inadequate construction or some combination of the two the likely cause of the breaching of the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals — and the flooding of most of New Orleans.

Nothing here about inadequate funding. The implication is that corrupt contractors used inferior materials.

Also, the MSM made a lot of jokes about Bush's statement that no one expected the levees to break. Here's confirmation further down the same article:

Former senator J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.) said he remembers numerous briefings from Corps officials about the danger of a hurricane overtopping the New Orleans levees. But he says he never envisioned a scenario like this one. "This came as a surprise," he said.

Another myth is that the federal government was slow or just didn't care about the people still in New Orleans. It has been poorly reported (I think that it was limited to Fox News) but the Red Cross and the Salvation Army were prevented from bringing in food and water. Here is an account.

Given the endless hyping of the 10,000 dead figure and numerous descriptions of bloated corpses floating in the water when both were highly exaggerated it is obvious that the MSM wrote their narative before the storm had lifted. Bush and the federal government were going to be pictured as failing to help the common people. As with any good story, reporters hate to let the facts get in the way.

Bush didn't help matters by waiting so long before being seen being involved. He should have cleared his schedule the day the hurricane hit and he should have made a tour of the destruction before returning to the White House instead of looking down from Air Force One.

With another major hurricane heading for Texas, we will see what happens. The new narative might be how much improved federal response is or how much better Texas authorities handle a disaster than Louisiana authorities.

Debating the War

Last week Christopher Hitchens debated George Galloway on the Iraq war. This is an interesting matchup. Hitchens is a former leftist turned neoconservative. Galloway, an unreformed leftist, is a MP representing the most Moslem district in Britian. He is currently on an anti-war tour of the US with Jane Fonda.

Eric Alterman has this to say about the debate:

I was disgusted to watch the Hitchens/Galloway debate on CSPAN yesterday. Both are brilliant debaters without much care whether the points they are making are consistent with the known evidence. Galloway is a considerably more offensive individual, and while he’s right about much of what he says regarding Iraq, he’s right for all the wrong reasons. He is the face of that part of the global left that really does abhor democracy and blames Israel for everything.

Alterman's description of Galoway is rather mild. He was ejected from the Labour party for encouraging Iraqi insurgents to kill British soldiers. He has also been implicated as a recipient of nearly a half million dollars in oil-for-food bribes.

A transcript of the debate is here. A couple of Galloway's points stand out. Here is the first:

Are you with the foreign occupation of Iraq, or are you with the right of the Iraqi people to be free and to resist the foreign armies who have violently invaded them.

Saddam attempted genocide against his own people but Galloway refuses to recognize this. Then of course, there is the paradox that the US will leave when the resistance ends.

And the second:

It won't matter, how many fly-swats we invest in, how many PATRIOT Acts we pass, how many anti-terrorist measures we pass. If you live beside a swamp, no amount of fly-swats will protect you from the monsters who will come out of that swamp. We have to drain that swamp by stopping that support for Sharon's Israel, his apartheid war, his crimes against the Palestinians.

It all comes down to the Jews. Saudis killed Americans in order to help Palestinians agaisnt Israel.

Cindy Shehan has said things very similar to both of these statements and she continues to be the most visible face of the anti-war movement.

So, when Eric Alterman says that Galloway is right for the wrong reasons, what does he expect? Why are the anti-war leaders also anti-democracy?

Then there is the anti-semitism. Ever since September 12, 2001, the left has been making noises about root causes. This is usually thinly disguised code to mean that we should cut all ties with Israel.

I read the influential blogs from both the far-right and the far-left. What the right says in private is pretty much the same thing that they say in public. The far-left, on the other hand, feels the need to clean up their language. Shehan disowned some of her statements. The anti-war group International ANSWER is a front for socialists.

Then there is the logical disconnect within the anti-war movement. Four years ago the woman's group Not In Our Name was demonstrating in favor of the Taliban. How in heaven's name can any American woman say anything in favor of the Taliban? The same is true when Shehan acts as though Iraq was a paradise prior to the US invasion. Galloway has gone as far as suggesting that the socialists and the Islamists make a common cause against the West.

The people opposing the war need to look more closely at the adgenda being pushed by their leaders. I doubt that most people who oppose the war ethically are in favor of the socialist platform they are supporting.