Another High Quality Massachusetts Politician

Giving his all in the doomed battle to elect Phil Angelides governor of California, my Senator, John F. Kerry, found the right note to rally Democratic loyalists:

You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

The audio is here. And here's the video.




As long time readers will know, my brother, an MD, is currently serving in Baghdad.

Kerry explains it all:

Senator John Kerry issued the following statement in response to White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, assorted right wing nut-jobs, and right wing talk show hosts desperately distorting Kerry’s comments about President Bush to divert attention from their disastrous record:

"If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have…

Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men…"

I am completely convinced that John Kerry meant to make a bad joke about President Bush, rather than a gratuitous insult aimed at the troops. So having made a stupid slip of the tongue, he immediately started digging himself an even deeper hole.

"Decades Of Distrust"

My son came home from school today and said the words that every father fears, "Dad, we're studying Israeli/Arab history in social studies." The basis for their study is a single double-sided page of information, with the same heading as this post, put between the Israeli and Palestinian flags. Why simplify, when you can over-simplify.

The summary is not as bad as I feared, but it ain't great. The Palestinians outnumbered the Jews, it admits, but they were still the underdog. The Jews had a "well-trained experienced army" as many Jews had fought with the British in World War II. (No, there's no mention of anything else the Jews might have gotten up to in World War II that would effect how they fought once in Palestine.) The Palestinians, however, "had never recovered from the Arab revolt against the Ottomans." (The summary does not mention that the revolt happened in 1916-1918, or that the entire Arab force was 5000 men, but apparently this was one of those devastating victories that makes it impossible to fight a war against refugees 30 years later.)

Here are the specific acts of terrorism mentioned in the summary: "one massacre of 250 Arabs at Dayr Yasin near Jerusalem"; "There were many Arab terrorist attacks to avenge this victory [the Six Day War], including the 1972 murders of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games"; "Mr Sadat, however, paid for the peace with his life: he was assassinated by Muslim extremists"; "In 1994, an Israeli extremist was responsible for the Hebron Massacre in which 29 Palestinians were killed in an attack on a Muslim mosque"; "In 1995, another Jewish extremist, angered by the Israeli prime minister's peace efforts assassinated Yitzak Rabin." The article does mention Arab terrorism generally, but always attributes the charge to someone: the US government says that Hamas has been responsible for suicide bombings (no specifics, please) or "Israelis blame Palestinians for frequent violent attacks." That last is followed immediately by "Palestinians blame Israel" for violent clampdowns, including the "'assassination' of several of their top leaders."

Far be it from me to claim that the Israelis are angels or the Palestinians devils. The Israelis have made mistakes and lost opportunities. But the important lesson that is missed by this even-Stephen summary of the last 60 years of Israeli-Arab relations is that the Arabs can stop this at any time, and only the Arabs can stop it. By the way, the first question my son had to answer after reading this summary was "What is prejudice?" The second was "How does prejudice arise?" He knew what was expected of him -- be blamed the parents.

Truth, Or No Truth? Is This A Real ABC Show?

WILLIAM SHATNER TO HOST "SHOW ME THE MONEY," PREMIERING WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22 ON THE ABC TELEVISION NETWORK

"Show Me the Money," a new high-octane variety/game show series to be hosted by Emmy-winning television legend William Shatner, will premiere WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22 (8:00-9:00 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network.

In "Show Me the Money" contestants must answer a minimum of six trivia questions. After each answer, the contestant chooses from among thirteen stunning dancers on stage, each of whom holds a scroll with a dollar figure to be added or subtracted -- for correct or incorrect answers -- to the contestant's total.

A correct answer, combined with choosing a dancer holding big money, can quickly catapult the player's winnings into the millions. But a wrong answer, combined with the wrong dancer, can wipe out winnings in an instant. There is no opportunity to play it safe - contestants will be tempted to take the money and run, but this rollercoaster ride of a game show requires that you play to the very end.

Adding to the variety aspect of the show are the thirteen stunning Million-Dollar Dancers who are always ready to break into any style of dance, while audacious master of ceremonies William Shatner spontaneously boogies with the beauties on stage.

With a career that spans some 50 years, Shatner is well known for originating the role of Captain James T. Kirk in the original "Star Trek" television series, and has remained a pop culture icon whose stature seems to grow with each passing year. Shatner will continue in his other ABC role, that of Denny Crane on ABC's hit series "Boston Legal," for which he has won back-to-back Emmy Awards.

"Show Me the Money" is produced by Endemol USA, a division of Endemol Holding. David Goldberg is the president of Endemol USA. Endemol USA is a leading producer of television programming specializing in reality and non-scripted genres for network and cable television. The company produces hit series including ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." Endemol USA is a division of Endemol Holding, a prominent international content developer, producer and distributor of television and online programming. The company, headquartered in the Netherlands, has subsidiaries and joint ventures in 21 countries, including the major European markets, the U.S., South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Australia. Endemol Entertainment is a fully owned subsidiary of telecommunications giant Telefsnica S.A., one of the largest companies in Spain. The series is executive-produced by Mike Nichols.

ABC Media Relations Contact:
Virginia Mastroianni (818) 460-6989/Virginia.M.Mastroianni@abc.com

From The BrothersJudd Archives: IS ALL MOVEMENT PROGRESS?

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Thomas Jefferson, as quoted by James Pinkerton in Tech Central Station. Thanks to Paul Cella for the pointer.

This quote, apparently inscribed into the Jefferson Memorial, is the glory and the tragedy of the United States rolled into one. The whole American project is the world's most (only?) successful radical revolution. Almost the entirety of our history as a nation, from colonization through revolution through industrialization through the civil war through manifest destiny through the World Wars through the civil rights movement, has cemented in our souls a theory of inevitable Progress and a belief that Inevitable Progress is Good.

And progress has been good, as who can deny. (Hi, Orrin)

Nevertheless, the theory of Inevitable Progress is pernicious and we are, right now, suffering from it. One cannot read Goodridge, the Massachusetts gay marriage case, without coming away with the sense that the Court believes that this change is inevitable. In the past marriage was closed and in the future it will be open, and Progress requires that we move it along, doing our small part in a vast historical enterprise.

Once we recognize this thought, we see it every where. How many changes are urged upon us on the grounds that some institution has been changed in the past and Progress demands that we continue the process? We must open up marriage, we must further reduce discrimination, we must widen the scope of our civil rights, we must broaden Medicaid to include prescription drugs, etc. Much of our politics has now come down to "our parents did X and our children will do Z, so we are obliged to do Y." Doesn't this explain the relatively muted reaction to Goodridge? We all knew it was inevitable, so why not get it over with.

More recently, we've started to work the theory backward. If some trend can be seen to have increased over time, we call it Progress. The seemingly inevitable loosening of television standards, to take a miner example, is Progress, with each new televised transgression applauded by the critics as "cutting edge" entertainment. Increasing sexual promiscuity is Progress. The increasing number of instances in which human life can be taken, is Progress. Swing is progress from Jazz; Rock is progress from Swing; and Rap is progress from Rock. (The process does have its limits. No one thinks that Disco was Progress.)

We hear this theory propounded all the time. Whenever a President says that our greatness is just beginning, he is speaking of Inevitable Progress. When people speak about the coming American century, both now and 100 years ago, they are speaking of Inevitable Progress. When people speak of lifespans of 140 years, or living on the Moon, or transferring our consciousness to computers, they are really saying that our ancesters lived 35 years if they were lucky, our parents will live 70 years unless they're unlucky and so our kids should live for ever.

In some ways, our belief in Inevitable Progress is human. Humans always believe that a trend, once identified, will continue undisturbed. We're always drawing lines through past events and projecting them confidently into the future. People in stagnant societies draw their line and assume nothing will change. Americans are among the few that can look at their entire history and say, "things have always gotten better, so they will always get better."

We have now taken this human trait, however, and made it uniquely American. Because our government is more thought experiment than historical tradition, we feel free to change the thought behind it. We have now taken our observation of improvement over time (a debatable observation, but one common to both conservatives and liberals), developed a theory of Inevitable Progress and made it our governing principle. What else does it mean to say that our centuries old founding document is a "living Constitution"?

And thus the definition of an American conservative as someone who stands athwart History yelling stop. The very definition embodies the idea of doomed opposition to Inevitable Progress and by doing so implies that true conservatism is unAmerican. And yet, I still believe. Not all movement is progress. Trends don't continue on forever, life without measure. We are not simply a bridge between the glorious past and an even more glorious future. The future is not always better than the past. If a little is good, it doesn't follow that more is better. Americans can no more foresee the future than could the Romans or the Greeks or the Goths.

I see the train a'comin, but all I can do is stand on the tracks yelling stop.
Posted by David Cohen at December 4, 2003 11:59 AM

And I Said I'd Never Post There Again

OJ finds a coreligionist.

Peter Sellers Does Bob Newhart

The best comic of the 20th century was Bob Newhart, most famous for his telephone call bits. Here, Peter Sellers plays the US President in Dr. Strangelove as a Bob Newhart character.

Sometimes We Can Make Time Go Backwards

I see on the blogs that Bill O'Reilly went on Oprah to shill for his new book about the cultural war between the Traditionalists and the Secular Progressives:

Bill: You know, we have our military fighting for our country overseas. We at home have to fight for our country. Do you want to be Denmark? Do you want to be Holland? That's what the S-Ps [secular-progressives] want. Anything goes: euthanasia, legalized narcotics, unfettered abortion, on and on and on and on. Look, when you and I were growing up, what kind of music did we listen to?

Oprah: I listened to The Temptations. …

Bill: What are the kids listening to now? Ho's. Glocks. Drugs. We've come a long way, haven't we? … These are the kids at 9, 10 …They know all about it. There's no more Temptations. They're obsolete. How about movies? What did we go to see? We went to see The Blob. Steve McQueen running around going, "There's the blob." We had a lot of laughs. Popcorn. Now they have a chainsaw guy cutting off people's arms. That's what kids are seeing. Oh, we've come a long way, haven't we? This country is under siege.

Oprah: But this is a country that allows The Blob and also allows chainsaw movies because this is America.

Bill: I'm not advocating a ban of chainsaw movies. Alright? I'm telling you it's bad. That's what I'm telling you. It's bad. So is gangster rap. You know it's bad. You've got an unsupervised 9-year-old whose parents aren't around thinking that he's going to go out and sell a couple of vials of crack, that's bad. Where is the counter influence? S-Ps don't make any judgments on behavior. S-P's don't want any restrictions on what you can or can't do. Yeah, we live in a country, that's allowed. It's bad. People have to start to make judgments.

I was thinking about this cultural war this evening, when my wife and I watched About Last Night. The movie is 20 years old, and what has happened to movies in the mean time is shocking. The movies have gotten much smaller. Characters in About Last Night smoke, they smoke dope, they have anonymous sex and there is a middle portion of about 15 minutes in which we watch a montage of naked Demi Moore and naked Rob Lowe having sex. They just don't make 'em like that any more.

So in this one area, we have pushed back against inevitable Progress. We haven't won the war, but here's a battle we did win.

Mystery Solved.

According to this story, American men have less testosterone than their fathers. Doctors say that this is true even holding constant age, smoking and obesity. We note, though, that this is not actually a study of American men:

The participants in the study of the health and endocrine functioning consisted of randomly selected Boston-area men ages 45-79, born between 1916 and 1945. Data was collected initially in 1987-1989, and two follow up visits were done in 1995-1997 and 2002-2004. There were a total of 2,769 observations taken on 1,532 men.

Do Conservatives Now Have To Start Rolling the "R"?

I don't usually steal stories from Best of the Web, assuming that you all would have already read them their. This story on a new Nicaraguan ban on all abortions, even when the actual health of the mother is threatened, is too delicious to ignore:

Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, who was a supporter of abortion rights as a young revolutionary, has said he has become a devout Roman Catholic and now opposes abortion.

Ortega's socialist government of the 1980s had a contentious relationship with the Catholic church, but Ortega recently has established warm ties with leading church figures in Nicaragua.

So now Kerry and Harkin are figuratively, as well as literally, to the left of Ortega.

A New Winner?

Republican Attack Ad Offends Canada (Ian Austen, NY Times, 10/27/06)

A Republican television commercial that has drawn criticism in the United States has also become a political and diplomatic issue in Canada.

"Canada can take care of North Korea. They’re not busy," says an actor in the campaign advertisement, against Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., a Democratic candidate for the Senate in Tennessee.

Whatever its intent, the aside is seen in Canada as a suggestion that the country is a free rider when it comes to global security. While Canada did not participate in the invasion of Iraq, it has posted a large portion of its army in Afghanistan as part of NATO forces since 2002.

Well, the point was that the character, a Harold Ford supporter, was ignorant.

When Did We All Become Maiden Librarians?

German soldiers in Afghanistan have been caught acting like, well, German soldiers:

Sick war pictures that put Germany to shame (Allan Hall, Daily Mail, 10/26/06)

German soldiers have caused international outrage after posing with a human skull in Afghanistan.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has pledged that the troops would be punished for desecrating the dead.

I'm shocked, shocked to find out that soldiers are taking macabre trophies and posing for shocking photographs. Innate human dignity blah ... common humanity blah ... respect for other traditions blah ... come as liberators blah blah blah. We all love humanity, but I'm not sure that we've ever met a human being.

Where Is Everyone?

We're all discussing whether to invade Iraq. I predict that we end up going for it.

Puts You Right Off Recipe Blogging

A strange cure for the baby blues (Helen Weathers, Daily Mail, 10/24/06)

As Margherita Watt, in a state of euphoric exhaustion, lay cradling her newborn daughter, Dixie, following a seven-hour natural water birth at home, her husband, Will, dutifully went to the kitchen to prepare her first proper meal.

A short while later, he returned with a cup of strong tea and a plate of what looked like chopped steak fried in olive oil for his wife.

Tentatively, she took a bite, chewed and swallowed rather quickly to avoid thinking too much about what she was eating. 'It tasted a bit like a rich, gamey meat,' says Margherita, 28, a former PR executive, who gave birth 12 weeks ago. ...[W]hat Margherita was eating was her own placenta, delivered minutes after her baby was born at 7.08am on July 28 and then stored in the fridge in a plastic box - alongside the celebratory champagne - to await the frying pan that afternoon....

Today, there are websites featuring 'placenta' recipes, including lasagne, spaghetti bolognaise, or placenta paté - although Margherita preferred to keep hers plain and simple rather than turn it into a culinary event.

Brings a whole new meaning to "making from scratch."

Scampi Con Alio y Ollio Over Fettucine

Heat water to cook the pasta, one gallon for each pound of Fettucine. Put one tablespoon olive oil and two tablespoons salt into the water.

Pour 1/4 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil into a cold frying pan.

Mince and then crush two cloves garlic (or use garlic to taste, but increase your estimate of the most garlic you can possibly handle by 50%).

Put the garlic and a pinch of red pepper into the cold oil.

When the pasta water reaches a rapid boil, add the Fettucine. Stir occasionally until the pasta is al dente, about ten minutes.

After adding the Fettucine to the water, turn on the heat under the frying pan to medium high. Cook the garlic and pepper in the oil for two minutes. Add 1 pound fresh (unfrozen) deveined, deshelled shrimp. Cook, stirring frequently until the shrimp is pink, the garlic is golden and the pasta is done.

Turn off the heat under the frying pan while you drain the pasta. Pour the shrimp and oil into the pasta and toss. Serve immediately.

Always Funny

At Least Brain Tumors Made Sense

According to London's Daily Mail, Men who use mobile phones face increased risk of infertility.

But are they using it correctly?

The Most Important Story Of The Month

In the midst of intense but necessarily temporary focus on the mid-term election, I've become convinced that the biggest story of October 2006 is the recently approved widening of the Panama Canal. Cheap transport of goods from one country to another will do more to better the human condition than anything any government will do over the next 8 years. The Panamanian people, 80% of whom just voted to approve a $5 billion bond issue to pay for the canal improvements, just took a point off of annual inflation and added a few points to global GDP growth.

Thanks, Panama.

The Most Important Story Of The Month

The story so nice, I posted it twice.

Yeah, Sure, "Cheney"

A University of Washington "economic geologist" claims that the Earth has "lots and lots" of oil.

Eric Cheney said Friday in a news release that changing economics, technological advances and efforts such as recycling and substitution make the world's mineral resources virtually infinite.

For instance, oil deposits unreachable 40 years ago can be tapped using improved technology, and oil once too costly to extract from tar sands, organic matter or coal is now worth manufacturing. Though some resources might be costlier now, they still are needed.

"The most common question I get is, 'When are we going to run out of oil?' The correct response is, 'Never,'" said Cheney. "It might be a heck of a lot more expensive than it is now, but there will always be some oil available at a price, perhaps $10 to $100 a gallon.

It's not apparent whether this is economics or geology speaking. It is basic economics that we will never run out of oil, we'll just pay more and more until substitutes are found that make sense at a given price. As far as that's concerned, I'm told by friends in the oil business that they need to be assured of long-term prices above $60 per barrel to make investments in substitutes pay-off. As OPEC must know that, too, I suspect that it'll be a while before we see long-term prices above $60 per barrel.

Stopped Clocks

Instapundit points us to this study of academics showing that they are out of step with the general population. They are, and I'm sure that's a tragedy, but that doesn't mean that they're wrong. To cite two examples from the article:

Almost one-third of professors cite the United States as among the top two greatest threats to international stability -- more than cited Iran, China, or Iraq.

Fifty-four percent of professors say U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is partially responsible for the growth of Islamic militancy.

Certainly, no one can doubt that US foreign policy is partially responsible for the growth of Islamo-fascism. After all, with a different US foreign policy, Israel would have long since been pushed back into the sea. The US is the greatest threat to "international stability," and proudly so. The professors are quite correct; where they go wrong is wishing for the stability of evil regimes.