Judith Apter Klinghoffer highlights another way that Europe has fallen down in taking any kind of action against Iran. She points out that FIFA, the international soccer association is refusing to ban Iran from the World Cup next year even though they banned Yugoslavia under Milosevic. Just imagine how Iranians, crazy as they are about soccer, would react if they learned that their president's aggressive statements and actions were keeping them out of international soccer. That would probably be even more dangerous to Ahmadinejad's power than any economic sanctions.

Wouldn't you guess that college graduates were, well, literate? Apparently not. Less than a third of college graduates tested in 2003 scored as proficient in literacy.

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, given in 2003 by the Department of Education, is the nation's most important test of how well adult Americans can read.

The test also found steep declines in the English literacy of Hispanics in the United States, and significant increases among blacks and Asians.

When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills. There were 26.4 million college graduates.

The college graduates who in 2003 failed to demonstrate proficiency included 53 percent who scored at the intermediate level and 14 percent who scored at the basic level, meaning they could read and understand short, commonplace prose texts.

Experts are blaming this steep drop in ten years on young people reading less and watching more TV as well as surfing the Internet. All true. However, these are college graduates. I would throw the onus back on the colleges. Are they passing students who don't have the ability to read the sort of complex reading materials that colleges used to require? We know that the high schools aren't doing their part to maintain tough standards and, seemingly, that attitude seems to have shifted, along with those high school graduates, to the college level.

And why should there have been such a steep drop in the literacy of Hispanic students? The expert quoted provides this explanation.

"The Hispanic population in 2003 is radically different than in 1992, and many of the factors that have changed for Spanish-language immigrants make learning English more difficult," Mr. Schneider said. "They are arriving later, staying in the U.S. for a shorter period, and fewer are speaking English at home."

Well, yes. This is all true. But, if they're not literate in English, how are they graduating from college? Do the professors just pass them along, excusing poor performance? Do the professors not even require any reading or writing?

I would love to see a breakdown of results tied to specific colleges. It's time to apply the same "get tough" approach to outcomes in education that we've begun to apply to secondary schools to colleges. Perhaps, if these colleges knew that future employers would know that they are graduating large numbers of students who are not proficient readers, those schools might decide to toughen up their standards. I suspect that these large numbers failing the test come from a certain tier of colleges and prospective students might like to know that information. How many of these colleges are public colleges? Are taxpayers supporting institutions that are failing to make sure that their graduates can read complex material? You can check out the report and the data here, but the information seems to be broken down only by demographics, not by state or institution. As such, the information seems rather useless for doing more than identifying the problem. If institutions and state governments supporting public colleges are going to do anything to deal with this decline in literacy among graduates, they need to know where the problem exists. They don't need a blanket one-size-fits-all solution. Many universities are probably doing a fine job and their graduates most likely are passing these tests. Let's figure out which schools have a problem so that we can start targeting those programs. Or, at the very least, let parents know what they're probably getting when they pay those tuition bills.

Jay Nordlinger has highlighted what I find one of the funniest oxymorons I've seen in a long time.

Okay, I’m holding in my hands a new book, about East Germany. The author is Mary Fulbrook, a history professor at University College London. The book is called The People’s State: East Germany from Hitler to Honecker. (So far, so unpromising.) And here’s how the text on the jacket ends: “Replacing the simplistic black-and-white concept of ‘totalitarianism’ by the notion of a ‘participatory dictatorship’, this book seeks to reinstate the East German people as actors in their own history.”

We like to say that Reagan won, but did he? In the universities, never! “Participatory dictatorship”! The cake is taken. Congratulations, Professor Fulbrook. Comrade Honecker would be so pleased.

"Participatory dictatorship!" I can well believe that there are gradations in tyranny, but I doubt if many East Germans felt that they were participating in that dictatorship. Only an academic could come up with such a clanker.

EU leaders are condemning Iran's Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust. Funny. They find language denying mass murder in the past as unacceptable yet don't seem to mind the constant statements coming out of the Arab world calling for the destruction of Israel now.

Gee, I don't know how Doug Bandow of Cato could have been so stupid as to have accepted money from Jack Abramoff to write favorable columns about Abramoff's clients. Did he learn nothing from Armstrong Williams? Didn't it ever occur to him to disclose his conflict of interest to his readers and to Cato Institute? Now, he's ruined his career and his reputation. What a shame for him and for every other columnist who now will have to work under this shadow of doubt from their own work.

Victor Davis Hanson has an interesting, if unappetizing metaphor about what we're experiencing now as it becomes apparent that things aren't really as bad as the media seems to delight in portraying them.

For the last three years we have seen a carbuncle swell as the old Vietnam War opposition rematerialized, with Michael Moore, the Hollywood elite, and Cindy Sheehan scaring the daylights out of the Democratic establishment that either pandered to or triangulated around their crazy rhetoric. The size of the Islamicist/Baathist insurrection caught the United States for a time off guard, as was true also of the sudden vehement slurs from our erstwhile allies in Europe, Canada, and Asia. Few anticipated that the turmoil Iraq would force the Syrians out of Lebanon, the Libyans to give up their WMDs, and the Egyptians to hold elections — and that all the killing, acrimony, and furor over these developments would begin to engulf the Middle East and threaten the old order.

In the face of that growing ulcer of discontent, we quietly kept on killing terrorists, promoting elections in Iraq, pressuring Arab autocracies to democratize, and growing the economy. All that is finally lancing the boil, here and abroad — and what was in there all along is now slowly oozing out, making the cure seem almost as gross as the malady.

If you haven't read Matt Pottinger's column in the Wall Street Journal about why he decided to give up his job as a reporter for the WSJ in Asia to join the Marines, go and do so. It is quite moving.

Diana West looks a little more carefully at the Saudi Prince Alwaleed who just gave lots of money to Harvard and Georgetown. Not only does this guy, one of the richest in the world, own a big stake in Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, he's also contributed millions to give aid to the families of suicide bombers who kill Israelis. And he doesn't stop there.

Prince Crimson bin Hoya is not only one of American academia's most generous benefactors ever, he's co-owner of ART TV network, the Saudi company that includes what Steven Stalinsky of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has described in the New York Sun as "the anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-Jihad Arabic TV channel Iraq."
That's putting it mildly. Programming, Mr. Stalinsky writes, includes telethons — the notorious terrorist fundraiser (mentioned above) of 2002, and an August, 2005 fundraiser for "Jihad in Palestine"; lectures that endorse suicide bombing and exhort Muslims to triumph over the West by the "slitting of throats and shattering skulls"; September 11 conspiracy theories blaming the United States, Israel and the Vatican; children's shows that instruct parents to teach their children to pray for "martyrdom"; a soap opera with Jews casting spells on Mohammed; and talk shows on wife-beating. I'd say it's about time Rupert picked up the phone.

And so should Harvard and Georgetown. Are these the same schools who don't like to have the United States armed services recruit students on campus because they fear that college students will think that a few appearances by a military recruiter on campus means that the university itself supports discrimination against gays? Well, isn't it a mite bit more likely that students will be confused if the school houses a multi-million Islamic Studies center funded by someone who aids and ecourages suicide bombers? If there is going to be a center to build bridges between the East and West, how about a center in Riyadh to support understanding of Christianity and Judaism? We all know how likely that is.

Charles Krauthammer is positively scary today looking at Presiden Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and what this guy believes. Recently, he's given us some insight into his belief system. He denies that the Holocaust happened and thinks that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth. Is this a guy you want to have a nuclear weapon?

Everyone knows where Iran's nuclear weapons will be aimed. Everyone knows they will be put on Shahab rockets, which have been modified so that they can reach Israel. And everyone knows that if the button is ever pushed, it will be the end of Israel.

But it gets worse. The president of a country about to go nuclear is a confirmed believer in the coming apocalypse. Like Judaism and Christianity, Shiite Islam has its own version of the messianic return -- the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam. The more devout believers in Iran pray at the Jamkaran mosque, which houses a well from which, some believe, he will emerge.

When Ahmadinejad unexpectedly won the presidential elections, he immediately gave $17 million of government funds to the shrine. Last month Ahmadinejad said publicly that the main mission of the Islamic Revolution is to pave the way for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam.

And as in some versions of fundamentalist Christianity, the second coming will be accompanied by the usual trials and tribulations, death and destruction. Iranian journalist Hossein Bastani reported Ahmadinejad saying in official meetings that the hidden imam will reappear in two years.

So a Holocaust-denying, virulently anti-Semitic, aspiring genocidist, on the verge of acquiring weapons of the apocalypse, believes that the end is not only near but nearer than the next American presidential election. (Pity the Democrats. They cannot catch a break.) This kind of man would have, to put it gently, less inhibition about starting Armageddon than a normal person. Indeed, with millennial bliss pending, he would have positive incentive to, as they say in Jewish eschatology, hasten the end.

This is scary stuff. And I don't have any confidence that anyone has a "plan" for dealing with Iran. Because it's not only Ahmadinejad, but all the mullahs behind him who put him in charge.

Tony Snow has some thoughts tying the call for a "plan" to leave Iraq to the desire for a "plan" to fix every problem in this country.

The latest Democratic position on Iraq goes something like this: Even though the Iraqis pulled off a stunningly peaceful and successful election on Dec. 15, President Bush still needs to establish benchmarks for the future, informing the American people of precisely what he will do -- i.e., how many troops he would demobilize -- should certain things happen on the ground in Iraq.

They believe human events unfold in a neat and predictable manner. Call it the Theory of Human Orderliness. The idea is that one can harness the insights of science and the methods of engineering to perfect societies. Theorists believe sound plans can impel people to behave in an ordered manner -- like asteroids tracing their paths through the void.

Thus, John Kennedy launched a war on poverty, asserting in his Inaugural Address that we had it within our power to vanquish hardship and want. Within years, the government began dumping untold billions into like-minded efforts to clean the air and water, provide health care for all, and ring in an era of manageable economic growth and prosperity.

The only flaw in the Orderliness Hypothesis is that it doesn't work if people are present. The war on poverty looked great on paper. It failed miserably in real life. Air-cleansing regulatory schemes looked great in computer models, but failed abysmally in reality. Centralized health care boasted of chalkboard elegance, but is breaking the bank right here, right now. The myth of managed affluence collapsed with the Berlin Wall.

And yet, failure has not altered Democratic thinking an iota. John Kerry boasted dozens of times in his debates with George W. Bush that he had a plan -- for everything: dental care, tree planting, street paving, book binding, teen rutting, mass transit, air circulation, steel production ... you name it. He announced these schemes with a sense of triumph, as if having a plan were superior to having a clue.

While I wouldn't totally throw out the idea of forward planning - and I'm sure that the Bush administration has plenty of "plans" themselves - you have to acknowledge that people change their behavior according to the incentives and disincentives out there. So, people who are poor might change their behavior if the government starts offering them financial aid or people with comprehensive health care would change their habits if they knew that a second party would pay for all their health care visits.

That doesn't mean, however, that people don't need plans for either war and government. They just need to take into account how the other side will react. No great general would make his own military plans without thinking about what the other guy is doing. For example, Ulysses Grant was a great general. However, the mistakes he made at Shiloh, for instance, were partly because he didn't take into account what the Confederates might have been planning. And, sometimes generals make great plans and then their side fails to carry them out. Robert E. Lee had great plans to attack McClellan during the Seven Days Battles, but every single time, he couldn't get his subordinates to carry out the elaborate plans he'd drawn up. Plans fall apart to a whole host of factors. That's why great leaders need to be flexible and to adapt.

John Burns reports from a Sunni town and contrasts the mood there to what it was even a year ago.

The freewheeling opinions among the Sunnis were hard, at times, to square with the hard-line views widely expressed to reporters on previous trips to Adhamiya, and with the inflexible attitudes common there when Mr. Hussein was still in power. The difference this time appeared to be less a matter of conversion than freedom from threat - the very thing that Ali, the schoolboy, hinted at when he celebrated having a day with his friends when they did not have to worry about the gunfire or bombs that had been common in Adhamiya.

For at least as long as the insurgent pullback to allow the Sunni voting lasted, people in the district seemed freed from intimidation, and the recurrent references to this sense of freedom reflected it.

"Before, we had a dictator, and now we have this freedom, this democracy," said Emad Abdul Jabbar, 38, a teacher acting as supervisor at the Ahrar school polling site. "This time, we have a real election, not just the sham elections we had under Saddam, and we Sunnis want to participate in the political process."

A 60-year-old merchant, Abdul Kader al-Saffar, and his wife, Ammal Abdul Razzaq, 40, who voted with their three sons, agreed. "We have found candidates in this election we can trust," Mr. Saffar said, referring to the Iraqi Consensus Front, a moderate Sunni group that had several of its political workers killed during the campaign.

Another thing many Sunnis seemed to agree on was the possibility of a reconciliation between the Americans and the Sunnis, and a distancing of the Sunnis from some of the Al Qaeda-linked insurgent groups. Many were critical of American troops, saying, as Mr. Saleh did, that "they came as liberators, but stayed on as occupiers." But pressed on the question of an American troop withdrawal, most seemed cautious, favoring a gradual drawdown.

"Let's have stability, and then the Americans can go home," said Mr. Sattar, the store owner. Told that this sounded similar to President Bush's formula for a troop withdrawal, he replied: "Then Bush has said it correctly".

This could be quite an interesting case.

Students from 19 states yesterday filed a class-action lawsuit seeking hundreds of millions of dollars from California officials for charging them significantly more than illegal aliens pay to attend state-run colleges.
The 42 plaintiffs say California state lawmakers and the University of California board of regents knowingly violated a federal law enacted in 1996 that says any state that offers discounted in-state tuition to its illegal aliens must provide the same lower rates to all U.S. citizens.

Just what California needs - to have to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars in refunds to all out-of-state students. I didn't know that there was such a federal law and I don't approve of the federal government telling states what they should do with charging tuition. But, the law was on the books and California knew about it and went ahead an implemented its practice of giving illegal immigrants the same tuition as in-state students while still charging out-of-state kids the higher rate. They should pay the penalty.

Mark Coffey has compiled his top ten favorite responses from Daily Kos on the Iraqi election. They either think it's a conspiracy to divert attention from all the Bush evilitude or they just don't care about Iraqis getting the opportunity to choose their own leaders.

We really do inhabit two different worlds. Compare their reactions to those you'll find on any conservative website talking about the election.

W. Thomas Smith reports on some reaction among both our soldiers and the Iraqi soldiers on the eve of election.

U.S. Army Major Chris Hanna with the 5th Brigade, 87th Division (Training Support) in Al Kindi describes the excitement of an Iraqi Army sergeant major, who, last week, for the first time — in a long time — loaded his wife and kids in the family car and drove to the grocery store: Something we Americans often take for granted. Earlier this week, the sergeant major voted with other soldiers and policemen who pre-voted so that they could secure the polling sites on election day.

"As we prepared to visit the Iraqi units and polling sites in Mosul, I noticed the ink stained fingers of all the soldiers who voted early," Hanna tells NRO. "I turned and looked over to the division sergeant major in the vehicle next to me and he was grinning from ear to ear. I held up my finger to see his, and he showed me his ink-stained finger and then a quick thumbs up. I'd never seen him so happy. Genuinely excited. He felt safe enough to go shopping last week, and now to vote on top of that? The optimism among the Iraqi soldiers and the Iraqis as we drove around Mosul is contagious."

Sergeant First Class Larry Bull, also with 5th Brigade, agrees.

"I've seen more smiles than anytime ever before," Bull says. "There seems to be an uplift of the spirits of all the individuals we pass from most everyone and all ages. I believe that the Iraqi people are seeing that the impossible might become the possible after the election. The vast majority of the populace seems to appreciate, not only the Iraqi soldiers, but us."

The excitement and joy is so contagious; you'd have to be a real curmudgeon or so torn up with Bush hatred not to feel it and be happy for this day.

Thomas Lifson looks behind the mask at Howell Raines. (I know what you're probably thinking - who cares about Howell Raines anymore - but the guy did run the New York Times until he was shoved out the door.) It is not a pretty picture.

Gateway Pundit, who has a terrific roundup of Iraqi election news, has up a picture of a "surprise" guest at the polling booths.

Actually, I think it's a great idea to have some of these Democrats come over and see for themselves what is going on in the election.

Ah, here is one journalist, for the Fairbanks paper, who acknowledges that his whole mental concept of the situation in Iraq was wrong.

Think about everything you’ve heard about the conditions in Iraq, the role of U.S. forces, the multi-layered complexities of the war.

Then think again.

I’m a journalist. I read the news everyday, from several sources. I have the luxury of reading stuff newspapers don’t always have room to print. I read every tidbit I could on Iraq and the war before coming.

Everything I thought I knew was wrong.

Maybe not wrong, but certainly different than the picture in my head.

I liken it to this; It was real struggle for me to choose to see the Harry Potter movies. I had read the books and loved the pictures I had in my mind of the details I read. I didn’t need to see a movie; I had a movie playing in my head of exactly how I perceived the stories.

I had similar notions about Iraq, Mosul, the war and what exactly soldiers do. And it was handily shattered like glass today by a group of soldiers, half of them younger than myself.

Perhaps we need some more embedded journalists on the ground there assessing the situation for themselves rather than from the movie in their heads.

UPDATE: Oops, the above journalist is a woman, Margaret Friedenauer, not a man. Shame on me for just assuming a gender stereotype.

Can you believe that the Washington Post doesn't have a front page story today on the election in Iraq?

Here's some good news about how Iraqis view their own situation. Several international news organizations concluded a poll of Iraqis and the results may surprise you.

The media pollsters began their survey by asking, “Overall, how would you say things are going in your life these days — very good, quite good, quite bad or very bad?”

Seventy-one percent of those polled say very good or quite good — up from 55 percent in a poll taken in June 2004. Twenty-nine percent say their lives are quite bad or very bad — down from 45 percent in 2004.

The pollsters also asked about individual aspects of the respondents’ lives in the neighborhoods where they live. Sixty-one percent report that the security situation is very good or quite good. Sixty-six percent rate their protection from crime as very good or quite good.

Seventy-four percent say local schools are very good or quite good. Seventy percent say their family’s economic situation is very good or quite good. Seventy-eight percent rate their freedom of speech as very good or quite good.

Of course, there are some who say their situation is worse than it was last year, and worse than it was before the war. But in both cases, they are in the minority.

The Iraqis polled by ABC and the other news organizations also express confidence in a number of national institutions. Sixty-seven percent say they have a great deal or a lot of confidence in the new Iraqi army. And 68 percent say they have a great deal or a lot of confidence in the police. Those numbers rank alongside confidence in the country’s religious leaders, which is at 67 percent.

With story after story about how the American soldiers and Iraqis themselves have a much more optimistic view of the situation over there than the portrayal in the media, you would think that the media might start questioning itself about the job it's doing. After all, they usually love gazing at their own navels and analyzing their performance. But, I see little evidence that any such self-examination of their coverage of the war and situation in Iraq has been going on.

With all the bashing that Wikipedia has gotten recently, it's interesting to see the results of this study by Nature Magazine. They compared entries in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica on scientific subjects and found them to have about the same rate of accuracy. I must say, that for subjects taht I know something about, particularly American history, the entries I've read have been very well-done and comoprehensive.

Here is an interview with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. He has some good advice on how people should be using Wikipedia.

No, I don't think people should cite it, and I don't think people should cite Britannica, either -- the error rate there isn't very good. People shouldn't be citing encyclopedias in the first place. Wikipedia and other encyclopedias should be solid enough to give good, solid background information to inform your studies for a deeper level. And really, it's more reliable to read Wikipedia for background than to read random Web pages on the Internet.

Exactly. Learn a little about a subject, but look elsewhere to get authoritative answers. And, as I tell my students, don't use it for your research paper in my class.

The whole story of Stanley Tookie Williams was really bizarre as all these people lined up to tell us what a wonderful guy he was and how he had just made a few mistakes in his past. Ignore the four people he killed or the gang lifestyle that he helped to promulgate. Ignore the fact that he had shown no remorse whatsoever for those murders. Jonah Goldberg believes that, if the the opponents of capital punishment want to make progress and win converts, they need to realize that their hyperbole is losing them support.

So here is what I think could be the foundation of a true teaching moment for the anti-death penalty community. One of the main reasons its sermons don't resonate beyond the choir isn't that Americans are consumed with racist bloodlust or yearnings for vengeance. It isn't even because all death penalty supporters are unshakably convinced of the rightness of their position. It's because the anti-capital punishment crowd has lost all credibility.

I'm sure that from within the movement, saying whatever it takes to save a life seems like a moral obligation — hence the last-minute appeals, the miraculous discovery of exonerating witnesses and the rest. But from outside the fishbowl, it just reinforces the impression that nothing they say can be taken at face value.

It's fine if Bianca Jagger or Mike Farrell wants to claim that Williams was redeemed, even though he refused to admit his crimes. But a nun should know better. Sister Helen Prejean told NPR that Williams didn't need to confess his sin to find redemption. "One way to show remorse is just say, 'I am so sorry I killed those people.' Another way to show remorse is with your life, what you do with your life. And look what he's done with his." That's good PR but bad theology.

Morality isn't the only thing that gets spun. Death penalty opponents — with the help of a sympathetic media — hone their statistical legerdemain, suggesting that everyone who's gotten off death row in recent years was innocent, when in fact many just had flawed trials.

And, of course, there's all the America bashing from a crowd that can cheer Yasser Arafat's Peace Prize but also can call Schwarzenegger a murderer with a straight face. Indeed, it's difficult not to conclude that, for many, the Tookies are merely convenient props to put the United States on trial. And, as we all know, props aren't responsible for their actions.

Larry Elder has an interesting comparison of the NAACP stand on capital punishment.

About the death penalty, according to the NAACP's website, the organization opposes it: "The NAACP has long opposed the death penalty because in many states there has been a disproportionate number of African-Americans sentenced to death, particularly when the crime involves a white victim."

But where was the NAACP's opposition to the death penalty back in 2000? The organization ran an ad during the 2000 presidential campaign of then-Gov. George W. Bush. The ad -- with a voiceover by the daughter of James Byrd, the man dragged to death by three men in Jasper, Texas -- attacked Bush for not passing enhanced hate-crime legislation. Bird's daughter, in a dramatic voice, said, "(I)t was like my father was killed all over again." But two of the three men convicted of killing Byrd had already received death sentences, with the third, who testified that he attempted to stop the other two from committing the murder, getting life without possibility of parole.

The NAACP ad, in essence, says that Byrd's killers should have been punished more harshly. So apparently white bigots deserve the death penalty, but a black multi-murderer who founded a street gang does not. All clear now?

And then he offers this thought experiment.

Consider the following hypothetical. David Duke, former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, murders, in cold blood, four innocent blacks. But, wait. Duke later renounces the Klan and pens children's books urging white kids to reject racism. But he refuses to accept responsibility for the murder of the four innocent blacks, claiming that a racist jury convicted him for his reputation, not for the murders. Imagine Snoop Dogg, Jamie Foxx, Ed Asner or the NAACP organizing a campaign to spare the "redeemed" Duke's life.

Remember all the predictions of rioting in the street upon Tookie's execution. Well, it hasn't come to pass. Mary Katherine Ham, blogging on Hugh Hewitt's site, ponders the absence of those riots.

Maybe there were no riots because, as Baldilocks points out, the folks the media seemed to anxiously expect to riot remember what Tookie's minions have done to their neighborhoods.

One Marine major serving in Iraq explains how things look differently to those serving on the ground there than they do to the American people. He explains how a survey of American military officers found that 64% our optimistic about our success in Iraq while 60% of Americans are pessimistic and want to pull out.

We know the streets, the people and the insurgents far better than any armchair academic or talking head. As military professionals, we are trained to gauge the chances of success and failure, to calculate risk and reward. We have little to gain from our optimism and quite a bit to lose as we leave our families over and over again to face danger and deprivation for an increasingly unpopular cause. We know that there are no guarantees in war, and that we may well fail in the long run. We also know that if we follow our current plan we can, over time, leave behind a stable and unified country that might help to anchor a better future for the Middle East.

It is difficult for most Americans to rationalize this optimism in the face of the horrific images and depressing stories that have come to symbolize the war in Iraq. Most of the violent news is true; the death and destruction are very real. But experienced military officers know that the horror stories, however dramatic, do not represent the broader conditions there or the chances for future success. For every vividly portrayed suicide bombing, there are hundreds of thousands of people living quiet, if often uncertain, lives. For every depressing story of unrest and instability there is an untold story of potential and hope. The impression of Iraq as an unfathomable quagmire is false and dangerously misleading.

It is this false impression that has led us to a moment of national truth. The proponents of the quagmire vision argue that the very presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is the cause of the insurgency and that our withdrawal would give the Iraqis their only true chance for stability. Most military officers and NCOs with ground experience in Iraq know that this vision is patently false. Although the presence of U.S. forces certainly inflames sentiment and provides the insurgents with targets, the anti-coalition insurgency is mostly a symptom of the underlying conditions in Iraq. It may seem paradoxical, but only our presence can buffer the violence enough to allow for eventual stability.

The precipitous withdrawal of U.S. troops would almost certainly lead to a violent and destabilizing civil war. The Iraqi military is not ready to assume control and would not miraculously achieve competence in our absence. As we left, the insurgency would turn into internecine violence, and Iraq would collapse into a true failed state. The fires of the Iraqi civil war would spread, and terrorists would find a new safe haven from which to launch attacks against our homeland.

Iraq the Model has a post as Mohammed writes about the feelings he has on the eve of the election. You can just feel the excitement he and his friends feel as they prepare to vote. It really is a moving post. And check out the cute picture he has up on the top of the page.

With joy, worry, fear and hope I await tomorrow. Our hearts beat fast hurrying the clock to bring us faster to the other shore.

Tomorrow it’s going to be us who decide and I can feel the greatness of the responsibility because the result will draw the shape of our future and will determine how long it will take till we can announce victory in this war; our war against the past, against the past’s illusions and the past’s mistakes; with our hands we can make this war last shorter… with our own choices.

One year ago we wanted to defeat terror and the shadows of dictatorship and tell them that we are not willing to go backwards and that we’re ready to build a new Iraq where the people choose their representatives…
The choice didn’t matter then as much as voting itself did; all we wanted to do was to go and cast our votes regardless of the choices we made.

Yesterday we were sitting together with our friends talking and discussing our points of view. We found that our ambitions are way bigger than the mere idea of voting or practicing our right to elect, now we feel that our votes are a responsibility and a heavy one.
We are hesitant and worried about our choices and maybe the opinion polls results that we’ve seen-or at least from what I hear from people I meet-indicate that there’s a higher percentage than normal of people who haven’t made up their mind yet on who to vote for.

Me and my friends were sitting discussing “who’s best for Iraq?” and the reasons on which each one of us based his/her opinion. I was seeing a drastic change in the sense of the historic responsibility we shoulder.
I see my friends call their friends and acquaintances encouraging them to vote for this candidate or that list and putting effort in convincing them with this or that idea.

In a matter of one year questions and answers changed a lot; less than a year ago the question was “will you vote?” But now the question is “who are you going to vote for?”
We are making progress, definitely we are!

The contrast between what used to be in Iraq and the possibilities that now exist are mazing to me sitting in my safe home in North Carolina. Imagine what it must be like for Mohammed and his friends to anticipate the moment that Iraqis choose their own government. I remember just a few years ago reading all these wise writers saying that there could be no such thing as a democracy in an Arab country. Iraq is trying to prove these naysayers wrong. Can't Americans put their partisan biases aside and be happy for the Iraqis?

This couldn't have happened without the United States and it would be nice if we could pause for a few minutes here in America and take some pride in what we have done. You can despise Bush for going into a war that you don't agree with. You can mourn those who have lost their lives in Iraq. You can want to pull our troops out as soon as possible. It is possible to hold all of those positions and still to be amazed at the idea of an Arabic country going from a brutal dictatorship to a democracy. If this election is successful, Americans and Iraqis will have pulled off something that few people thought possible. Whatever you think about the war, it seems hard not to think that this election is a good thing for Iraq and the Middle East and to wish them all the success possible as they embark on the experiment of democracy.

If you read the many writings by American founders in the early years of our country, you sense their doubts that the great American experiment would succeed. It was those doubts that led to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. In that critical period as the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation became clear to such influential leaders as Washington, Madison, and Hamilton, there were deep fears that the Revolution was going to be for nought and that we were going to descend into a quarrelling group of 13 different states and be of such weakness that European powers would overwhelm our infant country. Few in Europe thought the American experiment would be a success and even fewer would have predicted where America would be even 30 years later. We tend to look back and think that our history was inevitable. It wasn't.

I wonder how the Iraqi history books 50 years from now are going to portray this moment in history. Perhaps, our efforts will fail and Iraq will become a tyranny as some new warlord grabs power. Then, these years will be a mere blip in the history books if they aren't excised out entirely. A brief moment of hope before darkness descended again. Or, perhaps, our efforts will succeed and this moment will be regarded as their founding moment and tomorrow's election will be celebrated as the beginning of their path to a new world of freedom.

For years I've subscribed to Newsweek Magazine and found that each week I read less and less of it. Mostly I used the covers for a mural I have in my room of covers going back to 1997. It's a colorful and entertaining way to point out to my students stories from a time when they were in grade school and to show the evolution of various stories from the impeachment of President Clinton to the 2000 election to the war in Iraq. But, the obvious bias in story after story in Newsweek finally got to me and I cancelled my subscription. For about the past three years, any cover story that could be tied at all to Bush was cast to show Bush in a negative way. The contrast in its cover stories on John Kerry and Bush in the 2004 election are quite striking. Even its coverage of Reagan's death was then twisted into a story slamming Bush on stem cell research without any real coverage of the problems with such research and the promise of research on adult stem cells. Newsweek still keeps arriving, and every week I say to my husband that, if I hadn't already cancelled it, I would be ready to do so again. Now, I just beg the covers from my students and I have one very nice girl who brings them in to me each week.

Their cover story this week is really a joke. They have Bush in a bubble and then blast him for not consulting enough with the power elites in Washington. What they really mean is that he's not talking to them and he's not talking to Democrats. Read Brent Bozell on this silly non-story.

There's still more. Newsweek's reporters are actually indifferent to the actual foreign-policy records of the presidents they're touting as role models of consultation. They are conducting the ultimate exercise in Washington insider-dom. They are all about The Process. It doesn't matter if you succeed; it only that you make the right phone calls.

Early in the article, Thomas and Wolffe hang the hats of bipartisanship on their Bubble-Boy critique by noting Sen. Richard Lugar "cited Bill Clinton as the model" of consultation with the other party. And what in blazes did that accomplish? Did Clinton consult before his Wag-the-Dog two-day wars? Did Clinton get Osama bin Laden? Or did Clinton follow Murtha's actual advice to him and withdraw from Somalia and embolden Osama? They also cite John F. Kennedy, whose consultation skills didn't exactly help at the Bay of Pigs.

The same goes for domestic political consultation. Thomas and Wolffe hail Daddy Bush as a Murtha-consulting role model. The Thomas-Wolffe story ends by citing Daddy Bush's heroic tax increase as "doing the right thing." He consulted with Democrats and raised taxes. And spending went through the roof, the deficit rising to all-time highs. But he talked it out, slapped some backs, shook some hands. He moved left, and he lost.

In the end, this is about wanting the current President Bush to be moderate . His fault isn't just insularity, it's his occasional outbursts of conservatism. They cite that even Ronald Reagan reached out in his troubled second term to moderate old hand Howard Baker as his chief of staff. But Fred Barnes noted on Fox what Newsweek left out: Newsweek pulled this same attack on Reagan in 1981, with a story that fall on "A Disengaged Presidency."

They just can't stand the thought that a president of the United States doesn't consult them, doesn't stroke them, doesn't create the impression of reaching out. What they really want is for Bush to do what they think is wise - liberal policies. It's not the consultation they care about, but the decision. What if he did call up all these wise men and journalists and solicity their opinions, but then rejected their suggestions and made a different decision. Would the fact that he had stroked them better while rejecting their advice be of any comfort to Newsweek? We all know the answer. There would be a cover story of how Bush is forging his own path despite the good advice he'd been given.

This is just like the Democrats who whine that Bush asked them for their ideas on who would make a good Supreme Court nominee but refused to tell them whom he was going to nominate and let them veto his suggestion. They didn't want consultation; they wanted a veto. And no president is going to give the other party that sort of control over his decisions.

Perhaps, Represenatives Murtha and Pelosi would do well to listen to this woman.

Obligatory disclaimer of respect for Representative Murtha's service to our country.

But the man does not really understand American history. He made the following comment concerning our presence in Iraq.

Murtha said the United States was seen by Iraqis as an occupier. Being in Philadelphia, he drew a comparison to the American Revolution. He said that if the French had remained in the infant United States after the Revolutionary War, "we'd have thrown them the hell out of here." That's how Iraqis are reacting now to the presence of U.S. troops, the 73-year-old congressman said.

"The Iraqis are not against democracy," he said. "They are against our occupation."

This supposed parallel is so faulty as to earn the guy an F in American history. The French were our allies in the Revolutionary War. They were not the originators of the war, the major armies fighting the war, or the leaders of the military forces throughout the country. They gave us financial aid, and sent an army that didn't really do much that truly aided us until Yorktown. They had a navy that only made a real difference at Yorktown, but spent the rest of their time involved in the war down in the West Indies trying to expand on their possessions there while Britain was occupied in America. At the negotiating table, they were actually an obstacle to our achieving a satisfactory peace and our Ben Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay actually had to negotiate the 1783 Treaty of Paris behind France's back. After the Revolutionary War, there was no need of French armies to maintain peace and democracy in our country.

In contrast, in a more apt parallel, we still have troops in Germany and Okinawa six decades after the end of World War II. We still have forces in Korea five decades later.

It's never too late to prosecute a dictator. The Poles are planning to charge Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the last leader of Communist Poland, with violating the Polish constitution by imposing martial law in 1981.

Jaruzelski, 82, also could face charges for harassment, the internment of thousands of government opponents and the deaths of almost 100 people during some 18 months of martial law.

Ah, the mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine. Let it be so.

Michael Barone looks at the proposed position that the Democrats have been working on to show that they have a united stand on Iraq. He is not impressed.

Reporters Jim VandeHei and Shalaigh Murray describe an emerging compromise:

While the party is divided over the specifics of Iraq policy, most Democratic legislators are slowly coalescing around a political plan, according to lawmakers and party operatives. This would involve setting a broad time frame for drawing down U.S. troops, starting with National Guard and reserve units, internationalizing the reconstruction effort, and blaming Bush for misleading the country into a war without a victory plan.

It should be readily apparent that there's not much there there. "Broad time frame": That doesn't sound much more specific than what the Bush administration says. "Starting with National Guard and reserve units": Under the policy established by Gen. Creighton Abrams after the Vietnam War, National Guard and reserve units have specialized functions that no regular units have, so no deployment can take place without them. General Abrams noted that few Guard and reserve units had been called up to serve in Vietnam, and he wanted to make them essential to future deployments. You can debate whether that's a good policy or not, but you can't really have a deployment without the Guards or reserves. "Internationalizing the reconstruction effort": It already is internationalized, and further "internationalizing" is almost certainly impossible, since countries that have refused to participate will most likely continue to do so.

In other words, this "political plan" is exactly that, a verbal formula on which many, perhaps most, Democrats might be able to agree. But it's not a serious proposal in any real-world sense.

So, once you strip away the non-serious parts of their proposal, all you're left with is "blame Bush." I don't think they've made much progress in the past few years with coming up with a substantive plan that shows that they have any appreciation of what they would need to do if they were in power. Leadership is more than criticism and casting blame. It is choosing the least bad of several bad options. And they're not willing to do so.

The New York Sun has an excellent editorial wondering if the same leaders of Harvard from World War II who did so much to aid our war effort would have been as willing to take Saudi money to finance an Islamic Studies program as the school's leaders today have shown themselves to be.

Not all anti-Israel or anti-American professors receive funding from overseas, and not all professors who receive funding from overseas are anti-American or anti-Israel. That said, it will be illuminating to watch to see whom Harvard selects to fill the new chair that will be known as the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor in Contemporary Islamic Thought and Life. Somehow we doubt it'll be a scholar who reckons that Mecca and Medina should be redistributed to the Hashemites and the oil rich Saudi eastern provinces to the Shiites or who criticizes the Saudis for funding the Hamas terrorist group and for distributing audiotapes in the West Bank describing the Jews as "the sons of monkeys and pigs." Somehow we doubt it will be a scholar who criticizes the Saudi kingdom for obstructing the American investigation into the 1996 Dhahran barracks bombing. It will be interesting to see how the scholar stands on the petition calling on Harvard to divest from Israel and from American companies that sell arms to Israel.

Harvard or Georgetown may - or may not - find a way to justify taking the money that Mayor Giuliani made New Yorkers proud by refusing. But it will be a scandal if they use the money to promote a Saudi agenda as opposed to a scholarly agenda or an American agenda.

I know it's a faulty vision, but I sure would like to see Larry Summers get asked as many questions about this story as he got for his musings about why there weren't as many women in the hard sciences. I know, I know. This will not happen. And the fact that people will be so much more upset about his words about women scientists than by his accepting this donation says a lot about what is important in the academy these days.

Mark Steyn notes the extent to which the PC police have taken over in England and are now actual police. Say something in public that is offensive to one group and the police may actually show up at your door to investigate your words as a "priority crime." It sounds positively Orwellian, and demonstrates why we need to be very cautious to guard our rights to free speech.

Saul Singer has an excellent column about the choice that the Europeans seem to be making regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions and the secret hope that, somehow, Israel will take care of this problem for everyone.

Still, the question remains, why is little Israel being left to fight the world's war? The answer is not just that life's unfair. The real answer is that the enlightened post-modern European refusal to lift a finger — let alone a gun — to defend itself is consigning us all to a dark age of terrorism and war.

The irony here is that it is precisely those who claim to believe mot in a borderless world ruled by international law who are ushering in a new Hobbesian era. How is one to explain Europe's obsession with the United Nations on the one hand, and its emasculation of the principles on which that organization was founded?

If Europe, through the U.N. and in partnership with the U.S., simply followed the U.N. Charter, we would be living in a very different world today. That charter (Ch. 1, Art. 1, Para. 1, first sentence) states the U.N.'s purpose: "To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace..." (emphasis added).

Does this ring any bells? Is there a state that is a greater threat to international peace than Iran? How much terrorism does a state have to sponsor, how many member states does it have to threaten with destruction, and how far does it have to get in obtaining the ultimate means to carry out such threats before the collective obligations of free nations under the Charter are remembered?

The nations that wrap themselves most tightly in international law are actually those responsible for turning that law, and its aspirations for the world, into a dead letter. As in the case of Iraq, by refusing to join the U.S. in effective non-military collective action against Iran, Europe is making military action or an Iranian victory inevitable.

Do all those bien pensants of Europe who so sanctimoniously indulge in the idea of multilateral action realize the choices that are facing them. Will they simply hug their myths of an effective United Nations to comfort them if we should have to face the specter of a nuclear Iran.

Yesterday, I linked to a Jonathan Tobin piece saying that the federal government shouldn't be funding these college Islamic studies programs that blast the West and Israel. What we don't need is more classes set to convince kids that Israel is evil and that the West has been oppressing the people of the Middle East for centuries. Well, now we hear that Saudi Prince Alwaleed has donated $40 million to Harvard and Georgetown to expand their departments of Islamic Studies. Hmmm. I wonder what strings came with that money. Just what we don't need in the United States: more Saudi-financed interpretations of the Middle East.

You might remember the name, Prince Alwaleed. He was the Saudi prince who, after 9/11, tried to donate millions to New York City. But Rudy Giuliani turned down the money after Alwaleed said that the US was partily responsible for the attacks of 9/11. That was the moment when Giuliani totally won my support. Well, do you think that Harvard and Georgetown are going to use the prince's money to set up programs that lean more towards the Bernard Lewis or the Edward Said side of the spectrum in Islamic Studies? I don't think the prince is handing over $40 million for American students to study What Went Wrong with Islam. And what do you want to bet that Alwaleed will get more satisfaction from Harvard and Georgetown than Lee Bass got from Yale University when he tried to give them $10 million to set up a program on Western Civilization. Yale had to eventually return the money because they couldn't fulfill Bass's vision of what the program should be. I just somehow suspect that setting up an Islamic Studies program with professors that make a Saudi prince who thinks that the US was partially responsible for 9/11 will be a lot more successful than setting up a Western Civilization program that makes a Texas billionaire happy.

The Democrats are thinking of shaking up their nomination process. Apparently, they have decided that their problem in whom they've been nominating is due to having the process start with Iowa and then New Hampshire, not the most ethnically diverse states. The proposed solution seems to be to hold a couple of caucuses in other states between Iowa and New Hampshire and then some other primaries in states after New Hampshire that would have more diverse populations.

This will make no noticeable improvement in the process. Caucuses, by their very nature, involve activists - those people who want to devote two or three hours on a Winter evening to talking about politics and expressing their preferences. Activists in either party tend to be closer to the extremes rather than the center ideologically. This is Poly Sci 101. Now, think about the Democratic Party (but the same question would hold true for the Republican Party). Would they really benefit by choosing a candidate who has won over the more liberal activists in the party? Because that is what is going to happen if they add in more caucuses up front in the nomination process.

There is a political aphorism that states that candidates should run to the margins in the primaries and then move back to the center for the general campaign. In these days of mass and instant communication, every remark that a candidate makes to appeal to those caucus voters in 2008 will be recorded and filed away for the general campaign. And if the eventual nominee tries to shift to the middle in the Fall, the other party will be ready to launch a series of weather-vane type ads to show up the other person as someone who tacks with the wind. The ads will write themselves. And will such accusations be all that different from the 2004 campaign? Remember that GOP ad with John Kerry windsurfing and quotes used from his varying positions on issues? The Democratic Party is setting up the conditions for similar ads in 2008. Rearranging the nomination process isn't going to make any big difference in who ultimately wins the nomination.

James Taranto ponders John Bolton's tenure so far at the UN. He also links to pictures of this UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People where Kofi Annan celebrated along with UN officials in front of a map of the Middle East where Israel was no longer on the map. As Taranto says,

The Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a press release Friday in which it "condemns the participation" of the secretary-general in a conference that denies the existence of a U.N. member state.

We would like to know where the 43 senators--42 Democrats plus the lachrymose George Voinovich--who blocked a vote on Bolton's confirmation, forcing President Bush into a recess appointment--stand on all this. One could wave away such outrages, and indeed we're inclined to do so, on the ground that the U.N. is a hopelessly corrupt and worthless institution whose expressions count for nothing. But that is an awkward position for Bolton's detractors to take, since they claim to believe in the U.N.

They don't really believe in the U.N., of course. As we noted in April, in 1991 many of them voted to defy the U.N.'s request for troops to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. They are "pro-U.N.," it seems clear, only when the U.N. is anti-U.S. But again, if the U.N. has "moral authority" when it takes Saddam Hussein's side over ours, how about when it seeks the obliteration of Israel?

I hadn't heard of this story. I guess the UN putting their stamp of approval on the end of Israel does not rank as major news. What is the difference between such a map and what the President of Iran has said that he hopes for? I guess if the Palestinians started talking about moving the Israelis to Europe, we'd begin to hear from UN officials and European leaders about how inexcusable such rhetoric is. Otherwise, who cares?

The Debate Guy ponders Democratic politicians and their vision of leading the nation at a time of war.

The Anchoress has some advice on the book Maureen Dowd should have written. I don't think Maureen is capable of taking such writing advice. Where would she be without the dated cultural references and snark aimed at men in general, and George W. Bush in particular?

James Lileks remembers 2005. Here are some examples:

Pope John Paul II dies. To the horror of many, his successor turns out to be Catholic.

Gitmo torture tales surface again in May, as Newsweek claims that a Koran was flushed down a toilet. The story is later retracted. Did no one at Newsweek consider the difficulty of flushing a book down a commode? Probably its elitist reporters and editors have Mexican housekeepers who do all their flushing for them.

John Bolton is nominated to be U.S. ambassador to the U.N., despite his moustache. The U.N. tower has 38 stories, Bolton once noted, and “if you lost ten stories today it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” To the contrary, insisted Bolton’s critics, the uppermost floors are devoted to tsunami advance-warning detection, non-polluting hydrogen power, and a cheap AIDS vaccine that also doubles as a dessert topping—all almost ready for release. Bolton is later given a “recess appointment,” which is something Presidents can do whenever grade schools are not in session. When our new ambassador arrives at his U.N. office he finds that, yup, just like at State, the keyhole has been filled with Superglue.

....Bombs explode in London, as perfectly ordinary apolitical young men driven to extremes by America’s imposition of elections in Iraq react the only possible way: by driving metal through the flesh of British commuters.

The 1,587th death in Iraq provokes no major display of eye-catching graphics in the Western media, as it is not a round number.

John Roberts is nominated to the Supreme Court. The snarkblogs point out that he wore plaid pants in the ’70s, and that his children may yet. He is confirmed nevertheless. There are tense moments, however, when Senator Feinstein attempts to plumb his feelings as a man and father. This seems to be a new standard for top jurists. Roberts refuses to profess that he would powder the bottom of the Bill of Rights, tuck it in, leave a light on, and play new-agey music softly while he read a book in the next room, one ear cocked should the Constitution wake up crying because it had a nightmare about an emanation chasing a penumbra. He is confirmed nevertheless.

Read the whole thing and see how much of the year you remember.

One more lie about Tookie Williams. He wasn't the founder of the Crips.

Those who don't study history are condemned to having no perspective on events of their own lifetimes. Given this list of events, which period would you rank as the most trying? Which ones tried men's souls the most?

The Revolutionary War
The Civil War
World War I
The Great Depression
World War II
The Cold War
Vietnam/Cultural Revolution
The War on Terror

Apparently, young people today think they're living in the most trying time. They don't know from trying.

Siena College was sparked by noting this belief among their students to conduct a poll of 354 historians to rank the most trying times. As should be no surprise to anyone who knows anything of American history, the War on Terror ranked last on the Most Trying Scale. The results with the order from most trying to least trying were:

1. The Civil War
2. The Revolutionary War
3. The Great Depression
4. Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution
5. World War Two
6. The Cold War
7. World War One
8. The War on Terror

I would put WWII ahead of Vietnam, but otherwise, it seems about right. Perhaps, those college kids need some remedial history education.

You may have noticed the rather racy ad for MSNBC at the top of the page. Apparently, MSNBC is experimenting to see what kind of bang they can get for their buck by buying mass ads on the Internet and on blogs. They have bought ad space on 800 blogs simultaneously. This is the biggest ad buy ever from one client through Blogads. They're also buying up all the adspace available on Newsweek,WWashington Post, and Slate for Wednesday. Basically, if you're on the Internet, you can't miss an MSNBC ad.

It's an interesting reversal for these shows that constantly hawk their websites to now use the web to hawk their TV shows. You might wonder about the redundancy of advertising on 800 blogs. Surely, they could pick fewer blogs and be viewed by just about the same number of people. However, I think they're achieving the same sort of impact that is normally achieved by advertisers placing ads on every channel or in most newspapers. Why pick a full-page ad when you can save money with a smaller ad? It's for the impact - to send a message about that you fully support the product and want everyone to be aware of it. Perhaps, we're approaching the time when more and more companies will recognize that there is an audience out there on the Internet, mayhaps more of an audience than they might reach with their paper ads. And when they do, my humble little blog is ready to run their ads. Thanks to the marketing genius of Henry Copeland who founded Blogads a few years ago and built a full-fledged business out of nothing, bloggers now have the possibility of earning a little spending money to compensate for the hours spent at the keyboard. It's a lovely thought.

Stuart Taylor is one of the most fair journalists on the legal system out there. I'm always impressed by his judicious approach to legal news. He has an article in the National Journal about how the media has rather egregiously mischaracterized its reporting on Samuel Alito.

The systematic slanting -- conscious or unconscious -- of this and many other news reports has helped fuel a disingenuous campaign by liberal groups and senators to caricature Alito as a conservative ideologue. In fact, this is a judge who -- while surely too conservative for the taste of liberal ideologues -- is widely admired by liberals, moderates, and conservatives who know him well as fair-minded, committed to apolitical judging, and wedded to no ideological agenda other than restraint in the exercise of judicial power.

Read through his examples. Part of the problem is that these journalists are not lawyers and, apparently, don't really understand what they're writing about. The rest of the problem is that they seem to be swallowing the accusations of some of the liberal interest groups without much analysis. For example,

I focus here not on the consistently mindless liberal hysteria of the New York Times' editorial page. Nor on such egregious factual errors as the assertion on C-SPAN, by Stephen Henderson of Knight Ridder Newspapers, that in a study of Alito's more than 300 judicial opinions, "we didn't find a single case in which Judge Alito sided with African-Americans ... [who were] alleging racial bias." This, Henderson added, is "rather remarkable."

What is remarkable is that any reporter could have overlooked the at least seven cases in which Alito has sided with African-Americans alleging racial bias. Also remarkable is the illiterate statistical analysis and loaded language used by Henderson and Howard Mintz in a 2,652-word article published (in whole or in part) by some 18 newspapers. It makes the highly misleading claim that in 15 years as a judge, Alito has sought "to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation's laws," including "a standard higher than the Supreme Court requires" for proving job discrimination.

Michelle Malkin takes down the Michael Crowley article in the New York Times about how conservative bloggers are so much more influential than liberal bloggers because they can enter the vast right wing conspiratorial blood stream through Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Drudge. The idea that there is some monolithic conservative blogosphere is just clueless. Didn't anyone witness the cleavages in the blogosphere about Harriet Miers? What about debates over spending cuts and immigration? Those certainly aren't debates that are out there to help Republicans in Congress. Many GOP in Congress would much prefer to have such debates shoved under the rug.

Jonathan Tobin looks at the attempts to make sure that the federal government does not continue to finance clearly biased antil-Israeli programs in universities.

Those who oppose the more stringent measure worry about government interference in curricula and the heavy-handed use of the power of the purse. Some academic Arabists go further — and allege that the result of this legislation would be a form of "McCarthyism," in which independent voices would be squelched in a pro-Israel witch-hunt.

But the bill's opponents have it backward.

If there is any danger of a "thought police" running amok in academia, it is under the present system, where anti-Zionist professors reign unchallenged and enforce a new anti-Western orthodoxy that stifles both the truth and any hope of creative scholarship.

And lest anyone think this is a purely esoteric controversy, the influence of the Middle Eastern-studies industry is not to be underestimated. The pernicious influence of these academics now extends into American high schools, where textbooks and teacher education have been co-opted by the anti-Israel crowd. It's high time that the tenured radicals who see America and Israel as the source of all evil in the world and rationalize if not excuse the Islamo-fascist enemies of our civilization stop feeding at the public trough.

Once again, this is an expense that I would be quite happy to cut from the federal budget.

George Will puts his finger on the overwhelming hypocrisy of the colleges that don't want to allow military recruiters on campus because they think it violates their freedom of speech.

The schools' selective sensitivity about that amendment is amusing, given that many universities use speech codes to enforce "progressive" sensibilities and compel students to pay fees that finance speakers and other expressive activities offensive to many of those compelled. Schools eager to ban military recruiters from a few hours of access to students who want to meet them have faculties that expose students to a one-sided bombardment of political views. Furthermore, universities are nurseries of "progressives" who support campaign regulations by which government supervises the quantity, content and timing of political speech, and who favor public financing of campaigns, which requires millions of taxpayers to fund political advocacy they oppose.

Leon Wieseltier reviews the movie, Munich. It sounds like something that would so anger me that I can't bear to watch it.

Palestinians murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show evidence of a conscience. Palestinians suppress their scruples, Israelis suppress their scruples. Palestinians make little speeches about home and blood and soil, Israelis make little speeches about home and blood and soil. Palestinians kill innocents, Israelis kill innocents.

....There are two kinds of Israelis in Munich : cruel Israelis with remorse and cruel Israelis without remorse. One of the Israeli killers recalls a midrash about G-d's compassion for the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea, and keeps on killing. Another one of the Israeli killers protests that "Jews don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong. ... We're supposed to be righteous," and keeps on killing.

All this is consistent with Tony Kushner's view that Zionism, as he told Ori Nir of Haaretz last year, was "not the right answer," and that the creation of Israel was "a mistake," and that "establishing a state means fucking people over." (If he really seeks to understand Middle Eastern terrorism, he might ponder the extent to which statelessness, too, can mean fucking people over.) When Avner's reckoning with his deeds takes him to the verge of a breakdown, he joins his wife and child in Brooklyn and refuses to return to Israel, as if decency is impossible there. No, Kushner is not an anti-Semite, nor a self-hating Jew, nor any of those other insults that burnish his notion of himself as an American Jewish dissident (he is one of those people who never speaks, but only speaks out). He is just a perfectly doctrinaire progressive. And the progressive Jewish playwright Tony Kushner's image of Israel oddly brings to mind the reactionary Jewish playwright David Mamet's image of Israel: For both of them, its essence is power.

The Israeli response to Black September marked the birth of contemporary counterterrorism, and it is difficult not to see Munich as a parable of American policy since September 11. "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values," Golda Meir grimly concludes early in the film. Yet the film proclaims that terrorists and counterterrorists are alike. "When we learn to act like them, we will defeat them!" declares one of Avner's men, played by Daniel Craig, already with a license to kill. Worse, Munich prefers a discussion of counterterrorism to a discussion of terrorism; or it thinks that they are the same discussion. This is an opinion that only people who are not responsible for the safety of other people can hold.

What a twofer it must seem to Hollywood to make a movie that can criticize Israel's response to terrorism and, by implication, President Bush's response. This type of moral equivalence is infuriating and a sign of a real lack of moral reasoning.

Robert Novak looks at the opposition to Samuel Alito. All the groups are mobilized to try to prevent Alito's confirmation by depicting him as a "jack-booted thug" who will step on the rights of women and allow strip searches of children.

I think that the usage of hyperbole and mischaracterization (a euphemism for outright lies) is not going to swing it this time for these groups. They seem to think that they are raising enough of a fuss to serve as a brushback pitch to deter Bush from naming someone like Roberts or Alito for a third nomination if there should be one. They may achieve the exact opposite. After two such campaigns against perfectly reasonable Supreme Court nominees fail and both Alito and Roberts are serving out lifetime appointments, Bush might decide that the power of these liberal groups to stop conservative nominees. As Churchill said, "Nothing in life is so exhilirating as to be shot at without result." Bush saw what happened with Harriet Miers and the benefits he accrued by making the Roberts and Alito nominations. Groups like People for the American Way and the Alliance for Justice will have shown that they can't achieve what they tell their contributors that they can accomplish. It will be a lot harder to rouse up the masses another time. Perhaps, after people witness the inefficacy of such attacks and counterattacks, we can return to a more sedate confirmation process.

In case you had any doubt about the attitude that Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority had towards ending terrorism against Israel, this should clarify things for you.

The head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has approved a new law, providing monetary grants to the families of suicide bombers.

Abbas gave his approval just six days ago, a day before a suicide bomber struck the HaSharon Mall in Netanya, killing five Israelis and wounding scores of others.

The legislation refers to the suicide terrorists as shahids (martyrs), a term generally applied to a person who dies in an operation fighting against Israel.

Under the new law, the terrorist’s family will be paid a base sum of $250 per month. The law takes into account extended family arrangements commonplace in Arab societies. The families of married terrorists are entitled to an additional $50 per month, and $15 are added for each child, $25 for each parent, and $15 for each brother who lived with the terrorist prior to his death.

Don't forget that the United States and Europe provide much of the funding for the Palestinian Authority. That sure seems like a budget cut we could make right now.

The guy who made the false Wikipedia entry on John Siegenthaler has been tracked down. Or rather, his company was located. He then came forward and admitted what he had done and resigned from his company. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia (which, by the way, is a frequent Quiz Bowl question for its name coming from the Wiki Wiki line of buses in Hawaii) seems oblivious to the danger to his creation by such manipulation of the site to plant false information. I think they could solve this if they had a system of keeping track of who posts what so that if something egregiously damaging is posted, such as was done to Mr. Siegenthaler, they could track down and find the person who did that. Such people should, at least, get barred from posting there any more. Just wait until someone less tolerant than Siegenthaler decides to take Wikipedia to court.

Mark Steyn is his usual inimitable self taking on the oh-so-polite and diplomatic responses to the remarks by President Ahmadinejad of Iran that Israel should be wiped off the map of the Middle East and moved to Europe. It really is funny when you see the reaction of the diplomats to the call for destruction of one nation.

So how does the United States react? Well, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that the comments of Ahmadinejad "further underscore our concerns about the regime."

Really? But wait, the world's superpower wasn't done yet. The State Department moved to a two-adjective alert and described Ahmadinejad's remarks as "appalling" and "reprehensible." "They certainly don't inspire hope among any of us in the international community that the government of Iran is prepared to engage as a responsible member of that community," said spokesman Adam Ereli.

You don't say. Ahmadinejad was speaking in the holy city of Mecca, head office of the "religion of peace," during a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. There were fiftysomething other heads of government in town. How many do you think took their Iranian colleague to task?

Well, what's new? But, that being so, it would be heartening if the rest of the world could muster a serious response to the guy. How one pines for a plain-spoken tell-it-like-it-is fellow like, say, former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali? As he memorably said of Iran, "It's a totalitarian regime." Oh, no, wait. He said that about the United States. On Iran, he's as impeccably circumspect and discreet as the State Department.

What I was struck by was that the Europeans seemed to react less to his calls for the destruction of Israel - after all, Arab leaders do that all the time, than to his call for Israel to be moved to the continent of Europe. Now, that is an upsetting idea to them.

John Hawkins has compiled a list of the 40 most obnoxious quotes of 2005. There are some real doozies there.

Thanks for all the people who wished our kids good luck. They came in second in the tournament, losing a closely fought match against a school in Maryland, Richard Montgomery High School. Seeing two top teams compete in a well-written finals match is really the zenith of Quiz Bowlery and a pleasure to witness.