More Predictions Gone Wrong

Loyal reader RB points out the latest column from Time's favorite cover girl, Ann Coulter, who mocks liberal predictions about Iraq in her usual understated way...

Well, the Iraq National Assembly completed filling out the cabinet this week, and it can now be said that this was liberals' laughably wrong prediction No. 9,856. (Or No. 9,857 if you count their predictions of ruinous global cooling back in the 1970s, which I don't because that could still happen.)

Iraq's first democratically elected government in half a century has a Shia prime minister and a Kurdish president and several Sunni cabinet ministers. In fact, toss in a couple of dowdy lesbians from the Green Party and it would look a lot like Vermont's state house.

...The minority Sunnis, who once held sway under Saddam Hussein and were told by American liberals to expect major payback from the Shiites under a democracy, were chosen by the majority Shia government for four cabinet positions — including the not insignificant position of defense minister. Plus, the Sunnis might get a fifth if they can convince Rep. Ali Abu Jeffords to switch parties.

...What we've learned from this is: Talking to liberals is much more fun now that we have Lexis-Nexis.

In a Nov. 9, 2003, news article, The New York Times raised the prospect that "democracy in the Middle East might empower the very forces that the United States opposes, like Islamic fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and Egypt."

Democracy in the U.S. might have put John Kerry in the White House, too, but you'll notice we didn't abandon the idea.

I love that last line. Again, she's not always right, but she's almost always funny as hell.

DC Driving

Faithful reader KS sends us this hysterical breakdown of driving in DC. An excerpt for out-of-towners to understand why people hate driving in this town...

The DC road grid was laid out by a Frenchman, which explains why locals hate the French, and also explains much about US Foriegn Policy. Within DC proper, the roads are laid out in a grid, with other streets crossing the grid at weird angles, usually through a traffic circle. No one in DC knows how to drive in a traffic circle, and people from the surburbs are worse. Many streets are one way, and making a left turn can require travelling three or four blocks out of your way. Right turns are worse. Right turn on red is allowed, except at intersections that are posted otherwise.

...Avoid I-66 at any time. Just listen to the traffic report ONCE and it is the same every day. The sun is in your face in the morning, and for your return trip, it's once again blinding you in the afternoon.

Avoid Rt. 7, (Leesburg Pike or any other name it changes to) at all times as well. Same story as above except you have no breaks because on this road, there are people who commute from West Virginia.

Of course you could take the subway, known locally as The Metro. Remember that either the Orange or Red line will be shut down or single tracked due to an accident. Unless both are shut down or single tracked. This is most likely to happen during rush hour. The escalators rarely work, the elevators even more rarely. However, the trains are very clean, kept that way by highly motivated police who will not hesitate to arrest a 12 year old for eating a french fry.

The part about Route 66 needs to be expanded to indicate just how insane it is that the entire freaking highway is HOV (going in during the morning, and returning during the evening) during portions of rush hour, which leads to congested side streets for two and a half hours, alongside an empty highway that suddenly turns into a parking lot immediately after HOV ends.

Hapless Harry Rides Again

The Artist Formerly Known as Sprout lets us know that our old buddy Harry Reid isn't showing that much remorse about his comments regarding the President last week...

In a news conference, Reid was asked if his comment about Bush would make it more difficult to negotiate with Republicans.

"I tell people how I feel about things. I don't try to hide how I feel," Reid said.

"Maybe my choice of words was improper, and I have indicated that maybe they were, but I want everyone here, I repeat, to know I'm going to continue to call things the way that I see them, and I think this administration has done a very, very bad job for this nation and the world."

No, Harry, your choice of words wasn't just improper, it was inaccurate. It's rather difficult to describe George W. Bush as a "loser" -- plenty of folks on the left have hammered him as an idiot (which we'd dispute), but loser would be tough to support by any measure.

What's even better is that Reid felt the need to qualify the fact that his comments were improper... "maybe." Uh, no, Harry -- they either are improper, or they aren't. This is the sort of pathetic doublespeak that people hate from politicians. Don't qualify it -- just say that you were wrong.

Next, I suppose I should be grateful that President Bush's job description now also includes doing a good job for the world. At least Reid placed the nation ahead of the world. But telling it like it is, or "calling things as I see them", might require more than mere demagoguery. Here's his comments from Friday where he expanded on the "loser" line...

"He's driving this country into bankruptcy," Reid said, referring to the deficit. "He's got us in this intractable war in Iraq where we now have about 1,600 American soldiers dead and another 15,000 injured."

Ah, yes. He's the one driving the train, with no assistance from Congress on the budget deficit. I like how Reid referenced "bankruptcy" as where we're heading when he and his party think it's somehow wrong for President Bush to describe Social Security as bankrupt. Of course Reid and the Dems have been full of great suggestions on how we can trim the budget deficit via spending cuts. Oh, wait, they just want to raise taxes on "the rich" to trim that budget deficit -- by defining "the rich" with the same broad swath activist judges use in interpreting the Constitution.

As for the "intractable war" in Iraq, is Afghanistan intractable as well? We lost approximately 400,000 U.S. soldiers in World War II, which lasted nearly two years longer (for the U.S.) than Iraq has presently. Good thing Reid was only four years old in 1943, or Roosevelt might have been hearing complaints about his "intractable" war.

Another Headline You Never Thought You'd See

Wojr sends us a headline that is crazy... and it gets even crazier when we read the story...

Norio Oishi is a 73-year-old self-professed God who runs the Oishi Fukuanso, a cruddy ranch on the outskirts of Sapporo with living quarters made of tacky prefabricated buildings and shipping containers and where goats, dogs and horses freely roam.

Oishi Fukuanso is also the headquarters of Oishi's kooky cult of mostly women worshippers, several of who are now accusing the carnal cleric of dipping into their holy water fonts, so to speak.

...Oishi boasted of a little more than a dozen followers, with 90 percent of his congregation women. Nearly all of his followers have been allegedly been subjected to his form of unholy communion.

Read more if you wish. Personally, I'm thinking the writer seemed to enjoy writing the story a little too much.

A Lousy Deal

Will Collier makes an excellent point while blogging about United Air Lines dumping its pension liability onto the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC)...

I don’t mean to tread on Martini Boy's turf here, but the pensions crisis among all of these old-line companies illustrates a great no-no of long-term investing: lack of diversification. In the end, even though they presumably didn't have much choice in the matter, all those UAL employees who've been promised a defined-benefit pension are in the same boat as the Enron and WorldCom employees who voluntarily put all of their 401(k) money in their own company's stock. They bet the house on one horse, and by they time old age caught up with the grizzled nag, there was barely enough left of it to cart off to the glue factory.

...All of which begs the question, why does one of our political parties still insist that everybody in the country ought to be putting 12% of their income into a single rapidly-becoming-insolvent "company" that they have no control over, no ownership of, and no ability to diversify out of?

What is Social Security, if not a giant defined-benefit plan that's outrageously underfunded going forward? And to the lefties who'll yell, "Yeah, but United and Enron had greedy executives who took all the money," my response is, "Sure did--and how is that any different from greedy politicians who spend all the tax money?"

It's a brilliant point, and one that people often miss in the Social Security debate. In his primetime news conference last week, President Bush explained in no uncertain terms that future generations are going to receive cuts in benefits from Social Security unless we raise the tax burden to provide more support going forward. This is in effect little different than what United is doing with its pension liability -- the PBGC will only pay about $5 billion of the $9.8 billion by which United's pension plans are underfunded. For the folks in public high school in Tampa, that's approximately half.

I'd like to think the federal government isn't going broke. And it won't. But I'd like to think that in order to support future generations, American taxpayers won't be forking over half their paycheck to the federal government every two weeks or so.

Some liberals will probably claim that United's default is proof positive of the need for Social Security. They're effectively missing the point -- having a system of insured benefits is great, but only if the person who expects to receive the benefits will indeed be able to receive them.

Megan McArdle makes an important point:

At least when companies have insufficient accrued assets to meet their accrued liabilities, the government forces them to trim benefits or raise contributions. Government programmes, on the other hand, have a tendency not to self correct until the crisis is upon us--by which time the nature of the fix has gone from painful to catastrophic. And taxation to support government insurance programmes has a high deadweight loss.

What's the best solution, then? I'd say we're converging on it: a system of minimal government insurance for those who have been unlucky, in life or investments, combined with a regulated forced savings plan to make sure that those who aren't unlucky aren't tempted to free-ride on society, and incentives to employers to encourage additional savings among employees. This won't make anyone ideologically happy. But it seems like the least intrusive, most fair, most economically sound possibility.

(hat tip: Instapundit) The media and the Democrats can try to kill private accounts, but they're not going to succeed. They make too much sense. Eventually, people will realize that Social Security as currently structured doesn't work. We don't rely on cars built in the 1930's to get around. We shouldn't rely on a pension system designed back then, either.

Newsweak

Somehow, Newsweek has managed to create a poll for ranking high school academics that's more of a joke than the BCS is in college football (hat tip: Orin Kerr at Volokh)...

Hillsborough High School in Tampa earned a D grade from the state last year. And under federal standards, it fell far short.

But on Monday, Newsweek magazine named it the 10th best high school in the country.

In the country.

Hillsborough was one of 16 Florida high schools to rank in the top 100, including five from the Tampa Bay area.

"We knew we were good," principal William Orr said. "But we didn't know how good."

The Newsweek list is based on a single factor: the number of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests taken by all students at a school, divided by the number of graduating seniors. The students don't have to do well on the tests either. It matters only that they take them.

Test scores? No.

Graduation rates? Nope.

Closing the achievement gap between whites and minorities? Forget it.

Critics say the formula is simplistic. For example, a school's rank can actually improve if it has a high dropout rate.

Well, maybe that's because the dropouts aren't being harmed academically any longer by the school.

It's My Vacation -- Now Go Away, Or I Shall Taunt You A Second Time

The Lord of Truth reminds us why the French have been in decline for the last three hundred years or so...

For the religiously inclined, the holy day Whitsunday, or Pentecost, falls as always on the seventh Sunday after Easter. A state fiat won't change that, and the French Catholic Church didn't protest when the authorities recently proposed to cancel the national holiday called "Pentecost" to raise two billion euros -- a cut of that day's work -- for a special fund to care for the elderly created in the wake of the 2003 heat wave, which killed thousands of seniors. But the majority of Frenchmen -- 66% according to a survey in Le Parisien daily -- consider that Monday sacred.

So a self-avowedly secular Republic with diminishing church attendance fights Marxist -- aka the religion-as-opiate creed -- trade unions to drop a Christian holiday from the calendar. The government even implores the public in quasi-religious terms to make this "sacrifice" in the name of "national solidarity." "This is not solidarity, this is a rip-off!" responds the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), a big union. Righteous anger over Pentecost could break out in national strikes next Monday.

When we first tried to reach CGT for comment, no one answered the phone at the union's offices Friday, officially a working day. You see, last Thursday was Ascension, a holy Christian day that remains a state holiday, which emptied France's cities and offices for the long weekend. In France, the real state religion is vacation.

This is probably why they surrendered in World War II. They would have fought, but who wants to cut into precious vacation time?

Attention Eagles Fans: Time to Panic

So after I spend an entire day in meetings while suffering through one of the worst colds in the history of man, I get to see this story... and feel worse...

Blasting Terrell Owens' agent for giving the disgruntled wide receiver "self-destructive advice," Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said yesterday that the team would not renegotiate Owens' contract.

"It's not even an issue," Lurie said in an exclusive interview. "It's a nonissue. There are a lot of things I spend time thinking about, but that's not one of them."

Reached at his off-season home in Atlanta last night, Owens declined to comment.

After a stellar season in which he led the Eagles with 1,200 receiving yards and 14 touchdowns en route to the team's first Super Bowl appearance since 1981, Owens last month switched agents from his longtime representative David Joseph to Drew Rosenhaus. A powerful agent in the NFL, Rosenhaus quickly flew to Philadelphia for a five-minute meeting with Eagles president Joe Banner.

"My policies are not to comment, so I have no comment," Rosenhaus said.

Neither Rosenhaus nor Owens has said what type of deal the star receiver wants, only that the seven-year $46 million deal he signed before joining the team in 2004 was inadequate. Rosenhaus has not ruled out Owens' missing the Eagles' training camp in July.

Asked whether he expects Owens to be with the Eagles when the regular season begins in September, Lurie said: "If he wants to win a Super Bowl, he sure should be. At this level, with multimillions [of dollars], you're just trying to leave a legacy and win Super Bowls, as far as I'm concerned. And he's got a great opportunity."

In a wide-ranging interview in his office at the Eagles' complex, Lurie blamed Owens for allowing Rosenhaus, who has an NFL client list of more than 90 players, to give him "self-destructive advice."

"It's a shame," said Lurie, who bought the Eagles in 1994 for $185 million.

"Every player is both fragile and talented. Unfortunately, we're seeing around the league certain agents who take advantage of the fragility of the players, and are less worried about their continued success and stability than acting self-destructively. It's too bad."

Well, at least I'll miss the first two weeks of training camp for the honeymoon. Maybe T.O. will be vacationing wherever I am.

What About The Other 364 Days of the Year?

I got to move to Brazil...

Sex rarely makes the news in Brazil's conservative Northeast — until a small town declared an official Orgasm Day on Monday.

Espertantina Mayor Felipe Santolia endorsed the May 9 holiday, which he said was intended to improve relationships between married couples.

"We're celebrating orgasm in all its senses. There's even a panel discussion on premature ejaculation. But from what I've seen, women have more trouble achieving orgasm than men, especially in marriage," Santolia said by telephone from Esperantina, 1,300 miles north of Rio de Janeiro.

Santolia said the remote town of 38,000 people has been unofficially celebrating orgasm day for years, but that the town's former mayor had vetoed a bill making it an official municipal holiday.

You know, I'm really wondering if this is how President Clinton approached Monica. "Hey, wanna be multicultural and celebrate a Brazilian holiday with me?"

The John Kerry Post of the Day

My latest discovery about my favorite cheese-eating surrendermonkey-looking Ketchup King cum former Presidential candidate:

You can't keep a bad former Presidential candidate from flip-flopping yet again. Or at least being tardy.

Once again, this is no longer the regular feature it once was. But it's time to mark a special 100 days for everyone's favorite boring Boston Brahmin. No, it's not the first 100 days of his Presidency (thank you, Lord). It's been 100 days since Senator Swiftboat promised to sign Form SF-180 and release all his military records.

Polipundit has a heckuva suggestion for those of us who are wondering if Kerry has spent too much time windsurfing to remember his promise. This parody response is even funnier. Of course, neither will be quite as funny as a Kerry '08 campaign. Now there's high hilarity.

Lassie Has Nothing On Her

The Lord of Truth sends along some uplifting news...

A baby girl rescued by a dog after being dumped in a Kenyan forest to die was offered homes across the world on Tuesday, with callers from as far away as Japan offering to care for the infant, dubbed Angel by nurses.

Catherine Gicheru, news editor of the Daily Nation, said her newspaper had been swamped by calls from would be adoptive parents in Japan, Venezuela and South Africa after carrying the story of the baby saved from a lonely death by a female dog.
"She was thrown away like garbage, so she has touched a lot of hearts. Everyone is looking at it like a miracle," Gicheru said.

The baby, estimated to be about two weeks old, was handed over to police by a family whose unnamed dog found her in a forest near Nairobi as she foraged for food for her puppies.

The dog carried the baby in her mouth across a busy road and set her down beside her puppies in the compound of the family's iron sheeted shack.

Someone needs to offer the dog a new home as well. Heck, I'm surprised this isn't a Hallmark TV special in production.

There's More Than One Kind of Gridlock in DC

Yeah, I noticed again this morning...

Gridlock has increased its stranglehold on the region, as a national study released yesterday showed that Washington area residents spend an average of 69 hours a year in traffic jams at a cost of $577 per commuter.

The Washington area had the third-worst traffic congestion in the United States, behind Los Angeles and San Francisco, for the fifth year in a row. For those keeping score, local motorists spent an additional three hours a year in tie-ups, and the region closed the gap between second and third place, the study said. For commuters, the results of the study confirmed what they knew: Already unpredictable commutes are even less predictable, and things aren't getting better.

"This is like the Olympics of gridlock," said Lon Anderson, spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic. "And I think our leaders have it wrong. I think they think we should be going for the gold. This is not an honor for which we should be proud."

The best part is, the roads in DC are horrific. And yet the region just keeps getting more crowded. The flip side is the fact that my home gets more valuable by the day.

Another Shot of Vodka

You know, there's something to be said for honest Libertarianism. Stephen Green takes to task his former allies who seem unwilling to fight the war on terror...

I'm a big believer in liberty. I support abortion rights. I want gay marriage legalized. I think good porn can be quite healthy. I was calling for an end to the Drug War long before I ever took my first hit of pot. I like a little hearty raunchiness on my TV, and nothing frightens me less than the prospect of my child someday catching a glimpse of a boob on the tube.

For all its flaws, for all its occasional nastiness, I still think liberty is the best thing going – even when I disagree with how my neighbors exercise their freedoms. After all, maybe they don't approve of what I do with mine.

But where are my allies?

Much of the pro-choice lobby thinks it's just dandy if half of the Arab world is confined to the abaya. Many of my gay friends have apparently decided that, if some countries want to topple stone walls on top of their local gays, that's not the concern of San Francisco. "Porn for me but not for thee" is the attitude of about every pornographer who has ever expressed an opinion on the Terror War. And the TV and movie moguls make the porn kings look brave by comparison.

Where the hell are my allies?

The good news is, Green was seriously considering leaving the blogosphere, which would be a terrible loss. I don't blame him for considering the idea -- his wife's pregnant, and family's a helluva lot more important than making sure his readers are entertained. But it would be a terrible loss for all of us. Luckily, he talked himself out of it.

And since I'm so grateful, I'll ignore the praise he offered Hillary Clinton. Man, did that occassion a shudder.

Call The Cops

Wow -- for the past seven months, I've been breaking the law...

There are some 144,000 unmarried couples living together in North Carolina, and they are all breaking the law — a statute that has been on the books since 1805.

The law against cohabitation is rarely enforced. But now the American Civil Liberties Union is suing to overturn it altogether, on behalf of a former sheriff's dispatcher who says she had to quit her job because she wouldn't marry her live-in boyfriend.

Deborah Hobbs, 40, says her boss, Sheriff Carson Smith of Pender County, near Wilmington, told her to get married, move out or find another job after he found out she and her boyfriend had been living together for three years. The couple did not want to get married, so Hobbs quit.

Her lawsuit, filed in March in state court, seeks to have the cohabitation law declared unconstitutional.

...North Carolina is one of seven states that still have laws on the books prohibiting cohabitation of unmarried couples. The others are Virginia, West Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Mississippi and North Dakota. North Carolina appears to be the only state where the law is being challenged.

The Virginia Supreme Court in January responded to the Lawrence v. Texas decision by striking down that state's rarely enforced state law prohibiting sex between unmarried people. But a Virginia law against cohabitation remains on the books.

Great. Now I have to get married, or move to DC or Maryland. Now there's some pressure.

May The Force Be With You

All right, I'm officially getting excited for Episode III: the Revenge of the Sith. As everyone knows, this is a huge mistake. But even the initial reviews look good...

Everyone who has followed the "Star Wars" saga over the years will come to this film knowing that it all has to pay off here: the transformation from Anakin into Darth Vader, the face-off between Anakin/Vader and his mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi, the morphing of the Republic into the Empire, the exile of Yoda and Padme's birth of the twins Luke and Leia, siblings who become the central figures in episodes 4-6.

Given the general awareness of what's going to happen, it's up to Lucas to make it exciting. Despite fans' varying degrees of loss of faith that set in with "Menace" and "Clones," most will be inspired enough to believe again.

As if deliberately setting out to reassert his mastery over his iconic creation, Lucas opens with an amazing shot of his two Jedi Knights, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregorEwan McGregor) and Anakin (Hayden ChristensenHayden Christensen), threading their little spaceships through an extraordinary maze of explosions and airborne craft.

In fact, the initial 23 minutes virtually constitute one eye-popping action sequence, as the Jedis fight an assortment of battles to rescue the kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) from the clutches of the skeletal separatist General Grievous.

When things settle down to reunite Anakin with Padme, who announces she's pregnant after the idyllic secret wedding that climaxed "Clones," one is briefly reminded of Lucas' shortcomings as a writer and director of intimate, one-on-one scenes. But it's a minor problem here, as the dynamic of onrushing events soon becomes all-enveloping, and several interconnected conflicts are brought to a head.

Don't let us down, George.

The Wedding Update

This wedding update is brought to you by Shula's Steakhouse. Because after sitting through your fiancee's entire bridal shower, you need a giant 48 oz. steak and several beers.

82 days to go...

Yes, you read that correctly above. I sat throught the entire shower.

Hey, sometimes you make sacrifices, right?

Okay, I have no excuse. My fiancee actually disagreed with her mother's request that I attend the entire shower, but it's kind of hard to turn down your future mother-in-law's request, especially when she's paying for the whole wedding. She claims her other son-in-law did the same thing -- a claim that will be investigated at some point when I'm over the pain. To be fair, I think they also wanted to give me an impromptu birthday party during the shower as well. Good cake, but it would ahve tasted just as good if I'd only been at the shower for five minutes.

Just a few observations about the shower...

1. The whole gift-opening thing. Sorry, but it takes an hour to unwrap the gifts, minimum, and everyone's bored while you do it. They all "ooh" and "aah" when the gifts are held up, but I can't believe women find this interesting.

2. BTW, I need a new home to fit all this stuff. The wine glasses alone... yeesh.

3. Beach party theme, for anyone who's interested. If you are, you need help.

4. You know your wedding's going to be far too large an affair when people are wearing nametags at the shower.

5. I thought three Coronas would help. Nope.

6. The bridesmaids devised some interesting games to test my fiancee's knowledge about me. She still can't remember what 1970's TV star I once resembled. Take pride, Wojr.

7. Three hours. For most of that time, the birde's grandfather and I were the only males in the room. Thank God for him -- those 15 minutes of football conversation were a lifesaver.

8. I really wish I had taken up the Lord of Truth on the kidnapping offer.

9. Alli's Dad was around for ten minutes at the beginning, and the last half-hour. In between, he snuck home and sat on his deck reading a book. My admiration for him grows.

10. Finally, thanks to the Kansas Redhead for mocking me mercilessly when he learned where I was when he called Saturday. Just think, someday you'll get to pay for at least two of these events.

Until next time...