December 2007 Archives

I don't usually blog about movies, but "There will be blood" is an unusual case. I saw the movie at the Hollywood Arclight yesterday and really didn't know what to expect. I've been in a scaled-down news mode through the holidays and hadn't read any reviews or heard any of the buzz. I just knew Daniel Day-Lewis was in it and that's all the incentive I need. I would watch that guy watching paint dry. It was easily one of the oddest movie I've ever seen, but also possibly one of the best.

There are so many remarkable things about the movie that I've seen read in all the reviews. So I'm just going to mention one: the scenery. This is a wholly Southern California movie. Not just because it was filmed here and is about the turn-of-the-20th-century huckersterism (both oil and religion) that California was founded upon, but because of its achingly beautiful locations in the dry desert hills in and around Los Angeles County. That is reason enough to watch the movie. But happily there are many more.

On Thursday, I found myself discussing my Wall St. Journal op-ed on the Fox Business Channel's "Cavuto" program. Guest host Stuart Varney introduced the segment by saying something in his elegant British accent about how "There's lots of finger-pointing going on with the subprime mortgage crisis, but one man is pointing the finger at 'the little guy' -- you and me!" What ensued was an amusing four or five minutes in which I attempted to remind viewers that, in a democracy, the little guy is the boss -- and as such, he shouldn't be expecting the government to bail him out for biting off more than he can chew. When Stuart told me such a view is anathema in this election season, I acknowledged that as a key factor in my deciding not to run for the presidency.

Maybe it would more honest if we just kept all pedophiles in jail. Because clearly few people still believe in the rehabilitative qualities of our justice system.

New Jersey, for example, isn't going to suffer any Jack McClellans. If you recall, he's the self-professed pedophile who caused a big fuss last summer with his Web site that noted the best place for kid-watching. He was living in SoCal at the time after moving here from Portland, Ore.

EWING, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey enacted legislation on Thursday banning some convicted sex offenders from using the Internet.

In signing the restrictions into law, Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey, who is filling in while Gov. Jon S. Corzine is vacationing, noted that sexual predators were as likely to lurk at a computer keyboard as in a park or playground.

No federal law restricts sex offenders’ use of the Internet, and Florida and Nevada are the only other states to impose such restrictions.

The bill applies to anyone who used a computer to help commit the original sex crime. It also may be applied to paroled sex offenders under lifetime supervision, but it exempts work done as part of a job or search for employment.

In this day and age, not only would it be extremely hard to enforce, it's almost like cutting people off from society. Besides, it seems inherently unconstitutional to restrict Internet access and something that only a repressive government in say, Burma or China would do.

Those backward Pakistanis! Here they are, turning over control of a major political party to someone with no experience just because he's related to a former prime minister! Why, that's almost as pathetic as ... turning control of a major political party to someone with little experience just because she's related to a former president!

Or, one could add, electing someone as president just because his dad held the job before him ...

As America enters its 19th year of uninterrupted Bush-Clinton presidencies -- with no end in sight any time soon -- it's worth questioning the soundness of our own democratic sensibilities. The monarchic impulse runs deep ...

This from today's stormy election in Kenya:

"Elections chief Samuel Kivuitu, who read the results on live television after other media were expelled from the main vote headquarters Sunday, said (incumbent Mwai) Kibaki beat Odinga by 231,728 votes in the closest race in Kenya's history.

...But even Kivuitu had acknowledged problems with the count, including a constituency where voter turnout added up to 115 percent and another where a candidate ran away with ballot papers."

At first, I was wary of Mike Huckabee's foreign policy prowess (or lack of it). Now, I just want to cry. First he didn't know what the NIE on Iran's nuclear program was about. Then he thought Pakistan was still under martial law. I mean, turning the assassination of Benazir Bhutto into an illegal-immigration stump was just disastrous:

"'In light of what happened in Pakistan yesterday, it's interesting that there are more Pakistanis who have illegally crossed the border than of any other nationality except for those immediately south of our border,' Huckabee said Friday.

...Huckabee said 660 Pakistanis entered the country illegally last year. When asked by a reporter the source for that statistic, Huckabee appeared unsure, saying, 'Those are numbers that I got today from a briefing, and I believe they are CIA and immigration numbers.' The Huckabee campaign later said the figure came from a March 2006 report by The Denver Post.

But the Border Patrol told CNN on Friday that it apprehended only 'a handful' of illegal immigrants from Pakistan in 2007.

The number of illegal immigrants from Pakistan deported or apprehended is not mentioned in the latest report from the Department of Homeland Security/Office of Immigration Statistics. In 2005, the nation did not make the list of the top 10 sources of illegal immigrants. The previous year, Pakistan was the last country listed, but no specific numbers were given."

And now this:

"On Friday morning, Huckabee listed former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton as someone with whom he either has 'spoken or will continue to speak.'

At a Thursday evening news conference, Huckabee said, 'I've corresponded with John Bolton, who's agreed to work with us on developing foreign policy.'

Bolton, however, has a different view. 'I’d be happy to speak with Huckabee, but I haven’t spoken with him yet,' said Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

...Huckabee said he had also spoken with former State Department official Richard Haass (now president of the Council on Foreign Relations); military analyst Ken Allard; former national security adviser Richard Allen; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative think tank; and a 'number of military personnel.'

Reached via e-mail, Allen said an intermediary asked him to speak with Huckabee, but he hadn't yet agreed. 'I'm gradually getting older, but am fully capable of recalling with whom I have spoken,' said the former Nixon and Reagan foreign policy campaign adviser."

I cannot support a candidate who's so out to lunch on foreign policy. And that's a beef I have with Mitt Romney as well, who delivered a similarly lame response to the Bhutto assassination:

"'If the answer for leading the country is someone that has a lot of foreign policy experience, we can just go down to the State Department and pick up any one of the tens of thousands of people who spent all their life in foreign policy,' he said Thursday in New Hampshire.

Instead, Mr. Romney said, what is needed is a chief executive with leadership and the ability to assemble 'a great team of people to be able to guide and direct them to understand what decision has to be made.'"

Who really wants a president who's leaning on a stable of "yes"-men, who needs aides whispering in his ear every time he meets with a foreign delegation? A leader knows the issues and knows how to make decisions, not someone who brushes off the importance of foreign policy expertise.

I'm so grateful to have been able to write a political column that disses the lame eHarmony commercials at the same time -- as I did last week for Pajamas Media. Read on:

"...A man and a woman are lackadaisically standing in front of a camera, arms around each other like limp noodles. The guy proclaims that, with eHarmony’s '29 dimensions of compatibility' matching system, he found a woman who has everything he was looking for: 'Pretty … a great smile…,' he trails off as the bouncy music tries to convince us that they’re desperately in love as they dance like fumbling eighth-graders.

It’s like the courtship of low expectations that’s become a hallmark of Campaign 2008.

What’s missing is the passion, the oomph, the can’t-live-without-you factor. The poll swings have shown that each romance with a fresh new face fizzles quickly at best, and can spell a fiery death for the GOP at worst. Candidates try to convince us they’re a perfect fit on their eHarmony-esqe dimensions of conservative street cred, true compatibility that apparently can best be determined by checking off boxes..."

And that, I theorize, brings us back to the tried-and-true when deciding who gets our electoral affection. Read the whole thing!

Benazir Bhutto took the mantle of democracy from her father, and now that mantle has been passed to her 19-year-old son. See a pattern?

The Bhutto family represents a commitment to its own royal prerogatives, not a commitment to the poor citizens of Pakistan. And its fanbase goes along, despite the many contradictions.

As the NY Times pointed out on the day of her death, she jealously micromanaged her party from afar during exile. She did not groom worthy successors, as the elevation of a teenage son exemplifies. That was never her intention.

Here's another example of the power of science. I used to mock forecasters for having no clue, and I used to quote often a friend who said that predicting that tomorrow's weather as being the same as today's would result in you being wrong only about 5% more often than professionals.

But I've been struck lately by how much I've come to rely on their increasingly reliable predictions. I looked into it, and it turns out that the increase is a fact, not just a hunch. In 1979, we saw no better than 70 percent accuracy for a 3-day forecast and less than 40 percent for a 7-day forecast. Today those figures have risen to 96 percent 70 percent, respectively.

That's impressive.

If there's comfort in numbers, I can take some solace in this AP-Yahoo poll, which shows that I'm not alone in my indecision about 2008 presidential candidates. The poll finds that in the last month alone, four in 10 GOP voters switched candidates -- and nearly two-thirds say they might change their minds again. Not only that, one-fifth of voters who said they wouldn't change their minds, did.

I can relate. I began this election cycle feeling sympathetic toward Brownback, but quickly moved on when it became obvious his campaign would go nowhere. I then briefly resigned myself to Romney as the only candidate who could beat Giuliani, then got enthused about Huckabee, who, much to my surprise, soon began to soar. But Huckabee's appeal wore off quickly for me, and now I find myself leaning toward McCain. Although, truth be told, if Rudy is still leading in the California polls by the time we have our primary, I might just pull the lever for whichever candidate -- McCain, Huckabee, or Romney -- has the best chance of upsetting him.

So count me among the flip-floppers, past and present.

But my favorite part of the AP story about the poll is this tidbit:

Anne Marie Pontarelli ... shifted from the GOP to Clinton because she liked her equivocal initial response to the controversy over states' granting drivers licenses to illegal aliens.

"There are many shades of gray" on issues, said Pontarelli, 30, a consultant from Downers Grove, Ill. "The way she responded took a lot of guts."

Funny, I would have thought double-talking and refusing to answer a question directly showed the exact opposite of "guts." Go figure.

And who knew that, for at least one voter, Hillary Clinton's duplicity is actually a plus? Democracy is ... strange.

Hint: It's from TMZ's totally entertaining photo gallery of the presidential candidates then and now...

Following up on Chris' excellent observation -- this from the San Francisco Chronicle a bit ago:

"And sources close to the investigation tell The Chronicle that the surviving brothers have not been entirely forthcoming during interviews with police."

I was also looking at the MySpace profile of the guy who died, Carlos Sousa, who wanted to "partyharder then [sic] a rock star." His last login was Christmas Day, and his mood was "high." Now could he have been just high on life? Toxicological tests in the autopsy can determine that. If indeed it's true that he taunted the tiger, a person's gotta be high to climb into a big cat's cage.

Suggestion for the San Francisco cops, in case they haven't already thought of it: Check the tiger-attack victims' cell phones.

If the current speculation proves true, and Tatiana was egged on and enabled by the teens she would ultimately maul, I'm guessing that at least one of them has video. This sort of stupid stunt -- dangling one's body parts before a fierce, carnivorous beast -- is exactly the sort of behavior increasingly demonstrated among teenage boys eager to make it on "Jackass," or at least YouTube. Kids these days tend not to do anything this recklessly dangerous without documenting it -- after all, extreme stupidity is a one-way ticket to Internet fame.

Time could prove me wrong, of course, but my gut tells me this stunt was made for the small screen. And if so, that raises a key question: Does anyone doubt that the video will somehow end up on the Net eventually?

Tragedy in Pakistan today as, sadly, the inevitable happened: Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated by a cowardly little extremist who then blew himself up. Already, Ron Paul is on Fox, whining that this means we should keep our noses out of Pakistan as well as every other country -- that nuclear arsenal that could fall into the hands of Islamists, Ron, would definitely not stop at Pakistan's borders, nor does the tug-of-war between moderates and extremists. And on the campaign trail, comments generally looked like a competitive joust of who knew Bhutto best, who knew her longer (Clinton said she did), yadda yadda. The AP story on candidates' reactions is a bit gentler than the TV coverage, but still the campaigns are spinning the assassination into an opportunity to state that they're the best at foreign policy, dealing with the Islamic threat, and just best to be president in general:

"At a high school in Lawton, Iowa, on Thursday, Clinton said she had come to know Bhutto during the former prime minister's years in office and her time in exile and was "profoundly saddened and outraged" by the assassination.

In a world of such violence and threats, Clinton said, 'it certainly raises the stakes high for what we expect from our next president. I know from a lifetime of working to make change.'

Giuliani said the assassination underscored a need for the U.S. to increase its efforts to combat terrorism.

'Her murderers must be brought to justice, and Pakistan must continue the path back to democracy and the rule of law,' Giuliani said in a statement. 'Her death is a reminder that terrorism anywhere — whether in New York, London, Tel-Aviv or Rawalpindi — is an enemy of freedom. We must redouble our efforts to win the terrorists' war on us.'"

Can't, for the moment, anyone just express their sympathies and leave the footballing for another day? I guess this is what Bhutto gets for dying so close to the Iowa caucuses.

This from a reliable source, Modern Conservative:

"According to our source, an activist here in Arizona has been approached by the Ron Paul campaign; the campaign has requested that he run the Arizona effort to get Ron Paul on the general election ballot as a candidate of the Constitution Party.

Our source has requested anonymity, and we have agreed. We can, however, vouch for his/her reliability. Our source also provided us with details that added credibility to the account. (Unfortunately, disclosure of those details would put at risk our promise of anonymity. We apologize for the unnamed sourcing and lack of further details, but those were the requirements that accompanied this revelation.)We will keep you apprised of any new developments."

They raise the concern about what kind of adverse impact this train wreck known as Rep. Paul could have on the GOP come November. The Cult of Paul is already throwing a fit about MC's Chris Cook's call to expose what Ron Paul is really about -- you know, the taking campaign cash from a white supremacist and now saying Lincoln (a REAL American hero) shouldn't have fought the civil war. "This man, in our view, does not inject much needed debate into American politics, he injects poison," Chris writes at ModCon.

I know the rabid followers of RP delight in calling anyone in the opposition "a tool of the establishment," but if the establishment accepts the fact that a) white supremacists should be shunned and b) slavery was wrong and Lincoln fought the good fight to do what was right after political persuasion failed, is that actually a put-down?

And regarding adverse effects on the GOP ... remember that if Michael Bloomberg and his billions jump in the race as an independent, he's going to sap votes from the Democratic Party and left-leaning independents. So it could be a four-way.

Now it's looking like the teenage boy killed by a Siberian tiger on Christmas Day, Carlos Sousa, Jr., and his two friends were taunting the 350-pound tiger and even climbed into her enclosure, the SF Chron is reporting. Apparently there were just a handful of people there.

San Francisco police are investigating the possibility that one of the victims in the fatal tiger mauling on Christmas Day climbed over a waist-high fence and then dangled a leg or other body part over the edge of a moat that kept the big cat away from the public, sources close to the investigation said Wednesday.

The minimal evidence found at the scene included a shoe and blood in an area between the gate and the edge of the 25- to 30-foot-wide moat, raising questions about what role, if any, the victims might have had in accidentally helping the animal escape.

It gets worse. Pine cones and other debris were found in the moat, evidently thrown by someone taunting the tiger. Police found a human footprint on a metal fence inside and police say that the tiger may have been able to escape by "latching on to a leg or body part." Yikes.

If this is true, then the boys' stupidness caused the death of one of them and of the tiger, who was just being a tiger. Where were all the zoo attendants? Good question that I hope someone puts to the zoo administration. The SF Zoo is tiny, yes, but still should have adequate security.

It does, though, make you wonder if urban dwellers are so divorced from nature that we just can't conceive of something as outlandish as a tiger attack, especially when most of the tigers on TV are of the friendly talking variety. Or maybe it's just the nature of teen-age boys.

When I was in Costa Rica some years back, I made the mistake of visiting the zoo in the capital city, San Jose. The enclosures were so small that people could get real close to the animals. I was horrified to come across a group of young boys terrorizing spider monkeys by whacking them with peanuts and rocks. There was no one official there to do it, so I had to scare them off. But those boys at least had the sense to stay away from the tiger which they could have easily reached through the inadequate bars.

I'll try to avoid hyperbole here, but let's just say that the NFL's decision to air Saturday night's historic match-up between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants on broadcast TV is a victory for life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the American Way, freedom, quality entertainment and all things noble and decent.

Oh, yes, and it's also a victory for big government, but let's not try to focus on that part, OK?

As a native New Englander and a Patriots fan, I am thrilled. This Saturday night I have a family party to attend, so I'll need to tape the game and watch it later. Unfortunately, had the game only been on the NFL Network, as originally scheduled, I wouldn't have been able to tape it, as said network is unavailable in my area. And because I can't watch this one live, the sports bar wasn't an option.

But now, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has come to my deliverance, decreeing that the game -- in which the Pats can finish off an undefeated season, while shattering various offensive records along the way -- will be on both NBC and CBS!

Of course, Goodell was nudged by some of my least favorite people in government -- Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and Arlen Specter (R-Penn.), who basically threatened the league with a congressional hearing and/or losing its anti-trust exemption if it didn't agree to put this game on broadcast TV. And as a conservative, it's hard to cheer this kind of heavy-handed government intrusion into the private sector, especially when all that's at stake is entertainment.

But well, heck, I'm no libertarian, and this is big-H history in the making! So hooray for big government! Not since Congress wiped out the 55 mph speed limit has it done something that I can specifically point to as directly improving the quality of my life. And this may top even that! Why, this ought to push Congress' approval rating up into the thirties!

So thanks to the senators, and thanks to the commissioner. And one last thing ... Are you ready for some football?!?

First, here's a commentary of mine on subprime. I've longed to write about it but have avoided it previously, due to various family members working in it. Now that none of them are active in it, I thought I could open my mouth. And I hope to discuss it more on this blog in the future.

Second, let me be blunt. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto, a few miles from where I used to live, was tragic, sad, senseless, etc. And it was also predictable enough, in that volatile nation (any leader there risks death). This incident doesn't say much for stable, pro-American democracy in my homeland: An incompetent and corrupt yet charismatic leader gets killed, even though (and perhaps because) the U.S. likes her. A friend of mine tells me it's a cliche, but I always say that Pakistan is where easy answers go to die, and I'll keep saying that till someone gives me a better way of saying that (besides, nothing's a cliche till I'm done with it).

Some of the horrified but ignorant reaction on the part of U.S. politicians reflects the nature of how we inadvertently contribute to the mess. Statements by Giuliani or others indicate that Benazir was somehow the spinal column of Pakistani democracy. She wasn't. She was a disgraced politician who made a deal with Musharraf that would allow her to evade genuine and severe charges of corruption, so that she could return and share power with him. She then turned around and denounced him as an autocrat, when that proved the more pragmatic move.

Pardon my cynicism. I realize it seems out of place and politically incorrect so soon after a public death. But the manner in which U.S. politicians pandered to her, and promoted her, indeed reflects why many Pakistanis on the street feel manipulated by our nation's leaders.

No-shot GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul tossed out yet another juicy zinger this time on Meet the Press when he said that Lincoln was a bad guy for fighting the civil war. Paul’s solution: simply shell out some cash, buy the slaves, and set them free. One would like to believe that Paul is just jerking off the press and the public with his shoot from the lip, loose brained, solutions on everything from taxes to ending the Iraq war. And that his dig at Lincoln for fighting the Civil War is the latest in the train of dumb wit Paulisms.

But the Civil war and the Lincoln jibe needs a response for two reasons. The first is for its idiot read of history. Lincoln as an Illinois Congressman in 1849 proposed a bill for voluntary and gradual emancipation of the slaves in the District of Columbia. Lincoln toyed with the idea of offering compensation to get the slavemasters to go along with it. Congress dominated by Southerners and the slave owners showed absolutely no interest in taking a government bribe to give up their slaves in D.C. Lincoln didn’t give up the idea. In 1861, Lincoln, now president, dangled the carrot of federal dollars in front of the slaveowners in the Border States. He’d pay them $400 per slave to free them. There were no takers. The next year, Lincoln even arm-twisted Congress to pass a resolution providing for payment to the slaveowners in the Border States and elsewhere. That went nowhere too.

The slave masters understood something that Paul doesn’t. Slavery was not an aberrant, patchwork system that consigned a few million luckless blacks to hard, unpaid labor. Slavery was a cornerstone of the Southern economy. It wove personal lifestyle, custom, and comfort together for the benefit of the slave owners. Slavery was slyly encoded in articles in the Constitution, protected by court decisions, and bolstered by the full force of federal law (the enforement of the fugitive slave law). Lincoln had a better chance of dismantling slavery with dollars than Paul has of winning the White House.

The other more compelling reason to take on Paul’s dumb crack is that while the North may have won the war, the South won the peace. No other region has so dominated national politics--the military, the courts, Congress, the White House--as the South. It retooled slavery into a iron clad sytem of Jim Crow segregation, economic domination, and state government sanctioned violence to maintain power. No amount of money could have changed that.

The South maintained political dominance for nearly century after the end of slavery by forcing every Democrat or Republican that wanted to bag or stay in the White House to do and say as little as possible about race and racism, slavishly adhere to states rights, and pander to Southern politicians. When the civil rights movement momentarily changed this neat political formula white Southern Democrats simply swapped their Democratic political pin for a Republican one. In the eyes of many white Southerners, the Democratic Party became the hated symbol of integration and civil rights.

Millions in the South and elsewhere agree with Paul that the legacy of slavery has ruined the nation. If they could turn the clock back a century and a half they’d do just what Paul says and would not shed one drop of blood to free the slaves. Worse, they wouldn’t spend a penny to free them either. My suspicion is that neither would anti-big government, abolish-taxes Paul. Lincoln are you listening?

Chris' post on McCain reminds me of a recent Economist essay on a McCain revival:

Mr McCain is such a familiar figure that it is easy to forget how remarkable he is. He fought heroically in Vietnam, spending more than five years as a prisoner-of-war, when many other politicians of his generation discovered, like Dick Cheney, that they had “other priorities”. He has repeatedly risked his political career by backing unpopular causes.

Mr McCain's qualifications extend beyond character. Take experience. His range of interests as a senator has been remarkable, extending from immigration to business regulation. He knows as much about foreign affairs and military issues as anybody in public life. Or take judgment. True, he has a reputation as a hothead. But he's a hothead who cools down. He does not nurse grudges or agonise about vast conspiracies like some of his colleagues in the Senate. He has also been right about some big issues. He was the first senior Republican to criticise George Bush for invading Iraq with too few troops, and the first to call for Donald Rumsfeld's sacking. He is one of the few Republicans to propose sensible policies on immigration and global warming.

Mr McCain's qualities are particularly striking if you contrast him with his leading rivals. His willingness to stick to his guns on divisive subjects such as immigration stands in sharp contrast to Mr Romney's oily pandering. Mr Romney likes to claim that his views on topics such as gay rights and abortion have “evolved”. But they have evolved in a direction that is strikingly convenient—perhaps through intelligent design. Can a party that mocked John Kerry really march into battle behind their very own Massachusetts flip-flopper?

Few people ever actually read politicians' books, and for good reason -- usually they consist mostly of self-serving drivel. But Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe, to his great credit, read John McCain's tome, and gleaned this fascinating tidbit:

Eight years ago on the presidential campaign trail, after being burned in South Carolina for calling the Confederate flag is a racist symbol, McCain "clarified" his statement. His new position was that while some people regard the Stars and Bars as a symbol of slavery, he was not among them. McCain saw it "only as a symbol of heritage." Whenever reporters asked him about the subject, he would pull a note from his pocket, and re-read that statement. Why? As Jacoby writes:

By the fourth or fifth time the question came up, McCain later wrote in his 2002 memoir, Worth the Fighting For (coauthored with Mark Salter), he could have delivered the new response from memory.

"But I persisted with the theatrics of unfolding the paper and reading it as if I were making a hostage statement. I wanted to telegraph reporters that I really didn't mean to suggest I supported flying the flag, but political imperatives required a little evasiveness on my part. I wanted them to think me still an honest man, who simply had to cut a corner a little here and there so that I could go on to be an honest president. I think that made the offense worse. Acknowledging my dishonesty with a wink didn't make it less a lie. It compounded the offense by revealing how willful it had been. You either have the guts to tell the truth or you don't....

"I had not just been dishonest. I had been a coward, and I had severed my own interests from my country's. That was what made the lie unforgivable. All my heroes, fictional and real, would have been ashamed of me."

Wow. Ironically, in speaking about his lie, McCain is being more honest than any candidate in recent history. No excuses, no backpedaling, no rationalization. McCain admits he was wrong, that he is flawed, that he tries to learn from his failures.

Back when this race began, I never envisioned myself supporting John McCain. I knew his flaws too well, and measuring him up against my dream candidate, I found him wanting. But my dream candidate was only that -- a dream -- and compared to the flaws of his real-life rivals, McCain's no longer seem quite so troubling.

Like Bridget, I find myself "going back to the tried, true, and tested." McCain is a man of honor -- which doesn't mean he's perfect, but does mean he tries to grapple truly and honestly with his human imperfections. He's also moderate in the true sense of the word, which doesn't mean aping the liberal position on liberals' most sacred issues (a la Rudy), but bringing a non-ideological, principled pragmatism to his policies.

McCain might not be the ideal candidate, but to me anyway, he increasingly looks like the best one.

This seems like proof of this. Americans, let's show some taste and imagination, shall we...?

You just knew there was a local connection to the deadly Christmas Day tiger breakout at the San Francisco Zoo. And that connection is Manuel Mollinedo, the former general manager of the L.A. Zoo. Yikes. No matter what the decide will happen he will forever be the guy who let the tigers escape and eat people.

Santa caps off to Chris for his perspectives on Bill O'Reilly, the great Christmas Warrior, and Defender of the Faith.

I have some questions of my own for Mr. O'Reilly:

Now that secular culture has gone back to the malls to return gifts and forage at post-holiday sales, how are you continuing to celebrate the Christmas holiday that you so obviously cherish? Are you celebrating the full twelve days of Christmas, while tuning out secular culture's obsession with New Year's Eve parties?

And if, post-Dec. 25, you choose to have a profound, meaningful and ongoing encounter with the Jesus who is the reason for the season, have legal authorities been attempting to haul you away? Who, exactly, is keeping you and other pious men from enjoying the full potential of your holiday? Beyond your politically convenient grandstanding against the secular left, are you going to use your considerable media platform to encourage your own flock to enjoy said potential?

Just wondering.

My Sunday Viewpoint column on my down-and-out childhood and important lessons learned has been reprinted, well, lotsa lotsa places, including the Dallas Morning News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Houston Chronicle, the Montreal Gazette, and even as far away as the Daily Dispatch in South Africa. Consequently, I've been plugging away at answering lotsa reader mail. One pastor from North Carolina noted how much churches do to help the homeless; it was, indeed, a Catholic school where I found help as a kid. Others shared their own personal stories of hardship. And there was this letter from a reader of the Akron Beacon Journal:

"I have always thought about this very topic and your article touched me. Unfortunately, I am not sure if or how to act on my feelings. I would love to know if you are aware of any type of organization dedicating themselves to the humaness of homelessness; therfore offering every season as a season of giving respect and recognition."

In my column, I wrote about some of the everyday gestures that anybody can extend one-on-one to the homeless. In Los Angeles, we have people like Ted Hayes, who tirelessly advocates for the homeless. If you have advocates like Ted in your town, help their mission with fundraising activities or appealing the issues to your elected representatives. Remembering that so many of the homeless are veterans, there are opportunities to help with the Disabled American Veterans, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, or the National Veterans Foundation. Visit a local shelter and ask what you can do. Are there homeless folks in your neighborhood? Make a game plan with your friends, neighbors, fellow church members, fellow Rotarians, etc., about how to help. Remember that many programs to help the homeless are mired in bureaucratic red tape, and that many homeless need a bite to eat now -- so don't be afraid to brown-bag a few lunches and just hand them out.

One reader suggested using decommissioned military bases to house the homeless. Any other ideas on how to help? Post 'em here!

Yes, Virginia, there is a “War on Christmas,” and it dates back to well before political correctness, secularism, squeamish retailers, hyper-sensitive believers, or even Bill O’Reilly.

The real War on Christmas is so old, in fact, it’s older than Christmas itself. It began when Jesus was still in his mother’s womb. King Herod, learning that the Christ would soon arrive, dispatched the three wise men to find the newborn king — so that he might “come and worship him.”

The wise men, warned of Herod’s treachery in a dream, knew better than to comply with his wishes. So the king, “in a furious rage,” took matters into his own hands. As the Gospel of Matthew tells us, “He sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under.” Jesus only survived because Joseph — also warned in a dream — fled for Egypt by night.

Now that’s a war on Christmas.

And for 2000 years, with varying degrees of intensity, the war has raged on.

"It's a Wonderful Life" is the all-time Christmas-eve movie, and on this Christmas Eve, Jonathan has blessed us with a beautiful essay about the film in today's Daily News:

We are inclined, like George Bailey on the bridge, to see our lives in black and white, as success or failure, as good or bad. It is not so simple. Life is not so simple, and we are complex beings.

George chased a dream. He wanted success and adventure. He wanted to be an explorer, someone famous. He wanted to be an architect and build skyscrapers a mile high and bridges (ironic, huh?) miles long.

He equated success with fame and fortune - and when that didn't happen for him, he was blinded to what success, real success, is and how he had, in fact, achieved it.

The gift that he got on that bridge was not a literal angel. (I'm no "It's a Wonderful Life" fundamentalist.) He got to attend his own funeral and hear the eulogies - only done in the dramatic form of how the world would have been without him.

George was thus able to see that his success was in his family, in the good will of his neighbors and the love and respect of his friends. He came to understand that while he was looking up and not seeing the skyscrapers he hadn't built, he also did not see the houses he had built, the hearths he had stoked, the lives he had touched and the good he had done.

But you really need to read the whole thing. Merry Christmas, everybody!

I spend a lot of time following current events. It’s sometimes difficult not to get a little down about the state of humanity. Such encounters with the darkness are for me very brief. I’m an optimist. Like Anne Frank, I too “despite everything believe that people are basically good at heart.”

Yes, at this season we remember that there are Herods who destroy, but there are also heroes who heal our weary hearts. There are far more good people of every religion, ethnicity, race and class than there are bad. We read about the monsters. We see the violence. We feel afraid and dispirited. This is why I am so buoyed by an incident that took place this week in San Francisco (that was reported in Leah Garchik’s column on Friday in the S.F. Chronicle).

Cesar Martinez, a 14-year old student at Sacred Heart Academy was trying to get home after school and found himself at the BART station (the “metro” of SF). He also found that he was 25 cents short of the price of a ticket. Trying to get that quarter, he sought the assistance of strangers. He went up to well-dressed business people and regular commuters. They did, what many of us do, and that is averted their gaze, refused to look him in the eye and hurried past.

Just when he thought it could not get worse, it seemed to have. A homeless panhandler came up and hit on him for money. Cesar said that he couldn’t help because he himself was short of what he needed to get home. The panhandler reached deep into his own pocket, pulled out a quarter and gave it to Cesar.

Think for a moment about what a potentially transforming and hope-filled moment this was. If they each truly paid attention, they will never be the same. If we pay attention, we may never be the same.

Almost all religions teach us to be generous in spirit and to see beneath the surface of people. In Judaism there is a recurring theme that we ought to treat each person as if he or she could be the Messiah. That beggar, that old man, that young girl, that child could be the one who makes all the difference. And our kindness could make all the difference to that stranger. Christianity teaches the same lesson. Jesus says in Matthew 25 “Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.” It is in serving that we are up-lifted and in giving that we receive.

Cesar learned that you cannot always judge people by their exteriors—not their clothes, not their hygiene, not their education. Cesar learned that goodness and generosity can come from unexpected people.

And what might the panhandler have learned? I imagine that he is probably a person who believes that he could have done more with his life. It was surely not his dream or his parents’ dream that he would spend his days asking for handouts in a BART station. He is not likely often to find himself in a position of giving rather than receiving help. Think what it could mean to his sense of himself not have gotten a handout but to have handed out some of his precious substance. Neither the quarter nor the act of giving was an insignificant gesture.

Both in the giving and the receiving there was a blessing. Two people left that moment rich with possibilities of breaking through fears, stereotypes and assumptions. We too can leave this story changed. We can be inspired to look deeper inside ourselves and the strangers with whom we share this life. Not just a Christmas or Chanukah, but all year, we can practice seeing, as Charles Dickens wrote, “people below us as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

This sweet moment certainly changes the meaning and context of the biblical quote but something wonderful happened when a beggar rendered unto Cesar a coin who value far exceeded the number stamped on it. It has touched my heart and I hope yours.

I realize that Ron Paul appeals to the Libertarian in many voters. I realize that his grass-roots band of supports have roved around Los Angeles in a little pack, last seen by yours truly waving signs at 405 Freeway drivers from the Sunset Boulevard overpass. And I also understand that said supporters have taken great pride in becoming the worst spammers on Earth and raising moula for their main man.

But come on, folks: Keeping a campaign donation from a white supremacist is disgusting. Really.

"Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul has received a $500 campaign donation from a white supremacist, and the Texas congressman doesn't plan to return it, an aide said Wednesday.

Don Black, of West Palm Beach, recently made the donation, according to campaign filings. He runs a website called Stormfront with the motto, 'White Pride World Wide.' The site welcomes postings to the 'Stormfront White Nationalist Community.'

'Dr. Paul stands for freedom, peace, prosperity and inalienable rights. If someone with small ideologies happens to contribute money to Ron, thinking he can influence Ron in any way, he's wasted his money,' Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said. 'Ron is going to take the money and try to spread the message of freedom.'

...Black said he supports Paul's stance on ending the war in Iraq, securing America's borders and his opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants."

Oh, please. There's no way to spin this into anything admirable or acceptable. Paul's just being a greedy lil' bastard. And you know I'm not playing favorites with this because just this past week I knocked Giuliani and Romney for accepting endorsements from unsavory religious "leaders."

The Paul Posse claim they're at the forefront of a "revolution" with Ron Paul's candidacy. How about this for a revolutionary political idea -- putting principles of basic human decency before political profit?

For the slightest of moments, before his poll surge, I thought that Mike Huckabee could be the one for the GOP nod. The affection has faded, though. From watching him get mired in these religious back-and-forths to demonstrating a shallow grasp in the field of foreign policy (where Mitt Romney has yet to prove himself an expert, either, and Barack Obama's understanding makes one want to cry), there's something that rubbing me the wrong way. One Jewish Republican friend confided in me weeks ago that he's still nervous about Huckabee's preacher past, and how that would play into future power of the evangelical bloc in the Republican Party. And now that the race is turning into Baptist vs. Mormon, it's getting really annoying.

I feel myself more and more going back to the tried, true, and tested -- and the man who can snag moderates without being so Rudy. Months and months ago, when it was clearly the politically unpopular thing to do, John McCain unequivocally backed the surge in Iraq, even if it would cost him the campaign -- which, for a while, it looked like it would. He turned out to be right. But his surge support never seemed like a political gamble, yet a stand taken out of firm conviction and good understanding of foreign policy. And that's what we need in the White House.

Well, this is fun-tastic: Defense Secretary Robert Gates says Al Qaeda is mobilizing against Pakistan. This news comes out the day after a massive suicide bombing there.

Most people have varying opinions about the extent to which Pervez Musharraf has bungled Pakistan's attempt to fight the jihadists on its soil. We can all agree that it could or should have been handled differently, but it is hard to say how much tougher he realistically could have been against them.

This has been the ultimate conundrum: By pressing ahead too hard against the jihadists in the anarchic Northwest, he generated fury there and resentment in the rest of the country, which suspected him of being a mere U.S. puppet. By not pressing hard enough, he allowed Al Qaeda to regroup. Damned if you do....

The bottom line is that Pakistani citizens are being killed.

My father is the only member of my immediate family in Pakistan, although most of my relatives and my sister-in-law's family are there. They all live in Islamabad, the once-sleepy, then-smoggy, now chaotic town that I lived in back in 1978-80 (neighboring Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviets on Christmas day of 1979, which led to much of the current craziness).

A while back, the Islamabad Marriott hotel at which my brother was married was the target of a partly bungled suicide bombing. A mosque nearby was the site of a bloody showdown between government troops and radicals. And so on.

In our X-Box generation, we all may have ideas about which buttons, pressed with the right precision, would yield the best results. But few of us have been either in lower Manhattan on a September morning or in Islamabad or Peshawar in recent years -- places where the stakes are genuine. Places where strategic theory gives way to bloody reality. I do hope we as Americans can empathize with Pakistanis as they battle the demon in their midst, realizing they face the fallout of the GWOT daily in ways most of us cannot relate to.

Sometimes in politics, the little lie can be more damning than the big one.

George H.W. Bush might have been crossing his fingers when he said "no new taxes," but even when he broke that pledge, it never stuck him with the public image of a liar. Voters might not forgive a big lie (they didn't forgive Bush in 1992), but they can understand it -- that is, they can empathize with why the politician might have delivered it.

But it's the little lie that can really expose the politician as a fraud, the lie about something ultimately inconsequential. Case in point: Hillary Clinton's old claim that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to climb Mt. Everest -- well after Hillary was born. It's a silly little lie, really a meaningless and utterly unnecessary one -- and that's what makes it so politically damaging. We start to wonder if we can believe anything this person tells us.

Enter Mitt Romney, who now admits that he wasn't quite telling the whole truth when he said he "saw" his father march with Martin Luther King, Jr. The Boston Globe reports:

Mitt Romney acknowledged yesterday that he never saw his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. as he asserted in a nationally televised speech this month, and historical evidence shows that Michigan's Governor George Romney and the civil rights leader never did march together.

Romney said his father had told him he had marched with King and that he had been using the word "saw" in a "figurative sense."

How's that for Clintonian? Romney's defense seems to boil down to: It depends on what your definition of "saw" is. Really.

"If you look at the literature, if you look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of in the sense I've described," Romney told reporters in Iowa. "It's a figure of speech and very familiar, and it's very common. And I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort."

Oh boy. Now maybe what Mitt's saying here is true. Maybe he never meant to deceive; he was just being a little hyperbolic. But politicians have to be careful about their hyperbole -- just remember Al Gore, who still can't live down his claim to have invented the Internet.

And that's especially true for politicians, like Romney, who have a history of amending their positions when it just so happens to suit their political ambition.

In the grand scheme of political lies, this one is pretty petty -- which is why it will probably stick.

I have no idea how I get on these mailing lists, but somehow, I do, and so I am the proud recipient of the invitation to the right, which I now share with all of you.

Now, be honest: Is there really a better way you can imagine ringing in the new year then to take in some East German punk rock and raise some dough for Dennis Kucinich? Does life get any better than this?

And to think, at midnight, when all your lame friends will be kissing their sweehearts, singing "Auld Lang Syne," or watching the Big Ball drop, attendees at this soiree will get to participate in a *LIVE* video conference with Dennis and Elizbeth K! Just imagine: You can ask the Kuciniches anything you want -- about WTC #7, hemp farming, Roswell -- you name it!

As far as I can tell, there's only one downer: the "scrumptious vegetarian buffet." You'd think for $108 you'd at least get some real food.

Oh well, rocking the vote has its costs!

This one appears in today's Daily News, courtesy of the AP. It's of "Bulldozer" a five-month-old baby giraffe at the San Francisco Zoo, getting a bottle courtest of St. Nick.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I admit, Boris crossed the Hamsters Guild picket lines to work on this short -- which actually had a purpose, as my video Christmas card (can you think of a better way to impress State Department sources??). And the little fluffball did it in one take, with only one piece of peanut from the food service truck. Of course, by the end of rolling around on furry surfaces he was so full of static electricity that if I'd sent him down to the Chevron to pump gas he most likely would have spontaneously combusted.

When on long driving trips, as I was today, I often listen to Rush Limbaugh. His rants and screeds keep my blood pressure elevated and my attention focused. I often find him funny and fairly clever in his arguments and rhetoric. I can appreciate a pro—even when I strenuously disagree.

Therefore I was so stunned to find myself giving him “major liberal dittos” today that I nearly ran off of I-5 (on my way to visit my two perfect, beautiful and brilliant granddaughters). In between razzing Hillary for her haggard appearance, Bill for his lusts and global warming Cassandras for believing that global warming is man made, he was mocking the idea that ethanol could contribute in any way to a better world. I so hated the fact that I agreed with him that I spent the next four hours questioning my reasoning.

Upon conscientious reflection, I again concluded that ethanol is a terrible idea on every level. It does not make the environment cooler. We must refine it and then burn it in our cars. We still expend energy in tilling the fields, planting and then harvesting the crops. It does not significantly change our importation of oil from the Middle East—and won’t for the foreseeable future.

Ethanol is a feel good boondoggle. Only John McCain has had the huevos, the chutzpah to tell Iowans that he opposes governmental subsides for ethanol. The rest of the presidential panderers tell the Iowans what they want to hear. It seems like a win-win, but it is really a lose-lose proposition.

Some day, our descendents will look at our choice to turn food into fuel for our cars, while human beings starved, as a crime against humanity. How, I wonder, can my fellow liberals think that this is not monstrous but actually a good and noble idea?

That we, in all countries, spew smoke into the skies is bad enough. That our industrial production poisons our rivers and oceans is clearly terrible. But how, in good conscience, can we trade arable land and the production of calories, that feed bodies and keep people alive, into transportation? Our choice to do this has a cost in lives.

Some day we may turn the wind and tides into energy. Some day we will learn how to build the means of storing the sun’s energy. Till then, we will burn oil and coal, and it will degrade our environment. But turning our fields from food to fuel does several murderous things. It raises the price of food. The less corn for food for us and livestock, the more expensive the corn becomes. The higher the subsidy for corn, the more fields get turned to its cultivation and removed from other food crops.
When you consider how much corn is used in food, there is an enormous domino effect in our whole food chain.

Oil costs far more than we think. There is the price of getting it, refining it and shipping it. There is also the unaccounted cost of protecting it—hence wars around the world, the costs of which are not directly paid at the pump, but are paid none-the-less in our military budget and foreign aid to protect trade routs and prop up bad governments.

These are all good reasons to move towards other ways of producing energy. There is a price for oil that we pay in blood. But squeeze corn life also oozes out—not with the terrible violence of our oil wars of the last 100 years, but with slow and agonizing deaths by hunger and malnutrition.

Yes, other non-caloric crops have similar consequences—coffee, tea, tobacco and even flowers come at a cost. Maybe we are willing to pay, but it is never with the thought that we pay with our own lives or the lives of our children. Yet, it does come home to us—but again, like the invisible but real oil subsidy, not directly. Hunger breeds desperation and war. In our shrinking world, we will not be able to contain the hunger in the Third World. Their pain, their suffering and their rage will come to our shores, and we shall surely send our children to theirs.

As bad as oil is and as much as we need to transition from it, taking food from the mouths of babies so we can argue about changing mandated mileage from 25 to 35 MPG in ten years is cruel nonsense and the future will not forgive us our moral callousness or willful ignorance.

Many of our social policies and choices are between imperfect policies. We make many difficult, really agonizing, moral choices. Moral calculus should be agonizing and not feel good delusions. We are used to thinking about guns and butter. How about oil, food, flour and flowers? We have tough choices to make; let’s make them honestly.

I guess with Stephen Colbert indefinitiely off the air, there's no one around to parody Bill O'Reilly -- so O'Reilly has decided to do the job himself.

That's the only explanation I can come up with for O'Reilly's latest column, which will appear in Sunday's Daily News. At issue is the town of Great Barrington, Mass., which is mandating that all Christmas lights be shut off by 10 p.m., so as to reduce the town's "carbon footprint."

A goofy bit of pointless eco-overkill? Without a doubt. But O'Reilly can't leave it at that. He sees much more sinister forces at work:

The real strategy here is to diminish the public display of Christmas in that secular town.

So how do I know that? Well, thanks for asking. As it happens, I sent a Factor producer, Jesse Watters, up to talk to this (town official):

Watters: Isn't this a just ruse to de-emphasize Christmas?
Dlugosz: These are holiday lights ... we don't think we should be putting lights all over the place and impacting our environment. We're taking a realistic approach to holiday lights."

Did you notice the term "holiday lights?"

Ah-ha! He said holiday lights -- clearly this is an anti-Christian pogrom!

Good grief, Bill. Let it go. Please, let it go. I'm begging you.

For the record, I don't deny that some sort of "War on Christmas" is afoot -- by which I mean that aggressive secularists are tying to purge any hint of religious expression, especially the Christian kind, from the public square, and some gutless corporations and school boards are knuckling under to them. As much as some liberals like to scoff at the idea of an anti-Christmas agenda, It is a real phenomenon, which is why O'Reilly strikes a chord when he talks about it.

But just because there are some grinches who want to do away with Christmas doesn't mean that one is lurking under every bed, in every closet, or at every town-hall meeting.

O'Reilly here reminds me a lot of certain ethnic activists, feminists, anti-communists, etc. who see evidence of their bogeymen -- be it racism, sexism, communism, or what have you -- everywhere, even where none exists. Those evils are real, to be sure, but sometimes we get so focused on rooting them out that we start chasing phantoms.

And when that happens, noble causes begin to look foolish.

Perhaps it's time for the "Culture Warrior" to take a break from the "War on Christmas." Because by sliding well into the world of self-parody, O'Reilly is now only hurting his cause.

It's Britney Spears of course. At just 26, this pop star's trainwreck of a life -- head shaving, arrest, drugs, rehab, divorce, losing custody of her two boys, and now a third pregnancy with a boyfriend -- has probably made more money for the media and Time Warner empire than any machiavellian European dictator or smarty pants scientist.

Though her pregnant baby sister may soon trump her in popularity.

Yes, authoritarianism is not hot, though few tyrants wear a wifebeater shirt quite as well. Time did a good job of making Putin look like a bobblehead doll on its cover, but I wholeheartedly agree with Chris that the cover would have best gone elsewhere.

My choice? Garry Kasparov. The only thing that has kept this opposition leader alive under the Putin regime is the fact that he's a chess legend. The fact that he's a chess legend also makes him totally hot, shirt or no shirt. Kasparov could have comfortably retired and kicked back for the rest of his life, but he's taken the challenge to fight for freedom for the Russian people. He is truly David vs. Goliath. He has cojones.

Maureen Dowd summed up in her column this week what I've noticed for a while: when men compete with women they often resort to attacks on their personal looks as radio personality Rush Limbaugh (no looker himself, eh ladies?) did recently in regards to Hilary Clinton. I call it the Female Factor, and it didnt' start, and won't end, with Hillary running for president of the United States

Nor is this just a conservative thing, though there does seem to be more anger toward women who step out of the "traditional" roles, such as homemaker, secretary, trophy wife or First Lady, from that side of the political spectrum. Nope, liberals are just as likely to slam women they don't like with personal insults about their character or looks. Just witness the words people use to describe Ann Coulter whenever she says something calculatedly shocking. You know, the words so mean and nasty and gender-specific that I can't write them on a blog sponsored by a family newspaper.

No point in complaining that it's not fair. It just is. Women are judged by their looks and their age often before their accomplishments and their character, because it works to make us feel bad. We understand our attractiveness is often used as a measure of our worth, and even if reject it intellectually, we can't help but be affected by the truth of it. This isn't likely to change any time soon. If there's a bright spot is that lookism is starting to be applied to men as well. Not the best kind of parity, but we takes what we can gets.

Speaking of which, Hillary's possible presidential opponent seems to be putting on a little weight and losing even more hair. Stress eating? Hormonal fluctuation? This could be fun.

My friends at the Providence Journal ran this Christmas musing of mine today.

Amazingly, Bridget hasn't linked to this yet, but her heart-throb, Vladimir Putin, has been named Time's Person of the Year. Score one for all former KGB goons turned wannabe despots!

Still, we should be grateful for small mercies ... at least it wasn't Al Gore!

In fairness, I must admit that as much as I thought Gore was a poor choice for the Nobel Peace Prize, he would have been a decent one for Person of the Year. While I'm not sure how pronounced his influence has been on the grass-roots level, clearly he caught the attention of the world's elites and the media (just remember the Oscars). And, for better or for worse, ours is a mass media-driven consciousness.

Who else could have been a contender? One of my colleagues at the Daily News suggested "The Cheater," which I thought was a good idea in light of how many high-profile people got busted, in one way or another, for cheating this year. The Celebrity DUI seems like another possibility. Or, for that matter, how about "Fallen Celebrities" in general? This seems to have been a year of perpetual scandal for the people we lionize, idolize, worship -- and then tear down.

As for specific individuals, though, some names come to mind: In the long term, Mother Teresa's posthumous witness to her dark night of the soul, and the great depths of her faith, could have a profound spiritual influence -- but not one that will likely kick in before 12/31/07. Had Barack Obama been more successful as a candidate this year, he would have been a strong contender, too, if for no other reason than the implications for national race relations. And how about Oprah? The fact that she has single-handedly salvaged Obama's campaign shows us just how powerful her influence his -- year in, year out.

But if you ask me, 2007's Person of the Year is Shinya Yamanaka -- a professor at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences at Japan's Kyoto University, and the developer of the most promising innovation in stem-cell research to date.

The effects of Dr. Yamanaka's discovery cannot be overstated: He has come up with a method of pursuing potentially life-saving cures that is cheaper, easier, more effective, and infinitely more ethical than embryonic stem-cell research. His discovery will likely save millions of lives -- in our laboratories as well as in our hospitals.

Yamanaka has demonstrated that good science can -- indeed, must -- be pursued ethically. And he has brought the powerful testimony of science to what is the greatest moral dilemma (and moral failing) of our age: our cavalier attitude toward human life. "When I saw the embryo," Yamanka says of the time he looked through a microscope at a fertility clinic, "I suddenly realized there was such a small difference between it and my daughters. I thought, we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way."

Time Magazine has overlooked Dr. Yamanka's awesome contribution to humanity this year, but I suspect history will not.

The shock jock on a popular Los Angeles talk radio station screamed through the microphone with apoplectic delight, “You see, they hate each other too!" The “they” and the “each other” are African-Americans and Latinos. His shout was loud, crude, and aimed to do what shock jocks get paid to do, namely shock. But this was not standard shock jock bluster. He based his rant on a troubling eye catching response to a question in a recent survey by the New America Media. NAM is a consortium of ethnic media groups in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a wide-ranging poll, it sampled opinion among blacks, Latinos and Asians about each other.

The response that raised the eyebrows was that a near majority of Latinos said that blacks were crime prone and that they feared for their safety around them. A slight majority of blacks returned the negative typecast compliment and said that Latinos take jobs from blacks and they are out to undercut their political power.

Those are the type of utterances that white bigots supposedly spew. However, now they just as easily rolled off of black and Latino lips. That revelation for the shock jock and for many other whites merely confirmed that blacks and Latinos can be bigots too. The ugly truth is they’re right. And that also tells much about the often muddled, confused, and conflicted picture of race and ethnic relations in America.

For decades bigotry was always defined as racial discrimination and violence against blacks by whites. The black power movement and the strident black militancy of the 1960s dramatically changed that. Now blacks were hammered for their anti-white racial taunts. That eventually morphed into and codified as blacks playing the race card whenever things went especially bad. That always meant making whites feel guilty to get an advantage. The point is that blacks and whites were still the only ones that hurled vicious and vile negative stereotypes about each other and at each other, and that’s where it ended. The NAM poll convincingly exploded the notion that blacks and whites were the only groups that saw each other through jaundiced racial lens.

Blacks, Latinos and Asians can hold the same hostile racial attitudes toward each other, and aren’t afraid to voice them.

The common litany of stereotypes, myths and misconceptions that many blacks and Latinos now routinely toss out about each other sooner or later will rudely force their way into and badly taint the way blacks and Latinos see each other. In a worst-case scenario, the gulf in attitudes, perceptions and ultimately relations could widen rather than narrow between the two groups. The New America Media survey zeroed in on the negative beliefs and sentiments that blacks and Latinos hold about each. It other offered more proof that race relations and worse racial bigotry can no longer be colored in black and white.

Surely no one other than the loved ones of Shirley Lee Williams,72, is more upset how her body was overlooked in a crashed car in Tarzana on Saturday than the emergency responders who missed finding her crumbled form under the passenger-side airbag. When family members discovered she was missing, authorities checked the car that had been towed to a yard where they found her body.

It's a horrifying story, made only less so by coroner's statement that she probably died minutes after the crash. And many people will be expecting the authorities to do something so that this never happens again. But before people go hogwild condemning the police or EMTs or coming up with laws requiring that another form be filled out for each accident, we ought to consider that sometimes mistakes are just that. In my early days as a reporter, I've been to too many accident scenes to count. And the men and women who respond do everything they can to help in chaotic, gruesome and often dangerous situations. This was a freak accident that is getting so much attention precisely because it is so freakish and rare.

Indeed, the most suspicious thing is why Williams' son, the driver who crashed the car into the side of a building, didn't tell authorities his elderly mother was in the car. You'd think he might have been concerned enough to ask if she was alright.

But be sure that from now on, rescuers are going to be looking under every airbag for possible victims. Maybe even in trunks, under seats, in glove boxes, cargo holds...

Clotaire Rapaille, the brilliant psychiatrist and marketer, has written about how America is an adolescent culture in all the good ways and all the vexing ways. Unlike old, stodgy Europe, America is youthful, headstrong, ambitious, indefatigable, defiant, and optimistic.

That came to mind while looking at a statement by Frank Schaeffer in his new book, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. Schaeffer's observation:

We Americans -- secular, religious, of the left and the right -- like to think of ourselves as good. This national delusion is our real religion. We think we know something special about virtue, the way the French believe they have the inside track on food and wine. When we do bad things, we like to dress them up and call them good, for the same reason no Frenchman will admit to being a bad cook. We can't just hit an enemy, we have to call it "spreading democracy." We can't just abort a baby, we have to call it "reproductive rights".... Perception is reality in politics, maybe in ethics too.

Well, this is pretty amusing. Earlier this week, I complained that Mike Huckabee, my one-time favorite GOP presidential candidate, was selling his soul by flip-flopping on immigration to win the endorsement of "Minuteman" founder Jim Gilchrist. But perhaps I was too hasty in my judgment.

My first mistake was accepting at face value the L.A. Times' description of Huckabee's new immigration plan -- leave within four months, or face the round-up. Gilchrist, apparently, fell for that description, too, which is why he signed on to Huck's campaign. But as WorldNetDaily reports, there's more. Huckabee's plan would make illegal immigrants leave the country, but only -- in his words -- for a "days, maybe weeks" until they could be processed and legally allowed to re-enter. And at that point, they become fully documented, and a path to citizenship opens up.

That's a lot more realistic, no? It takes people out of the shadows, requires accountability, and promises to end the problem of illegal entry by creating a sensible, legal alternative.

No wonder the restrictionists hate it. For all their insistence that they love legal immigration, it's just the illegal kind they hate, they invariably resent any plan that would replace the latter with the former. Go figure.

So, when Gilchrist finally caught on to the full nature of Huckabee's plan, he publicly considered yanking his endorsement. And a slew of anti-immigration groups signed onto an anti-Huckabee, anti-Gilchrist manifesto.

But after a couple days' examination, Gilchrist has decided to stay with Huckabee -- even though, he admits, he doesn't much like Huck's immigration plan.

Suddenly, I find this endorsement a lot less distasteful. It's inexcusable for Huck, or anyone, to sell out his principles to appease some radical, influential constituency. But, if he can stick to his principles and still win the constituency's support -- indeed, even help nudge said constituency a little closer to reason -- well, that's a feather in his cap, as far as I'm concerned.

My column today is one that I had to write. In light of all the recent arguments about how much a candidate's religion should figure into Campaign 2008, I've been thinking more about the endorsements from questionable religious leaders. Like Pat Robertson endorsing Giuliani, and Giuliani standing on a stage beaming with, accepting the endorsement of, a man who's said some pretty unsavory things in the guise of religious leadership.

Giuliani is hardly singled out here: Mitt Romney had previously courted Robertson's endorsement with appearances at Regent University, one in which he suggested that the single life was selfish. 'You cross into the deep waters by marrying and raising good children,' Romney said to Regent graduates this spring.

Romney got the endorsement of Catholic-bashing Bob Jones III, who as president of the school in 2000 only dropped its ban on interracial dating under heavy media scrutiny. 'We have the same things we want to fight for on issue after issue, so I'm happy to have his support,' Romney said in October.

Lifting the ban on interracial dating came with a caveat that parents give written consent. 'When you date interracially or marry interracially, it cuts you off from people,' Jones reportedly said in March 2000.

Haven't we moved past the point of endorsements from folks like this mattering anymore?

At some point, wouldn't a candidate of character stand up and say, 'Sorry, endorsement not needed'?

Now, there's another thing about Romney that I looked into over the weekend. The name of Gary Jarmin, a conservative activist who ran a distasteful senior scare scam and described from the horse's mouth as operating in the service of Sun Myung Moon, originally appeared on the roster of Romney's National Faith and Values Steering Committee. It was removed there, but still appears on this follow-up press release about additions to the committee. So I contacted the Romney campaign and asked if Jarmin was still on the committee, and received this response: "He had to resign because of other commitments."

Is "other commitments" code for "you're a liability, see ya"? Rumor has it that the WaPo has been probing Jarmin. 'Twas only a matter of time before the Romney connection came up.

It doesn't deter crime. It's expensive. It's needless in today's world. It puts innocent lives at risk. And in the state of New Jersey, it -- capital punishment -- is no longer.

Yesterday, Gov. John Corzine signed a law ending the death penalty in the Garden state, and commuting to life-without-parole the death sentences of eight condemned inmates. This marks the first time in 40 years a state has opted to dispense with capital punishment.

But could it be a trend? And could California be next?

As I wrote in a Daily News column nearly five years ago (re-posted after the jump), the death penalty in California has become an expensive joke. It serves little purpose to maintain it, and doing so comes at a steep cost, both financially and morally.

For decades, the Democratic Party stood valiantly against popular opinion and for its principles in opposing capital punishment, but that ended around the time of Clinton, when the party decided the issue was a loser, and winning mattered more than anything else. Since then, neither party -- and only a handful of politicians in either -- has been willing to talk about the issue honestly.

But maybe that's changing. Polls have shown a softening of public opinion in the issue, and in New Jersey, politicians clearly felt safe enough in their jobs to voe the right way. Time will tell if politicians in other states, including California, show the courage to follow suit.

It's not just Bridget and I who are (surprisingly) warming up to John McCain. It's a full-blown movement. It must be -- both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal say so. Quoth the times:

In a sign of a re-energized candidacy, (McCain) plans to return after Christmas Day to campaigning in Iowa, where he has failed, until recently, to gain support and has devoted few resources since the near-collapse of his campaign in the summer...

The crowds following Mr. McCain (in New Hampshire) have been steadily growing in the last month. On Monday, they burst out the door of American Legion Post 59 in Hillsborough as he announced an endorsement by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut.

It is a trifecta of major newspaper endorsements, from The Des Moines Register, The Manchester Union Leader and The Boston Globe, along with others, that has buoyed the campaign with a little more than two weeks before the first nominating contests.

Is McCain peaking at just the right moment? Could be. Meanwhile, things aren't going so well for Rudy Giuliani. The New York Sun reports:

Rudolph Giuliani's decision to largely abandon the early voting state of New Hampshire and concentrate his efforts on the Florida primary three weeks later reflects an uncomfortable truth for the former New York mayor: The more he campaigned in the Granite State and the more he spent on advertising there, the more his poll numbers dropped.

For once, a prediction of mine seems to be bearing out. As I have said repeatedly (see here and here) the more Republicans get to know Rudy, the less they'll like him.

What a fascinating trip this campaign has been, with all its ups and downs. A Rudy-Hillary race once seemed ineivtable; now it looks like neither might make it to the general election. And the McCain resurgence makes things all the more interesting: A solid man of principle, McCain would be the perfect anti-Hillary. His crossover appeal would arguably make him the most competitive Republican. And if the Dems were foolish enough to nominate Obama or Edwards, McCain would have to be the favorite, IMO.

Remember the headline, friends, as it will be relevant in uno momento. It is a phrase that resonates with me at the moment, and I can still see Drill Sergeant Walton, his brown-n-round campaign hat perfectly perched, explaining this concept to my eagerly push-upping platoon on a range at Ft. Benning, one chilly November day, a few years ago. I remember not the transgression, but the lesson is fixed firmly in my memory (not seared upon my soul, Senator Kerry, but solid irregardless): "Pri'at, there ain' no cure fo' stoopid."

But, I digress (though the reader is encouraged to hold that thought).

Normally, when your truly posts or comments upon this hallowed page, it is to defend the officers of the LAPD, or highlight the inteptitude of their critics-come-managers.

Much to my chagrin, upon occasion, the boys (and girls) in blue leave themselves (and me) with no solid cover from which to return suppressive (and, might I add, friendly) fire. And, yeeeeeehaw, the folks at Valley Traffic Division could not have done much worse this weekend.

Sadly, the end state of this matter may prove utterly without humor.

It seems that Valley Traffic responded to an injury collision this weekend, and was a tad bit less than thorough. They failed to note the gravely injured and/or dead/dying elderly woman in the passenger seat of a car that had crashed into a business. She was covered, it seems by the airbag of the car. After completing their "inspection" of the scene and "examining" the evidence, the car was towed to a local wrecking yard, where Ms. Shirley Williams, age 78, of Paso Robles, was found. The next day. Dead.

I should add, the same failures were fully executed by the LAFD. They did not check the whole car for damage or victims. But the cops were there longer, and dealt with the matter in more detail. Supposedly anyway. One must wonder had the driver been intoxicated would VTD have missed an open container on the same seat, shrouded by an air bag. Had he been a suspect in a drive-by shooting, would South East GED have missed a Glock under that seat? And what about the vehicle inventory form from when the car was impounded? Didn't "person, female, 1 each" kind of ring any bells?

It is a notion so ridicluous as to seem absurd.

Yet, there she was. Right under their noses.

Now it is up to the coronor to determine if Ms. Williams died upon impact or if her life drained away in a junk yard in Conoga Park.

How sad. How frightening.

My first post ever here was to blast away at Police Commissioner Robert Saltzman's freshman proclamation that the LAPD's biggest problem is a lack of diversity. I submit not. In fact, Commissioner Saltzman, I submit the the LAPD seems to have acquired an excellently diverse cross-section of idiots, hired for something other than their crime cracking skills. Society is full of idiots and crooks. I should hope the LAPD's "diversity" wouldn't strive to include either, but I might just be missing the point of all this nose counting. But, perhaps this was an aberration. Perhaps all the idiots gathered at this one scene. I suspect not.

Whatever the case, Ms. Williams was neither protected nor served when she most needed the LAPD. Yet, her case will attract no march from Al Sharpton. Naji Ali will not bring his one-man travelling circus to the Valley. My colleague Earl Ofari Huthinson shan't opine upon this injustice.

I submit Shirley Williams was far more a victim than Rodney King ever conjured himself to be in all his post-beating stupors combined.

I first learned the true character of cops on a Thanksgiving weekend a decade or so ago. I was a street crime reporter in the San Gabriel Valley, and rolled out at 2 a.m. on the Saturday of the holiday weekend for a fatal wreck. A car upside down, fully engulfed. In the flotsam and jetsam created by a blazing Mustang sliding down the freeway on its roof, we discovered a child seat. For more than an hour, on a barely lit strech of road, I lent a hand as the cops checked under shrubs and ivy, down embankments and in an underpass - everythingin a 500-foot radius. The first place one CHP sergeant checked was the oncoming lanes, on the other side of the center devider. He did so equipped only with a flashlight to both find a victim and ward off speeding drunks.

If a child was there, those cops were going to find it.

But that Ms. Williams would have had the same - as she should have.

This sort of mishap is inexcuseable, and is the domain of civil servant bureaucrats, not those who serve their fellow man.

There ain't no cure for stupid. No cure, indeed. But you can prevent it, Mr. Saltzman.

Well... they are both single...

Following up on Chris' post... this morning at 3-something a.m. I watched "Honest Joe" Lieberman -- the man who will always have my heart for sticking it to the Dems who gave him the shaft -- endorse John McCain on Fox News. For weeks, in political discussions, I've said, "John McCain was soooo eight years ago." That was his glory moment. But let's be serious -- hours before the endorsement I finished a column on some kooky endorsements other GOP hopefuls have nabbed, and how said candidates' gleeful acceptance of such questionable folks is, well, utterly depressing. I know McCain has backbone and principles that have sometimes pissed conservatives off, but the point is he has backbone and principles. So does Lieberman. So my mind is still drifting on my '08 pick, but the guy who stood behind the surge while reaching out to the Univision audience is starting to grab my attention more...

Would I vote for a McCain-Lieberman ticket? Heck, yeah!!

OK, me neither. But that won't stop me from plugging this very funny ESPN story. It's penned by none other than my brother-in-law, who spent a whole day following around Tiger Woods, and who has documented the experience for all the world to read.

That should be the nickname for the duo of Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman, the latter of whom (a Democrat) endorsed the former (a Republican) for president today -- in matching sweaters! Generally I think that endorsements do little to win support for a candidate, but this one may be different.

Usually, a high-profile endorsement is treacherous because, for all the people it can woo, it can also alienate others (i.e., Pat Robertson's backing Rudy Giuliani, or Jim Gilchrist's support of Mike Huckabee). But the only people who don't like Lieberman are the hard-core lefties, and they're not going to support a GOP candidate anyway. So a Lieberman endorsement costs McCain exactly zero votes, while possibly making him more attractive to moderate Democrats in the general election, as well as to national-security-first Republicans who might otherwise lean toward Giuliani in the primary.

If nothing else, should McCain win the GOP nomination (doubtful), expect a rockin' Lieberman speech at the GOP convention next summer.

And a prediction: If McCain is president (doubly doubtful) and the Democrats control the Senate by only one vote (triply doubtful), expect to see Lieberman bolt parties and return the Senate to the GOP ...

In case you missed it, in Sunday's Viewpoint, KABC host and Daily News columnist Doug McIntyre laid down two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions AND a sesame-bun on L.A. City Councilwoman Jan Perry's plan to ban new fast-food restaurants in her district:

Let's examine Perry's quote of note: "We have a serious problem in my district with fast-food restaurants and the increasing level of obesity and diabetes."

Now, if we made this a fill-in-the-blank contest and asked Perry's constituents to complete the sentence: "We have a serious problem in my district with __________."

How many folks do you suppose would answer, "fast-food restaurants?" I'd be high-balling it at 0 percent.

Rotten schools, gang murders, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, crummy housing, no jobs, lousy public transportation, did I mention gang murders? Any or all jump to mind as pressing, immediate priorities for the L.A. City Council, but leave it to Perry to tackle the really tough problems lesser leaders might dodge - the Egg McMuffin vs. the Bacon Breakfast Jack.

Really, you need to read the whole thing.

From our Washington reporter, Lisa Friedman, in Sunday's paper:

"Rep. Howard Berman, D-Van Nuys, who said one of the earliest causes he embraced while in college at UCLA was the abolishment of the House Un-American Activities Committee, said the era underscores the importance of being vigilant against curtailing civil liberties in the name of national security.

Berman said he finds some parallels in what he described as today's 'very radical concerns about radical jihadists.' That, he argued, has led to 'overreaches' in the Patriot Act and other tools Congress passed as part of the War on Terror.

...Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus of The Nation magazine, said he thinks a similar blacklisting would be unlikely today, both because the media would not keep the story silent as they did in the 1950s and because of the new strength of independent filmmakers and the Internet.

'There's such a profusion of ways to distribute ideas,' agreed Berman, whose district includes most of the major studios. 'The days when four or five top executives could get together and stop people from working because of their political views are over, hopefully.'"

Well, congressman, these are the days when four or five top executives can get together and stop people from working because of their political views -- if those views are conservative. I can't tell you how many people I've met in the industry who've a) lost out on work because of their right-of-center politics, b) have had to put up with workplace harassment because of their right-of-center politics, or c) are scared stiff that any of their Hollywood co-workers or bosses will learn that they vote right-of-center, because they fear the repercussions it will have on their careers.

I once heard director/producer David Zucker -- who became Republican after 9/11, is right on national security issues and a big environmentalist -- speaking at a wrap party for an anti-John Kerry commercial he shot. He hailed all the friends he'd made in the local GOP community -- "especially since I've lost all my old friends," he deadpanned. Let's just say you have to be a star that big to survive a political outing to the elephant side in Tinseltown.

The French prez, who's been single for about two months after a lickety-split divorce, has apparently discovered It's a Small World in the dating pool:

"Recently divorced French President Nicolas Sarkozy doesn't appear to be hiding his latest love interest.

He visited Disneyland Paris with supermodel-turned-singer Carla Bruni this weekend, the respected weekly L'Express reported on its website.

Three magazines will run images of the two in this week's editions, L'Express said.

The president's office would not comment on the status of the two."

Well, maybe this woman will actually vote for him.

Meanwhile, visiting Moammar Gadhafi last week had a date with 1,000 French women, but that's another story...

We now return to our regular heavy-handed rule in Pakistan, coupled with an al-Qaida/Taliban power keg and general pervasive instability as well as fatal bird flu.

Musharraf had a message today for all of his haters: Stop whining. I saved the country. "Against my will and as a last resort, I imposed emergency rule and saved Pakistan from destabilisation."

This has become a bonafide hit in Venezuela -- Gucci- and Louis Vuitton-clad Interior Minister Pedro Carreno slamming capitalism and singing the praises of socialism... until a journalist asks him to then explain his duds:

"'I don't, uh ... I ... of course,' stammered Carreno on Tuesday before regaining his composure. 'It's not contradictory because I would like Venezuela to produce all this so I could buy stuff produced here instead of 95 percent of what we consume being imported.'"

It's campaign time -- for the title of Grande Conservative Blogress Diva 2008, that is!! Yes, I'm on the ballot over at Gay Patriot, where the Blogress Diva is sort of the political equivalent of Cher. So I'm humbly asking -- as is P.Diddy, though in a less subtle manner -- for your vote. My platform:

• Being a uniter of all the political divas, not a diva divider
  
• Flat tax/fair tax? Pshaw -- how about no tax?
  
• Continuing to piss off Chavez and Ahmadinejad
  
• Showing the world that L.A. is about more than Lohan/Spears drama -- represent!

Who knew that there were so many shy crustaceans in need right here in the San Fernando Valley? Luckily, I stumbled upon this ad on Craigslist LA today by the "San Fernando Valley Hermit Crab Rescue" where you can meet potential adoptees like Tink, a Purple Pincer.

Tink is the smallest of the crabs here at SFVHCR. This small male loves to climb and is often found clinging to the tall plastic plants. He also enjoys digging into the substrate.

The SFVHCB will help folks "rehome" their hermit crabs as well.

If you have a hermit crab (or several) that you cannot care for or no longer want, the San Fernando Valley Hermit Crab Rescue can help. We take in land hermit crabs, giving them a suitable environment where they will thrive in comfort and health.

Is this is joke? I'm not sure considering just how cr--, er passionate, some folks are about rescuing animals. But decide yourself.

Speaking of pets, here's a picture of Beastie, the new puppy in my household. He's might be a handful, but I wouldn't trade him for a beach full of crabs, hermit or otherwise.

href="http://www.insidesocal.com/friendlyfire/bigdog1.bmp">bigdog1.bmp

Daily News astute reader Fernando Torres, or phone tax as everyone's calling it. I have to point out that he was whipped into an outrage by a DN editorial called Cynical Leaders. Sadly, due to the limitations of the "new, improved" DN web site, it is no longer available online. You'll just have to trust that it was compelling enough to move at least one reader to bug his city representative.

Here it is in it's entirety: (Forgive the weird formatting, it was a forwarded e-mail.)

I received your email expressing your concerns
about the Telephone User's Tax. Occasionally issues come before the
City Council that rise to a different level. While the voters have
elected their representatives to be their voice on a daily basis,
some issues have such significant impacts that the voice of the
voters needs to be heard directly if possible. The continuance of the
telephone tax is, in my opinion, just such an issue. For decades,
cities across America, including Los Angeles, have assessed a users
tax on telephones. Because of the size of Los Angeles' population,
that tax now amounts to $270 million. Due to a change of Federal
rules and the passage of Proposition 218, the tax needs to be
re-authorized by local voters. Hundreds of cities have already held
such elections, and in almost every case have voted to continue the
tax to maintain vital city services, such as police and
firefighters. While I fully understood the severe consequences of
not extending the tax, I also have generally opposed new taxes. The
proposal sent to the Council had a lot of vague information in it.
Those concerns led me, along with Councilmember Dennis Zine, to vote
NO on the original presentation. However, Councilmember Zine asked
for a detailed report of the impacts on City services. When that was
presented it became abundantly clear that the reduction of personnel
in all departments of the City would have a very negative impact on
vital services. Last year I asked over 100 individuals from our
local Neighborhood Councils to study the City Budget and try to find
make significant changes or reductions. They worked for hours, but at
the end of the exercise, they were only able to find $32 million in
cuts, a tiny fraction of the $270 million impact of this tax issue.
Particularly faced with the fact that over 60 percent of the City's
budget is dedicated to the Police and Fire Departments and the
collection of trash, this demonstrated how little room there is in
the City Budget for cuts of this magnitude. Let me make it clear,
contrary to the news reports on this item, the Council did NOT
approve the tax. Faced with the realities of the facts of the matter
the Council merely put it on the ballot for the voters to decide. I
determined that the best thing to do would be to ask the voters to
debate the issue and take a vote, which is after all the very basis
of American democracy. It's my pleasure serving as your
Councilmember. Please feel free to contact me any time.> > >
Sincerely, > > GREIG SMITH>

Smith is correct. The council members approved it for the ballot, is all. Of course, if they hadn't approved it for the ballot, then we wouldn't be talking about.

California's politicians love sin taxes, and why not? They're a convenient way to raise money by imposing the cost on a small group of unpopular people -- like smokers or drunks. That's why the politicos are always looking for new ways to raise "sin" taxes or create new ones, such as surcharges on gas-guzzling cars, or sugary sodas, or bullets. But if we really want to sin-tax our way to fiscal solvency, here's a novel idea: Why don't we impose a sin tax on ... sin?

You laugh, but they're doing it in Texas. Effective January 1 -- unless opponents can get the courts to intervene -- Austin is going to start collecting a $5 per-customer tax on nudie bars.

Think about how much money this plan could make here, in the smut capital of the world. Not only do we have scores of nudie bars, but this is also the home of the pornography industry, what with Larry Flynt Publications, the major porn studios, and innumerable smaller operations. What if the state put a $5 tax on every nudie-bar patron, a $1 surcharge on every DVD, a quarter on every magazine? Plus add in a 10 percent income-tax surcharge for all virtual "adult" businesses, like web pornographers and phone-sex operators.

The Golden Compass movie irritates some religious persons who who feel it is an anti-religious movie. My response would be that, if you believe you should be free to proselytize, you must grant such freedom to others. It's the essential Golden Rule of proselytizing.

It's not that simple, of course. Each of us tends to believe that the communication of our message represents the proclamation of truth that will set humanity free, while the communication of competing messages represents a dark attempt to enslave humanity. When my father and I found ourselves differing on religion, he told me I had been brainwashed by outside forces. I asked him why his devout adherence to the religion of his heritage didn't show himself to be equally brainwashed. The issue was never resolved to either's satisfaction.

My first op-ed in my writing career was a July 1, 2002 column in the Daily News (before Chris' time as editorial page czar), on why atheists need to grant religious people the ability to express their faith:

Those who despise the slightest hints of public religiosity may be projecting outward their own overly dramatic fear of coercion. The Michael Newdows of our country may dimly sense a swirl of forces inside himself, asking him to reconsider questions about the meaning of his life and his world. Fearing where that would take him, he silences those voices, for himself and for others. There will be no coercion on his watch, no public prayers, nothing that hauntingly reminds him of issues he is trying to leave behind.

Yet the truth is that an open religious marketplace is the best antidote to coercion. The New Testament revealingly depicts how some of the apostle Paul's most fruitless missionary work was in Athens, where the bustling farmer's market of ideas gave him a short and fair hearing and a far more tepid response than he received in many other cities.

By contrast, climates that are repressive to religious expression unwittingly set the stage for an explosion of conversions (in much the same way that a religious parent's fanaticism often predicts the future rebellion of the children).

One passage that I regret the editor took out was about Jerry Seinfeld's old joke about why many men are homophobic -- they know they have weak sales resistance, always being talked into buying things they don't need or that don't work, and they fear they could be talked into being gay. The same applies both to many atheists and to the faithful types who condemn the Golden Compass. (Of course, they always claim that they're not worried about themselves but are simply looking out for likeminded people who are more gullible and more susceptible to being brainwashed; this "charitable interest" is behind much of the repression of human history.)

But both groups need to learn the rules of the marketplace of the ideas, to compete fairly, and to protect one another's right to compete.

How do we look at the past? Will we go backward through all sports stories and analyze the character of the athletes? Out with Babe Ruth, he drank during prohibition. Out with Ty Cobb, he was a miserable misanthrope and racist. Out with Pete Rose, he was… Well, okay we already threw him out at Coopers town for betting and lying.

As long as we’re looking at the past, lets get Jefferson off Mt. Rushmore for owning slaves, Franklin off the currency for being a womanizer and Lincoln for spending way more nights than absolutely necessary sleeping in the same bed with another man.

We should probably strike David from the Bible for sending his rival to his death in order to carry on an adulterous affair with the widow, and surely in today’s climate Republicans would question Jesus about keeping company with Publicans, prostitutes and tax collectors.

I have no problem with disciplining athletes who cheat from this day on. But going back to pick up what was missed and trying to change and judge the past is a fool’s errand. Baseball on every level was complicit in tolerating drug use and profiting by it. Revenues have never been higher. Trying to change the record book with a pointillist and pointless field of asteriks* is futile. The Olympics are already in the absurd position of wondering that now that they have stripped Marion Jones of her medals whether to award them to another athlete who was later found to have used drugs. Professional bicycle racing has already self-destructed by following past winners down the rabbit hole of retroactive justice.

Remember that Ali was stripped of his title and ability to earn a living during his prime years because of his refusal to serve in military. If he had gone to jail after due process, that would have been one thing. But he was stripped by boxing for reasons of social pressure.

The job of sports is sports. Barry Bonds may be a pain. Okay, no maybe. He is. He may be a cheat, but he cheated within the context of a culture, including ownership, that encouraged and rewarded such cheating. Frankly the bad guys here are Fehr of the union and Selig of the owners. They cannot cleanse their benign neglect and active hypocrisy by punishing scapegoats. Well, they can, but they shouldn’t.

* Interestingly, at least to me, there is no agreement on the plural of asterix. Asterixes is hated and asteriks awkward. Some drop the first e and go for astrix in singular. If we can't fix this, how will we ever find peace with the past?

For a while now, my favorite among the GOP presidential candidates has been former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. I liked that he was solid on social issues, flexible on economic and environmental ones; skeptical of Bush administration foreign policy, anti-torture, and reasonable on immigration. To his credit, he had taken on both the mammon-first wing of the GOP and the anti-immigration nativists. But most of all, I liked that he seemed to be a sincere, thoughtful guy whose decisions came from his conscience, not some focus group.

But then something bad happened. Old Huck, once a hapless long shot, became a front-runner.

With that, the governor clearly decided he could no longer campaign from his heart -- the stakes are now too high! -- and he had to play the game like everyone else. So now Huck is rapidly squandering the one quality that made his special in the first place.

Whereas Huckabee once opposed the embargo on Cuba -- an anachronism from the Cold War -- he now supports it, so as to curry favor with influential Cuban-Americans living in Florida. And whereas he once was among the GOP's most sensible candidates on immigration, opposing a plan that would have punished the children of illegal immigrants by denying them in-state tuition at public universities, he's now signed on to the most draconian anti-immigration plan of all: ordering all illegal immigrants to leave the U.S. within four months, or else face the round-up.

So much for the realism, let alone the Christian sense of compassion, that once made Huckabee attractive to me.

But hey, selling out your principles is part of the political process. Huckabee's massive immigration flip-flop earned him the endorsement of "Minuteman" founder Jim Gilchrist -- never mind that, in accepting that nomination, Huckabee had to apologize for once thinking the "Minutemen" were a little ... you know ... creepy. "There are times when I, probably in the early days of the Minuteman, I thought, 'What are these guys doing . . . what are they about?'" Huckabee told Gilchrist during their press conference in Iowa. "I confess, I owe you an apology for even questioning why in the world you guys would do it."

Nice, Huck. Maybe you can kiss up to Tom Tancrazy next. Now I know how all those liberal Giuliani followers must have felt when they saw their guy playing kissy-face with Pat Robertson.

Yes, politics demands wide coalitions, but when those coalitions are forged through Romney-esque, self-serving flip-flops, they come at the expense of the candidate's own integrity.

Shucks. Instead of backing a candidate I can get excited about, it looks like, once again, I'll be stuck choosing from the least among the "evils." Sigh.

Okay, I was wrong. There is a wacky war on Christmas and it's pretty nuts. The HuffPo headline read "The White House Super Christian Christmas Card. THe text went on to excoriate the White House for some kind of religious partisanship. Well, first of all Christmas is kind of Christian so having a Christmas card indicate something about being, well, Christian, seems appropriate. The addition of the word "Super," prepared me for an alter call and some born again testimony.

But the card failed to deliver the theological horror. It had a quotation from the Hebrew Bible (Nehemiah 9:6) and the following not very outrageous benediction: "May the joy of all creation fill your heart this blessed season 2007."

Yes, it failed to quote the Quran and the Gita and Buddha were missing. No equal time for earth-based religions. But also please note that this "Super Christian Christmas Card" also never mentioned Jesus or used the word, "Christ."

If there is a war on Christmas it is being fought with truly stunning ineptitude. And if the White House is promoting Christianity, it isn't doing much better. Folks. It's a nice card.

On the off chance there was any doubt, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proved that living large on someone else's dime is a truly bipartisan affair. As we observe in today's Daily News editorial, this puts Arnold in the same class as Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez; only Arnold's practices appear to be even more ethically questionable:

For his part, Nunez simply dips into campaign funds to enjoy the best in dining, accommodations and shopping. It may be a little unseemly, but at least in his case, we know who's paying the bills.

With Schwarzenegger, things aren't so clear.

The Governor's Office depends on a secretive nonprofit - the California State Protocol Foundation, which operates under the auspices of the California Chamber of Commerce - to foot the bill for foreign travel, including Learjets and luxury hotels. But even though the foundation has given the governor and his staff what amounts to $1.6million in travel-related gifts, we don't exactly who has given what.

That's because the administration claims these aren't gifts to Schwarzenegger per se, but to his "office." And as such, they don't need to be listed on the conflict-of-interest reports that journalists routinely scrutinize.

This might be an indication as to why Arnold has been such a bust as a reformer. It's hard to "blow up boxes" after you've come to realize how comfortable they are.

This quote comes not by way of some right-wing, science-hating Christian fundamentalist, but from Shinya Yamanaka -- a professor at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences at Japan's Kyoto University, and developer of the most promising innovation in stem-cell research to date.

According to this piece in the New York Times, when Dr. Yamanaka first looked through a microscope at a fertility clinic, the plain reality of science gave him an epiphany: “I thought, we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way.”

Thank you, Dr. Yamanaka, for a much-needed reminder: Good science begets good ethics -- and vice versa.

The long awaited and much ballyhooed Mitchell Report drives home not one but two disturbing truths. The first is that dozens of players with the wink and nod connivance of the MLB and union top cats, trainers, medical personnel, drug companies, and even federal watchdog agencies winked and nodded as dozens of baseballs biggest names pumped up their bodies with performance enhancing drugs.

The second and in some ways even more disturbing truth is that the dump for the deliberate blind eye to drug abuse crashed down on the head of one man, Barry Bonds. Though technically Bonds was not indicted by a federal grand jury for steroid use, the charge is lying to a grand jury, the real reason he’s in the docket is that he is the most visible, high profile, and thus convenient scapegoat to take the blame for baseball’s revel in its steroid filled home run bleacher shots that sent attendance records soaring and jingled cash registers.

Another bitter truth on top of that disturbing truth is that the Mitchell Report can name all the names it wants and make all the recommendations for cleaning up the sport that it wants, but other than Bonds no other MLB baseball player has or will wind up in a court docket for illicit use of steroids. Despite the hoopla, teeth gnashing, phony self-righteous indignation, and clamor to do something about the shame and disgrace of drug use in the majors, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the MLB officials or owners will follow to the strict letter the reform proposals.

If anything the Mitchell Report instead of partially vindicating Bonds leaves him even further hung out to dry. None of the dozens of players mentioned in the report come anywhere remotely close to the public and media loathing that Bonds engendered. Long before the ink was dry on the first sentence in the Mitchell Report, the giddy orgy of Bond's vilification was brutal and relentless, and that was even before he was accused of any wrongdoing.

Baseball didn’t say zilch about banning the use of steroids before 2002. It had absolutely any zero testing procedures that mandated penalties for those caught cheating until 2004. It did not scrub the use of the performance drug HGH until 2005. Even then, punishments were spotty, and capricious. That is until the feds began to take a harder look at the use of the junk in the sport, and Bonds began to inch closer to MLB icons Babe Ruth’s former home run record and later Hank Aaron’s home run record.

The get Bonds hunt was then on with a full vengeance.
Bonds now began to run shoulder to shoulder with O.J. Simpson as the man much of the public loved to hate. He was a big, rich, famous, surly, blunt-talking black superstar who routinely thumbed his nose at the media. That stirred deep latent and not so latent visceral contempt and revulsion for him.

Bonds didn’t help matters by seeming to take special delight in irritating the heck out of sportswriters, fans, and the baseball establishment. His surly shoot from the lip thumb your nose at the sports crowd defied, or defiled the pristine, story book, nostalgia dripped image of what sports heroes should be, and how they should comport themselves. It made no difference that Bonds is no bigger a jerk in his boorish, sulking, spoiled behavior than other legendary superstars. But coming from him it just seemed to rub nerves even rawer.
So here’s a prediction. The Mitchell Report will grab headlines for a day. It will set the chops of talking head sports commentators, sports writers, and baseball buffs in full throttle. It will spark another round of angry calls from some public officials to crack down on drug use in the majors. It will draw solemn pledges from MLB officials to do whatever it takes to end the cheating. And just as quickly it will blow over.

What won’t blow over is the fingerpoint at Bonds. He looms even bigger in importance. His trial will be billed as a sort of steroids trial of the century. All the dirt, real or manufactured, about steroids and baseball, meaning Bonds, will be piled on the publics and the legal table. A conviction will be even better. That would give MLB officials the perfect chance to distance themselves from the cheaters, or more accurately, the perceived grand symbol of drug cheating, Mr. Bonds. The only scenario that could be even more worthy of an A list Hollywood script is for Bonds to come clean admit that he knowingly used drugs and do a public mea culpa for it.

The owners, MLB officials, many sports writers could then breathe a big sigh of see I told you so relief and skip along smug in the knowledge that an ugly, and tainted chapter in baseball’s saga is finally past. Batter up!

Hunter S. Thompson used to say that elections are the Super Bowl for political junkies. That's must be why immediately following debates the question that is asked is, "Who won?"

I know we call it a debate, which denotes discussion and considering opposing arguments. That would lead to a winner. What we really have is 90 minutes of self-promotion and front runner flagellation. That's not a debate - that's the "Real World Washington DC"...with a fraction of the nudity and public drunkenness (but that could change after the Iowa caucus - yeehaw!).

Anyway, the new thing for those that watched the 'debate' on Fox was the "Voter's Voice" chart. It's the real time opinion of Republicans watching the debate. It soared for Romney and shrank for Paul. The it went back up for Huckabee and down for Giuliani. And then I wondered if the voters were listening to the debate or reading the crawler. "Clinton leads in NH by 31%." Down. "Meanwhile, Chertoff says terrorist threat from abroad not abated." Up. "Islamic terrorists enjoy pouched kittens for religious festival." Huh? You know crawler stuff...

My point is: leave it to Fox to fast track opinion over content.

And its like the super hot blond anchors on Fox - can't see how it's relevant - but it is effectively distracting.

www.tinadupuy.com

Readers may recall my struggling -- as a native New Englander and a Patriots fan -- with the team's fate following the "Spygate" brouhaha back in September. I didn't think what the team did was right, but I suspected that it wasn't much different from what every other team does all the time. And now, to wit, we learn that the very franchise that blew the whistles on the Pats' videotaping -- the New York Jests -- was itself video-taping the Pats. Newsday reports:

According to league sources familiar with the situation, the Jets were caught using a videotaping device during a game in Foxborough last season that resulted in the removal of a Jets employee. After Gillette Stadium officials saw him using the recorder early in the game, he was told to stop and leave the area. He had been filming from the mezzanine level between the scoreboard and a decorative lighthouse in an end zone. The camera was not confiscated by the Patriots or stadium security.

Tuesday night the Jets admitted that they did videotape the game and their employee was confronted, but said they had permission from the Patriots to film from that location.

Note: Whether or not the Jests had the Patriots' permission to tape is irrelevant. League rules clearly state: "no video recording devices of any kind are permitted to be in use in the coaches' booth, on the field, or in the locker room during the game" -- regardless of what the host team says.

That the Jests did have the Pats' permission only suggests what a scoundrel NY coach Eric Mangini really is: Apparently he and New England coach Bill Belichick (as well, no doubt, as many others) did the exact same thing, with one another's tacit approval. But then Mangini backed out of this gentlemanly arrangement and stabbed his one-time mentor in the back (again).

And this is why -- we can only hope -- the Patriots will absolutely demolish, humiliate, and utterly shame the Jests this Sunday!

OK, just had to get that out. Back to your usual FF programming ...

The hot-heads so eager to stir up faux controversy about the pope's comments on global warming have actually missed what really was the controversial nugget in his message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace. It's this:

Consequently, whoever, even unknowingly, circumvents the institution of the family undermines peace in the entire community, national and international, since he weakens what is in effect the primary agency of peace. This point merits special reflection: everything that serves to weaken the family based on the marriage of a man and a woman, everything that directly or indirectly stands in the way of its openness to the responsible acceptance of a new life, everything that obstructs its right to be primarily responsible for the education of its children, constitutes an objective obstacle on the road to peace.

In short, you can't be both anti-family and pro-peace. And if you doubt that, just go to any neighborhood where the fatherlessness rate is high, and see how peaceful things are.

The Center for Media and Democracy, that online leftie group created to counter PR spin and point out media foibles, has come out with its top three honorees for the 2007 Falsies Award.

Sharing the gold is Nancy Pelosi and the other leaders of the national Democratic Party for making a lot of noise about ending the war, then not doing it, and the Republican-backed lobbying group, Freedom's Watch.

Second prize go to the dwindling number of global warming deniers (motto: It's better than global colding!).

Third goes to the baby formula industry that has created sock puppety online presences that are really ads.

Here at the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), we've dearly treasured our Falsies since we gave the first awards out in 2004. After 12 months of reporting on the cynical, manipulative and just plain anti-democratic pollution of our information environment, we love adding an extra dash of humor to our work. But this year's Falsies Awards are extra super special.

Why, you ask? Well, more people responded to our Falsies Awards survey than ever before. Thanks to the more than 1,400 people who took part! Our Falsies are your Falsies, too.

Read all about it here.

Having worked in the media for most of my adult life, I am well aware that the professionals in this business are a smart, well-educated bunch. Which is why, for the life of me, I can't understand why they seem to turn into blithering idiots whenever the subject of religion arises. For the latest case in point, see this widely cited Times of London piece, The Pope condemns the climate change prophets of doom, and its lede:

"Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

"The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering."

Wow, next thing you know BXVI will be putting a fatwa on Al Gore's head!

The sensitive green souls over at Wonkette responded with a post titled The Pope Sucks, in which they call Benedict a "Nazi," and quote the Times' paraphrase of his remarks as though it were verbatim. They sign off by wishing His Holiness "a jolly f***-you," albeit theirs in uncensored.

But wait in a minute. The subject of the Times article is the Pope's Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, which he will deliver on January 1. You can read it for yourself here. But be forwarned: You will be disappointed, as it bears almost no resemblance to the anti-green screed that the Times -- and, following its lead, countless other media organizations -- have made it out to be.

For starters, the address isn't about the environment. Primarily, it's about the role of the family in society. Secondarily, it's about the state of the human family in the era of globalization. Within this context, the pope writes about the human family's "home," the earth, and concludes:

We need to care for the environment: it has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion. Human beings, obviously, are of supreme worth vis-à-vis creation as a whole. Respecting the environment does not mean considering material or animal nature more important than man. Rather, it means not selfishly considering nature to be at the complete disposal of our own interests, for future generations also have the right to reap its benefits and to exhibit towards nature the same responsible freedom that we claim for ourselves.

That's a sentiment that most greens, save for the most rabid and misanthropic among them, would entirely agree with, no? As for the subject of global warming, the Holy Father has this to say:

I'm in heaven, and, yes, a Stairway took me there. The critics, who once derided Led Zeppelin, are jealously one-upping one another in praising their latest and most definitive reunion.

I became a Led Zeppelin fan around 1980 -- only a few months before they broke up. Zeppelin fever would only last a few more months at my Thousand Oaks high school, then would be replaced by new wave. Purple-haired Oingo Boingo fans would mock me as a dinosaur, as would my preppy USC classmates the next few years. My 1977 Led Zeppelin concert shirt was derided as hopelessly outdated, even just a few years later. Now, my two-year-old niece wears on. Now, Led Zeppelin is revered by aspiring musicians, by prestigious conservatory faculty members, and by millions around the world. I wasn't in London on Monday, but reading the reviews, I may as well have been.

What the mockers of 1982 didn't know is that fashion and social and political trends go in cycles, but quality endures. Rock never progressed, in terms of range, adventurousness and quality, beyond Led Zeppelin -- which is why new rock heroes such as Dave Grohl worship the band (Grohl even hoped publicly for the chance to play drums for the band, though he acknowledged that the proper choice was Jason Bonham, the son of Zep drummer John Bonham).

I am thrilled to see quality get paid its proper respects, and I'm even happier for my hero Jimmy Page than I am for my vindicated self.

To understand how incredibly separated from reality the politically driven Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners is, one look no further than their latest review of an officer-involved shooting.

Distributed yesterday on the LAPD web site, this report, regards the January 22, 2007 shooting of Officer Andy Taylor.

The long-story short of this event is that Officer Taylor was shot four times at point-blank range by a suspect who was handcuffed and already searched. Taylor barely survived, saved literally by his badge, which deflected a round suspect Mathew Powell fired into his chest.

The report is bizzarre on its face, even to those of us fully familiar with the stilted "Officer A, Subject 1" language that is a by-product of certain police officer protection laws. But, for a real trip down the LAPD Rabbit Hole, flip over to page 11 and read this gem of antiseptic, ivory tower analysis (Officer C is Taylor, Suspect 3 is Powell):

Following the removal of Subject 3 from the apartment, Officer C guarded Subject 3 in the hallway. Officer C sat Subject 3 up into a seated position, with Subject 3’s back against the north hallway wall, opposite the doorway to the apartment. Officer C then observed Subject 3 raising his right knee and begin to rise up from the ground by pushing up with his right leg. Officer C placed his hands on Subject 3’s upper torso in an attempt to push him back to a seated position. Simultaneously, Subject 3 rotated his body in a counterclockwise direction, bringing his hands to his right side while holding a handgun. Subject 3 then fired two rounds at Officer C, knocking him rearward. Officer C regained his
footing, crouched down and grabbed Subject 3’s wrists with both hands. Unable to gain control of Subject 3’s handgun, the struggle continued westbound down the hallway. As Subject 3 raised himself off the floor, Officer C tackled him to the ground in a prone position with Officer C landing on top of him. Subject 3 canted his body onto his left side, extended his arms to the right side of his body, attempting to point the handgun at Officer C. Officer C attempted to force Subject 3’s torso onto the floor with his bodyweight while fighting for control of the handgun.

The BOPC found Officer C’s non-lethal use of force to be in policy.

That's right, the BOPC devoted all of that space to finding Taylor acted appropriately in tackling a man who was in the process of shooting him. It's a good thing the BOPC didn't consider the possibility that Taylor spoke to the scum ball in a disrespectful manner after being capped four times. They might still be writing for another month if that were under review.

There's your consent decree at work, Angelenos. A cop gets shot four times and hours of effort go into analyzing if the officer was "in-policy" in tackling him. Glad to know we have that much trust in the LAPD hiring process.

The rest of the report, however, is revealing in other respects.

At the end of the incident narrative sit a series of facts that do not appear in most (if any) other force incident reviews. These include statements that Powell's hands were tested for gunshot residue, his gun was tested for finger prints and hisDNA was also found on the gun. Also included were details about the actions of fire fighters and paramedics ho responded to the scene.

What was this all about? Well, if you read the Times Homicide Blog you will find a lengthy discussion i the comments in which Powell's famly asserts he was wrongly killed for a variety of vacuous reasons. Normally, this would be of no concern to logical folks.

Unfortunately, the BOPC is neither normal, nor logical. (Remember, this is the same body whose newest member declared "diveristy" to be the department's greatest challenge the day a cop was nearly killed - quite possibly because of said body's most controversial policy).

Nope, Commissioner John Mack, who never met a cop he actually liked, took up the cause of the wanna-be cop-killer Mathew Powell. He demanded updates on this particular case outside of the normal reporting cycle.

It's obvious, I suppose. Andy Taylor OBVIOUSLY shot himself four times with a random gun, just to make the killing of a random suspect look good. I mean, nobody actually kills cops. That's just an excuse to cover up murder and oppression of well intended thieves and drug dealers. Isn't that right, Mr. Mack.

Are you paying attention, Mr. Mayor?

Mariel sees signs of Obama's rise in a GOP hit piece. Well, here's another one: Hillary Clinton's campaign is actively trying to dig up dirt on him. This isn't a shock -- campaigns dig up dirt on their opponents all the time, and even in June there were reports of the HRC camp setting up a Obama gossip-mongering site. But it is interesting for two reasons:

First, it exposes Hillary's utter hypocrisy in her pious preaching about the "politics of personal destruction" (a subject about which she and her husband could write the authoritative manual). This is the sort of phoniness, as Jonathan notes in his response to Earl, that makes Hillary so unpopular among so many.

More telling, though, is this e-mail that Hillary dirt-digger Bob Nash sent out looking for the goods on Barack:

From: Bob Nash To: Sent: Sun Dec 09 Subject: BARACK

HOW ARE YOU ?? I AM FIGHTING HARD >

SECOND ARE YOU PEERSONALLYAWARE OF TH EWORK BARACK DID ON THE SOUTH
SIDE WITH COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION S , ETC ./. BOB

WHAT DI DHE DO AFORE HOW LONG AND WITH WHO ??

PLS TELL BOB HELLO BOB

Bob J Nash
Deputy Campaign Manager
Hillary Clinton for President Exploratory Committee
4420 N. Fairfax Drive
Arlington, VA 22203

All-caps is e-mail's telltale sign of a nutcase. Apparently to work on the HRC goon squad, you need to be a little ... unhinged.

They just launched a new website explaining their side of the conflict.

Stand tough brass!

Encino residents Judea and Ruth Pearl lit the Pearl family menorah at the White House tonight. The menorah dates back to Judea Pearl's grandfather, Chaim Pearl, who was cited in the last words of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded in Pakistan in 2002: "I am a Jewish American from Encino, California. My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish. Back in the town of Bnai-Brak there is a street named after my great-grandfather Chaim Pearl who is one of the founders of the town."

Below, Ruth Pearl gets a nice smooch from the prez...

Finally, the Huckapult in the polls is garnering the attention it deserves: in the form, of course, of scared GOP hopefuls going on the offensive. Romney's campaign, perhaps realizing that a chunky bankroll and good hair might not win the coveted early primaries, is finally taking notice that the former Arkansas governor may be the man to Huckabeat in Iowa and is launching its first TV ad against him.

The topic of the ad? Immigration. Romney's going after Huckafriendly over in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. Never mind that a somewhat flexible stance to deal with current immigration problems coupled with tighter border security would win Huckabee votes within the giant middle ground in a general election. Also, let's be serious, Mitt did have workers sans green cards trimming the hedges at his home. So we'll see how the stone-throwing in glass mansions works out for the guy who didn't fare so well from his "I'm a Mormon, you're not" speech.

Now, I'm a big fan of campaign mudslinging. I've loved dirty campaigning ever since I wrote so in the WSJ's Opinion Journal in the 2004 horse race and somebody I won't mention at the Times ripped it off a few weeks later. I believe that if all of the candidates played nice and acted genteel, then we wouldn't see the true candidate. To understand better how he or she would handle conflict with our enemies later, I'd like to see how that candidate handles conflict with ballot foes now. So let the mudslinging fly. We'll see who comes out clean in the end..

The Daily Telegraph has a story about the hottest Christmas gift for naughty kids -- and adults who loved their Legos but were never able to shape them into illicit items.

"Forbidden Lego: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against" was written by a couple of former Lego designer/development guys who could never get the corporate OK for their automatic Lego gun and continuous-fire Lego ping-pong ball launcher.

And if anybody tries to blame the Lego gun for inspiring the next angst-ridden degenerate who decides to go on an AK-47 spree... well, don't even go there. It's just Legos.

Check out the guy Vladimir Putin has hand-picked as his puppet to be the next Russian president, first deputy prime minister Dmitry Medvedev. I tell ya, Russia may be regressing to the Cold War era in terms of declining human rights and an increasingly autocratic state, but these Soviet Part Deux leaders are no squidgy, shoe-banging buffoons. Will Medvedev campaign with shirtless photos like those that have boosted his puppetmaster's popularity? Heck, can Garry Kasparov lead opposition protests with his shirt off? Chess mastery is hot! Might it be kinda cold in Russia for so many strapping politicos to be running around shirtless?

I want to defend the people who disposed of the CIA tapes showing us interrogating Al Qaeda suspects. I want to indict the people who did the both the taping and the torturing. I believe that torture is wrong. I believe that videotaping our agents torturing bad guys is just stupid. This is like celebrities taping sex acts and expecting them not to show up on the net. They will show up and at the very worst possible time.

So, just what were they thinking when they taped prisoners who were (I am confident in fact bad guys), undergoing “stress questioning?” I’m assuming it wasn’t for pornographic reasons—though that is possible. (Please see: Herr Doktor Kraft-Ebbing). Someone thought it might be a good idea to document the interrogations. Well, someone was wrong.

I am not shocked that we transgress. I am very shocked when we are stupid, cover up badly and hold no one accountable. There are times when we push the boundaries. Torture is not legal and should never be legal. But it happens. What should we do when it happens? We should count on the bravery and patriotism of our people, and they should own up and take the hit. They should tell the truth and go on trial. If it was important enough to make someone choose to break our laws, they should be subject to justice. With any luck, their peers will acquit them if the case was urgent enough.

The same should be the case with taping these interrogations and then disposing of the tapes. I’d send the idiot who called for the tapes to be made to jail for gross incompetence. The people who disposed of the tapes however could be heroes. Had these tapes come out—and as with sex tapes, you have to count on it—they would have been played 24/7 on Al Jazeera and Al Arabia. And if you believe our standing is low in the Arab and Muslim World today, please know that there is still a great distance we could and would fall.

The cover up attempt however is wrong on so many levels. We cannot have a system of law and justice when our agencies and branches of government lie to each other—and lie under oath. If you want to know why there are conspiracy theories regarding nearly everything we do, it is because we chip away at our own credibility. The damage is mostly self-inflicted. The CIA does not get to lie to the 9-11 Commission. They do not get to swear that no tapes exist when tapes do exist. A patriot might order the destruction of the tapes and stand up and justify the act. But we cannot have a government of liars who continue to harm our us by evading and avoiding their patriotic duty to serve the interests of our nation.

The great question is not if we are perfect. We are not. The question is if we can violate our laws with absolute impunity or if we believe in and practice accountability? The elephant ate my homework evasion should not be allowed to stand.

The California state GOP took the trouble today of sending out a press release Barack Obama noting that "appearing with Hollywood celebrities and holding hip-hop and alternative rock concerts" doesn't make him an experienced candidate.

It then goes on to list "top democrats" and their take on his "lack of experience."

Hmmm. Why o why would the state GOP jump into the democratic primary fray? Do they think Obama's the big threat now that Oprah's got her arms around him? A good guess. Oprah has more influence on America than any other single person in the universe (except for maybe bin Laden, but that's in a more reactive way). She can make or break anyone.

Or, maybe there's just nothing else going on in Sacramento, what with the holiday season an all.

No matter what the issue, here in Southern California, there is always an immigration angle to be found. As a case in point, allow me to present the following transcription of a voice mail I received this morning from a self-described animal "rescuer" who was none too happy about today's Daily News editorial on the efficacy of "no-kill" rules at L.A. animal shelters:

"The overcrowding at the shelter is due to our people that are coming here to this country. OK, now I don't want to sound like a bigot, but I'm laying it right where it is. We have people coming in here that don't treat animals the way they should be treated. And they are letting them breed. They don't care because they themselves don't watch how much they populate. OK? And that's one of the major problems. They toss off animals, they discard them. We have situations where they get tired of them, 'Oh, we'll just take them to the shelter. Oh They're too old. They can't play. We don't want them any more.' That's what is really happening....

"Other cities have no-kill policies, and they've worked fine. They just won't work in L.A., that I pretty much agree with, because of our inept system here and because of all the immigrants that we have here who don't give a rat's you-know-what about animals That's the reason why we have a big problem here..."

Get past all the vitriol, and I don't doubt there's some truth here: Where there are more people, there will be more pets and pet-related problems. Likewise, many Third World countries, as a whole, don't share our "enlightened" approach to animals -- for better (they don't deify their pets) and for worse (they do enjoy cock-fighting). Here, as with any number of social issues, when different cultures butt up against each other, there will be some friction.

But what I find particularly interesting about this angry rant is that, generally, we consider pro-animal rights to be a lefty position, and anti-immigration to be a righty one. Yet here the two converge -- as they do, occasionally, among certain environmental and overpopulation types -- in a shared sense of misanthropy.

I'm embarrassed to say that, very time a story like this or this comes along about a gunman wreaking havoc, I grit my teeth and pray, "Please, please, don't be from the Middle East or my native Pakistan."

I will admit that, when I first saw the picture of the shooter of the Virginia Tech shooter, my reaction was, "Phew -- he's an Asian."

If a gunman is white or Asian or handicapped or so on, people will shake their heads about the inevitable risks of living in a chaotic society, and will wonder for a while whether we can do much more to intervene with lonely psychopaths and will then go back about our business. But if a person is of Middle-Eastern ancestry, some people will say, "A coordinated, sophisticated war has descended upon us -- maybe we should have invaded some more countries when we had the chance, to teach these folks a lesson."

That was the sort of reaction among neoconservatives when an Iranian-born man plowed an SUV into a crowd of students in 2006. That incident was seen by them as a strategic shot within a larger war of ideologies, when a sober assessment seems to indicate that the driver was simply a nut. However, viewing the war on terror as a matter of "nutcase management" is not as much fun as seeing it a grand, cosmic battle between barbarians and the enlightened. Politicians and religious leaders would not be able to exploit it nearly as well for their personal gain.

Andrew Young says that Barack is too young. The former ambassador to the UN seemed to lack a certain diplomatic touch in claiming that Bill Clinton “is every bit as Black as Barack.” I really don’t know what that means. Some ask if Barack is black enough? That is confusing in itself, but now to claim Clinton as Black…well, I’ve lost the string here. However, when The Honorable Mr. Young says that Clinton (presumably Bill) has “been with more Black women than Obama.” Oy.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson asks a couple of really good questions concerning the enmity directed at Hillary. I’d like to take a swing at them, but I’m not exactly qualified. I am not an impassioned Hillary hater. True, I am not enamored of her, but neither do I hate her. I do, however, have some insight on part of his question.

For the real haters, there are no really good answers or explanations. They have hated both Bill and Hillary from the start. They dogged them, seeing them as a team, and fought them at every turn. Personally, I don’t understand the depth of their animus. One theory holds that this is a cultural left-over from Vietnam and the social issues around drugs, sex and the war that rent this nation 40 years ago. This explanation I do not believe fully explains the venom on the right, but it does fit into why many liberals have moved on to Obama in order both to change the generational context and nostalgically to look for another Robert, not John, Kennedy.

I have a clearer idea however why she is not broadly loved. Despite her obvious intelligence, her growing skill in public speaking, her ability both to take a punch and give one, there is a certain magic that is missing. The idea of her plays better than the reality. Her negatives are high, not simply with the right-wingers who hate her but also with Democrats. Her support has been wide but not deep. In Iowa when the likely caucus goers are asked to name their first, second and third choices, she comes in third. (Okay, you may need to be a political junkie to know that this indicates very fragile support)

Her chief flaw is pandering—a trait she may have picked up from Bill. Unfairly, she lacks his charm. She shares with Romney the impression that she will say anything, do anything or seem to believe anything to get a vote. It is not one critical sin or transgression but an accretion of shifting that undermines a sense of authenticity. She supported anti-flag burning legislation, we must think not so much out of conviction as political convenience. While I do no to sit in judgment of her faith, the cross around her neck seems to have appeared only after announcing herself as a candidate. Her shifting stands on both the war and immigration do not seem principled but political.

I believe this will sink her and her Republican doppelganger, Mitt Romney. He too believed passionately in core values on the liberal side when running in Massachusetts and did a series of 180s when presenting for national office. To have had an epiphany on one issue is, well, one thing, but to have changed on a panoply of defining issues bespeaks a certain inuathenticity.

I believe this election will be about authenticity. I believe that we want to have some idea of what our next president believes and not simply measure rhetorical skills, spin and slick advertising. Many otherwise liberal folks voted for Reagan because he seemed real. I know liberals who opposed McCain on many core issues but were drawn to his focus and sense of mission. Huckabee is catching Romney not just because the Evangelical values voters are drawn to him, and not because there are Mormon haters (though sadly there are) but because he seems to believe something.

With Republicans searching for the next Reagan and Dems for the next Bobbie, I believe that both want someone to believe in more than they want ideology. It is instructive that after RFK’s assassination some of his followers—counter intuitively to the naïve experts—went to arch populist and bigot George Wallace. RFK’s popularity, as Reagan’s, transcended party-line and struck people as both passionate and genuine.

A Hillary v Romney election would be about money, spin and shape shifting. Whether or not they are, by dint of experience or platform, the best choices to be president, a Huckabee v Obama election would actually be about something: at least it would contain elements of substance.

Thinking back to last night's Hatton-Mayweather fight in Vegas, which the British press practically billed as a do-over of the American Revolution -- and which, ha-ha, ended with the same result, with a knockout of the Brit Hatton by Michigan man Mayweather in the tenth round. Wouldn't it be nice if they got Campaign 2008 over with so quickly? Brangelina, David Beckham and the rest of the celeb contingent could grab their choice seats, Don King could lead the GOP cheering section with his American flags, then the two top candidates could go in the ring and duke it out. May not be very civilized, you might say. But below-the-belt hits and all, the boxing ring is not too far removed from the political arena:

The occasion was a symposium on the presidential candidates held by the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable which sponsors a weekly public policy discussion series in Los Angeles. Midway through a heated discussion over the relative merits of Democratic presidential contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton a member of the audience let loose with an impassioned I can’t stand Hillary blast and punctuated it with the quip, I’d vote for anybody but her. I asked him a simple question: Why do you hate Hillary?

He sat with his mouth wide open and a perplexed glaze on his face, no sound issued from him. His mute response was no surprise. My question to him is the same question to the legions that slam Hillary; tell me specifically what terrible thing she’s done that stirs such froth around your mouth. Skip the personal attacks, vitriol, innuendos, slurs, and don’t repeat hearsay, gossip, or what you heard someone say about Clinton, and that includes Bill. Give me one tangible thing that she has done to piss you off so much that you are proud to be a charter member of the anybody but Hillary club. Name one tangible thing?

I asked the man in audience to tell me one thing that she’s done politically or even personally that ticked him off so that without batting an eye he’d say that the thought of her winning sends him into a paroxysm of rage. The question continued to dangle for a long and pregnant moment with no response.

He, of course, is no different than the swarm of other Hillary bashers. The visceral dislike, even loathing of her, is so deep and broad that it welds together a strange mesh of the usual suspect Hillary haters from the Christian fundamentalists, ultra right Republicans and conservative talking heads, through a bevy of her former Hollywood pals and Bill Clinton campaign bankrollers, all the way to self-styled progressives and ultra radicals. They have absolutely nothing in common other than the ecstasy they get from pounding Hillary for her alleged political and personal sins.

But what are they? And what did she do that has earned her the label of everything from the devil incarnate (the late Jerry Falwell) on the right to branding her a shill for fat cat lobbyists and corporations on the left. That’s just cheap shot name calling, trashing, and vilification from the rank and file. But the press has also gleefully jumped in on the Clinton beat down. It spins, twists, massages in reverse, and blows to smithereens any and every piece of nasty Clinton gossip or dig.

I asked the Hillary hater a third time to name one specific thing that she’s done to earn his obsessive enmity. The silent Hillary denouncer after some fishing, fumbling and stalling, said that she cheer led Bush on the Iraq war when she voted to authorize it, OK. But so did her Democratic presidential rival John Edwards, and though Obama says that he wouldn’t have voted for it if he had been in the Senate then. However, in two subsequent votes he backed spending measures that continued war funding. If the other top gun Democratic presidential contender Bill Richardson had been in the Senate he almost certainly would have backed war authorization.

In fact, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus was sharply divided over support of the original Iraq war resolution in 2002 that gave Bush authority to wage war. Edwards later apologized for backing the resolution. Obama joined with thirteen other Democratic Senators to oppose the crucial big money Iraq war appropriations bill in May. One of the other thirteen senators was Clinton. She is no different than other Democrats that have cut and run from Bush’s war. They all recanted when public opinion turned sour on the war and Bush and it suddenly became politically fashionable and popular to do so.

The Iraq war support certainly doesn’t explain the vehemence of the Hillary targeting. Her centrist, cautious, and sometimes fuzzy stance on health care, education, taxes, and immigration are legitimate issues to dissect, debate, and criticize. But these are issues that all of the contenders can and should be held to the fire on. They are fair game for that. But intense political debate and disagreement on the crucial public policy issues in and of themselves is simply not enough to stoke visceral dislike of a candidate, let alone explain the intense hate for Hillary.

My challenge then to all Hillary bashers is the same as it was to the guy at the Urban Policy Roundtable in Los Angeles; tell me exactly why you hate her so much?

.

At the recommendation of a friend, I went over to the Washington Post's Web site the other day to take their Choose Your Candidate quiz. There are left and right editions, and the lengthy test gauges which statements you agree with most, thus picking your perfect candidate on each issue and overall. I took the GOP version and came up with John McCain in first, and Mitt Romney coming in last.

But all this test really shows is how you like someone's rhetoric. Many of the candidates agree on various issues (and on some pages, Ron Paul's statements, though anonymous, stick out like a sore thumb), so all you're choosing is the candidate who says it best. Since action matters more than words, it's not exactly a good way to pick a candidate. It's a way to pick the candidate who spouts your favorite spin.

Although no fan of Mitt Romney's, my take on his JFK Part Deux speech is a little more favorable than Jonathan's. That's not because I think it was a great speech. It wasn't. it was clumsy, and left itself far too open to interpretation, the result of which is criticism like Jonathan's, which boils down to this:

Major premise: We should tolerate religious differences

Minor premise: Secularism is a new religion

Conclusion: We cannot really tolerate secularism because they are trying to take away our common faith.

I don't think this is what Mitt was trying to say, although it's a fair interpretation, given his ambiguity. But as a religious conservative -- the group, really, that I think the speech was directed toward -- I think I have a sense of what Mitt meant to say, or was trying to say, or at least should have said. And I think it was this:

I don’t want to be a contrarian here (Oh, well that’s not quite true) but I found Romney’s declared war on secularism arrogant, condescending and illogical.

I do understand the irony of my position. As someone whose major field of interest, study, writing and teaching is religion, coming to the defense of secularists may seem a tad strange. To add to the irony, I also spend a disproportionate amount of time defending religion from secularists who blame religion and God for causing all of our wars and conflicts. They seem to believe that if we got rid of the idea of God and religion, we’d all live in perfect harmony. This is a proposition that is demonstrably and historically false. Still, I do feel the need to play fair with my secular friends.

There may or may not be a war on Christmas from a small number of secularists, religious of non-Christian faiths and even some devout Christians with a more classically Puritan perspective. Personally, I think that to call these minor skirmishes war is to give it greater credibility than these small number of easily offended deserve. Romney, however, did declare war.

In his peroration on religion he came out strongly for religious tolerance for his religion, but tolerance seems to stop with western monotheism.

Note the logical flaw in his silly syllogism:
Major premise: We should tolerate religious differences
Minor premise: Secularism is a new religion
Conclusion: We cannot really tolerate secularism because they are trying to take away our common faith.

He went on to hold that “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Huh? Does this mean that people of no faith have neither the right nor the possibility of being free? Is this lack of a right something that he believes is withheld by a jealous God? He sets the default position for being a freedom deserving American at being a person of faith.

In trying to make himself acceptable to Christian fundamentalists, he is fudging the differences his faith has with mainstream Christianity. He is also aligning himself with the forces of fundamentalism in order to have a common enemy (secularism) and distract his religious opponents from their differences.

Personally, I don’t care what Romney believes about God, Jesus, Buddha or Madeleine Murray O’Hare. His private faith is not my business. However, when he speaks about freedom and tolerance and then closes the door on millions of people who do not believe, he fails to practice what he preaches in the very act of preaching it. That is quite an accomplishment.

Today's Daily News features an op-ed from a local dad who was surprised one day to hear his girls' singing the following from their school's upcoming holiday concert:

"Rockin' around, the holiday tree, have a happy holiday..."

Yep, you read that right -- "holiday" tree. And with that, SoCal gets the first local skirmish of the annual War on Christmas, in which aggressive secularists and/or the hyper-sensitive try to banish every hint of the reason for the season. As the dad in this story, Johnny Knight, notes, this purgation is the antithesis of the tolerance we say we want to teach our children:

I want my children to be able to accept that other people have different beliefs, and I hope they have meaningful and fulfilling relationships with these other children as they grow up together. ...

I am bothered, however, about how our children are being taught what seems to be the complete opposite of tolerance in their schools. The lesson they are being taught is not that differences should be honored, celebrated and appreciated, but hidden and squelched. They are learning that to "get along," we all must check our differing beliefs and cultures at the door.

Obviously the rantings of some right-wing Christianist, right? Wrong. Mr. Knight is a practicing Jew raising his girls in his faith. This is not, as he notes, ultimately a question about religion, but tolerance -- and whether we are willing to tolerate beliefs contrary to our own.

Happy Hanukkah, Mr. Knight -- and merry Christmas, too.

Oprah can’t help Barack Obama nail Hillary Clinton in Iowa, New Hampshire, or even South Carolina. The throng of Oprah groupies that pitched camp in front of the Obama campaign headquarters in Columbia, South Carolina to get free tickets to her and Obama’s appearance at the Colonial Center in that city were there to ogle, and if they are lucky, touch the garments of America’s favorite TV earth mother at the auditorium.

But after the ogling and touching Oprah, it doesn’t mean they’ll vote for Obama. A Pew Research Center poll after a big Oprah fundraising bash in September found that by a crushing margin respondents said that Oprah’s tout of Obama won’t sway them the least bit. And it shouldn’t, at least not because, Oprah says so. Despite all the talk about Oprah being a transcendental force that supersedes mere celebrity mortals she’s still just that, a celebrity. The thousands that clawed for tickets to rub shoulders with her at her Obama pep rally in Columbia, South Carolina were there precisely because of her star power and the insatiable celebrity mania that grips far too many star struck Americans.

Yet, celebrities fail miserably every time to do much for their political picks. Willie Nelson, Madonna, Jon Bovi, Martin Sheen, and in reverse, George Clooney are big money celebrities and virtual household names. They all endorsed Democratic presidential candidates in 2004. Nelson endorsed Dennis Kucinich. Bon Jovi endorsed John Kerry. Sheen endorsed Howard Dean. Madonna backed Wesley Clark. One of their picks went down to flaming defeat. The other three never came close to getting the Democratic presidential nomination.

As for Clooney, he publicly declared that he hoped that his non-endorsement of Kerry probably helped him at the polls. It didn't. Though Clooney now backs Obama he’s still very mindful of the potential liability of celebrity hood and has publicly said that he thinks campaigning for a candidate hurts a candidate. Clooney recognized a political truism that's etched in stone. That's that a celebrity pump of a presidential candidate does little to boost the candidate.

Selling Obama is not like selling one of Oprah’s handpicked authors that the mere mention of on her show will send their book hurtling to the top of the charts. Voters make their decisions about politicians on a combination of factors, party affiliation, their stance on the issues, their political beliefs, and their experience at getting the job done. Few will rely on Oprah’s word that Obama is the best to handle global warming, tax policy, the Iraq war, terrorism, job creation and inflation, failing public schools, criminal justice issues and judicial appointments.

A candidate, and only the candidate, has to sell his or herself that they have a sound grasp of the issues, and can forcefully and clearly articulate them, and most importantly, are the most experienced. That’s the glaring Achilles Heel for Obama. In every poll, even the most rabid Clinton loathers, rank Hillary at the top of the pile in experience in dealing with foreign and domestic issues. Voters got burned badly with Bush. His gross inexperience in statecraft before grabbing the White House cost Americans dearly in eight years of his disastrous bumbles and fumbles on everything from the Iraq war to domestic policy. Many voters won’t make that mistake again.

The O and O show has caused the tongues to wag, eyebrows to rise and they will draw legions to their campaign stops. But that won’t be the knock out wallop Obama counts on to floor Hillary. Celebrities simply don’t and shouldn’t pack that kind of political punch. And neither does Oprah.

Yesterday I sat down with our ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, hours before he addressed the Los Angeles World Affairs Council at the InterContinental Hotel in Century City. Afghan-born Khalilzad, the highest-ranking Muslim in the Bush administration and a name often mentioned as a secretary of state candidate should a Republican win in 2008, was really friendly and opened up on a variety of subjects. In today's news section, I write about U.S. plans for a third set of sanctions against Iran -- NIE or no NIE. I saved a couple of questions on press freedom for my journalism site. And the rest of our conversation? You'll just have to wait for my column!

We have come a long way in the last 47 years since people wondered if America was ready for a Roman Catholic president. JFK had to promise that as president he would not be too Catholic. Today the controversy around Rudy is not that is a Roman Catholic but that he doesn’t seem Catholic enough. I mean this in terms of how he lives his life and not the outward trappings of religiosity that all the candidates seem to don as a garment.

This season’s race has seemed to have forgotten the Article 5 section 3 of the Constitution that says “..no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Today the private faith of every candidate is on display. And while it is good that we no longer worry about electing a Catholic, we have shifted our anxiety to Mormons, and also, just under the surface, to a man with two traditionally Muslim names.

The religion question has come center stage, but a candidate’s private faith really is not the business of public politics. We have the right to know what a candidate’s values are. His or her character is certainly admissible into our national dialogue. But the individual faith of a potential president is really not any of our business.

We have effectively created a religious test and all the pretenders to the throne would be thrown off the hustings if they confessed to atheism or even agnosticism. There is, in fact, only one avowed atheist in the Congress—and that is H. Fortney “Pete” Stark of California. There are, I’m certain, many more, but like gays and lesbians, they are closeted by an implicit understanding of “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.”

Aside from the Constitutional impropriety of religious tests, the more immediate concern is that they are worthless. We seem to believe that someone’s religion or denomination conveys valuable information about both their character and their future policies. This is demonstrably false. Knowing that Rudy calls himself Catholic does not tell us what he would do about abortion, stem cell research, the death penalty or war. Christopher Dodd is also Catholic, and I suspect he and Rudy would govern differently.

Nor does Huckabbee’s Baptist ordination tell us anything about him that is intrinsic. Bill Moyers is also an ordained Baptist minister. I suspect they come to different conclusions on some values issues—even though their values are legitimately and sincerely derived from the same source. George W and Hillary Clinton are both Methodists. And from this we can infer exactly what?

Expecting policy and character to proceed predictably from religious affiliation or public displays of religiosity is like assuming all Americans see the Constitution as saying the same thing. We may all be lovers of the Constitution but we certainly understand that precious document differently.

Remember that Jesus warned against the ostentatious displays of piety by the hypocrites and said in Matthew 6:6, “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” Good advice from the Good Book.

"And you Sir, are no JFK..."

In his 'I'm a Mormon, but..." speech, Romney used the phrase "The religion of secularism.'

Which is a contradiction in terms. An oxymoron. Like 'real politician'.

Let's see other one's we can come up with!

I've got:

-Food of Anorexics
-Library of Illiterates
and
-Hope of Nihilists

Rob's post about Mitt Romney mentions a piece Rob wrote back on 7-04-04 called The American Bug. It was a great column, and so, for the benefit of our readers, I've posted it after the jump. Enjoy!

PS -- A prediction: Romney's Mormonism will matter far less to conservative Christians voting in the GOP primaries than it will to secular liberals voting in the general election (assuming he gets there).

Mitt Romney, having spoken about how "freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom," reminded me of an old joke. [click below to continue]

I must admit that when I first began reading Jonathan's post about fellow Democrats' benign neglect of the Hamas-loving Mike Gravel, I thought, "So they ignored the yahoo in the room. Big deal, politicians do that all the time." But then Jonathan got me with the line, "Had he made analogous charges or observations as starkly offensive to Blacks, Hispanics, Asians or gays, can you imagine the other Democrats remaining silent? Don’t you think that someone would have challenged him?"

Jonathan is absolutely right. The silence here is damning. And so is this press release, which appeared in my inbox late yesterday afternoon:

DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE MIKE GRAVEL
TO SPEAK AT MPAC CONVENTION ON DEC. 15

(Los Angeles - 11/30/07) -- The Muslim Public Affairs Council today announced that Democratic Presidential candidate Mike Gravel will be a keynote speaker at its seventh annual convention on December 15 in Long Beach, CA.

A two-term U.S. Senator from Alaska, Gravel is best known for his blunt, no-nonsense approach in the Democratic Presidential debates where he's known to rail against the war in Iraq with the same outrage he used to condemn the one in Vietnam. In 1971, Gravel ordered the top-secret "Pentagon Papers" - a series of secret government reports that chronicled United States failures in Vietnam - into the Congressional Record and then went on to lead a one-man filibuster in the Senate that led to the end the military draft in 1973.

SEE: Mike Gravel's Comments During the 3rd Democratic Presidential Debate

SEE: "Mike Gravel, An Anti-War Crusader for Two Generations" (Kansas City Star, 11/21/07)

Gravel has been written off by media commentators as unelectable and has little money to finance his White House bid, but he has been able to keep his hopes alive through YouTube and the Internet. Low in the polls, he was blocked from the two most recent Democratic debates in October and November. His primary reason for running for the presidency is to advance his agenda for direct national elections on issues, called the "National Initiative."

SEE ALSO: Interview with Mike Gravel on "This is America with Dennis Wholey"

"The whole reason I am running is to empower the people," Gravel told AFP. "What the people need to be able to do is to be put in position so they can vote on the policies issues that affect their lives."

MPAC invited all of the Presidential candidates from both parties to address the Muslim American community at the annual convention. To date, Gravel is the only candidate who has accepted....

This is just a bad, bad move on MPAC's part. Fine -- the organization invited all the candidates, and only Gravel said yes. Sure, it should let Gravel, and any other candidate who wants to speak, get a spot at its convention. But to issue a gushing press release extolling the virtues of a candidate who just so happens to be an apologist for two Muslim terrorist organizations ... well, let's just say that's going to do very little to debunk the pernicious stereotypes that MPAC ostensibly exists to counter.

Tomorrow (Thursday) morning I'll be on the following syndicated shows discussing the glorious referendum defeat of Hugo Chavez:

• "The Lynn Woolley Show", 7:30 a.m. Pacific time, for 15 minutes
  
• "The Right Balance" on Accent Radio Network, 8:20 a.m. Pacific time, for 10 minutes
  Follow the links to listen online!

As promised, I'm checking back with my initial review on what I've read so far of Slash's autobiography -- which I thought I'd read on Vicodin after wisdom teeth removal, but I kept falling asleep after a couple of pages. No disrespect to Slash (aka Saul Hudson), because the book is nothing short of intriguing. It's also so detailed that you could use it as a handbook to do a Guns N' Roses tour of L.A. -- the houses where they grew up, the pittance-wage jobs they held (which, for Slash, included a paper route that covered Wilshire and La Brea down to Fairfax and Beverly), the apartments where they crashed, the studios they jammed (and, er, partied) at.

On page 50, though, Slash disses da Valley when he talks about entering Fairfax High in 1979:

"My best friend, Steven Adler (later Guns N' Roses drummer), was shipped back to the Valley for high school, which was as far off as Spain in my mind. I did visit him out there a few times and it never failed to disappoint: it was flat, dry, hotter than it was at home, and exactly like a sitcom neighborhood. Everyone there seemed to cherish their identical lawns and identical lives. Even at a young age, I knew something was wrong with that place; beneath the normalcy, I could sense that these people were more f'd up than anyone in Hollywood."

Slash also doesn't set out to trash Axl Rose, but from the very start of GNR you can see what a self-centered, arrogant, disturbed problem he is. Slash relates an early story when Axl was asleep on Slash's grandmother's couch, and she gently asked Axl to go sleep in Slash's room so she could watch her afternoon TV shows, and Axl told Slash's grandmother to F-off. Then when Slash nicely tried to talk to Axl later about why that wasn't appropriate and why he should apologize:

"Axl stared out the window as I spoke, then he started rocking back and forth in the passenger seat. We were driving on Santa Monica Boulevard, doing about forty miles an hour, when suddenly, he opened the car door and jumped out without a word...He didn't show up back at my house that night and he didn't come to rehearsal for four days."

Several outrageous things happened and, worse, didn’t happen during the Democratic debate on NPR on Tuesday. I am truly upset and angry with all the Democratic candidates running for the presidential nomination. I am deeply offended mostly at what they did not say.

Loose cannon, former Senator from Alaska, Mike Gravel, usually portrayed as the weird eccentric who is even better for a laugh than Dennis Kucinich, defended Iran’s support of Hamas and Hezbollah. He wondered why we think, “there's something wrong with Iran supporting Hamas and Hezbollah? These are two elected organizations, and — and why can't they (Iran) give support to those organizations? Israel doesn't want it, so why do they (the Democratic candidates) buy hook, line and sinker that they can't give aid to Hamas and Hezbollah?” He continued that, “We give unlimited aid to Israel. These people (the Palestinians) are fighting for their rights.”

Okay, you can say that he is a nut or a radical. You can explain that he doesn’t really represent the mainstream of the Democratic Party. You can marginalize him and explain him away.

What you cannot explain away, forget, or in my view forgive, is the silence of the other Democrats. No one said, “Hey wait. I want to respond to that.” No one distanced themselves from him or followed up his endorsement of the aims and methods of Hamas and Hezbollah with an objection. No one questioned or denounced his creating a “moral equivalence” between Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah terrorists.

Notice that he was not simply advocating for a Palestinian state or remarking on the pain of the Palestinians. He was specifically equating Iran’s support of two terrorist organizations that reject a two-state solution and the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, with our aid to Israel. How could this go uncommented upon? If silence connotes assent, what did these candidates convey by their silence?

They all simply moved on to the next question. Maybe they were embarrassed. Possibly they didn’t want to give the issue further airing. They can spin it today as not wanting to “dignify” his rant. However, let’s try a little thought problem: Had he made analogous charges or observations as starkly offensive to Blacks, Hispanics, Asians or gays, can you imagine the other Democrats remaining silent? Don’t you think that someone would have challenged him?

As a life-long liberal, people often challenge me to explain why the Jewish Community is no longer as predictably and overwhelmingly liberal as we once were? Some theorize that once we got money and property, we abandoned our ideals and sense of social justice and compassion. I do not accept this at all. If you want to understand why the center of gravity of the local Jewish Community has moved to the right, listen to the heartbreaking and deafening silence of Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Kucinich and Obama. Remember the famous quotation attributed to Edmond Burke, “All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men (and one woman) do nothing."

I am also unhappy that this story, Gravel’s words and the silence of the Democrats, has been met with like silence from the media. Where is the outrage? Where is the coverage?

Iran has friends in China and Russia who say that we should all back off from Tehran, now that the U.S.'s best intelligence estimate suggests the Iranians aren't working to blow the world up. But President Bush and Israeli officials suggest that Tehran is still a menace that needs to be stopped anyway.

I think this goes to my point about how the human animal likes to get into fights, and then later rationalizes how the fight was a necessary response to a provocation. Here's a good head-shrinking on that issue. It also shows how human hawks, unlike their feathered namesakes, don't have good vision about long-distance threats. China and Russia loom as potentially greater threats to the American way of life than the jihadist hillbillies do, and yet our clumsy approach to the GWOT has fueled those two nations' resolve to be America's nemeses.

Robert C.J. Parry's post here intrigues me, as he considers the case of liberals who get mugged.

I used to be a peacenik, one who naively believed that we could achieve lasting peace through kindness. I used to look at Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount and see a bold declaration that loving an enemy will pay more lasting dividends than crushing him.

I later became a realist. I realized that, while doves believed that kindness would bring peace and hawks believed that ruthlessness would bring peace, human beings kept fighting all along. We are fighting animals, though each of us has our own view of what will stop the fighting. Even so-called doves find themselves wanting peace in Iraq but revolution against oppressive regimes in Central America.

Robert expresses a hope that the British schoolteacher in Sudan, accused of blasphemy by teddy bear, "will join those of us who recognize the enemy for what it is, and stop coddling the irrational with feelings."

Perhaps. But this brings up problematic issues. Is Sudan our "enemy" as such? This sort of thing happens in my native Pakistan and in Saudi Arabia, but we Americans treat those countries as friends. And some would say that we've done some fairly Sudanese things ourselves to the native Americans in our country. And when our enemy Saddam was gassing his people, he was being coddled by the Reagan and Bush I loyalists. Later we would use such gassings as a rationale for regime change. "Who's on first...?"

It gets a bit complicated in terms of when humans should coddle bad guys and when we should be crushing them, especially in light of our own failings. As a realist, it seems obvious to me that we unleash our tribal need for crushing foes by casting them in the worst possible light when we decide it's time to fight -- yet we also ignore that group's immorality if we think they can aid us.

Getting back to the plight of the schoolteacher, Ms. Gibbons, I sport an admiration for both the unwavering conscience of the conservative and the heartfelt passion and decency of the liberal. The Gregory Pecks of the world are more potent in their impact when they champion the little guy at a real personal cost. A liberal doesn't start being a liberal until he's been mugged, and still chooses not to view the residents of the troubled ghetto with revulsion.

Reading a variety of recent OpEds, letters and editorials in various publications, including the DN, it has become clear that campaign financing is an issue that lurks just under the surface of the 2008 elections.

I think it is a matter that should be easily resolved.

The reason campaign donations are so important is that it they are defacto votes. More money = more ads = more votes, in a crude calculus.

Which is to say, everyone who donates votes. Every PAC. Every corporation. Every party. Everyone from out of state. They all dictate who gets elected in your jurisdictions.

So, I say: ban them. Do away with most donations.

It's a remarkably simple concept, if you think about it. Just ban most donations. Why should a farmer from Kansas or Fortune 500 CEO effect who runs for congress in my district?

Candidates should be limited to accepting donations from United States Citizens who reside in their district. Period. We can make a reasonable limit on the size of donations - say, $2500. That's more than most folks (certainly I) could afford. But it is small enough overall that candidates will still appreciate every $20 from every old lady who takes the time to write a check.

Corporations and unions and special interests could still have their input. But, they would be limited to endorsing candidates and advising their members, customers and share holders for whom to vote and donate. No more dispensing $10,000 to both presidential candidates. No more presenting one face to the public but spreading largesse in another.

The endorsement of the NRA or ACLU would probably become even more valuable. But the money would no longer come from dues or PAC contributions. It would eminate from voters' belief in the candidate.

A shift to this system would require battling back all kinds of special interests. They will line up to preserve their monopoly on politicians' attention. The political campaign industry, with highly paid, high gloss consultants will also run around screaming. They will argue that "it takes $2 million to run for the State Assembly, there's no way you can raise that in small increments."

Yes, that's right. Well, half right. There's no way to raise that kind of money in small increments, but it doesn't take $ 2 million to run for the Assembly.

When the free flow of money dries up, politicians will be forced toi campaign within their means.

This would be excellent practice for them before they head to City Hall, Sacramento or DC. Spend only what you got, and be careful about squeezing for more.

The legendary Jess Unruh coined the axiom that "money is the mothers' milk of politics."

It's time that candidates were reminded just who momma is.

Here's the story that goes with this cartoon.

I'm back after a week that included:

• The removal of bony impacted wisdom teeth with just novocaine because they couldn't find a vein for the anesthesia/sedation, which apparently indicates that I'm a vampire (just with fewer teeth now)
  
• While I was recovering (roughly) from the oral surgery experience that made "Little Shop of Horrors" look like "Little House on the Prairie," a few days later someone fraudulently used my Visa check card number and drained my bank account (my subsequent investigation has led to a wholesale racket in L.A., and one cop now referring to me as Nancy Drew)
  
• And then a couple of days after that, a guy who claimed his insurance card was "at home" (yes, I got the cops out there) smashed into my precious, nearly new convertible

When robbers and thieves get busted, typically they cite financial pressure as their reason for turning to crime. They needed to keep food on the table, or even nurse an expensive addiction. But two young convicts in Ohio have offered a new explanation for their criminal endeavors -- they had to keep up with the soaring price of tuition. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports:

Andrew Butler should be a junior at the University of Toledo, where the theater major would be starring in school plays, maybe one day headed to Hollywood or Broadway.

Christopher Avery should be a sophomore at the University of Cincinnati, an engineering major with a lucrative career ahead.

Instead, the men are going to prison for at least 20 years because they tried to raise tuition money with two armed holdups last summer....

"Why?" Judge Steve Martin asked the men, who had no criminal records. "You're in college, I don't understand."

Both men cited tuition.

Butler said tuition went up so his scholarships and financial aid were not enough.

"I was stressed out," he said. "I needed more money for college."

It almost sounds like a joke -- not least of all because the judge's name is Steve Martin -- but it's real. There you have it: Proof that American colleges today are breeding grounds for criminality! (rim shot)

Wow, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post (whose syndicated column runs Wednesdays in the Daily News) must really have it out for Mike Huckabee. This week, he essentially regurgitates his hit piece from two weeks ago on the former Arkansas governor, trashing him on mostly religious grounds.

And why does Cohen feel the need to go after Huckabee again? Because Huckabee behaved tactfully, and refused to use religion as a campaign wedge issue.

Seriously.

Cohen's objection is that, when on "This Week," Huckabee declined to answer host George Stephanopoulos ' question about whether GOP rival Mitt Romney is a Christian. “Mitt Romney has to answer that.... It's not for me to determine what somebody else's faith is," Huckabee answered.

To which Cohen goes apoplectic:

Mike Huckabee knew precisely what was being asked of him, and he also knew, because he is a preacher, what the right -- not the clever, mind you -- answer should be. But Huckabee merely smiled that wonderful smile of his and punted. This, with apologies to George W. Bush, is the soft demagoguery of low expectations.

Stephanopoulos ... provided the perfect opportunity for Huckabee to make some ringing statement in support of religious tolerance. He might have made some reference to the ugly anti-Catholic campaigns run against Al Smith (1928) and John F. Kennedy (1960).... In other words, Huckabee might have preached.

Sure, that might have been nice --- had Huckabee actually been asked something like, "Can a Mormon be president?" But he wasn't. Instead, Stephanopoulos tried to set him up with an entirely theological question about what qualifies as authentically Christian belief. It was a question of zero relevance to the presidential race, and one which, if Cohen had an ounce of integrity, would offend him far more than Huckabee's diplomatic response.

Because if anyone was trying to use religion to divide here, it was Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos knows full well that Mormons think themselves -- and strive to be -- followers of Jesus Christ. But he also knows that Mormonism holds numerous tenets, about the nature of Christ and other issues, that are so at odds with orthodox Christianity that most Christian denominations don't consider it a Christian faith. This would certainly be the case of Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister.

What Stephanopoulos was trying to do was stir up an old religious debate, and put Huckabee in a pickle: If Huckabee says Romney is a Christian, he offends many Christian believers who see Mormonism as something radically different from what they believe; but if he says Romney is not a Christian, he offends Mormon voters.

Huckabee, to his credit, saw through this trap and offered the response that was not only politically savvy, but also spiritually sound: It's not his place to judge another man's faith or heart, period.

Good answer. A tolerant one, too. And one that directly responded to the question being asked -- a rarity in politics these days. Had Huckabee blathered on about the need for tolerance, he would have simply been dodging the question, for which Cohen surely would have blasted him.

For those not in the know, "Slacker" is Mariel's friendly nickname for me. Of course, she chose this moniker entirely at random, and for no reason in particular. I'm sure of that.

Anyway, in case you're wondering why this slacker hasn't been posting lately (OK, so you aren't), I took Monday off to see my mom, who's visiting from the East Coast. I also plan to take Wednesday off for the same reason. And, if all that weren't enough, Mariel (no slacker, she) will be off Friday AND another colleague is in the hospital. Add that all together, and you get little time for blogging, unfortunately.

Thus, I am about to undertake the ultimate slacker's adventure: Rather than find something interesting to say, I'm just going to riff off on what all my FF colleagues have already said:

Rob: Thanks for the primer on Pakistan! Now I can fool friends at cocktail parties and make them think I know what I'm talking about!

Jonathan: The phrase: Rudy is a scoundrel really requires no "but." That said, if we're going to talk about doing away with ethnic pot shots, could we also blow the whistle on those who think it's funny to call our German pope and Austrian governor Nazis? (An Austrian-American whines ...)

Mariel: These pay raises are an outrage! I think we need to write an editorial ...

Rob: I like your post on the war on science, and I've added my 2 cents in the comments field.

Rob, again: Divorce is also eco-destructive because kids have to be shuttled around from home to home. Anyway, if "for the good of the planet" can keep couples together, great, although I would have hoped that "good of the kids" would be sufficient.

Robert: OK, so this teacher is more than a little goofy. But she means well, and heck, she's more than paid for her naivete.

Earl: Good points on Taylor, although I would note this is hardly an isolated case. The media rushing to judgment? And hewing to a dubious but sensationalistic story line? Yup, that sounds about right.

Tina: Nice piece on illegal-immigrant makeover in Sunday's paper!

And finally, Bridget: We hope you're recovering well, and we'll see you back in the mix soon!

OK, time for this slacker to get back to work!

The Sean Taylor murder ignited what has to rank as the dumbest, wrong-headed orgy of stereotype laced speculation in living memory. The instant the Washington Redskins all-pro safety was gunned down in his suburban Miami-Dade County home, a pack of talking head sports analysts, writers, and fans filled the airwaves and newsprint with their see I told you so pontifications that Taylor’s alleged thug life style did him in.

The initial accounts of his murder fed ample fuel to the contention of the self-styled experts that the supposed self-destructive ghetto culture has done in countless numbers of young black males. Taylor, of course, was the latest, but by no means the only tragic example of that. They insisted without a shred of evidence that the break-in at his home was not random, that he was a target, and that the killing was a hit.

The initial news accounts were a heavy handed pile on of Taylor’s misdeeds, run-ins and altercations with the law. Subsequent news accounts dropped the obsessive itemizing of the full litany of Taylor’s missteps. But they still managed to do a sneaky broken record sounding reminder that Taylor had had past problems with the law. That further imprinted in much of the public’s skulls that Taylor was a bad guy and that there had to be a direct connect between his past, that really wasn’t past, and the murder.

There were two tragedies in the Taylor murder. The first is the murder itself. It snuffed out the life of a talented, promising, young man who was well on his way to becoming a solid role model and leader for his teammates and other young players, and in time may well have been that same solid role model off the field as well.

The second is that for an enraging instant it gave the legions of know it alls the irresistible chance to point the blame finger at the killer lifestyle that supposedly ensnares all young black males, and that included Taylor. Fortunately, the arrests of the suspects and their confession of what actually happened that fateful evening at the Taylor home gives lie to that notion. But even in Taylor’s death, and even after the truth came out about it, the truth is still a casualty to stereotypes. Witness this, every news account of the arrests, confessions, and background information on the suspects was still punctuated with the reminder of Taylor’s scrapes with the law. The thug life fascination with black males is still very much alive and kicking in some press rooms, and beyond.

Consider, dearest readers, the case of Ms. Gillian Gibbons.

Full of impractical thoughts - but good intentions and the right feelings - Ms. Gibbons sashayed from Britain down to The Sudan a few months ago, intent to teach the bright youngins of Khartoum's Unity High School.

"What's that," you say, dearest reader, "ain't Sudan the place that George Clooney goes running around clandestine-like 'cause there's murder and maheym and genocide?"

Um, yeah.

"Ain't the government of Sudan pretty much allowing this genocide to occur," you query.

Um, yes again.

"Ain't Sudan full of Radical muslims, and ain't most of the murder and mayhem being caused by them," you query, puzzled by the plainest of facts.

The answer is yes, indeed, and your confusion is well founded, I assure you. A war zone is an unpleasant place to live. It's really difficult place to teach school, though doing so is courageous. That is, unless, of course, you're not a local, and you're heading into a place where the bulk of the locals want to kill you in the name of the Jihad. Then you're just plain stupid.

Ms. Gibbons, it seems, didn't quite accept that folks who crash airplanes into buildings in the name of religion - or who actively support genocide of peasants - might be a tad off kilter. No no, they just need a few good examples and positive feeeeeeelings, and all will be right in the universe.

All they need is love, no?

Well, no.

"A conservative," it has been said, "is a Liberal who has been mugged."

Perhaps Ms. Gibbons will come to realize the gravity and insult of the intellectual mugging she's just received. And, perhaps, she will join those of us who recognize the enemy for what it is, and stop coddling the irrational with feelings.

Feelings are nice, but they won't salve 40 lashings - not even those inflicted for a teddy bear.

Who'd have thought that environmentalists and social conservatives could find such common cause? It looks like marriage is better for the environment than divorce. Suddenly, the Dobson crowd and Gore groupies will be fond bedmates, until the latter camp inevitably tries to speed up the planetary healing process through forced polyamory.

Seems like a hell of a thing that presidential candidates need to spend this much time addressing whether they read the entire Bible as being literally true. But that's where we are.

This, of course, raises the old issues about whether conservatives, who are more religious than liberals, are making war on science. There seems to be some strong evidence here. Conservatives are far more suspicious of the best empirical research on the climate, for instance. And while 60% of Americans believe in the virgin birth as we enter this Christmas (oops, "holiday") season, only 40% believe in Darwinian evolution, according to the latest Harris poll.

But I suspect that ideologically neutral, truly empirical science is as offensive to doctrinaire liberals as to hardcore right-wingers.

Seems like raises for elected officials during tough economic times is a tradition here in California.

LA's elected officials just got huge raises even as they are looking to cut services and raise taxes. UC and CSU executives got pay raises and big perks even as seek to raise fees for students. And now it seems all the Sacto pols will get a pay raises too, even though they are facing a $10-billion budget deficit. A story in today's Sacramento Bee nails legislators for taking pay raises amid a budget crunch. Some serious cognitive dissonance going on among the political set, no?

California's legislative salaries, already the nation's highest, will rise to $116,208 today for all but a handful of lawmakers who have declined the hike while the state fights a massive budget shortfall.

Thirteen legislators – four Senate and nine Assembly members – have asked the state controller to kill their $3,110-a-year raise.

The other 106 lawmakers and 11 of 12 constitutional officers are taking the money, although they officially have until Dec. 17 to turn it down.

But will they? Would you?

I am not a fan of Rudy. He has acted both immorally and irresponsibly. He has been less than transparent in his public and private lives. Though to be fair, transparency and adultery are difficult to reconcile unless you’re referring to the opacity of a negligee.

In reading all the Rudy stories* that have broken since the revelation that his girlfriend/mistress, now wife, was schlepped from trysting place to trysting place by publicly paid guards and police, I have a concern. The civilian bloggers disproportionately compare him to Mussolini or make Mafia references. The public comments almost invariably drop in an Italian word or reference. I don’t want to go too PC here but this strikes me as NOT ok.

Going for ethnic stereotypes is no more permissible with Italians than it would be with Jews, Hispanics or Blacks. There is the implication by connection that he is as he is because of his ethnicity and this further implies that others of his group may also be so blessed or cursed (and it doesn’t matter is if it is a good or bad stereotype. The assumptions are insulting).

So call him a crook or a cheat. Reject him as a bully if you wish, or love him for being tough and a testosterone besotted real man. All of this is about Rudy and not the vowel at the end of his name.

*Full disclosure: Do not take my claim of reading “all the Rudy stories” literally. Were I to have done so, I would still be reading and not writing. Let’s leave it at: I read a fair sampling of Rudy stories and comments.