The Daily Brief

Via Michele, and Jeff. CNN’s got this obit.

Hunter S. Thompson. The man who defined gonzo journalism. The man who made stream of consciousness cool without beat rhymes. The man who taught us that drinking and peacocks don’t mix. You know, the bald guy who hangs out with the little Chinese gal in Doonesbury. He died yesterday of an appartent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

I’d like to rant and rave about his brilliance but quite honestly, I haven’t read any of his stuff in 25 years and considering my hobbies at the time…I couldn’t tell you most of what he wrote about anyway. When you were a young, actor, singer, dancer, you know, liberal arts major with almost no hope of a financially solvent future, you read Thompson because everyone read Thompson. Because now you “got” it when Doonesbury did a series of Uncle Duke strips and it was important that you “got” Doonesbury because otherwise…you were one of them…the straights…the unenlightened. The ones without the secret smile. Some of you more sober folks may have thought we were scheming secret schemes…relax, that smile mostly was our brain bubbling with thousands of little “Oh…WOWs.” building and building into a giant…cataclismic…sigh…where are the Doritos and who stole my beer? No major conspiracy…just good tequilla.

As I finish my first cup of coffee and say a little prayer for all the little freaks out there who are seriously distraught this morning, I’m just plain pissed off. HST was nothing if not defiant. For him to go out like this after a life lived flipping off the universe…

Saturday afternoon, February 19, at around 1:30 PM CST, an ambulance belonging to Pafford Emergency Medical Services, of Hope, Arkansas, was struck by a train in Hempstead County Arkansas, just outside the small town of Fulton. Three medics on the ambulance were killed, two on scene, and one dying later in a Texarkana, Texas, hospital. The patient, a 69 year-old woman who was being transported to the hospital with a possible stroke, survived after being pulled from the wreckage by her family members who were following the ambulance. The fatalaties wiped out 25% of Pafford EMS’s staff.

It is unsure just what happened, but witnesses stated that it appeared the driver thought he had time to get across before the train would get to the crossing. The Arkansas State Police are investigating the accident.

This accident hits especially close to home for me. In my 20-odd years as a paramedic, I spent a lot of those years training other EMT’s and Paramedics, and I spent a great deal of that training focusing on safety. So many new medics drive much too fast when they get behind the wheel of an ambulance, and Nurse Jenny, during her days as a Paramedic, lost a former partner to an ambulance accident – due to driving too fast. Had we not transferred out several months earlier, Jenny would likely have been in the back of that ambulance, and the very thought makes my blood run cold.

There is some validity to the idea of driving in a hurry on the way to a scene, but NEVER any reason to drive too fast for conditions, and absolutely never, ever, any reason to try beating a train to a crossing. The few seconds or even minutes, spent waiting for a train will never mean the difference between life and death for a patient, but it certainly can make the difference between life and death for an ambulance crew! The reasoning for the patient is this: If your patient is in such bad condition that a few minutes’ delay while in the ambulance will mean that they die, then that patient would probably die anyway. And dead or injured medics can help no one. More reason for driving even slower once the patient is on board is that, once the lifesaving abilities of the medics are available, and the ambulance equipment is available, the situation is, or should be, under control. Now, I’ve been on a lot of calls where it seemed that everything that could go wrong was going wrong, but, in reality, the bedlam was just imagined. We really were in control! In a controlled situation, more harm than good can come from excess speed.

Our hearts go out to the families and co-workers of the members of Pafford EMS lost in this tragic accident. We so dearly hope that other EMS units across the country will learn from this, and that medics will step back, take a deep breath, and try to get their driving habits under control. Let’s try to save lives, and let the lessons learned in Arkansas this weekend do some good in the field. If we do that, then these three medics will not have died in vain, and some sense of meaning and peace can come out of great tragedy.

February 19 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of a horrific battle for the tiny island of Iwo Jima. The battle would ultimately last 36 days and take the lives of 6,825 brave American Marines and nearly 22,000 – virtually all – of the Japanese defending the island.

Iwo Jima, located in the western Pacific, at 24.3N/141.5E, is a small, uninhabited island in the Ogasawara, or Volcano, Islands chain. It is some 650 miles southeast of Tokyo, about halfway between the Mariannas (Guam, Tinian, and Saipan) Islands and the Japanese capital. The island chain was administered by Tokyo, was considered Japanese turf, and no foreign army had ever set foot on Japanese territory in the 5,000 year existence of the nation. In World War II, the location of Iwo Jima translated into a highly coveted prize for the US Forces on their drive toward the Japanese home islands. And the Japanese were just as determined that the United States would not capture the island.

Japanese General Kurabayashi, commander of the 21,000 + troops on the Island, is reported to have said to his wife, upon being notified of his posting to the command, that she should not expect his return. The historic attitude of the Japanese at the time was such that death, even by suicide, was much preferred over surrender or capture in battle. And Kurabayashi prepared his troops and his defenses brilliantly. During their preparation for the long-awaited American invasion, they dug some 1500 rooms out of the volcanic rock, connected by 16 miles of tunnels. About the only protuberances above the surface were the machine gun and mortar positions inside pillboxes constructed of reinforced concrete, up to one meter thick in places. They were ready – or so they thought – for the onslaught of the Gai-Genes (foreign devils).

On February 19, at 2 AM, a one-hour barrage of naval gunfire left the island a smoking hell-on-earth. This was followed by one hundred ten bombers, dumping maximum bomb loads on the small target. Nothing on the surface could have been left alive. And all of this had been preceeded by 72 hours of naval bombardment without letup. At 8:30 AM, the Marines received the order to begin landing on the island. One hundred ten thousand Marines in 880 ships, the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions, began heading for shore. For these men, who had sailed 40 days earlier from Hawaii, the moment of truth had come. The landing, on a scale hardly imaginable today, was the largest to date in the Pacific war.

The fighting was brutal. Carnage was everywhere. Men died before they could even get to shore. Mortar rounds, well-calibrated before arrival of the Americans, fell on the landing craft with deadly accuracy, leaving burning hulks on the shoals, sending men and equipment to the bottom between ship and shore. On shore, the Marines established their beachhead, but they were terribly exposed to heavy enemy fire, as the volcanic sand was too loose to allow for the digging of foxholes. The Japanese, fighting from their pillboxes and from caves, would come to the surface, fire, and retreat to their cover, while Americans had to treat their wounded, establish firelanes, and, it seemed, move heaven and earth to construct viable fighting positions with suitable cover. Historians have described the American attack as, “throwing human flesh against reinforced concrete.” It has also been noted that one-third of all Marines who died in WWII were killed on Iwo Jima.

Other statistics show that the total American casualties (dead and wounded) were 25,851, and that some 48,000 survived either unscathed or with minor injuries. This was a battle unique in history: 100,000 men fighting for possession of an island the size of Manhattan. The battle was won by the inch-by-inch tenacity and bravery of the foot soldier. Not technology, not anything else but by uncommon valor of United States Marines.

The one act most remembered today was the raising of our flag on Mt. Suribachi. Suribachi, or “Suribati-Yama” in Japanese, stands 548 feet high, and is an active volcano. Iwo Jima itself is a submarine caldera, historically with some 10 eruptions, all recorded in the 20th century, the last in 1982. The island’s name means, in Japanese, “Sulfur Island.” The task of capturing Mt. Suribachi fell to the men of the 28th Regiment of the 5th Marines. They reached the base in the afternoon of the 21st, and by nightfall of the next day they had surrounded the mountain. On the morning of the 23rd, men of “E” Company, 2nd Battalion, started trudging up the treacherous slopes of the volcano. At around 10:30 AM, men all over the island erupted in a cheer heard all the way up to the summit as the US flag was hoisted into the air. Later that same afternoon, a larger flag was raised, and it was during the hoisting of this flag that AP photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped the famous Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph which later was used in constructing the US Marine Corps Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The benefit realized by the US Forces in the capture of Iwo Jima was huge. Throughout the rest of the war, some 2400 B-29’s made emergency landings at Iwo, resulting in the saving of 27,000 American lives. With the three airfields on Iwo Jima active, fighter aircraft stationed there would be able to escort bombers on raids over Tokyo, protecting them from attack by Japanese fighters, resulting in untold lives saved. Was the battle for Iwo Jima worth the sacrifice of over 6,800 American servicemen’s lives? Just ask the survivors of the B-29’s that were saved by landing there, or the men who were protected by the fighter escorts, or their children, grandchildren, or their wives.

A Google search for Iwo Jima is worth the effort. A wealth of information, some of which was used in this article, can be found there. Another site, referenced earlier, is here. It is maintained by the family of John Bradley, one of the men who raised the flag that day sixty years ago. We today owe a great debt of gratitude to brave, courageous Marines who placed themselves in harm’s way to secure not only this island, but to win a war that was forced upon us, and to win it with unsurpassable honor.

What else can be said, but

Semper Fi!

UPDATE: Watch a program about Iwo Jima on the Military Channel at 8PM on Thursday, Feb. 24, 2005, entitled, “Return to Iwo Jima.”

Posting on DragonLady’s post has reminded me of what is perhaps my favorite contemporary popular song of all time: Donald Fagen’s New Frontier from the album The Nightfly (1982). My regular readers will understand why this song has such impact on me. Please forgive me any errors, as I’m going at these lyrics from memory:

Yes we’re gonna have a wingding
A summer smoker underground.
It’s just a dugout that my dad built
In case the reds decide to push the button down.

We’ve got provisions and lots of beer
The key word is survival on the new frontier.

Introduce me to that big blonde
She’s got a touch of Tuesday Weld.
She’s wearing Ambush and a French twist
She’s got us wild and she can tell.

She loves to limbo, that much is clear –
She’s got the right dynamic for the new frontier

Well I can’t wait ’til I move to the city
‘Til I finally make up my mind
To learn design,
And study overseas

Do you have a steady boyfriend?
Cause honey I’ve been watching you.
I hear you’re mad about Brubeck.
I like your eyes, I like him too.

He’s an artist, a pioneer –
We’ve got to have some music on the new frontier

Well I can’t wait
’til I move to the city
‘Til I finally make up my mind
To learn design and study overseas.

Let’s pretend that it’s the real thing
And stay together all night long
And when I really get to know you
We’ll open up the doors and climb into the dawn.

Confess your passions, your secret fears –
Prepare to meet the challenge of the new frontier

I have just watched the episode of Austin City Limits, originally aired 10/23/04, featuring Michael McDonald, and 17 year-old Brit phenom Joss Stone. McDonald’s set was just his tired old stock fare (although his cover of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On still brought tears to my eyes). But Joss Stone has me absolutely spun! I had her pegged, from about her third stanza, as a young ‘Retha. And it appears I am not alone in that opinion:

The 17 year-old from Devon, whose voice has been called a mix between “a white” Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin, found herself stepping up on stage to receive an award that could have easily gone to last year’s debutante Natasha Bedingfield, R ‘n’ B singer Jamelia, London’s feisty singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse or the alternative rock singer PJ Harvey.

The American pop machine is a fickle thing. What can you say about something that turns marginal talents like Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears into superstars? But, if there is any justice in the world, “Joss Stone” will be a household word within two years.

I used to watch this show regularly, up to a bit over a year ago, when it became one week after another of everyone against Tony Blankley, on the question of, why is the Iraqi campaign morally wrong, and why is the United Stated States doomed to failure? But I had grown weary of the show long beforehand, for disgust at John’s ceaseless egocentric bombast.

But I thought I’d check back there, thinking that recent successes in Iraq might have quelled the rhetoric, But I can’t find it on the schedule for my local PBS station – nor at NBC. And, when I enter my ZIP Code (92683) at their website, I get a 404 error.

Has The McLaughlin Group lost the LA audience?

I went to Costco today, and bought a $20 pack of the cheapest steaks they had ($2.99/lb.).

But I tell you – USDA Choice Sirloin Tips are better than Select Rib Eyes any day of the week.

(Oh, BTW – what is commonly sold as a Rib Eye Steak these days is actually a Rib Steak.)

A new chapter in the Marine Corps legend was written. My uncle was there, a Radioman 3c, on an AKA. He was lucky, he only had to contend with the Kamikazes (which he noted weren’t as bad as the ones he later encountered, literally, at Okinawa).

Today I’ll be at The National Museum of the Pacific War to remember those who gave us so much by giving their all.

Semper Fi, my friends, Semper Fi…

(If anyone finds me there, I’ll buy you dinner. Just ask, “Are you Sparkey?” Contest not open to friends, family, co-workers, members of the communist party, insurgents, weirdos, or the humor impaired.)

So I had a physical today. I have high cholesterol. As if that’s not bad enough, I have been dogging the hubby over his for the last 4 months thinking mine was still the level it was in ’98. Mine’s higher than his. Then the doc drops another bomb on me. I’m now in the age group where they recommend you get your first mammogram. WTF? I don’t want to be worrying about grown-up health issues.

I feel like Lindsey Lohan in Jamie Lee Curtis’ body looking in the mirror saying, “I’m like the crypt keeper!”

Dammit I still feel 16…somewhat…

I got this from a friend. I’m thinking this is geek week. 😉

What DnD Class Are You?
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Fighter. The questing knight, the conquering warlord, the king’s champion, the elite foot soldier, the hardened mercenary, and the bandit king-are all fighters. Paladin 100% Fighter 100% Rogue 90% Barbarian 90% Ranger 90% Monk 90% Sorcerer 90% Druid 90% Cleric 70% Bard 60% Wizard 60%

The folks at Spirit of America have their Help Wanted sign out.

For those of you that haven’t been following Bravo’s Project Runway as closely as I have. Olympus Fashion Week has already happened. The winner of the PR final three hasn’t been announced. But popular opinion among those at the show has it between Kara Saun and Jay McConnell. As always, my money is on Kara.

That said, I can say this about Wendy Pepper: Whatever the absolute measure of her talents, she has had the right designs at the right time. She won the Banana Republic Challenge, and the Nancy O’Dell Grammy Challenge (perhaps the two most momentous of the series). Further, while the judges raked her design over the coals (as they did, to one extent or another, for everyone, save Kara) in the USPS Challenge; to me – she had absolutely the right idea – evolutionary rather than revolutionary. And so it goes with most of what she does – she is in touch with Middle American sensibilities more than most haute couture designers.

Further, I have to add that I have some experience in the world of design (albeit industrial, rather than couture). But it is the same paradigm: Today we do lunch. Tomorrow, I eat your lunch. Next week – who knows? Isn’t it the same in most industries? To think otherwise is infantile.

But enough – on to tonight’s episode: They brought back the eliminated designers (and some of the models) for a final, candid, interview. Only two notes here: First, it established not Wendy, but eliminated designer Vanessa Riley, as the real dragon lady (no relation to our own DragonLady) of this series. But, as I predicted earlier, all the designers pointed to 17 year-old model Melissa Haro as the consummate professional among the group (Morgan wouldn’t even come on the show). As I said, Melissa is America’s next big supermodel.

At this date, I am not sure what my reason was to stop over for a couple of days in the Wilhelmine splendors of the spa-town of Baden-Baden. We were just passing through, my daughter and I, going from an assignment in Greece to another one in Spain, and taking our time, on a long meandering jaunt up through the length of Italy, over the Brenner Pass, and across Germany, and France. I had plotted a zig-zaggy route, and made some reservations in places that I knew I wanted to see, but left other stops for following an impulse— did we want to stop and look around here, or was I just tired of driving for the day? Baden-Baden was one of the planned stops; something about the spa-baths, and the splendors of Brenner’s Park-Hotel, all those marvelous relics of the 19th century high-life lived by gentlemen in flannel suits and panama hats, and ladies in sweeping petticoats, with their hair swept up, and whole flocks of birds piled onto impossibly ornate hats was just too enticing to resist. Baden-Baden had been a pillar in what the historian Barbara Tuchman called “The Proud Tower” of Europe before World War I, that wonderfully cosmopolitan place where no one needed a passport and all the royalty were cousins by blood or marriage or both, before war and revolution, blood and barbed wire and the Maxim gun brought down that shining edifice.

I couldn’t afford to stay at a place like Brenner’s, though, but we happily settled into a room in a tiny family-run guesthouse in the old part of town, where a hot bath in the shared facility was extra, and the owner/manageress kept the detached bath taps behind the bar, and handed them over upon payment of the additional fee. Poor woman, she looked a little bit frazzled, and explained that her husband was suddenly hospitalized, and she was left to run the place and do the housekeeping herself, and so she apologized for things not being as tidy as usual. Their son, a sturdy little blond boy named Oliver, was exactly Blondie’s age. The two of them looked enough alike to be twins; in the way of children they became instantly inseparable, constantly dashing off together to the garden or into the family quarters to play with Oliver’s toys and books . How they communicated, I had no idea, but they did.
(Blondie: I dunno how we talked— we were just kids. I think we pantomimed stuff to each other.)

(Blondie in colorful local attire, c. 1985)

She was in two minds about going with me into the heart of Baden-Baden the next day. Oliver’s mother had presented me with a little packet from the local tourism authority meant to be handed out to everyone who came to visit Baden-Baden; brochures and a town map, and some coupons and discount offers on local attractions, including one for a most splendid new establishment, the “Caracalla-Terme”.
“It’s a hot bath and spa, “I said, “Named after a Roman emperor. We’ll take our bathing suits and things, and check it out. And we’ll go eat at Brenner’s Park Hotel.”

I had already discovered through the simple expedient of driving through it, that Baden-Baden was a tiny place, with narrow little streets and little available parking, but until we ventured out on foot, we had no notion of how beautiful it actually was. The Lichtentaler Allee, a long and skinny park, beautifully planted with trees and a velvety green lawn ran along one bank of a little local river, the Oosbach. We followed it, strolling all the way into town, looking across the little river at the back gardens of the villas and mansions on the other side, where formal gardens ran down to the grassy bank. The houses were all painted the pastel colors of Easter candy, with white neo-Baroque trim.

Brenner’s was all that, but blown up to gargantuan proportions. The prices on the menus posted in the porte-cochered covered entryway were pretty gargantuan, also, even the a la cart luncheon menu. However, there was an afternoon tea served daily…
“We’ll come back for afternoon tea, “ I told Blondie firmly. After all, we had come all the way to Baden-Baden, of course we should eat under the Brenner’s fabled roof at least once.

In a paved square in the center of town, ringed by trees still bearing the shredded yellow remnants of their yearly foliage, and two rows of colonnaded shops, a band played lilting music, Lehar and Strauss waltzes for an audience taking their leisure on the sort of metal folding chairs seen in parks all over Europe. The miniature shops in the colonnade sold charming little luxury goods— bath salts and lotions, silk ties, leather gloves and confectionary. We shared a little round cake shaped like a chestnut conker, covered in pale green marzipan and little spikes of sugar icing, and I bought a pair of black pigskin driving gloves. The saleslady brought out a little brocade pillow for me to rest my elbow on while she personally battened the glove onto my hand to check for a good fit. It was a mild day, just cool enough in the shade to put on a sweater. The sky was clear and blue, the sunshine just warm enough, and flowers still blossomed everywhere, in ornamental beds, in urns and hanging baskets. Baden-Baden seemed like one of those enchantingly perfect little towns in a glass globe.

(To be Continued…..)

This is a really good idea to help keep our deployed servicepeople close to their families back home:

The e-mails have been rolling in to Mitch Goldstone for weeks since he launched a program to collect used digital cameras to donate to military families.

Among the most heartbreaking was one from Madeline Letchford. The wife of a deployed Camp Pendelton Marine said she was sad that she’d have to spend her first anniversary – Valentine’s Day – without her husband.

The Marine, was also missing out on “every blink” of their newborn son’s growth, she wrote to Goldstone. Not anymore.

Two weeks ago, Operation Photo handed Letchford a digital camera that she has used to snap nearly 100 photos of 6-month old Jimi smiling, crying and sleeping. She e-mails them to her husband, and posts them on Goldstone’s Irvine-based Web site, a service he offers for free.

“It just means so much to share the silly things that moms and dads get to see,” the Oceanside resident said.

Over the past two months, Goldstone has collected more than 2,500 used digital cameras after asking clients of his 30 Minute Photos shop and online photo-services business to donate digital cameras to military families. Operation Homefront, a Santa Ana nonprofit group that helps military families, is working with Goldstone to distribute the cameras across the country.

Michael Jackson has just been taken to the emergency room. And my first thought was, “wow – perhaps he will die, and save us this circus.”

I swear, this must just be my week taking solid whacks at low-dangling piñatas— there is a mass convergence of lunacy, not a ship of fools but a bus of idiots; Ward Churchill, Eason Johnson all in play, and now Lynne Stewart, weeping all over the news about her conviction. And the full moon, according to my calendar, won’t be for another week and half; perhaps someone has been conducting sky clad rites, or there is some great eruption in the Force. Or maybe everyone is just getting back to work after Superbowl….

I had read a long magazine profile about Lynne Stewart, crusading activist lawyer a couple of years ago; first I had ever heard of her specifically, although I probably heard her name in references to her client, the Blind Sheik, the trial and conviction of whom did make the overseas papers. I can’t remember who wrote the profile or where I read it; probably one of those East-Coasty cultural organs like New Yorker or the NY Times Magazine, but the essence of the piece was immediately filed and stashed in the eccentrically organized mental filing cabinet of my memory. (Imagine drawers full of files and facts with no neatly labeled source and file number on the folders. This is why I am a killer at Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit, but have to do Google searches to verify sources, quotes and dates of publication.)

The profile on first reading seemed pretty straightforward, and rather favorable: portrait of a long-time activist for a whole range of sometimes unpopular causes and people, a principled believer in civil rights, and the law, dedicated to clients who deserved some presumption of innocence, and effective defense, a down to earth, frumpy grandmotherly sort, held in the affection of her family and close friends; the author, I sensed wanted to like her very much, wanted us in reading it to like Lynne Stewart also. But at the end of the article I had just a faint sour taste in my mouth, and uneasy mild dislike that I could really not pick out any particular reason for. There was something chill… a sense of an absence in emotion, as if a sociopath were going through all the paces, saying all the charming, engagingly friendly things, but with cold and empty eyes all the time.

There was mention of the ongoing investigation and charges of assisting Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in communicating with his followers as a sort of threat hanging over her, but it seemed to be treated with airy dismissal, and something of no account, an exaggeration, a figment of post 9/11 paranoia on the part of an over-zealous and bigoted Justice Department. Perhaps that was where my unease crept in. This was after 9/11, after the fatwa on Salman Rusdie, after bombings and riots and murders, after assassinations in Egypt and across the Islamic world, and she thought nothing of aiding her client to communicate with his fanatical followers? At his direction, mayhem elsewhere would be unleashed… and she was carrying on as if it was nothing to do with her, as if she were the consigliore to a Mafia don; a co-conspirator rather than a defender?

I listened to her sobbing on Morning Edition last week— she sounded shocked, disbelieving, as if she had never really considered the possibility of conviction until the very roof caved in on her. And she still hadn’t gotten a clue, and I began to idly wonder why. Didn’t a competent defense lawyer have to keep some kind of detachment about a client, a boundary against identifying too closely and wandering into all sorts of ethical and emotional sand traps? If anything, she seemed to be a true believer in the innocence of her clients and the malignity of the prosecution… and did that make it easier to slip over a line, to regard some rules as dispensable if it served the client’s interest? Laws are laws, planted thick across the land, as Ben Bolt pointed out in “A Man for All Seasons” and they are to protect all of us, not to be cut down as a convenience to a client.

The thought occurred that this is a fantasy ideology; it is not the law, or the client that she has served for thirty years, it is the entrancing vision of herself, the heroine in her own fantasy, defending the indefensible. 9/11 wasn’t real, the jihad of fundamental Islam against our country isn’t real, it’s all someone else’s malign plot, and she is the star of her own heroic epic movie, and everything and everyone else are merely props and extras. It was chilling, therefore, to read an excerpt from the indictment, courtesy of Belmont Club: “Also during the May 2000 prison visit, the superseding indictment alleges that Yousry (a confederate of Abdel Rahman’s masquerading as a translator) told Abdel Rahman and Stewart about kidnappings by the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group in the Philippines and “Abu Sayyaf’s demand to free Abdel Rahman, to which Stewart replied, ‘Good for them.’”. Those held by Abu Sayyaf included more than a dozen children, and a German woman in poor health. Props and extras, indeed. In another interview, (courtesy of Monthly Review via Damien Penny) Ms Stewart stoutly defended the rights of some people to lock up others; “I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution.” (Imagine, the sheer, unmitigated nerve of those dissidents, to undermine the “people’s revolution”— it’s all up to Mao or Stalin or Fidel to set them straight, of course.)

It may also be worth pointing out that Ms. Stewart seems to have had precious little firsthand experience of actually living under the conditions imposed by a people’s revolution for months or years on end, although she may come to a greater understanding of what “locking up people” actually means, up close and personal. Lost in the fantasy ideology, where other people are only abstractions, Ms Stewart might be that kind of lofty, well-meaning intellectual, like that of the Hallam family in mystery writer Robert Barnard’s “Skeleton in the Grass”

“The Hallam world suddenly presented itself to her as two tracts of territory, separated by a ditch. Within the inner circle were the family and servants at Hallam— a warm beautiful cosy community. Beyond the ditch was humanity at large, for whom the Hallams had a great, generous love, the highest aspirations. But between the two worlds were the people in the ditch: the people among whom the Hallams lived and for whom they felt nothing… a phrase from Bleak House thrust itself into her brain; “Telescopic Philanthropy”. The Hallams kept their eyes on the horizon, on a new and better world, but they hardly noticed what went on around their feet… there was… for all their high-thinking and their social concern, a sort of lack, a sort of blankness.”.

Just that lack, that blankness, that lack of empathy with real people is what really dooms the efforts by these real life-Hallams, like Stewart, who have their eye on the new and better world… but hardly notice what goes on around their feet, or in a Philippine jungle, a Soviet gulag… or what happened to those two big office towers in the Financial district, three years ago.

Glenn Reynolds has an extended post on the growing foreign policy rift in the Democratic Party. While it, and the many items he links to, provide a good read, this really isn’t a new issue. This writer, and the folks at The New Republic, have commented on it extensively in the past. The appointment of Howard Dean as DNC Chairman, coupled with Hillary Clinton as the presumptive ’08 Presidential candidate, does not bode well for resolution any time soon.

But also important to note is the growing social policy rift in the Republican Party, as documented in this new book by former New Jersey governor and EPA chief, Christine Todd-Whitman, followed up by her website. Among Whitman’s points:

1. Whitman argues that this shift poses a serious threat to the long-term health and competitiveness of the Republicans, a party in which moderates like Whitman, Colin Powell, Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and George Pataki are paraded in public when necessary, but openly opposed behind the scenes.
2. Whitman refers to those on the far right as "social fundamentalists" whose "mission is to advance their narrow ideological agenda" by using the government to impose their views on everyone else. Though she admits that evangelicals may have helped to win the 2004 election, they have claimed much more credit than they deserve for Bush’s success, and she warns that catering to this narrow group will have consequences.

Robert Formaini critiques Richard Parker’s February 6^th Boston Globe article “The Pragmatist and the Utopian” in TCS:

In any case, Friedman was absolutely right to criticize Nixon for wage and price control policy regardless of whether one calls that criticism “far right.” Has Parker ever read (Nixon’s “price czar”) C. Jackson Grayson’s The Confessions of A Price Controller? Doubtful. He’s too busy listing Galbraith’s term as World War II “price czar” approvingly. I once watched — I think it was an episode of Galbraith’s tendentious Age of Uncertainty — him describe the glee he felt when some poor businessmen came to his Washington office begging for a price increase. The look in his eyes as he recounted the story was like something out of an Ayn Rand novel, and I don’t mean a look one would find on any of her hero’s faces. Perhaps Parker saw that episode as well, his head nodding in liberal approval. All I felt was complete disgust. But for Galbraith, and so many others, to have been young then and pro-Keynesian and in Washington, well, dare I say it sounds almost….utopian?

Parker claims that Reagan’s White House fully accepted Friedman’s monetarist positions for the Fed and acted on them. It’s true that, starting in late 1979, the Fed began to target the quantity of money, seeing at that time a double-digit inflation rate, high unemployment, and a prime rate that peaked at over 22%. (This was all due to the Keynesian fine tuning under Ford and Carter, but Parker and Galbraith want to argue, one supposes, that had only Galbraith been doing the tuning…well, everything would somehow have come out better.) In fact, Friedman’s (or Hume’s….or Mill’s….or Fisher’s….) ideas worked exactly as he said they would: cutting the quantity of money did bring the inflation rate down. But this outcome came at a price: a severe recession. So, according to Parker, the Fed and Regan abandoned Friedman and pursued a policy of “turbo-charged” Keynesian-style deficits to get Reagan re-elected in 1984 even after his disastrous — yes, here it comes again, the worst political cliché in modern economic history — “tax cuts for the wealthy.”

It’s really sad to see people still clinging to tired old Keynesian fantasies in this day and age. Far from being “utopian”, free-market economics recognize such human failings as greed and sloth, and make the best of them.

This from the Trib:

WASHINGTON — Less than 24 hours after the Bush administration announced its plans to save billions of dollars by scaling back two new Air Force planes, a group of senators on Tuesday launched a campaign to rescind those cuts.

Chief among them was Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Republican from Georgia, where 8,500 workers assemble both planes–the F/A-22 fighter jet and the C-130J Hercules transport–at the Lockheed Martin plant in Marietta.

After attending a Pentagon breakfast with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Isakson said the secretary promised that indeed he already was reconsidering the C-130J cut.

[…]

However one interprets the breakfast, it was no surprise that members of Congress stepped up quickly to take issue with the administration’s proposed $419.3 billion military budget. Nor was it a surprise that the Raptor and the Hercules, two projects whose development costs have skyrocketed, would be on the chopping block.

“The F-22 should go away now,” said Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate Budget Committee staff member and author of a book that examines Congress’ role in authorizing multibillion-dollar military projects.

One would authorize buying 179 Raptors, which have been 19 years in the making and only recently were put into production. That would be 96 fewer than the Air Force was expecting.

At one time, the Air Force planned on a fleet of 750. So far, 45 Raptors have been delivered, according to Lockheed Martin, the primary manufacturer.

The second cut would end production of the C-130J next year. To date, 121 have been delivered and 59 more are on order, according to Lockheed Martin, which also makes that plane.

While I like both these planes, I really have to question the wisdom of continuing procurement. I mean, there’s little doubt that the Raptor is a whole new frontier in air superiority fighters. But the Eagle/Strike Eagle are already the best thing in general deployment, and Raptors cost the world. As for the C-130J: it still doesn’t have the capability of the C-17. And, even with some problems with wing cracks, the existing C-130 fleet still has a lot of life left in it.

If you want a good laugh, revisit my post from yesterday, look at comment #13 – it’s from my sweet, wonderful daughter. Then after her comment, I put it in perspective about her important lesson when she was learning to drive.

It’s a hoot, take a look!

From reader Jaalinta, via LFG, comes more evidence for the theory of coalescing idiocy, which postulates that all the stupidity in the world, of every political extreme and variety is actually converging into one huge, radioactively pulsating orb.
Professor Ward Churchill, faux-Indian activist and intellectual piñata for every humorist in the blogosphere has just been named as a high priest of the Raelians.
I swear, it’s getting harder and harder for Scrappleface and Iowahawk to keep ahead of real life.