The Nobel Prize Curse

The Nobel prizes, named for the inventor of a more effective explosive for war, Alfred Nobel, has become devalued in the last few decades.

Al Gore's Nobel may very well turn out to be the beginning of the end for global warming.


How's that, you say? Surely Al and the International Panel on Climate Control, armed as they now are with the great cachet of the Nobel, will sweep away all oil-company-inspired opposition and bring the Green revolution to completion. We'll all be riding unicycles to work and recycling our nail clippings come next Tuesday, and be happy doing it, lest Al, watching from the big house in Nashville, be made unhappy and give orders to have us sent to Prudhoe Bay to feed moss to the caribou.


Isn't that how the Nobel's supposed to work? But in fact does it? A glance at how the causes of some recent prizewinners have fared may prove enlightening.


* In 2005, the prize went to Mohamed elBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for his efforts in discouraging nuclear proliferation. Evidently, the word hasn't reached Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Pakistan yet.


* In 2004, the winner was Wangari Maathai, for her efforts on behalf of "sustainable development, democracy, and peace", which appears to amount to planting trees in Kenya. Last year Prof. Maathai began a campaign against the menace of plastic bags. Good for her, I say.


* The 2003 winner was Shirin Ebadi, "for her efforts for democracy and human rights". Everywhere but her home country of Iran. She'll get around to it eventually, though.


* For 2002, it was our own Jimmy Carter, for peace, democracy, human rights, and I don't know what all. Two weeks ago, Jimmy was given the bum's rush by a pack of Sudanese security thugs. I guess they hadn't heard about his Nobel.


* The 2001 prize went to Kofi Annan. Kofi has more or less dropped out of sight after leaving the UN. I wonder why?


* In 1997, it was Jody Williams of the International Campaign to ban Landmines. Haven't heard of them recently either. Did they dig ‘em all up?


* And in 1988, the nod went to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces. You didn't know there was a Nobel for well-run whorehouses, did you?


But enough. It's clear from this list that not a single cause -- from nonproliferation to land mine clearance -- has prospered recently since the major figure involved won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Hillary Defends Possible Straw Donor Cash With Disingenuous Straw Man Argument

If your ethics are out to lunch, and if you are sufficiently brazen, and if the media is in the tank for you, you can do what Hillary is doing.

Judging by Hillary's refusal to return the hundreds of thousands in Hsu-tainted funds that she raked in through her Senate campaign and HillPAC, and now her insistence that she'll keep (and keep on keeping) the questionably princely sums that are pouring out of low income, possibly non-existent Chinatown residents, one has to presume that she's decided the scandal has finally hit that magical Clintonian critical complexity, beyond which neither the public's attention span nor the media's already mild appetite for Democrat-damaging stories will hold her to any kind of reasonable standard of conduct.

She took advantage of the controversy's complexity this weekend in a defiant speech that addressed not the impropriety of keeping questionable funds, without so much of a second look even after serious questions were raised about the legality of those contributions, but the non-issue of the propriety of accepting donations from first-generation Americans.

Who Will Stand Up For Campus Free Speech?

Not Liberals;

Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo "mental health evaluation" before being allowed to return to school.

Punishment for expressing an opinion is not unusual on the modern campus. Neither is the lack of protest among faculty and students for the kind of treatment Scheffler got. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is defending the student, reports that it has failed to find a single Hamline student or faculty member who has spoken out in favor of Scheffler's right to free speech. So far, no protest from has been reported in the student newspaper or in outside internet outlets such as Myspace.

Scheffler, it should be said, is something of a campus gadfly, with disdain for campus diversity programs and other policies. The university said Scheffler's e-mails were threatening, but those messages, available on the FIRE web site, contain no semblance of a threat. Free speech was the core issue and still is.

Free speech has a very small constituency on the modern campus, particularly if the speaker under attack is conservative. Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, is certainly no conservative, but he had run afoul of the campus left on many issues, not just the heavily publicized one of women in science (suggesting more campus respect for patriotism and the return of ROTC to Harvard, warning the "coastal elites" that they have drifted too far from the American mainstream). So when feminists managed to cancel Summers as a speaker before the University of California board of regents, there was scarcely a peep of protest. The American Association of University Professors spoke out, and so did the Harvard Crimson. But in a couple of hours of searching the internet, I found only one professor nationally who complained about the treatment of Summers.

A similar silence greeted the cancellation of a speech by Minuteman leader Jim Gilchrist at Columbia University. Gilchrist and a colleague were driven off the stage at Columbia last year by angry radicals. Gilchrist was reinvited a month ago, but when the speech was announced, campus Hispanics, who consider him racist for opposing the flood of illegals into the country, pressured the relevant student authorities to ban him. The campus chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union thought about protesting but decided not to. Again, I was able to find only one professor willing to say that silencing Gilchrist was a bad idea. I asked Gilchrist if there were more. He said he knows of no other instructor who spoke out. The campus joke is that Gilchrist should have come out in favor killing gays and nuking Israel. Then he would have been as welcome as Mahoud Amadinejad.

The campus rule of thumb is that if someone on the liberal side is disinvited or punished for speech, the left will howl - and the right will usually howl too. This is what happened when the University of St. Thomas disinvited Archbishop Desmond Tutu for making remarks critical of Israel. After protests from across the political spectrum, he was reinvited. A better example is the hiring and almost immediate firing of liberal Duke law professor Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of a new law school at the University of California, Irvine. A huge number of conservatives protested, including professors and virtually the whole first string of nationally known conservative and libertarian bloggers. Chemerinsky was rehired.

The process doesn't work in reverse - with liberals protesting the silencing of a conservative. It's one of the most obvious flaws of the modern PC university.

A Medal of Honor

From the Wall Street Journal

Yesterday President Bush presented the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military honor for valor in combat, to the family of Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy, a Navy SEAL who was killed in Afghanistan in 2005. It is the third Medal of Honor bestowed in the war on terror, and all have been awarded posthumously.


Lt. Murphy, of Patchogue on Long Island in New York, was the 29-year-old officer-in-charge of a four-man SEAL reconnaissance team tasked with capturing or killing a high-ranking Taliban leader in the Hindu Kush mountains, east of Asadabad behind enemy lines. A group of goat herders betrayed their position to the Taliban, and the team came under a heavy coordinated assault by dozens of insurgents, perhaps as many as 100.

The SEALs were at a tactical disadvantage and became pinned down in a ravine. Lt. Murphy, already wounded, moved out from behind cover, seeking open air for a radio signal to place a rescue call. He was shot several more times in the back. He dropped the transmitter, picked it back up and completed the call, and then rejoined the fight.

The battle, the last stage of Operation Redwing, was the worst single day of casualties for Naval Special Warfare since World War II. Only one man from the SEAL team would survive. A Chinook helicopter, carrying 16 soldiers for the rescue mission, was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is almost spoiled for choice when it comes to such instances of heroism and sacrifice. It is regrettable that these volunteers are too often rewarded with indifference by the U.S. political culture, where "supporting the troops" becomes nothing more than a slogan when there is a score to settle. The representative men in this war are soldiers like Lt. Murphy.

It is hard to overstate how pro-American the people of Kurdistan are

From the WSJ:

Michael J. Totten writing in the magazine Azure:

It is hard to overstate how pro-American the people of Kurdistan are. They are possibly more pro-American than Americans themselves. If Bill Clinton was America's first "black" president, people in at least one part of the world say Bush is the first "Muslim" one: He is sometimes referred to in Kurdistan as "Hajji Bush" (meaning that he made the Muslim pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca), an undeniably high honor for a Republican Christian from Texas. No, Kurdistan is not a "red state," and Kurds are not Republicans. Nor does it occur to most of them to prefer America's conservatives over its liberals. Rather, their warm feelings of gratitude and friendship extend to all Americans and both political parties for having liberated them from the totalitarian dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

If you ask them, it was a real liberation -- but one need not ask. Any reference to the Iraq war as an invasion will be quickly corrected.

Fred Thompson and the value of 'easy does it'

Is Fred Thompson too lazy to be president? Many in the press seem to think so.

Pundits and Democrats are making the same mistake with Fred Thompson that they did with Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower: underestimating him because he's not a workaholic. Mr. Reagan liked to joke that "They say hard work never killed anyone, but I figure, why take the chance?" Reagan also once observed of himself, "I've really been burning the midday oil." The same could be said of Mr. Thompson. To detractors, this is clear evidence of his limitations. It isn't.
...
Democrats routinely confuse hyperactivity with achievement. This began when John Kennedy made such a fetish of contrasting his "vigor" with Ike's apparent indolence.

Since then, so many Democrats have tried to model themselves on JFK that perpetual motion has become a party trait. Bill Clinton – who hero-worshiped JFK – was an effective president in many ways, but would have been more effective if he'd learned some fundamentals of time management: don't procrastinate, stay up late obsessing, or worry problems to death with endless discussion. The latter more than anything is what scuttled the health plan he and Hillary noodled to oblivion.

Perhaps because so many of them come from the ranks of management, more Republican politicians seem to have learned that the essence of leadership involves delegation of authority, a schedule that isn't jampacked, and one that includes regular time off. Does Thompson take breaks and knock off at 5 p.m.? If so, he's got plenty of company among the electorate.

Amid the spate of bad reviews for Thompson's laid-back campaign performance, a few reporters have noticed how much more his laconic manner appeals to heartland voters than it does to coastal reporters. According to Michael Scherer of Salon.com, Thompson's obvious appeal to Iowans confuses members of the national press, "an ambitious crowd that distrusts those who brag of meandering through life."

Dennis Ross and the Middle East

Dennis Ross has been an American diplomat in the Middle East. His efforts have not been fruitful .. for the United States, although they were very successful for Arafat when that murderous pederast was alive.

Whenever I see Ross on TV I get a mental image of a blob of pudding. Something soft and squishy. I don't know why; it may be his features, his voice, his ideas.

Put now Powerline's Paul Mirengoff has taken out after Ross and the results are not pretty.

Dennis Ross is perhaps the least successful diplomat in American history. And his lack of success isn't down to bad luck. Ross concluded that Yasser Arafat was a legitimate peace partner for Israel, and embarked on the fool's errand of trying to bring about peace between Israelis and Palestinians on that basis. Has any American diplomat ever misjudged an important matter so thoroughly?

Ross now brings his analytical powers and judgment to bear on Iraq. He accuses President Bush, who has brought about both regime change and the rise of a constitutional government that's just about holding together, of engaging in "stagecraft" to the exclusion of "statecraft." In the process, Ross has produced a column in which almost everything he says makes no sense.

For now, I'll skip over the attack on Bush and begin with his Ross's shockingly silly key recommendation. Ross proposes that the U.S. announce that we will withdraw from Iraq, and that we then start a bidding war among various Iraqi factions over the terms of our defeat. The side that presents itself as the most cooperative will be rewarded by dictating when and how we withdraw. And we'll punish any side that comes across as insufficiently cooperative by doing the opposite of what they want. Sort of like one might do with one's kids, I guess.

Read the entire Powerline article and Ross' article in the New Republic. With Ross in charge, it's a wonder that more people didn't get killed in the Middle East and that Israel survived his diplomacy.

The Cold Civil War in the US

A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can't thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he's playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he's playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.

Single Payer Health Care Systems; anAmerican Experiment

The States, it is often said, are the laboratories in which we can try sociological experiments. That way we don't subject the entire country to a policy disaster.

Well, some States have tried "single payer ssystems" and Megan McArdle writes:

Why can't states run single payer systems?

Ezra's speech on state health care programs comes out against them, but neatly avoids the obvious: the reason that they all failed was that they were incredibly expensive. Moreover, they were vastly more expensive than the planners had anticipated, which knocked budgets out of whack. This in spite of the fact that the programs were very well positioned to take advantage of all of the collective bargaining, administrative, and preventative medicine efficiencies that advocates of national health care keep promising us will shave the cost of such a system.

Whatever those savings are, the evidence seems to be that they are outweighed by the fact that if you make health care free, and don't ration it, people use a whole lot more than you were expecting them to. Your costs, accordingly, shoot through the roof.

TennCare didn't get into trouble because there was a recession; it got into trouble because it was godawful expensive and getting more so by the minute. Costs were projected to rise by about 75% over the next five years, and even though the federal government would have picked up almost half the tab, Tennessee couldn't afford to pay it. The failure of the various state initiatives is an instructive look at our future.

Media Ideology: I Hate Conservatives

POST AT A JOURNALISM FORUM: "I hate conservatives."

Click on the link and see for yourself.

FYI, I checked a few of the other forums. This is a Journalism Forum of the Maynard Institute. Here's how it describes itself.

The Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education:
Leading the News Industry Toward Better Journalism Since 1977

For nearly 30 years, the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education (MIJE) has helped the nation's news media reflect America's diversity [read Black] in staffing, content and business operations. Through its professional development programs, the Institute prepares managers for careers in both business- and news-sides of the journalism industry.

A Rich History of Training

The Institute has a history of training and placing more nonwhite [read Black]journalists than any other single institution in the country.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, more than 200 were trained and placed through the Institute's flagship, Summer Program for Minority [read Black] Journalists (SPMJ), held at the University of California, Berkeley.


Since 1980, almost 200 journalists of color trained for advancement to editing desks at the six-week Editing Program, which was relocated in 2000 to the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, from its original home at the University of Arizona Journalism Department.

Moslems Riot in Amsterdam

Unrest in the Moroccan neighborhoods of Amsterdam have many fearing that the chronic violence that rocked the Paris suburbs will spread to the Netherlands. If the Dutch police don’t get much tougher much faster, warns Michael Van Der Galien, that is exactly what is going to happen.

Click on the link for the full story.

“Sex on a Saturday Night” At Princeton

From NR online:

Christian Sahner, a 2007 graduate of Princeton University, recently took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to criticize his university’s handling of sex. The university administration, he pointed out, sponsors lectures with titles like “The Religious Right’s Obsession with Gay Sex” and has residential advising sessions of “Sex Jeopardy.” But what he found most appalling was “Sex on a Saturday Night,” a mandatory event for freshmen in their first week on campus.
...
While I’d like to believe that there really isn’t any open hostility towards social or moral conservatives, the facts point in a different direction. When I was a student at Princeton, the university hosted the anti-Catholic art exhibit, “Shackles of the AIDS Virus.” Sponsored by and housed in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, this was a shockingly offensive attack on Catholicism for its teachings on sexual morality — one that the University would never accept if targeted at, say, Islam. Administrators claimed not to have realized the anti-Catholic nature of the exhibit, but even after it was pointed out to them, they refused to do anything about the exhibit, citing its “educational value.”
...
These recent articles and the resulting public reaction serve as prime examples of how college campuses send signals — signals about what are acceptable social views, and what are not; signals about which people can legitimately be mocked, and which cannot.

But there is still a market for mocking the Left. The radio talkers on the Right, for example, are cleaning up with the American public validating their beliefs.

Three cheers for freedom.

Bobby Who? National Media Skips La. Governor Campaign -- Again

From Newsbusters:

The national media completely obsessed over Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, conducting an amazing propaganda campaign which suggested a la Kanye West that George Bush hated black people, demonstrated it by the government's "neglect." They paid little attention to the incompetence of state and local officials, like Gov. Kathleen Blanco. She was so tarred by her response that she didn't even run for re-election.

Yesterday, Republican Congressman Bobby Jindal, who lost to Blanco by four points in 2003, easily won the governor's race. Bobby who? That's right, the national media that obsessed over this area (and we mean you, Brian Williams, and you, Anderson Cooper) hasn't exactly been all over this post-Katrina story. Don't believe it's the victory margin. Dare we suggest that Jindal's status as an Indian-American person "of color" is an inconvenient topic for the liberal media?
...
The most amazing part of the Jindal story is watching how liberal-media types twisted themselves into pretzels in case Jindal actually had won. In the New York Times a few weeks ago, editorialist Adam Cohen claimed that since African-American candidates have done miserably statewide, "If Mr. Jindal wins, it may mean not that race no longer matters in Louisiana, but simply that……Asian-Americans now fall on the white side of the racial divide." [Amazing. Voting for the Indian-American puts you on "the white side." Republicans, by default, are the party of "the white side."]

The REAL racists - both white and black - are now fully committed to the Liberal end of the ideological spectrum. I'm very glad Al Sharpton is not in MY party.

And, Hillary, Bobby never ran a gas station in St. Louis.

US To Pull Kosovo Troops Unless NATO Steps Up Aid in Afghanistan

The US Military is said to be "stretched." Well, we can find the troops if we don't have to support our deadbeat "allies."

Via Reuters (H/T Free Republic):

KIEV (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates will consider shifting U.S. troops from Kosovo to Afghanistan next year if NATO allies do not fulfill their commitments, U.S. government officials said.

Gates, in Ukraine on Sunday to ask eastern European countries for help in the war, had first considered laying the threat before NATO defense ministers this week at a meeting in the Netherlands, senior U.S. officials said.

But upon the advice of senior military officers, the Pentagon chief has extended the U.S. commitment to Kosovo to summer 2008. If NATO allies have not sent more troops, trainers and equipment to Afghanistan by then, Washington will consider pulling its 1,600 troops out of NATO's Kosovo force KFOR.

"The secretary had wrestled with the idea of moving our forces in Kosovo to Afghanistan but decided late this week to extend our KFOR presence until next summer," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.

"But beyond that is very much up in the air. The secretary is disappointed in NATO's inability to live up to its commitments and if that doesn't change before then, he's prepared to go to the secretary of state and to the president to discuss yanking our troops out of Kosovo," Morrell said.

Excellent idea!

Were they not supposed to be out by Christmas .... 1999?

A quagmire!

Yugoslavia never attacked us!

Blackwater Event Staged for Virginian Pilot

According to the Virginian Pilot’s Bill Sizemore, 50 people gathered at Blackwater’s headquarters and defaced some signs and trespassed on private property. For the benefit of the Virginian Pilot.



Why do we know that this was theater done for the benefit of the Virginian Pilot? It really doesn’t take much detective work.

Moyock, North Carolina is a small town and Blackwater USA is located at 250 Puddin Ridge Road, off Route 168, well off the main road through town. You can Google the map.

The Virginian Pilot would not send a reporter and cameraman out to stake out such an unlikely location, hoping for something to happen. But there they were; with the names and home towns of the participants. With Chris Curry’s camera at the ready; and a predetermined story to tell.

The demonstrators appeared to be having a good time. It was a pretty fall day in Tidewater. Earnest men and women in protester uniform with the classic 60s beards, long hair and ponytailed look. Many wearing glasses. Their eyes are not as good as they were 20 years ago. Carrying signs demanding that we “Start seeing Iraqi Children.” Another demands we “Ask Blackwater about thier [sic] 15-Billion narco terror contract.”
And Bill Sizemore and Chris Curry were there to bring us the excitement

Planning to create a media event in your backyard? Here are the themes that the Pilot will cover: Blackwater, sea turtles, Blackwater, “undocumented immigrants,” Blackwater.

Washington Post's Neely Tucker Takes Sides

Neely Tucker writes about the $4.2 million Rush Limbaugh raised for charity by auctioning off a letter sent by Harry Reid and 40 other Democrats to Clear Channel Communications CEO Mark Mays. Letters sent to the chairman of a media firm whose life is controlled by an agency of the Federal Government by powerful members of that government is a serious issue and should be addressed in a serious way.

But the Drive By Media - in the person of Neely Tucker - treats this as if it were a spat among politicians.

At the root of the controversy is Rush Limbaugh's use of two words: "phony soldiers." The Left saw this as a "gotcha" moment and rushed to the microphones to announce that Rush had impugned all soldiers who disagreed about the war in Iraq. Rush claims, with plenty of evidence to back him up (you can read the transcript of the program yourself) that he was referring to such Leftist heroes as Jesse Macbeth whose stories about committing atrocities in Iraq has been shown to be totally false. Quite a few others have come forward, only to have their lies revealed.

But for Neely Tucker, the controversy does not exist. He has made up his mind and she knows that Media Matters and Harry Reid knew what Limbaugh had on his mind when he uttered those words.

Here's his take: Rush referred to any soldier who opposes the Iraq war as a "phony soldier." How else do you interpret this?

The letter in question is an Oct. 2 two-pager from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to Clear Channel Communications CEO Mark Mays lambasting the syndicate's Rush Limbaugh, who had recently criticized U.S. troops who were against the war in Iraq.

"Phony soldiers," blasted Limbaugh.

Phony reporter? Not really. Neely is all too typical of reporters these days. He knows what he knows and everything he writes is sent through the prism of his ideology. He spent some time in Zimbabwe, and based on his writing the problem with Zimbabwe is AIDS. Well, yes, AIDS is a problem for pretty much the entire African continent. But - as they say in Liberaldom - let's look for the root causes. And the root cause of pretty much everything that has gone wrong with Zimbabwe and its people is that Great Black Hope of Liberals everywhere in the West: Rober Mugabe.



Mind reading is a skill that many journalists claim to have. Me, I have to examine the evidence.

Pity.

Jonah Goldberg Has Thoughts on Sex, Celebrity and Real People

“I paid off a poker debt with sexual favors, and I fell in love,” former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson told Ellen DeGeneres of her new beau earlier this month. “It’s so romantic. It’s romance.”

Indeed. What a shame Audrey Hepburn isn’t available to turn this hooker-with-implants-of-gold story into the date movie of the year.

In case you don’t know the story: Pamela Anderson, who made her name as a centerfold and faux lifeguard with built-in flotation devices, has gotten hitched to Rick Salomon, whose greatest accomplishment was surreptitiously videotaping himself having relations with Paris Hilton.

...

For years, conservatives criticized the likes of Madonna for proselytizing commercialized decadence, and conservatives routinely came out the losers. The press, generally being liberal, disliked the perceived censorial uptightness of conservative “culture warriors.” The press, also being professionally and personally infatuated with celebrity, instinctively defended stars over the meanies, because stars boost ratings and get you into glamorous parties. The meanies stay home with their kids.

But here’s the thing: Conservatives were right about Madonna, and even Madonna has partially admitted as much. The problem is that Madonna — like Hilton and Anderson — is irrelevant. These celebrities can afford their sins or, if you prefer, their mistakes because they’re rich and famous. Madonna told one interviewer that she’s never changed a diaper. How many “working moms” can say that?

What matters is the signal such people send.

Forget the question of “bad” versus “good” for a second. These people got rich by glamorizing behaviors and values normal people simply cannot afford. The working-class teenage girl who tries to follow in Madonna’s or Paris’s or Pam’s footsteps isn’t going to follow them into the pages of People magazine. She’s going to follow those footsteps straight off a cliff. And yet, the bad guy in our culture is the person who says so.

I don’t want to restore Puritanism. But would it really be so terrible if more people pointed out that prostituting yourself over a poker debt and then marrying the John isn’t merely unromantic, it’s not even something to brag about?

Limbaugh Raises over $4.2 Million for Marine Corps--Law Enforcement Foundation

HERE is Rush's annoucement of Betty Casey Winning the Harry Reid smear letter.

And HERE is his take-down of Harry Reid's attempt to take some of the credit.

From Powerline: How to take a lemon...

UPDATE: At NRO Mark Hemingway covers this story. I forgot about Rush's challenge to the Senate Democrats:

Limbaugh issued a public challenge to all of the senators involved to join him in matching the winning bid. “I would like to issue this challenge to Senator Reid and the 41 senators who signed his letter. You say you support the military. You say you’re big, and you think it’s patriotic, and that I was unpatriotic. Well, I would like for each of you, Senator Reid, and the 40 senators who signed, to match whatever the winning bid is. Show us your support for the U.S. military by all 41 of you pro-military people, Democrats in the Senate, match whatever the winning bid is and send that amount to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation,” he said.

Given the huge bids on the eBay sale, I didn’t suspect that too many of the 41 senators’ offices would have that much cash lying around. But I called all of them to ask anyway. As long as the mood in Washington is a spitting contest over who’s more patriotic, maybe I could get some agreement over Limbaugh’s publicity stunt. Or, failing that, maybe a divisive partisan comment might drive the story back on to the front page, with the goal of further publicizing the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation.

No such luck. I called all 41 senators involved, and I spoke to press secretaries or left messages with 33 Senate offices (I tried repeatedly, and you’d be surprised at how many busy signals you get trying to get ahold of senators.) I told dozens of press secretaries all about the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation and Rush’s challenge. I got only two responses, and of those, only Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado proved himself above the recent pettiness. He issued a terse statement: “The Senator supports their [the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation] work and is pleased to hear that Rush does as well.”

HERE's some additional reaction:

Angry Dittoheads Flood ABC Blog via Drudge Link...
The dittoheads take ABC to task for their usual biased reporting. When was the last time ABC's Political Radar blog had well over 1000 comments on a single story? I'm assuming never...

Hmmmm...no mention of the fact that Rush is matching the winning bid. ABC, part of the "Drive By" Media, clearly wants ignorant readers to think that Reid and the Dems actually had something to do with this. Typical. Liberals and the henchmen in the left wing media are all liars.

Posted by: Rick Oct 19, 2007 1:16:47 PM

Harry Reid and the other 40 oh-so-patriotic senators are absolutely disgraceful. I hope their constituents remember their attempt to break the constitution when election time comes around.

Posted by: Dusty Oct 19, 2007 1:17:30 PM

The letter shows Senator Reid and the other signers as the demagogues they are. Now that he is trying to claim credit for the amount raised for a worthwhile charity, I will be waiting to hear how much of his money (not my tax money that I already know he likes to 'invest') he has donated. In other words, will he put his money where his mouth is?

Also waiting for ABC to get the story straight. Please hurry, I'm not young!

Stark Raving Mad

From Powerline:

Paul noted earlier the bizarre rant by Congressman Pete Stark during today's "debate" on the SCHIP program. Here it is; it has to be seen to be believed. This could be the craziest outbreak of Bush Derangement Syndrome ever. "Bush just likes to blow things up," soldiers in Iraq are being killed "for the President's amusement," and so on. The guy is a nut. The real question is, are there any members of the Democratic Party, prominent or not, who mind?

The question is asked: is it possible for a Democrat to go too far?

Stark's tirade was insane, but for some time, not a single Democrat tried to distance himself or herself from it, while Stark was wildly applauded on the left (and equally crazed) side of the blogosphere.

27-0 at the University of Iowa

Mark Moyar explains why he did not get the job offer at the University of Iowa.

It’s not the score of a Hawkeye football game. It’s the number of Democrats versus the number of Republicans in the University of Iowa history department, and it has Iowans in an uproar. So, too, do charges published by Mark Bauerlein that left-wing bias has influenced the department’s hiring process. In response to the revelations, department chair Colin Gordon announced that the department had committed no wrongdoing, and neither he nor the university has expressed any concern about the total absence of intellectual diversity. Rarely have the hypocrisy and mendacity of academia been so thoroughly exposed as in the history department’s damage-control campaign.
...
Students, parents, alumni, taxpayers, and politicians should pressure the University of Iowa’s administration to enforce the university’s non-discrimination policies, and to create new faculty positions for conservatives beyond the reach of other professors’ tentacles, as other schools have started doing. They should demand that the university use its lecture series to bring in conservative speakers, not just liberals and radicals. In the meantime, students must realize that the university is not a free market of ideas, but a one-party state that strives to convert the impressionable and unwary by hiding half of the political spectrum.

Read the rest.