Yikes

Our good friend NC passes on Charles Krauthammer's latest column, which is just filled with good news...

It was announced last week that American scientists have just created a living, killing copy of the 1918 ``Spanish'' flu.

This is big. Very big.

First, it is a scientific achievement of staggering proportions. The Spanish flu has not been seen on this blue planet for 85 years. Its re-creation is a story of enterprise, ingenuity, serendipity, hard work and sheer brilliance. It involves finding deep in the bowels of a military hospital in Washington a couple of tissue samples from the lungs of soldiers who died in 1918 (in an autopsy collection first ordered into existence by Abraham Lincoln), and the disinterment of an Alaskan Eskimo who died of the flu and whose remains had been preserved by the permafrost. Then, using slicing and dicing techniques only Michael Crichton could imagine, they pulled off a microbiological Jurassic Park: the first ever resurrection of an ancient pathogen. And not just any ancient pathogen, explained virologist Eddie Holmes, but ``the agent of the most important disease pandemic in human history.''

Which brings us to the second element of this story: Beyond the brilliance lies the sheer terror. We have quite literally brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction. It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four years of the First World War. It killed more humans than any other disease of similar duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notes The New Scientist, when the re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories in Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus ever tested.

Yeah, I'd be a tad bit scared. As Krauthammer notes, the 1918 flu was a bird flu --as is the dangerous avian bird flu developing in Asia. Forget the bio-war possibilities and just focus on the potential pandemic -- we may all be wearing masks this winter to work.

Stephen Gordon at the Speculist has more (hat tip: Instapundit). And if anyone out there can tell me where to get some Tamiflu, that would be nice.

Completely Irrelevant Thought of the Week

Call it our latest feature.

At least once a week (and most people would guess more often) I have a thought that needs to be shared, even though it concerns nothing of any importance whatsoever. We're reasonably certain that the world would go on happily without this idea being expressed, but why take the chance?

Explain this to me. Almost any time I see cookies with white chocalate chips in them, they're accompanied by macadamia nuts. Yet macadamia nuts, as a member of the nut family, aren't all that popular. If nuts were members of the Brady Bunch family, macadamia would be Cousin Oliver. Yet they are constantly paired with white chocolate chips in cookies. Why can't I get a white chocolate chip cookie without macadamia nuts?

Warning: spending more than ten seconds thinking about this is an utter waste of your time.

No Left-Wing Bias to See Here, Part 734

If you want to know why most on the right don't trust the media's reporting on Iraq... well, Jason Van Steenwyck tells us why we don't. And Dafydd at Big Lizards provides even more context. (hat tip: Instapundit)

The press wants us to pull out of Iraq and declare it a defeat. There's only one problem -- no one trusts them to tell the truth. And we shouldn't.

Great Writing From One of Our Favorites

Lileks' latest Screedblog is too damn funny not to provide a link...

What caused the Pakistan earthquakes? If you trust Venezuela’s Castro-wannabe Hugo Chavez, it was the free market. Adam Smith’s invisible hand, flipping mankind the bird. The "world global capitalist model,” Chavez insisted, “… is destroying the world. The world is in danger. Never has there been such disasters, hurricanes, droughts, torrential rains. Incredible! The world is dangerously off balance."

By this theory, Gaia is mad at us because we cut down trees and buy sneakers. Gaia is peeved because people want to drive to work in offices heated by nuclear power. We should all push a donkey cart up a rutted road and sit in the market all day waiting for someone to buy our withered tubers, so we can buy a small piece of burlap soaked in sugar to feed our nine children. Gaia hates capitalism.

Chavez, of course, believes none of this; if he opposed this “unbalanced” world he’d cap the oil wells and command his people to burn dung. it’s just the latest stick with which the internationalist left can thwap the piñata of the rich free West. It gets Chavez closer to the day when college students, yearning to poke a thumb in dad’s eye, will dump the Che T-shirt for one with Hugo’s mug.

...If Chavez’ opportunistic eco-twaddle smacks of the sort of religious eschatology you get from Pat Robertson, it should. The pious leftism of the international nomenklatura is a religion. The United States may not be their Great Satan, but it’s the devil they know. The bureaucrats and the EU anointed are the priesthood - and the Nobel peace prize is the means of bestowing sainthood.

Which brings us to its latest recipient: ol’ see-no-evil Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. This is like giving the Surgeon General the Nobel Price for medicine after bird flu depopulates the North American continent.

I only wish I could write like that. Read the whole thing.

More on Miers

Our good friend NC points us to John Fund's latest missive in the Journal regarding the vetting -- or lack thereof -- for Harriet Myers' nomination. Check out this passage...

Indeed, even internal advice was shunned. Mr. Card is said to have shouted down objections to Ms. Miers at staff meetings. A senator attending the White House swearing-in of John Roberts four days before the Miers selection was announced was struck by how depressed White House staffers were during discussion of the next nominee. He says their reaction to him could have been characterized as, "Oh brother, you have no idea what's coming."

A last minute effort was made to block the choice of Ms. Miers, including the offices of Vice President Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. It fell on deaf ears. First Lady Laura Bush, who went to Southern Methodist University at the same time as Ms. Miers, weighed in. On Sunday night, the president dined with Ms. Miers and the first lady to celebrate the nomination of what one presidential aide inartfully praised to me as that of "a female trailblazer who will walk in the footsteps of President Bush."

"Shouted down" objections? Look, it's bad enough that I spent three years in law school and countless years afterward listening to the idiots on the left act as if volume won arguments. This is absurd.

I would link to David Brooks' stinging takedown of Miers' writing abilities in the left-wing dishrag, but they don't let anyone have access to their editorial page anymore without paying a fee (more likely it's sheer embarrassment regarding any Paul Krugman column, but we digress). But if you get the dishrag at home, definitely read it (I can't believe I just wrote those words). Meanwhile, James Taranto lets us know why we should be uneasy...

President Bush last week expressed his confidence in the constancy of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, saying that "20 years from now she'll be the same person, with the same philosophy," as she is today. White House aides making the case for Miers, meanwhile, have been insisting that she is a reliable conservative. Since she has no judicial record and has had little to say about constitutional law, we can only guess at what her judicial philosophy might be, if indeed she has one at all. But if she is a political conservative, then she has not remained constant over the past 20 years.

We base this on a look at her testimony in Williams v. Dallas, a voting-rights case from 1989, when Miers was an at-large member of the Dallas City Council. Read over it and the impression that emerges is of a left-leaning centrist, not a conservative.

...The Drudge Report has picked up one aspect of this testimony: her declaration that she had refrained from joining "politically charged" organizations like the Federalist Society, even though she had been a member of the liberal Progressive Voters League. When the lawyer questioning her asked if the NAACP (of which she was not a member) was "in the category of organizations you were talking about"--i.e., "politically charged"--she answered "no." Notes Drudge: "In 1987, the NAACP launched a campaign to defeat the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court; In 1989, the group organized the Silent March; over 100,000 protested U.S. Supreme Court decisions the group claimed 'reversed many of the gains made against discrimination.' "

There's a lot more there, and it's not good. The words "David Souter" keep jumping to the fore.

Fine, But We Won't Take Ewoks

This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "ugly American"...

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a Wookiee named Chewbacca growled and howled his way through "Star Wars" movies. On Monday, the actor who played him will take the oath to become an American citizen.

British-born Peter Mayhew will be among 441 people from 77 countries who will become naturalized Americans in a ceremony in Arlington, Texas.

...When he takes his oath to become an American, Mayhew said he'll recite what he can remember and "it will be a Chewie growl for the other parts."

Somewhere out there, my old friend Wojr is smiling. Meanwhile, the real question is whether Wookies can have dual citizenship.

Not a Good Way to Defend Harriet

Hugh Hewitt, who has been one of the most ardent supporters of the Miers nomination, stated that he thinks Harriet Miers would probably end up being comparable to Potter Stewart. Patterico, in a terrific response, notes a response from the book The Brethren that illustrates the issue of judicial activism about as well as I've ever seen...

Here is the story of how Potter Stewart came to concur in Roe v. Wade, from the book The Brethren, at p. 196:

Stewart thought that abortion was one of those constitutional issues that the Court rarely handled well. Yet it was becoming too important to ignore. Abortion was a political issue. Women were coming into their own, as Stewart learned from his daughter Harriet, a strong, independent woman.

As Stewart saw it, abortion was becoming one reasonable solution to population control. Poor people, in particular, were consistently victims of archaic and artificially complicated laws. The public was ready for abortion reform.

Still, these were issues of the very sort that made Stewart uncomfortable. Precisely because of their political nature, the Court should avoid them. But [you knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you? — Ed.] the state legislatures were always so far behind. Few seemed likely to amend their abortion laws. Much as Stewart disliked the Court’s being involved in this kind of controversy, this was perhaps an instance where it had to be involved.

So: Stewart recognized that this was a political issue. But he had an independent daughter who was teaching him about women’s lib, and the state legislatures were just moving too slow for his personal liking. So, in an act of pure judicial arrogance, Stewart joined the Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade.

The passage quoted by Patterico frames the issue perfectly as conservatives see it.

Roe did not involve a Constitutional right to privacy -- it involved a policy choice made by 7 out of 9 men in black robes who simply took the power to make laws away from the state legislatures and assigned it themselves. What's more, at least one of them, based on this passage, recognized this to be true.

Quite simply, it's wonderful that Justice Stewart recognized that abortion laws might have a disproprtionate impact on poor women. But if he wanted to do something about it, he should have run for the state house in the states that he believed were behind the times in reforming their laws. Deciding to take the issue out of the realm of the legislature and declaring it off-limits is akin to despotism, not justice.

I don't know whether Harriet Miers will be another Potter Stewart. But I don't want to take that risk.

NFL Recap Week Five

We know. We know.

Everyone here is waiting for some kind of ill-humored rant from your humble recapper, screaming about his beloved team's unexpected fall from grace this weekend. In fact, we're reasonably sure that in the five years we've been writing recaps (and more importantly, preventing the nomination of Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court), we've never seen our team (the Eagles, for those of you not paying attention to these recaps, which should be everyone) lay such an egg. And considering that Philadelphia fans like myself are known for being about as stable as the Balkans, we should be expected to explode.

But folks, we have found the cure. No, not the Yankees losing, although that's always nice. No, not the Phillies firing their general manager -- even though it tells us what a sad place Philly is that we celebrate such events. And no, even the news that Tom Cruise is about to become a grandfather, since his daughter Katie is preg... wait, what do you mean she's his fiancee???

See, in this crazy world, there's plenty of stuff that will drive you just bonkers. How does one stay calm?

The answer is poetry. Japanese poetry, to be exact.

Yes, it's the return of the haiku recap.

For those of you unfamiliar with haiku, it's our favorite form of poetry. It was essentially spoonfed to us by countless elementary school teachers trapped by an unimaginative curriculum into attempting to teach us syllables and cultural awareness simultaneously, along with the important principle that poetry need not rhyme, while at the same time allowing us to butcher an ancient Japanese art form. Something for everyone, as it were.

So without further ado, let's get to it...

Cowboys beat Philly
Still, I think most all agree
We hate the Cowboys.

The Pats on the ropes
Hold on to beat Atlanta
Never doubt Brady.

Bills beat Dolphins
Miami gets Ricky back
Joke writers will smile.

Cleveland beats the Bears
Browns have 2 wins -- Crennel should
Be named coach of year.

Lions beat Ravens
Does anyone really care?
Billick, but who else?

Pack gets first win by
Crushing the Saints in Green Bay
Brett not washed up yet.

Seahawks beat the Rams
Who beat them thrice last season
Please get well, Coach Martz.

Jets over Tampa
Vinny's not old - Jets fans say,
Bring back Richard Todd.

Titans rock Houston
Texans still winless, but Carr
Always has great hair.

Colts beat the Niners
No real surprise here; Indy
Is the league's best team.

Skins fall in Denver
Valiant effort just falls short
Still beats Spurrier.

Panthers stuff the Cards
Denny Green not doing well
But Cards have no fans.

Jags get a big win
Over unbeaten Bengals
It's strange to type that.

Steelers beat Chargers
Almost lose Roethlisberger
Great name for haiku.

Why are these haikus
So undeniably bad?
We blame our teachers.

Die, Monkeys, Die!

The last of the flying monkeys is dead. Shed a tear...

Sig Frohlich, who has died aged 97, was a bit-part actor for much of his long career in Hollywood, playing messengers, waiters, callboys, clerks and soldiers, rarely earning even a flicker of recognition from viewers over 50 years.

But he achieved some lasting celebrity as one of the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz (1939). This was despite the fact that he was completely disguised in a monkey costume and uttered no words on screen.

The 13 actors playing these unlovely animals, in the service of the Wicked Witch of the West, were originally promised $25 for each time they swooped down screaming from the sky on the heroine, Dorothy (Judy Garland). The director, Victor Fleming, protested that this sum was the usual fee for a whole day's work. But it was agreed that Frohlich, who was an early member of the Screen Actors' Guild, should receive an extra $5 a swoop since he was the one who snatched Dorothy's dog, Toto; and he was paid more for his other scenes with Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch.

Frohlich, the last surviving monkey, found himself constantly questioned about the film, which enjoys such iconic status in the United States that flying monkeys are periodically referred to in The Simpsons. He was a favourite at the Wizard of Oz festival, which is held in the house where Judy Garland was born at Grand Rapids, Minnesota.

Frohlich believed that the great interest was due to the monkeys being the stuff of childhood nightmares.

(hat tip: The Corner) Um, what kind of screwed up kid has nightmares about flying monkeys? Yeesh. As for The Simpsons using the flying monkees as a reference point, they've used everything as a reference point, as South Park once noted.

The Miers Nomination in Trouble

John Fund's Monday column on the Miers nomination was must-reading. The Lord of Truth and several others pointed me toward it. The following passage was particularly enlightening...

It is traditional for nominees to remain silent until their confirmation hearings. But previous nominees, while unable to speak for themselves, have been able to deploy an array of people to speak persuasively on their behalf. In this case, the White House spin team has been pathetic, dismissing much of the criticism of Ms. Miers as "elitism" or even echoing Democratic senators who view it as "sexist." But it was Richard Land , president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who went so far as to paint Ms. Miers as virtually a tool of the man who has been her client for the past decade. "In Texas, we have two important values, courage and loyalty," he told a conference call of conservative leaders last Thursday. "If Harriet Miers didn't rule the way George W. Bush thought she would, he would see that as an act of betrayal and so would she." That is an argument in her favor. It sounds more like a blood oath than a dignified nomination process aimed at finding the most qualified individual possible.

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter says he has no doubt Ms. Miers is taking "a crash course" in constitutional law. She will be primed with talking points and her compelling success story when the hearings begin. The presumption that she should be confirmed will weigh heavily on Republican senators who will be constantly reminded that the president has made dozens of good judicial picks for lower courts.
But that ignores the fact that every Republican president over the past half century has stumbled when it comes to naming nominees to the high court. Consider the record:

After leaving office, Dwight Eisenhower was asked by a reporter if he had made any mistakes as president. "Two," Ike replied. "They are both on the Supreme Court." He referred to Earl Warren and William Brennan, both of whom became liberal icons.
Richard Nixon personally assured conservatives that Harry Blackmun would vote the same way as his childhood friend, Warren Burger. Within four years, Justice Blackmun had spun Roe v. Wade out of whole constitutional cloth. Chief Justice Burger concurred in Roe, and made clear he didn't even understand what the court was deciding: "Plainly," he wrote, "the Court today rejects any claim that the Constitution requires abortions on demand."

Gerald Ford personally told members of his staff that John Paul Stevens was "a good Republican, and would vote like one." Justice Stevens has since become the leader of the court's liberal wing.

An upcoming biography of Sandra Day O'Connor by Supreme Court reporter Joan Biskupic includes correspondence from Ronald Reagan to conservative senators concerned about her scant paper trail. The message was, in effect: Trust me. She's a traditional conservative. From Roe v. Wade to racial preferences, she has proved not to be. Similarly, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation recalls the hard sell the Reagan White House made on behalf of Anthony Kennedy in 1987, after the Senate rejected Robert Bork. "They even put his priest on the phone with us to assure us he was solid on everything," Mr. Weyrich recalls. From term limits to abortion to the juvenile death penalty to the overturning of a state referendum on gay rights, Justice Kennedy has often disappointed conservatives.

Most famously, White House chief of staff John Sununu told Pat McGuigan, an aide to Mr. Weyrich, that the appointment of David Souter in 1990 would please conservatives. "This is a home run, and the ball is still ascending. In fact, it's just about to leave earth orbit," he told Mr. McGuigan. At the press conference announcing the appointment, the elder President Bush asserted five times that Justice Souter was "committed to interpreting, not making the law." The rest is history.

Harriet Miers is unquestionably a fine lawyer and a woman of great character. But her record on constitutional issues is nil, and it is therefore understandable that conservatives, having been burned at least seven times in the past 50 years, would be hesitant about supporting her nomination.

Elitism is the dumbest charge anyone can make. Perhaps one could consider me an elitist, but my objection to Miers has nothing to do with her law school degree from SMU. It's what she's done since she graduated, which shows a complete lack of involvement in Constitutional law. The defense to this would be the idea that perhaps we should have non-lawyers on the Court, to better represent the common man. Setting aside that argument for a moment (and it's not one that I find compelling anyway), Miers is a lawyer. It's not too much to ask that the nominee, if they are a lawyer, be someone with a background in Constitutional law (and if they're not a lawyer, someone with a public policy background a tad bit more expansive than Miers' would be a good idea). As our good friend NC noted, it's fine to nominate your personal lawyer if his name is Ted Olsen (or, for liberals, Lawrence Tribe). Whatever the ideaology of the choice, the lack of judicial experience would be mitigated in such a case by the fact that the person has spent more than enough time working with issues similar to the ones they would confront on the bench. We don't have that here.

Fund also went on Hugh Hewitt and noted that White House is unprepared for six to seven surprises regarding the Miers nomination that should appear in the press in the next few days (hat tip: Polipundit, via Volokh and Instapundit).

By the way, Polipundit is hammering this nomination, with a pretty good set of suggested questions regarding Miers (Loyal reader RB, who pointed me to this post, noted other potential questions that should be asked regarding Miers' understanding of constitutional law). My feelings on this are getting stronger.

I don't think Miers should be confirmed, and I don't think she will be confirmed. In fact, I think it's increasingly likely that the best-case scenario takes place -- Miers withdraws her name upon the suggestion of folks at the White House who can actually read the tea leaves regarding the fight they're about to endure. Remember, the folks who would rush to the defense of a conservative nominee will not do it with enthusiasm for Miers. In fact, some will actively be undermining the nomination.

It's times like this that I recall a great quote from noted philosopher Hank Hill...

PEGGY: Oh, give me a break. I don't see how having a girl on the team would
ruin it. Did a woman judge ruin the Supreme Court?

HANK: Yes, and that woman's name was Earl Warren.

The President has created a battle that he didn't need. And he doesn't have the allies he needs to win it.

Everything's Bigger In Texas

Over at Patterico's site, the Angry Clam has the link to the White House tape where LBJ orders Haggar pants. It's not every day the President belches and says the word "bunghole."

Well, except if it was LBJ. And maybe Nixon.

Helping Out In the Face of Tragedy

Michelle Malkin has a good roundup of links regarding how we can help those struck by the quake in Southeast Asia. Saying a prayer would also be worthwhile.

Hey Kofi: Hands Off The Internet

Let's all agree on one thing -- the U.N. needs to stay away from regulating the Internet. And if they try to do it, while failing to accomplish anything useful for the last decade or so, it's time to withdraw from Kofi Annan's debating society.

MADDening

The next time Mothers Against Drunk Driving (M.A.D.D.) sends me a solicitation (which arrive regularly in the mail), I'm going to remember Radley Balko's well-written piece...

Unfortunately, MADD has come to outlive and outgrow its original mission. By the mid-1990s, deaths from drunk driving began to level off, after 15 years of progress. The sensible conclusion to draw from this was that the occasional drunk driver had all but been eradicated. MADD's successes had boiled the problem down to a small group of hard-core alcoholics.

It was at about this time that MADD began to move in a different direction, one not so much aimed at reducing drunk driving fatalities but at stripping DWI defendants of basic criminal rights. MADD also seemed to expand its mission to one of discouraging the consumption of alcohol in general — what critics call "neo-prohibition."

MADD's biggest victory on this front was a nationwide blood-alcohol threshold of .08, down from .10. But when two-thirds of alcohol-related traffic fatalities involve blood-alcohol levels of .14 and above, and the average fatal accident occurs at .17, this move doesn't make much sense. It's like lowering the speed limit from 65 to 60 to catch people who drive 100 miles per hour. In fact, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reviewed all the statistical data and concluded "the evidence does not conclusively establish that .08 BAC laws by themselves result in reductions in the number and severity of crashes involving alcohol."

...MADD is also pushing its agenda onto family laws, including a zero tolerance policy for divorced parents. Under the bills MADD is trying to push through state legislatures, a parent caught consuming one beer or glass of wine before driving could face penalties that, according to MADD, "should include, but are not limited to" — "incarceration," "change of primary custody," or "termination of parental rights." This means that if you take your kid to the game, have a beer in the third inning, then drive home, you could very well lose your rights as a father.

Even MADD's founder, Candy Lightner, has lamented that the organization has grown neo-prohibitionist in nature.

"[MADD has] become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned ...," Lightner is quoted as saying in an Aug. 6 story in the Washington Times. "I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving," she said.

Unfortunately, the tax-exempt organization has become so enmeshed with government it has nearly become a formal government agency. MADD gets millions of dollars in federal and state funding, and has a quasi-official relationship with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In some jurisdictions, DWI defendants are sentenced to attend and pay for alcoholic-recovery groups sponsored by MADD. In many cities, MADD officials are even allowed to man sobriety checkpoints alongside police.

(hat tip: Instapundit and Andrew Stuttaford at The Corner) You know, MADD usually sends its fundraising appeals with those checks that you're not supposed to cash (my favorite stupid fundraising idea). Maybe people should start cashing those checks to get back their tax dollars.

I Need To Eat At Subway

I returned to blogging just in time to note this important story...

Two years after relations between the US and France soured over the Iraq war, French-bashing in America appears alive and well in light of a recent ad campaign by a fast-food chain linking France and cowardice.

The ad by the Subway chain touted a cordon bleu chicken sandwich with the words "France and chicken, somehow it just goes together". A photo of a chicken dressed like Napoleon accompanied the advertisement.

Subway ran the ads in about 10 US states for nearly a month and pulled them in September following an outcry by members of the French expatriate community and other customers offended by the racist undertone.

Mark Bridenbaker, a spokesman for Subway, which has outlets in France, defended the campaign telling AFP it was aimed at lauding French cuisine.

"The perfect match of French cuisine and the Subway chicken ... that was the intent of this advertising," he said. "But once we realized that people were taking offense, we removed everything from stores right away."

Others, however, say the ads are evidence French-bashing has become well-ingrained and perfectly acceptable among a segment of the American population.

"Saying that the French are dirty or cowards is a little bit like saying the sky is blue. Nobody is going to contest it," said Denis Chazelle, a long-time French resident of the Washington area who created a website in March to try and dispell misconceptions about his native country and who led the campaign against the Subway ads.

"I think (French-bashing) is worse now than it was two years ago because, although it's not as relentless as it was, it has become a lot more accepted and part of the landscape," he added.

Chazelle said had Subway run an ad campagin targetting Mexicans, Israelis or Italians, it would have faced a boycott and management heads would have rolled.

"But if it concerns the French, it's no big deal," he said. "People here can say they hate the French without blinking an eye or an afterthought."

Marc Saint-Aubin du Cormier, another French native who created a website to monitor anti-French sentiment in the United States and Canada, agrees.

...Chazelle and Cormier said one reason such comments largely go unnoticed is because the French expatriate community in the United States is fairly small and has no active lobby groups.

Not only that, but they tend to surrender their possessions when confronted by German immigrants. Seriously, perhaps the better solution would be to develop a sense of humor, but we know that's asking a lot.

Meanwhile, while I much prefer Quizno's to Subway, I'd definitely start eating Subway again if they re-started this campaign.

Too Sensitive to Get It

During my self-imposed hiatus, I missed a chance to comment on the Bill Bennett imbroglio. By way of background, Bennett stands accused of being a racist for using an ill-advised hypothetical on his radio show, where he cited Steven Levitt's book Freakenomics and its evidence that the increase in abortions following Roe v. Wade led to a drop in the crime rate. Bennet made the mistake of saying the following: "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."

That's a rather unwise way to make a point in a society where race-consciousness is a point of hper-sensitivity... but it doesn't make Bennett a racist. And to give credit where it's due, many liberals have noted as such.

But Jonah Goldberg rips into those who attacked Bennett, and makes some great points along the way...

My first objection is more of a delicious irony. Notice how so many righteously offended liberals keep referring to fetuses as people. In the New York Times, Bob Herbert proclaims that Bennett considers "exterminating blacks would be a most effective crime-fighting tool." Schultz and McAuliffe say Bennett wants to exterminate "babies."

Funny, I thought the bedrock faith of pro-abortion liberals is that fetuses aren't babies. Isn't it interesting how this lynchpin of liberal morality evaporates the moment an opportunity to call Bennett a racist presents itself? Talk about utilitarianism.

...His argument wasn't about race at all. His point was to discourage even pro-lifers from demeaning the cause by making abortion into an acceptable governmental tool for social policy.

Bennett was sincere when he said that aborting all black babies simply to lower the crime rate would be "ridiculous, and morally reprehensible." He could have just as easily said to the caller: "Hey, look, we could save a lot of money on skyrocketing education costs if only we aborted the mentally impaired and learning disabled. But you know what? Ends cannot justify the means of murdering the unborn." It would be silly to waste a lot of time trying to rebut him by saying, "Well, actually you wouldn't save that much money."

The former philosophy professor picked a hypothetical that he thought would make the horror of such utilitarianism obvious to everybody. Murder a whole generation just to lower the crime rate? Disgusting!

Bennett's real mistake was in thinking people would be mature enough to get it.

Well-stated. Maybe if people started listening to more than just the words "black" and "white", they might understand it.

Harriet Who?

Yes, it's been a couple weeks. But I've been busy -- in part figuring out how to politely tell the President whom I supported for re-election to... well, let's just say he's made better decisions.

Forget hurricane relief -- I'm smart enough to realize that while the Administration screwed up, so did every facet of government at the state and local level, and our media's decision to sensationalize rumors into fact has left us with even less faith in the MSM than before (well, I guess it might have been worse if Dan Rather had been reporting, but not much). The disaster in New Orleans was a tragedy in every way -- exaggerating the events helps no one.

But supposedly, the President was weakened enough by the events surrounding Katrina that he didn't want to invite a battle on his next Supreme Court nominee. Never mind that his first nominee sailed through confirmation, simply because the President found a strong candidate who made the Senators look like complete buffoons (well, more than usual). No, here we needed to find a compromise candidate, someone approved by Harry Reid. Yuck.

I'm sure Harriet Myers is a fine lawyer and wonderful human being. I think she's probably a terrific administrator, based on her experience running a large Texas law firm. But that doesn't qualify her for the Supreme Court. I couldn't agree with George Will more...

It is not important that she be confirmed because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court's tasks. The president's ``argument'' for her amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to, for several reasons.

He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their prepresidential careers, and this president, particularly, is not disposed to such reflections.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that Miers' nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers' name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.

Charles Krauthammer also nails the issue to the wall...

It is particularly dismaying that this act should have been perpetrated by the conservative party. For half a century, liberals have corrupted the courts by turning them into an instrument of radical social change on questions -- school prayer, abortion, busing, the death penalty -- that properly belong to the elected branches of government. Conservatives have opposed this arrogation of the legislative role and called for restoration of the purely interpretive role of the court. To nominate someone whose adult life reveals no record of even participation in debates about constitutional interpretation is an insult to the institution and to that vision of the institution.

There are 1,084,504 lawyers in the United States. What distinguishes Harriet Miers from any of them, other than her connection with the president? To have selected her, when conservative jurisprudence has J. Harvie Wilkinson, Michael Luttig, Michael McConnell and at least a dozen others on a bench deeper than that of the New York Yankees, is scandalous.

It will be argued that this criticism is elitist. But this is not about the Ivy League. The issue is not the venue of Miers's constitutional scholarship, experience and engagement. The issue is their nonexistence.

The most disturbing thing in Krauthammer's article is not the obscene number of lawyers in the U.S.; it's his statement that schoolchildren will one day end up trying to figure out who was who in the "Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton" 1989-2017 Presidential succession. Shudder. But I digress.

Professor Bainbridge urges a fight on the nomination. I'm ticked off that we need to fight amonst ourselves on the nomination, but the President bought this battle by failing to live up a specific promise. Instead of offering us another Scalia or John Roberts, we're offered a personal friend (and the word crony would not be improper) whose qualifications are sparse and at best may turn into Clarence Thomas -- but is just as likely to turn into David Souter. Okay, maybe W. is smart enough to avoid that... but I can't take that on faith. Dan Henninger, who appears to think Miers will be confirmed, stresses why conservatives are upset...

For nearly 25 years, conservative legal thinkers have been building an argument that liberalism transformed the Court into an instrument of national policymaking more appropriate to the nation's legislative institutions. Roe v. Wade is the most famous of those policy decisions. And the most famous dictum justifying judicial policy innovation is Justice William Douglas's "penumbras formed by emanations"--from Griswold v. Connecticut.

Across these many years conservatives have been creating a structured legal edifice to stand against a liberal trend toward aggrandized federal power that began in the 1930s. Chief Justice William Rehnquist's "New Federalism," which devolves many powers back to the states, was one such example. Harriet Miers may share these reformist views, but her contribution to them is zero. Conservatives are upset because they see this choice as frittering away an opportunity of long-term consequence.

If instead the Senate had been given the chance to confirm someone who had participated in this conservative legal reconstruction and who would describe its tenets in a confirmation hearing, that vote would stand as an institutional validation of those ideas. This would become a conservatism worth aspiring to. In turn, Congress's imprimatur would follow the nominee onto the Court, into the judiciary and the law schools. A Miers confirmation validates nothing, gives voice to nothing.

Our voice is to say no. Our hope is that Harriet Miers withdraws.