In one of her most fascinating interviews to date (dutifully transcribed by Riehl World View) Ann Coulter reveals Bill Clinton's deep dark gay secret. The proof? Why, it's his blatant heterosexuality, dummy!

DEUTSCH: Off the air, you were talking about Bill Clinton. Is there anything you want to say about Clinton? No?

Ms. ANN COULTER: No.

DEUTSCH: OK. All right. Did you find him attractive? Was that what it was?

Ms. COULTER: No!

DEUTSCH: You don't find him attractive?

Ms. COULTER: No. OK, fine, I'll say it on air.

DEUTSCH: Most women find him attractive.

Ms. COULTER: No.

DEUTSCH: OK, say it on air.

Ms. COULTER: I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality.

(Via Dean Esmay.)

Obviously, the most elementary logic dictates that such people are latent heterosexuals.

What that means is that Exodus International and others interested in "reparative therapy" for gays should look no further then the nearest gay bath houses and sex clubs.

Who knew?

Never have I been fooled for so many years, by so many!

UPDATE: Many years ago, the National Lampoon spoofed the gay conversion theme with Anita Bryant's "Homo No-Mo" course:

Of course, what Ann Coulter proposes is the inverse, so maybe it should be reworked, and called "Ann Coulter's Hetero-Shmetero" or something.

I don't have time for photo-shopping today, but I'm open to any ideas that will benefit humanity.

They might as well have!

Anyway, this dance video (which makes me want to resort to wisecracks about the "gay steppes") is quite funny:

(If it won't play here, try this link.)

Speaking of Genghis Khan, did you know that Mongolia recently renamed its airport the "Genghis Khan International Airport"? I didn't know that until today's dance routine.

That's Entertainment!

(We can all rape and pillage together, in a manner reminiscent of Genghis Khan.)

There's a reason the federal government is dragging its feet on illegal immigration. It's a wildly expensive and complicated problem with the potential to erupt in a race war.

One of the things that always makes me sit up and take notice is when I see people on right and the left agreeing on something. In this case, it's agreement on the possibility of a domestic war over immigration. People on the right don't tend to use the term "race war" so much as "civil war." (Tacitus looked at this issue in April, but most conservatives are quite uncomfortable with it.)

I don't think the terminology is important so much as the idea that any such war might take place.

I'm generally pro-war where it comes to national defense, but where it comes to civil war, I am so vehemently against the idea that I'd do almost anything to stop it. Terrible harm came from the last Civil War. I disagree with people who say it was "worth it," as I think it stands as a warning. A second American Civil War is almost too awful to contemplate. That's why I've devoted so much time to opposing that thing we call a "Culture War" because the rhetoric gets so heated that it often strikes me as a sort of "cold" Civil War. (In 2003, cultural conservative Dennis Prager opined that the Culture War was already a de facto "Second Civil War" -- and he wasn't even considering immigration.)

I don't care what anyone thinks about immigration; it does not justify another American Civil War. (Or "race war" which is pretty much the same thing.)

Fortunately, right now it's still a war of rhetoric and hyperbole.

An unwinnable war of words.

(And fortunately, as long as people are talking, there's the unintended consequence of mutual appeasement.)

Pit bulls are incredibly strong dogs, as anyone who's ever owned one can attest. Coco's ability to leap into the air is a constant source of amazement to me; if a tantalizing object is dangled before her, she can jump from a standing position to a height of over six feet. When I play fetch with her, she can catch the stick or frisbee before it hits the ground -- as far as I can throw it. Nothing particularly heroic about any of it, although I don't doubt that under the right circumstances, Coco would display what we'd anthropomorphically call heroism. That's because the strength of these dogs is matched only by their utter devotion and determination.

If you are a good person and have raised a good dog, knowing that you have a dog that would not hesitate to lay down its life for you is very touching. Humbling, even.

The problem, of course, is that bad people raise bad dogs, and the dogs don't realize they're bad, as they're just doing what dogs do based on centuries of tailoring their survival to living with man. If you're a dog, your identity is generally tied to that of your owner. Which is why it so horrifies me to see an otherwise good dog in the wrong hands. It's more irritating than reading about "gun violence," because in the case of a bad guy misusing a gun, the gun is not a victim, whereas a misused animal is. Frankly, if we consider the number of pit bulls owned by lowlife scum, what amazes me is that there are as few incidents as there are.

Quite ironically, the fact that there are so few attacks on people is an unintentional but logical byproduct of the dogs' historic background of being pitted against bulls, bears, and other dogs for sport. While the medieval brutes who bred these canine gladiators were anything but kind, they could not tolerate any dog with the slightest inclination to attack humans, for otherwise how could they have pitted them? Under the rules which evolved in dogfighting, the dogs had to be handled routinely, picked up, separated, then faced off to determine whether a dog was a coward, or whether it would walk across the "scratch" line to take hold of the other animal. Dogs that turned away, or tried to jump the pit were considered defective, as were dogs which displayed any tendency to turn and bite humans -- even in the heat of combat. The result over the centuries was a dog that was downright amiable, even clownish -- in many cases almost ridiculously so.

Now, this is not just my opinion -- many, many students of the breed have noticed this over and over again. (A fascinating New Yorker piece explores the phenomenon in detail.) It seems like a paradox to people, but it isn't. I've always suspected that the "natural born entertainers" were more likely to survive the sadism and cruelty which inhered to these blood sports -- perhaps out of pity, perhaps simply because people enjoy being entertained. Like it or not, the cruel spectacles were also circus performances, and people like circuses, and shows. (Shades of WWF, perhaps?)

There's a famous account of a huge pit bull with rippling muscles which was being judged in a dog show, and which had patiently stood at attention and put up with the usual poking, probing and gawking. This he bore with unflappable patience and dignity until suddenly a small and yappy Chihuahua (probably suffering from an inferiority complex) broke loose from somewhere and attacked the pit bull in a total frenzy. People were afraid the little dog would be killed with one bite, but the pit bull's owner/handler ordered him to be still. The Chihuahua was really aggressive, though, and although the bites weren't having any physical effect, the onslaught of this tyrannically impotent rage was nonetheless ruffling the pit bull's sense of pride, and he kept looking reproachfully at his master, as if pleading with him to do something. This was many years ago, when people still thought this sort of thing was great entertainment, and as neither dog was being hurt, the crowd was laughing uproariously (at both dogs' expense).

Finally the pit bull could take no more, and he devised a plan to put an end to the suffering. Firmly but gently, he took hold of the Chihuahua by the scruff of the neck, lifted him off the ground and quite deliberately, walked over to the nearest trash can, got up on his rear legs, and carefully placed the Chihuahua in the trash!

Something like that requires what we humans would call premeditation and deliberation.

While putting a Chihuahua in a trashcan might not be what most of us would call heroism, I think this pit bull confrontation with a bear would be:

An Ontario man who killed a 200-pound black bear with a hunting knife says his faithful dog saved his life -- twice.

Tom Tilley, 55, of Waterloo, Ont., had been portaging last Thursday in northern Ontario near Wawa with his five-year old American Staffordshire, Sam.

He said they were walking toward the beginning of the portage to retrieve the canoe when he heard Sam start to growl.

"And I turned behind me and 20 feet behind me there was this black bear coming up the trail, sneaking up behind me," he said.

"If Sam hadn't growled, I may not have known until it was too late."

Tilley's first instinct was to try and make lots of noise and make himself appear bigger. He also started to slowly walk backwards, but nothing seemed to be scaring off the bear.

Suddenly, the bear took off down the portage path, ran through the brush and came onto the portage trail behind Tilley -- cutting off his escape route.

"At that point I kind of realized I might be in a bit of trouble."

"The bear seemed to me to be acting aggressive. I'm not a big guy and I could very well easily be prey."

At that point, his dog Sam placed himself perpendicular to the bear, across the path. The bear dug its teeth into the dog's back, and Tilley said he became enraged.

"I love my dog very much, and my first thought was, 'You're not going to kill my dog'."

"The momentary distraction that Sam provided to take the bear's attention away from me gave me the opportunity to run behind the bear, straddle its back and begin to stab it.

"I kept stabbing until it was dead.

There's more here about the dog's recovery:

WATERLOO - Since the swell of national attention highlighted the heroism of Tom Tilley and his dog Sam, offers have flooded in to pay for the dog's medical treatment.

Some callers want to nominate Sam for a canine hero award.

[...]

Sam was wounded when the bear clamped down on his back, tearing away skin and leaving several puncture wounds.

Since the incident last Thursday, Tilley and Sam have been inundated with media requests from across the country, as well as with calls and e-mails from well-wishers.

"Personally, I'll be glad when it dies down," the soft-spoken Tilley said Monday.

Sam is recovering well.

"We went to the vet today. We were hoping to get some of the tubes out from the surgery, but they're staying in for a little while longer."

These remarkable dogs still provide mass entertainment, even though we call it "news."

Last of the weekend photos.

Some contemplation:

And some action:

I like it when excitement appears out of nowhere!

now SHOW ME THE MONEY!

Update: Explanation

Updatus Secundus: So what if Mel Gibson is not Tom Cruise?

Update Tertius: Bee double ee double are you in? Beerrun. That's the spirit!

Now bring me the wenches. This is how we schnell!

Update Yonban: This is madness. He's going to attack? Yes. He's defeated. He must accept his shame. Kill them. All of them. Now. My horse! [phantom elipses]. Fire! Ute! Ready! Aim! Fire! Fire at will!

Non-update Update: You have your honor again. Let me die with mine. [I will miss our conversations].

According to police reports, a drunken Mel Gibson apparently stated that "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

Would alcohol make him say something like that? Possibly, but that does not mean the alcohol put the thoughts in his mind. From my experience with alcohol (and I've had a lot) alcohol doesn't work that way. It loosens inhibitions, and causes you to let slip things you might later regret. Alcohol can cause great embarrassment, but usually because it causes a loss of control. Loss of control means an inability to control impulses -- but the impulses are there.

On the other hand, we all say things we do not mean, whether drunk or sober. I've said all kinds of stupid things.

I think Gibson should own up to what he said, and discuss it. If he thinks the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world, I'd like to hear his explanation. If he doesn't think they are, I'd like to hear him say that. I'm still bothered by the fact that he failed to state whether or not he disagreed with the ravings of his anti-Semitic father, because under the circumstances (this was when "The Passion" was released), I think he had a responsibility. (So did David Bernstein.)

And under these circumstances, I don't think it's enough to simply say that he said "things" he doesn't believe:

“I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said, and I apologize to anyone I may have offended.”

I'd really like to know what the sane and sober Mel Gibson thinks about those he calls "the Jews" -- and not what a professional damage controller might have scripted for him. If he can't say what he really thinks, I'm afraid I'm going to have to doubt the sincerity of his apology.

Bear in mind that none of this has anything to do with the drunk driving charge, of which Gibson's guilt will depend on the evidence. And of course, there's nothing illegal about being an anti-Semite, blaming the Jews for all the wars in the world, or just blaming the Jews for some wars.

I'd like him to just tell the truth.

UPDATE: Power Line's Scott Johnson thinks Gibson's drunken remarks support the qualms he had about "The Passion":

If one is inclined, as I am, to the view that the personal beliefs of artists may be relevant to an interpretation of their works -- a view that the New Critics discounted as "the intentional fallacy" -- Mel Gibson's alleged drunken tirade provides some evidence to support my qualms regarding the film. Gibson's statement on his arrest seems to lend credence to the report of his drunken tirade.

MORE: When I wrote about "The Passion," Snopes.com had an article about the anti-Semitism of Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson's father. The Snopes page has been pulled, and so has its archive (which the Wayback Machine gives as a "BLOCKED SITE ERROR.")

UPDATE: Via Dean Esmay, Doc Rampage offers a partial defense of Gibson:

obviously Gibson is special. Almost anyone else could yell anything and none of their friends, family, coworkers, or customers will ever know what they said. By contrast, now that it has become public, all of Gibson's friends, family, coworkers, and customers (moviegoers) are going to know what Mel Gibson said. The consequences for including that information in the report are likely to be far, far more damaging to Gibson than they would be to most other people.

He's still a great director, though. Drunken anti-Semitic remarks do not alter or undo his work.

And suppose he turns out to be a genuine anti-Semite. He would deserve the strongest criticism -- even condemnation -- for it.

But take Wagner's undisputed anti-Semitism. Isn't that a separate issue from the quality of his operas?

UPDATE: Kofi Annan look out! Mel Gibson may be after your job! (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

I'm beginning to think that "gun violence" is the Philadelphia Inquirer's biggest issue. It's gotten to the point where nearly every Sunday's front page is devoted to this tedious topic, with nothing new to say. Yes, Philadelphia has a huge crime problem, and many people are shooting each other.

There is a criminal culture which believes in using guns to settle disputes, and to the Inquirer (as well as people who agree with them) this means guns are the problem.

In today's piece (part of a series titled "A Summer Under the Gun"), a local professor often said to be an expert in these matters makes a cultural observation which is hardly new, but which I think illustrates a serious problem posed by any attempt at analysis:

The main job on the Street is drug dealer.

"By selling drugs," wrote University of Pennsylvania professor Elijah Anderson, an authority on urban street life, young inner-city males "have a chance to put more money into their pockets than they could get by legal means, and they present themselves to peers as hip, in sharp contrast to the square image of those who work in places like McDonald's and wear silly uniforms."

Another factor the Inquirer has pointed out time and time again is the inescapable fact that having a gun makes people (including criminals) more powerful than if they didn't have a gun:

In prison for armed robbery, Antwian comes across as a mild-mannered 19-year-old who doesn't talk hard-core street lingo. He said his home life was rough, with harsh physical discipline.

Antwian didn't fully embrace the Street. But when problems arose, guns were easy to get. A friend whose father had a gun collection got him a chrome 9mm Ruger to deal with some guys in his Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood who "kept trying to roll me."

Challenged to fight one day, Antwian pulled out his Ruger from his waistband and placed it on the ground for all to see.

"Nobody wanted to roll on me then," Antwian said.

He was emboldened. Following an altercation with some guys at a park, he returned with the Ruger and started firing to scare them.

"After that, everybody at the school whispered about it," he recalled. "A couple girls wanted to associate with me."

He now had a reputation.

Or doesn't that matter? Anyway, if you read on, his criminal irresponsibility gets worse and worse. (And silly logical me, I don't even think it's the fault of the gun "availability"):

He did a little drug dealing in Germantown before moving to the Northeast, but "it wasn't really me. I just did it to get a quick couple dollars."

He did try to work. He cut grass in his neighborhood. He sold knickknacks out of a catalog. He stocked shelves at a Rite Aid, served as a cashier at a women's clothing store, cooked and waited tables at a rib joint in Manayunk. He worked at McDonald's for a month and got fired for showing up late. His last and best-paying job was in construction: $250 a week under the table.

"But I was smoking so much weed I'd be broke every day," he said.

He decided, "I need something right now, something I could do tonight."

Antwian, then 17, had given the Ruger to a friend who'd sold it. So, he paid $100 to a construction coworker who was a crack addict for a sawed-off shotgun. Then, with a friend, Antwian said, he committed three robberies that night.

Wearing a black flight jacket with five shells in an upper-arm pocket, Antwian approached his first victim, an older man, and pulled out the 12-gauge.

"You know what this is!" he announced. His friend patted the victim down and found $200. They told him to turn around and they ran off.

"We was like, ‘Damn, it was that easy?' " Antwian recalled.

For the next six weeks, Antwian committed five more stickups before his arrest and conviction on the last one.

"It was like my mind-frame shut down," he said. "If I wanted to do something, I just did it."

That's the whole problem in a nutshell. For some people, it is self apparent that it is an argument for gun control, while for other people it is a reason to be armed.

To me, the fact that there are people who'd hold a gun to my head and demand money is a good reason to be armed.

Yet to others, the presence of people who behave that way is an argument against anyone having guns. Even law abiding people.

I don't see any way to bridge this hopeless gap.

It reminds me of the sad fact I discussed yesterday: some people would take Coco away from me because bad people own pit bulls.

I was gone all day yesterday and most of the night, which only caused me to neglect personal business around here, so now I have to get caught up with non-blog-related matters. (It's surprising -- even shocking -- how much time blogging can take.) Hopefully, I'll have some time later today.

(That looks almost unattainable, doesn't it?)

Dogs with a pit bull "appearance" are illegal in Kansas City, Kansas:

Under the city’s ordinances, it is illegal to have any dog with predominant characteristics or appearance of Staffordshire bull terriers, American pit bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers or any combination of those breeds.

From the looks of this story, it doesn't appear that pit bull ban is working very well:

KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Charges were filed Friday in connection with a pit bull attack that killed a 71-year-old woman Thursday.

Police said Derrick D. Lee, 32, was charged with involuntary manslaughter. He is being held on $100,000 bond.

Officers said Lee owns the house next to Jimmie May McConnell. She was in her garden Thursday morning at 3100 Longwood Ave. when a dog jumped the fence and mauled her. She was taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Officials said McConnell had a heart condition, and she couldn't recover from the stress of the dog attack.

Preliminary autopsy results indicated McConnell died of a cardiac arrhythmia brought on by the trauma of the attack, Wyandotte County coroner Alan Hancock said.

McConnell had extensive bites on her limbs and torso, "but not one of the bites were such that you could say one was responsible for her death," Hancock said.

The bite marks will be examined by an expert to determine if more than one dog attacked McConnell.

Animal-control officers tranquilized the dog in McConnell's back yard and took it away. A second dog was taken from the house next door.

Police would not confirm that the dogs were the ones responsible and were trying to determine the dogs' breed. But neighbors identified them as coming from a home next to McConnell's and believed they were pit bulls.

Lee, on his way into court for a hearing in an unrelated case Friday afternoon, told The Kansas City Star he had nothing to do with the attack.

Lee said he had lived at the house where the dogs were found but hadn't been staying there for three months. He would return to the house to feed one of the dogs and another dog - the one involved in the attack - was a stray that would come up and steal food. He didn't know who the dog belonged to and thought it lived by a nearby creek, Lee said.

Police said Lee was arrested at the Wyandotte County Courthouse where he had appeared on unrelated charges of possession of crack cocaine and battery of an officer.

"She was so scared of the dogs. This has gone on for over a year. Those dogs have acted like they want to come through that fence," Chris McConnell told KMBC. "She worked in the garden every day, and they would growl and bark aggressively at her. She said, 'One day, one of those dogs are going to get me.' They finally got her."

KMBC reported that this wasn't the first time that neighbors have had problems with this neighbor's dogs. According to a representative with the Unified Government of Wyandotte County, animal control officers found two pit bulls at the neighbor's home in 2004.

Code enforcement officers deemed the neighbor's house uninhabitable because there are no utilities hooked up inside.

Pit bulls are banned in Wyandotte County, Kan., where the attack took place.

Police said they have not been able to contact the dog's owner. Officials said they are investigating the case as a homicide. (Emphasis added.)

To recap, a dog neglected by a[n alleged] thug in a derelict house roams the streets and terrifies the neighbors, finally attacking one who later dies of heart failure.

And the focus is not on the [alleged] criminal, or on how he treated the animal he won't admit he owned. No. The focus is on a particular breed, so that dogs can be identified and taken away from law-abiding responsible people.

Based on their "appearances," of course.

I'm sorry, but the illogic and the insanity involved here defy analysis. My dark side wonders about the human psychology underlying the anti-pit bull hysteria coupled with breed specific legislation.

Might the lowly pit bull be a permissible scapegoat for something else?

I've spent enough time on this that I might as well upload pictures of the "suspects":

Yeah, yeah. Presumption of innocence and all that.

(But at least we know the pit bull is guilty! Reassuring, isn't it?)

UPDATE: My speculation about possible unconscious motivations was neither original, nor (it seems) unfounded. Not according to CHAKO Dog Blog:

Donald Butler, a member of the Public Safety Committee for Horicon, Wisconsin, believes that Horicon should ban Pit Bulls. His rationale for wanting Pit Bulls out of Horicon is simple, if shockingly discriminatory.

"Horicon is not a ghetto. This is one breed of dogs we do not need."

Many educated dog advocates, attorneys, and scholars have stated that breed discrimination is often a guise for classism. Never before, however, has a public official come right out and admitted such a thing!

We applaud Donald Butler for his bravery. It takes guts to admit that the sole motivation for wanting to get rid of Pit Bulls is because one believes that only "ghetto" people own Pit Bulls. Is it possible that Mr. Butler believes that, by banning Pit Bulls, all the people with darker skin will leave Horicon with their beloved Pit Bulls?

Mr. Butler, despite his bravery, made quite the ass of himself for such assumptions. Even if true, he has shown himself to be a racist, pure and simple. However, Mr. Butler's belief that Pit Bulls are "ghetto" is, of course, erroneous. People like Helen Keller, Michael J. Fox, and John Stewart own Pit Bulls.

MORE: In my quest to be fair to both "sides," I should point out that Slate's Clara Jeffery has examined whether pit bulls themselves can be racist. Apparently so! And amazingly enough, so can other breeds.

Believe it or not, such things depend on training!

AND MORE: The pit bull racist symbology is older than I thought. From the New York Times, 1991:

At the core of the book is a strangely baroque dog story. Bandit, Ms. Hearne writes, "belonged to an old man in Stamford, Connecticut, an old black man, Mr. Lamon Redd." On July 9, 1987, Mr. Redd's tenant and next-door neighbor, "one Mr. Johnson," quarreled with his girlfriend. She went home to her mother, Effie Powell, who in turn came over to Mr. Redd's yard and clobbered Mr. Johnson with a broom, an attack "which Mr. Johnson seems to have deserved," Ms. Hearne asserts. "Bandit brought the assault on his friend to a screeching halt, with his teeth." For six weeks or so, he "did time in the pound." And when he came home he was "in a sorry state." He "wet on the porch, was whupped, and bit Mr. Redd. At this point a neighbor called the police, Bandit was seized again, and a disposal order was issued."

This is where Ms. Hearne enters the story. When Mr. Redd appeals the disposal order (he blames himself for Bandit's second attack, since the dog warned him repeatedly before biting), his lawyer calls Ms. Hearne as an expert witness. At the time, no one -- not Mr. Redd, not his lawyer, not the state's chief canine control officer and not Bandit -- knew what they were in for. Ms. Hearne's legal mission is to save Bandit's life. And this she does. But her mission as an unrepentant trainer of both dogs and people is far bigger. That is why "Bandit" is not only a dog story but also a deeply eccentric lesson in justice, linguistics, racism and teleology.

It is hard to tell at any given moment where Ms. Hearne's argument, or even one of her sentences, is going. Nonetheless you feel you are being led by her playful pedantry to a place where you will be shown to be wanting.

Ms. Hearne has a lesson for everyone. For the judge who handed down the disposal order, she has a linguistics lesson: "I do not think you can execute someone who does not know what an execution is." For those who testified in court against Bandit -- claiming that "pit bulls" like him have "vicious genes" and "the Jekyll-Hyde syndrome" -- she has a lesson about bigotry. "The pit bull 'hysteria,' " she writes, "is one of the cleverest pieces of racist propaganda." Today, people are invited "to make the leap from socially unacceptable inner city males to pit bulls." That much was clear, she writes, when Mr. Redd tried to defend his dog by saying "the white ladies like him, too."

My often narrow focus on matters of logic makes me miss things like racial symbology. I hate to think it was staring me in the face for so long.

Sometimes, logic can be a shortcoming I guess.

UPDATE: I forgot to link to the famous "FIND THE PIT BULL" test. There's only one pit bull there, and even I had trouble spotting it. But that doesn't matter to today's dog grabbers.

UPDATE: In breaking news story linked by Drudge, 68 pit bulls were found living in a dilapidated house -- with children:

WICHITA, Kan. -- Two Kansas children are in protective custody after authorities found 68 pit bulls living in their home.

Police said the children -- an 11-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl -- were found living in deplorable conditions.

The dogs were living inside and in the back yard. Many of the dogs have scars and were probably used for fighting, authorities said.

The children's father was arrested on various charges, including resisting arrest and child endangerment.

And the breed is at fault?

But of course!

(Will someone please tell me whose culture war Coco and I are supposed to be fighting?)

This looks like domestic terrorism to me:

SEATTLE – One person is dead and five others have been injured in a shooting at the Jewish Federation at 2031 Third Ave. in downtown Seattle. One suspect has been taken into custody.

Seattle police spokesman Rich Pruitt said police are confident that only one shooter was involved.

Sources told KING 5 the suspect is a 31-year-old Pakistani man with a criminal background. He is from the Pasco but his citizenship status or how long he has lived in the United States is unknown. Also unknown is what sort of criminal record he has. Officials are on the way to the Pasco to interview his family.

According to the Seattle Times, a man got through security at the Jewish Federation and told staff members, "I'm a Muslim American; I'm angry at Israel," then began shooting, according to Amy Wasser-Simpson, the vice president for planning and community services for the Jewish Federation.

FBI spokesman David Gomez said officials believe the suspect acted alone and is not affiliated with a foreign organization.

There will probably be a strained effort to say this was not terrorism because it was a lone individual. Well, Timothy McVeigh was a lone individual.

I live in a neighborhood that's about 50% Jewish, in which there is a Saudi madrassa. It worries a lot of people that someone from the madrassa might just lose it and flip out like this one of these days.

This reminds me of my post on Wednesday about eliminationist rhetoric. Here's a guy who put his into practice.

If only there were some way to require that immigrants to this country learn American civics and assimilate. I have no idea whether the gunman was a citizen, but if he was, I wonder whether he really believed in this country, or considered it an enemy to be defeated along with "the Jews." If he thought these people were Jews and not Americans, if he thought he was a Muslim and not an American, he had no business calling himself an American.

I'm sorry, but "Why do they hate us?" is not a question which we should have to ask of Americans -- or for that matter, people on the American street.

UPDATE (07/29/06): Via Glenn Reynolds, I see that there's quite a hurry to declare that the shooter suffered from "mental illness." Not that this would make him any less a terrorist than any other nutcase who believes in shooting Jews in the name of God, but aren't such issues normally raised by defense lawyers?

Jeff Goldstein is one of the funniest people in the blogosphere, and the continued psychotic threats against his child have not only gone way too far, the whole thing makes me wonder what the goal is. To stop Jeff from being funny? To make him quit blogging? To make him turn off comments? Or to make "the blogosphere" (as if a psychotic troll were representative) look bad? Or all four?

Regardless of the reasons, going after someone's kid is just so low.

It's still hard to believe that a trained professional would act this way, but it appears to be the same person as last time. Patterico has more.

Words fail me.

Anyone who feels the same way that I do should go here and hit Jeff's tip jar (as I did) to help him pay for the legal expenses he'll likely incur having to defend and protect his child. It's unbelievable that any blogger should ever have to go through something like this.

I wish Jeff the best of luck.

An end to sock puppetry? By all means.

Via Glenn Greenwald Reynolds, who doesn't make clear which "side" he's on.

Why?

This "Glenn" confusion is starting to bother me. Has anyone (outside of Brazil, that is) ever actually seen Glenn Greenwald? I mean, in person? Sure, there's been a talking image floating around on the Telescreen, but how can we be sure that there really is a Glenn Greenwald, much less that the talking image actually depicts a human being of that name?

Sorry, but I'm skeptical.

There are just way too many "coincidences."

UPDATE: A rare admission from the Glenn behind the strings.

Also via Glenn Reynolds, Don Surber shows that Greenwald is wrong about a number of things, while spinning the sock puppetry to make him look like the victim of personal attacks.

Food for thought.

But what about the cute lyrics?

In his latest Weekly Check on the Bias, Jeff Soyer discusses the current crime wave in Philadelphia and asks whether lenient judges are to blame:

More anti-gun laws don't stop crime. Locking up thugs for a good long time does. The City of Brotherly Love is experiencing a surge in gun violence. There's been an interesting set of letters appearing in the Philadelphia Daily News over the past few weeks. It started with one by Joseph Fox, Chief of Detectives of the Philadelphia Police Department here:

More than 70 percent of Philly's murder victims have criminal records, many of them extensive. In excess of 80 percent of those arrested for murder have criminal records, many of them for violent crime.

The number of people who are engaged in violent criminal activity is minuscule as a percentage of the overall population. Common sense dictates that if this limited number of violent criminals are locked away, the bloodshed would begin to abate.

Our judges have the power to do this.

Prison overcrowding:

PHILADELPHIA -- As many as 25 to 30 men have been kept for days in a holding cell with a single toilet and no beds as detainees overwhelm Philadelphia's prison system, a lawsuit filed yesterday charged.

The suit comes just five years after state and federal courts ended 30 years of supervision prompted by earlier lawsuits over prison conditions.

The city -- whose prison population has more than doubled since 1987 to about 8,800 -- reopened a long-shuttered prison over the weekend to make room for the newest detainees.

Holmesburg Prison, which was closed a decade ago, is being used temporarily to hold prisoners during the intake process. Pretrial detainees have recently been held for days in police districts and the police administration building, sometimes without beds or access to lawyers or medical care, the lawsuit charged. Police holding cells are designed to hold people for just a few hours.

"It's intolerable to treat people that way, and there's something called the Constitution which says that you can't," said civil-rights lawyer David Rudovsky, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who filed yesterday's suit as well as an earlier suit in 1971.

City Solicitor Romulo L. Diaz Jr. said the city has been aware of the problem, and working on it with judges, prosecutors and others, for more than a year. He expects that more money will be needed to hire staff and equipment and come up with alternative solutions, such as home-monitoring devices for low-level offenders.

The city currently spends $262 million a year on its prison system, up from $93 million in 1987 and $195 million in 2001.

Rudofsky, btw, is a member of the Penn law school faculty, a prominent prison rights attorney, and former local counsel for the famed Mumia Abu Jamal, so he knows his turf. While I am leery of activists whose ultimate goal is to close all prisons, it strikes me that if prison conditions are so unconstitutional that inmates have to be released early, something is very, very wrong.

Professor Rudofsky mentions the war on drugs:

"With the war on drugs, you have an inexhaustible supply of possible prisoners, limited only by the number of police you have," Rudovsky said.

Alternatives to incarceration should be considered for people charged with minor crimes and those nearing parole, he said.

Riley's 20-year-old son died after a .22-caliber bullet went through his forehead and lodged in his brain. A neighbor, Anthony Byrd, confessed.

Byrd, also 20, told police that he had bought the gun "off someone in the street." What street, from whom and for how much, he didn't say.

Byrd called the shooting an accident, which is curious since he ran from the crime scene and waited a week to surrender.

"I was confused," he told investigators. As for the gun? "I don't really remember what happened to it."

Byrd admitted his guilt, and let the lawyers decide whether to call it murder or manslaughter. A few weeks ago, he was sentenced to 111/2 to 24 months behind bars, with credit for time served since his arrest last fall.

With the Philadelphia prison system so overcrowded the city is being sued, the odds are that Byrd will be free sooner rather than later.

Get a gun, take a life, and get yours back that fast? If it's that easy, no wonder everyone's doing it.

Conservatives and many Second Amendment supporting libertarians (like myself) often argue that the solution is locking up people who commit crimes with guns, but if they cannot be locked up, doesn't that tend to reduce the lock-em-up argument to a form of mere debate rhetoric?

The fact is, violent criminals with long records are not being locked up. They can get guns illegally in numerous ways, and making guns harder for law abiding people to get only decreases the number of armed law abiding citizens. Considering the dysfunctional nature of the lock-em-up system, armed law-abiding citizens -- like this store owner, and this armed citizen -- are one of society's few last lines of defense.

I think this is another example of how the drug war is ruining the criminal justice system.

By artificially driving up the price of substances of little inherent worth, these laws create opportunities for instant wealth, torture traditional notions of crime and jurisprudence, manufacture false morality while criminalizing human suffering, and provide a gigantic, artificial playing field for opportunistic crime which otherwise would not be there.

The result is that ordinary police work is corrupted, and we see police overreacting to things like cell phone photography, as well as the use of deadly SWAT teams in routine law enforcement.

If drugs were legal, the streets would be safer, there'd be room in the prisons, and while addicts would continue to be victims, they'd no longer be punished for being victims, and they wouldn't have to prey on the rest of us.

Who knows? Some of them might be motivated to get help.

MORE: I forgot to mention that Jeff is taking a break from his weekly report on the bias. I hope it's only temporary, as I think Jeff is providing a real service to the Second Amendment.

Thanks to an email from blogger and commenter James Rummel, I discovered (only after about a half an hour of trial and error experimentation) that MT Blacklist would not allow any comment which used the word "Socialism."

OK, I hate socialism, and I freely admit my bias. But never in my wildest dreams would I even think of banning the word, and I couldn't imagine what would possess my anti-spam software to do that either. It's not as if I've been getting spam from Trotskyites, or anything that would trigger automatic deletions of such words. Besides, James Rummel was making a point not about ordinary socialism, but "National Socialism." Even that wasn't allowed.

The words "socialist" and "socialism" simply would not go through -- either alone or in combination with other words. But "social" went through.

Finally, I saw the problem.

"Socialism" contains a very-banned, very-offensive word:

CIALIS

I deleted that from MT-Blacklist's banned words, and now anyone can comment about socialists, or socialism.

Googling around, I discovered that I am not alone.

Here's The Liberal Avenger, in a post titled "SoCIALISm":

Who knew?

The disappearing comments were due to the popular drug name CIALIS playing an integral role in every soCIALISt here.

In light of this I wonder what the reasoning was behind Lilly Pharmaceuticals’ decision to call their drug CIALIS.

Labor Day celebrations frequented by workers with raging hard-ons?

Workers of the World - frolic around my May Pole.

[Update: OK - lame joke. Who can write the best May Pole joke now?]

(I bet old Fidel could use a dose of the former while he awaits the latter . . . Stiff either way, coming or going!)

I'm confused again.

Ed Cone (via Glenn Reynolds) linked to the official website of the Randi Rhodes Show, which yesterday had a comment about Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, directly followed by a comment about the Israel/Hezbollah war:

Bush puppet/Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki spouts White House talking points sprinkled with Islam to a joint session of Congress.

Kofi Annan: UN observers were deliberately attacked and killed by Israel. WTF?!

I'm glad I'm not a war blogger, but sometimes I feel guilty about neglecting my war coverage. I just don't have access to inside information of the sort which might enable me to comment even in a semi-coherent manner about battlefield decisions, troop movements, enemy strength, etc. (Of course if I did, I probably wouldn't comment at all, so there's a bit of a paradox in all this.)

But I can certainly make a stab at trying to make sense out of someone else's analysis. Or (as in this case) not.

I'll start with al-Maliki's "White House talking points." I'm assuming that the Randi Rhodes analyst is on the left, and that he or she therefore must have taken into account not only Prime Minister al-Maliki's actual remarks, but the widely-reported left-wing criticism of them:

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean on Wednesday called Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki an "anti-Semite" for failing to denounce Hezbollah for its attacks against Israel.

Al-Maliki has condemned Israel's offensive, prompting several Democrats to boycott his address to a joint meeting of Congress and others to criticize him. Dean's comments were the strongest to date.

"The Iraqi prime minister is an anti-Semite," the Democratic leader told a gathering of business leaders in Florida. "We don't need to spend $200 and $300 and $500 billion bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself and who refuse to condemn Hezbollah."

So I am still confused. Unless Howard Dean is covertly suggesting that anti-Semitism is a White House talking point, something does not make sense.

Fortunately, my job does not require me to make sense of the Randi Rhodes Show, or its analysts.

As to the assertion by Kofi Annan that "UN observers were deliberately attacked and killed by Israel," Belmont Club's Wretchard has devoted an extensive analysis to that, and it's pretty clear that the troop positions of UNIFIL (the UN group) and Hezbollah are very close together, and that Israel has had a very tough time avoiding accidentally hitting UNIFIL. Wretchard also quotes from this statement from a CBC radio interview with a Canadian general (which can be streamed at LGF):

We received emails from him a few days ago, and he was describing the fact that he was taking fire within, in one case, three meters of his position for tactical necessity, not being targeted. Now that’s veiled speech in the military. What he was telling us was Hezbollah soldiers were all over his position and the IDF were targeting them. And that’s a favorite trick by people who don’t have representation in the UN. They use the UN as shields knowing that they can’t be punished for it.

The U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, was created and dispatched to that country after terrorists from Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization entered Israel and hijacked a bus and Israel responded. Thirty-six hostages died. Israel's response was to enter south Lebanon to destroy the terrorist base camps.

The U.N.'s response was to adopt Resolution 425, which, naturally, called for Israel to withdraw "immediately" and set up UNIFIL for the expressed purpose of "assisting the government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of effective authority to the area." It did such a good job of preventing the PLO from using south Lebanon to attack Israel that in June 1982, Israel felt compelled to launch a full-scale invasion to oust the PLO once and for all.

UNIFIL was there from the 1982 assassination of Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel through the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, both with the involvement of a Syrian government to whom the idea of a strong and truly independent Lebanon was anathema.

UNIFIL was there when Hezbollah, with full Syrian and Iranian complicity, rushed in to fill the political vacuum left by the PLO. When the Israelis withdrew totally from every square inch of Lebanon in 2000, UNIFIL stood by as Hezbollah established its "effective authority" over south Lebanon.

UNIFIL never has done much real peacekeeping; the U.N. reacts only if Israel attempts to defend itself. As former Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Dore Gold notes: "Hezbollah would launch military attacks 50 meters from a U.N. outpost, Israel would shoot back and UNIFIL would protest against the Israeli response."

I'm shocked.

Shocked!

Give peace a chance?

Anyone naive enough to imagine that Nasrallah and Hezbollah want peace -- or have ever wanted peace -- should watch this video.

Yeah, this war-blogging, Rhodes-analyst stuff is a real drag.

But what's the alternative?

Peace blogging?

MORE: The Jerusalem Post points out that Israel indignantly denies targeting UNAFIL deliberately, and demands an investigation of UNAFIL's apparent inseparability from Hezbollah:

Such an investigation must determine more than just how UNIFIL troops were located in such close proximity to Hizbullah terrorists that they ended up in the line of fire. More fundamentally, it would delve into how, in complete contravention of its objectives, UNIFIL stood by without a murmur as a terrorist organization amassed thousands upon thousands of rockets whose unprovoked use has killed and wounded dozens of Israelis and precipitated the current war.

The bitter irony is that Annan himself reported to the Security Council back in January 2001 that UNIFIL had completed implementation of the part of its mandate requiring it to help Lebanese authorities resume control of the area vacated by Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. If he was right, the IDF would not now be operating against Hizbullah, and absorbing mounting casualties. And four UNIFIL workers would not be dead today.

Giving peace a chance!

UPDATE: Via Glenn Reynolds, Captain Ed has an interesting post titled "The Nasrallah Blues." The Israelis have penetrated the sheikh's communications network, and he's being forced to acknowledge the serious shortcomings of his leadership. Says Ed:

Having a commander communicate an apology of this sort indicates a growing dissatisfaction with leadership in the ranks. Nasrallah so far has done nothing to convince anyone that he has a grasp of either strategy or tactics. He has proven that he has no understanding of his enemy, nor much of his putative allies in the region, almost all of whom have declined to rush to his side in this fight.

If Nasrallah survives, I suspect he'll try to claim an Arafat-style "victory." And if this is then spun as a "victory" for peace, who knows? Might there even be a Nobel "Peace" Prize in his future?

UPDATE: THANK YOU GLENN REYNOLDS for linking this post, and welcome all!

I almost forgot that today is the 26 of July -- an important Communist holiday in Cuba which commemorates Castro's 1953 assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago.

They celebrated by (among other things) blasting Bush:

(AP) Fidel Castro led tens of thousands of Communist Party faithful in celebrating Cuba's Revolution Day on Wednesday, telling a large crowd that his revolution's social achievements exceed anything a U.S.-backed replacement could accomplish.

Returning to his roots in eastern Cuba, Castro also praised Granma province, named for the yacht that carried him back to Cuba in 1956 to launch the battles that led him to triumph three years later.

"Granma (province) doesn't need any Yankee transition plan to vaccinate and teach our people to read and write," Castro said, drawing loud applause from the crowd in this provincial capital. "They should tell Mr. Bush ... to come to Granma to see a development plan."

What shouldn't be overlooked in any thorough report of this year's Rebellion Day festivities was a very special event held in Alta Gracia, Argentina just over the weekend -- in which Castro and his protege Hugo Chavez visited the boyhood home of Che Guevara:

ALTA GRACIA, Argentina— Fidel and Hugo went on a pilgrimage yesterday to Che’s house.

In an emotional journey, Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezuelan ally Hugo Chavez toured the Argentine boyhood home of Castro’s fallen comrade and legendary guerrilla, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. It was a first visit for both.

“Fidel! Fidel!” and “Hugo! Hugo!” the crowd of 2,000 chanted as the 79-year-old Castro, wearing his trademark green military fatigues, got out of his limousine. Chavez was right by Castro’s side as they entered the house amid a crush of security agents.

While Castro made no public comment, he smiled broadly and shook hands with supporters in the crowd. Chavez told reporters the two were delighted by their tour: “Fidel invited me to come and get to know the house. For me, it’s a real honor being here.”

“We feel it! We feel it! Guevara is right with us!” the crowd shouted yesterday. .

Castro first visited Argentina in 1959 after the Cuban revolution and returned to attend a regional summit Friday that inducted Venezuela into the Mercosur trade bloc.

Guevara spent most of his childhood in central Argentina, where his family hoped a mild climate would ease his severe asthma. Guevara’s family later moved to Buenos Aires, where he enrolled in medical school before launching the famous motorcycle trip around South America that inspired him to give up medicine for leftist revolution.

Here's the pair, posing with the little bronze Che:

And here's the entourage posing in front of the famous Korda "T-shirt" photograph that's so in with those who care -- who really care -- about "social justice":

And last but not least, a group hug!

Awwww.....

Where it came to "eliminationist rhetoric," Guevara did more than just talk the talk.

He practiced what he preached.

I'd like to examine what I consider to be a textbook example of genuine eliminationist rhetoric. (As opposed to the highly questionable variety discussed by Rick Moran.)

I found the above picture at a post by Tammy Bruce titled "Hezbollah Among Us."

Calls for destruction of Israel and the Jews are nothing new, and had the same picture had been taken in any number of places in the Mideast, it wouldn't be all that newsworthy.

But -- it was taken at a demonstration in New York.

In this country, advocacy of genocide is normally thought of as a right wing phenomenon. Had the above people been wearing Nazi uniforms, they'd have almost certainly been greeted by huge and angry counterdemonstrations, like those which greeted the uniformed Nazis here. As it happens, I consider advocates of genocide against Jews to be on the right, but it really doesn't matter whether they're considered on the left or the right. They are engaged, quite literally, in eliminationist rhetoric.

So why is it that this literal eliminationist rhetoric -- advocacy, right here in the United States, of genocide against the Jews -- would not be called eliminationist rhetoric by the people who routinely use the term against the likes of Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh? (Or would it? Please enlighten me if my suspicions are wrong.)

Is it because "eliminationist rhetoric" is some sort of leftist code language? Frankly, I think it would be more likely that Tammy Bruce would be accused of using "ER" simply for suggesting that the genocide advocates be deported:

This is one example where everyone at this rally carrying signs calling for Israel's destruction and are sympathetic to Hezbollah should be considered supporters of the enemy, arrested and interrogated. And then, of course, either jailed or deported. And if they have somehow managed to become citizens of the United States, they should be stripped of that honor and then deported back to the pit from whence they came.

I think there would be. Even though we're no longer at war with Germany, but we are at war with international terrorists.

Or am I missing something?

MORE: My confusion may touch on the definition of "genocide." As Glenn Reynolds observes, all genocide is not equal:

... in lefty newspeak, "genocide" is a code word meaning "self-defense" . . .

Well, yes. There was a film with precisely that theme.

(Um, wouldn't that be "oldspeak" then?)

UPDATE: My "extremest" thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking this post!

Welcome all.

UPDATE: Via Glenn Reynolds, here's Austin Bay on fascism:

Fascists organizations often have an imperial restorationist rhetorical pitch and political platform. Mussolini certainly did and Bin Laden does.

Get ready for some moral relativism, because that's exactly what's coming.

During the discussion of sock puppetry (in the most recent post about Doug Thompson and CHB), commenter Kip Watson asked about the origin of the term:

Did you just coin the term 'sock puppets' for this sort of dishonesty?

(I hadn't heard it before)

If so, nice one! Knowing the devils name is how you drive it out!

Posted by Kip Watson at July 25, 2006 08:06 PM

No; I didn't first use the term -- not even to describe CHB (the credit for that goes to John Hawkins).

As to the online use of the term, according to Wikipedia its use goes back to the 1990s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_sock_puppet

The term was perhaps first used on July 9, 1993 in a posting to bit.listserv.fnord-l, but was not in common usage in USENET groups until 1996.

(Links added to my comment.)

Now I'm thinking, did I make a mistake? Or are there different categories of sock puppets?

As the Wikipedia entry notes, sock puppetry is frowned on:

Sockpuppet (sometimes known also as a mule, or a glove puppet) is an additional account created by an existing member of an Internet community pretending to be a separate person. This is done so as to manufacture the illusion of support in a vote or argument or to act without social effect on one's "main" account stay away from the issue. This behaviour is often seen as dishonest by online communities and as a result these individuals are often labeled as trolls.

I have lower standards than most people, and while I post and comment under my own name, I have no problem with anonymous or pseudonymous posting or commenting. True, when push comes to shove, opinions from anonymous people are not taken as seriously as opinions from identified people, but that's just common sense, as well as collective blogospheric wisdom.

I do see a distinction between sock puppetry and genuine, fullscale fraud, and via Glenn Reynolds, I see that I am not alone. Allah ranks the various "scandals," and rates the Greenwald sock puppetry at the bottom -- below even the Hiltzik affair.

When he appeared on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Glenn Reynolds (hmmm... these days, I guess we need to be careful not to say "Glenn" without the last name, don't we?) didn't seem to think the Hiltzik sock puppetry was all that big a deal. I don't either. I think the only reason Allah ranks it above the Greenwald affair is because Hiltzik was an MSM journalist, and Greenwald is a blogger.

Because they're online where consequences are few and anyone can do pretty much anything, bloggers enjoy an inherent right to anonymity (including the right at their own risk to engage in sock puppetry) which isn't shared by mainstream journalists. They post often, and at all hours of the day and night, and it gets crazy sometimes. Bloggers always have the option of waking up in the morning, saying, "I said that?" and going back and retracting it, correcting it, modifying it. Unlike Hiltzik, there are no major consequences, and they won't lose their jobs. However, it goes without saying that absent some acceptable explanation for the behavior, bloggers face a loss of credibility for sock puppetry.

(Again, there is a difference between "honest" and "dishonest" sock puppetry; pretending to be "Karl Rove" is honest; perhaps it's not even sock puppetry.)

I don't especially like sock puppetry, but in blogging, it just goes with the turf. Many of my commenters are anonymous, and I don't mind. Some of them are pretending to be other than what they are, and sometimes I've seen obviously the same commenter return under a different name. If I learned who it was, and proclaimed that to the world, would that be a scandal? Not at all -- probably not even if I could establish it was Glenn Greenwald. However, if I could establish it was Dan Rather, that would be something else. (On the other hand, if "Glenn Greenwald" or "Dan Rather" left ridiculous comments, I'd instantly know these were honest, "friendly," sock puppets.)

My point is that mere sock puppetry in the blogosphere is not that big of a deal. This is why I am having second thoughts about calling CHB and Doug Thompson "sock puppets." (My chart may be more like it.) Not only is Capitol Hill Blue calling itself a news site, Google includes it as a news site. This is despite the fact that for years the site relied on a fictious "expert" named "George Harleigh" -- a professor of Political Science said to have worked for Nixon and Reagan, whose identity I questioned, and who, within a day of my InstaLanched post, was scrubbed from the site and admitted not to exist. (The fact that CHB tried to make this look retroactive raised many suspicions, and in comments it was pointed out that the "story" had been predated.)

Whether it's a mini-scandal or a big scandal, I don't know. (That depends on whether the term "Google News" is to be taken seriously, I guess.)

I soon noticed a 2003 mini-scandal involving this same site and another fictitious person -- one Terrance Wilkinson, said to have worked for the CIA and whose fake allegations managed to make their way onto CNN before he was unmasked.

Both times, CHB replied that it had been "had." I'm very skeptical about this claim, and I am particularly skeptical about the repeated disappearance and reappearance of Doug Thompson, and the way his multiple editors appear and disappear.

Most recently, I noticed that a "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield" (said to be a psychologist who treats patients for lying and prevarication) said exactly the same things about George Bush that she said about Bill Clinton.

Here's what CHB reported her saying about Clinton in 1999:

"The President exhibited all the classic symptoms of pathological prevarication," said Dr. Stephanie Crossfield, a psychologist who treats people who have trouble telling the truth. "His eye movements, gestures, and changes in voice tone all point to a consistent evasion of the truth."

"President Bush exhibited symptoms of pathological prevarication," says Dr. Stephanie Crossfield, a psychologist who treats people who have trouble telling the truth and who watched Bush's performances on Monday and Tuesday at my request. "His eye movements, gestures, and changes in voice tone all display traits of consistent evasion of the truth."

"Article removed from our database"

"Because of sourcing problems we have removed this article from our database. We also learned that at least one passage was lifted by a researcher from another news source without attribution. Our apologies...."

This is unbelievable in the extreme. Every time I catch this guy, he simply pulls the articles!

What more can I say? Other than, here's the Google Cache. Again.

I have lost count of the number of times I have had to resort to Google caches with "Capitol Hill Blue." This is the second time with the same "article." On Sunday (July 23, 2006), language was inserted crediting the San Francisco Chronicle after I pointed out plagiarism.

In three years of blogging, I've never seen anything like this, and I hope I never do again. Considering that it comes from a long-established news site, I think it's massive, ongoing fraud, and I am sorry I called it mere "sock puppetry." Had I not asked questions, that March article would still be sitting there. So would the numerous articles quoting "George Harleigh."

Back to "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield." When "George Harleigh" was exposed here, a "Bill McTavish" (claiming to be the editor, but whose identity I also suspect is fictitious) blamed a previous "editor" named "Jack Sharp" (equally unverifiable).

Who is to be blamed now?

Bear in mind that "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield" is said (by Doug Thompson) to have been "hired" by CHB to "diagnose" President Clinton by watching a video. None of the links still go to CHB, but this archive site and Free Republic both preserve the original text, which reads as follows:

President Bill Clinton lied repeatedly during his Friday press conference, avoiding the truth when discussing the China spying scandal, his relationship with his wife and charges that he raped Juanita Broaddrick, an analysis by two experts shows.

Capitol Hill Blue hired a psychologist who treats chronic liars and a private investigator who uses voice stress analysis to catch liars. They analyzed the President's press conference live on television and again on videotape.

Their conclusion: The President lied more often than he told the truth. Even when he told the nation that he felt a "scorecard" would show he had been a good President who had told the truth more often than he had lied, he was, in fact, lying.

"The President exhibited all the classic symptoms of pathological prevarication," said Dr. Stephanie Crossfield, a psychologist who treats people who have trouble telling the truth. "His eye movements, gestures, and changes in voice tone all point to a consistent evasion of the truth."

Jonathan Rensley, a private investigator who used a voice stress analyzer to monitor the President's performance during the press conference, agrees.

"In spite of his demeanor, the President's voice patterns showed unusually high levels of stress, consistent with someone who is not telling the truth," Rensley said.

At Capitol Hill Blue's insistence, Dr. Crossfield and Rensley did not make their judgement based on one viewing of the President's performance or by consulting with each other. Both watched the press conference live, then rechecked their findings by viewing a full videotape of the press conference on both Saturday and Sunday to confirm their findings.

Dr. Crossfield where are you?

Can anyone help? I mean, isn't there a registry of psychologists anywhere? And if it turns out (as I'm 99.99% certain it will) that Dr. Crossfield doesn't exist -- and hasn't existed -- for the past seven years she's been quoted as an expert, who will be blamed? Thompson, McTavish, Sharp, Hampton, or Riley?

I'll say this in defense of the blogosphere's sock puppets. At least they aren't quoted as expert sources in news stories like "George Harleigh" and "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield." They weren't relied on for years by people on the right as well as the left.

And at least the blogosphere's sock puppets don't disappear when they're discovered. Nor are they blamed on other sock puppets. They remain part of the blogosphere's shared collective heritage.

Frankly, I hope "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield" does exist.

(Since she's an expert on the subject of deception, I'm sure she wouldn't mind sharing her views on sock puppetry. . .)

AFTERTHOUGHT: Considering that I had to go back and add "Reynolds" to the name "Glenn" above, I'm wondering about something. Can't the "Glenn" in "Glenn Greenwald" be changed or dropped to avoid further confusion? I know the Greenwald sock puppetry isn't a big deal, but it does reveal that his identity might not be all that important to him, so maybe just as a slap on the wrist he could just lose or change the first name (or have it lost or changed).

Or am I being too harsh?

MORE: As I've said before, exposing phony news sites is not my shtick, but I just stumbled onto this because the name "George Harleigh" did not ring true. People have said that because Capitol Hill Blue is not taken seriously, "exposing" anything there is a waste of time. Well, if CHB isn't taken seriously, then why is it listed as a Google News site when many other deserving sites are not? CHB, it should be remembered, lays claim to being "better" than the blogosphere:

Howard Kurtz, media writer for The Washington Post, once described the Internet as the place where “anybody with a modem and a mouth can be a publisher.” Blogs drive Kurtz’s point home. Even his newspaper has blogs written by reporters as well as freelancers hired to produce even more blogs written from a partisan point of view.

Which is my problem with blogs. Most, especially political blogs, exist solely to advance a narrow-focus point of view, an openly partisan agenda. The blog generating the most buzz these days is DailyKos, a “community blog” operated by a couple of Democratic activists who, among other things, use their blog to attract clients to one partner’s consulting business and then provide a quid-pro-quo of endorsements by Kos to those who pony up fat consulting fees.

Kos caters to “progressives,” the current buzzword for “liberal.” Somebody apparently focus-grouped the word “liberal” and found it has a bad rep so they came up a new name that means exactly the same thing.

“Progressives” have their litany of followers, usually mom-and-pop bloggers who churn out sermons to the party faithful and decry anything that smacks of right-wing, conservative or Republican.

The right-wingers, of course, have their blogs to counter anything posted by the left and this all leads to a shrill war of words that splatter all over the Internet as verbal diarrhea.

I might be wrong about Kos, but since Thompson is using him as the example of all that's wrong with the blogosphere, I have to say that I don't remember seeing that kind of invective there (or at Atrios for that matter). Both are about as partisanly anti-Bush as it's possible to be.

Nonetheless, Thompson goes on to complain that "he" can't integrate "us":

In my three, aborted attempts to integrate the “blogosphere” into Capitol Hill Blue I found that those who want to read blogs and respond to articles posted thereon have no desire to participate in civil non-partisan discussions. Posts quickly turned into partisan diatribes with each side bashing the other.

Never!

I think CHB is beneath the dignity of our sock puppets!

UPDATE (07/27/06): The CHB post-pulling festival continues. A commenter emailed me about my previous post about "George Harleigh"

Your link to CHB on Bush killing kittens seems to be gone. The page is there, but whatever was on the page is gone.

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7779.shtml

Dr. Justin Frank, a prominent George Washington University psychiatrist and author of the book, Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, says Bush has a cruel, sadistic streak that goes back to his childhood when a young George gleefully bragged about dissecting cats, cutting them open while they were still alive.

The boy who tortured cats, Dr. Frank says, grew up into an alcohol-abusing bully who strikes out at anyone who opposes him.
All one has to do, Dr. Frank says, is confront the President and the bully emerges.

"To actually directly confront him in a clear way, to bring him out, so you would really see the bully, and you would also see the fear," he says.

AND AN AFTERTHOUGHT: It occurs to me that this is getting extremely redundant. The news stories keep getting pulled, "experts" keep disappearing, and various "editors" are blamed in a game of musical chairs.

I'm not in charge of the Internet, so beyond this, there's little I can do. CHB will doubtless carry on as long as there's someone there to keep it going.

The First Amendment right to free speech carries no requirement or guarantee of honesty.

Sorry for the long post which is about to follow, but the time has come for me to return to the roots of my various political (doubtless infantile) disorders.

A better choice for the title of this post might be "Poli Psy 101" . . . (Ironically, by writing this post, I'm neglecting my search for one of the country's leading political psychologists -- Capitol Hill Blue's "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield"!)

The problem is, psychopolitical "disease" diagnoses are everywhere. A comment by Jon Thompson reminded me of an account I read recently about a doctoral student in psychology whose opinion that she was "not privileged" triggered a demand that she submit to psychological evaluation. She refused, and was expelled:

[Lorraine Land] started working on her doctorate in fall 2002 and had no major problems until October 2004, when she told psychology professor Cheryll Rothery-Jackson about an experience she had with clients of different socioeconomic backgrounds while doing a practicum at Friends Hospital in the Northeast.

"Really, what I said was not harmful," says Land, who has blond hair and wears a bubble-gum-pink outfit complete with a sparkly headband. "I acknowledged as a white woman, I'm sure I've had privileges; that doesn't mean I'm privileged. I'm not a Paris Hilton."

Rothery-Jackson, who is black, did not chastise Land for her remarks, but Land says, "From that point on, she went after me." (Rothery-Jackson did not respond to requests for comment.)

A few weeks later, Land received a letter from the psychology faculty saying she was argumentative, lacked insight and clinical experience and needed to control her tone. Then, the day before Thanksgiving, she received a review noting "serious concerns" in every aspect of her training. She submitted ways to improve, but the school was not satisfied.

During this time, Land says, Rothery-Jackson and another professor, Scott Browning, violated her trust by calling Friends Hospital to ask colleagues how she was progressing.

Finally, on Feb. 25, 2005, Browning told Land, who was already in therapy for anxiety, that she needed to undergo a psychological evaluation. Stress then led Land to request a break from her practicum. Friends Hospital agreed, but the college faculty never approved the change and failed Land in the course.

The school then dismissed her due to the failing grade and her reluctance to undergo an evaluation.

But there really is a growing tendency to label political opponents as mentally defective. It's not especially helpful to me, as I like to know what people think, and I am more concerned with whether they are right or wrong than in the mental processes underlying their thinking. My "rigid toilet training" post attempted to look at this in the context of "authoritarianism":

Dean, who's reinvented himself too many times to count, has now come up with a very popular meme that echoes the conservatism-as-mental-illness idea, but with a new twist -- the word "authoritarian" doesn't distinguish between conservatism and mental illness! It's a Marxist term which conflates the political and the personal into one grand evil.

There's a term called "malignant narcissism" which I also hear from time to time. But anyone who thinks that "malignant narcissism" and "authoritarian" are in any way mutually exclusive should consider the case of North Korea's Kim Jong Il. He's both! I think psychoanalysis may be helpful in dealing with an unstable man like that, but it's of little value in ordinary political discussions, unless the goal is simply to yell and polarize. But the tendency of so many people to do it may indicate that hopeless polarization has set in -- to the point where all discussions are impossible, so ad hominem attacks (often launched by Choir A against Choir B) are the only thing left.

However, it's the "in" thing these days to do "Poli Psy," so I think it's high time that I check myself in for evaluation right here at this blog.

Back in the days when self-appointed political diagnostician John Dean was still a conservative, I was a Marxist in my thinking. Of course, I wasn't much of an authoritarian (my Marxism clashed with my anarchistic tendencies and lifestyle) and I'm still not much of an authoritarian. In fact, politically, every test I've taken shows me to be solidly in the libertarian camp.

People change their political opinions all the time. I've changed my mind countless times over the years. When I was in high school I was not just a Marxist, but a fiery radical. My radicalism didn't last long, as my political philosophy changed during the first couple of years I attended UC Berkeley. It turned me off to see what I perceived as uniformity of thought, and unquestioning acceptance of the virtues of socialism by so many. Many self-proclaimed "Marxists" didn't know the first thing about Marx; I soon learned that the most of the people who really knew Marxist theory were either:

a) opposed to Marxism as a result of studying it and seeing it in practice; or

b) dedicated, true-believing Marxists who could spout Marx almost line and verse.

Members of the Communist Party, while Marxists, tended to keep their Marxism in the closet, because they were told to, and they did as they were told as a matter of party discipline. You had to get close to them to get them to really discuss Marxism, but what I soon learned was that their kind of Marxism was tempered by a constant political realism. Communist Party Marxism was Marxism met up with the political maxim that "politics is the art of the possible." The Communist Party worked very hard, but in the background. The focus was always on issues to which they tried to get as many people as possible to relate.

But the Trots and the Sparts -- they were the Marxists who'd really and unabashedly talk Marxism. And why wouldn't they? Trotskyism, after all, was always a deviation from traditional Communism as it had come to be defined by Soviet theoreticians, and if you think about it, if you want to deviate from something, it's a prerequisite that you first know the "ism" you are deviating from. The Trots knew their stuff, but it was hard carrying on conversations with them, because they were like broken records.

Looking back on this, I'm remembering that my revulsion towards Communism was based on what I perceived as Communist authoritarianism.

By 1976 I had become so disillusioned with the left that I had decided I was a Libertarian. Learning about Cuba from people who'd been there did not endear me to the place. Gay bars which had been joyously cheering the victory of Fidel were closed down as places of bourgeois decadence not long after. Not much to cheer about. In general, Communists struck me as control freaks. People who, the more you got to know them, the more they wanted to tell you what to think. Communism in practice, I realized, was a very controlling deal. The ideology had an answer for everything. All you had to do was look it up, and follow Marxist principles. The Trots were more like fundamentalists in the sense that they could at least look up the text for themselves. But then they'd get into these fractious, tedious arguments, in the most hair-splitting detail. Insufferable. The Communist Party types were even worse, as they took direction from above. It was authoritarianism at its worst. No dissent at all. Party discipline was a prerequisite to any responsibility. If you wanted to join the Communist Party, you'd be given tasks involving utter drudgery (like standing around gathering signatures on some petition), and you'd be watched. Graded, like a child in school. Original thinking? Forget it. That's only for those with years proven to be "politically reliable."

So, I didn't like real Marxists, and I didn't like the idea of Marxism in government. However, I liked the hordes of fake Marxists (political poseurs) even less. None of them seemed free. I liked the idea of simply being left alone, and politically I was more of an anarchist than a Marxist, so Libertarianism (with its emphasis on leaving people alone) had an early and enduring appeal.

Nonconformity doubtless played a role, as I've always tended to rebel against whatever the status quo might be at a given place and time, provided I can identify it. I had long hair until everyone had long hair, then I had short hair (and so forth), and then I was into the early punk scene until that too became conformist, but the process is as silly as it is exhausting, because rebellion leads to conformity, which leads to rebellion. . . So, while I've long since abandoned following these cycles of mindless contrarianism, I still refuse to do something (or, especially, to think something) simply because someone tells me to.

My voting record, I think, reflects my evolution. In 1972 I voted for George McGovern, and in 1976 I voted for Roger McBride. But by 1980, I had come to see Ronald Reagan as a great enough threat that I didn't want to waste my vote by voting for the Libertarian. (More here.)

This is not to say that I liked the socialism I considered part and parcel of Democratic Party politics, mind you. What turned me off to Reagan above all was the "culture war" rhetoric; I thought he was part of a simplistic mindset which regarded long hair and pot smoking and gays as unpatriotic. The fact that he courted people then known as "televangelists" filled me with disgust, and even rage. The mistake that I thought was being made was what today is called "conflation." Generalizing about people by invoking cultural stereotypes (like saying all hippies are leftists when many weren't, or wouldn't have been) is a way of keeping them out of your tent, pleasing your own kind. But it's a cheap shot, and long term, it does damage. Rather than bashing hippies, Reagan should have bashed Marxism -- preferably with a long-haired staffer by his side. But he couldn't do this, because it might have been misunderstood, and he'd have lost votes. The truth is, many members of his generation hated hippies because of their appearance, just like (let's face it) many of them hated gays. Wittingly or unwittingly, I think that Reagan (much to the delight of the left, which obliged by providing stereotypes every step of the way) did much to perpetuate the conflation of the personal and the political.

If only it hadn't happened. But it did.

I think it was Reagan's single greatest mistake.

It's why I'd like to continue to call myself a Goldwater liberal, and also why I am quite irritated that John Dean is not only advancing a Marxist psychopolitical meme (that political enemies are "authoritarians"), but he does so in the name of Barry Goldwater (a man who was himself a victim of these tactics).

I'm not about to buy the Dean book, but if the prologue is any indication, it's a masterpiece of prevarication -- and above all, conflation.

Let me admit my bias here. I do not buy into the conventional history of Watergate.

I did for years, but it never made sense to me why Nixon's people would want to burglarize the DNC or "bug Larry O'Brien's office." (Jim Hougan, btw, was the first to debunk this thoroughly, and he's neither an authoritarian nor a cultist, but someone who thought the CIA was out of control.)

The "bug O'Brien" theory didn't make sense to a lot of people -- least of all Richard Nixon, whose initial reaction that the burglary made no sense was absolutely right. A hard-bitten man (and certainly no moralist about such things), Nixon reacted along the lines of "WTF?"

"(expletive deleted) Of course, I am not dumb and I will never forget when I heard about this (adjective deleted) forced entry and bugging. I thought, what in the hell is this? What is the matter with these people? Are they crazy? I thought they were nuts! A prank! But it wasn't! It wasn't very funny." -- Richard Nixon, February 28, 1973

I realize that I certainly can't solve Watergate in a blog post. Even in a long blog post. The facts are laboriously complicated, but anyone who wants background about my skepticism can read my much-neglected Watergate blog. Again, Jim Hougan (a great writer BTW) was the first to really go back and explore the burglary details in his book Secret Agenda. (I recommend the Hougan book highly, along with Colodny and Gettlin's Silent Coup. People who don't want to buy out of print books can stream Barbara Newman's "The Key to Watergate" which was originally made for A&E's Investigative Reports series.)

Not that I'd expect Glenn Greenwald to actually sit down and ask serious questions about the burglary itself, but his recent endorsement of John Dean's book (in a post titled "John Dean and Authoritarian Cultism") speaks volumes about the diagnostic approach to demonization of people with dissenting (or even skeptical) views.

In 1991, as Dean recounts at length, he learned that 60 Minutes and Time Magazine were preparing to feature a new book, entitled Silent Coup, which claimed that Dean himself was the one who ordered the Watergate break-in. The book alleged that Dean's motive was that his wife, Maureen, had a connection to a Washington, DC call-girl operation and thus had knowledge of various sex scandals involving Democrats, and Dean sought to obtain documentation to use against them.

The very idea that Dean himself had ordered the Watergate break-in because of his wife's connection to a call-girl service, and that these secrets were somehow kept for 20 years, was completely absurd on its face.

(From Reihl World View via Glenn Reynolds.)

Greenwald does not mention that it was Jim Hougan who first discovered the connection to the call girl operation. Nor does he disclose that there are serious historians who also think Hougan, Colodny, and Gettlin were right.

One such historian is Joan Hoff:

Joan Hoff, professor of history at Indiana University and co-editor of the Journal of Women’s History, is a specialist in twentieth-century American foreign policy and politics and in the legal status of American women. She was executive secretary of the Organization of American Historians from 1981 to 1989. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, includig the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ Article Prize and the Stuart L. Bernath Prize for the best book on American diplomacy. She is the author of several books including Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women and Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive.

Nor is it "right wing" -- despite Greenwald & Dean's continued protestations:

And once Dean vehemently denied these allegations, both 60 Minutes and Time investigated the claims and both decided not to run the story -- a noble decision which, in Time's case, led to the loss of the $50,000 it had paid for the rights to run an excerpt of the book.

But using right-wing smear techniques which, back then, were still new, but which are now a staple of the "conservative" movement, these patently false allegations against Dean were aggressively promoted by right-wing ideologues and then accepted and given great attention by the mainstream media.

The book's publishers enlisted both right-wing follower G. Gordon Liddy and by-then-born-again Christian activist Charles Colson -- both of whom still hated Dean for his blasphemy in testifying truthfully against the President -- to promote the book and push its allegations against Dean.

More and more right-wing groups and personalities jumped on board this smear campaign, until it received full-fledged support from mainstream right-wing media personalities. That, in turn, induced many mainstream media programs -- from Good Morning America to CNN's Larry King Live -- to invite the authors on to discuss the book. Out of this now all-too-familiar process, this defamatory book ended up on the New York Times' Best Seller List. As Dean recounts:

Despite most of the news media’s fitting dismissal of Silent Coup’s baseless claims, the protracted litigation provided time for the book to gather a following, including an almost cultlike collection of highprofile right-wingers. Among them, for example, is Monica Crowley, a former aide to Richard Nixon after his presidency, and now a conservative personality on MSNBC, cohosting Connected: Coast to Coast with Ron Reagan. Other prominent media-based conservatives who have joined the glee club are James Rosen and Brit Hume of Fox News. How these seemingly intelligent people embraced this false account mystified me, and I wanted to know. . . .

As for Colson, his reason for promotion of Silent Coup remained a complete mystery for me, as did the motives of people like Monica Crowley, James Rosen, Brit Hume, and all the other hard-core conservatives who embraced this spurious history and made it a best seller. The only thing I could see that these people had in common was their conservatism.

That is how the "conservative" movement works to this day, although its methods have become even more efficient and less scrupulous. Petty allegations and character attacks begin percolating in the smear sewers of the right wing -- through insinuations by talk-radio dirt-mongerers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, speculation by Matt Drudge, smear campaigns by shadowy groups and organizations, and now by attention-desperate and glory-seeking right-wing blogs. From there, the attacks are reported by the right-wing media and then fed into the mainstream media.

A lynch mob is created which seeks not the truth of what happened, but the destruction of the movement's enemies.

Colson is an authoritarian, and because he agreed with Colodny's theory, then anyone who agrees with Colodny's theory becomes a Colsonite authoritarian!

What sort of "movement" is this to which Watergate skeptics are said to belong? A right wing "authoritarian" movement compiling "enemies lists" as part of a plot to restore the deceased Richard Nixon? I'm tempted to ask just what is an "enemy," because I wonder whether the term is being used fairly, but that would require another essay on another topic. But I'm curious: does Glenn Greenwald have enemies of his own? Or does he think that the word "enemy" is a malevolent term used by people who disagree with him? I don't know. Hell, I don't even know right now whether I'm questioning the authority of Glenn Greenwald or John Dean. (Considering that the latter's disavowal of his famous Blind Ambition, I'd have to conclude -- however reluctantly -- that Glenn Greenwald is a better authority.)

What about the fact that Nixon was a centrist Republican, to the left of Goldwater? Does it matter that he ended the Vietnam War, started the EPA, and instituted wage and price controls? Or has Nixon morphed into a savior of the far right? Hardly. The far right didn't like him then, and they don't like him now.

Interestingly, Colodny (who, btw, writes for notorious right wing rags like Counterpunch) thinks that the call girl connection was part of a CIA coup orchestrated by General Al Haig and other right wingers. Jim Hougan thought so too -- and still thinks so:

In his June 2, 2005 article in the Post, outing his source, Woodward tells us that Felt regarded the Nixon White House as “corrupt…sinister…(a) cabal.” And, as the Post reporter makes clear, this was a view that Felt held prior to the Watergate break-in. Indeed, Woodward says, “Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis.”

As it happens, this is exactly what I thought at the time, as did nearly every other liberal that I knew. Strange, then, to learn that this same point of view was shared by Mark Felt, a professional Red-hunter so highly placed in the FBI that only the Director, J. Edgar Hoover, outranked him.

Or maybe it’s not so strange.

A similar view of the Nixon Administration was held by James McCord, the rightwing evangelist and former CIA Security chief who led the break-in team at the Watergate. In a series of queer “newsletters” written after he had been arrested, McCord put forward a conspiracy theory suggesting that the Rockefeller family was lunging for control of the government’s critical national security functions, using the Council on Foreign Relations and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger as its means to an end.

At the Pentagon, then-Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, went even further. To Zumwalt, the Nixon Administration was “inimical to the security of the United States.”[1] Indeed, as the admiral later explained, he eventually left the Administration (this was in 1974) because “its own officials and experts reflected Henry Kissinger’s world view: that the dynamics of history are on the side of the Soviet Union; that before long the USSR will be the only superpower on earth and…that the duty of policy-makers, therefore, is at all costs to conceal from the people their probable fate…” [2]

Egad... they’ve sold us out!

And while I still refuse to call it "projection," I hardly think it constitutes mental illness -- especially of the "authoritarian" variety -- to ask questions about things like the ongoing effort to hide a key to a particular desk.

Since when are we not supposed to question authority?

This weeks RINOs carnival is hosted at Nick Schweitzer's blog, The World According to Nick. He calls it the The Lazy RINO Sightings Carnival, and while there's a picture of a RINO sleeping in the sun, there's nothing lazy about the posts.

I've never quite figured out all the reasons why I'm blogging, and if I had to reduce it to the biggest reason, it would probably be that because I am too easily distracted, getting my thoughts in writing helps me focus more clearly, in the hope that I might be able to approach real thought. Blogging is my attempt to cut through the distractions.

But right there, I'm getting distracted from the purpose of this post, which is to urge the lazy among you to go read the Lazy Carnival!

Via Justin, I just learned that Bill Whittle has posted chapter one of his new book, AN AMERICAN CIVILIZATION.

I like his take on ad hominem attacks:

The entire concept of Civilization has been so deconstructed, and vilified, that by having the audacity to defend the ideals of Civilized behavior Your Author has been called a racist (nope – I happen to have African Ancestors!), a repressed homosexual (please – I have two pairs of shoes!) and even a potential cannibal! (What happens in Papua New Guinea, stays in Papua New Guinea.)

Worse than all of this – I can barely bring myself to mention it – I have been called a nerd by some of these horrible, mean, spiteful people! Me! A Nerd! I suppose that by having a banner on my website where a nerd compares me to another nerd by using a Star Trek reference somehow makes me a nerd! Preposterous!

Reading that made me so furious I just had to unwind and think. I removed my button-down triple-knit nylon print shirt (with all five Enterprises including kick-ass Enterprise E), and decided to just ‘go commando’ leaving only the black turtleneck underneath. I grabbed a Fresca, unzipped my boots and decided to pop in a cassette. (Man, that Dolby NR sure cuts the hiss!) Hanson or *NSYNC? ABBA or Partridge Family? I definitely felt like some old skool, so I broke out the trusty old party mix with Starland Vocal Band and Gary Wright, plus some MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice representin’ that mad hip-hop flava I’m so down with, then put on my Yoda jammies and my bunny slippers, leaned way back in my plaid recliner, and began to ponder. Deeply ponder. Cogitate, even.

Why all the hatred? Why are so many people so ashamed of the most amazing Civilization that has ever existed on the face of this planet? What the hell have these people been taught to make them think such transparent nonsense?

A must read, I'd say.

I played tour guide for an out of town visitor this afternoon, and took a few photos.

Some oddball architectural details I liked:

I don't know whether this is on or off, peeling or unpeeling:

A breakthrough at long last:

And finally, my photograph of an unexplained photograph of a couple of guys who obviously had too much time on their hands.

Perhaps they were getting ready for a small scale ball.

All in all, a lovely day.

I'm having some serious logical problems with this:

It's time for all of us to collectively mourn more for people than we do for a horse. If we don't show the most desperate among us that we value their lives more than an animal's, they have no reason not to kill indiscriminately.

Hickey contrasts Barbaro with a murdered man named Damon Edward Heggs, who not only didn't receive as much press coverage as Barbaro, but whose family received nowhere near the public attention devoted to Barbaro:

. . .on the ride home, I got to thinking about the anonymous well-wishers who order carrots by the caseload and ship them over to an animal hospital that's decorated by 4-foot-high get-well cards covered with signatures. About how we're almost at the point that Barbaro's bowel movements qualify as breaking news. By the time I got back to the Philadelphia Theater of War, I knew why:

We the people care more about an animal than we did about Damon Edward Heggs.

Whether that's good enough for Mr. Hickey, I do not know. But it certainly isn't good enough for animal rights activists, who maintain that Barbaro was a victim whose life was every bit as worthy of that of Mr. Heggs.

Here's In Defense of Animals:

Many racehorse "owners" see these animals purely as economic investments, so rather than trying to save the lives of horses injured during competition, they will choose to simply euthanize them to spare themselves the expense of veterinary services. The least sympathetic investors can even recoup some of their losses by selling an injured horse to a slaughterhouse where they will be killed just as cattle are: with a shot from a captive bolt pistol to the head and a knife blade across the throat. Winners like Barbaro aren't kept alive simply out of compassion. This repeat winner will be used for breeding other racehorses, continuing this vicious cycle of abuse.

Racehorses have been genetically selected and bred for one specific purpose: to run extremely fast. These animals normally weigh over 1,000 pounds, but their ankles are as thin as a human being's, making them very fragile indeed. As long as thoroughbreds are forced to race one another at excessive speeds with a rider jockeying for position on surfaces that can be as hard as cement, there will be serious injuries, many of them fatal. In this way, racehorses are victims of a multi-billion dollar industry that literally gambles with their lives. It can never be an acceptable form of "entertainment" to those who truly care about the welfare of animals.

What Mr. Hickey finds so offensive is that the media pay more attention to Barbaro than Mr. Heggs. That, however, is a direct result of market forces, not morality. The same people who decide to run big headlines about Barbaro, while barely mentioning another fatal victim of street crime, have not made a moral decision that a horse life is more valuable than a human life. If the statue of William Penn fell off Philadelphia City Hall tomorrow, it would be a HUGE headline in all the local papers, even if no one was hurt. Does that mean that "we the people" care more about bronze statues than human beings? Of course not. Would people be more upset? Yes, and they'd probably volunteer more time and money to get the building repaired than they would for a victim's family. But it doesn't mean that they place greater moral value on statues than on human life. These things are not logically related. Many people are more interested in the sports page or business section than the news section, and this does not mean that they place a higher value on baseball than surviving a nuclear attack by Iran or North Korea.

Then there's this:

If we don't show the most desperate among us that we value their lives more than an animal's, they have no reason not to kill indiscriminately.

Marcia explained that her son was a good kid. He went to Overbrook, ran a cleaning business and had a 3-year-old daughter. He didn't smoke, drink or have enemies. He didn't get in trouble.

"The police," she said, "assured me that it was a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time thing."

As far as I'm concerned, his murderer should get the death penalty, or at least life in prison. Of course, now that I've said that, I'm thinking that perhaps Mr. Hickey thinks that the murderer was in the "most desperate" category. That he may have killed because "we" place more value on the life of an animal than on his. How can Hickey be so sure? Can he look into the mind of the murderer? For all we know, the guy was shooting at someone else, and Damon Heggs got caught in crossfire.

Assuming the murderer was the kind of person who had "no reason not to kill indiscriminately," can it be that Hickey is seriously suggesting that had the murderer realized that society places more value on human life than on the life of a racehorse (which I think it does), that he would not have killed? That some sort of mass "collective mourning" of murder victims in deliberate disproportion to the alleged collective mourning of dead horses is going to change the reasoning of anyone callused enough to shoot people?

I don't think so. I think the way to show that society values the lives of people is to prosecute those who kill them.

As I've explained, I value the life of Mr. Heggs more than the life of Barbaro. But, at the risk of sounding callused, I'd value the life of Barbaro more than the life of a murderer.

(If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that Hickey was using a straw horse to blur the distinction between murderers and victims.)

UPDATE (07/28/06): Brian Hickey has responded in a comment below. While I continue to disagree with him, the fact that he came here to defend his piece speaks well of his integrity, and of the City Paper.

I'm wondering what went into the thinking of the ACLU's decision to file suit on behalf of Fred Phelps' God Hates Fags "church group":

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A Kansas church group that protests at military funerals nationwide filed suit in federal court, saying a Missouri law banning such picketing infringes on religious freedom and free speech.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit Friday in the U.S. District Court in Jefferson City, Mo., on behalf of the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church, which has outraged mourning communities by picketing service members' funerals with signs condemning homosexuality.

The church and the Rev. Fred Phelps say God is allowing troops, coal miners and others to be killed because the United States tolerates gay men and lesbians.

Missouri lawmakers were spurred to action after members of the church protested in St. Joseph, Mo., last August at the funeral of Army Spec. Edward L. Myers.

The law bans picketing and protests "in front of or about" any location where a funeral is held, from an hour before it begins until an hour after it ends. Offenders can face fines and jail time.

In this case I would think that picketing a cemetary would bear some similarity to picketing a private home, restrictions on which the Supreme Court has generally permitted. A cemetary has never been a traditional public forum; it is a place where people expect a certain tranquility, and come with a certain vulnerability. It strikes me as very similar to a hospital. I suspect the Supreme Court's abortion-picketing cases -- roundly criticized by Scalia -- which have generally upheld restrictions on protests of abortion clinics, staff homes, etc. -- will be found analogous and will apply.

Although oddly enough, come to think of it, the ACLU, despite its general absolute-free-speech position, has rarely come to the aid of the first amendment rights of abortion protestors.

But in general, I'm inclined to agree with reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions, because this goes to the right to be left alone. The right to protest is not an unlimited right to force people to listen to the message at all times and places. Protesting in front of someone's house crosses the line that separates free speech from simple harrassment. It's a bit like receiving repeated, unwanted telephone calls. Just as free speech does not allow the God Hates Fags people to call people repeatedly on the phone for purposes of harassment, they shouldn't have a right to show up at someone's house and wave signs.

In Frisby v. Schultz, 487 U.S. 474, anti-abortion protesters (with the ACLU filing briefs) demanded the right to picket the home of a doctor who performed abortions, contending that the following local law was unconstitutional:

"It is unlawful for any person to engage in picketing before or about the residence or dwelling of any individual in the Town of Brookfield." App. to Juris. Statement A-28.

The ordinance itself recites the primary purpose of this ban: "the protection and preservation of the home" through assurance "that members of the community enjoy in their homes and dwellings a feeling of well-being, tranquility, and privacy." Id., at A-26. The Town Board believed that a ban was necessary because it determined that "the practice of picketing before or about residences and dwellings causes emotional disturbance and distress to the occupants . . . [and] has as its object the harassing of such occupants." Id., at A-26 - A-27. The ordinance also evinces a concern for public safety, noting that picketing obstructs and interferes with "the free use of public sidewalks and public ways of travel." Id., at A-27.

On May 18, 1985, appellees were informed by the town attorney that enforcement of the new, revised ordinance would begin on May 21, 1985. Faced with this threat of arrest and prosecution, appellees ceased picketing in Brookfield and filed this lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. The complaint was brought under 42 U.S.C. 1983 and sought declaratory as well as preliminary and permanent injunctive relief on the grounds that the ordinance violated the First Amendment.

There simply is no right to force speech into the home of an unwilling listener.

The Court also upheld the ordinance because a home, by its nature, is a captive audience:

The First Amendment permits the government to prohibit offensive speech as intrusive when the "captive" audience cannot avoid the objectionable speech. See Consolidated Edison Co. v. Public Service Comm'n of New York, 447 U.S. 530, 542 (1980). Cf. Bolger v. Youngs Drug Products Corp., supra, at 72. The target of the focused picketing banned by the Brookfield ordinance is just such a "captive." The resident is figuratively, and perhaps literally, trapped within the home, and because of the unique and subtle impact of such picketing is left with no ready means of avoiding the unwanted speech. Cf. Cohen v. California, 403 U.S., at 21 -22 (noting ease of avoiding unwanted speech in other circumstances). Thus, the "evil" of targeted residential picketing, "the very presence of an unwelcome visitor at the home," Carey, supra, at 478 (REHNQUIST, J., dissenting), is "created by the medium of expression itself." See Taxpayers for Vincent, supra, at 810. Accordingly, the Brookfield ordinance's [487 U.S. 474, 488] complete ban of that particular medium of expression is narrowly tailored.

But a funeral only happens once, because we only die once, and people come there to honor us, and to grieve. The people there are not only a captive audience with no way to escape, but many of the loved ones are in a precarious mental state. Literally, they are in pain. The idea that they should have to endure protesters -- of any kind -- at such an event strikes me as obscene. I think it's far more invasive, harassing, and egregious than a protest in front of a home.

If the Missouri statute is not a perfect example of a permissible time, place, and manner restriction, I don't think anything would be.

I'd also note that the nothing in the statute (the text of which has been posted in comments to Jonathan Adler's post) singles out Fred Phelps or his particular message. It simply prohibits funeral protests, and it would apply equally to anti-war protesters, anti-gay protesters, anti-union protesters or anti-abortion protesters. A hero has just as much right to an undisturbed funeral as a villain*, and those who mourn the dead have a right to do so without being made a captive audience.

*I'd go so far as to say that mass murderers (and even people guilty of worse crimes, like Ken Lay) have the right to protest-free funerals.

But what about protests at weddings?

I'm getting a bit tired of Capitol Hill Blue. It's an unreliable web site which I'd never read before July 16, and I think it's staffed by sock puppets. John Hawkins had it right in February, when he said:

I wonder if Thompson actually makes up like names for these fake sources? Like ya know, Mr. I. Friend the Secret Service Agent or White House Aide Puff'N'Stuff? Better yet, maybe he makes little puppets out of socks, puts them on his hands, and asks them questions. "Mr. Socko, you saw Cheney drunk, didn't you? Of course you did! That's a good Mr. Socko!"

The fact that there are actually bloggers out there linking to this moronic fraud for reasons other than to laugh at him, even if they are on the left, is a stain on the entire blogosphere. Even liberals should know better than to buy into this sort of garbage...

What I find most remarkable is that it matters very much to some people whether the site is relied on by "liberals" or "conservatives." My assumption has tended to be that because the site is primarily anti-Bush in the extreme, that most of its fans would be on the left. However, not only does Doug Thompson claim to be "non-partisan," before Bush was president much of his wrath was directed against Clinton, and he helped feed the then-popular stream of Clinton conspiracy theories.

Remember, I only wanted to know who George Harleigh was.

The rest just sort of flowed, and when I saw the Harleigh quotes disappear, I was forced to do more work, and that resulted in one of the longest posts I've written. I didn't stop to speculate much about who was reading Doug Thompson, and I really don't much care.

I think it's fair to point out that the site has a number of right wing boosters.

Writing in 1999 for WorldNetDaily (who else?) Lew Rockwell listed Doug Thompson among the "courageous writers and thinkers who have thrown themselves into the battle to stop the bombings and stop the war."

WND's editor Joseph Farah thought so highly of Doug Thompson that he went out of his way to express gratitude to him (and other "journalistic colleagues") in a special 1999 Thanksgiving column:

I'm thankful for a small group of journalistic colleagues, as well. I think, especially, of Bill Gertz, Matt Drudge, Robert Morton, Doug Thompson, and Paul Sperry - all of whom stand up to the establishment, to the conventions of our day, in their relentless desire to seek truth.

Doug Thompson, publisher of Capitol Hill Blue was recently diagnosed with the tumor, but a spokesman from CHB said the publisher confirmed that he is doing well.

"He tires easily," said CHB editor Jack Sharp, "but his doctor is confident of a full recovery."

Sharp told WorldNetDaily that physicians have decided to treat the tumor medically rather than surgically.

"I expect him to be back up to full speed by late September or early October," Sharp said.

Freepers praised Thompson at the time, and wished him well:

I received an email this morning from a friend of mine who works in House Speaker Denny Hastert's office. He reports that that the word on the Hill is that Capitol Hill Blue publisher Doug Thompson is seriously ill with a brain tumor and has been undergoing chemotherapy for the past three weeks.

I sent an email to Jack Sharp, the editor of Capitol Hill Blue this morning to try and get more information, but I thought fellow freepers might want to know. Doug and his web site have been strong supporters of Free Republic and I felt others would want to join my family in our prayers for Doug for a swift and complete recovery.

Sigh.

Here we go again.

Who is Jack Sharp?

Why oh why am I plagued with this infernal curiosity that makes me, simply, want to know?

I am not accusing the left.

I am not accusing the right.

I Want. To. Know.

But I'm afraid that might be asking too much of this wretched imaginary cyber world.

Whoever he is, "Jack Sharp" is the man now said to be responsible for "George Harleigh." Not Doug Thompson! At least, so claims "Editor Bill McTavish":

Doug Thompson is not responsible for George Harleigh's quotes appearing on Capitol Hill Blue. Hareigh was first quoted by former editor Jack Sharp in our series on Congressional miscreants and Harleigh was quoted more often in stories written by others. The only times Doug used a quote from Harleigh in any of his writings was when someone else on our staff passed it on to him because they thought he might find it useful.

(Emphasis added.)

I'm stumped.

Whatever happened to CHB's mysterious "former editor"? Why, the man headed CHB when the site was in its "pioneer" days. Why did he leave? What did he do after he left? I think it's a bit strange that there's no word anywhere. Did he die? (A distinguished Tennessee botanist of that name died in 1997, but nothing in his encyclopedia entry mentioned CHB. There's also a Tennessee assemblyman with that name, but his biography makes no mention of CHB.)

I'm skeptical.

Is there any reason why my skepticism should be labeled right wing?

I'd note that even now -- after the Bush stuff -- the right wing given up entirely on Doug Thompson. For example, he's linked by Chuck Baldwin.

And here's another interesting "factoid": CHB was "sold" in a deal to take effect on April 1, 2003:

"Capitol Hill Blue is a pioneer in web-based journalism," said partnership spokesman William J. Lowrey. "We intend to honor that tradition and improve upon it."

The partnership is composed of working, Washington-based journalists who work for print, broadcast and web-based media outlets.

"We intend to use Blue as a test bed for new techniques and concepts for web journalism," Lowrey said.

Capitol Hill Blue first appeared on the web on October 1, 1994, as a one-page weekly newsletter published by veteran journalist Doug Thompson. He expanded publication to daily on January 1, 1995, and the site gained fame during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals of the Clinton administration.

Thompson left the publication earlier this month to pursue new opportunities.

Terms of the sale were not disclosed. The new owners will take control of the web site on April 1, 2003.

Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.

And. Sigh!

Alas there are only three William J. Lowreys on the Internet. (All died long ago.)

Anyway, the autopsy will have to wait, for I'm digressing from the question of whether CHB disinformation is rightist or leftist.

Parenthetically, I should point out that "George Harleigh" is disappearing everywhere. So fast it makes my head spin. Last week there were thousands of Google hits; now they number in the hundreds. I realize that CHB pulled all the Harleigh references, but that alone does not account for the disappearing links. (From over 1400 to about 500 in less than a week.)

This is not meant to be comprehensive, but aside from WND, at least one Huffington Post contributor has relied on CHB, as did Newsmax's Geoff Metcalf.

James Corsi evokes the constitution-as-a-piece-of paper meme, but does not mention Doug Thompson. (Corsi's theories are being systematically debunked by John Hawkins, btw.)

The point is, a lot of people were fooled -- for a long time -- by Doug Thompson, and not all of them were on the left. Some were libertarians. But some libertarians were more skeptical. Like Rand Simberg in 2004, who said he thought Thompson had "gone off the deep end" and was making stuff up.

At this point I doubt very many people will care, but beyond the issue of politics (and made up sources) there are also serious questions of plagiarism. In the comment to a Reason piece on TIA, one commenter raised the issue:

I don't know whether TIA is still running or not, but I am pretty certain Doug Thompson and Teresa Hampton are thieves and plagiarists.

Comparing this CHB piece to an earlier piece from the San Francisco Chronicle, I noticed the same characters, the same quotes, yet Thompson makes it appear that he did the reporting.

Here's CHB:

Dennis Dalbey cuts the hair of Camp Pendleton's young Marines, giving them the regulation haircut before they head to combat in Iraq. His barbershop on the Coast Highway near the base in California is covered with painted yellow ribbons, flags and "We support our troops" banners. But Dalbey, a Republican and a self-described conservative who voted for Bush, says he is fed up with the President's lies.

"Enough is enough," he says. "It's time to bring the boys home."

In San Marcos, retired Navy veteran Herb Ranquist, 77, sits in the local VFW hall and says Bush is a failure.

"I voted for him two times, and I wish I hadn't," Ranquist says. "It was probably one of the worst mistakes I ever made."

Dr. Crossfield says it doesn't take a degree in psychology or advanced training in spotting liars to realize the President plays fast and loose with the truth.

"More and more ordinary Americans see the evidence clearly every day," she says. "It is difficult to ignore."

Must I go there too?

Or is it possible that reasonable people might be able to agree that regardless of who or what it is, or how, or why it originated, Capitol Hill Blue has been so thoroughly discredited, that it should not be relied on by anyone, anywhere, ever again?

(I don't know, but tedious as it is, I feel obligated to return to my stream of thought despite having been so rudely interrupted by "Stephanie Crossfield." I don't have time to debate her existence right now. I just don't.)

The passage about the Dalbey barber shop appears to have been lifted from the San Francisco Chronicle without crediting author Carla Marinucci, Chronicle Political Writer, who wrote this:

Dennis Dalbey, armed with scissors, an electric hair clipper and a steady hand, has given dozens of Camp Pendleton's young Marines the regulation haircut before they head to combat in Iraq.

In his Cut-Rite Barbershop on the Coast Highway, he wears his loyalty to those customers openly -- the business is adorned with painted yellow ribbons, flags and "We support our troops'' banners.

But these days, Dalbey, a Republican and a self-described conservative who voted for President Bush, is not nearly as supportive of the commander in chief.

"Enough is enough,'' he said of the war while showing Lance Cpl. Aaron Kernell, 19, from Tennessee, to a red Naugahyde chair for a cut. "If they haven't got this thing settled by year's end, it's time to bring the boys home.''

I suspect I'll continue to be harangued by anonymous sock puppets who think that I'm maligning "the left" because some people on "the left" relied on CHB sock puppetry.

By that logic, I'm also maligning "the right."

MORE: Back to CHB, March 23, 2006:

"President Bush exhibited symptoms of pathological prevarication," says Dr. Stephanie Crossfield, a psychologist who treats people who have trouble telling the truth and who watched Bush's performances on Monday and Tuesday at my request. "His eye movements, gestures, and changes in voice tone all display traits of consistent evasion of the truth."

FWIW, the quote appears to have been lifted almost verbatim from the earliest citation of "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield" I could find (with "Bush" substituted for "Clinton," of course). And who "hired" Dr. Crossfield? CHB in 1999! So claimed Doug Thompson!

Capitol Hill Blue hired a psychologist who treats chronic liars and a private investigator who uses voice stress analysis to catch liars. They analyzed the President's press conference live on television and again on videotape.

Their conclusion: The President lied more often than he told the truth. Even when he told the nation that he felt a "scorecard" would show he had been a good President who had told the truth more often than he had lied, he was, in fact, lying.

"The President exhibited all the classic symptoms of pathological prevarication," said Dr. Stephanie Crossfield, a psychologist who treats people who have trouble telling the truth. "His eye movements, gestures, and changes in voice tone all point to a consistent evasion of the truth."

Jonathan Rensley, a private investigator who used a voice stress analyzer to monitor the President's performance during the press conference, agrees.

"In spite of his demeanor, the President's voice patterns showed unusually high levels of stress, consistent with someone who is not telling the truth," Rensley said.

At Capitol Hill Blue's insistence, Dr. Crossfield and Rensley did not make their judgement based on one viewing of the President's performance or by consulting with each other. Both watched the press conference live, then rechecked their findings by viewing a full videotape of the press conference on both Saturday and Sunday to confirm their findings.

Who is Jonathan Rensley?

Um, do I have permission to stop yet?

AFTERTHOUGHT: While I've probably spent way too much time on this CHB business, the time I've spent on it pales in comparison to how long the web site has been cranking out fraudulent nonsense, outright plagiarism, and more.

If this CHB web site is as fraudulent as I think it is, how is it that it has been taken seriously for so long? Why is it that the sources were allowed to go unchallenged for so many years? Is it because of the shortness of human memory? Or is it because so many people are suckers for what they want to believe?

UPDATE (07/23/06 -- 03:06 p.m.): Incredible as it may seem, CHB has just -- in the past hour -- rewrittten the above plagiarized article from the San Francisco Chronicle!

Here's the Google cache:

Venture out beyond the Beltway and you find conservative Republicans shaking their head and wondering the same thing.

Dennis Dalbey cuts the hair of Camp Pendleton's young Marines, giving them the regulation haircut before they head to combat in Iraq. His barbershop on the Coast Highway near the base in California is covered with painted yellow ribbons, flags and "We support our troops" banners. But Dalbey, a Republican and a self-described conservative who voted for Bush, says he is fed up with the President's lies.

"Enough is enough," he says. "It's time to bring the boys home."

In San Marcos, retired Navy veteran Herb Ranquist, 77, sits in the local VFW hall and says Bush is a failure.

"I voted for him two times, and I wish I hadn't," Ranquist says. "It was probably one of the worst mistakes I ever made."

Dr. Crossfield says it doesn't take a degree in psychology or advanced training in spotting liars to realize the President plays fast and loose with the truth.

And here's the now-edited article as it currently appears at CHB:

Venture out beyond the Beltway and you find conservative Republicans shaking their head and wondering the same thing. As the San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Dennis Dalbey cuts the hair of Camp Pendleton's young Marines, giving them the regulation haircut before they head to combat in Iraq. His barbershop on the Coast Highway near the base in California is covered with painted yellow ribbons, flags and "We support our troops" banners. But Dalbey, a Republican and a self-described conservative who voted for Bush, says he is fed up with the President's lies.

"Enough is enough," he says. "It's time to bring the boys home."

In San Marcos, retired Navy veteran Herb Ranquist, 77, sits in the local VFW hall and says Bush is a failure.

"I voted for him two times, and I wish I hadn't," Ranquist says. "It was probably one of the worst mistakes I ever made."

Dr. Crossfield says it doesn't take a degree in psychology or advanced training in spotting liars to realize the President plays fast and loose with the truth. (Italics in original.)

Earlier, some commenters had noticed that the Google caches disappear too; so if you're interested, better check it out now!

Will someone please tell me this is comedy?

UPDATE (07/25/06): Hey, maybe Doug Thompson can go work for USA Today! (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

I should probably point out that the link to the USA Today story goes to Clayton Cramer, whom I stand accused of "hate linking." (Not sure what that means, but I refuse to stop it.)

UPDATE (07/25/06): Doug Thompson replies, sort of. His commenter named "Jonathan Levinson" (I love it!) is questioning my bona fides:

I decided to do a little background checking of my own on Eric Scheie, the blogger who claims he "outed" this situation. I find it odd that someone who demands so much disclosue from others doesn't include a link to any information about himself on his own blog. Make me wonder what he has to hide.

A little additional research shows he claims to have a "criminal law" background as a prosecutor.

He also is the sponsor of an Internet petition to gain a Presidential pardon for convicted Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy.

That tells me all I need to know about the leader of this pack of liars. I'll stick with DT and CHB.

I'll say this: I exist, and I am who I say I am.

What I'd still like to know is whether "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield" exists.

UPDATE: I've written another post on CHB -- "The psychology of sock puppetry."

It occurred to me that the George Harleigh>Doug Thompson>Bill McTavish>Teresa Hampton>Sandra Riley connections might have been tough for readers of the several previous posts to follow.

So, I have attempted to simplify everything by making an easy-to-follow flow chart:

PLEASE NOTE: This is intended as a guide only, and it is based on my interpretation of the data before me. Others may have suggestions. The ultimate identities and various twists and turns of the parties is of course open to some speculation, but the following "facts" are known from the "evidence":

It is anyone's guess whether any of this will interrupt the flow chart I so lovingly designed. But stay tuned!

UPDATE: My thanks to commenter and blogger Signal94 for cluing me in on the "departure" of "Doug Thompson."

Sig94 is a great blog BTW -- with some incredibly cool cars! (My first car was a 1941 Plymouth, for which I paid $200.00.)

UPDATE (07/25/06): Via Glenn Reynolds, I see that Wuzzadem has made some fine sock puppets. (Now, if I could just borrow them, the roles are already mapped out. . .)

I can't believe the really intelligent, well-thought-out, and downright encouraging comments and emails this blog has received in response to the "George Harleigh"/"Doug Thompson"/CHB affair. My thanks to all, and again, especially to Glenn Reynolds for linking the post. Discrediting web sites is not what I normally do here. Most of the time, I write long philosophical essays about whatever strikes my fancy, and the only reason for the extended posts about "George Harleigh" and his sock puppet compatriots is that I was embarrassed to see quotations from a "famous" man I'd never heard of who'd worked for both Nixon and Reagan.

While I may be wrong, I think I've gone about as far as I can go with this, this thing. As John Hawkins's February post reminded me, this "Doug Thompson" and his minions (both real and imaginary) were discredited long ago. (At least they should have been.)

And (as people have told me) he's now even more discredited. Which means I can just stop, right?

In a way, yes. (But not for the reasons I might like to assume.)

The normal meaning of the word "discredited" is -- no longer being worthy of being given credit. Not believable. No more credibility. Based on the comments here, based on John Hawkins' post (and plenty of others by less-known bloggers) based on what people have told me, Doug Thompson and CHB have zero credibility, and are discredited.

But what does that mean? Many of Ted Rall's crackpot remarks have been discredited. Many people would say that Michael Moore has been discredited. John Dean discredited his own book ("Blind Ambition" -- long considered a sort of Bible of Watergate). Yet all of these people and more just keep cranking stuff out willy-nilly, and there are always people to buy it. (Another day, another Rall cartoon. Another Moore film. Another Dean book.)

Doesn't this mean that (at least in the eyes of their followers) they are not discredited?

Glenn Reynolds earlier linked to David Bernstein's post which seriously discredits Hezbollah. I think it's fair to conclude that Hezbollah has been discredited. But Hezbollah's followers won't reach any such conclusion.

My question is, considering the nearly unlimited audience capacity of the Internet, can anything ever be said to be truly, finally, completely, discredited?

I doubt it. Rather, I think there will be an ever growing number of people who will be always discredited in the minds of some, and never discredited in the eyes of others. I think that as the online community grows ever-larger, audience growth virtually guarantees a new Warholistic phenomenon -- not so much that everyone gets his 15 minutes of fame, but that everyone gets to be discredited.

And, of course, vindicated!

I do not doubt that Mr. Thompson (or whoever he is) will claim vindication, and his loyal readers will keep right on reading him. That's because of the vastness of the audience. Crackpot conspiracy sites don't wither and die because conspiracies are disproved. To the contrary, they thrive because people don't want them disproved. (The Apollo moon landing was fake! What? Didn't you know?)

This probably sounds like relativism. By definition it may well be relativism in the true, mathematical sense of the word.

Truth, unfortunately, has very little to do with it.

But in truth, aren't some things really discredited?

(I'm tempted to regard discrediting Doug Thompson as approaching a sort of victory for the truth. . . But what about the people whose job it is to discredit the discreditors?)

Who is Doug Thompson?

Honestly, I have no idea (although for starters, this Doug Thompson

says he's not this Doug Thompson:

Who appears to be the same as this guy.)

But what do I know? Nothing. Until July 16 (when a friend emailed me and asked about a story he'd written) I had never heard of Doug Thompson, and never read his site. This started as a small fit of curiosity aroused by "George Harleigh" -- because I'm somewhat of a history buff, and I felt a bit embarrassed by my ignorance of a famous man. Now, it's gotten so strange and involved that I feel I'm under a bit of a duty to find out precisely who's who.

I thought I should check out his official biography:

Doug Thompson realized the value of capturing history 46 years ago as a 10-year-old schoolboy in Farmville, Virginia, when the community, caught up in a fight over integration, closed the public schools and opened an all-white private school.

Thompson wrote about his experiences and submitted his story and photos to The Farmville Herald,the local newspaper. He developed other photo stories for the paper and a journalism career was born.
When his family relocated to the Blue Ridge Mountain community of Floyd, the 14-year-old Thompson took his photographs and stories to Pete Hallman, editor of the weekly Floyd Press. Hallman encouraged the young man to continue writing and taking photos, teaching him the ins and outs of the newspaper business.

Thompson went on to join the staff of The Roanoke Times where he covered the police beat, emerging racial turmoil in the city and tackled other tough subjects. His story about a young girl who obtained an abortion (illegal at the time) won the top feature writing award from the Virginia Press Association. Another, about street racers in the city, won a feature writing award while his coverage of the murder of a Southwest Roanoke couple and the abduction and rape of their teenaged daughters brought the top news writing award from the association

After moving on to The Telegraph in Alton, Illinois, Thompson continued to win awards for writing and photography, capturing the Illinois Associated Press Managing Editors top prizes for news, feature and column writing as well as first place awards from the Illinois Press Association.

The first journalism award I won, a Feature Writing First Place from The Virginia Press Association in 1967, came from a story about an anonymous teenager in Roanoke who obtained an abortion that was illegal at the time. I've won more than 30 journalism awards over the last 38 years and about half of them for stories that depended heavily on anonymous sources.

Does anyone know or care what sort of award he won? Today's resume refers to a "Feature Writing First Place" award from The Virginia Press Association, but here's Thompson's account:

In 1967, I interviewed a teenage girl who sought out an abortion (illegal at the time). She talked about her experiences in graphic detail and I put those details in the story which sparked a heated debate among editors at the paper. Howard Eanes, the assistant managing editor, did not want to publish it.

"This is a family newspaper," he argued. "We don't print sensationalist material like this." Eanes also said he doubted the story was true.

Woody Middleton, the managing editor, agreed with Eanes so I took the story to executive editor Barton Morris who read it, liked it, and overruled Eanes and Middleton. The story ran on the front of the local news section on a Sunday and sparked widespread community uproar along with a visit from the Roanoke Commonwealth's Attorney who wanted to slap me in jail for daring to write a story about a young woman who, at the time, committed a felony by having an abortion.

I refused to cooperate, the paper backed me, and the furor died down. Three months later, the Virginia Press Association honored the story with a first prize in the annual state news writing competition. I was right but my relationship with both my managing editor and his assistant went downhill from there.

I called the Virginia Press Association and was told their records don't go back that far, but the guy I spoke to was very polite, said he'd check and email me if he found anything.

Back to the biography:

Thompson took a sabbatical from newspapers in 1981 and moved to Washington to work on Capitol Hill. He served as press secretary for two Congressman (Paul Findley of Illinois and Manuel Lujan of New Mexico) and then Chief of Staff before joining the House Committee on Science & Technology as special assistant to the ranking minority member.. From 1987-1992, Thompson served as Vice President for Political Programs for The National Association of Realtors. During that stint he became involved in campaign finance issue and was a founding member of the Project for Comprehensive Campaign Reform.

I'm curious, though, why the current biographical resume doesn't mention being "Chief of Staff" for Congressman Dan Burton? (This is taken from in the now-disappeared biography listed at something called the Save America Foundation:)

Thompson took a sabbatical from newspapers in 1981 and moved to Washington and work on Capitol Hill, where he served as press secretary to two members of Congress (Rep. Paul Findley of Illinois and Rep. Manuel Lujan of New Mexico), Chief of Staff to a third (Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana) and then Special Assistant to the Ranking Member of the House Space, Science and Technology Committee (Lujan again).

I'm also wondering why, when Thompson excoriates Dan Burton for sexual misbehavior, he doesn't mention that he was once his Chief of Staff. Isn't that something the readers might want to know? I'm not saying he wasn't Burton's Chief of Staff, and I'm not about to check every claim. I've spent enough time as it is. But in logic, either he was or he was not. I'll just assume he was. But why the scrubbing of the reference?

NOTE: I don't have time to flush this out, but there seems to be another Doug Thompson in Washington.

Back to the current resume:

But journalism remained Thompson's true love and returned to his roots as a free-lance writer and photographer. His work has appeared in a number of publications, including Esquire, Life, Look, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Paris Match, AFP, the Associated Press and Reuters.

I suspect no one does, so no one will.

But there's plenty more.

Unlike Al Gore, Doug Thompson actually did help invent the Internet:

During his stint at the House Committee on Science and Technology, Thompson worked on transfer of what was then DARPANet from the Department of Defense to the National Science Foundation, the beginnings of the Internet. Sensing the coming growth of the Internet, he started a web hosting and design company in 1994 and that same year launched Capitol Hill Blue as the web's first political news site.

Besides Blue, Thompson publishes a number of other web sites. He also owns Blue Ridge Creative, a photography, video production and digital imaging company in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia as well as web hosting operations. In 2001.

The Thompsons left Washington in 2004 and moved to a hilltop retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwestern Virginia. He returns to Washington once a year to speak to journalism students at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism and still has business interests in the National Capital Region but his days as a Washingtonian are over. Despite his success in new media, Thompson remains a newspaperman at heart and lives by the creed that it is the role of a newspaperman to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." In 2004 he returned to his newspaper roots by joining the staff of his hometown paper as a sports photographer and reporter covering the county government and courthouse beats.

All things considered, should "William D. McTavish" simply fire "Doug Thompson"?

It's not for me to decide.

Europe is hardly the free place Americans so often assume it to be.

Brussels Journal's Paul Belien was recently visited by the police because of alleged "racist articles" on his website:

This morning, a police officer from the "Projectcel Mensenhandel en Vreemdelingen" (Project Cell Human Trafficking and Foreigners) came to my door to question me about alledged "racist" articles on this website. I was not in. My son was told to tell me to contact the police asap in order to make an appointment for interrogation. Apparently crime statistics in Belgium are so low that the police have nothing better to do than harrass journalists. However, since my lawyer is on vacation they will have to wait. The Belgian regime has decided to intimidate me in the hope to close down this website. I am becoming quite a regular at the local police station.

The whole thing is quite scary, and it shows the danger posed by "hate speech" laws. Anyone can claim to be "aggrieved" by another person's statements, and allege that they are racist or hateful. Or "extremist." Or "pseudofascist." Or even "authoritarian."

Today, Fjordman (who blogs here) has a piece in the Brussels Journal which gets really radical, and advocates American-style freedom for Europe:

This “swirl of speech-law charges, lawsuits, and investigations” is now sustained by an “antiracism” industry. “Europe’s speech laws are written and applied in ways that leave activists on the political left free to whitewash crimes of leftist regimes, incite hatred against their domestic bogeymen of the well-to-do, and luridly stereotype their international bogeymen, often with history-distorting falsehoods such as fictitious claims of genocide said to be committed by the United States and Israel. It may be no coincidence that Socialist and extreme-left parties have played central roles in the design of speech laws.”

According to Alexander, this trend represents “the greatest erosion of democratic practice in the world's advanced democracies” since WW2. He recommends that reform-minded Europeans should use “the example of U.S. practice, which tolerates even loathsome speech.” I agree with him. It is time Europeans put aside some of our prejudice against the USA and adopt something similar to the First Amendment in the American Constitution, securing the right to free speech.

Lest anyone think Americans have nothing to fear, consider Dayton Law Professor Vernellia Randall's view:

Courts have often recognized that the right of free speech is not absolute. They have limited free speech when it becomes libel, incites a riot, threatens an elected official, or conspires to monopolize industries. Bans on cigarette advertising or liquor sales also narrow free speech. Anti-racists must become First Amendment realists who argue that individuals harmed by racist speech and symbols should be able to sue under defamation laws, intentional infliction of emotional distress laws, and/or assault and battery laws.

Moreover, racism is a violation of human rights, as stated in the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) ratified by the U.S. government in 1994. Article 2 of this international human rights treaty requires that governments "prohibit and bring to an end, by all appropriate means..., racial discrimination by any [private] person, group or organization." CERD goes further to say in Article 4 that "States will condemn all propaganda and organizations which are based on ideas or theories of superiority of one race...or which attempt to justify or promote racial hatred...and will adopt positive measures to eradicate such incitement to...discrimination."

The Race Convention is the only treaty that deals comprehensively with the elimination of all incidents of racial discrimination at the local, state and federal level, and supports positive actions by states, such as affirmative action, that are under attack in the United States. The treaty not only protects the right of a black family to buy a home, but also protects all African Americans from discrimination so that they may live in the neighborhood of their choice. In this way, the treaty not only protects individual rights, but also collective rights as a members of a group.

When ratifying the CERD treaty, the U.S. government decided to make a reservation to Article 4 saying that "suppression and criminalization of certain expression" such as racist speech and organizations is "inconsistent with existing First Amendment principles." Even while the ink was drying on the treaty, the government reaffirmed the constitutional shield for racists by declining to enforce this provision of the treaty.

The anti-racist movement now must build a human rights movement in the United States that will force the repeal of this crippling reservation to the Race Convention. We can use international human rights standards to develop effective laws to halt the worldwide spread of the dangerous virus of racism. By bringing human rights home, contagious boxes of hate literature will no longer be shipped around the world with labels saying, "Made in America."

Most Americans tend to take free speech for granted. Police going after bloggers is thought of as something happening only in brutal Third World dictatorships. I'd go so far as to say that many would be surprised to read about the police going after a blogger in Belgium.

Those who think "it can't happen here" should remember that it happens in countries we consider free, and that a growing chorus of people want it to happen here.

MORE: I just returned home and saw that I accidentally cut and pasted a paragraph from Fjordman's post (involving Second Amendment advocacy of all things) into the beginning of Professor Randall's quote!

Sheesh!

It has been deleted. My apologies to both, and any readers who might have been confused. (I'm wondering whether George Harleigh's ghost is playing tricks on me. . .)

My previous post about the much-quoted "George Harleigh" (said to be a SIU political science professor who worked for Nixon and Reagan administrations) has received enough attention that I thought it merited a new post.

Clayton Cramer linked my original post and asked his readers for help in locating the mystery man. According to readers who've checked the relevant academic databases, there's nothing. Anywhere:

There's nothing by "George Harleigh" on EBSCOHost Academic Search Premiere, either.

[...]

Social Science Citation Index reports, for Harleigh, G :

"NOTICE

The author name you entered did not result in a match from the index. Hint: Check the spelling of the name, or remove the initials to broaden your search."

No change when the initial was omitted.

There's a Harley, G, who has published
" Zhang XF, Harley G, De Jonghe LC
Co-continuous metal-ceramic nanocomposites "

Doesn't look like political science.

JSTOR returns Harleigh Hartman and Harleigh Trecker.

Political Science Abstracts returns no hits for Harleigh

Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life returns no hits for Harleigh.

Dissertation Abstracts returns Harleigh Enid Wilmott, a biologist.

OCLC's "WorldCat" shows no titles by George Harleigh

GPO Access shows no government documents with author George Harleigh.

Amazing--someone became a professor at Southern Illinois University without a single published work, anywhere!

Philadelphia journalist Steve Silver has linked this post and is also asking questions about George Harleigh:

Calls by the blogger to SIU, and searches of Lexus-Nexis for published material by him, find no mention of Harleigh, and he's not mentioned on Google anywhere other than in providing quotes to blogs. Anyone ever heard of this guy, and have any evidence that exists or did exist? I'm figuring either he's real and everyone's wrong, or someone just made him up and his same few quotes have been recycled again and again for years, or there's some guy out there claiming to be a disgruntled former Nixon/Reagan aide.

The burden of proof, though, normally falls on those asserting that the person exists. In the case of George Harleigh, virtually all quotations and references to him originate with Doug Thompson, a self-described journalist ["newspaperman"] who runs the Capitol Hill Blue web site.

Which means at this point that the burden is on Mr. Thompson to supply evidence:

If "George Harleigh" is a pseudonym, that fact should be disclosed, and if there is a person calling himself "George Harleigh" whose remarks are being repeated, it falls on Doug Thompson to provide some evidence that this man is who he says he is.

Under the circumstances, until I hear otherwise, I think it is entirely reasonable to conclude that:

Again, if my suspicions turn out to be wrong, I'll certainly acknowledge that with apologies to Doug Thompson and George Harleigh.

MORE: According to blogger Angry Bear, three years ago Doug Thompson admitted that he had been conned for the last 20 years by someone named "Terry Wilkinson":

The Capitol Hill Blue story cited below is a hoax--Capitol Hill Blue founder Doug Thompson now alleges that he was intentionally deceived by someone pretending to be Terry Wilkinson for the last 20 years (Thompson: "Erasing the stories doesn't erase the fact that we ran articles containing information that, given the source, was probably inaccurate. And it doesn't erase the sad fact that my own arrogance allowed me to be conned").

But that's because the references were erased. Another post has the full quote about the "erasures," plus more from Doug Thompson: If that is the case, then why were these words edited out of the post in question? Another post here -- same thing, Doug Thompson's apology from nowhere.

Editing the fraudulent character out of the post is one thing, but if we assume Doug Thompson was conned, admitted it, apologized for it, and vowed not to let it happen again, well, why would he censor such an important admission to his readers?

Might this not be seen as casting doubt on the sincerity of his admission?

Or am I missing something?

UPDATE: More on the Wilkinson "con" story:

On a forum for the CHB website, Doug Thompson, who runs CHB, was asked about the problems a Freeper had reported in trying to get information on Wilkinson. Here is the meat of Thompson's reply:

I've known Terry Wilkinson for 20+ years and his decision to go public was a painful one that I'm sure will bring recriminations. But he loves his country a lot more than any political party or politician. I've received some emails today regarding his comments and have forwarded them on to him. It's his decision as to whether or not he wishes to respond.

But I don't feed anyone's desire for a witch hunt. When we ran the stories about Bill Clinton's sexual assaults on women, we identified a number of the women. I don't recall anyone at Free Republican demanding "proof" of their identity although I did have a number of liberal media types hounding me for more information.

I didn't pander to them and I won't to anyone else. I stand by the stories that run on our web site. You are free to read them or not read them, believe them or not believe them. It's a free world. We've been on the web since 1994 and we will be here 10 years from now.

Hopefully, there will be some kind of confirmation or refutation of this story within the next few days, but I thought the information was interesting enough to at least make note of it. I'll let you know if I find out anything further.

UPDATE: This is more fun than I thought. Kevin Drum had a post discussing the CHB con job which refers to a "'CIA advisor' named Terrance J. Wilkinson" and which says:

YELLOWCAKE UPDATE....Yesterday I wrote a post about a story in Capitol Hill Blue in which a "CIA advisor" named Terrance J. Wilkinson claimed that he was present at White House briefings where George Bush was told that the Niger uranium story was bogus.

"I'm not sure how seriously to take this," I wrote, and it turns out that the answer is, "Not at all." Writing in Capitol Hill Blue today, publisher Doug Thompson says, "I've been had big time." Wilkinson is a fake and the briefings never took place.

Will John Ashcroft's goons soon be rousting everyone named "George Harleigh"?

My favorite comment predicts the end of the "right wing" CHB:

Goodbye CHB. danelectro: fascinating. It certainly explains this weirdness better than anything else I've seen, and CHB is, as you say, clearly a right-wing site: so why would they break a story trashing Bush?

(Is it just my imagination, or are there a lot of antiwar activists claiming to be "right wing"?)

UPDATE: Cache of now-dysfuntional Truthout post with the full text of CHB's original apology here. (Rather than clutter up the blog, I'm putting it below.)

Truthout.org's website appears to be functioning, so I don't understand why the CHB apology link is not.

MORE: In 2003 Glenn Reynolds discussed the CHB Wilkinson matter in at least two posts, and praised the bloggers who had linked the retraction.

. . .many bloggers who ran with the original story have noted it, including quite a few lefty bloggers who clearly wanted to believe it. They deserve credit -- as does Capitol Hill Blue -- for the retraction.

Stay tuned!

UPDATE: I have emailed Mr. Thompson with my concerns, and I'll note any response I receive.

UPDATE: as of 3:35 p.m. today (07/20/06), "George Harleigh" is being deleted from posts! Here's the cache of the most recently written post -- as it appeared yesterday:

It's not the first time the unwary President, who claims to be a born-again Christian, has been caught cursing. He called a New York Times reporter a "son of a bitch" to an open mike, told Wall Street Journal reporter Al Hunt "fuck you" in front of his daughters and, in a meeting with members of Congress, called the Constitution "just a goddamned piece of paper."

"Like Nixon, Bush's private persona is much different," says retired political scientiest George Harleigh, who served in both the Nixon and Reagan administration. "Nixon cursed like a sailor when he was out of public view. So does Bush."

The U.S. president blames Syria and Iran for supporting Hezbollah guerrillas operating in southern Lebanon.

It's not the first time the unwary President, who claims to be a born-again Christian, has been caught cursing. He called a New York Times reporter a "son of a bitch" to an open mike, told Wall Street Journal reporter Al Hunt "fuck you" in front of his daughters and, in a meeting with members of Congress, called the Constitution "just a goddamned piece of paper."

The U.S. president blames Syria and Iran for supporting Hezbollah guerrillas operating in southern Lebanon.

Bush also seemed to complain about U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan wanting an immediate ceasefire to stop the violence between Israel and Hezbollah.

Ditto with this article -- The Continued Madness of King George:

Yet Savage's story fell off the media landscape with a resounding thud as the rest of the mainstreamers, apparently kowtowed by Bush's threats to haul reporters and editors in front of grand juries if they dare write about his abuse of the Constitution and use of U.S. spy agencies to snoop on Americans, stuck with reporting on the President's latest road show to sell the failed Iraq war.

The revised USA Patriot Act emerged from Congress with a number of oversight provisions requiring the President to report to the Hill on a strict timetable. One of those provisions said the White House had to tell Congress just how the FBI used the expanded wiretap and surveillance powers granted under the act.

Some in Congress, like Senator Patrick Leahy, are pissed as hell at the President's claim that he is above the law.

Yet Savage's story fell off the media landscape with a resounding thud as the rest of the mainstreamers, apparently kowtowed by Bush's threats to haul reporters and editors in front of grand juries if they dare write about his abuse of the Constitution and use of U.S. spy agencies to snoop on Americans, stuck with reporting on the President's latest road show to sell the failed Iraq war.

"Frankly, I'm surprised," says political scientist George Harleigh, who worked in the Nixon and Reagan White Houses. "I thought the story would have legs and get much more attention. After all the debate in Congress over the need for the President to keep them in the loop he simply signs away one of the key provisions of the revised act."

The revised USA Patriot Act emerged from Congress with a number of oversight provisions requiring the President to report to the Hill on a strict timetable. One of those provisions said the White House had to tell Congress just how the FBI used the expanded wiretap and surveillance powers granted under the act.

No word from Doug Thompson.

MORE (04:05 p.m.): George W. Bush: An American Dictator:

''He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises -- and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened," said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.

''He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises -- and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened," said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.

Political scientist George Harleigh, who served in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations where Presidential power became major issues, says Bush's actions place the country on a dangerous course.

"Presidential authority, once assumed, is seldom relinquished. The Constitution prevailed when Richard Nixon ignored the laws that govern his actions," Harleigh says, "but this President neither obeys nor upholds his oath to support the Constitution. He sees the document as an obstacle to his power and has chosen to ignore it. If no one else is willing to uphold the Constitution then it becomes, as attorney general Alberto Gonzales has written, an 'outdated document' and places this Republic in grave peril."

Harleigh believes this nation faces more than a battle for which political party controls the White House and/or Congress.

"This is now a battle for the soul of America," he says. "The very future of this Republic may well rest on whether or not anyone can, or will, stop George W. Bush."

AND MORE (04:07 p.m.): The "heady atmosphere of Congress" quote from 1999 I mentioned yesterday has been scrubbed:

Does the heady atmosphere of Congress turn honest men and women into a criminal class? Or is elected office simply a magnet for those who lie, cheat and steal for a living?

It could be a little bit of both, say political scientists and Constitutional scholars.

Congress has always had its share of rogues and scoundrels:

· Adam Clayton Powell, the fast-talking Harlem Congressman who was re-elected even after Congress expelled him in 1967. Powell had survived charges of income-tax evasion (with a hung jury) even before his first election to Congress.

Does the heady atmosphere of Congress turn honest men and women into a criminal class? Or is elected office simply a magnet for those who lie, cheat and steal for a living?

It could be a little bit of both, say political scientists and Constitutional scholars.

"There's no doubt that politics attracts the glib, the fast talker and the con artist," says retired Southern Illinois University political scientist George Harleigh. "It's a natural place for those who think fast on their feet."

Congress has always had its share of rogues and scoundrels:

· Adam Clayton Powell, the fast-talking Harlem Congressman who was re-elected even after Congress expelled him in 1967. Powell had survived charges of income-tax evasion (with a hung jury) even before his first election to Congress.

But he was alive and quotable all these years?

Any readers who can help, please let me know.

I'm dumbfounded.

AND MORE: Here's today's version of "The Decider in Chief":

Decider-in-chief? A key statement to the arrogance that is George W. Bush.

"I decide what is best," he says.

For Bush the game has always been about power. Absolute power. Dictatorial power.

This is the American President who said: "it would be much easier if this was a dictatorship, as long as I get to be the dictator."

At the time some people thought he was joking. Those who know him knew he wasn't.

In 1999, while completing a profile of Harris County, Texas, Judge Robert Eckels, I interviewed a number of Texas political observers. Republican and Democrat alike agreed that then Gov. George W. Bush was stubborn, arrogant and used to having his own way.

And yesterday's (from the cache):

Decider-in-chief? A key statement to the arrogance that is George W. Bush.

"I decide what is best," he says.

For Bush the game has always been about power. Absolute power. Dictatorial power.

This is the American President who said: "it would be much easier if this was a dictatorship, as long as I get to be the dictator."

At the time some people thought he was joking. Those who know him knew he wasn't.

"Of all the Presidents I've served or observed, George W. Bush is the least receptive to the opinion of others," says political scientist George Harleigh, who served in both the Nixon and Reagan administration. "He has no interest in what others think and he doesn't listen to the advice of experts or professionals."

In 1999, while completing a profile of Harris County, Texas, Judge Robert Eckels, I interviewed a number of Texas political observers. Republican and Democrat alike agreed that then Gov. George W. Bush was stubborn, arrogant and used to having his own way.

I'm starting to feel sorry for "George Harleigh" -- a cyber victim who has outlived his cyber usefulness.

I have to go out, so I'll let Clayton Cramer speak for Mr. Harleigh:

I'm sure that somewhere in a virtual reality hell, "George Harleigh" is disappearing, while screaming, "I'm melting, I'm melting!"

Victim of a cyber meltdown . . .

UPDATE: Thank you, Glenn Reynolds, for linking this post, and calling attention to the plight of the disappeared!

Welcome all; I appreciate the additional insights.

UPDATE (07/21/06): My thanks to all the commenters for providing helpful information!

While I still haven't received a reply to my email to Doug Thompson, I'm intrigued by Editor William D. McTavish's "report and apology to our readers" which has appeared at Capitol Hill Blue. It is dated July 17, 2006 at 11;05 a.m. and states:

Three months ago, we asked a panel of fellow journalists to assist us in a review of of stories published on this web site over the past 12 years and asked them to assist us in determining any which they felt might be poorly sourced or based on questionable sources.

That review is complete and we are in the process of deleting or modifying some stories which our panel felt did not satisfy the criteria established for responsible journalism.

Is there any way to verify the July 17 date and time of the "apology"?

While I haven't checked each story, I notice that in the case of "The decider-in-chief: A drunk with power", Harleigh is gone, but without the explanation.

And the "goddamned piece of paper" story seems to have disappeared entirely. Why no explanation?

In all, 329 stories were modified or removed from our databases of 25,000 plus articles because of problems encountered when we went back to check on sources or to verify the identity of those quoted. As editor, I was tasked by the publisher to apply new, higher standards for publication of material on this web site and to apply those same standards to stories published in the past.

Most modifications were clarification of source material. Only 12 stories were removed from the archives. However, the modification of 83 stories involved a "named source" we have quoted a number of times and who claimed to be (1) a retired political science professor and (2) a former official in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

Then there are the "emails":

In 1998, our former editor, Jack Sharp, began receiving a regular, almost daily, email "newsletter" from a "Professor George Harleigh" offering quotes, observations and commentary on current political events along with permission to use those comments as we saw fit. "Professor Harleigh" claimed to be a retired political science professor from Southern Illinois University and offered, as backup, links to a number of web sites and news publications that quoted him or used material furnished by him. We checked the web sites and other news publications and found him quoted often so we began using his material in selected stories. Since 1998, we have used quotes from "George Harleigh" in 83 stories on our web site.

Recently, we received an inquiry from Southern Illinois University saying they were trying to locate the "George Harleigh" who claimed to have taught at their institution but said they did not have any record of a "George Harleigh" or even a "Harleigh" ever teaching at the university's campuses in Carbondale or Edwardsville, Illinois. That inquiry led us to investigate further and we found that "Professor George Harleigh" may be a fictitous name.  We talked with other web sites that have used quotes from the same source and all, like us, received the quotes in an email newsletter format. The newsletter email currently traced back to a qmail account. We also posted inquiries on bulletin boards and other blogs. When we received today's newsletter we immediately mailed back and asked for additional information. We did not receive an answer and followup emails bounced back as undeliverable.

Regarding the "inquiry from Southern Illinois University," why isn't the University official who contacted them named?

This raised enough questions in our minds to remove any quotes by or references to Mr. Harleigh from the 83 stories, including one published today. None of the stories originated from information supplied by him and, in no case, were his comments the central focus of the story, so we did not feel the need to remove any stories or mofidy their original intent so they remain in our archives without the quotes from "Harleigh."

All quotes attributed to Mr. Harleigh came from the daily newsletters he sent and were unsolicited. They were, however, timely and often fit into stories we were developing and we used them. That was our mistake. It was a foolish, lazy practice that should not have happened.

This is the second time in 12 years of publishing this web site that we have been burned by a source who turned out to be not who he claimed. We're human. We make mistakes. When we find out we were wrong we try to move quickly to correct those mistakes. We apologize to our readers for allowing this to happen and we will no longer use quotes from unsolicited sources and will take greater care to make sure the sources of quotes we do use are legitimate. We will be adding a link to this report to all stories modified but please bear with us while we complete that time-consuming task.

I know I shouldn't judge others by my standards, but considering it's the second time, I don't think they're being very forthcoming.

And quite frankly, I'm now wondering . . . Did anyone ever verify the explanation of the Terrance Wilkinson matter?

MORE: This is getting so absurd that I'm now wondering how to find out more about the editorial background of William D. McTavish. Can't find much, except that he was called a Republican in UK's Telegraph. According to Capitol Hill Blue:

Reporter and columnist Bill McTavish is a registered Republican and a veteran who served three deployments in Vietnam

Back in 2004, when people cared about these things, The Annoyed Army was scouring to find him. He was called "elusive" One commenter said

For an accomplished journalist he doesn't seem to have written anything that shows up on the Internet, except CHB.

Chuck, you seem to enjoy posting stuff from William D. McTavish, but as I look through Google, he seems to have sprung from whole cloth in 2004, (as far as Google is concerned he only exists at CHB... and as a baby that lived to age 2 months back in 1910 :tinfoilhat: ) and APNews.com, returned no bylines by him... made me think, is this actually your pen name?

MORE: This gets more and more bizarre. It turns out that "Bill McTavish" issued a similar apology and retraction in May:

Please allow me to introduce myself to you, the readers of Capitol Hill Blue.

I'm Bill McTavish, the new publisher of this web site, effective immediately. I'm the head of a new team that takes over Capitol Hill Blue and, we hope, takes the web site in new directions.

When I was asked to take over as publisher of CHB, I insisted that I have the authority to review past articles published on this web site and remove any that I, and others, felt did not meet established standards of impartial journalism, were poorly-sourced or just plain speculation. I brought in journalists I respect and asked them to go through the archives and identify stories where they considered the sources questionable or the facts hazy. As a result of their review, we removed 217 articles from the database archives of more than 25,000 stories.

Gone from the site, for example, are speculative articles on President Clinton's sex life, Mrs. Clinton's sexual preferences, President Bush calling the Constitution a "goddamned piece of paper" or various and sundry conspiracy theories.

Gone too are articles where a recheck of sources did not, to my satisfaction, pass the smell test. Some of the articles removed included columns written by our founder and publisher. I'm not saying these stories were wrong, although I had doubts about some of them, but they were not sourced to my satisfaction and were never verified by additional sources or other publications. Even though they have not been proven wrong (or even denied by the subjects of the story) they did not, in my opinion, pass the standard for verification that now exists for this web site. I may have missed some but if and when someone brings such articles to my attention we will review them, apply the same standards to the others that were removed, and remove them if they fail to meet those standards.

I have brought in a staff of veterans and young professionals to beef up our news coverage and provide a balanced product. Callie Houston now runs our blog, Fred Hylton oversees the editorial product and we have a staff of reporters, researchers and fact-checkers to review every story. We subscribe to Reuters, AP and Scripps-Howard news service to bolster our news coverage. Our popular discussion board, ReaderRant, continues as an independent web site run by a talented and dedicated group of administrators and moderators. They know how to do their jobs and will get no interference from me.

I consider the past exactly that -- the past. This web site made some mistakes and decisions were made to run with stories that showed, in my opinion, poor judgment. We will remain non-partisan in our approach to news but our goal is news based on fact, not speculation, and truth, not wishful thinking. We will continue to ask questions that need to be asked and hold all elected officials to an equal, non-partisan standard. I don't expect you take my word that everything is hunky-dory but I do ask that if someone links to something from our site that it be considered for the content and not simply dismissed because someone may have considered the site questionable.

To answer a question I am sure you have: Yes, Doug Thompson still owns Capitol Hill Blue but he has stepped away from any involvement in the editorial product and now invests his time and resources in a new project aimed at campaign reform. If, and when, he chooses to write columns or articles for this web site they will be subject to the same review, editing and fact checking as any other writer or source.

He has tasked me with the goal of improving CHB and restoring its reputation. Some of the articles I removed from the archives were either written by him or approved by him and he did not object. Recently, he published a public apology to his readers and then asked me to fix the problems. My first step was to clean up the product. My second step is asking those of you who had questions in the past to take a fresh look at what we do and make up your own mind.

If you have any questions, comments, gripes or vents, please feel free to contact me publisher@capitolhillblue.com.

William D. McTavish
Publisher
Capitol Hill Blue

AND MORE: I verified the existence of at least one real William McTavish.

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer has more, and links to an important post at McKinley's America which makes what Cramer quite properly calls "a legitimate request":

I suspect that no bulletin board or blog postings were made.

CHB says they were receiving these newsletters frequently, including yesterday. They should provide a copy of as many of these newsletters as they have available, including the full mail headers (which can be used to determine the actual originating IP address and could lead to the revelation of the fraudster-- if he wasn't made up in full cloth).

This seems like a legitimate request. It would certainly establish that CHB was the victim of a fraud, and not the orginator of it.

MORE: Under the circumstances, it seemed relevant to me to ask who is Doug Thompson. New post here. (I'm still not sure I know. Although I'm sure I know even less about Mr. McTavish.)

AND MORE: The plot thickens into a veritable hall of mirrors. Here's a wild tidbit. Apparently CHB has an "ombudsman" named Sandra Riley, who promised to crackdown on the elusive McTavish (and another reporter, one "Teresa Hampton"):

September 8, 2004
Teresa Hampton and William McTavish fired
by ombudsman Sandra Riley
on Capital Hill Blue

A problem with unnamed sources brings Hampton’s July 28 story, Bush Taking Anti-Depressants into question. While she quotes Dr. Justin Frank on his analysis of the President’s behavior, she does not offer any corroboration to the conclusion that White House Physician Col. Richard J. Tubb actually prescribed any anti-depressant medication to Bush. For that reason, the story was pulled.

I also killed a July 29 story, Sullen, Depressed President Retreats into a Private, Paranoid World, by Hampton and former CHB reporter William D. McTavish. Again, the only quoted source was Dr. Frank and the quotes were repeats of those from earlier story. His quotes did not back up the claims by unnamed sources.

This makes two stories removed from the CHB archives. A common thread in all three is that they were authored in part or in whole by Hampton, who was recently relieved of her duties as editor because of a lapse in judgment over publication of a column that reflected a personal agenda by the writer (McTavish, who was also fired).

Because of this, our publisher has asked me to go back over all articles written by both Hampton and McTavish. I am doing so and will report to our readers when the review is complete.

Has a familiar ring, no?

Note: the quoted CHB text in the the link the blogger no longer appears in the link.

MORE: Yet another old CHB link confirming that "McTavish" was "fired."

Is this a game of cyber musical chairs?

AND EVEN MORE: "Editor" Teresa Hampton, btw, is interesting in her own right. According to her former biography, she not only co-authored the "award-winning All the President's Women series" (sorry, can't find the series or the award) but graduated from "Southern Illinois University."

I just have to ask: was "George Harleigh" one of her "professors"?

MORE: In Februrary, John Hawkins wondered whether the CHB site might not be sock puppetry:

I wonder if Thompson actually makes up like names for these fake sources? Like ya know, Mr. I. Friend the Secret Service Agent or White House Aide Puff'N'Stuff? Better yet, maybe he makes little puppets out of socks, puts them on his hands, and asks them questions. "Mr. Socko, you saw Cheney drunk, didn't you? Of course you did! That's a good Mr. Socko!"

The fact that there are actually bloggers out there linking to this moronic fraud for reasons other than to laugh at him, even if they are on the left, is a stain on the entire blogosphere. Even liberals should know better than to buy into this sort of garbage...

I don't think there's any way to know who anyone connected with CHB is. (Including Doug Thompson.)

MORE: In March, Doug Thompson not only called Glenn Greenwald a "prominent New York litigator," but he recounted his personal tale of oppression at the hands of Alberto Gonzales:

"The significance of this cannot be overstated," says prominent New York litigator Glenn Greenwald. "In essence, while the President sits in the White House undisturbed after proudly announcing that he has been breaking the law and will continue to do so, his slavish political appointees at the Justice Department are using the mammoth law enforcement powers of the federal government to find and criminally prosecute those who brought this illegal conduct to light.

"This flamboyant use of the forces of criminal prosecution to threaten whistle-blowers and intimidate journalists are nothing more than the naked tactics of street thugs and authoritarian juntas."

Just how widespread, and uncontrolled, this latest government assault has become hit close to home last week when one of the FBI's National Security Letters arrived at the company that hosts the servers for this web site, Capitol Hill Blue.

The letter demanded traffic data, payment records and other information about the web site along with information on me, the publisher.

Now that's a problem. I own the company that hosts Capitol Hill Blue. So, in effect, the feds want me to turn over information on myself and not tell myself that I'm doing it. You'd think they'd know better.

I turned the letter over to my lawyer and told him to send the following message to the feds:

F*ck you. Strong letter to follow.

I looked around, and found the new expurgated version of the story -- the same article (titled "Bush declares war on freedom of the press") but minus the personal tale of oppression. (Better peek fast, as it too, will probably disappear.)

What happened to the security letter which got him all the attention?

Does that mean Doug Thompson found out that he -- Doug Thompson -- was unreliable in his own account?

(Just thought I'd ask; maybe it will.)

UPDATE: Capitol Hill Blue made easy -- with a convenient flow chart!

UPDATE (07/24/06): The search for missing persons continues!

The post-Hurricane Katrina "lessons" (if that's what they are) seem to be piling up.

During the emergency, citizens' guns were confiscated illegally, and they are now having to petition to get them back, and meanwhile state and federal legislation is in the pipeline to stop this sort of abuse from happening again.

Losing your gun is bad enough, because without a gun in an emergency, you can find yourself defenseless against any number of things. But another -- perhaps more tragic -- thing that happened to people in New Orleans was that they lost their dogs -- not because they were confiscated officially, but because they either left them behind when they fled for their lives, or else they weren't allowed to take them when they were evacuated.

The story about the little boy crying because his dog couldn't accompany his evacuation touched a nerve nationally. For me, so did this article in the Sunday Inquirer, for it raises some very disturbing issues:

Sheila Combs lost nearly everything in Hurricane Katrina: her home, her possessions, her job and - what really broke her heart - her 2-year-old mutt, Rocket.

Combs assumed that the chow-Finnish Spitz mix had died after she, her mother and her 9-year-old son were evacuated from New Orleans to the Houston Astrodome.

So it seemed to be a miracle last month when a volunteer group seeking to reunite Katrina pets with their masters discovered Rocket alive and flourishing in Doylestown.

Except that the pooch isn't Rocket anymore - he's Rusty. And his new owners have no intention of giving him back.

The resulting tug-of-war is among dozens of cases nationwide in which allegations of class bias have been raised by Katrina survivors attempting to reclaim beloved pets from the Good Samaritans who took them in.

Not to generalize (as I know some rescue people who aren't like this) but the "rescue" mentality has a strong appeal to people who possess the holier-than-thou form of altruism Ayn Rand used to condemn. They rationalize that because they've got the animal, that they've "saved" it from more than just the Hurricane. They've also saved it from inferior beings.

"It's almost entirely a movement of animals from poor blacks to middle-class whites," said Steven Wise, a Florida animal-rights lawyer involved in several custody battles.

People who first considered themselves foster caregivers now say some Katrina pet lovers don't deserve their animals back.

In what has been called a cultural misunderstanding, they cite neglect - including failure to have animals spayed or neutered and not getting rabies and heartworm prevention - as evidence of unfit care.

Cultural misunderstanding? I guess it's fair to say that people who sexually mutilate perfectly healthy dogs and imagine they're superior to people who don't are guilty of a cultural misunderstanding. Might even be understatement.

Army Lt. Jay Johnson, who was in Iraq when the hurricane hit, has filed suit against the SPCA of Texas to retrieve his shih tzu, Missy, whom he left with relatives in New Orleans. And Linda Charles, 41, is suing to recover her German shepherd, Precious, from the Humane Society of North Texas.

"It's aggravating that people took not only our dog, but lots of people's dogs, and they're doing what they want with them," said Charles, of New Orleans, who now resides in Baton Rouge, La.

After the storm, many who fled left provisions for their pets and expected to return in a few days. When they didn't, the Humane Society of America and others collected the animals and shipped them to kennels around the country.

Rescue workers left spray-painted notes on houses and posted information on Internet sites, such as Petfinder.com, to help owners locate their animals. But by the time Katrina survivors were resettled and ready to search, many pets had found new homes.

Some groups set Dec. 31 as the deadline for owners to retrieve animals. After that, they were considered eligible for permanent homes.

But under Louisiana law, residents have three years to claim lost property, said Mimi Hunley, a member of the Louisiana Attorney General's Office who is helping mediate pet disputes.

And pets are property, Hunley said. "It really is that simple."

Wise, who is involved in the Charles and Johnson cases, said it's hard to understand why the animals aren't being turned over.

"These people lost everything," Wise said of the hurricane victims. "The only thing they have is their family, and these dogs are their family."

The SPCA of Texas and Humane Society of North Texas declined to comment on the cases.

It's a disgrace that people who love their animals so much that they are still trying to get them back are encountering resistance. But it isn't surprising.

There is, of course, something worse than losing a gun or losing a dog -- and that is losing your life. In today's Inquirer I see that people in nursing homes may have been deliberately killed because it was too much trouble to save them :

NEW ORLEANS - A doctor and two nurses who labored at a sweltering, flooded hospital in Hurricane Katrina's chaotic aftermath were arrested and accused yesterday of murdering four trapped and desperately ill patients with injections of morphine and a sedative.

"We're talking about people that pretended that maybe they were God," Louisiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti said. "And they made that decision."

The defendants were booked on charges of being "principals to second-degree murder," which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison.

The three - Dr. Anna Pou, 50; nurse Cheri A. Landry, 49; and nurse Lori L. Budo, 43 - were the first medical professionals charged in a monthslong criminal investigation into whether many of New Orleans' sick and elderly were abandoned or put out of their misery in the days after the storm.

All three were released without bail.

Pou, an ear, nose and throat specialist, and Landry and Budo were accused of deliberately killing four patients, ages 62 to 90, at Memorial Medical Center with a "lethal cocktail" of morphine and Versed, a sedative. No patient names were released.

No one knowswhether that happened in the New Orleans deaths. The worst-case scenario would be if the doctors "tried to save themselves and didn't want to feel guilty leaving the patients behind and killed them," Caplan said.

The best-case scenario, he said, would be if those accused believed that "all possibility of maintaining people on technology has come to an end, you're out of power and your battery power is running out, and you say, 'I can't let these people suffer.' "

"Under American law, neither scenario would be excusable," Caplan said.

Unfortunately, this makes the bad side all the more horrendous to behold. People are justly horrified by opportunists who engage in looting and rioting, but I think a good argument can be made that people who abuse positions of trust are worse.

Anyone whose noticed the blog isn't opening properly (links and sidebar stuff don't appear), please be patient. We've run out of space, and the problem will be fixed soon!

I'm glad I called myself a "Goldwater liberal" before this latest bout of psychopolitical "analysis" started:

Something is rotten in the state of conservatism, says John Dean in Conservatives Without Conscience. Today’s conservatives are “hostile and mean-spirited,” “vengeful, pitiless, exploitive, manipulative, dishonest, cheaters, prejudiced, mean-spirited [again], militant, nationalistic, and two-faced,” not to mention “enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited [once more], power hungry, Machiavellian, and amoral.” Mental handicaps such as “intolerance of ambiguity, need for certainty or structure in life, overreaction to threats, and a disposition to dominate others” turn them ineluctably into “authoritarians” and “social dominators.” Unless stopped, Dean warns, conservatives “will take American democracy where no freedom-loving person would want it to go.”

Those who buy the conclusion that Dean all but assumes—namely, that movement conservatives are destroying the Republic—will find all this wonderfully cathartic. No need to troll the internet for anti-Republican Party talking points: Conservatives Without Conscience hits them all. The GOP has shifted to the extreme right and imposed virtual one-party rule; evangelicals want to install a theocracy and tear down the wall of separation between church and state; the Bush administration has stripped citizens of their civil liberties and emasculated the other branches of government; social conservatives hate women and gays and want to reduce them to second-class citizens; conservative legal scholars, merely by questioning the theory of judicial supremacy (which Dean confuses with the power of judicial review), threaten the independence of the courts. The right wing gets away with these and other crimes by being a bunch of hypocritical, sanctimonious jerks.

Humorlessly posing as a disinterested champion of the public weal, Dean defends his unkind words for conservatives by invoking the theory of the “authoritarian personality.” First introduced by the neo-Freudian Theodor Adorno in the 1940s but largely discredited by the 1970s, the theory evidently still has its champions, who have carried on a small, if obscure, research industry in its name. Their work does not appear to have earned widespread acceptance among academic psychologists. No matter: in Dean’s mind, as he spends the bulk of Conservatives Without Conscience arguing, the theory of the authoritarian personality establishes the malevolence of conservatives as scientific fact.

To anyone not blind with ideological rage, however, the theory has patent flaws. The whole thing turns out to be rather trivial, notwithstanding all the portentous claims made on the theory’s behalf. Take, for example, the work of Dean’s favorite guru, a University of Manitoba psychologist named Robert Altemeyer. Altemeyer has spent a career administering a questionnaire he calls the “Right Wing Authoritarianism Survey,” in which he asks subjects to agree or disagree with statements such as “the old-fashioned ways and old-fashioned values still show the best way to live” or “there is nothing wrong with premarital sexual intercourse.” After collecting the results, Altemeyer goes on to find that those who score high on the “RWA” scale also tend to be political conservatives. Well, yeah: the questions themselves do little more than elicit conservative or liberal attitudes in the first place. The RWA scale shows only that conservative beliefs correlate well with . . . other conservative beliefs. Call it science if you will—Dean does—but it certainly hasn’t much in the way of explanatory power.

Dean, who's reinvented himself too many times to count, has now come up with a very popular meme that echoes the conservatism-as-mental-illness idea, but with a new twist -- the word "authoritarian" doesn't distinguish between conservatism and mental illness! It's a Marxist term which conflates the political and the personal into one grand evil.

A marvelous label. And a very impressive one. A masterpiece, even. While there are definitions, they really don't matter. What matters is that if you disagree with someone who believes in this nonsense, you're subject to being called an authoritarian outright, or accused of having "authoritarian tendencies" if there's still hope for you.

If you really want to have fun, there's even a test here. The author describes Adorno as having produced,

a Freudian-Marxist melange of pseudo-scientific speculative foolishness that is now, thank God, thoroughly discredited.

Jonah Goldberg (doubtless an authoritarian fascist if ever there was one) has more on Adorno:

[T]his is a very, very old game. Ever since Theodor Adorno came out with his scandalously flawed Authoritarian Personality in 1950, liberal and leftist social scientists have been trying to diagnose conservatism as a psychological defect or sickness. Adorno and his colleagues argued that conservatism was little more than a "pre-fascist" "personality type." According to this school, sympathy for communism was an indication of openness and healthy idealism. Opposition to communism was a symptom of your more deep-seated pathologies and fascist tendencies. According to Adorno, subjects who saw Nazism and Stalinism as similar phenomena were demonstrating their "idiocy" and "irrationality." Psychological counseling, many argued, could cure these maladies. But for some it was too late. In 1964, an ad in the New York Times reported that 1,189 psychiatrists determined that Barry Goldwater was not "psychologically fit" to be president.

Goldwater??? Huh?

Like I said, I'm glad I got my foot in the door with the Goldwater liberal meme before John Dean, 'cause he's now claiming to be that and it hurts my feelings big time!

Yes, it's true. Dean (of whom I've complained many, many, many times), not only continues to obfuscate his role in Watergate, but he's now attempting to claim the mantle of Barry Goldwater:

Before the break, though, before lights, camera and complete inaction on the part of the assembled crowd, Dean talked about the current state of politics. Much like during his interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, he said that he is a Goldwater conservative, but in this day, that places him left of center.

From what I gleaned in the discussion and Q&A session (again, not showing my complete political ignorance), Dean's new book, Conservatives Without Conscience, focuses on the authoritarian aspects of the current administration and the big league players in American politics. He talked about growth of executive powers and an administration shrouded in secrecy.

An anonymous commenter noted this very thing:

Anonymous said...

a goldwater conservative is certainly not anywhere near left of center. His brand of conservatism is right of the current administration on all but a few red herring social issues.

Goldwater conservatism may be many things, but it simply is not leftism (my satirical "Goldwater liberal" business notwithstanding).

From Goldwater's "The Conscience of a Conservative":

"I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them."

"muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism; economic policies of low taxation and light regulation."

I would agree with George F. Will's definition. I tend to see him as what most bloggers would call a small "l" libertarian. In today's terms, a neolibertarian. (Precisely what's being called "extremist" and "authoritarian" in leftie blogs today.)

Will has more:

. . .[T]he domination of the Republican Party by cultural conservatives did make some other conservatives - libertarians and religious skeptics, among others - feel uneasy, even unwelcome. Being derided as RINOs - Republicans in name only - did not help.

Back to Will:

The re-emergence into Republican respectability of conservatism with a socially libertarian cast - Goldwaterism - is a development with a large potential to discomfort the Democratic Party.

The re-emergence can make the Republican Party more appealing to many young and suburban voters, two cohorts in which Democrats have recently made substantial gains.

But because the Goldwater-as-leftist meme seems to be striking a nerve right now in the antiwar crowd, I'd like to shatter their bubble and dispel any notion of Goldwater as a pacifist who didn't believe in strong national defense. For starters, Goldwater was a "hawk's hawk":

An ardent Westerner with a face as blunt and craggy as the state he represented, Goldwater believed in less government and a strong military.

During the Cold War, he was a hawk's hawk, possessing a deep distrust of the Soviet Union. He also was a stickler for the Constitution and the way he interpreted it. Although he banned racial discrimination in his family's department stores and worked toward a similar ban for Arizona schools and the National Guard, he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because he believed it was unconstitutional.

Like me, and many libertarians, Goldwater did have a serious problem with the religious right:

When the new religious right began its takeover of the Republican Party in the 1980s, he broke with them when they advocated limits on the court's ability to bar prayer in school or order busing. He thought their demands would breach the separation of powers between the courts and the Congress, and that religion had no place in politics.

He believed that the federal government should stay out of people's private lives, which is why, late in life, he came out pro-choice and pro-gay rights.

Goldwater was a fervent hawk who believed that nuclear weapons could help bring victory in Vietnam.

But regardless of whether you see Goldwater as a neolibertarian, or of social conservative who became a libertarian late in life, the idea that John Dean -- an antiwar activist who's made a career out of calling for Bush's impeachment -- is a "Goldwater conservative" is laughable.

I wish I thought it was funnier.

But I can't stop thinking about September 11, and what Goldwater's reaction might have been to the United States being attacked.

I remember that he made very ominous comments during the Iranian hostage crisis, threatening to bomb Iran back into the stone age if a single hostage was hurt. I think he would have been far angrier on 9/11.

Goldwater was not unfamiliar with the tactic psychoanalytic labeling of political opponents:

. . .In 1964 a large number of American 'qualified' psychologists signed what purported to be a professional analysis of Senator Goldwater as a clinically unbalanced character. I remember the anger of mine, a professor of psychology at an American university and himself a strong opponent of Goldwater's, at this extraordinary breach of professional ethics and of scientific principle. (Goldwater eventually received heavy damages from them in a court action.)

In 1964, "Fact" magazine quoted dozes of liberal psychiatrists analyzing Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Some examples: "A dangerous lunatic..." "a result of rigid toilet training..." Goldwater sued for libel and won.

I'll be kind, and I won't accuse them of projection.

UPDATE: My extreme (er, should that be "extremest"?) thanks to Glenn Reynolds, for linking this post!

I welcome all comments on this exciting new hybrid phenomenon -- and I think it deserves a new name:

"Goldwater Marxism."

Extremism in pursuit of socialism is no illness!

MORE (07/19/07 -- 11:00 a.m.): Sorry it has taken so long to update as well as edit a few mistakes. (The server has been overwhelmed, so I've been unable open anything, but I'll keep trying.)

UPDATE: I am surprised and honored to see that G. Gordon Liddy (who has been sued repeatedly by John Dean -- the latter discussed in several posts) has left a comment below, as follows:

Concerning Dean's book, "Conservatives Without Concience," I have this observation: Nowhere in the book will you find the name, Ida Maxwell Wells.

Dean claims, concerning the litigation he initiated against me and others over the book, "Silent Coup," that the litigation was "ended by the judge," but he neglects to say why: It is because I insisted upon a trial and Dean and his wife, fearful of what it would reveal, withdrew thier charges.

Then, Dean persuaded Ms. Wells to sue me on essentially the same theory, provided her with his own lawyer and, in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, in Baltimore, in whose files lies all the evidence to prove me right and Dean wrong, I won the case by a jury verdict.

For a summary, but certainly not all, of the Wells case evidence, see the appendix of my book, "When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country.

The twists and turns of the Watergate story are complicated, and many mysteries remain. My own summarized view of these events is here.

MORE: My thanks to Dean Esmay for linking this post! I'm especially honored -- because according to the F-scale test, Dean is now officially certified as a "liberal airhead."

UPDATE (07/24/06): More here on "questioning authority."

I'm so busy that I haven't had time to post anything, but in New Jersey yesterday (where else?) I happened upon this sterling example of responsible journalism:

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if I posted it I might be accused of engaging in "extremist rhetoric" -- or that at least I wasn't being scrupulously fair to both sides.

So I had decided not to share it at all. Until, that is, I happened upon another sterling example of responsible journalism:

Despite my attempt at fairness, though, I'm worried. Might I be internally guilty of that form of extremist rhetoric called projection?

The very future of this Republic may well rest on whether or not anyone can, or will, stop George W. Bush.

He's so famous I feel like a complete idiot going to my readers for help like this, and I'm sure I'll feel even more idiotic when someone finally provides me with the details I cannot find anywhere. (I want to know where he taught, and in what capacities he worked for Nixon and Reagan.)

"George Harleigh" is quoted in innumerable web sites, and he's a retired Political Science professor who worked in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations. I feel like a total idiot, because I'm unable to find out anything about him. His name doesn't appear in the indexes of any of my books on Nixon or Reagan, I can't find a Wikipedia entry on him, and I can't even ascertain the university where he taught.

In 1999 he was said to be from "Southern Illinois University.":

Does the heady atmosphere of Congress turn honest men and women into a criminal class? Or is elected office simply a magnet for those who lie, cheat and steal for a living?

It could be a little bit of both, say political scientists and Constitutional scholars.

"There's no doubt that politics attracts the glib, the fast talker and the con artist," says retired Southern Illinois University political scientist George Harleigh. "It's a natural place for those who think fast on their feet."

Congress has always had its share of rogues and scoundrels:

Does the heady atmosphere of Congress turn honest men and women into a criminal class? Or is elected office simply a magnet for those who lie, cheat and steal for a living?

Political scientists and Constitutional scholars say it could be a bit of both.

"Politics attracts the glib, the fast talker and the con artist," says George Harleigh, a retired political science professor who worked in the Nixon and Reagan administrations. "It's a natural place for those who think fast on their feet."

Congress has always had its share of rogues and scoundrels:

Weird.

Professor Harleigh was quoted in a report not long after the Reagan funeral:

Capitol Hill Blue has an unsourced report that, amid rumors of proposed Bush ads featuring Reagan's image,

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan has sent a message to the White House expressing her “extreme displeasure” at any attempt to use her late husband as a campaign tool in the Presidential campaign

.and quotes retired Southern Illinois University political scientist George Harleigh.

"Ronald Reagan has achieved god-like status among conservative Republicans and you don’t mess with his memory. If they are smart they will pull the plug on the campaign and order the ads destroyed. Unfortunately, the Bush campaign has not yet impressed us with its intelligence."

He's quoted as an expert on Nixon too, because, it is claimed, he worked there. In the second administration:

The carefully-crafted image of George W. Bush as a bold, decisive leader is cracking under the weight of new revelations that the erratic President is indecisive, moody, paranoid and delusional.

“More and more this brings back memories of the Nixon White House,” says retired political science professor George Harleigh, who worked for President Nixon during the second presidential term that ended in resignation under fire. “I haven't heard any reports of President Bush wondering the halls talking to portraits of dead Presidents but what I have been told is disturbing.”

Two weeks ago, Capitol Hill Blue revealed that a growing number of White House aides are concerned about the President's mental stability. They told harrowing tales of violent mood swings, bouts with paranoia and obscene outbursts from a President who wears his religion on his sleeve.

After wasting an hour, I'm stumped.

There has to be an easy explanation. Surely this George Harleigh is a famous man, and I'm missing something.

Can anyone help?

AFTERTHOUGHT: This is not the first time something like this happened, and it shows the limitations of the Internet as a research tool. If any readers could do a Nexis search, I'd be much obliged.

UPDATE: Dennis found nothing via a Nexus/Lexis (or is that a car?) search, so in despair I called the phone number listed at the Southern Illinois University website. The woman I spoke with checked the emeritus list and said the name "Harleigh" did not appear. The list, she said, went from "Hargraves" to "Harlow."

(If only it was so easy to call the Nixon and Reagan administrations. . .)

MORE: The reason I'd like to know whether "George Harleigh" is on the level is that the only man who seems able to quote him says other things I'm unable to verify. A couple of examples

President Bush tortured cats when he was a boy;

President Bush said the Constitution was "just a goddamned piece of paper."

Does that mean that it doesn't matter whether the reports exist? Or that it doesn't matter whether they're true?

MORE: Not only is "George Harleigh" alive and well, he has just weighed in on President Bush's recent "open mike" remarks:

Blair said Rice has "got to succeed" if she goes to the region. Bush replied: "What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit."

It's not the first time the unwary President, who claims to be a born-again Christian, has been caught cursing. He called a New York Times reporter a "son of a bitch" to an open mike, told Wall Street Journal reporter Al Hunt "fuck you" in front of his daughters and, in a meeting with members of Congress, called the Constitution "just a goddamned piece of paper."

"Like Nixon, Bush's private persona is much different," says retired political scientiest George Harleigh, who served in both the Nixon and Reagan administration. "Nixon cursed like a sailor when he was out of public view. So does Bush."

The U.S. president blames Syria and Iran for supporting Hezbollah guerrillas operating in southern Lebanon.

MORE: Commenter Scott below is "starting to think George Harleigh is an Alan Smithee type person." Alan Smithee, FYI, is a Hollywood pseudonym for directors who do not want their names to go on bad films. The problem is that in the case of "Smithee," it is beyond dispute that there was a director who actually directed a film. (Something that can be verified by the existence of the film.) How could we ever know whether the statements imputed to "George Harleigh" were uttered by anyone other than the writer?

UPDATE (07/19/07): My thanks to Clayton Cramer who links this post and comments:

Okay, so some leftist reporters are making people up. What's the big deal? "George Harleigh" has some credibility in attacking Bush because of his obvious impeccable credentials, as a political science professor, and as someone who worked for two conservative presidents. But if he exists only in the imagination of leftists, then he's a lie.

Also, thanks to commenter Scott below, who has emailed Doug Thompson "asking for Contact Information for George Harleigh, or a list of publications, articles, or books that he's written."

I can't wait!

If I am wrong, I'll apologize to Mr. Thompson as well as Mr. Harleigh.

MORE: George Harleigh disappears. New post here.

MORE (07/21/07): New visitors, please be aware of my more recent post thoroughly debunking what appears to be an incredible game of cyber musical chairs.

Plus, a look at Doug Thompson here.

Other than a post expressing general support for Israel, I haven't had much to add to the discussion of the Israel/Hezbollah war. This is not because of any lack of interest, but because I'm not much of an expert on these things, I don't think I really have much to contribute. Once again, I lack access to inside information, and this makes me naturally hesitant to second guess people who not only have such access, but who are operating in the heat of battle.

I got an email asking me why I missed the Hezbollah/Iranian/Iraq (via Moqtada al Sadr) connection, and I explained that I discussed the Iranian connection before, as well as Hezbollah's connection with al Qaida.

The emailer left me with this interesting aside:

You can thank Jimmy Carter for his work in the creation of modern day Iran.

In yesterday's Inquirer, Trudy Rubin made a very interesting point:

Suddenly, the G-8 agenda shifted from how the world community might press Iran to freeze its suspect nuclear program to how to prevent new Mideast wars from exploding.

Iran was delivering a warning to Washington via proxies, without firing a gun.

The Lebanese movement Hezbollah gets money, arms and guidance from Iran, and would not have conducted such a dramatic raid into Israel without at least consulting with Tehran. Israel claims the Hezbollah rockets that hit Haifa came from Iran.

As for Gaza's Hamas, it has leaders in the Syrian capital, Damascus, where they can consult with visiting Iranian officials. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been courting support with the "Arab street" (whose Sunni Arabs are normally hostile to Persian Shiite Muslims) by spouting hard-line rhetoric about Israel.

Meanwhile, thanks to the United States, Iran can exert powerful influence in Iraq, where Shiite parties allied to Iran now run the government, and in Afghanistan, whose leaders are also close to Tehran. By ousting Saddam Hussein and the Taliban - Iran's greatest enemies - Washington made Iran into the superpower of the region.

What I'd like to know is, what's going on with Saudi Arabia?

There's some interesting top-level hobnobbing with Iran right now.

But trying to analyze these things from a position of ignorance is like spitting in the wind.

(At times like this, I wish I had access to information.)

NOTE: My slowdown worsens. I have to spend all day in New Jersey, and I'll be lucky if I even get to open this blog again before midnight.

Sigh.

(Who ever said life was fun?)

UPDATE: Captain Ed discusses a NYT report indicating that Saudi Arabia thinks Iran is a bigger threat than Israel:

What is clear is that even the various kleptocracies in the region have becomed unnerved by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rhetoric and brazen pursuit of nuclear weapons. The fall of Saddam Hussein removed the one military force that could stack up against Israel, and the American occupation puts Israel out of reach for most of the rest of the Arab nations. That makes any nation that deliberately invites Israeli and American retaliation a little less than rational, and the nutty rhetoric coming from Teheran only means that the Americans will stick around a little longer.

Iranian provocation threatens to engulf all of the Arab nations in a war they cannot hope to win. Why should they back Hezbollah's play, when Sheikh Nasrallah and Iran didn't bother to consult them?

For all their talk, the Arabs understand that Israel really presents no long-term threat to their own regimes.

Is there anybody who voted against the Commander-in-Chief who can remain free?

Anybody?

I'm thinking it over.

I'm thinking it over!

The problem is, absent some sort of coup, Bush only has a couple of years as president. The American concentration camp system cannot possibly hold more than a small fraction of the total number of Americans who voted against Bush.

So, if we assume Bush is the "Commander-in-Chief" in question, I think the question is at minimum premature.

(Perhaps it's some form of extremist rhetoric . . .)

After more than three years of blogging, I'm finally hosting a carnival -- a new first for me. And I don't get new firsts that often, so this ought to be considered cause for celebration.

Over the years, I've written a number of mini-reviews of carnivals, but I can't do that this time, because my assignment is to write it! (If I'm lucky, I'll avoid the hall-of-mirrors of reviewing my own review.)

How to celebrate hosting my first carnival? Well, it's a little like having a first baby -- not new for people who've done it, but new for the person having it. So I think I'll have a baby. (A baby rino, of course.)

VOILA!

A RINO is born

Wow. This giving birth thing wasn't as tough as I thought. I didn't even need an anesthetic, and the little fellow is already off and running. (Of course, the first thing my little RINO did with his precocious, inquisitive self was to watch this video which illustrates graphically what his parents had to do to get him here!)

RINOs being linear types who are fond of charging into things, my baby RINO thought the best way to approach this Carnival would be to simply take the posts in the order they were received. It's also more fair that way, because while obviously some are better than others, each is good in its own way. Remember, RINOs tend to be loner animals, not joiners of herds. But some varieties are more gregarious than others. Above all, they cannot be stereotyped.

Top RINO starts the stampede

The first post I received was from the head bull -- Stephen (aka The Commissar, at The Politburo Diktat).

Why do they want to kill us?

One of the reasons our RINO counterparts in the wild are endangered is because the horns are used to make traditional Arab daggers in countries like Yemen:

It was not until the 1970s that rhinos declined dramatically, due to a surprising cause: the soaring price of oil. Young men in the Arab country of Yemen covet rhino horn for elaborately-carved dagger handles, symbols of wealth and status in that country. Until the 1970s, few men could afford these prized dagger handles. But Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries are rich in oil, and prices for this "black gold" climbed dramatically in that decade due to a worldwide oil shortage. The result was a seven-fold increase in the per capita income in Yemen, a rise in wealth that made rhino horn dagger handles within the reach of almost everyone. This small country, with a population of 6 million at the time, suddenly became the world's largest importer of rhino horn.

The value of rhino horn made it enormously profitable to poach rhinos and sell them on the black market. For example, in 1990, the two horns from a single black rhino brought as much as $50,000. Just like poaching for elephant ivory, poaching for rhino horn is simply too profitable for many subsistence farmers and herders to resist.

Knowing the enemy

While I realize that reading a 268 page jihadi manifesto is a lot of work, it's worth keeping in mind that if you do too much of what the guy in the next picture is doing, you might lose what you most value!

No rest for our RINOs!

Can DINOs be RINOs?

QUESTION: If Liebermann became a Republican, wouldn't he just go from being a DINO to a RINO?

I know this Carnival is supposed to be the Raging of the RINOs, but twice now I've been thinking about DINOs. Hmmm again . . . Global Cooling might have killed the DINOs the first time around. Maybe the hot air of Global Warming will bring them back?

As to which DINO might most resemble a RINO, I think it would be one of the ceratopsians -- a monoclonius, perhaps?

Well, why not? In my own case, a DINO gave birth to a RINO, and there's always an ecological niche for charging nonconformists who believe in self defense. . .

Lost heads and Yemen

And here's what the Yemenis make from our endangered brethren:

What's the matter? A Kalashnikov's not good enough?

Why the need to kill endangered species simply to get a handle for such outmoded technology?

Superstition, probably.

Medieval quackery

Two posts on the Mideast

Taking us for granted?

After that last post, I need a drink!

So here goes; down the hatch!

Defending my dog

Coco's reaction? She's glad someone spoke up for her at the RINO Carnival and she's feeling awfully protective of her baby RINO right now:

RINO goes national

RINO defends border

The fires of emotion

Rachel's post about controlling passions reminded me of the unconfirmed legend:

There are a number of legends about rhinoceroses stamping out fire. The story seems to have been common in Malaysia and Burma.

This type of rhinoceros even had a special name in Malay, badak api, where badak means rhinoceros and api means fire. The animal would come when a fire is lit in the forest and stamp it out.

Whether or not there is any truth to this has not yet been proven, as there has been no documented sighting of this phenomenon in recent history.

And with that, it's time to cover the fire, for this brings me to the the end* of this week's RINO Sightings Carnival.

I'd like to thank all who participated -- a wide range of bloggers with a wide range of subjects.

RINOs, of course, need plenty of range space, and they're not used to getting together like this. But when they do, watch out!

Till next time . . .

LATE UPDATE (07/17/06): JimK at Right Wing Thoughts sends a fascinating last-minute submission with this look at informer Mubin Shaikh's role in the recent Canadian terrorist plot. I realize that in the real world, we can't expect informers to be saints, and this Mubin Shaikh clearly does not qualify for sainthood (unless working for the imposition of Sharia Law in Canada qualifies as saintly activity). I think it's wise to consider all possible motivations when dealing with someone like that.

Jim also shares his thoughts -- and a video -- about Girls who kick ass, and concludes:

If you are a man who doesn’t appreciate a strong woman, I put it to you that you are not a complete man.

* I could be wrong, though. RINOs are not elephants. We sometimes forget! So . . . if I left anyone out, just let me know.

UPDATE: Thank you, Glenn Reynolds, for honoring the RINOs by linking this Carnival!

Welcome all!

I was planning to grapple with my thoughts about the war between Israel and Hezbollah Iran, until I was distracted by today's Sunday paper.

Not that an article on the Israel/Hezbollah war didn't merit the front page (it did), but on the same front page there are two huge articles on "gun violence" (at the web site, this one is called the "top story"). Plus there's the accompanying piece headlined "In the city, any day can be a killing day, and on top of all that, today's lead editorial calls for gun control.

Yet I keep reading that gun control is not a winning issue for Democrats, and that the Democrats know it. Philadelphia is a city run by Democrats, and Pennsylvania's governor is Democrat Ed Rendell.

And all politics is local, right?

So what gives?

I'm having a political logic problem, because whether it's a "winning" issue or not, local, Philadelphia "gun violence" (the Inky's term, not mine) is an issue that will not go away. (Only yesterday, an Inquirer story editorialized that Philadelphia is a "war zone," -- and just the day after I had given credit to the rival free Philadelphia Weekly for the term! Really now. Such competition can only leads to cycles of war zones.)

To be fair to the Inquirer, though, today's editorial lists cultural factors along with the availability of guns:

The blueprint hits many right notes: It is long-term. It is multi-pronged. It aims to increase awareness about violence, change community norms, link people to services, and improve enforcement of gun laws.

As part of the research that went into the Blueprint campaign, the teens and adults who live inside the street code of violence, or who have lost loved ones to it, talked about the reality. Listen:

"Respect is everything - pride, and get your name out there as the next big person."

"We fight because we don't know no other way."

"If you don't have money, you are going to get it."

"A lot of violence is because kids don't know how to read."

"Little bitty kids are repeating" violent song lyrics.

"My pop never encouraged me for nothin'."

"You've sometimes got 15 kids on the block, and the oldest cat watching them is 12."

"It's racism."

A list of reasons like that won't submit to a one-size-fits-all solution.

Responding to these problems requires a change of culture in some homes, on some streets. It requires creating more opportunities on those streets to make money legally.

It requires fathers to be present in their kids' lives, and all parents to be more responsible for their children. It means more parenting classes that can teach adults the skills they never learned from their own families.

Children need more role models and mentors who can show that respect doesn't have to come from violence, more people such as businessman Blane Fitzgerald Stoddart, a product of Philadelphia public schools and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Stoddart has been a driving force behind community development and safety programs in West Philadelphia.

Kids need to be taught how to respond to conflict and perceived disrespect without shooting a gun. Peer mediation programs in the city schools, along with violence prevention curricula such as Second Step, are providing those lessons. Support them with your time and dollars.

The media should seek out stories about African Americans and Latino males doing the right things.

And yes, the flood of guns has to be dammed.

Gun rights' advocates preach unreasonable absolutism when it comes to the sale of firearms. . . .

I also think it touches on the Inquirer's advice to its fellow members of the media:

". . .the media should seek out stories about African Americans and Latino males doing the right things."

I'm wondering. Might this image (which I saw at every news rack and every store in the area last week) be undercutting that theme?

I don't know.

But what about the cult of hero worship surrounding rap stars who proudly serve time for not snitching on shooters? It's one thing to send a message that we shouldn't be too judgmental of people who fear for their lives and won't "snitch," but isn't the cover suggesting a bit more? Isn't there a difference between being afraid to snitch, and belonging to a cult which boasts of proudly intimidating the snitchers? Why would anyone want to blur the distinction between the two?

After all, the whole point is that these T-shirts are being worn all over the place -- especially in areas plagued by shootings.

I'm not saying Philadelphia Weekly wanted to boost T shirt sales, of course. But to put it bluntly, the T shirt is intended to be -- and is -- a form of intimidation (bordering on advocacy of violence) against people who snitch, as well as an expression of solidarity with people who don't. And of course it's permitted expression under the First Amendment. But its free speech character has nothing to do with the public's right to properly condemn it. While PW seems to feel differently, I think the suggestion that the public should not condemn the whole anti-snitching movement is not a stellar example of what the Inquirer calls "doing the right thing."

All the more reason I applaud another Inquirer proposal from the editorial:

Kids need to be taught how to respond to conflict and perceived disrespect without shooting a gun.

Maybe they also need to be taught something I think is a major reason there isn't as much shooting in some neighborhoods as others (despite the "easy availability" of guns): when someone commits a crime, why, you call the police!

That was once called common sense; now it's called "snitching."

I don't think this is a profound idea, but the fact is, in some neighborhoods, calling the police is considered a form of cultural treason. I'll never forget an incident which really opened my eyes to the phenomenon. When I was in my twenties, I moved into a bad neighborhood in Berkeley, California, which was plagued by what were then called "drive-by shootings." No one seemed to know how to deal with the problem, which was obviously drug-related. I soon noticed that the shootings were inextricably related to groups of young people who'd hang out and direct customer traffic to whoever might have been the connection to whoever might have been holding. I was amazed by the complexity of the operation, and being a curious person, I entertained myself watching through the shades with binoculars. Young "lookouts" (early adolescents -- usually 12 or so) would hang around a few blocks from the "action," and if they saw a police cruiser they'd yell "rollers," which would then cause an immediate (if temporary) disbursement. If you wanted to buy, you'd have to ask one of the older guys, who'd then direct you to another guy, who might tell you to pay twenty dollars "to the guy over there." Then, someone else would come along and tell you to go somewhere else to score. More often than not, the stash would be hidden, and rotated constantly. The kids were so good at this game that often you'd see a customer stopping to pick up what looked like a tiny piece of trash (which had just been left next to a fence by someone else), then get in the car and immediately drive away. Other methods including cigarettes and candy being apparently "shared" during what would look like a long conversation between driver and pedestrian, but the car would drive off, and it didn't take much imagination to see what was going on. Even stash houses were often not the real location, but they were multi-unit buildings where one apartment might appear to be holding, but the real stash was handed across a common ventilation shaft from another apartment. Of course, ventilation shafts in the backs of these buildings often are a few feet away from the back of another building on the next street -- with a completely different address.

You could almost swear that the dealers knew more about search and seizure law than the cops!

Now, I think drugs should be legalized. "Relegalized" is the word I like to use. Really, it never ceases to amaze me how few people know that not that long ago (when my father was a small boy, in fact) heroin and cocaine could be purchased over the counter in any neighborhood drug store or ordered from the Sears Roebuck catalogue. If druggies could buy the drugs, urban entrepreneurs wouldn't be setting up these businesses on street corners. And they wouldn't be acting like mini Al Capones, either; when was the last time a shootout occurred over alcohol distribution rights?

I have to say, the libertarian in me was conflicted, because I don't think anyone should be imprisoned for drugs. However, what most bothered me was the noise. I had trouble sleeping because there's something about people "tweaking" in the street at three in the morning (with the inevitable noise that entails) and your alarm clock is going to go off at six, that another libertarian principle is invoked: the right to quiet enjoyment of your home. (I mean, even if we see the drug trade as a business, why should freelance pharmaceutical retail outlets have any more right to make noise on residential street corners than anyone else? At the risk of sounding like a hopeless communitarian, what's wrong with reasonable business hours?)

Back to my memorable incident. Eventually, I made the acquaintance of a very nice elderly woman -- the type who kept an eye on everything. One day, we were chatting in her front yard and, looking about and lowering her voice to a whisper, she asked me to come inside quickly. She had a confession, but the way it came out was a major shock for me at the time:

"I'm so glad you white boys have moved in here, because now they know I'm not the only snitch, and they don't know who's callin' the police."

What this meant, though, was that they "knew" that I (and my partner) were "snitches."

Why? Simply because we were "white boys"? (Like I say, it was a shock.)

I'm wondering now, would the T shirt have made me safer?

(Times change.)

There are ad hominem attacks, and then there are ad hominem attacks.

And I am fascinated by the latest, full-blown all-out assault launched by the free leftist Philadelphia Weekly against local talk show host Michael Smerconish.

Here's the cover:

Because of my penchant for analyzing things, I always want to know what is going on, as personal and ad hominem attacks fall generally divided into two styles:

In the case of "personal" attacks on public figures, the target himself is only the ostensible target. (That's why I placed "personal" in quotes, and it's also why defamation law distinguishes between public and private figures.) It's not intended to change the mind of the "victim" so much as it is to intimidate his allies, influence people to abandon him, and (as the case may be) simultaneously rally his collective enemies -- either against him or against whatever "forces" he is said to represent.

Before I get into analyzing this mess, let me admit that I'm at a bit of a disadvantage, because I do not know Smerconish, and other than inadvertent bits while flipping through the channels, I have never listened to his show. Local talk radio bores me, although I read somewhere that Smerconish may be courting a national audience. (His web site is here and his show can be streamed here, although I've never tried it.) Because of my ignorance, I cannot characterize his politics, although he is generally said to be conservative.

However, he's also said to be a conservative who's rumored to be going wobbly, or possibly moderating his views. I haven't researched this extensively, but Smerconish contributes to the Huffington Post, and the conservative-leaning Newsbusters notes his background as a moderate, and takes serious issue with him being called a "conservative." And just last month, Smerconish attacked Ann Coulter, and threatened to vote Democrat in 2008.

Could Smerconish's apparent flirtation with liberalism be the reason for the high profile attack?

Why? What possible interest might a local leftist freebie have in attacking -- as a far right conservative -- a moderate Republican said to be headed in a leftward direction? I mean, I could see conservatives caring about such a thing (obviously some of them do), but since when are liberals interested in policing deviation from conservativism? Am I alone in seeing that as odd?

I have no dog in this race, and as far as I'm concerned, Smerconish can do whatever he wants.

The perennial Rhetoric student in me is just insatiably curious. Is the goal is to drive Smerconish back into the pen of right wing untouchables, with vicious insults used like a cattle prod? Is the goal to keep leftists away from him? Are the writer and his paper merely having a great time venting at Smerconish's expense? Or all three?

I'll start with the editor's introduction to the hit piece:

I figured Steven Wells would go mad listening to Michael Smerconish every morning—which is pretty much exactly what happened.

I might be mistaken, but I'd almost swear that PW's editor doesn't seem to like Smerconish's show or the station:

Smerconish's radio show can be heard from 5:30 to 9 a.m. weekdays on 1210 AM, a station once known by the iconic call letters WCAU, but now known only as the Big Talker.

A useful slogan, but here's a more apt one—the Big Wanker.

Hannity and Limbaugh do shows on the Big Talker. So does Bill O'Reilly. You have to be a wanker to have your radio dial anywhere near this satanic house of darkness.

Once, before radio became a medium of thieves and corporate raiders, 1210 was a big deal. With its 50,000 watts, you could pick it up everywhere. People in Birmingham, Ala., and Buffalo, N.Y., could hear the Phillies rolling into the seventh, or even better, listen to Jack McKinney—Irish rebel, Daily News columnist and radio host—riff on the issues of the day.

McKinney—there was a guy who could make you think.

These guys, the only thing they make you think is how quickly you can put a bullet in your head.

I keep hearing the word "wanker" a lot. Is that a synonym for wingnut? In some circles, maybe. But before we get to Smerconish, it's probably worth pointing out that author Steven Wells not only excoriated the Beatles for various political deviations (primarily for perpetrating a "myth of the inherently talented white male singer/songwriter genius"), but called John Lennon a "wanker":

For sure, Lennon's solo classic "Imagine" is an ideologically perfect socialist/atheist utopian anthem. But against that you've got to set George Harrison's bourgeois bellyaching on "Taxman" (the government taking money off multimillionaire pop stars to build schools and hospitals? Outrageous!) and Paul McCartney's excruciatingly embarrassing support of Dubya's war on brown-skinned people controlling their own oil.

The Beatles were well dodgy. But to state that in public is to risk a savage kicking. I once appeared on a TV show on which I said John Lennon was my fave Beatle 'cause he was a rude, screwed-up, arrogant wanker. Cue animal howls of outrage from the assorted "friends" of the clog-popped moptop also present in the studio.

If that's the way Wells feels about the Beatles, imagine. . . Just imagine -- how he feels about Smerconish.

Actually, Smerconish's biggest crime seems not to be Smerconish, but Ronald Reagan:

While the rest of us were bewitched by the twitching swagger of walking corpse Sid Vicious, or the hypnotic ferret-eyed Dickensian cynicism of John Lydon, or the subverted S&M ice-queen proto-goth chic of sinisterly sexy Siouxsie Sioux—you fell in love with the stiff Antichrist, the suburban Satan, Mr. 666 himself—Ronald Wilson Reagan.

As WC Fields once asked, "Is any of that in my favor?"

Reagan is so evil, that it's tough to reconcile with Smerconish's religion:

And this is the bit I really find hard to understand, Mike. You were—and still are—a practicing Catholic, with a keen sense of right and wrong.

Yet you saw nothing wrong with the wholesale slaughter of liberal Catholic clergy by Reagan administration-trained Central American death squads.

You saw nothing wrong with Reagan's support for squalid antidemocratic right-wing dictatorships in Central America and elsewhere (including our good friend Saddam Hussein).

You saw nothing wrong when, on March 24, 1980, the Reagan-backed El Salvadorian dictatorship shot down Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero for daring to call, in the name of Christ, for an end to the repression.

Or when, just 11 months later, the same Reagan-backed regime (funded by Washington to the tune of $1 million a day) sent a U.S.-trained and -equipped “antiterrorist” death squad to the village of El Mozot, where they massacred 800 men, women and children (after first torturing the men).

You saw nothing wrong when Reagan declared that the “dirty war”-fighting Contra terrorists were “the moral equivalents of our founding fathers.” Or with Reagan's support for the right-wing government in Honduras that murdered more than 200,000 indigenous people over a 36-year period.

But hey, they were probably all communists or something, right?

Musical taste, that's very important to developing and raising the proper political consciousness. Smerconish's "worst of all" crime (well, after voting for Reagan) is that he liked the wrong music. Ted Nugent, Yes, and Kansas figure as top objects of scorn, although Wells also steers a gratuitous insult towards the Grateful Dead for the crime of Ann Coulter liking them. This is a 4200 word essay, and I can't begin to do it justice. (Yeah, I disagree with the author's politics, and I'm sure he'd hate me for that, but I do admit, he's an accomplished practitioner of mouth-watering invective. Like "choking on cheesy corporate cock like the forelock-tugging lickspittle it really is" and "wizened old ax-spanking-turkey-cock-dressed-as-spring-chicken.")

Back to the indictment. Smerconish, it seems, did not like the music of his "peers." (The Sandinista-supporting Clash.) So, for shame!

So when your peers, your fellow politicized punk-era gobshites—like Joe Strummer and Jello Biafra—were ranting and raving in horror and disgust at the torture and murder of all those innocent men women and—God help us, Mike—children, where were you?

Busy, by your own admission, voting for every swivel-eyed psychopath-supporting Republican presidential candidate that came trotting down the turnpike.

For shame, Mike.

Remember the racist outrage when Kirk kissed Uhura back on Star Trek in 1968—American TV's first biracial kiss?

Before your time, Mike?

Well then, what about the Christian pressure group-orchestrated outrage when T.O. got mildly amorous with a white TV actress in a TV commercial in 2004? Or the insane hurricane of horrified gasping that supposedly swept America when it glimpsed Janet Jackson's carefully tasseled tit at that same year's Super Bowl?

If you still think PC is a left-wing disease, Mike, print up bumper stickers reading “Fuck Our Troops” or “This Flag's for Burning,” then stick 'em on your car and see what happens. Go on. I dare you.

The only difference now is that we live in ever so slightly more enlightened times where, now and then, an excess of prudery or political zealotry might come from the touchy-feely liberal left—rather than, as it did in the 1950s, almost entirely from the embittered proponents of racism, sexism and homophobia.

Ah yes, the good old days, when white Americans could walk the streets with banners demanding white children be protected from the dangers of “jungle music” without fear they might be told to shut their stupid racist mouths.

'Sup, Mike? Didn't you get the point of Pleasantville? By the way, here are a few other cultural pointers you might've missed in the past 40 or so years.

The Sheriff of Nottingham, Captain Hook and Darth Vader were not the good guys. You weren't supposed to laugh when Bambi's mother got shot. Those two strapping red-staters in Brokeback Mountain were both gay, and the savages who beat one of them to death for being gay? They were almost certainly not liberals.

As I say, as ad hominem invective goes, the piece is a classic.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly who is supposed to be persuaded, and of what.

As I've never listened to the show (as if listening was necessary for writers like Wells), and I don't consider myself a conservative, I really can't consider myself part of Smerconish's "misogynist, homophobic, tinfoil-hat-wearing right-wing-radio-listening fan base." (For starters, I voted against Reagan, twice.) But even if I was a Smerconish fan, would I see the light that Wells would have my wobbly hero follow after reading the hit piece? Somehow, I doubt it.

(But it doesn't matter. As it is, I'm consigned to a hopeless state of permanent libertarian fascist darkness.)

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking this post, and welcome all!

Had I the slightest idea this would happen, I'd have done my homework, and actually listened to the radio! Fortunately, the hit piece didn't focus on the program. That's part of the magic of the ad hominem attack. Who needs reality-based facts?

This is very disturbing news:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Thousands of Iraqis demonstrated in Baghdad on Friday praising the leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group and denouncing Israel and the United States for attacks against Lebanon. Some protesters said they were ready to fight the Israelis.

The Iraqi protests came as Israeli warplanes struck the Lebanese capital of Beirut, blasting the airport for a second day, knocking down a bridge, igniting fuel storage tanks and cutting the main highway to Syria. Hezbollah fired more rockets at Israeli towns across the border.

The demonstrations started immediately after Muslims left Friday prayers in mosques around the county. Thousands of people chanted slogans and carrying banners denouncing the Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.

Since Wednesday, 61 people have been killed in Israel’s bombardment, mostly Lebanese civilians - including three who died in bombing of south Beirut early Friday, police said. On the Israeli side, eight soldiers have died and two civilians were killed by Hezbollah rockets on northern towns.

“No, no to Israel, no no to America,” chanted some of the more than 5,000 demonstrators in Baghdad’s eastern neighborhood of Sadr City. “Oh God make (Hezbollah’s leader) Hassan Nasrallah victorious.”

The article goes on in like vein. While I'm tempted to stomp up and down and yell "What a bunch of f---ing ingrates!," I think I should at least try to hold out hope that this represents a small minority of activist Shiites, who see the Shiite-led Hezbollah as allies.

It doesn't help that the "moderate" Ayatollah Sistani (who thinks homosexuals should be killed "in the worst way") also seems to have voiced support:

In the Shiite holy city of Karbala, Sheik Abdul Mahdi al-Karbalai, representative of Iraq’s top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani said” we condemn the Zionist terrorist offensive against Lebanon that targeted the infrastructure of this country, while Hezbollah hasn’t targeted the infrastructure of the Zionists. They targeted military facilities.”

Israel was attacked!

Or doesn't that count for anything anymore?

Sigh.

I'm reminded of similar arguments I've had with people over 9/11. There's a growing mindset that if you're attacked you're just supposed to accept it, and start negotiating surrender.

Would the people advancing that argument feel that way if someone broke into their houses?

I guess some of them would.

Times change.

MORE: Dave Price thinks that Israel is at war with Iran:

Israel should behave as though they are at war with Iran, because they are. The mullahs are barely even bothering to pretend otherwise anymore.

These truly are regimes run by thugs, and nothing less than the probability of retaliatory violence being visited at their own doorstep will deter them.

If that seems overly aggressive, consider what action the United States would take against a nation actively harboring and supporting a terrorist group that was killing Americans (for a hint, look east and west of Iran).

These days, we live in a world of missing links. I've become quite used to it. But I don't like it when links are missing because they have been deliberately pulled under duress -- like this.

Nor do I like it when links are deliberately omitted when those links present the other side of the very opinion being attacked!

But what about the pesky issue of not linking to someone because you don't want to give him traffic, even though you disagree with him? According to an angry post ghost-written by "Karl Rove" for Ace (and linked by Jeff Goldstein), it's not a good idea to link Glenn Greenwald, because he's a troll and a link whore. I agree that Greenwald is a troll and probably a link whore. And I'd like to take Ace's advice and ignore him, except this is a complicated situation because (as you'll soon see), I am the one who is being ignored.

And not just by Glenn Greenwald, but by Austin Cline, who's not only much more famous, but whose recent ferocious attack on Glenn Reynolds is inextricably intertwined with Glenn Greenwald, but which provides not a single link to Glenn Reynolds. While I was more bothered by Austin Cline's opinion than by Glenn Greenwald's I see no way to discuss the former without mentioning the latter.

And if I mention the latter, and I don't provide a link, doesn't that put me in the same category as Austin Cline? Hell, it might even put me in the position of committing a Wolcott! (And much as I enjoy Wolcott's style, the deliberate non-linking of things under discussion just doesn't work for me. Plus, even Wolcott might have turned over a new leaf.)

Anyway, according to Austin Cline, it’s now official. Glenn Reynolds is a far right extremist. And not just any old far right extremist; he's a far far right, far right extremist's extremist!

That's right, Glenn must now be considered far to the right of the Republican Party and to the right of "the conservative movement" itself. Not only that, his extremist rhetoric is so beyond acceptable political discourse that even the right wing should be shutting him out and loudly condemning him:

There's a better-than-even chance that someone will get hurt or even die because of the rhetoric of people like David Horowitz, Bill O'Reilly, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds. Their rhetoric is well outside what is acceptable in political discourse; the fault for this, however, lies not just with them but with the entire conservative movement in America. Conservatives and members of the Republican Party have had the moral and political responsibility for shutting such people out and loudly condemning them. Instead, they have welcomed ever more extremism into their ranks and are thus complicit not only in the current situation, but also in whatever violence is perpetrated as a consequence of it.

If you read that for the first time, you'd almost think Glenn had just recently been discovered to be a mouthpiece for Nazi sympathizers or something.

Searching in vain for the Reynolds rhetoric which is going to get people killed, I found only a link to this post by Glenn Greenwald (there! I enabled his link whoring with apologies to Karl Rove):

In order to avoid criticizing his comrades on the Right who are engaging in thug tactics, Reynolds actually equates discussion of the vacation homes of top government officials (who enjoy the most extensive and high-level security on the planet) with publication of the home addresses of private individuals and journalists (who have no security of any kind). By his reasoning, mentioning that the Vice President has a vacation home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland is no different than publishing the home address of private individuals who are publicly identified as traitors.

Logically, providing but ignoring a link beats launching an attack with no link at all, so that means Glenn Greenwald is fairer than Austin Cline at About Atheism. Still, neither one of them is really being fair -- or most importantly, original.

I think that I am the one who is being ignored, as this post will attempt to prove.

Parenthetically, as many people don't click these links (assuming they are there to click), I think it's fair to point out that they're building the case against Glenn Reynolds out of hot air, as he simply did not say what is being attributed to him above. From the missing link:

. . .I don't argue that. Greenwald is arguing with himself. I think he's got his Glenns confused. And for those who don't follow links, here are the Online Integrity principles on this stuff:

Private persons are entitled to respect for their privacy regardless of their activities online. This includes respect for the non-public nature of their personal contact information, the inviolability of their homes, and the safety of their families. No information which might lead others to invade these spaces should be posted. The separateness of private persons’ professional lives should also be respected as much as is reasonable.

Public figures are entitled to respect for the non-public nature of their personal, non-professional contact information, and their privacy with regard to their homes and families. No information which might lead others to invade these spaces should be posted.

Clear? Well, I think so.

But at the risk of engaging in the same type of "me first!" narcissism that they're engaged in, I do think there's something else going on here. I admit, I'm a little annoyed, because the arbiters of far right extremism won't give me any credit. I repeatedly warned the blogosphere about this far right business long ago -- back when Glenn Greenwald was just a plain old lawyer whose main contribtion to humanity had involved representing unusual clients.

Why, I even provided the following scary picture to document my claims:

What more could any reasonable person want?

And am I being given any credit for it? Hell no! These self appointed judges of all right wing extremism seem to think that they came up with the idea, when the original research -- the long tough hours of backbreaking work, the joyless task of speaking truth to authority -- all that and more was mine! And the final victory -- in the form of a confession by the Instafuhrer himself -- all of this happened long before people like Glenn Greenwald and Austin Cline came along with their so-called "discoveries."

Who do they think they are?

No, seriously. And I really should be a lot more pissed off about this than I am, but who ever said life was fair? If these people won't acknowledge me as the original source -- the mother of all missing links to Glennocidal Instafascism -- then I'll just have to show them that not only have I been proving Glenn's extremism for a lot longer than they have, but even now I do an infinitely better, and above all, more comprehensive job.

As most experts on right wing extremism (especially libertarian fascist conservatism of the Reynolds variety) will agree, it's hardly enough merely to assert that someone is "just like" a noted fascist figure -- however true the claim may be. To really connect the dots and really prove the historical case, there can be no more substantive and meaningful methodology than a list of verifiable similarities.

Let's start with the damning and incriminating noise factor.

Above all, both Glenn Reynolds, and his mentor Benito Mussolini are known for shouting at people. Reynolds shouts so loudly that (to quote decibel expert Andrew Keen) he's "drowning out mainstream opinion" by "shouting louder and blogging more often than the rest of us."

Benito of course simply screamed at crowds from his emperor pulpit, but isn't that a distinction without a difference?

Might this just as well be Glenn Reynolds, drowning out mainstream opinion (and receiving millions of hits) while cravenly shouting us down?

The same cruel and empty slogans, the same attitude towards all who might even think of disagreeing! (Notice the intimidated wingnuts cowering in the background -- just the way Reynolds' trembling chickenhawks cower today.)

Haven't we seen it all before, and haven't I already proven it repeatedly?

And if the noise factor alone isn't enough to convince the few remaining skeptics, let's take a look at disturbingly similar content -- and (most damning of all) disturbingly similar silence.

Let's take a look -- an objective, unbiased, scientifically verifiable, reality-based look -- at some of the important issues of concern.

I could go on and on. Do I really need to? I mean, other than the slight policy difference over ice cream, their positions are nearly identical on nearly every major issue.

I think I have more than made my point. No one has done a better or more comprehensive job of proving Glenn Reynolds far right extremism than I have. These leftist Johnny-cum-latelys owe me apologies, which I'll kindly accept in the order they are received!

The problem is, I'm not the only one who's owed an apology, so I guess I'll have to stand in line . . .

UPDATE: After reading Snarky Bastard's post, I'm adding Andrew Sullivan (who also relies on Greenwald) to the list of people who have failed utterly to credit my tireless documentation.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds cannot hide the appearance of fascism!

Welcome all -- and viva Il Instapundo!

UPDATE: Link fixed above. While the first one was right, the second "missing link" went to the right wing delinking campaign against Glenn, which is worth reading. (My thoughts on that here.)

UPDATE (07/15/07): As if anyone needed further proof of his appetite for fascism, Glenn Reynolds has now made insensitive remarks about malnutrition in the United States! (The insensitivity, IMO, is heightened by the undeniable fact that the victim is a woman of color.)

UPDATE (07/15/06): For the most meticulous and thorough fisking of Glenn Greenwald's claims I've seen to date, do not miss this post by damnum absque injuria. (Via Glenn Reynolds.) At the risk of sounding down and dirty, is there such a thing as a douchefisking?

UPDATE (07/17/06): More proof of the scope and influence of Glenn Reynolds' extremism in this description of the "right-wing blogosphere":

. . . their usual relaxed and carefree attitude toward the espousal of murder, genocide, and the dismantling of the American political system in favor of an authoritarian one-party state.

UPDATE (07/18/06): Ken from it comes in pints? thinks I might be missing a distinction between Reynolds and Mussolini:

. . . so far as I know, Mussolini never put puppies in a blender or murdered a hobo.

Unless Arin.net gave me a false reading, it looks like this ISP took down a site run by a blogger called "snarkybastards.com" (70.84.99.146 -- and cached here) because Glenn Reynolds linked to him!

According to Glenn, that's what his email says:

I got this email:

This morning you linked to a post by Conor Friedersdorf defending you against Andrew Sullivan. I run the site, snarkybastards.com, and the no-talent [censored] who evidently run my server have decided that the traffic generated by your link violates my terms of service. I must therefore ask you to delink so that they will restore service long enough for me to retrieve my blog and move it elsewhere.

"No-talent [censored]" is a bit strong (it's my "censorship," not his!) but what kind of hosting service kills your site when it gets noticed? A lousy one, I guess.

Might something else be going on?

(Hope this isn't a trend . . .)

UPDATE: Problem solved. Snarky Bastard is back up, with a great post about Glenn's right wing extremism!

Yes, that was what a lead headline at Raw Story read as I went to bed last night.

But this morning, they've dropped the "Beirut burns" portion, which severs the classical allusion to Nero.

I liked last night's version better, and because I liked it so much, I fiddled around and saved a screen shot (while Beirut burned of course):

As to the connection -- the actual tie in -- between pigs and Beirut, I found myself disappointed, because the headline in the linked piece reads

Bush defuses tension at German news conference with gentle jibes

STRALSUND, Germany - With the world's most perplexing problems weighing on him, President Bush has sought comic relief in a certain pig.

But my classical appetite was whetted, so I read on in search of more details about the latest victim of Bush's genocidal wrath:

This is the wild game boar that German chef Olaf Micheel bagged for Bush and served Thursday evening at a barbecue in Trinwillershagen, a tiny town on the Baltic Sea where the boar chef also serves as second deputy mayor.

"I understand I may have the honor of slicing the pig," Bush said at a news conference earlier in the day punctuated with questions about spreading violence in the Middle East and an intensifying standoff with Iran over nuclear power.

The president's host, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, started a serious ball rolling at this news conference in the 13th century town hall on the cobblestone square of Stralsund. But Bush seemed more focused on "the feast" promised later.

"Thanks for having me," Bush told the chancellor. "I'm looking forward to that pig tonight."

If this 13th century setting and formal news conference seem an odd stage for presidential banter, the 21st century problems that Bush confronts often prompt him to attempt to defuse the tension in the room with a dose of humor.

Wurst of all, the president repeatedly and with apparent premeditation talked about the pig (a boar, no less) -- and even threatened to bring up the subject the next day!

And when an American reporter asked Bush whether he is concerned about the Israeli bombing of the Beirut airport and about Iran's failure to respond to an offer for negotiations that the U.S. and European allies have made, Bush replied with more boar jokes before delving into the substance of the questions.

"I thought you were going to ask about the pig," said the president, promising a full report from the barbecue. "I'll tell you about the pig tomorrow."

Why, in terms of monumental scale, it even approaches the evil of Condoleeza Rice's depraved shopping spree, in which she actually bought shoes while poor people in New Orleans were eaten by alligators. (In fairness to Condi, I don't know whether the shoes were made from alligators. Such a factoid, if true, might possibly mitigate the horror.)

The serious side of me might wonders what Bush was supposed to do. So I suppose I should ask some serious questions. Am I missing something here about the connection between pigs and Beirut? Is there some sort of inside joke which known only to Raw Story and its readers, or is there really a connection?

I had to know, and fortunately, this piece at Aljazeera provided a clue:

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida's leader in Iraq, has said in an audio tape put on the internet that rockets had been fired at Israel from Lebanon last month "on the instructions" of Osama bin Laden.

"The rocket firing at the ancestors of monkeys and pigs from the south of Lebanon was only the start of a blessed in-depth strike against the Zionist enemy... All that was on the instructions of the shaikh of the mujahidin, Osama bin laden, may God preserve him," said the voice attributed to al-Zarqawi.

Hmmm. . .

Maybe more context is needed. It just so happens that last month, shortly after the Bush administration killed the guy who claimed his outfit fired rockets at the pig ancestors, I was walking down the street in Chinatown. Friday being pig delivery day in Chinatown, I took this picture and posted it in honor of Zarqawi (would be pig ancestor slaughterer):

It seemed like poetic justice at the time. I know, I know, Philadelphia is not Beirut, and Zarqawi never fired rockets from here.

But Philadelphia is often described as a war zone, because a lot guns run around and shoot people all by themselves.

It might be a stretch, but if Bush ate pork in Chinatown during the gun violence epidemic, wouldn't that be Nero-like too?

Of course, as Bush crimes go, nothing could top reading to children about a goat while the Towers fell. Said Osama bin Laden:

It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American forces would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone at a time when they most needed him because he thought listening to a child discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than the planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers. This gave us three times the time needed to carry out the operations, thanks be to God.

(I'm pretty sure Bush has a dog too, and maybe some cows and chickens on his ranch, but I don't have time to explore every damning connection in a single blog post.)

The Mohammadan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

-- Will Durant, in The Story of Civilization

To say that Muslims and Hindus "disagree" on this history is to engage in understatement which would be laughable if these things weren't so serious. There are claims and counterclaims, and even allegations that the history was sanitized by Indian activists from both religions seeking to unite each other in order to better wage their fight against British imperialism. (Interestingly enough, Muslim Mughal rule in India was formally liquidated by the British.)

There's enormous animosity between Muslims and Hindus, and a lot stems from the fact that Hindus were forced to live under Sharia Law:

Aurangzeb's influence continues through the centuries, affecting not only India, but Asia, and the world. He was the first ruler to attempt to impose Sharia law on a non-Muslim country. His critics, principally Hindu, decry this as intolerance, while his mostly Muslim supporters applaud him, some calling him a Pir or Caliph. He engaged in nearly perpetual war, justifying the ensuing death and destruction on moral and religious grounds. He eventually succeeded in the imposition of Islamic Sharia in his realm, but alienated many constituencies, not only non-Muslims, but also native Shi'ites. This led to increased militancy by the Marathas, the Sikhs, and Rajputs, who along with other territories broke from the empire after his death, and to disputes among Indian Muslims. The wanton and ruthless destruction of countless Hindu temples remains a dark stain on Muslim/Hindu relations to this day. His one-pointed devotion to conquest and control based on his personal worldview has continuing resonance in our current world.

But I neglect Hezbollah, Israel, and Lebanon.

I'd say there more fronts than most of us want to imagine or admit in what I won't admit to imagining is a war.

Sometimes I feel like a nitpicking asshole.

I mean, I try to look at the big picture of things (and ask the broader questions) but every time I do that, it seems the smaller, more mundane details just creep up on me and get in my way, hit me in the face. Or even spill all over the place. They can range from the definitions of words to hotly debated pieces of history such as the Crusades, and when words can't be agreed on, when basic facts can't be agreed on, how on earth can I hope to look at the big picture, and focus on philosophical questions? In a previous essay, I conceded CAIR's point about the Crusades as something that tended make Christianity look bad. I did this not because I am out to avenge the victims of the Crusades or have any dog in that particular race, but because I wanted to look at the mechanics of the argument. Yet by conceding that, I ran afoul of the argument that the Crusades were a good thing. The merits of the Crusades were not what I wanted to debate, for that would take at least an essay-length post. And that would be superficial, as books -- many books -- have been written on the subject.

So, OK, people are sensitive about the Crusades. They think they were justified, or at least should be seen in the context of the times, and the larger Islamic threat or something.

I don't like to devote too much time to avoiding giving offense to anyone's sensitivities, but then I don't like these endless distractions either. I just wanted an example of something most people would not consider to be a stellar example of Christian conduct. So, I thought, should I have maybe used the Inquisition as an example? Would that have "worked"?

No, it would not have worked. Because last month, I was out to dinner with some friends, and when the issue of the Inquisition came up, I was immediately scolded by a friend whose father is a Jesuit scholar, and who maintains that the Inquisition was largely a "myth" made up by Protestants at war with Catholicism. That its methods were humane, that only a maximum of twenty five people were killed, etc.

Sure enough, there are plenty of web sites like this arguing that the Inquisition was a myth, and Inquisition denial seems to be a thriving cottage industry. The BBC had a special called "The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition," and of course there's the usual (disputed) Wiki entry. And the books . . .

Let me therefore stop right here and say something: this post is not about the Inquisition! I only thought I might use it in the sense of assume-for-the-sake-of-argument (wish I could just say "AFTSOA") example, but I realize that I can't. Because to do so, I'd have to devote an entire essay to the Inquisition.

Siht, (sic) what's my point here?

I'm getting buried with nits I'm complaining about not wanting to pick!

If you use something as an example in the context of larger discussion, the central argument can easily be lost if someone takes issue with the underlying merits of the example -- even if the merits of the example really belong elsewhere, in a debate about that subject.

In the post in which I "gave away" the Crusades, I also thought I could point to Aztec sacrifices and cannibalism as things we could all agreed upon as morally egregious, but I discovered that no, there isn't agreement even on that. What that means is that in order to generalize about things, or discuss the logical premises in arguments, I need to constantly endeavor to be more careful, or at least preface everything with "assume this," "assume that," or "if this is correct," and of course, "for the sake of argument." I can do it, but it seems like a lot of busywork, and sometimes I wish I could just say what the hell I think and run the risk of being "offensive."

I could, and I can. But being offensive is just not my style. If I vent and let loose with a string of ill-thought-out generalizations, profanities, and ad hominem attacks, I'd lose the whole point of what blogging means to me, which is an attempt to use logic, reason, and analysis to find out what I really think.

Venting is a bit like having a temper tantrum. It has its place (and I have done it in posts) but like any fit of temper, it's only of limited value, and it tends to be self-indulgent. If I stub my toe, or if I try to pour a cup of coffee and it dribbles all over the counter, I'll lose my temper and probably let loose with the usual profanities.

But would I write them down and sign them?

No, because such things are silly distractions, although the underlying experience might ultimately generate a blog post (or, as is happening right now, a few paragraphs in a blog post).

I might point out that finally at the tender age of 51 I discovered the precise mechanism that made my coffee pot dribble, and now that I have learned to work around it, I need no longer wail and scream about the stupid coffee pot which "always" leaves a black pool on the countertop as well as streaks along the face of the cabinet underneath.

I did this by trial and error, by filling the carafe with water and pouring it repeatedly into the sink. To my utter amazement, I discovered that whoever had engineered it had made the assumption of a zero-degree, straight, line line-of-sight pour (the way you would pour if you held the pot straight in front of you and lined up the indentation like a gun sight). The carafe, I discovered, did not dribble unless it was tilted in an off-line manner!

Obviously, this meant that the engineers who designed the thing were thinking in a linear manner. They assumed that a human arm would pour in the same straight, line-of-sight manner as would a robot arm. I'm no engineer, but I don't think they took into account the nature of the human arm, or the human wrist. Because, if you take a carafe (especially a full one) and aim its neck towards a coffee cup, unless you are "correcting" yourself your aim will be far from centered on line-of-sight. Because of the nature of my wrists, when I tilt the full carafe my natural tendency is not to tilt it in a straight line, but to tilt it to the left while pouring, so that instead of flowing in the direction it seems it should, the coffee is actually pouring towards the left. And thus the dribbling.

The solution, of course, was simple. I learned that all I have to do is correct the angle, by deliberately rotating my wrist and tilting the carafe towards the right, and thus making it line up straight. (It's counterintuitive, of course, as it doesn't "feel" right. It feels as if you're tilting the thing to the right, which you are not.)

I'm sure most housewives (and most engineers) already know this, and I'm ashamed it took me nearly a lifetime to figure it out on my own.

But it beats having a tantrum.

Not to change the subject, but while I'm nitpicking, am I crazy for wanting to know just wanting to know what precisely is the name of the city which suffered the al Qaeda attack?

Earlier this week, it was Mumbai in many of the reports.

But yesterday it was "Bombay":

BOMBAY, India - It took just minutes.

One by one along the railway line, the bombs went off, ripping apart the trains, tearing through flesh, and paralyzing what is arguably India's most vibrant city.

And today, it's still Bombay:

BOMBAY, India - The soggy, crumpled photograph shows a young man grinning at the camera.

An inconsolable Vasanti Chavan is afraid it is the last happy photograph she will ever have of her 24-year-old son, Chetan.

Q. OK, my first question isn't really about the attacks. Why do some people call the city Mumbai and some call it Bombay?

A. A good question. Bombay was the name that the imperial English bestowed on the city, a corruption of the name first given by Portuguese traders in the 16th Century.

The local state government changed the official name back to Mumbai, always the city's name in the native Marathi tongue, in 1995. News agencies seem divided over which to use.

How about the blogosphere? According to Technorati, as of right now,
Bombay at 91,669 is losing to Mumbai at 127,379.

And no. I refuse to engage in an ideological analysis to see which "side" I am supposed to "choose."

The bombing is a horrific event, and I wanted to write about it. But I feel this same creepy feeling of digust that if I say "Bombay," someone might correct me. But then, if I say "Mumbai" someone might correct me. Not that I am in any way obligated to reply. But is this a political litmus test of some sort?

Might deliberate deference to the unnecessary renaming of a city be one of those things Arnold Kling called a "trust cue"?

Which way am I supposed to tilt without spilling my mental contents all over this nice clean blog?

Sigh.

All this nit-picking makes me feel like engaging in risk taking behavior and engaging in preemptive nit-picking, by deliberately planting nits to be picked.

How could I do that?

Well, how about pointing out that the Inquisition actually came to Bombay! And on the heels of the fall of the Sultans of Gujerat:

The rule of the Sultans of Gujarat over the archipelago of Bombay came to an end with the arrival of the Portuguese. In 1508 the first Portuguese ship, captained by Francis Almeida sailed into Bombay harbour. The Portuguese were already at war all along the coast of India. In 1534, with just 21 ships, they managed to defeat the kingdom of Gujarat, and extracted, among many concessions, rights to the islands of Bombay.

India was not a priority for the Portuguese. Francis Almeida had been sent to the east to secure the spice trade for his country. The most lucrative part of this trade lay further east. Bombay and the Arabian sea was important only as a staging post to Malacca. Almeida's successor, Albuquerque, consolidated their position by taking control of Goa in 1510, Malacca in 1511 and Hormuz in 1515.

The northern parts of the Portuguese holdings in India, mainly on the coast of Gujarat, were defended out of their fort in Bassein, present day Vasai, on the mainland north of the islands, and stronghouses were built in Bandra, Mahim, and the harbour of Versova. Control over Bombay was exerted indirectly, through vazadors who rented the islands.

The vazador of Bombay was a certain Garcia da Orta. He built a manor house on the island in 1554. On his death in Goa, in 1570, the island was passed on to his sons. During this time Bombay's main trade was in coconuts and coir. The island of Salsette also exported rice.

The Portuguese encouraged intermarriage with the local population, and strongly supported the Catholic church; going to the extent of starting the Inquisition in India in the year 1560. The result was a growing mixed population which supported the Portuguese in times of strife. However, their intolerance of other religions, seen in the forcible conversion to Christianity of the local Koli population in Bombay, Mahim, Worli and Bassein, had the effect of alienating the local population.

I guess I can hope that the people who blow things up are not misinterpreting history or engaging in historical nit-picking. God forbid that I should be asked to choose between the lovable Spanish Inquisition and warm and fuzzy Sultans of Peace.

(Could irony be called a "distrust cue"?)

If my effort at satire in the earlier post seems tacky, perhaps it's getting harder and harder for me to make fun of ad hominem attacks, outbreaks of trollish agent provocateurism, and bad logic -- all while keeping a straight face. . .

But honest, folks, I'm trying to be funny! God forbid I might allow myself to have feelings of repugnance at anything another blogger said. This is all just good clean fun, right? We're all just having fun stating our opinions, because that's what the blogosphere is here for!

And if I didn't know he was a fun-loving guy, I'd almost be willing to swear that Glenn Greenwald considers his former representation of Nazi sympathizers as something to be worn as a badge of pride.

Even (gasp!) moral authority:

As is true for many lawyers who have defended First Amendment free speech rights, I have represented several groups and individuals with extremist and even despicable viewpoints (in general, and for obvious reasons, it is only groups and individuals who espouse ideas considered repugnant by the majority which have their free speech rights threatened). Included among this group were several White Supremacist groups and their leaders, including one such group -- the World Church of the Creator -- whose individual members had periodically engaged in violence against those whom they considered to be the enemy (comprised of racial and religious minorities along with the "race traitors" who were perceived to defend them).

As I've had controversial clients myself, I have no problem with any lawyer representing any client, however vigorously (within the bounds of legal ethics, of course), because I recognize the importance of the adversary system, the presumption of innocence, etc. Matthew Hale was Greenwald's most famous client, and it goes without saying that Mr. Greenwald had just as much of a duty to represent him as would any other attorney.

Still, the account of this shooting spree which was allegedly committed by Hale's followers raises questions which go beyond Mr. Greenwald's free speech formulation:

Elevating the profile of last July's racially-motivated shooting spree to still a higher level, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights has filed suit against the white supremacist group it claims is responsible for the two-state tear that left two dead and nine wounded.

In a federal lawsuit filed here Tuesday, lawyers for a Decatur pastor wounded during the spree allege World Church of the Creator leader Matthew F. Hale not only encouraged, but conspired with shooter Benjamin Nathaniel Smith to "commit wholesale acts of genocidal violence in furtherance of their self-proclaimed 'racial holy war' against any and all African-Americans, Jews, Asians and other ethnic groups."

Filed on the anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the suit seeks unspecified actual and punitive damages from Hale, Smith's estate and the World Church of the Creator for the Rev. Stephen Anderson, a pastor of Greater Faith Temple Church who suffered three gunshot wounds July 3, 1999, while standing in the driveway of his home in Decatur.

Lawyers are suing under the Illinois Hate Crimes Act and the historic Anti-Klan Act, enacted in the 1870s to financially damage white supremacist organizations engaging in acts of terror, intimidation and violence.

Hale's lawyer, New York attorney Glenn Greenwald, took a similar tact in responding to the suit. "It's all just guilt by association," said Greenwald, who isn't sure yet whether he will be representing Hale on this latest federal action.

He did, however, seem interested in taking the case on. He compared it to the first suit, which alleged Hale ordered Smith to target minorities.

"All they can say Matt Hale did is express the view that Jews and blacks are inferior, he said. "There's just no question that expressing those views is a core First Amendment activity."

Further, Greenwald said, "I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me."

Huh?

Who might they be? Reverend Stephen Anderson, who seems to have done nothing more odious or repugnant than standing in his driveway?

I realize that when Greenwald said this, he was being a lawyer, and not a big leftie blogger, but still. . .

Since when is it odious and repugnant to be standing in your driveway only to be shot by Nazi sympathizers?

There's more:

The first suit, filed in state court by Chicago attorney Michael Ian Bender on behalf of two Orthodox Jewish teens shot at in Rogers Park, is pending, though a circuit judge in Chicago threw out allegations that Smith's parents were somehow responsible for the shootings.

In addition to the Center for Constitutional Rights, Chicago's Latham & Watkins and the People's Law Office represent the Rev. Anderson.

"We signed onto this because we felt strongly about this case and this cause of action [for the Rev. Anderson] as a victim of a hate crime," said Mary Rose Alexander, the Latham & Watkins partner handling the case. "We feel justice should be served." The case is Rev. Stephen Tracy Anderson v. Matthew F. Hale, The World Church of the Creator, etc., and the Estate of Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, No. 00C2021.

Let's assume the latter firm was the odious and repugnant one. It's a left-wing activist outfit, which seems to focus on things like Guantanamo. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't like their political agenda, but is that the point now, and was it then? I mean, if they were acting as attorneys in good faith for a man who was shot for being black and standing in his driveway, how is that odious and repugnant? How was representing Orthodox Jewish teens odious and repugnant?

I don't trust Glenn Greenwald's repugnance -- then or now.

It just smells, well, funny.

(Like I said, I'm trying. . .)

UPDATE (07/16/06): More on Greenwald and his prevarications here. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

While writing about rhetorical hyperbole, I discovered that war has broken out:

MARJAYOUN, Lebanon (Reuters) - Hizbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers and killed up to seven Israelis in violence on either side of the Lebanese border on Wednesday, further inflaming Middle East tensions.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described the Hizbollah attacks as an "act of war" by Lebanon and promised a "very painful and far-reaching" response.

Two Lebanese civilians were killed and five people wounded in retaliatory Israeli air strikes after Hizbollah announced it had captured the Israelis.

Israeli ground forces crossed into Lebanon to search for the captured soldiers, Israeli Army Radio said. Hizbollah and the Lebanese authorities said there was no large-scale incursion.

Either way, I'll admit my bias.

I'm on the side of the West.

Glenn Greenwald thinks the Deb Frisch debate (discussed infra) really ought to be about Misha, for saying the following:

Five ropes, five robes, five trees.

Some assembly required.

Well, let's assume that "five robes" refers to the five justices wearing them. While Misha didn't mention anyone by name, it could certainly be surmised that he's talking about the five justices he's just criticized for (in his view) putting the country in danger. Is that an attack on an institution, or is it a personal, real threat? Regardless of interpretation or propriety, it in any way comparable to singling out a two year old child as a proper candidate for murder and sexual abuse?

As to Misha, he says it's hyperbole:

my hyperbole tends to be directed at the ones I have a beef with, rather than at their 2-year-old children

I have repeatedly declared that spammers should be crucified. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed that not only has the right wing blogosphere failed to properly condemn me, but Glenn Greenwald -- and (so far as I know) the entire left wing blogosphere -- have also remained silent. I'll echo what Glenn Greenwald calls Confederate Yankee's "most cited sermon[]" here:

one might be tempted to think that this absolute lack of condemnation was a tacit acceptance of these tactics.

Gee, I'd hate to think that my eliminationist rhetoric might be seen in context.

I'm sorry if I sound overly inflammatory, because even though I'm not known for being a self flamer, I have offered to immolate myself before -- in the interests of peace -- but no one ever took me literally.

Am I getting warm yet?

Well, it could be worse.

(I mean, it's not as if this was about Jeff Goldstein's penis.)

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds is refusing to condemn those who refuse to condemn.

(My refusal to condemn Glenn's refusal to condemn deserves the strongest possible condemnation, I'm sure.)

CORRECTION: I am sorry that I mischaracterized Frank J. by implicitly insinuating his refusal to condemn what he has in fact literally and willingly and with aforethought condemned:

Misha is a bad bad man. It is wrong to call for deaths of Supreme Court Justices. Don't tell me you were just using "hyperbole" because I don't like that word since it looks like it should be pronounced HIPE-ER-BOWL, but it's not. Killing is wrong, and, if you don't like Supreme Court Justices, you should just wait to vote them out of office the next time they hold Supreme Court Elections.

A couple of local criminals pleaded guilty to murder recently. While that's hardly earthshaking news, a disturbing detail caught my attention:

David and Carlos Carmichael are mentally retarded and illiterate despite graduating from Philadelphia high schools, their attorneys contend. Both have strong employment histories in food service.

Yet they survive, because our society has created a phony marketplace giving them an unfair advantage -- backed by government force:

Many libertarians attempt to point to the very existence of the public school system as a hindrance to quality education. But that explanation doesn't suffice. Active private markets can usually exist alongside government provision, even when the government service is free.

For example, the existence of the post office doesn't mean we are hamstrung in sending packages from place to place. If we don't like post office service, we can choose another carrier. Because there are so few restrictions, there is no shortage of companies willing to deliver packages for a fee. In the educational market, there are surprisingly few options for private, affordable, consumer-responsive educational services.

The reason is legal restriction. Thanks to federal pressure, all states presume to define what does and does not constitute a "school" and an "education." They do this through compulsory education laws, the very existence of which implies a state supervisory role as well as the use of coercion. To the extent that market-based schools step outside the approved boundaries, they set themselves up for legal entanglements and harassment.

For example, in no state in this country may a mother decide, without government permission, to set up a for-profit school in her home and have neighborhood parents pay her for educational services of their own choosing to the exclusion of other forms of schooling. Both the service provider and the willing parents would risk visits by social workers and school officials, and then, possibly, incarceration. That's true even in the freest states.

In a free market, this would be the mainstream means of purchasing educational services, especially at the elementary level. Classrooms would be small and largely neighborhood based. Fees would be low. Stay-home moms would have a great entrepreneurial opportunity to bring in some extra income. The reason such an environment does not exist is because compulsory schooling laws prevent it from developing in the first place.

What can be done to foster a market in schools? Compulsory education laws must be repealed. Only this radical step would introduce genuine market forces into the education industry. This would be a great victory for parents and children. But for the educational bureaucrat, it would be a nightmare, even if the public school system were left exactly as it is now.

Some say this would amount to government giving up its central source of privilege in the educational sector. That is precisely why it is the best and most profitable avenue for reform. In the meantime, home schooling may not be a perfect solution, but, like tax shelters, it thrives because it is able to meet a market demand by exploiting loopholes in the law.

Just as importantly, home schooling sends a message to the elites that there are some things, namely children, that are not owned or controlled by the government. Until compulsory schooling laws are completely scrapped, it will continue to be a crucial means for providing the quality education that public schools have failed to provide.

As approaches to education go, I'd say illiterates with diplomas is also pretty rad.

What is freedom of religion?

Americans often make kneejerk assumptions about these things, and simply think you have the right to believe in whatever you want, and the right to freely exercise (or not exercise) that belief.

In reply to an email I received earlier about the Saudi madrassa, I asked sarcastically whether freedom of religion would allow Aztecs to build pyramids, then drag sacrificial victims up the stairs to cut out their beating hearts.

Obviously, they'd be allowed to build the pyramids, but not even the wildest interpretation of the First Amendment would allow human sacrifice or ritual cannibalism.

Well, suppose that there was a group of "Aztec fundamentalists" who didn't actually eat people or practice human sacrifice in this country, but who were sponsored and funded by Aztec fundamentalists in another country. And suppose the foreign Aztec fundamentalists did eat people and practice human sacrifice, and believed in promoting those things here. Not only that, let's suppose that they were influential enough to bully foreign governments and private citizens into funding their promotional campaign.

I think readers will see where I'm going . . .

I just want to pose a common sense question. Are there limits? If free speech does not include the right to yell "FIRE" in a crowded place of entertainment, should the equivalent be allowed in a crowded place of worship? How about advocacy of genocide?

Does religion afford a cover which would not be available in its absence? Does it make any difference whether you chop out a beating heart because you just always wanted to, as opposed to doing so because you wanted to satisfy the religious demands of Huitzilopochtli?

One of the reasons the Aztec hypothetical is easy is because there is no such religion today. There are no organized Aztec apologists to deny that human sacrifice is part of "mainstream moderate Aztecism" or to claim that the Aztec codices have been "misinterpreted." They won't scream that "sacrifice" in its proper context actually means making real sacrifices by doing things like helping people, feeding the poor, or engaging in self improvement. There's no group to deny that they have any involvement whatsoever with practitioners of actual human sacrifice, nor will they say that the wielders of sacrificial knives have misinterpreted the true Aztec religion.

Stay with the Aztec hypothetical, and assume the existence of the religion and modern Aztec lobbyists making these arguments. Fine; let's agree, then, that the practitioners of human sacrifice and their advocates are engaged in misinterpretation.

Would it really matter whether they were "real Aztecs"? Aren't we entitled to do something about the misinterpreters -- no matter what we might call them? Or would we allow these misinterpretations to be interpreted by the people who lobby on behalf of the religion said to be misinterpreted?

OK. I do not suggest that the Aztec religion is the moral equivalent of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Shintoism. This was not meant as a moral equivalency argument, but as a hypothetical application of the First Amendment.

But let's turn to an example of modern religious interpretation. And a religion often said to be misinterpreted. Here's a spokesman for CAIR:

[Parvez Ahmed, CAIR chairman] said a minority of Muslim extremists helps perpetuate anti-Muslim sentiment in the US, but that it is wrong for Americans to rush to conclusions based on these groups that have distorted or misinterpreted Qur’anic text. He compared it to making judgments on Christians based on the Crusades.

But I have a question:

Would it be permissible to make judgments on the Crusaders themselves based on the Crusades?

OK, Christofascists, radical Christianists, simple renegades -- I don't care what you call them; can't they be condemned? Certainly, we would not take seriously any Christian activist who complained that Christians shouldn't be judged based on the Crusades, but who then turned around and supported the Crusades, would we?

And just as we wouldn't condemn all Christians because some of them burned witches at the stake, then surely we shouldn't judge or condemn all Muslims because some of them engage in the following behavioral patterns:

- executing people for not praying.

Just as I'm sorry that a few misinterpreters of Christianity might support the Crusades, I'm sorry to see that people calling themselves Muslims are doing the above things while claiming that they're justified in the name of Islam. My hope is that they are in fact misinterpreting Islam. In fact, I hope it so much I'd be glad to hear it.

If the CAIR lobbyists don't want me to judge Islam by the actions of the religious renegades in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Somalia, can't they at least state plainly that the above conduct is practiced only by renegades?

Unless religious renegades can be renegades and still be considered members of the religion they're renegades against, I just don't get it.

I hate to think that misinterpreters might be in charge of misinterpretation.

Who gets to interpret these things anyway?

Beats me.

However, it may be that I got a little carried away with the Aztec example. Not because I might have been seen as engaging in a moral equivalency argument, but because I was engaged in ethnocentrism. I had no right to judge the Aztecs at all.

That's because, according to Jack D. Forbes, Professor of Native American Studies at UC Davis (and Guggenheim Fellow), the Aztecs were no different from the Christians. Or the Muslims. Or anyone else.

From 1493 onward the Spaniards were guilty of the sacrifice (for their own Roman Catholic religion and for secular wealth and power) of the lives of many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Native Americans. And yet the historians and anthropologists speak only of Aztec and Maya human sacrifice, exempting the Spaniards because of their white race and Catholic religion, it would seem.

The failure to talk about human sacrifice today may be, in part, due to the fact that many of our modern practices of human sacrifice are "secular" rather than "religious." But much of modern sacrifice involves the use of elaborate patriotic rituals, lots of military ceremony, and an overriding ideology (such as anti-communism, extreme nationalism or ethnic racism). Very often also the sacrifice is proclaimed as part of a holy war or a sacred cause and various Christian, Jewish, Muslim and now Hindu religious functionaries bless the troops or the killers and ask the Supreme Being to smite the terrible enemy, even if they are women or children.

It is just plain European ethnocentrism to avoid applying the concept of human sacrifice to the Spaniards and to our modern world. The same thing is true of "cannibalism," used to undermine the credibility of Native cultures in the Caribbean, South America and in the Iroquois regions of Ontario and New York. Anthropologists have failed, for example, to see the consuming of the lives of slaves and exploited workers by Europeans as a form of "eating." In the case of infanticide, we have many examples of that today in the inner cities of the United States where poor babies are dying at Third World rates. Similarly, the killing of parents (matricide and patricide) is being practiced on a large scale in the U.S. through the denial of health care and adequate diets to old people. It is wrong to accuse Native people of the north of leaving old ones to die when neglect of elders is an intrinsic part of classic capitalism.

Gee. And all this time I thought the Aztecs were bad! (And so did Justin!)
But this guy's a professor, right? Of Native American Studies, which means he has more right to interpret than I do.

So, according the rules of interpretation, I guess I stand corrected.

(I'll just remain cowering at the bottom of the pyramid. . .)

I MULTICULTURALISM.

(I must always try to put a little heart into everything I write.)

A short article in today's Inquirer reminded me that the problem of mentally ill criminals is not limited to the New York subway system. Notwithstanding all their protection and security measures, even the courts aren't safe:

YORK, Pa. - The county sheriff has apologized for what he called an "embarrassing and egregious" security breakdown after court security workers missed a knife later thrown at a judge in a courtroom.

Terry Lee Rehm, 58, was arrested Thursday after authorities said he threw a 13-inch butcher knife at Judge Michael J. Brillhart, who was seated on the bench. The knife went over the heads of several county employees and a defendant and sank into a wall to the judge's left, authorities said. No one was injured.

The man charged with hurling a butcher knife at a county judge Thursday was also arrested 2½ years ago, accused of threatening to blow up the courthouse and demanding to talk to Satan.

On Feb. 24, 2004, Rehm walked into the office of Karla Forbes, a court reporter, and told her he was the author of "The Invisible Line," according to the arrest affidavit from the incident.

He told Forbes and Beth Ness, another court reporter, that he wanted to talk to Satan, Jesus Christ and Mr. York County, the document states, and that he wanted justice. It also states Rehm told the women he was a terrorist and wanted to blow up the courthouse.

When the women asked him to leave, he refused. When sheriff's deputies intervened, Rehm sat down on courthouse steps and repeated that he was terrorist and that they would have to carry him out.

When deputies picked him up, he started screaming, according to the document.

Rehm was handcuffed and taken to York Hospital.

Rehm was charged with disorderly conduct and making terroristic threats. In a request to determine Rehm's competency to stand trial, his attorney, T. Korey Leslie, wrote that the man "appears to suffer from a mental disorder and has at least one known prior commitment to a mental hospital."

Rehm also "demonstrated bizarre and inappropriate behavior in the presence of counsel," Leslie wrote, and he was unable to "communicate with counsel coherently or logically."

Following a psychological examination to determine whether he was fit to stand trial, the misdemeanor charges were dropped in October 2004, court records show. However, court records available do not indicate why the charges were dropped. The prosecutor and defense lawyer in the case couldn't be reached for comment.

In last week's incident, detectives said, Rehm smuggled the knife and a number of other potential weapons past courthouse security: bullets, a wrench, two screwdrivers, two knives and a hammer.

I'm wondering about the cracks. Is there a pattern in which an accused suspect's mental illness, while not being a defense to a crime (it isn't), becomes a de facto opportunity for buck passing by everyone concerned?

As a practical matter, incarcerating the mentally ill poses problems -- one being that there is no way to force criminals into treatment:

"It's kind of like a revolving door," Mr. McHugh said. "When they need room at the forensic hospital, the inmates come back, and they may take their medication or they may not. Our department does not have the legal authority to medicate someone against their will."

Mr. McHugh acknowledged that in the prisons, opportunities to consult a psychiatrist are "relatively limited," an impression confirmed by a former inmate, George Jones, who was held in administrative segregation in Rahway from 1992 until his release in 1995.

Mr. Jones, who has a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and antisocial tendencies but is not one of the five plaintiffs in the suit, said that the only way to get an appointment with a psychiatrist at Rahway was to do something wrong.

"If I wanted to see a psychiatrist, I flooded my cell," he said. "On the bottom tier, somebody was always either burning themselves up or burning their cells or eating feces or trying to kill themselves to get medical attention."

When an inmate did see a therapist, Mr. Jones said, the average session lasted two or three minutes. "Basically," he said, "it was just: 'Are you taking your medication? Are you sleeping O.K.? Would you like to increase your medication?' That and 'Do you feel like hurting yourself today?' "

Dr. Grassian, citing court decisions in New York, California and Texas limiting or blocking the solitary confinement of mentally ill prisoners, said policy makers were gradually being forced to recognize that subjecting the mentally ill to harsh punishment rather than therapy exacted a high price, both in prison and out in society.

"It's like beating a dog and leaving it in a cage and making it as violent as you can, and then taking it to the middle of Manhattan," Dr. Grassian said. "What do you think is going to happen when you open the cage?"

When I served as a Berkeley Police Review Commissioner, I used to hear laments from officers who just didn't know what to do with crazy people when they were the subjects of complaints. Some -- not all -- were called "homeless," and this was reflected on police cititions with the word "NOMAD" appearing as the "address." The cops knew they'd never show up for court, and they didn't want them to. They didn't want crazy filthy homeless people urinating in their nice clean police cars either.

Do I blame them? Hardly.

One time, a homeless man broke into my car, tore open a bag of dog food I'd left inside, ate some dog food, washed it down with engine coolant I had in the back seat, then passed out. I know this because the next morning when I saw a man sitting in my car and angrily told him to get out, he promptly puked all over himself and the front seat -- and after he staggered away I saw the open coolant container and dog food bag along with the mess he'd made. I say this not to engage in mindless homeless-bashing, but to illustrate a simple fact of life: no one wants to deal with mentally ill, dysfunctional people. I'm not sure the problem is that they slip through the cracks so much as it is society's game to ignore them in the hope they'll just go away. Only when they finally do something really serious do they get attention. Until then, there really is no system.

From Congressional Quarterly, 2002:

Beginning in the 1960s, deinstitutionalization, a policy of hospital closures, developed in response to advocates who argued that Americans were being warehoused in state mental institutions and would receive better care in their communities. Furthermore, the development of more effective psychotropic medications promised better symptom control, and a greater chance that some patients could eventually care for themselves. In response, state governments dramatically accelerated the release of patients and the downsizing of state mental hospitals. In 1955, state mental hospital populations peaked at 559,000 persons. Today, 70,000 individuals with severe mental illnesses are housed in public psychiatric hospitals. In the past decade, 40 state mental hospitals have closed, while more than 400 new prisons have opened. "I'm very suspect of deinstitutionalization," Dion says. "It just cost-defected from the state mental hospitals to the jails. Now the state can say they have a more caring, loving system in their hospitals."

Many promises underlying the closures have not been kept. Community-based programs haven't taken care of the released hospital populations. "Deinstitutionalization happened pretty quickly, and the government has become pretty hesitant to provide funding for the services," Mauer says. "The community programs just fell through the cracks, so the criminal justice system became the default."

It is also not enough to expect the state to shoulder the entire burden, says Lynn Duby, commissioner for the Maine Department of Behavioral and Developmental Services. "Medicaid cannot be the main funder. When you have to fund something 100 percent through state funds, of course it's not enough."

State governments have traditionally been the major source of money for public mental health services, and remain so today. But according to the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, total state spending for treatment of the seriously mentally ill is one-third less now than in the 1950s. According to a 1998 study by the Center for Mental Health Services of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the growth of spending for the treatment of mental illness and substance abuse nationwide has been lower than for health care generally. It is clear that the costs for caring for the mentally ill have shifted from the health care system to jails and prisons.

Legal advocacy groups, of course, make lots of trouble for the police and prison system, as mentally ill criminals are in a never-never land (as well as a special category against which discrimination is forbidden). It is considered unfair that they be treated like prisoners, but of course in many cases there are no viable treatment options (closed state hospitals, no compulsory treatment, no halfway houses, no money, etc.)

Ignoring a problem in the hope that it will go away has a poor track record.

It's not a crack that mentally ill criminals are falling through. It's a huge, de facto gap.

When I started writing this post, I had intended it as a lead-in to this week's RINO Sightings Carnival, which is hosted by BloodSpite at Technography.

It's a great carnival, artistically and poetically presented, and I highly recommend it.

Lots of good rhino pictures, too, and the pictures served as a poignant reminder that the critter we like to emulate is in serious, serious trouble. I say that not as an environmentalist, because I'm not an environmentalist.

However, I am someone who admires these grand animals and hates stupidity and ignorance. And I am very sorry to read that the West African black rhino has apparently become extinct, as a result of poaching:

One of four sub-species of African black rhinoceros has been declared extinct after researchers failed to find the animal in its last known habitat.

The West African black rhino (Diceros bicornis longipes) had fallen from a population of around 3,000 to just 10 in recent years but today specialists from the World Conservation Union (IUCN) said no traces of the creature had been found during a recent survey in northern Cameroon.

"As a result this subspecies has been tentatively declared as extinct," said Dr Martin Brooks, the chairman of the African Rhino Specialist Group at the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission.

The sub-species, one of six types of rhino found in Africa, had been decimated by poaching for its horn, which is used as an aphrodisiac in Yemen and China. The long porous border between Chad and Cameroon, where the rhino enjoyed West Africa's savannah, prevented easy protection.

In 2000, Dr Brooks estimated that just ten of the rhinos were still alive and could have drifted too far apart from each other to breed.

A shame, but what is not entirely clear from the article is whether the primary culprit is the use of the horn as an aphrodisiac. It appears not, as the primary uses are as Yemeni daggers and in Chinese medicine:

Africa's "black" and "white" rhinoceros total about 3,600 and 11,100 individuals, respectively. The Indian rhino numbers about 2,400. The Javanese and Sumatran rhinos are in truly dire condition. About 300 Sumatran rhinos survive in peninsular Malaysia, Sabah, and Indonesia (and perhaps a few in Thailand and Burma); only about 60 Javanese rhinos remain in the wild, including one group of 50 in Java and a second population of around 10 in Vietnam.

Why the decline? Asian rhinos probably suffer most from loss of habitat. In Africa, horn trade may be the most dangerous factor. Wildlife biologists believe horn poaching for two big export markets cut black rhino populations from about 70,000 to 2,550 between 1970 and the mid-1990s. The first market (in China, Korea, and Taiwan) is traditional Asian medicine, where rhino horn is ground to a powder used to treat headaches and fevers. Across the Red Sea, meanwhile, horn is used for the ornamental hilts of traditional Yemeni daggers known as jambiyya. (These are curved knives about a foot long, reported by the Yemen Times to cost $800-$5,000 apiece. Per capita income in Yemen is about $450.) A 1997 staff report from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species estimated that 67 tons of rhino horn had been shipped from Africa to Yemen in the 1980s and early 1990s. With a typical horn weighing three kilos, jambiyya-making may account for the loss of 22,000 rhinos over these years.

As to the rhino horn's use in Chinese medicine, it's grounded in rank superstition. The horns have been studied scientifically, and found to have no medicinal properties, and no aphrodisiac effects.

Furthermore, the only places where the rhino horn has ever been used as an aphrodisiac were said to be in certain parts of India, and even that has died out. Thus, the report that it's "used as an aphrodisiac in Yemen and China" would seem to be incorrect.

Medicine, yes. Dagger handle, yes. Aren't these ignorant customs superstitious and idiotic enough without having to blame sex too?

I'm sorry that it's too late to save the West African Black Rhino, and that there isn't a damned thing I can do about it.

The whole thing is a crying shame.

Sigh.

While it won't save the real rhinos, as a means of combatting ignorance I don't see how reading this week's RINO Sightings Carnival can do any harm.

American RINOs are a relatively new breed, and fortunately, they're far from extinct.

The Saudi madrassa I've written about in a number of posts seems to be receiving national attention. The following comes from an email I just received, from which I've removed the headers:

For Immediate Release Residents Protest Expansion Of Islamic Center in PA “ Venue For Young Muslim "Jihad Camps" July 10, 2006 Philadelphia, PA Militant Islam Monitor - Residents of Lower Merion County protesting the expansion of the Foundation for Islamic Education because of zoning violations, recently became aware that the center is planning to hold a Muslim Youth camp with many of the controversial speakers who appeared at a self-described "Jihad Camp" in 2001. The FIE is funded and owned by the ex Saudi Minister of Energy and Electricity -Mahmoud Abdullah Taiba, and is a satellite campus of the American Open University the American division of al-Azhar University in Cairo, a hotbed of Muslim Brotherhood activity.- LINK HERE

A hearing on the expansion permit was scheduled to take place on July 13th. Even prior to the news about the camp, Lower Merion councilman Philip Rosenzweig conceded that "it would take time for the FIE to reestablish trust with the neighbors," according to a July 5th article Philadelphia Inquirer. When the Foundation for Islamic Education took over the 23-acre college campus in Villanova in 1994, Muslim leaders overcame neighborhood opposition by agreeing to a host of restrictions which included limits on traffic, number of permanent residents to be housed there, the frequency and scope of religious retreats and limitations on noise. As the Foundation seeks zoning permission to expand operations it has had to admit it violated not only the covenants, but also the original 1994 zoning order as well. Foundation leaders are pledging to be "better neighbors" from now on, but it is proving to be a tougher sell this time. The Lower Merion Zoning Hearing Board took up the expansion proposal in November. After a second hearing in May, James Greenfield – representing 26 neighborhood families - asked the board to reject the zoning application, saying "The Foundation will not police itself and has no qualms about expanding its use without regard for the governmental regulations. The board must therefore regard this institution as a threat to the community." The Foundation is headed by Mustafa Ahmed and represented by attorney Fred Fromhold who – according to news reports - declined last week to comment on the neighbor's complaints.LINK HERE

Among the complaints are that the school foundation began an elementary school in 1999 and was the site of a summer camp in 2004, neither of which are permitted under the zoning order. Neighbors