I was sent an email of an article, supposedly written by Walt Bogdanich and Gretchen Morgenson on October 22, 2006 and I found that they write for The New York Times, the organ of the religious left.

Nancy Pelosi condemned the new record highs of the stock market as "just another example of Bush policies helping the rich get richer". "First Bush cut taxes for the rich and the economy has rebounded with new record low unemployment rates, which only means wealthy employers are getting even wealthier at the expense of the underpaid working class".

She went on to say "Despite the billions of dollars being spent in Iraq our economy is still strong and government tax revenues are at all time highs. "What this really means is" that business is exploiting the war effort and working Americans, just to put money in their own pockets". When questioned about recent stock market highs she responded "Only the rich benefit from these record highs. Working Americans, welfare recipients, the unemployed and minorities are not sharing in these obscene record highs".

The People's Cube.

Taking a cue from Vaughn, who is perhaps even more cynical than I, let me say a few things about global warming.

No doubt the Supreme Court is glad indeed to flex its muscle just to show that it can. Not satisfied by letting city governments seize land without due process for the purpose of private enrichment, it has acquired a taste for even more bossiness, and nothing pleases a liberal more than telling people what to do because it's best for them. It beats the real work of competition.

The green hysteria of some of the Supremes is unconvincing in several ways. Souter, Bush One's stealth judge, who has bombed us over and over, whined, "They don't have to show that it will stop global warming. Their point is that will reduce the degree of global warming and likely reduce the degree of loss." This is exactly the sort of mushy thinking that I went on, and on, against in a reply about heedless spending of money on education without a plan for its being well used. Will it be worth the money? We don't know. But we'll feel good about it, so that's okay.

[I originally wrote that Reagan appointed the whingeing Souter, but was corrected. It was Bush.]

"As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather patterns of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval ... The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age." - Time Magazine, 1974

Keep the above nonsense in mind as you consider that the US Supreme Court today stepped into mankind's latest sky-is-falling, junk science-based debate, Global Warming.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Let us say that you are the city and you want to determine whether or not a new $60 million dollar convention center will perform as expected so you proceed to gather data on five other like facilities to see how those facilities are performing.

Do you...

1) Try and find five like-sized facilities in like-sized non-destination cities...you know...like Midland...to base your estimates on, or

2) Use five comparable facilities located in places like

• Overland Park, Kansas, which is a suburb of Kansas City and resides in a metropolitan area that has a population of 1.9 million people.
• Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the largest city in and the capital of the State of Oklahoma, and which possesses an area population of 1.2 million people.
• Covington, Kentucky, which sits right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ohio, and in a metropolitan area with a population of 2 million people.
• Galveston, Texas, which sits forty five miles from Houston and is in a heavily populated area itself....and which has....let's see...oh, yeah, an oceanfront and beaches.
• Madison, Wisconsin, at a population of 500,000 the second largest city in the state and home the ginormous University of Wisconsin-Madison (with a student population that is roughly half of Midland's entire population).

The facilities compared may be "comparable" but what does that matter if the cities in which they reside are not at all comparable?

On the other hand, when asked to provide examples of comparable facilties in comparable towns the researchers could obviously not provide examples of any. That may be the answer right there.

But it won't be.

Wallace at BigGoldDog has lost his Father.

Thoughts and prayers, Wallace, thoughts and prayers.

Madonna's "Confessions" Tour TV Special lands in fourth place in the ratings behind Jericho, ABC's Show Me The Money and Fox broadcasting of the movie Cheaper By The Dozen.

It may be time to declare a new American Strumpet Laureate.

From Scrappleface:

"In an effort to make its film about the birth of the Christ more relevant to the holiday season, New Line Cinema today released a re-cut version of its promotional trailer for 'The Nativity Story', incorporating elements of other popular holiday classics like 'Deck the Halls' and 'Deja Vu'.

The re-released trailer comes after focus groups told New Line that the original commercial "lacked a strong holiday appeal."

"We acknowledge that a baby born in a manger 2,000 years ago has little relevance for today's audiences," said an unnamed studio spokesman, "but we're hoping the new spot will let us ride the coattails of these other films that capture the meaning of the holidays more explicitly."

And from Chicago:

"CHICAGO (AP) - A public Christmas festival is no place for the Christmas story, the city says. Officials have asked organizers of a downtown Christmas festival, the German Christkindlmarket, to reconsider using a movie studio as a sponsor because it is worried ads for its film "The Nativity Story" might offend non-Christians."

Unbeleivable.

I periodically shop at landsend.com--the tailoring is decent, the Oxfords nice enough and the prices right. The coloring is not quite as vivid as this rara avis might want, but all in all it's serviceable. However I've begun to wonder at their target audience.

The goggle box just showed a commercial flogging an electric-blue backpack for children which they claimed would be "visible for 1,000 feet. That's three football fields."

"As God as my witness, I thought that turkeys could fly."

(Hat Tip: Scott Chaffin)

I'm headed to Albuquerque for Thanksgiving, and tomorrow will lunch at the top of Sandia Peak, having taken the tramway up there. I want to see the world beneath my feet, learning to take the Olympian view of the problems of the Little People I need in preparation to running for Congress as a Democrat.

I'm going to steal things from innocent people at gunpoint before I ride the tramway up and from the top throw them down on people at random whether they need them or not, and if I hit them on the head, so much the better. And if I do this enough, I'll rise to be Speaker of the House.

I just wish I had an aquiline nose to look down to make my view all the loftier. Algore's got quite a beezer, doesn't he?

Today on the WSJ news on XM Radio I heard a talk by a woman CEO talking about how she achieved her success--which is quite formidable. It was obvious that she had thought long and hard about the price she'd paid and that as a woman she was torn between her career and what she'd missed in her family life. (Men, it seems, are more attuned to that than before, but women are hit the hardest. On marriage, men work longer to provide, women less to nurture. Walter Williams on pay inequity.)

There was no defiance in her voice as she went over her sacrifices. She'd been married about 25 years, but had missed half of the last ten anniversaries. She hadn't been as involved in her daughters' lives as she wanted, and had missed a great many of their activities.

Still, she went on, they had opportunities. She was commuting, she said, between South America and Europe and they spent more than one summer traveling in Europe which they couldn't have done if she hadn't had that job. (Unbidden came the thought that if they were traveling they were apart from her, and so in this day of fast transportation, they might as well have been in Disneyworld in Orlando as in Paris.)

Also they saw the Greek Olympics and couldn't have without her job. I care nothing for the Olympics, thinking it hugely overblown. And the only enjoyment I've had from it was when Salt Lake City bribed the committee selecting the Winter Olympics site, as is the fashion, but didn't know how to tender the bribe without leaving traces.

Yesterday in the salt mines I received a call. "Theo, this is Jean. I want to know what's going on."

There are several things wrong with this, the first one being the first word. Owing to my familiarity in these pages, others have earned the right to hypocorism and it is utterly fitting to address me as "Theo" or "Theoc" although the derivation of the latter puzzles me. Also she'd never spoken to me. Isn't Mr. Nom-de-plume more customary right off the bat, especially on the phone?

The second thing was "Jean." It is not an uncommon name. Googling it gives 412,000,000 instances, against my real name, which gives rise to 943,000,000. Still, Jean is not by any means unique. (Theocritus brings up the rear with 242,000 hits.)

The current practice of using a surname dates back a few years, oh, say roughly a thousand, and it has the grand distinction of setting us apart, one from the other. In a day of rampant individualism I fail to see why people should wish to be ambiguously identified to a total stranger. A delusion of grandeur? That may not be too strong.

A good read on Robert Gates, of interest to many, but perhaps especially to those of us who bleed Maroon. Hattip: Virginia Postrel.

A man who will not compromise with the sun is a person to be reckoned with, and that is how Bob Gates has come to be viewed at Texas A&M. As the university's twenty-second president, he is determined to leave his mark on the school as few previous leaders have done. One can infer from his CIA background that he is not easily dissuaded from his chosen course or prone to doubting his own powers of observation.

...gonna be an interesting confirmation hearing and an interesting tenure as SecDef.

My aircraft-carrier desk groans under mountains of self-justifying regulations and demands for reports, all mostly to the end, that I can see, of providing an avenue for the self-expression of bossy people but not with an eye to the actual running of my business. CPAs, I am sure, have even more of this to handle than I do, and of course I had to add to it when I, trawling through the recesses of letters I've written on various Macs dating back to 1987, came across a letter written in reply to one from my CPA, Randy, of whom I've written before.

Randy had moved to another firm, and had asked that my business follow him. Of course it did; he's a fine fellow. But never one to waste an opportunity to be a smart-ass, I sent him:

Frenchwoman May Be First to Lead France

...and the fourteenth French President to possess no balls.

*rimshot*

Thank you, I'll be here all week. Be sure and tip your waiters.

From the Rocky Mountain News:

"Gasoline retailers can't win. One day, they're accused of "gouging" us at the pump with outrageously high prices; the next, they're accused of "predatory pricing," which means giving us a deal so good it's illegal."

Well, since it is an oil company doing both things then, yes, both are inherently bad.

Bad. Bad. Bad.

Unfortunately, and despite the best efforts of the west, I don't think we'll be buying 'Islamic Girls Gone Wild' videos anytime soon. In fact, the sexual liberation of Muslim women is still aeons away, if this astounding story is any indication:

"Pakistan's opposition Islamic alliance, the MMA, is threatening country-wide protests over amendments to the country's rape laws. The six-party alliance has been meeting in Islamabad after the national assembly voted that rape should no longer fall under Sharia law ... The Sharia laws have been widely criticised by human rights groups ... Until now, rape cases were dealt with in Sharia courts. Victims had to have four male witnesses to the crime - if not, they faced prosecution for adultery."

Geeeez. How is the rightful modification of these laws even an issue with the MMA? I mean, I know it's the Third World and everything, but should common sense not prevail here? For every group that takes a step toward protecting and liberating women over there, it seems as if two other groups step up to squash the progress. When I read stories like this, it gives me very little hope for the idea of a reasonable social tempering anywhere in the Middle East. Equal rights and personal liberty as we know it is still virually non-existent there -- especially for women -- and so long as groups like the MMA are given power and influence, not much is going to substantially change.

Hang in there, ladies, and be sure to kiss each other as often as possible when no one's looking. You're in our hearts. Here's hoping we see you at Spring Break one of these days.

A reader has mooted the idea that the divide between the left and right is answered by the question, "Am I my brothers' keeper?" She thinks that the left says yes, and the right no. I think it's more nuanced than that.

Even though I have no faith whatsoever I do think that we owe it to others to try to help them when we can; a friend, who by the way before retirement shepherded drugs through the FDA's approval process and is part source for this article, says that religion is rooted in morality, not the other way around. So long as we get some of it I'm agnostic as to its source.

At the very least, it is incumbent for us to be fair with people. Not to cheat, steal or lie, or take advantage of people. Not to instill fear or raise ghosts or set a fox among the chickens. But I don't see how it can be done on any but a personal level without coercion, which is a nice word for slavery. Past that I do not know if it can be shown that we have other obligations toward others. This is not to say that we ought not do more, and I think it desirable that we, individually, do more, but that we are not obligated to, and that we think very carefully before we coerce others to do more.

One thing alone militates against social engineering against poverty, and it is sufficient. It doesn't work, and trillions of dollars poured into getting rid of poverty under Johnson's Great Society have shown that it doesn't. Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have written on this, marshalling economic arguments which I cannot rehearse well and shortly, or perhaps not even that well.

As a conservative I do not believe that human nature is mutable. Human circumstances are, but nature is not and we are all products of our nature. That is the difference between left and right. We conservatives take a dim view of nature. A conservative view (at least my conservative view) which is by definition non-ideological: what is must not be resisted by what ought to be. It is a stance borne out by experience that when reality is resisted at any level with enough force--something I found out owing to something else entirely, there is a price to pay. Mine was nearly fatal. I paid it. There are other people who wants others to pay it for them and this will not do and it is not fair to let them get away with trying it.

Today President Bush played host to GM Chairman and Chief Executive Rick Wagoner, Ford's Chief Executive Alan Mulally and Tom LaSorda, president and chief executive officer of Chrysler Group, who are "expressing their concerns" about health care and trade issues. I love that word "issues"; it's a red flag to me.

"Expressing one's concerns" is a way of demanding special treatment, as though one's wishes somehow came from outside and therefore aren't selfish, when they most certainly are, in the sharp-elbowed way of every two-fisted whiner I've known demanding something he hasn't earned.

I personally feel that I can express my concern that money earmarked to rebuild New Orleans will go for that instead of being siphoned off into the pockets of politicians. (And if money tends to flow in a bed like a river, it will have nowhere else to go.) But that is not a plea for a special dispensation made just for me, and of course, at others' expense.

Thomas Sowell!

Reorienting those who voted their "feelings," in order to "send a message," the more intelligent of whom may now be suffering from buyer's remorse. Read it now.

I have a liking for The History Channel, which is on DirecTV Channel 269 and I have instructed my TiVos to grab the episodes of Modern Marvels. Some of is crap, of course; one deals with tobacco, which has the power to bore me into insensibility until I reflect on tobacco subsidies coming out of my pocket, and on the punitive taxation on tobacco on the argument that it is deadly, while ignoring the idea that if it is so deadly, why is it not outlawed? The taxes it brings in are astronomical; it is a cornucopia for those bottom-feeders of the legal world, the trial lawyers, who like maggots live on sores and if none can be found, some will be made to fester and feast on, all purulence welcomed, enter in the rear; and also outlawing tobacco would increase health-care costs because smokers die earlier, requiring less government money to take care of them, and that is as cynical a calculation as I've heard. Today. Tomorrow, pace Scarlet, is another day. There. More than I had wanted to think about tobacco. And I erased the program without viewing it.

(I take my exercise by getting exercised. Unfortunately it's not my pecs that are getting bigger.)

You mustn't let the fact that CBS has a large chunk of the History Channel defer you from watching it. On reading that it was an organ of CBS I thought that it would be so ideologically slanted that we would find unblinking credence given to the claims made by some people of dubious character:

White folk try to rewrite history and write us out. White supremacy caused Napoleon to blow the nose off of the Sphinx because it reminded you too much of the Black man's majesty. --Louis Farrahkan addressing the Million Man March

Re: "Waterboarding" as torture.

Question: Can it really be called torture when no less than two TV reporters (at last count) have volunteered to be filmed being waterboarded in order to boost ratings?

I ran across this column while out of town on a business trip and I must say that the tone and tenor of the columnist's views and larger body of work on the subject were not what I would have thought given our locally-based exposure to the author to-date.

"Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want."

The rest is here.

I plead misjudgment and, if I were Janet Jackson, a wardrobe failure. While in Abilene I confected an entry which had some good points and a metaphor ran away with me. I realized that, as written, even the attempt to make it seem not patronizing didn't work; it was. It was posted for few hours but garnered no comments, and there ought to have been some.

The points are to be made, I think; just not in that way. As soon as I can think of a way to get over one of them without being that very patronizing, I, like a cold sore, will be back.

Last Sunday I went up to town, that is Midland, where I spent seven happy years. I went to Dillard's for a few rags to put on my back. Since the loss of the tonnage, I had bought perfectly serviceable shirts from Land's End--Oxfords, good tailoring, decent material, and cheap--but, well, boring. A little vanity is a good thing and Murano is richer by some dollars owing to my vanity, which is I suppose from the dent in the AmEx not so little after all.

While there I bought the first jacket I've had in 20 years; I'm to have luncheon the day after Thanksgiving at the top of Sandia Peak in Albuquerque, taking the tramway, and there is every expectation that it will be as cold as the calculations of the incoming House on the best ways to insert their clammy fingers into my pocket.

Because my Mac works so well--20 billion transistors beavering away all the time, doing quadrillions of things an hour, and because I'm damned lucky to get 100 flushes from a toilet without having to play with it, I thought, on this progression, it might be a good idea to give a jacket a test run to see if they'd managed to get making one down right, before I needed it, shivering, on the top of a mountain in late November.

They've figured it out. What next? An ice pick that works right away? How do they do these things?

I've been thinking about the complaints about the theocracy as stated in the media, and several more which are not traditionally described that way.

I have read that a tragedy is something bad that happens, but something, anything, good may come from it. A disaster has no good side. The election result Tuesday, while bad, was a tragedy and not a disaster and we ought not take it as more.

To, unavoidably, me, as a vehicle for what I am trying to say. There really is more here than another extended dissertation, an Oprah moment, on the great Theocritus.

Yesterday I lunched with my CPA, Randy, an old and valued friend. When, out of honesty, it became necessary to come out to him, I did so and he, of all my friends, was the one I worried about the most. He's a born-again Christian. A kind man, and a good one, but his attitude is best taken from his response:

"Theocritus, you know that I take my morality from the Bible and I think that it's a sin. But we're all sinners. We all lie [which I had quit doing in coming out] and I do too." He really doesn't. He's honest, and that's why I like him. Competent too.

Randy went on to say that he respected my unwillingness to shade things, to be subreptitious, and in general tell the truth. We talked for a few minutes about that, then for an hour about business, and parted better friends than before. See what I mean about having chosen friends well and having been lucky? We're closer than ever before. I'm closer to all my friends than ever before. How great that is.

Today he called for my take on the election results, and was worried that yesterday I hadn't joined in the general dismay and foreboding, the gnashing of teeth, the slumped shoulders. He joked that he was afraid that there was more in the closet yet to come out. But it wasn't, really, a joke; he wondered if there had been a true sea change of the soul.

"There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction." - John F. Kennedy

"The immediate is often the enemy of the ultimate." - Indira Gandhi

So the unbeatable and all-powerful Karl Rove has become mortal. Just like the the once unbeatable and all-powerful James Carville before him.

I could feel a lot better than I do about the election results from last night but all that I am feeling is like someone who lost that didn't deserve to win in the first place. Not that the Dems deserved it. It will be hilarious in the coming months to find out what it is they mean by "responsible re-deployment". To me that sounds like they will take great care not to let the door hit them on the ass on the way out. And if millions of Iraqis go the way of millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians...well...that is just too bad, I guess.

Ace pretty much sums up my feelings on the whole thing.

I do have a question for all of the Diebold Conspiracy Theorists out there. Did you hack the hackers or can you just admit that you were full of crap the whole time?

UPDATE: Treacher has the scoop:

"A major concern of the last few elections has been that Republicans need to cheat to win, and the problem was going to be even worse with the new Diebold machines. What happened? Did Cheney forget his password again? That darn Cheney, always forgetting his password."

Fair warning: Comments posted with names that are "one-offers" of current contributors or other commentors like "Lipny", "Theocrutis", and "Halsingwam" will be deleted. If it continues thereafter the offending IP address will be banned.

What can I say? I am in a bad mood today.

Dear Mr. President,

It is time for you to remember which drawer you put your veto pen. Get it out. Dust it off. Polish it. Leave it on the top of your desk as a reminder to the House and Senate. And be prepared to use it.

Sincerely,
Shepherd

Today on the Wall Street Journal News, which I listen to in the morning, driving around, drinking coffee, to pretend to myself that I'm tending to my affairs instead of planning what discourteous things I'll blog, I heard the news which the ignorantsia wait for like the Nobels or the Oscars. It's Time's whatever of the year.

Time magazine, which mainlines the DNC, has awarded its Invention of the Year. For some years they have anointed themselves as kingmakers, and it is merely the publishing equivalent of that cheap rhetorical rabbit punch of saying, "As is well known..." when it bloody well isn't, or, "Everyone I know thinks..." when I don't give a tinker's damn. So Time in its infinite smugness tells us what's important. To us. To the world. To, well, Time.

This was a fecund year in invention. One of the nominees is a battlefield robot with hydraulic arms that can lift a 400-pound soldier out of danger, able to climb a steep hill. Let's see. Soldier wounded to protect us, and a machine designed to save his life. Sounds a great thing to me and I'm all for it.

Another invention is the vaccination against cervical cancer. I've seen the ravages of cancer in my own family and anything to conquer it is fine by me, and gets my unstinting vote.

But Time's invention of the year is YouTube.com. Yes, the video-exchange format where people with nothing better to do can fritter away hours watching pointless videos of people doing useless things, instead of spending their time profitably, like, oh, setting off firebombs in a blog.

Time. A bawdy house for trifling minds.

And a snip at $20 for subscription costing normally $240, which they tried to sell me today. And they were good enough to provide a postage-paid return envelope, which I was glad to use. Stuffed with crap.

It looks like Michelle Malkin will be a great place to watch election day silliness. Best so far:

The Times quotes analyst Charlie Cook's prediction if unhinged Democrats don't win the House: "I think you'd see a Jim Jones situation - it would be a mass suicide," he said.

Michelle also coins a new, great term for those having trouble with voting machines: electile dysfunction. Maybe we'll have a pill for it by 2008. Only it'll need to be red instead of blue!

Mark Steyn:

"....John Kerry -- a celebrated anti-war activist suddenly "reporting for duty" as a war hero and claiming that, even though the war was a mistake and his comrades were murderers and rapists, his four months in the Mekong rank as the most epic chapter in the annals of the Republic.

It's worth contrasting the fawning media admiration for Kerry's truncated tour of duty with their total lack of interest in Bob Dole's years of service two presidential campaigns earlier."

The rest...spot on as usual...is here.

I cannot be sanguine about the results of Tuesday's elections about the House. As I've thundered in these pages before, the Republicans do not deserve power, but the Democrats frighten me even more.

Two nights ago on Logo, which is a channel on DirecTV aimed at a gay audience, there was an interview between Jason Bellini and Bob Schieffer, that oily, anile CBS reporter, and it was of course aimed at the target audience. (Logo is not entertainment of high value; it is aimed at a gay audience, but that audience is less monolithic than some think. People who have read my postings might concur, and I'm a great deal more than gay. But still, Logo's very existence is astonishing.)

The interview was of course augury for the Democrats' chances for taking over both houses of Congress. Considering who was doing it, there was not as much lip-smacking as I might have thought. Full marks for trying to suppress the smirks. (I might, quite optimistically, think Schieffer was putting the best face on it, but probably not.)

Friday I went to the Courthouse to vote against people, a right I exercise whenever I can. I was conflicted.

I have my disagreements with the Republican party--its spending, which can kindly be described as Democrat-lite, but not that light; the unfunded $18 trillion prescription-drug benefit for the greedy geezers, the richest demographic in America; the bloated Department of Education, whose very existence is a triumph of hope over experience; and the hugely swollen agricultural bills, a hideous insult to Adam Smith's invisible hand, and first-cousin to the beadledom of Midland's attempt to pander with others' money to entice Countrywide Home Loans into town. Walsingham, I'd appreciate an assist here.

Nor do I like the fact that now Congress can peruse at will my IRS records.

Still, there is one thing which triumphs over this all.

So many people are licking their lips over Ted Haggard, in the throes of that particularly toothsome combination of Schadenfreude and the exposure of hypocrisy that I am subject to myself, that it may be time to look at it another way.

As I'm sure you know, Reverend Ted Haggard was the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, a charismatic group of tens of millions. Haggard claims to have become a born-again Christian in 1972 when he heard, at 17, it would calculate, a sermon by Bill Bright in Dallas. I'm sure he thought he could change.

As the world knows now, it is alleged that for three years he had been having monthly trysts with Mike Jones, who claims no longer to be a prostitute although it seems that he can whore for a camera. Mr. Jones, last year in a bankruptcy case, was deposed as being a physical fitness trainer, and the photo in The New York Times shows that he has not run to seed. Jones preserved messages from Haggard arranging for meetings, and for the purchase of amounts of meth, and voice analysis of the messages tend to bear out Jones' allegations that they are the voice of Art, the name that Haggard assumed for the shadow-world he was trawling.

(In a Clintonic statement, Haggard said that he bought some out of curiosity but didn't use it. He too didn't inhale.)

Recently I was at a seminar at the Inelegante Hotel, and I was made even more appreciative of my hole here in Casa Nova. The carpet in the hotel was not my rather nice Kazakhstan rug, but was made by a loom on acid, and the chairs in the meeting room were designed by Howard Johnson's with the sole idea of getting bums off seats to make room for other bums. Their bums on seats.

For luncheon we had something which was served under the rubric of sandwiches. One bread was croissants, which were made during the Taft Administration. It was my fault; I've had real croissants, and they need to be made at the most a few hours before, and with fresh butter. These were made years before with palm oil and had the texture of the finest Gucci shoe leather. The luncheon meat was neatly rolled, and in an attempt to make it seem more than it was, the lettuce was some wilted leaf so finely shredded that it looked like chopped parsley. It could have been shredded $100 bills from the U.S. Treasury.

Photo of the day.

Countrywide CEO gets retirement package of $10,000,000.00. But worry not! He isn't retiring!

"As if Countrywide Financial Corp.'s CEO isn't getting paid enough, the mortgage lender's board is taking the unprecedented step of lavishing him with $10 million in retirement money. And he isn't even retiring."

And as a taxpayer in Midland and in Texas, let me just say how happy I am to help out.

I'm getting quite tired of double-standards. I suppose that I ought to be used to them now, but can't quite get there. It's much like signing that check to the IRS to give up your money to be spent in ways that you don't like--after decades it ought to be easy but somehow it's not.

Every week I hear some sniggering from the left about President Bush's stupidity. I knew him in the 70s and 80s, and even played Bach on the harpsichord at the Globe Theater in Odessa for him, in the company of the kid who would grow up to write most of the Starr Report to make his election possible, and W. is not stupid. He's not an intellectual; he won't be trading quips from Wilde--thank God--nor do I expect to hear him debate the nuances of, say, the performance of Mitsuko Uchida's performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto in d minor, K466, with Perahia's, and then wonder if Brendel, who does admirable Beethoven, will be too controlled. Leave that to other people, people like me who, thank God, aren't in charge of running the world. Or in charge of running anything but my mouth, which is run constantly with wild abandon careering off into every direction. At least, unlike David Corn, I'm not paid for running my mouth. I serve up venom for free.

Despite the precedent of big wins in midterm elections for the party out of power -- especially in a sixth-year midterm election -- something is depressing the Democrats' popularity with Americans this year. I suspect it's the perception that many of them are Democrats.

But instead of recognizing that the Democratic Party is a dying party, falling far short of its due historical gains, any gain by the Democrats will be hailed as a crowning mandate for the party that wants to lose the Iraq war, shut down Guantanamo and stop spying on Islamic terrorists on U.S. soil.

And go read the rest of Ann Coulter's latest, just for fun. Fun? You did know that jihad is fun, didn't you?

Michael Novak, National Review, today:

The Republican base is extremely angry at the mainstream media. The media have ceased to be striped-shirted referees in the ring. This year, day after day, they have been throwing sucker punches aimed to help the Left. Nowadays, there is no trustworthy referee. Where a reasonably impartial press (tilting only slightly left) used to be, there is now only a passion to hurt a president in a time of war, the most dangerous war in our history. Republicans will be voting against the left-wing media, the left-wing courts, and the whole culture of the Left.

Emphasis added, surprise, by me. Go read it and then emphasize whatever you want to emphasize.