August 2006 Archives

Everyone is talking/laughing about the Naked Gun-style oopsie by CNN's Kyra Phillips when she left her mic on-air during a bathroom break, and although she must be embarrassed, her husband is probably feeling pretty good about himself. From the beginning of the transcript:

Phillips: "Yeah, I'm very lucky in that regard with my husband. My husband is handsome and he is genuinely a loving, you know, no ego--you know what I'm saying. Just a really passionate, compassionate great, great human being. And they exist. They do exist. They're hard to find. Yup. But they are out there."

With all the ragging on men these days, it's refreshing to hear such genuine praise for a husband.

I've only been following the "secret hold" on the porkbusting database story peripherally, but I'm as unsurprised as anyone that the Senator holding up the bill is Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens (R-AK). (In case you missed it, the "bridge to nowhere" debacle was over the $223 million of taxpayer money Stevens earmarked to connect the mainland to Alaska's Gravina Island -- population 50.) Ted Stevens is the king of pork, so it's only natural that he'd want to kill a $15 million database that will allow the public to easily search federal contracts and expenditures. Hey Senator, time to retire.

Update:
I changed the title of the post because now it lookes like ex-Klansman Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) also has a hold on the bill. Again, not surprising, since you can hardly drive through West Virginia without seeing 100 structures named after the old man and paid for by federal tax dollars.

The winner of contract to build the next lunar spacecraft will be announced this afternoon. The project is now called Orion, but many in the industry still know it as the Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV. Regarding the contract:

Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Northrop Grumman Corp., maker of the vehicle that landed a man on the moon 37 years ago, may beat out Lockheed Martin Corp. for a $4.5 billion contract to build the next lunar spacecraft.

The new vehicle, called Orion, is the centerpiece of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's $122 billion effort to return to the moon as early as 2018. Northrop is the leading contender for the award to be announced today, analysts including J.P. Morgan Securities Inc.'s Joseph Nadol said.

Not only is the contract worth a lot of money, but the project itself should be very exciting. One of the most interesting features of the announcement is that NASA has been so good at keeping the secret, after telling Congress who they selected over a month ago.

It's easy to predict the weather in Los Angeles: it's pretty much the same every day. I never realized how bad meteorologists were at predicting the weather until I moved here to St. Louis. They're commonly off by 10 degrees or more, and they can't even say if it's going to rain or not. For instance, yesterday was supposed to have a high of 78, but by late morning the temp was already 86 and the weathermen didn't even bother to update their forecasts! Today is forecast to be "8 degrees warmer than yesterday" but it's definitely not going to be 94... which means that it will probably be 86 again, and that the weathermen didn't even notice how far off their predictions were yesterday!

I can't wait for feminists to leap all over the Hong Kong scientists who are claiming that men need women to keep them from "anti-social and violent behavior".

Researchers have expressed alarm about cultures that favor male babies, saying sex-ratio imbalances could destabilize society because more men will remain unmarried, raising the risks of anti-social and violent behavior.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they said parts of China and India would have 12 percent to 15 percent more men over the next 20 years -- many of them rural peasants with limited education.

"The growing number of young men with a lack of family prospects will have little outlet for sexual energy," wrote Zhu Weixing of China's Zhejian Normal University and Therese Hesketh of the Institute of Child Health at University College London.

"This trend would lead to increased levels of anti-social behavior and violence, as gender is a well-established correlate of crime, and especially violent crime," they said, adding the trend would threaten stability and security in many societies.

If fish don't need bicycles, then bicycles certainly don't need fish!

Seriously though, I've written about the dangers of gender imblance before, and Arab/Muslim countries tend to have even worse problems than China.

I was just reading the Wikipedia entry for Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis and it includes the fascinating factoid that, despite being elected to numerous offices, he never completed a whole term in any of them.

The year 1844 saw Davis's first political success, as he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, taking office on March 4 of the following year. ...

The year 1846 saw the beginning of the Mexican-American War. He resigned his House seat in June, and raised a volunteer regiment, the Mississippi Rifles, becoming its colonel. On July 21 they sailed from New Orleans for the Texas coast. ...

Because of his war service, the governor of Mississippi appointed Davis to fill out the Senate term of the late Jesse Speight. He took his seat 5 December 1847 and was elected to serve the remainder of his term in January 1848. When his term expired, he was elected to the same seat (by the Mississippi legislature, as the Constitution mandated at the time). ...

He had not served a year when he resigned (in September 1851) to run for the governorship of Mississippi on the issue of the Compromise of 1850, which Davis opposed. This election bid was unsuccessful, as he was defeated by Henry Stuart Foote by 999 votes. ...

Pierce won the [1852 presidential] election and made Davis his Secretary of War. ... Davis's term was to end with Pierce's, so he ran successfully for the Senate, and re-entered it on March 4, 1857. ...

Though an opponent of secession in principle, Davis upheld it in practice on January 10, 1861. On January 21, 1861, he announced the secession of Mississippi, delivered a farewell address, and resigned from the Senate. ...

Davis was elected to a six-year term as president of the Confederacy on November 6, 1861. ...

On April 3, 1865, with Union troops under Ulysses S. Grant poised to capture Richmond, Davis escaped for Danville, Virginia, together with the Confederate cabinet, leaving on the Richmond and Danville Railroad. He issued his last official proclamation as President of the Confederacy then fled south to Greensboro, North Carolina. On May 10, he was captured at Irwinville, Georgia.

It looks like Albania's capital of Tirana is struggling with a problem I've wondered about for a long time: they're running out of cemetary space.

Tirana municipality has shut down one of the city's two cemeteries and said the other has space for only one more week. It blames the government for holding up the expropriation of nearby land that would add space for two years' worth of graves. ...

Most Albanians see black humor in the situation.

"Could you spare some space for me?" an old lady asks the gravediggers in one popular joke. "Of course, just don't be too late," they answer.

There's certainly an enormous amount of unused land in the world, but the problem is that most of it is very remote. Not many families will want to bury their loved ones 100 miles deep into the desert, jungle, or tundra. Cemetaries take up a lot of space, people want them close (but not too close), and once they're built they last pretty much forever (or until your civilization collapses). Maybe we should start burying people vertically or in layers.

A new study has proven once and for all that left-handers are better.

College-educated left-handed men earn almost 15 percent more on average than similarly educated right-handed men, according to a recent study. ...

The college-educated-lefties-are-richer finding isn't what the economists expected when they started looking at data from a decades-long study that has followed 5,000 men and women since 1979. They had suspected that hiring discrimination, right-handed machinery and other factors might lead to left-handed people making less than their right-handed peers.

"Surprisingly, it turns out that left-handedness leads to increased income amongst educated males," said Christopher S. Roebuck, an economist at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., and one of the study's three co-authors. ...

The frustrating part of the study -- for readers and researchers -- is that no one's sure why college-educated left-handed men make more than right-handed peers. Or why there's no similar correlation for women.

"We do not have a theory that reconciles these findings," Roebuck said.

Not being left-handed himself, Professor Roebuck misses the obvious truth: left-handed people are simply extraordinary.

Specialists calculated that every tenth human being is left-handed. ... Latest research works conducted in many countries of the globe showed that the IQ level of left-handed people is higher in comparison with the one of right-handed individuals. Every fifth outstanding person is left-handed as a rule.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg!

"There are a lot of extrasensorial individuals among them," doctor of medical sciences, Alexander Lee said. "We checked the supposition. There are hardly any right-handers among those, who have the gift of remote viewing, telepathy, or X-ray viewing," the doctor said.

Right and left-handers are virtually different types of people with their own special mindsets and perception of the world. "They get along with each other perfectly, but there is a hidden evolutionary struggle taking place between them, which reminds the struggle between primeval humans, Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal men. It seems to me that left-handers will eventually win the fight owing to their anomalous abilities," scientist of anomalous phenomena, Pyotr Chereda said.

No doubt.

... and now 53% of Brits recognize the Islamic threat.

The alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners and last year's terrorist attacks on London have made more people fear Islam as a religion, not merely its extremist elements, a poll for The Daily Telegraph has found.

A growing number of people fear that the country faces "a Muslim problem" and more than half of the respondents to the YouGov survey said that Islam posed a threat to Western liberal democracy. That compares with less than a third after the September 11 terrorist attacks on America five years ago. ...

The proportion of those who believe that "a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country and are prepared to condone or even carry out acts of terrorism" has nearly doubled from 10 per cent a year ago to 18 per cent now.

The number who believe that "practically all British Muslims are peaceful, law-abiding citizens who deplore terrorist acts as much as any- one else" has fallen from 23 per cent in July last year to 16 per cent. However, there remains strong opposition to the security profiling of airline passengers based on their ethnicity or religion. ...

Most strikingly, there has been a substantial increase over the past five years in the numbers who appear to subscribe to a belief in a clash of civilisations. When YouGov asked in 2001 whether people felt threatened by Islam, as distinct from fundamentalist Islamists, only 32 per cent said they did. That figure has risen to 53 per cent.

Five years ago, a majority of two to one thought that Islam posed no threat, or only a negligible one, to democracy. Now, by a similar ratio, people think it is a serious threat.

I'd love to see a similar poll commissioned by our federal government, and I'd love to see the results. I'm impressed that the liberal Brits still have this much sense, and the next paragraph should serve as a reminder of why this nation once ruled the world.

The findings illustrate the huge task facing the Government's new ''cohesion and integration commission" which was formally launched yesterday, charged with finding out whether the multi-cultural experiment has failed and, if so, why.

Wait... they want to actually evaluate a government policy to see if it's working? Don't they know that's not how bureaucracies are supposed to work? Multiculturalism is tautologically good!

(HT: Larry Kudlow.)

Update:
Rod Liddle also writes about the death of multiculturalism (HT: Instapundit).

I've been following Tradesports odds on Republicans keeping the House and the Senate, and the numbers don't look quite as bleak for the GOP as Albert R. Hunt suggests. Says Mr. Hunt,

Barring an unexpected and big event, Democrats will win control of the U.S. House of Representatives in November and conceivably the Senate, too. Whether it's a tsunami or just a powerful wave, the political dynamics are moving in that direction, or more accurately, against the Republicans and President George W. Bush.

Democratic insiders, who months ago thought their chances of winning a majority in the House were no better than even, and that the Senate was a lost cause, have become far more optimistic. Now, they say, winning the House is a lock, and the Senate is within reach. ...

More telling is that the smartest Republican political minds agree. ``The issue matrix and political dynamics are not good for us,'' says Representative Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican. ``Only some big national or international event before the election can change that.''

Presumably the stupid Republican political minds are those who disagree, but in any event, the bettors on Tradesports (whose only incentive is to be right) don't see the House as a "lock" for the Democrats.

The bettors give Republicans only a 46% chance to retain the House, but that's a far cry from certainty for the Democrats. However, unlike the Senate which has remained a steady bet for the GOP, the House numbers have been trending downward for a long time.

In response to my previous post about Google's interview process, one Dr. Gene A. Nelson left a comment starting with:

As an experienced American citizen programmer with a Ph.D., I hope that you recognize that the real purpose of these "tests" is to discriminate on the basis of age and national origin - specifically to discriminate against older American citizens in favor of "fresh (inexpensive) young blood" from places like India and Communist China. Why?? So that the corporate owners reap higher profit margins.

That's an interesting claim, but I tend to be slow to buy in to conspiracy theories. Further thoughts?

I agree with Clayton Cramer that civil forfeiture laws are unjust and scary.

I am pretty hostile to civil forfeiture of property--where the government seizes something, and claims that it was used in a criminal act. Unlike a criminal prosecution, where the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt to a moral certainty that a person has committed a crime, with civil forfeiture, the government grabs the property, and says, "We only need a preponderance of evidence. If you disagree, you are welcome to file suit and try and prove us wrong."

In many California counties, if the police seize a gun--even if they later realize that there was no crime involved--they simply will not return a gun to the owner. You want a $400 gun back? Go hire a lawyer, and spend thousands of dollars trying to get it back. ...

There's a little problem, however: what if the police are wrong? I remember seeing a disturbing news show some years ago in which they interviewed a lot of people who had money taken from them by the police under civil forfeiture who were clearly not criminals. One of them was an orchid grower. It is a cash business. He had no criminal history. He broke no laws. The government didn't even make a small attempt at charging him with any crime--and he was out $9,000. They had a bunch of cases like this, where there was simply no reason to assume that this person was criminal.

Even worse, the civil forfeiture thing often leads to raids that make no sense--and get people killed. One of them was Donald Scott, shot to death in his Malibu home some years ago because the National Park Service wanted his land--and those accommodating sorts at the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department flew over his land, decided that he was growing marijuana there, and did a (depending on who you believe) no-knock raid--and shot him to death. (By the way, there's gobs of documentation on this case--I picked that particular account, but I read many of the news stories at the time about it. The only thing that made this one special is that Mr. Scott was rich--usually the victims of these crimes are poor or middle class.)

That's why it's important to never allow drugs or other illegal substances into your car or onto your property. Cops can seize anything they want, even if the owner isn't the one involved with illegal activities.

I've got a huge dataset of spam from the past few years of running my site. Unfortunately the Movable Type interface I've got available at the moment won't let me upload the whole Excel spreadsheet, but I'll be happy to email it to anyone who wants to see. Here are some highlights.

Top ten filter strings that have blocked the most spams:

51175 - <h1>

32347 - texas-hold-em

20657 - texas-holdem

17727 - qualitypornlinks4u.info

14717 - free-online-poker

13310 - payday-loan

11606 - hey.com

9204 - free--online--poker

6601 - 00120.com

6304 - pornlink4u.info

Five filter strings that were created on 1/1/2005 and caught a spam today, 8/24/2006 (a useful span of 600 days):

2944 - viagra

2216 - (diet|penis)[\w\-_.]*(pills|enlargement)[\w\-_....

700 - hydrocodone

382 - freewebs.com

175 - xenical

Total filter strings: 8144

Total spams caught: 417,385

Filter strings that never caught a spam: 63%

The top 14 filters caught 50% of the spams -- that is, the top 0.17% of filters caught half the spam.

Median number of spams caught by a filter: 11

Mean number of spams caught by a filter: 131

Standard deviation of number of spams caught by a filter: 1307

Defining rate as spams caught divided by useful span, the filter with the highest catch rate is "free--online--poker" with 9204 hits in 4 days, for 2301 spams per day. The filter with the highest rate with a useful span of over 50 days is "qualitypornlinks4u.info" with 17727 hits in 62 days, for a rate of 281 spams per day.

The International Astronomical Union has decreed that Pluto is not a "planet" by (re)defining the word. I put "re" in parentheses because it's not clear that "planet" was ever really defined other than as a list with nine members. So now there's a new definition that results in Pluto being stripped of its status, much to everyone's dismay except (some) astronomers.

So what is Pluto now? A "dwarf planet". But apparently "dwarf" isn't an adjective describing Pluto's size, it's part of a whole new term: "dwarf planets" aren't "planets". So what have we got?

The decision establishes three main categories of objects in our solar system.

* Planets: The eight worlds from Mercury to Neptune.

* Dwarf Planets: Pluto and any other round object that "has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, and is not a satellite."

* Small Solar System Bodies: All other objects orbiting the Sun.

The problem with the old definition of "planet" is that it included Pluto but had no specific criteria that would have prevented hundreds of other bodies (some, like 2003 UB313, larger than Pluto) from logically falling to the same category. Despite everyone's affection for Pluto, no one really wanted to expand the list of planets to that length... and scientists tend to dislike arbitrary classifications.

Unfortunately, the new definition appears to be based on the idea that a planet must "clear the neighborhood around its orbit", which is somewhat ambiguous. Says an astronomer in charge of exploring Pluto:

"I'm embarassed for astornomy," said Alan Stern, leader of NASA's New Horizon's mission to Pluto and a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. "Less than 5 percent of the world's astronomers voted." ...

Stern, in charge of the robotic probe on its way to Pluto, said the language of the resolution is flawed. It requires that a planet "has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." But Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune all have asteroids as neighbors.

"It's patently clear that Earth's zone is not cleared," Stern told SPACE.com. "Jupiter has 50,000 trojan asteroids," which orbit in lockstep with the planet.

So, again, we seem to be stuck with an unclear definition that, though more aesthetically pleasing to some, doesn't add up to more than "I know it when I see it".

A South Carolina woman has been arrested for hosting sex and alcohol parties for teenagers, but take careful note of the difference between the complaint against her and the actual charge. Of the father who reported the situation to the police:

Deputies say the investigation began August 14 when a parent said her [sic] daughter had gotten drunk and had her first sexual experience at one of these parties.

"It really scares me that it's not that our kids have to worry about their peers anymore, it's they have to worry about other parents," said Rick Eaton, the father who went to police when he learned about the parties. "From my daughter has told me that Ms. Patricia has taken another woman's child up to get her birth control pills. Her excuse was that these teenagers having sex in her home was out of her control, which is wrong. You've got to have more control in your home than that."

The father here was concerned that his daughter was being given drugs and encouraged to have sex, which is certainly a horrific situation. But what did the police actually arrest 46-year-old Patricia Hartwell for?

"Hartwell's arrest should send a strong message to other adults who provide alcohol and drugs to children in Lexington County," [Sheriff James] Metts said in a written release. "We have zero tolerance in Lexington County for the transfer of alcohol to minors, and adults who provide alcohol to children will be vigorously investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent allowed under South Carolina law."

Apparently Hartwell would have been in the clear if she'd restricted her parties to sex and drugs! Personally, I find it far more disturbing that young kids are being encouraged to have sex and take birth control than that they're drinking alcohol. There's no doubt that drinking is a serious problem for some teens and adults, but c'mon, it's obvious that the sexual aspect of this situation was by far the most harmful. Unfortunately, one of the legacies of the abortion industry is teenage sexual promiscuity (it's good for business!), and there aren't many ways left to legally restrain it.

Forbes offers some rather uh... non-PC advice: "Don't marry career women".

Guys ... whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it.

Well well well... lots of blog commentary already, but I'll have to read it tomorrow.

Update:
Forbes apparently pulled the article and then put it back up next to a "counterpoint". (HT: Boing Boing.)

Update 2:
The counterpoint doesn't really address the statistical claims of the first article. Writes Michael Noer, the original author:

If a host of studies are to be believed, marrying [career] women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill (American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier (Institute for Social Research). ...

In 2004, John H. Johnson examined data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and concluded that gender has a significant influence on the relationship between work hours and increases in the probability of divorce. Women's work hours consistently increase divorce, whereas increases in men's work hours often have no statistical effect. "I also find that the incidence in divorce is far higher in couples where both spouses are working than in couples where only one spouse is employed," Johnson says. A few other studies, which have focused on employment (as opposed to working hours) have concluded that working outside the home actually increases marital stability, at least when the marriage is a happy one. But even in these studies, wives' employment does correlate positively to divorce rates, when the marriage is of "low marital quality."

The author of the counterpoint, Elizabeth Corcoran, attempts to refute these studies by sharing her own personal experiences.

I'm not usually a fan of dipstick tests, particularly when it comes to marriage and relationships. But a downright frightening story written by my colleague, Michael Noer, on our Web site today drove me to it. According to the experts cited by Michael, marrying a "career girl" seems to lead to a fate worse than tangling with a hungry cougar.

OK, call me a cougar. I've been working since the day I graduated from college 20-odd years ago. I have two grade-school-aged children. Work definitely takes up more than 35 hours a week for me. Thankfully, I do seem to make more than $30,000. All of which, according to Michael, should make me a wretched wife.

In spite of those dangerous statistics, my husband and I are about to celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary. You'll see us snuggling at a mountain-winery concert this month, enjoying the occasion. I don't think I'm all that unusual--so it seemed like a good time to test Michael's grim assertions.

It appears that Mrs. Corcoran has experienced "high marital quality", which is laudible and most likely due in large part her and her husband's own level of quality -- however, high quality marriages seem to be rather rare these days. The whole reason we do studies and generate statistics is because the personal experiences of a single person are often wildly divergent from reality.

Crystal at the Biblical Womanhood Blog writes that limitetime forces us to make choices that prevent us from having everything.

My applause to Noer for saying what few others are willing to for fear of being ripped to shreds by the feminist crowd. You can read his article here. For once, someone is willing to state the truth: Women who work full-time can't be as good of a wife. I don't understand what is so hard to understand. A woman who devotes 40 or more hours of her week exerting time, effort, mental capacity, and energy into a career is just not going to have as much to give to her husband.

Now, one may argue that the money a wife (or husband) earns is more important than whatever they'd otherwise be doing. It's certainly possible that there are men who don't want anything from a wife other than to earn some extra money -- there are certainly wives who would be pleased for their husbands to do nothing but work and send home a check. However, the studies above indicate that those are the long term desires of most couples, even if at any given instant they might think they'd prefer more money to the alternatives.

Bankers in the UK are introducing a new kind of mortgage that spans generations. Apparently these types of mortgages are common in Japan and other areas, but I've never heard of them.

Parents will be able to hand down their home loans onto their children under a radical shake-up of Britain's mortgage industry which starts today.

In a revolutionary move, homeowners would never need to repay a single penny of their mortgage before they die.

Instead, the debt will be passed to their offspring, allowing them to slash the amount of inheritance tax they would have to pay.

If housing prices rise faster than the mortgage interest rate, these types of loans could be incredible investment vehicles. Stocks tend to outperform real estate, but it's a lot harder to borrow huge sums of money to purchase stocks. So what happens when you die?

For example, a parent could have an interest-only mortgage of £100,000 on their home which is worth £150,000. When they die, the mortgage and the house would pass to their children. The children would only have to make a decision about whether or not to take on the mortgage when their parents died.

If they did not want the mortgage, it could be settled by selling the house or repaid by other means, such as an insurance policy or the sale of other assets. If they did agree, they could continue to pay the monthly interest payments which their parents were paying before their death - and keep the house. It would have an inheritance tax perk because only £50,000 - the value of the house excluding the mortgage - would be included in their parent's estate.

Of course, a simplified tax system could eliminate the need for all these twists and turns.

Everyone knows that Tom Cruise is insane, and combined with his exorbitant salary it shouldn't be a surprise that he's the latest in the line of huge stars dumped by major studios. But don't be deceived, it wasn't just Tom's bizarre behavior that did him in: movie star salaries have been dropping for years due to plummeting earnings. (Compare to stars' earnings in 2000.) Tom Cruise is just the low-hanging fruit, and now that he's been picked off the tree just wait for others to follow. What's more, advancing CG technology may eventually render (heh) actors entirely obsolete. Imagine our kids swooning over digital babes and hunks that only exist on a hard drive.

My prediction is that the next overpaid primadonnas to face the axe will be corporate executives -- eventually the spread of information on the internet and the explosion of MBAs will have to dilute their salaries.

Opinion Journal details a series of events in San Diego that demonstrates what has long been painfully obvious to Christians: atheists want to eliminate Christianity entirely, not just protect the "separation of church and state".

The cross was erected on city property in the 1950s as a tribute to veterans from both world wars and the Korean War. It was uncontroversial until 1989, when Mr. Paulson and his supporters sued to have it removed from public land. In 1991, U.S. District Judge Gordon Thompson ruled in their favor. So the city decided to sell the land to a private organization. In 1992 more than two-thirds of voters approved of the sale, and in 1998 it went to the highest bidder--a group that planned to keep the memorial intact.

Mr. Paulson, indicating that his beef is with the cross and not just its presence on public property, went back to court to block the sale. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals obligingly ruled that selling the memorial violated the state constitutional prohibition on state-sponsored religion because it unfairly discriminated against any potential buyers who would have had to bear the burden of pulling the cross down.

Frustrated local voters fought back, and last year 76% of them approved Proposition A, authorizing the city to donate the memorial to the federal government. They were shot down again, this time by Superior Court Judge Patricia Yim Crowley, who invalidated the vote on the ground that it violated state law by showing preference for a particular religion. ...

The one judicial reprieve in this case came from Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who last month stayed a U.S. district court order fining San Diego $5,000 for each day that the cross remained standing--giving Congress time to pass the eminent-domain transfer.

So Congress is buying the cross to protect it from idiotic judges who despise democracy and view themselves as aristocrats rather than servants of the people. Christians should remember this battle when the ACLU and others plaintively whine that they're trying to prevent oppression while underhandedly eviscerating the rights of the majority.

The title of the New York Times article is "Bush Argues Democrats Don’t Understand Threat to U.S.", but from the President's remarks it seems that he doesn't understand the threat that Democrats pose to America.

President Bush seized today on Democratic calls for withdrawal from Iraq to make an election-year case that his political rivals did not properly understand the threats to the nation and would create a more dangerous world. ...

In general, however, Mr. Bush struck a different tone than the vice president has used in recent weeks, including Mr. Cheney’s suggestion two weeks ago that implied that Ned Lamont’s victory in the Connecticut primary against Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut would embolden "Al Qaeda types."

In response to a question today. Mr. Bush said he agreed with that analysis, but added: "We’ll continue to speak out in a respectful way, never challenging somebody’s love for America when you criticize their strategies or their point of view."

When a person or a party consistently advocates strategies designed to weaken our country and turn over American security to pathetic "international" bodies, why shouldn't we question their patriotism? When a person or party is eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq and thereby strengthen not just "al Qaeda types" but Iran, Russia, China, and all the rest, shouldn't we wonder whether they want what's best for America? When a person or party sits idly by for a decade while Americans are murdered, kidnapped, and blown up by the hundreds, isn't it legitimate to ask if they really love our country?

It's not that Democrat politicians don't understand what's at stake in the War on Terror, it's that they care less about American victory than about their own jobs. They picked the wrong horse in the political race -- most of them decades ago -- and they fear that they can't switch now without losing their seats. Sure, they know it's bad when Americans get blown up, but it's better than the alternative in which Democrat Senators and Representatives have to find work in the private sector.

I'm back from my trip to DC and regular posting should resume shortly. I'm completely exhausted from my trip -- on top of the recent move and everything else -- and I really just want to relax at home and be with my wife, but alas. At least being at work is a little more low-key than traveling these days.

The trip itself was very good, and it was great to see my family from both coasts again. I also got to see my grandmother, probably for the last time, and that was both enjoyable and bittersweet. I've been blessed to have very few family members die yet during my lifetime (only my paternal grandfather), but my grandmother Mani is my last remaining grandparent (by blood). Once she's gone, I'll be in the second-oldest generation alive in my family, though I'm one of the youngest members.