Monthly Archives: May 2005

Red State/Blue State France

A little more on French voters’ decisive rejection of the EU constitution. The New York Times has a pretty good story on the referendum, which includes these paragraphs: At the polling place at the Karl Marx primary school in downtown Bobigny, a working-class suburb of Paris, by contrast, there was no sense that Europe’s future hinged on the constitution. With 18 percent unemployment and a large ethnic Arab and African »

An important Galloway footnote

I forgot to footnote an important point in linking to Clinton Taylor’s excellent column on George Galloway’s Senate testimony. The cybersleuthing on which Taylor relied (duly noted in his column) was performed by George Gooding of Seixon in “With all due RESPECT, Mr. Galloway.” Gooding is still working the story; Roger L. Simon notes here that the information from Gooding has been forwarded to Senator Coleman via Simon’s site. »

French voters say “non”

File under the category of good news, Schadenfreude subfile: “French voters reject EU constitution.” Bill Kristol anticipated the good news, and took some pleasure in the anticipated unhappiness of the Eurocrats in “A new Europe?” Mark Coffey anticipated the result by making Jacques Chirac his “Weekly jackass no. 25” over at Decison ’08. Mark Steyn, on the other hand, predicts that “EU just won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” (Courtesy »

Michael Carlson and his credo

This past Jan. 24 Army Sgt. Michael Carlson (above) was killed in Iraq. As a high school senior at St. Paul’s (parochial) Cretin-Derham High School, Carlson wrote the moving credo that the Wall Street Journal published on its editorial page earlier this week. Today the Minneapolis Star Tribune tells the story of Carlson and his credo: “His words are his legacy.” Here are four paragraphs of Carlson’s credo: I admire »

The worst that could happen

Our friend Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics writes to give us a heads-upt: Time Mag is reporting that FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley is going to run against [Republican] John Kline in [Minnesota’s] 2nd district. Look for the article, apparently she says, ‘What »

Memorial Day

It’s not quite here yet, but people are putting flags and flowers on graves all across America. This beautiful picture showed up on Yahoo News Photos this afternoon. Eleven year old Thomas McGahan, a Boy Scout, and his Cub Scout brother Nicholas, of Northport, N.Y., place flags on graves at the Long Island National Cemetery. Click to enlarge: UPDATE: Austin Bay gave a speech at the Travis County International Cemetery, »

Keeping the Heat on Ms. Foley

Hiawatha Bray, a member of the Newspaper Guild, of which Linda Foley is the President, has challenged Foley to either support or retract her charge that American soldiers are mass murderers of American and foreign journalists. He got a response from her, but it was, as he says, “extremely odd”: Foley wrote, “I am not going to discuss this with you on the eve of Memorial Day weekend.” Foley got »

More Hate

The latest comes from Broward County, Florida, where a publicly subsidized art show included more hate speech directed at President Bush: The piece in question is a painting depicting President Bush being sodomized. Artist Alfred Phillips said images of an oil barrel and a man wearing a Muslim headdress in the work are part of a political statement about the United States being abused by oil companies. Michael Friedman, the »

Galloway’s liberty

In a column for the American Spectator site, Clinton Taylor fact checks a few of the details in George Galloway’s testimony before the Senate Permanent Subcommitte on Investigations: “Curious, George!” As an attorney who has struggled with more than a few witnesses, I was struck at the time of Galloway’s Senate appearance by Galloway’s apparent advantage over his interrogators in his liberty with facts. Taylor’s column supports my impression. JOHN »

Miss Universe Mania Sweeping Latin America

AFP reports on the sky-high interest in this year’s Miss Universe pageant in Latin America, where no fewer than seven contestants are among the favorites. AFP says Miss Venezuela and Miss Puerto Rico are this year’s Latina “heavyweights,” a metaphor I’m not sure they’d appreciate. Apparently pageantry is to Venezuela what soccer is to Brazil: Nothing, however, compares with the obsession of Venezuelans, who treat beauty pageants with the same »

Matthew Lourey, RIP

Minnesota DFL (Democratic) state senator Becky Lourey is an opponent of the war in Iraq and the mother of Army helipcopter pilot Chief Warrant Officer Matthew Lourey. CWO Lourey was on his second tour of duty in Iraq; he was killed when his helocopter was shot down in central Iraq on Thursday. The Star Tribune story by Mark Brunswick, Patricia Lopez and Kevin Duchschere is incredibly painful: “State senator’s son »

Bolton Showdown Approaches

The White House has said it will not give the Democratic Senators the highly classified documents they are seeking in connection with John Bolton’s nomination as U.N. ambassador. Scott McClellan pointed out: The Democratic and Republican leaders of the Intelligence Committee have had access to this sensitive, highly classified information. The Democrats clamoring for it have already voted against the nomination. This is about partisan politics. What I thought was »

Don’t cry daddy

I’ve written here about Elvis Presley whenever the opportunity presented itself, such as the seventieth anniversary of Elvis’s birth last January (my post was “Have you heard the news?”). Most recently, in “The annotated Elvis” I compiled a short list of a few of Elvis’s greatest recordings occasioned by John’s post “In which I poach on my partner’s territory.” One of these days I’ll take a stab at writing up »

In defense of “24”

Several readers wrote impassioned and knowledgeable responses to Paul’s post linking Diana West’s column regarding the FOX series “24” yesterday. Jonathan Burack wrote: I am second to none among those I know in denouncing even the tiniest signs of dhimmitude when I see them. I therefore cannot believe Diane West really paid much attention to 24 on this score. Yes, of course, there were Americans involved in the Islamist Marwan’s »

High Noon, take 2

In yesterday’s Day By Day strip Chris Muir noticed something slightly amiss with the Missouri Compromise of 2005. It’s as though the gang of seven Republican senators rewrote “High Noon” to suit their own temperament. When Marshall Kane turned to his Hadleyville townsmen for help to fight off Frank Miller as he was about to arrive in town fresh from the prison Kane sent him to years earlier, they didn’t »

A Feminist Fisking

Reader Dean Henderson pointed out Danielle Crittenden’s evisceration of lefty “novelist” Erica Jong, who compared the status of women in the United States unfavorably with that in the Arab world: Of course women in the Middle East need the vote, an end to domestic violence and free access to contraception. But so do we. Odd that it is always easier to proselytize for feminism abroad while ignoring deteriorating women »

A “Koran Abuse” Incident We Haven’t Heard About

Haider Ajina has, I think, a fascinating perspective on the hypocrisy surrounding the current demonstrations, etc., protesting the mishandling of the Koran by American soldiers. Haider discusses the conference in Baghdad that reportedly was attended by terrorists, including al Qaeda’s number two leader, which we wrote about here: During this same conference you refer to in your piece (Saddam and His Terrorist Friends), Saddam boasted and showed off a Koran »