The president is our leader, the figurehead of the country, a father figure. Are the "children" supposed to follow his example? Are we in an era of trickle-down immorality, like trickle-down economics? The country sees their leader not telling the truth. These actions send a message that you don't have to mean what you say, that you don't have to care about other people, that you can do whatever you have to do or say whatever you have to say to get ahead. Is that the message we want to impart to our children? Is that the culture we want to live in?
--Barbrastreisand.com

Believe it or not, she's referring to Bush. Strange, I don't recall her being in a huff over Clinton.

And they bode well for Republicans. Dean and Kucinich both beat Kerry handily, while no other candidate pulled more than 4%. If the Dems wind up putting Dean or Kucinich out I find it very hard to imagine them taking the White House in '04.

The National Do Not Call Registry is now online.

1) You can have any opinion of Strom Thurmond you want, but revelling in his death, especially since he was no longer a Senator, is still kinda ghoulish.

2) It's entirely possible for a person to be against the Supreme Court striking down sodomy laws without being a homophobe or a fundamentalist.

3) As always, Bud Selig is evil.

CNN

Candidate Gephardt has made it clear that if elected he'll ignore the constitutional role of the Supreme Court and do whatever he feels like.

"When I'm president, we'll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day," Gephardt said.
--FOXNews.com

If you read the rest of the article there's a lot more malarky about how making decisions based on their skin color is supposed to bring us together as "one nation."

On Saturday alone Harry Potter sold 5 times as many books as Hillary's entire first run.

Barnes & Noble sold 40,000 copies of Hillary's book the first day. Harry Potter, well...

"We expected to sell 1 million copies in the first week and we sold that many within the first 48 hours," Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio said Sunday as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (search) set records around the world in its first weekend.

Nobody in the industry had seen anything like it, at least since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (search), which came out three years ago. Scholastic, the book's U.S. publisher, estimated 5 million copies were sold the first day alone, well ahead of the pace of Goblet of Fire.
--Fox News

Orrin Hatch has been Linking to a porn site from his official Senate site. Not his or his staff's fault, but still noteworthy.

David Brooks has a good piece over at The Weekly Standard essentially on how the Dems have gone off the deep end. (via Realpolitik)

When conservatives look at the newspapers, they see liberal columnists who pick out every tiny piece of evidence or pseudo-evidence of Republican vileness, and then dwell on it and obsess over it until they have lost all perspective and succumbed to fevers of incoherent rage. They see Democratic primary voters who are so filled with hatred at George Bush and John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney that they are pulling their party far from the mainstream of American life. They see candidates who, instead of trying to quell the self-destructive fury, are playing to it. "I am furious at [Bush] and I am furious at the Republicans," says Dick Gephardt, trying to sound like John Kerry who is trying to sound like Howard Dean.

It's mystifying. Fury rarely wins elections. Rage rarely appeals to suburban moderates. And there is a mountain of evidence that the Democrats are now racing away from swing voters, who do not hate George Bush, and who, despite their qualms about the economy and certain policies, do not feel that the republic is being raped by vile and illegitimate marauders. The Democrats, indeed, look like they're turning into a domestic version of the Palestinians--a group so enraged at their perceived oppressors, and so caught up in their own victimization, that they behave in ways that are patently not in their self-interest, and that are almost guaranteed to perpetuate their suffering.

Day By Day has a good cartoon today. Check it out.

Orrin Hatch is using pirated code on his official site.

"No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer," replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to disrupt music downloads. One technique deliberately downloads pirated material very slowly so other users can't.

"I'm interested," Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."

The senator acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."

"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions, he said.

"There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws," Hatch said.

--Washington Post

The best way to stop illegal music downloading is to provide an easy legal way (like iTunes) to download music. Beyond that, downloaders should be prosecuted; the answer isn't vigilante justice.

It looks like Ohio will have a concealed carry law.

You can now consider me a graduate of the University of Cincinnati College of Engineering in Computer Science. Now for the hard part, finding a job. If anybody's got any leads let me know. :)

Now there's the Lego version.

1. Would you concede that Iraq had WMD before Gulf War I?
2. Would you concede that a large number of these weapons were unaccounted for when the inspectors left in '98?
3. What do you suggest Iraq did with those weapons? Do you really think Iraq destroyed them and just decided not to show us just to be petulant?

Just because we haven't found the weapons (yet) doesn't mean they didn't exist. You can argue that they were shipped off to Syria, or you can argue that they were destroyed and Saddam was just to stupid or egotistical to show us, but I don't think you can argue that they didn't exist in the first place.

He's leading the BBC poll.

Hamas continues to carry aout attacks in Jerusalem. I think it's important for the peace process to remember that there is a difference between Hamas and the Palestinians. Isreal needs to work with the Palestinian leaders to root out Hamas and not take unilateral action. For the peace process to work I think it's important that the Palestinian leaders be involved in knocking down Hamas. The Palestinians need to be willing to help defeat Hamas, and Israel needs to give them the chance.

Eat your heart out. (via Cincinnati Blog)

And it's coming from the Palestinian Authority daily of all places.

"I am still convinced that there are many dynamic opportunities for promoting liberal ideas in our countries, following the spectacular collapse of [all] the other political trends such as nationalism, socialism, and Islam. There is no doubt that these political streams will grasp at any straw before being swept away by the trend opposing them – that is, the trend of revival, realism, and belief in knowledge, rationality, and balanced judgment." ... "Over many decades, these political trends have not managed to realize a single one of their ideas such as [Arab] unity, democracy, freedom, or social justice. Moreover, they have proven that when in power, they turn into a hedonistic [social] echelon, leading a life of comfort and luxury, and suppressing the people in inconceivable ways."

"Who could believe the stories about what had been going on in Iraq for decades – about the mass graves, the cold-blooded slaughter of anyone who let himself be seduced into criticizing the regime or [anyone] lagging behind in enthusiastic support of every move it made?"
...
"We [the Arabs] are in need of a revival of enlightenment, away from the revolutionary [ideas]... for which our peoples paid a high price. Only a few decades ago, we were the equals of many peoples: in human growth, in social justice, and in welfare achievements. Now they have all surpassed us."

"We are at the bottom of [the global] scale in our ability to assist our people, and we head [the global] scale in human rights violations, and in every area – as referred to by United Nations reports and the UNDP report on Arab human growth. And it is my wish that this report would be known by all the people, so we all know what these revolutionaries have done..."

"We are still distant from the information revolution, and only the liberal trend can bring such a revolution about. The parties of the past are afraid of information, because they deal in general slogans and discuss purely theoretical problems. They do not believe in information, numbers, or statistics... they are hostile to the information revolution, to technology, and to communication with the other... They are hostile to mutual cultural [cooperation]; they refuse to benefit from the huge technological advances and they refuse to absorb the lessons of the astounding developments in our world..."

"Only the liberal trend can fight the idea [that some element] has a monopoly over truth, can revise old ideas, and can advance in confidence, stage by stage, without the skipping [of stages] for which the people pay the price in the form of barbarism and savagery... We will not enter the stage of revival and enlightenment as long as we do not shake up the conventions and as long as we do not thoroughly investigate our convictions. This was the way towards the Renaissance in Europe, and we have no other."

--Al-Ayyam (Palestinian Authority), May 28, 2003.(via the good folks at MEMRI:)

LT SMASH (whose name I admire for its subtle Simpsons reference) has a good piece on understanding Americans for the foreigners who are realizing that we're the most powerful nation in the world.

The bullet points:
Americans revere their Constitution.
Americans believe in free-market capitalism.
Americans reserve the right of self-defense.

He’s worked up a pretty good case of paranoia over this FCC ruling. He seems to be under the impression that people's problems with radio are over conservative hosts like him, and not the stranglehold that Clear Channel has in most markets.