Hop over to Aaron's place and vote for me now: I want to maintain the fiction that I don't care, but not at the expense of a respectable showing. And the Hearts suit contest is over at the end of the day on Monday. (Keep in mind that, IIRC, the Jack and King of the suit are reserved for dudes who get along well with the ladies. Which means Hubris, Beautiful Atrocities, or possibly Goldstein, if you ask me.)

If you're a regular reader and you don't vote for me, then you have to send me money this winter to underwrite my trip to Washington in February for CPAC. Fair's fair, after all.

UPDATE: I take it back, in my charming-yet-flaky way. I love Michelle Malkin—and she gives me a lot of traffic—but it looks like The Anchoress is pulling even with her, and I'd love to see the deep, meditative chick win. After all, that rarely happens in real life. So vote for her now, and send me money in December/Janurary to support my trip to the East Coast. I'm deadly serious, by the way.

Posted by: Attila at 03:22 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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. . . lays it on the line.

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"Well, mine are newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and The New York Times. You know," he replies. "Respected media sources."

Respected by whom? I wonder. Other members of the media? I know those people. I have dinner with them every month. They are just as shallow and intellectually lazy as anyone else.

Out loud, I simply remark that I don't trust them.

"Who do you trust?" he asks me. "Right-wing blogs?"

Well, yes. I trust people I know to be whip-smart and honest. People who correct themselves when they're wrong.

And, by the way: that's whom.

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His insight? Target can be beat. His proposals: remarkably specific.

Via Insty.

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"We're guaranteed to get a baby placed with us soon," my husband insists. "After all, we're broke."

He has a point. We need a crib, and a few obvious items: bottles, diapers, onesies. I'm shopping hard, and won't spend a dime more than I have to (beyond ensuring safety issues, of course).

We're gravitating toward an Ocean/Underwater theme, though the Night Sky is still a possibility. (Pale pink and blue are icky anyway, and some of the pastels in many nurseries give me the creeps. Duckies will be acceptable; bunnies are under review.)

As a style snob I do have guilty pleasures, of course: in my personal life it's Mary Englebreit, and with respect to my baby it could turn out to be "classic Pooh" items based on the original Ernest Shepard drawings for the real A.A. Milne books. Those are colorized in pastel shades, and might not fit with the oceanic theme. We'll see.

But here's my real baby furniture/layette question for the night, directed at the parents out there: Are my husband and I supposed to share a diaper bag? Do I get a reasonably masculine one in black or denim blue or some such, and whoever has the baby for the afternoon takes that along? Or will we each have a diaper bag preference? Can I get one for myself that's more colorful than the average guy would carry around?

I guess the answer depends on that whole singleton vs. twins question. I've been suspecting lately that we might have to settle for a singleton, but Attila the Hub is correct: we're broke. Which would make twins a good deal more likely, if you accept that the Universe/God has an excellent sense of humor.

The idea of how much money the first year of parenthood is going to cost makes me crazy—especially after all the infertility treatments, and the adoption fees themselves. But any project can be approached with a spending plan, and I shall simply have to make one up, and find the money to get what we need.

For some reason, I feel it's going to happen in the spring, though there's simply no way to tell at all.

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It's not too late to have an impromptu party! A lot of Condistas throughout the country will be doing just that.

If you're starting your own local Condi club, there's lots to talk about:

• Parallels between the "draft Condi" movement and the Eisenhower candidacy.

• Dick Morris' new book on the potential showdown ("inevitable," in his mind) between Condi and Hillary. Does he overstate the case? And/or does he have a point about the GOP needing to go after the Democrats' demographics?

• Dr. Rice's career to date: could it be considered the ideal apprenticeship for the Presidency? Which pivotal heads of State is she getting to know right now?

• If the Secretary accepts our charge and runs, at what point should she declare her candidacy? Later is better in terms of keeping her popularity as strong as it is now, but at some point she will have to commit. Would it be inappropriate for her to continue in her present postion? Would Bush have to appoint a new interim Secretary as Condi campaigns?

• To what extent would having two female candidates neutralize gender as an issue in 2008?

• The people whose names have been suggested as potential candidates are not as strong as Condi is. Would any of them help to balance the ticket, however? Would the base support a Rice/Giuliani candidacy, for instance?

• Would those be the funnest debates in the history of the country, or what?

Don't forget to raise funds, and keep apprised of current events via the Americans for Rice. Because AFR is a 527, it's appropriate to send money to help them raise awareness and persuade Dr. Rice that her duty lies in the White House.

Posted by: Attila at 01:33 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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It was freezing here in the hills near Pasadena last night. And by “freezing,” I mean “55 degrees.”

ItÂ’s almost too cold to drink gin and tonics. Almost. I may have to switch to dry mini-Manhattans alternated with room-temp water. I like gin and tonics because I can make ginless tonics as well . . . hm. I could always try some sort of scotch and soda variation with cheaper whiskey and room-temp soda. IÂ’ll see.

Or I could just drink hot Tension Tamer tea with five or six valiums dissolved into it.

[Honey, whaaaaaaaaaaaat?]

Posted by: Attila at 12:21 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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1 um...it is NEVER too cold to drink G&T's

Posted by: Darleen at November 12, 2005 01:47 PM (FgfaV)

2 Hills near Pasadena? Some of the happiest years of my life were spent in Sierra Madre. And Manhattans are correct under any circumstances, though I prefer doubles to the "mini" version. ;-)

Posted by: Mr. Roberts at November 12, 2005 09:38 PM (kcbRI)

3 It's important to remember than I'm a small person; that's why I like to mix my own drinks . . .

Posted by: Attila Girl at November 12, 2005 11:09 PM (jCk4g)

4 I repeated this joke at a party this weekend, and some guy tried to "correct" me about what the freezing point was. I mean, let's be fair: some people have a Y chromosome and a sense of irony. But some . . . don't. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Posted by: Attila Girl at November 13, 2005 11:13 PM (jCk4g)

5 Since it is well below 55 right now in MT you have my deepest sympathy... NOT. At 55 it is still golfing season but I don't have any black balls to find in the snow so I'm stuck dreaming of next spring. By the way,... I always prefered hot butter rums on days like this. They even keep the fingers warm. xy chomobaby

Posted by: Jack at November 14, 2005 09:32 PM (b4Nv4)

6 So you're telling me that when you go outside you don't simply put a flannel shirt over your T-shirt to wear as a light jacket? Next you'll be telling me there aren't any palm trees around, and houses are available for under a million dollars. How gullible do you think I am?

Posted by: Attila Girl at November 15, 2005 01:03 AM (jCk4g)

7 Pretty gulliable, today I left my house sitting on 30 acres (considerably less then 1 mil) dressed in only my "T" shirt. The thermometer read about 25 F but there was no wind. And the trees around here have needles on them. The rest used to have leaves but the leaves are all on the ground. Do palm trees every lose their leaves?

Posted by: Jack at November 15, 2005 02:17 PM (6FeBQ)

8 Please note; I meant I was not wearing any jacket when I said 'only wearing my "T" shirt'. I did have pants and shoes too.

Posted by: Jack at November 15, 2005 02:38 PM (6FeBQ)

9 Wow. It sound beautiful; I almost wish I could see it, but I'm actually a bit of a weather wimp. I'm sure you hadn't guessed that. Palm trees are a little like evergreens (which we actually have a few of on our property). They're never without some covering, but when the wind kicks up--especially out here, where the air is so dry--the "fans" dry up, detach themselves from the trees, and blow around in the streets. (Keep in mind that SoCal is a desert with a thin veneer of real soil. We steal water from Northern California and Arizona to keep our cities going.) My mother once made a Christmas tree out of some old palm fronds: she attached several to the wall, decoreated them, and placed a train set below. It was a fun Christmas tree.

Posted by: Attila Girl at November 15, 2005 10:02 PM (jCk4g)

10 If we get some real snow here I'll send you a picture. It is pretty,.... till you have to start shoveling it off the walkway. The palm Christmas tree sounds interesting, still prefer the pine and the smell, espesially in the fireplace. By the way, you are on my blog list, the name is what got me.

Posted by: Jack at November 16, 2005 07:03 PM (W9cbS)

11 The only thing I love about snow is looking at pictures of it. California, famously, has lots of Washingtonias - gorgeous tall palms that actually don't shed their fronds once they're dead. They can make a skirt of rustly dead fronds all the way to the ground even when they're 50 feet tall. Here we got a lot of hurricane pruning with Wilma - the wind rips all the fronds off sometimes. But the palms don't seem to mind. The plants themselves bend with the wind so well they almost never snap in half. When they do it's a scary sight, something that gives us the willies just to see. I defronded my 20-foot queen palm when we were still undecided about whether to try to raise her back up. She came down in the hurricane and landed on the orchid tree and then the roof. We came so close to chainsawing my pretty queenie. But we hoisted her back up instead with my guy's Kenworth big rig. She's already growing new fronds. AND!!! Mr. Jack, we have deciduous evergreens here! Bald cypress and pond cypress actually drop their needles for the winter. But never fear! we also have odd shaped pines called slash pines and longleaf and loblolly, who never make a cone shape but are well-behaved in the Keep your Needles field. We make Christmas wreaths from pine branches wound around with lots of Spanish moss.

Posted by: k at November 17, 2005 03:58 AM (M7kiy)

12 Whoops, forgot the most important part: The temperature right now is 70 degrees. The high will be right around 80 today. It'll do that for a week or so then drop about 5 degrees when we get this cold front coming through. :p

Posted by: k at November 18, 2005 03:01 AM (6krEN)

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After all, it’s beyond “inside the blogs.” It’s inside inside the blogs.

But Aaron was sweet enough to nominate me for the heart suit in his bloggy deck of cards, so go vote for one of the fine ladies who light up the right. (The actual poll for voting is on his left sidebar.)

I wasnÂ’t willing to waste a vote on myself. I agonized, wanting to vote for Ith, Sissy Willis of Sisu, and the Anchoress all at the same time. Finally I settled on Jane at Armies of Liberation, because she gets results in the Real World: she takes heat from groups that sport ties to AQ. She gets prisoners released from Yemeni jails. She makes dictatorships nervous.

For many of us, blogging can be (at its worst) mental masturbation. JaneÂ’s blog is mental sex.*

* I stole that line. Can you figure out from whom? If you can, you should definitely go vote for me.

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1 Jane does get results. She's not long for this world

Posted by: jeff at November 12, 2005 01:11 PM (q23kU)

2 Already voted for you. Don't know where the line originated but I remember Woody Allen using it in "Annie Hall" back in the 70's sometime.

Posted by: Jim at November 12, 2005 06:29 PM (J0usP)

3 Thanks for putting me in such awesome company!

Posted by: Sissy Willis at November 13, 2005 01:19 PM (mrcD4)

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Here, in this rather, um, rambunctious thread over at Protein Wisdom.

(Context: Goldstein's discussing the fact that Bush is finally standing up to his critics on the issue of WMD and how we got into the war.)

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Glenn links to the trailer for Why Wal-Mart Works, and Why That Makes Some People Crazy.

I'm just as perplexed by the hostility. After all, the same people who complain about Wal-Mart very often make regular runs to Costco, where they buy a little more than they need to for the sake of getting the best per-unit price (storing the excess in their larger-than average homes).

People on restrictive budgets, of course, can't afford to do this. Apparently my anti-Wal-Mart friends would prefer that they live in (even greater) material deprivation, buying fewer products from overpriced local stores. Glenn:

I prefer Tarzhay myself for its more upscale ambience, but my discomfort with Wal-Mart is purely aesthetic, and I think it's odd that some people see it as evil incarnate. [ . . .] I think there's a class issue: Wal-Mart is unavoidable evidence that the American working classes don't think, or live, the way the American thinking classes want to imagine. For this sin, Wal-Mart can never be forgiven.

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We are being gouged. Michael Demmons proves it.

[h/t: Outside the Beltway.]

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My Nancy Drew mysteries from eBay. Some liberry was getting rid of them until the nice lady in the northwest rescued them; they're marked "DISCARD"!

They are all the revised versions (the 20-chapter format) that were supposedly purged of racism/guns and "refined" in the 50s/60s. I'm pretty sure those are the editions I read as a child: in my day, all Nancy Drew books had yellow spines (these have violet spines).

So, eat your heart out, Hubris. I'll soon be re-reading:

The Mystery at Lilac Inn (1961)

The Clue of the Dancing Puppet (1962)

The Clue of the Velvet Mask (1953/1969)

The Hidden Window Mystery (1956/1975)

and The Mystery of the Brass Bound Trunk (1976)

Then I'll save them for my little girl, so she can have a warped notion of female identity and a fascination for All Things Criminal, too.

("Mom! Your work is so derivative! You can't decide whether you want to be Michael Connelly or Dorothy L. Sayers. I mean, at least get the hard-boiled/tea cozy distinction down. And all that gratuitous sex is just gross!)

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I'm sorry. Given that drilling for oil can be done in an environmentally sensitive fashion, and given the price that we pay for dependence on foreign oil, I just don't get it. I do not understand why we aren't using everything in the toolbox to break our dependence on outside energy.

Sure: conservation is part of the solution. New technologies are part of the solution. But we need to develop other options in the meantime. I don't understand the argument that "it won't solve the problem 100%, so it's not worth doing." We should be approaching this from a number of different angles.

Michelle Malkin reprinted this letter to Hastert from her reader Rick, whose blog is here (go to her site for many, many more letters from disappointed people):

I have a neighbor who is a single mother. She struggles, but she gets by with a combination of determination and hard work.

. . . .

Not too long ago she came to my wife in tears, humiliated by the need to borrow money from us; gasoline prices, you see, were high enough to break her meager budget. Thanks to your "leadership", they aren't likely to drop too far, are they?

I served in the Army as an Intelligence Analyst and served in Desert Shield/Desert Storm; I happen to know that dependence on foreign oil has a number of effects- It keeps the price higher; it makes us strategically weaker; it funnels money out of our economy; and it puts some of that money in the pockets of groups like Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and al-Qaeda.

So while the tundra of remote Alaskan coasts may not have a oil derrick, some of the money I spend on gas will be going to the creation of roadside bombs in
Iraq. So while Zarqawi may thanks you, I most emphatically do not.

People are dying because of the terrorism caused by oil money in the hands of despots and outlaw groups. While I understand that energy is essential to economic development—and development is making lives better and safer in the third world, not to mention here—I don't understand why we don't do what we can to ease the suffering just a little.

Drill ANWR. Build refineries. Now.

Posted by: Attila at 08:33 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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. . . is being used on the floor of the senate (link here at the magazine), and he'll be posting the text of Bruce Willis' speech soon. (I hope he got a picture, too!)

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I'll be working at my occasional on-site job today and tomorrow (and very likely the first few days of this coming week).

This will have deleterious effects, on 1) my blog, and 2) my lifestyle of complete and absolute indolence.

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Not the war in Iraq: the war between the Bush Administration and the CIA. Jeff's got an extended quotation from the Journal Online, and some thoughts of his own on where to go from here.

There's clearly something fishy going on. Whether or not you think that Joe Wilson's trip to Niger was one of the CIA's attempts to embarass the President (Dorkafork at INDC* says no), the CIA does appear to be out of control—and more than a little incompetent.

Bush can't stand above the fray any more: he is the fray.

* Fixed to give credit where it's due. My apologies to Dorkafork; I just can't get used to the fact that some blogs more important than mine have additional writers even when the main blogger isn't on vacation.

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. . . don't even bother with Jarhead. The people who put it together are so ignorant of military matters that none of them even own clothing in shades of green (or blue).

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. . . is celebrating two years of blogging and his millionth hit. In the spirit of celebration, he allowed Beth to "interrogate" him; it's a lovely interview. Drop by and add your congratulations!

And, seemingly in answer to my previous request for help in finding the secrets to Allied air superiority during World War II, he comes out of the closet with respect to his main site, Ace Pilots. Which is dedicated to the planes and pilots of that conflict.

I feel like it's Christmas, seven weeks early.

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Jeff of Beautiful Atrocities is shooting smack blog entries, and has a stunning little example headlined: "SUPPORT THE INSURGENTS! DEFEND BORED YOUTH!"

But it's not like Jeff isn't willing to put his activism where his, um, html is. Au contraire:

Join us tonight in SF, where the usual spotty crowds of shiftless rabble will assemble with signs reading SARKOZY=HITLER, NO BLOOD FOR CREME BRULEE, & VOULEZ VOUS COUCHER AVEC MOI, then proceed to chant incoherently, torch Peugeots, make jackasses of ourselves, & hopefully get laid.

I love stories with happy endings; they make me cry, but in the good way. Be sure to wear that cute leather jacket, Jeff.

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The Commissar links to a few folks who are pointing out that funky social policies, bad economic conditions, and racial segregation have a lot more to do with the French riots than Islam does.

It's a horrific situation; let's try to evaluate it objectively, rather than projecting our fear of Islamo-fascism onto that situation.

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