Monthly Archives: December 2004

How Stingy Can You Get?

Via Tim Blair, Chuck Simmins has tried to tabulate contributions by American individuals and companies to tsunami relief efforts. His total so far: $169 million. And that doesn’t even count the aircraft carriers. UPDATE: The New York Times says: The huge response from individual donors who want to help victims of the tsunami in Southeast Asia, spurred in part by a year-end spirit of gift-giving, has stunned officials at the »

Happy New Year!

…to all of our readers. I wanted to get this up now, since I’m likely not to be awake at midnight. Best wishes for 2005 from the Power Line gang. »

The Latest From Washington

There is a new wrinkle in the Washington gubernatorial election, and it happens to bear directly on the question of how important bloggers are or can be. The Seattle Times reports that Democrat Christine Gregoire was officially certified the winner of the election yesterday. But the Times also reports that a serious problem has arisen in King County, the Democratic bastion that gave Gregoire her margin of “victory”: The latest »

Ring in the old

E.J. Dionne has figured out why John Kerry lost — it was because of the viciously negative attacks by the Bush campaign. Why don’t the Democrats respond in kind? Because they’re afraid of being criticized by the MSM. John Hillen at the NRO Corner treats this column with the derision it deserves in a post called “Give Thanks for E.J. Dionne.” Sometimes I get the feeling that we’re about to »

Pragmacons, coming to a blog near you

Jim Geraghty at the »

“Slavering right wing hacks,” nous?

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber thinks that Nick Coleman’s attack on Power Line, though “rather weak,” makes a point that’s “hard to refute:” It »

Nick at Nite

Reader Greg Lang writes: You might throw Nick Coleman off track by saying that he did a good column, his current one. At my Soliah.com I have linked the past columns by Nick on the woman injured in the St. Paul Daytons’s [department store] bombing forty years ago. This I considered good work since the Symbionese Liberation Army [terrorist] Sara Jane Olson/Kathleen Soliah is in prison until at least 2010, »

The return of Shimon Peres

Today’s news reports indicate that the Labor Party is set to join with the Likud in a coalition that returns Shimon Peres to a position of power as “deputy premier.” The Haaretz account is “Peretz waives demand to serve as vice PM.” Last week Professor Steven Plaut of Haifa University anticipated the return of Peres as the current fulfillment of the Likud Party’s traditional role of returning the Labor Party »

Distortions on top of contortions

A few days ago, I posted on a piece in Slate by Phillip Carter and Owen West arguing, without merit I thought, that Iraq in 2004 looks like Vietnam in 1966. Carter and West made one subsidiary point that I didn’t address. They claimed that “U.S. losses in Fallujah [were] almost equal to those” incurred during the famously bloody Vietnam War battle of Hue. Carter and West stated: In the »

The Gonzales nomination — battle royal or abdication?

The current issue of National Review has an article by my former colleagues Lee Casey and David Rivkin about what they predict will be the “battle royal” over the nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General (I don’t think the article appears online). The battle, Lee and David say, will center around Gonzales’ role as White House counsel in developing the administration’s legal position on the classification and treatment of »

Megaphones without oversight

Joe Carter of The Evangelical Outpost usefully rounds up the blogosphere’s commentary on Nick Coleman’s defamatory diatribe against us in the Minneapolis Star Tribune yesterday: “Megaphones without oversight: Blog swarms, opinion storms, and brand destruction.” In addition to rounding up the blogosphere’s commentary, Carter also applies the Hewitt doctrine to yesterday’s events. I spoke yesterday with Coleman’s editor at the Star Tribune to complain about the factual inaccuracies in Coleman’s »

Pipes Junior and Senior

The Rocket Prof called our attention to this surprisingly sympathetic portrait of one of our heroes, Daniel Pipes, in this month’s Harvard magazine. The article begins by drawing an analogy between Pipes and his father, Richard Pipes, who was a professor at Harvard who was ostracized for his anti-Communist beliefs: Daniel ’71, Ph.D. ’78 (early Islamic history), is what old-timers would call a chip off the old block. Both are »

What the spiders did

The legendary CIA counterintellience chief James Angleton invoked T.S. Eliot’s reference in “Gerontion” to a “wilderness of mirrors” in order to describe his own work. At OpinionJournal Edward Jay Epstein brings Angleton’s spirit to his coverage of a talk given by one of Angleton’s foremost KGB antagonists: “The man who stole the secrets.” »

Megaphones without oversight

Joe Carter of The Evangelical Outpost usefully rounds up the blogosphere’s commentary on Nick Coleman’s defamatory diatribe against us in the Minneapolis Star Tribune yesterday: “Megaphones without oversight: Blog swarms, opinion storms, and brand destruction.” In addition to rounding up the blogosphere’s commentary, Carter also applies the Hewitt doctrine to yesterday’s events. I spoke yesterday with Coleman’s editor at the Star Tribune to complain about the factual inaccuracies in Coleman’s »

Terrorist Attack in Mosul Fails

The terrorists, perhaps emboldened by their suicide bombing last week, tried to launch an actual military attack on a small American outpost in Mosul earlier today. The result was predictable: most of the terrorists, at least 25, were killed, compared to zero Americans: [T]he troops were attacked by a coordinated force of about 50 insurgents who fired rocket-propelled grenades and semi-automatic weapons. At that point, two F-18 and two F-14 »

A word from Mr. Carpenter

Both Rocket Man and I had the privilege of practicing law with Norm Carpenter over many years. He set an example of professionalism and civility that we have always aspired to follow. Today he has forwarded us a copy of the following message that he sent to Nick Coleman: I have two comments on Nick Coleman’s ill-tempered attack on Power Line printed today in the Star Tribune. First, I resent »

Nick Coleman’s idea of the purpose of journalism

Evan Coyne Maloney spots something of significance amidst the rantings and false accusations that make up Nick Coleman’s Strib diatribe against Power Line. Coleman said: Powerline is the biggest link in a daisy chain of right-wing blogs that is assaulting the Mainstream Media while they toot their horns in the service of … what? The downtrodden? No, that was yesterday’s idea of the purpose of journalism. Maloney responds: That’s funny; »