Fausta's got the story; she'll be talking about Castro's resignation on her podcast in a bit over an hour (8:00 Pacific; 11:00 Eastern).

My only question is, "is this real?" Or will Fidel still hold the puppet strings? Will his brother have any real power?

Fausta (with Sean of The American Mind, at CPAC—whose Castro resignation post is also good). I decided I'd rather run a picture of these two, rather than the old dictator. They're a lot more photogenic.

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for no reason at all, except that I wanted to post this pic on his birthday, but my computer was acting up. It lets me post pix when it is in the mood, and at no other time.

Trivia question: what Southern California pier was this taken on?

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and how the House Democrats are picking the trial lawyers . . . um, I mean, our CIVIL LIBERTIES!—over fairly pedestrian gathering of intelligence:

Protecting the countryÂ’s surveillance capabilities in a time of war? Not so much. Protecting trial lawyers? A party imperative.

As the neo-civil libertarians on the left continue to argue (in between crafting smoking bans and environmental legislation that will have the government, in essence, monitoring your thermostat), their real concern here is that the telecoms not be given immunity for their “illegal activity.” Point out to them that no “illegalities” have been established, and the answer is always the same: if these big corporations have nothing to hide, than why would they need immunity? — an argument that studiously ignores two obvious facts, first, that litigation not only penalizes the telecoms financially (would they go to court or just settle?) while enriching the trial lawyers (who get paid either way); and second, that such a threat of legal liability is also a back door way of keeping risk-averse corporations from cooperating with the government. After all, why cooperate if doing so could open you up to a lawsuit, even if you have assurances that what your are doing isn’t illegal?

After all, Jeff points out—along with Andy McCarthy—the intel we lose while Pelosi et al. go out for their recess will likely "stay lost." Fewer dots to connect, and all that. But it's okay: it'll be Bush's fault if the dots don't get connected, no?

For decades now, the Dems have worked (with outspoken exceptions) to weaken US security — either by placing (unconstitutional, in my opinion) restrictions on intelligence agencies (FISA was never supposed to affect military intelligence gathering), or by cutting military spending, or by adopting a cynical tone of moral indignation at the “loss of freedoms” that they know to be a chimera of their own construction.

Which is their prerogative, naturally — but something that John McCain should be outraged by (if only for appearances), and seeking to use as wedge issue by trumpeting his concerns to his buddies in the media. Like a shiny maverick riding to the rescue of a weakened nation.

Yeah, well. That's McCain. I'm still torn between actually voting for the man, and writing in "a ham and cheese panino."

Take home lesson #1: however awful you think the Rethuglicans are on national security, they are less-bad than the Democrats. Mostly.

Take home lesson #2: never hesitate to shrewishly nag your favorite bloggers into posting more. They'll pretend to resist, but at some point they will buckle, leading to juicy reads. Hooray for the juicy reads! (And less-hooray for the depressing events they chronicle.)

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and the company will be out hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But Laura will be happy. So stay home if you're sick, even if you're under deadline!

The question of the day being: When does the American work ethic/way of doing business conflict with sound public health policy?

Seriously: I used to work for a company that had me shipping a "book" (a magazine) every two weeks. Getting sick wasn't an option. I used to keep a stash of cough syrup in my desk drawer, and I switched from coffee to tea-without-milk, so I could muddle through when I was sick. I had to be there.

And my mother the schoolteacher helpfully reminds me that in one's first 1-2 years in a public school, the human immune system is utterly overwhlemed, and one is sick half the time—or better.

So, teachers: stay home. The kids will entertain themselves, and your immune system won't get "over the hump."

But Laura will be happy. Has she never worked somewhere where she was actually, you know—necessary?

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All the testosterosphere cares about is, "is she hawt?"

And she is. End of story.

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Joni Mitchell is so underrated as a poet.

"It takes cheerful resignation,

Heart and humility;

That's all it takes,"

A cheerful person told me. Nobody's harder on me than me—

How could they be?

And, nobody's harder on you than you.

Betsy's blue;
She says-"Tell me something good!"
You know I'd help her out if I only could.
Oh, but sometimes the light
Can be so hard to find;
At least the moon at the window—
The thieves left that behind.

People don't know how to love;
They taste it and toss it,
Turn it off and on
Like a bathtub faucet.
Oh sometimes the light
Can be so hard to find—
At least the moon at the window—
The thieves left that behind.

I wish her heart;
I know these battles.
Deep in the dark,
When the spooks of memories rattle.
Ghosts of the future,
Phantoms of the past,
Rattle, rattle, rattle
In the spoon and the glass.

Is it possible to learn
How to care and yet not care—
Since love has two faces:
Hope and despair.
And pleasure always turns to fear, I find.
At least the moon at the window—
The thieves left that behind .
At least they left the moon
Behind the blind
Moon at the window.

I just took an extra Ritalin; it seemed like the thing to do. Ex-fucking-celsior!

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Via Insty, an interesting observation from The Belmont Club:

There are two ironies here. The first is that while Barack Obama has gone out of his way to say that he is 'not a Muslim', in a wider sense the Muslims have taken him into their bosom. An acquaintance, writing from Jakarta says the same feeling is pretty strong over there too. While in America he projects the image of rallying America he simultaneously conveys the impression of being on the side of the Arab too.

The other irony of course is that the Arab attraction for Obama is potentially at odds with the Arab desire for a powerful America which can contain Iran. So far Obama has managed the remarkable feat of being all things to all men, even men who are mortally opposed to each other. What happens when he has to come down on one side or the other?

Reynolds remarks with characteristic understatement: "my guess is that someone will be be disappointed." Indeed.

More from the Belmont post:

Tamara Cofman Wittes, who's attending the annual 5th Annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum notices that anti-US rhetoric is way down this year. Instead of fire-breathing anti-American keynote speakers, "the opening keynote was instead delivered by President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who argued that Muslims in Afghanistan and Bosnia were right to expect and accept American military intervention to relieve their suffering, and America was just in coming to their aid."

The reason for the change in tone has been a grudging respect for successes in American foreign policy and Washington's new focus on Iran.

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Maybe. Or perhaps, as usual, people still use "white" as a sort of signifier for "middle class." Now that's irony.

Joyner cops to being white—though not on all stereotypical fronts—and Sandra Tsing Loh referred to herself recently in The Atlantic as "whitish." (The phrase appears in her review of Letters to a Young Teacher, by Jonathan Kozol—it isn't online yet; "Tales Out of School, page 91. Her auto-libel is on page 98.) That one worried me. Isn't she actually equally "Asianish"? Or are we getting into Tiger Woods country, here?

Paging Jeff Goldstein . . .

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At least, he's outspending Clinton there, according to Sean. By a considerable margin, too.

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S.R. writes:

Poor Millard Fillmore. The butt of schoolyard jokes, TV sitcom jokes, and TV advertisement jokes. The thirteenth president of the United States (last prominent member of Whig Party, serving from 1850 until 1853) ascended to the office upon the death of Zachary Taylor. (It's believed Taylor died of gastroenteritis.)


So, what's the truth about President Fillmore? Here are the major points of his three years in office. He pushed five major bills through Congress to:



• Admit California as a free state;

• Settle the Texas boundary and compensate her;

• Grant territorial status to New Mexico;

• Place Federal officers at the disposal of slaveholders seeking fugitives;

• Abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia.



Another important legacy of Fillmore's administration was the sending of Commodore Matthew C. Perry to open Japan to Western trade, though Perry did not reach Japan until Franklin Pierce had replaced Fillmore as President.


And what of that famous story about the bathtub, for which poor President Fillmore is best remembered (and ridiculed)? Well, some biographers credit humorist and national scold H.L. Mencken with starting the hoax that Fillmore was the first president to have a bathtub with running water in the White House. So, now you know.

And so do the rest of you. Thanks, S.R.!

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. . . will be experiencing real, sustained hunger any time soon.

We've forgotten what that feels like.

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that the college kids "lawyer up" before the next mass shooting in a supposedly "gun-free" zone, rather than afterward?

Whom am I supposed to root for, here? Must I really suggest that if you're crazy enough to want to leave the planet—and take a few others with you in a blaze of ingloriousness—that you select an institution with a large "endowment"?

I wonder what would happen if one of these hugely-endowed universities got shot up. Like Harvard, with a $35 billion endowment. Man, if the lawyers didnÂ’t start setting the folding tables up outside the student union like the credit card companies do every September, IÂ’d lose all respect for their sleaziness.

The lawyers', or the universities'? Or both? Neither has a monopoly on sleaziness.

Via Insty, who's riffing off of Jay Tea at Wizbang.

I'd really like to see the laws against carry on campus challenged—before they lead to more loss of life.

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And as polysyllabic as ever. Today's subject: is race real? Not very, of course.

To many contemporary social scientists and race theorists, the idea that “race” is something essential — that “blood” differences determine racial identity — is too close to the kind of thinking that has historically justified (and legally codified) separatism and, its civic offshoot, race-based social policy, bigotry, and racism. Which is why many theorists have worked so diligently to disarticulate race from blood, and reconstitute it as a product of human conception — a social construct — a maneuver that they believe allows them to rescue the category of race while simultaneously cleansing it of its least desirable attribute: the idea that it is somehow fixed and, by extension, determinative.

For my part, I’ve argued that the social construction argument for race — based as it is on dubious claims to history, memory, and heritage that collapse under the weight of logical analysis — is, at its heart, no different from the blood argument for race, in that both rely on an identical first cause, namely, an a priori belief in what one is.

That's the problem.

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on the rather delicate issue of whether the DNC will adhere to its own primary rules, or—well, count every vote from disenfranchised Florida and Michigan:

The problems this poses for the Democrats are political, not legal. It is well established through a line of Supreme Court and lower court decisions that the political parties can set virtually any rules they wish for selecting a nominee. Burt Neuborne, NYU law professor, explains succinctly that "political parties are free to structure their nominating processes any way they want, as long as they don't discriminate on the basis of race." Most recently, Senator Bill Nelson's failed district court case in Florida (Democratic Party v. Jones) showed that the courts have little interest in meddling with the internal rules of a party, regardless of how important the stakes.

However, the issue is not merely a legal one for the DNC or for the potential nominee. This is, you will recall, the same party that championed the cry of "count every vote" when George Bush and Al Gore fought over Florida's vote and again when the results from Ohio in 2004 showed a close, election-ending victory for Bush. Then the party officialdom, egged on by the usual gang of liberal civil rights groups, argued that even though the result might not produce a different outcome the principle of making every citizen's vote matter was paramount.

In anticipation of an ugly floor fight and to avoid offending voters in two key states the DNC may try to broker a "deal," a compromise of sorts to count or partially count the prior returns and have a new caucus or convention in the spring so Michigan and Florida voters can have a say. Clinton would like nothing better, of course, ideally to vault her into the lead in the delegate count or, at the very least, to demonstrate an underlying weakness in her opponent and pique the superdelegates' interest in swinging the nomination her way. Obama, on the other hand, likely wants no surprises, no recount, and no rule changes at this point.

Aside from the delicious possibility that the Democrats will be tied up in knots and create real excitement at the convention, political observers and operatives have reason to be concerned about the outcome of this fight. On one hand, the ability of the parties to make and enforce rules is at stake. As pollster and political analyst Charlie Cook puts it, "This is a fight over whether appropriately-adopted party rules matter, or whether there is electoral anarchy, with any state doing what they darn well please." If there is any hope to enforce a more rational primary calendar in the future, the DNC must stick to, or be perceived as sticking, to its guns.

However, the Democrats' own rhetoric is coming home to roost. The NAACP Chairman Julian Bond has already written a letter to DNC Chairman Howard Dean expressing "great concern at the prospect that million of voters in Michigan and Florida could ultimately have their votes completely discounted." Upping the ante, he went on to contend that excluding these delegates would revive memories of the "sordid history of racially discriminatory primaries."

On a more mundane partisan level, Democrats would be wary about telling voters from the always key state of Florida that, unlike 2000, their votes really shouldn't count. Republicans would certainly like nothing better [than] to welcome snubbed Florida Democrats with open arms.

So even though the nomination may not hang on it, the ongoing battle over Michigan and Florida's delegates may prove to be an ongoing source of agony for the Democrats. That can only mean one thing for Republicans: grab a bag of popcorn and enjoy the show.

I'll be buying it in bulk during the Dem convention; this should be good. After all, without a real Republican candidate to vote for, I'll have to take my pleasure where I can find it for the foreseeable future.

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The producers of Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed are putting together their contact lists for Los Angeles screening(s) of the movie, which questions the putative exclusion of Intelligent Design from academic debate about the evolution of species and the origins of life.

I've seen the film once, but it raised more questions for me than it answered. So I must go again. It is beautifully done.

Any webloggers, podcasters, or radio people who would like their info forwarded to the PR team/producers should email me about this within 48 hours, so I can give the organizers an idea of the new-media demand. As I understand it, people with science/biology backgrounds are especially encouraged to throw their hat into the ring for these screenings. (Of course CalTech Girl and her public-schoolteacher husband are going; you had to ask?)

Hope to hear from you soon; thanks!

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Assassinations of progressives are so 1960s, at least in this country.

It was kind of a mid-century fad—like those colored glass balls attached to branches of wood and made to look like oversized bunches of grapes. Weren't those on, like, every coffee table in America for a year or two? While "My Beautiful Balloon" played on the radio, and booths were installed in the corners of every avocado-green-accented kitchen? That was right before we started in on the shag carpeting, IIRC.

The last time someone made a try for a President, it was Ronald Reagan, a Republican. And the most heartbreaking Presidential assassination in this country has to remain that of Abraham Lincoln. He was a Democrat, though. Right? Right?

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and McCain's tin ear when it comes to conservative voters (and the rest of 'em, for that matter):

The only people who care about public financing of campaigns are so-called “good government” wonks. This issue is nowhere on voters’ radars. Sure, it’s part of McCain’s brand as a reformer, but it doesn’t put Obama on the defensive. The Illinois Senator can shrug it off by countering that he’ll focus on issues that actually affect the American people: health care; the economy; and the Iraq War. While Obama will look more engaged with voters McCain will appear more abstract and aloof.

To make matters worse for McCain talking about public financing of campaigns will irritate conservative critics. It not only brings up the disagreement many have with him on his namesake first amendment restriction legislation, but many conservatives consider public financing as campaign socialism.

Why bother with an issue that will gain him little advantage when thereÂ’s an issue sitting right in front of him begging for a strong, passionate approach? For the life of me I canÂ’t understand why McCain hasnÂ’t taken up the Berkeley-Marines issue. Some straight talk in defense of U.S. Marines would galvanize conservatives and create a wedge between the anti-war/military Left and independents and law-and-order types Sens. Clinton and Obama want in November.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

UPDATE: McCain went after Obama over earmarks and transparency. ThatÂ’s a much better issue. He needs to forget campaign finance and sink his teeth deep on this.

RTWT; he's got links and stuff.

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Zendo Deb on why this school shooting was different from other recent ones that have received a lot of publicity. I dated a girl in high school, and we tried to be discreet. But the gay and bisexual guys were the ones we had to be very protective of, and extremely secretive about.

Because if someone found out about girls having affairs with girls, we'd mostly get taunted (e.g., the girl in my anthropology class who'd exclaim "dyke," every time I showed up). The stakes with guys were higher: if any of the supposedly straight guys were found out to be bi or gay, they might get beaten up.

Or killed.

So don't talk to me about the gay fuckin' agenda, okay?

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. . . they can't refuse:

My favorite image from the USMC kerfuffle in Berzerkley.

Via ZombieTime, via Dave in Texas over at Ace's place, via former Marine and successful writer Write Enough.

That lay in the house that Jack built.

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what kind of change is it, exactly, that you had in mind?

Insty:

Obama's policy proposals are getting a lot more attention than they did before Hillary's inevitability broke down. Like Mike Huckabee, he got a "nice guy" pass when people thought he didn't have a shot, but a few wins in a row and he's starting to get major-candidate scrutiny. Some Obama supporters object to such scrutiny, but their claims ring rather hollow. After all, he is running for President.

The audacity of asking questions . . .

"O Bama, Oh oh Bama." I love that song. Go buy David's book, now: he spends the proceeds on feeding me when I'm on the East Coast. Really. I think I gained weight during my two days in Baltimore this time.

And he forced port and excellent Scotch upon me. I take it back: buy two copies. They make great, um, Easter gifts.

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