Via Tim Blair, Chuck Simmins has tried to tabulate contributions by American individuals and companies to tsunami relief efforts. His total so far: $169 million.

And that doesn't even count the aircraft carriers.

UPDATE: The New York Times says:

The huge response from individual donors who want to help victims of the tsunami in Southeast Asia, spurred in part by a year-end spirit of gift-giving, has stunned officials at the world's largest private relief agencies.

Many relief agency officials, accustomed to begging for donations after a disaster has hit, called the response "unprecedented." They said that while no one has tallied all private giving, the numbers reported by individual organizations indicate that the amount will far surpass contributions for previous disasters.

...to all of our readers.

I wanted to get this up now, since I'm likely not to be awake at midnight.

Best wishes for 2005 from the Power Line gang.

There is a new wrinkle in the Washington gubernatorial election, and it happens to bear directly on the question of how important bloggers are or can be. The Seattle Times reports that Democrat Christine Gregoire was officially certified the winner of the election yesterday. But the Times also reports that a serious problem has arisen in King County, the Democratic bastion that gave Gregoire her margin of "victory":

The latest questions about King County came after the elections office released on Wednesday a list of all registered voters in the county, broken down by those who voted and those who didn't. The Republican Party, among other groups, had requested the information as part of its investigation of voting irregularities.

Conservative blogger Stefan Sharkansky pointed out the discrepancy Wednesday, and by yesterday it was Topic A among Rossi backers and Republican Party officials.

Party Chairman Chris Vance said it could be the "smoking gun" needed to overturn the election.

The number of King County ballots counted in the final tally was 899,199 — 3,539 more than the number of participating voters reported in the county's list.

County officials are trying to reconcile the discrepancy--yes, I'll bet they are!--and an updated voter list will be released late next week.

Stefan Sharkansky's key post on Sound Politics is here.

UPDATE Stefan Sharkansy emailed us as follows:

Today I did even more extensive analysis based on the precinct vote count that was released by the county late yesterday. Now we can compare ballots counted per precinct with the count of voters who voted in each precinct. There are 600+ precincts with more voters than ballots, a total of about 1,500 ballotless voters. To get to the net discrepancy of about 3,500 more ballots than voters, there must also be about 5,000 voterless ballots...

Noted on my latest post: http://www.soundpolitics.com/archives/003343.html

Stefan also says: "Some of our comment posters are now calling Sound Politics the 'Powerline of the Northwest'. I take that as an enormous compliment even if it's a bit of a stretch." Actually, if Stefan's investigations show that Gregoire's victory was fraudulent, his work will dwarf anything that we or, I think, any other blogger has done. Of course, it's much too early to speculate about the ultimate outcome.

FURTHER UPDATE: A Seattle reader writes:

I offer one example of how dorked up King County Elections is - the bluest of the blue counties in the state. I've lived at my current address for the last 4 and a half years. My family purchased this home from the estate of the deceased owner; I assume she passed away about five years ago. This election we received from KC an absentee ballot for the long departed. Not only that, she is still listed on the voter rolls as an "inactive" voter (found that out from Stefan Sharkansky of soundpolitics.com). In other words, I could have voted her ballot if I could have forged her signature, and it would have been counted because she still hasn't been removed form the county's list of eligible voters!!! There are many more examples of the county's incompetence being documented by the Shark, that collectively exceed the margin of victory in the Gov's race. And naturally, the local press has washed their hands of the entire episode. Unbelievable. I am confident that this could happen anywhere in the nation if the election is close enough.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that's right. I think most cities make no serious effort to keep their voter rolls up to date, with the result that many deceased people, and many others who have moved away, "vote" in each election. I'm not sure what it will take to cause the public to get serious about election integrity. The pols won't touch it unless they have to, for fear of being dubbed "racist."

E.J. Dionne has figured out why John Kerry lost -- it was because of the viciously negative attacks by the Bush campaign. Why don't the Democrats respond in kind? Because they're afraid of being criticized by the MSM. John Hillen at the NRO Corner treats this column with the derision it deserves in a post called "Give Thanks for E.J. Dionne."

Sometimes I get the feeling that we're about to ring in 1989. The E.J. Dionnes of that year were convinced that the first President Bush defeated Michael Dukakis due to negative ads (especially the Willie Horton bit that I discussed here). But smart Democrats like Bill Clinton were willing to entertain the possibility that the anti-Dukakis ads addressed real problems faced by the Democrats, and were willing to think about how, at least cosmetically, the Democrats might reinvent themselves.

There don't seem to be as many smart Democrats these days. Or maybe the deficit is in the courage department. However, the Democrats still have one important figure who is both smart and gutsy. Her name is Clinton too.

Jim Geraghty at the Kerry Spot predicts that 2005 will see the emergence of "Pragmacons" -- a new self-proclaimed “middle group” of conservatives who share the pro-democratic goals and ideals of the neoconservatives, but who believe that "American options and resources in this effort are limited by a faulty U.S. intelligence system and the Herculean difficulties of turning 'subjects' into 'citizens.'"

I believe that, in a sense, most conservatives are already Pragmacons. Indeed, it seems self-evident that there are significant limits to the ability of the U.S. to spread democracy, pluralism, free markets, free speech and religious freedom throughout the world. The tough question is where those limits are located (e.g., are they located in Iraq). A distinct Pragmacon "wing" will emerge to the extent that conservatives conclude that the neoconservatives are radically wrong on that question. And, yes, 2005 could well be the year in which this occurs.

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber thinks that Nick Coleman's attack on Power Line, though "rather weak," makes a point that's "hard to refute:"

It’s a bit rich for slavering right wing hacks [I'm sure he didn't mean us] to accuse the mainstream media of ideological bias and expect to get taken seriously.

Is this point really so hard to refute? It seems to me that anyone who can demonstrate serious bias on the part of a mainstream media that denies bias will be taken seriously. That was part of our "wager" when we started Power Line, and it no longer constitutes conjecture. Blogs like ours are taken seriously when we point out significant instances of MSM bias. And not just by Time Magazine. The other day, I heard Don Hewitt (creator of 60 minutes) and Ben Bradlee (who helped create the modern MSM) agree on C-SPAN that they take bloggers seriously. (Bradlee, though, questioned whether the rise of blogs is a good thing, as well he might).

Farrell next claims to have detected "double-think" in the blogosphere:

On the one hand, bloggers like Glenn Reynolds respond to their critics by saying that they can’t cover everything, and that they’re not providing a news service, only opinions. On the other hand, they seem to believe that blogs should radically change or replace the mainstream media. Either of these statements is reasonable enough on its own, but taken in conjunction, they’re pretty jarring.

Here, I think Farrell is missing the distinction between particular blogs and the blogsphere as a whole. No one blog can cover everything and many blogs, such as ours, deal primarily in opinion. But one can envisage a blogosphere that readers rely on to obtain essentially everything they now get from a newspaper or a newscast. The basic facts of a story would come from links to news services. The analysis would come from specialized blogs or non-specialized blogs that happen to have expertise in the subject area. The op-ed type opinions would come from the opinion blogs. I actually think we're pretty close to having such a blogosphere, although that's clearly a matter for debate.

Thus, the blogosphere is likely to replace the MSM for a growing number of consumers. Many others will continue to check out the MSM, but regard it much more skeptically (that is, take it much less seriously) than they have done in the past. It will be up to the MSM to decide whether it wishes to respond to these developments by undertaking radical change.

UPDATE: Instapundit has resonded to Farrell. So has Hugh Hewitt. Hugh also addresses criticism directed at him by Matt Welch. Welch argues that bloggers like Hugh who accuse the MSM of bias will soon by judged by the standard to which they hold the media and, being biased themselves, will fall short. As Hugh patiently explains, however, the standard by which he is judging the MSM is not "bias," but rather the willingness or unwillingness to dress up bias as "objectivity." In other words, honesty.

HINDROCKET adds: First of all, I don't know of anyone who thinks blogs can or should replace the mainstream media. I certainly don't, although, as Deacon says, the blogosphere can supplant the mainstream media in the limited sense that it can be an entry point whereby readers are directed to mainstream news sources as well as to blog commentary. But the idea that the blogosphere can't be valuable or important unless it is a complete replacement for conventional media is ridiculous.

Second, I think that distinctions can usefully be drawn among several concepts that are often assumed to be interchangeable: bias, objectivity and neutrality. "Bias" is usually used pejoratively; I would use it to mean reporting news in a way that is in fact slanted, while purporting to report it neutrally. I would say that the New York Times is biased, but Power Line isn't. "Objectivity" I understand to mean, essentially, fairness. Being objective means to weigh evidence and arguments fairly, as, for example, by reporting that President Bush turned in a mediocre performance in a debate, even though the person making that judgment supports the President. I would say that Power Line is objective, or at least tries to be, while 60 Minutes is not objective. "Neutrality" means indifference as among competing parties, candidates or ideologies. Power Line is not neutral; neither is the Washington Post. There are probably a few truly neutral news sites or commentators, but not many.

Not everyone will agree with my definitions; maybe no one will. But I think it is helpful to distinguish among these various concepts. In general, "bias" is not a term that it is helpful to apply to commentators, as opposed to reporters. Paul Krugman is a liberal and Ann Coulter is a conservative. One could say that they are both "biased" because they argue for a particular point of view, but that would be meaningless and unhelpful, in my opinion. With respect to commentatary, which is what we at Power Line generally do, the relevant questions are: Are the facts accurately and fairly represented? Are there other, obviously relevant facts that are omitted from the analysis? And, are the arguments made on the basis of the facts logical and persuasive?

People often refer to blogs as expressing "opinions," just as some columnists are referred to as "opinion columnists." Indeed, some newspapers take the position that the usual concepts of truth and falsity are inapplicable to opinion columnists because everything they write is, by definition, only an "opinion." (The New York Times, for example, has only recently abandoned this view.) This seems to me to be silly. No columnist or blogger who only expresses his or her opinions will last long. The question is: how persuasively does the commentator support his or her conclusions (call them opinions, if you want to) with facts and logic?

For the most part, sites like Power Line are not in direct competition with with news gatherers and reporters, although we do original reporting on occasion. We are, however, in direct competition with op-ed columnists. Anything they can do, we can do. And, like op-ed columnists, one of the things that we do is to critique the accuracy and fairness--call it "bias"--of news reports in the mainstream press. When we critique mainstream news sources, we try to be objective, but we are not neutral.

That's how I see it, anyway.

Reader Greg Lang writes:

You might throw Nick Coleman off track by saying that he did a good column, his current one. At my Soliah.com I have linked the past columns by Nick on the woman injured in the St. Paul Daytons's [department store] bombing forty years ago. This I considered good work since the Symbionese Liberation Army [terrorist] Sara Jane Olson/Kathleen Soliah is in prison until at least 2010, at least in part, due to her addtional effort to make such horrible weapons. In Nick's latest column he pointed out that Mary Peek died at age 82, still extracting shrapnel. A google search of Mary Peek shows past Nick Coleman columns about this. This is Nick at his best; you should consider saying so.

Nick's columns on Mary Peek are my "bread and butter" on the horrible effects of terrorist bombs and Nick did a good job following this. You should state this and focus on why the media so strongly protect the bomber's "privacy." According to Nick, he is in Washington working for the congressional black caucus. That is where a story might lie.

Coleman's column today carries a headline that reads ironically in light of his recent attack on us, but the column, as Lang suggests, is a good one: "Waiting for an apology that never came."

Today's news reports indicate that the Labor Party is set to join with the Likud in a coalition that returns Shimon Peres to a position of power as "deputy premier." The Haaretz account is "Peretz waives demand to serve as vice PM." Last week Professor Steven Plaut of Haifa University anticipated the return of Peres as the current fulfillment of the Likud Party's traditional role of returning the Labor Party to power: "Israel's single-issue party."

Peres is of course the former Prime Minister of Israel; as Yitzhak Rabin's Foreign Minister he was an architect of the Oslo Accords that brought Yasser Arafat and the PLO to power on the West Bank and Gaza. In 1994 Peres shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Arafat.

Rabin and Peres made the cynical calculation that Arafat's brutal thuggery would be turned on the Arabs in the territories that had become a burden for Israel to govern under civilized constraints. Their bargain with Arafat must be judged one of the twentieth century's most most misguided acts of statesmanship -- misguided statesmanship for which Israel and others continue to pay the price.

As a distant lover of Israel, I have been genuinely puzzled by its failure to produce a statesman equal to the challenges faced by the country over the past 20 years. In every area of modern life the country boasts a genius that on a per capita basis must be unrivaled. Yet on the world stage its politicians seem almost retarded.

The country has never had a public accounting for the utter disaster that was Oslo. Its politicians seem to keep the country's citizens in the dark about the nature of its national security strategy and the actions taken to pursue it. Ariel Sharon's deal with Peres seems to me a metaphorical expression of the problem.

Symptomatic of the delusional political thinking that has brought Israel so much grief is the fact that there has as yet been no public accounting for the disaster of Oslo itself. Vital advocates of Oslo such as Shimon Peres are still respectable public figures playing significant roles and urging the same policy. It is as if Neville Chamberlain (if he had still been alive -- he had the grace to die in 1940) were still advising Winston Churchill on the statesmanship of appeasement in 1942.

Michael Oren is a serious historian for whom the retrospective view comes naturally and who has taken the measure of Oslo. If you don't know who Oren is, go buy a copy of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which has been issued in paperback with a new afterword. In a column for the Wall Street Journal ("Oslo's legacy: A road map to nowhere") last year, Oren wrote:

[T]he trouble wrought by the Oslo Accords -- so-called, after the city where they were mediated -- has been incalculable. Instead of a "New Middle East" [touted by then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres] with peace between Israel and an independent Palestinian state, war has ravaged the area, devastating economies, killing and maiming thousands. Rarely has an agreement been so celebrated -- Rabin and Arafat won Nobel prizes -- generated such vast expectations, and occupied so many presidential days, only to utterly fail. Now, in the wake of Mahmoud Abbas's resignation as Palestinian prime minister, one must ask why.

There are many answers, the most obvious of which is accountability. Israel was not held accountable for expanding its West Bank and Gaza settlements in excess of Oslo's proviso for their "natural growth." But while Israelis may have exploited the treaty's spirit, the Palestinians flagrantly disregarded its letter. No sooner had Arafat returned from Washington than he began smuggling explosives and weapons into the territories, harboring wanted terrorists, and educating Palestinian children to destroy Israel -- all blatant breaches of Oslo. In the mid-'90s, Arafat's Palestinian Authority failed to stop and in some cases abetted the suicide bombers who killed hundreds of Israelis. Yet, in spite of these gross violations, neither Arafat nor his Authority was ever called to task. Advocates of Oslo equivocated that the Palestinians would comply with the accords but only after they had achieved statehood, and until then, they were too weak to clamp down on terrorism or even to cease incitement. The many Israelis who died in the interim were dubbed, perversely, "victims of peace."

Another, subtler, reason for Oslo's collapse was the absence of mutuality. The accords called on both sides to "recognize their mutual legitimate and political rights," but while Rabin specifically recognized the rights of the Palestinian people, Arafat never acknowledged the rights or even the existence of a Jewish people. Had he done so, he would have accepted the Jews' claim to a permanent state in their homeland, and signaled his willingness to divide that land with them. Instead, he arrogated all of the land for the Palestinians and sought to transform Israel into a de facto Palestinian state through the mass repatriation of refugees. While "Palestinian people" and "Palestinian state" entered Israel's political lexicon, the words "Jewish people" and "Jewish state" never passed his lips. Privately, with President Clinton, he even denied that the Jews had historical ties to Jerusalem.

The next factor undermining peace might best be called thuggery. Rabin believed that democratic Israel was incapable of taking the draconian steps necessary to defeat Hamas and other terrorist groups, and so sought a Palestinian partner free, he said, "of civil rights monitors and the supreme court." That partner was Arafat, a strongman whom the U.S. and Israel essentially hired to suppress other Palestinian thugs. The assumption that a corrupt Arab dictator would suit the Palestinians was racist, but also politically unsound. Arafat pocketed the millions of dollars in payoffs but made no serious effort to combat Hamas. Rather than reigning in terror, he increasingly engaged in it himself.

The lessons of Oslo could not be clearer, but have they been learned? The answer, judging from the U.S.-backed "road map" -- a direct outgrowth of Oslo -- must be no.

Oren wrote his column in September 2003. Has the death of Arafat changed the equation? Is Mahmoud Abbas a legitimate partner for peace? Does Sharon know something about him that we don't? It's certainly possible, but today's news suggests on the contrary that he is the true heir of Arafat: "Guerilla chief gives Abbas his backing." And Sharon's reliance on Peres to retain power and implement his plan provides powerful evidence that something is sorely amiss here.

A few days ago, I posted on a piece in Slate by Phillip Carter and Owen West arguing, without merit I thought, that Iraq in 2004 looks like Vietnam in 1966. Carter and West made one subsidiary point that I didn't address. They claimed that "U.S. losses in Fallujah [were] almost equal to those" incurred during the famously bloody Vietnam War battle of Hue. Carter and West stated:

In the three-week battle for Hue, 147 Marines were killed and 857 wounded. In the twin battles for Fallujah, more than 104 soldiers and Marines have been killed and more than 1,100 wounded.

And, they noted, the fatality numbers do not adjust for the fact that, in Iraq, advanced technology and medicine prevent many more wounded from dying than was the case in Vietnam.

This didn't sound correct to reader Helen Wells. So she googled the battle of Hue and obtained better information. It turns out that, yes, 147 Marines were killed at Hue. Along with 74 Army soldiers and 384 ARVN. Thus, total deaths on our side at Hue were nearly six times higher than in Fallujah. And even if, in Kerryesque fashion, one decides to exclude the deaths of our Vietnamese allies, the ratio is two to one.

Moreover, the claim of Carter and West that they are understating the comparative intensity of the fighting in Fallajuh by not adjusting for technological advances can't withstand scrutiny either. At Hue, Wells points out, we had a forward based surgery facility staffed with eight doctors. Wounded soldiers who made it to the facility alive had a 99% chance of surviving.

In my first post on the Carter-West piece, I wondered why the authors went through contortions to try to show that Iraq 2004 looks like Vietnam 1966. Now it may be fair to ask, in addition, why they engaged in distortions to make this point.

The current issue of National Review has an article by my former colleagues Lee Casey and David Rivkin about what they predict will be the "battle royal" over the nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General (I don't think the article appears online). The battle, Lee and David say, will center around Gonzales' role as White House counsel in developing the administration's legal position on the classification and treatment of individuals captured in the war on terror.

Until now, I've assumed that there won't be much of a battle. After all, the Democrats just lost the presidential election due in part to President Bush's inroads with Hispanic voters and, in larger part, to the public's distrust of the Dems on national security. Why, then, would the Senate Democrats want to attack an Hispanic nominee on the ground that he hasn't been solicitous enough when it comes to captured Taliban fighters and suspected terrorists? Moreover, I've assumed that the stakes aren't that high. We're not talking about a Supreme Court nomination. And, in any case, the Senate Democrats know that Gonzales is far about as liberal as anyone President Bush is likely to nominate as Attorney General. That knowledge wouldn't stop them if they thought they could make political hay out of opposing Gonzales, but it should give them pause before they shoot themselves in the foot.

Lee and David argue, however, that the stakes are actually quite high. The reason, they say, is because the positions Gonzales has taken on detainees go to the heart of the crucial debate over our national sovereignty. Gonzales has based his positions regarding detainees on the treaties to which the United States has consented, and ignored Protocols adopted by much of the world but rejected by the U.S. He has relied on a definition of "torture" more restrictive than the norm propounded by international advocacy organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, which effectively considers torture to be any coercive method of interrogation designed to break down the prisoner's resistance, regardless of physical or mental impact. Gonzales has, in short, upheld this country's right, as a sovereign nation, to be bound only by international rules to which we have consented. To the left, this is unforgivable.

But that's the principled left. Will Senators Leahy, Kennedy, and their lot take a political hit for these principles? I have my doubts. I suspect that they'll attempt to appease their leftist overlords by trying to procure conciliatory noises from Gonzales on detainee policy. If Gonzales stands firm, my guess is that the Senate Democrats will pretend that Gonzales has made such noises, and then back off.

The Rocket Prof called our attention to this surprisingly sympathetic portrait of one of our heroes, Daniel Pipes, in this month's Harvard magazine. The article begins by drawing an analogy between Pipes and his father, Richard Pipes, who was a professor at Harvard who was ostracized for his anti-Communist beliefs:

Daniel '71, Ph.D. '78 (early Islamic history), is what old-timers would call a chip off the old block. Both are essentially loners, non-belongers (the subtitle of Vixi [Richard Pipes' autobiography] is "Memoirs of a Non-Belonger"), and fighters. Pipes the elder, the fiercely anti-communist cold-warrior, head of President Ford's Team B (formed to evaluate the CIA's estimates of Soviet nuclear intentions) and Soviet policy adviser to President Reagan, was cursed as a "wretched anti-Sovietist" by Pravda—and pretty well marginalized at Harvard for his politics.

Notwithstanding his brilliant academic background, the younger Pipes now works entirely outside the academic world. He writes:

I have the simple politics of a truck driver, not the complex ones of an academic. My viewpoint is not congenial with institutions of higher learning.

Many of those who "marginalized" Richard Pipes for his anti-Communism are still around. It would be nice to think that a few of them, at least, learned a lesson from the collapse of the Russian Empire and the downfall of socialism generally. But most, I suspect, are just as anti-American today, when the enemy is militant Islam, as they were 25 years ago, when the enemy was Communism, and just as scornful of Daniel Pipes as they were of his father.

UPDATE: Reader Bob Ellison adds this personal insight:

You speak of the "marginalization" of Richard Pipes. Well, I took his famous course on Soviet history at Harvard in 1988. Harvard's faculty and students then, as now, were overwhelmingly leftist, but Pipes slogged through anyhow, getting us young and teaching us right. His lectures were scintillating, and as I recall, the course attracted a good 200 students per year. The course drove me and many like me to switch to the Government department and explore conservative and (then nearly heretical) anti-communist ideas.

The marginalizers failed to put down Pipes Senior, as they are failing today to best his son.

The legendary CIA counterintellience chief James Angleton invoked T.S. Eliot's reference in "Gerontion" to a "wilderness of mirrors" in order to describe his own work. At OpinionJournal Edward Jay Epstein brings Angleton's spirit to his coverage of a talk given by one of Angleton's foremost KGB antagonists: "The man who stole the secrets."

Joe Carter of The Evangelical Outpost usefully rounds up the blogosphere's commentary on Nick Coleman's defamatory diatribe against us in the Minneapolis Star Tribune yesterday: "Megaphones without oversight: Blog swarms, opinion storms, and brand destruction." In addition to rounding up the blogosphere's commentary, Carter also applies the Hewitt doctrine to yesterday's events.

I spoke yesterday with Coleman's editor at the Star Tribune to complain about the factual inaccuracies in Coleman's column and to ask the Star Tribune to run corrections. Calling Coleman a "megaphone" would be far too kind, but my conversation with the editor persuades me that the "without oversight" portion of his description of us applies more to Coleman than it does to us.

Among other things, the editor advised me that Coleman's attack on us involved no reporting, and that the column's factual misrepresentations were to be read in that light. Moreover, certain of the misrepresentations were to be construed as sarcasm rather than taken at face value.

Finally, according to the editor, Coleman's false assertion that he didn't know and we didn't say whether we might be on the take from some campaign, political party or anonymous benefactor, appeared to violate no Star Tribune standard. In his meeting with Coleman after my discussion with the editor yesterday morning, Coleman had told the editor that he "assumed" we received a stipend from the Claremont Institute. (Wrong. As we expressly stated here in response to Coleman's slander earlier this month, "we are not paid by anyone" for our work on the site. What part of "not" doesn't Coleman understand?)

I asked the editor what standards Coleman's column was subject to at the Star Tribune. He said he didn't know; he would have to research the answer to that question and get back to me. But they do have standards, which is of course a relief!

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty has some excellent thoughts on the Strib's abdication of responsibility for the paper's accuracy.

HINDROCKET adds: Chris Muir's invaluable Day By Day puts the "controversy" in what I think is the right context, namely, the desperate struggle of a little-known and out of touch columnist for recognition. This is tomorrow's strip; Chris kindly sent us a preview and granted us permission to post it. Click to enlarge:

The terrorists, perhaps emboldened by their suicide bombing last week, tried to launch an actual military attack on a small American outpost in Mosul earlier today. The result was predictable: most of the terrorists, at least 25, were killed, compared to zero Americans:

[T]he troops were attacked by a coordinated force of about 50 insurgents who fired rocket-propelled grenades and semi-automatic weapons. At that point, two F-18 and two F-14 military jets swooped down on strafing runs and firing Maverick missiles, wiping out much of the insurgent force. "That's when the close-air support came in and did a job on them," [Lt. Col. Paul Hastings] said.

The Iraqi terrorists are growing increasingly desperate as next month's elections draw closer and closer. Osama bin Laden has issued a tape recording denouncing the elections and condemning any Iraqi who votes as an "infidel," which means that he or she is threatened with death. But the clock is clicking on the terrorists. They hoped to defeat the U.S. Army militarily, but failed. They hoped to defeat President Bush in last month's election, but failed. They hoped to generate enough violence to force, with the aid of their allies in the American press, postponement of the January elections, but failed. When millions of Iraqis go to the polls one month from now, it will mark the beginning of the end of the Islamofascist campaign of terror.

UPDATE: More recent news stories say that one American was killed in the attack.

Both Rocket Man and I had the privilege of practicing law with Norm Carpenter over many years. He set an example of professionalism and civility that we have always aspired to follow. Today he has forwarded us a copy of the following message that he sent to Nick Coleman:

I have two comments on Nick Coleman's ill-tempered attack on Power Line printed today in the Star Tribune. First, I resent the implication that "Ivy League" is a synonym for wealth and power. My grandfather arrived from Ireland in the 1890s (forty years after Coleman's ancestors) and went to work on the railroad. By virtue of scholarships and working three jobs I worked my way through an Ivy League school (the same one as Hindrocket and the Big Trunk). After service in the Marine Corps in Korea I went to law school on the GI Bill while working at two jobs. I then joined the same law firm as Hindrocket and Big Trunk. I think my grandfather would have been proud of me -- more so than if I had decided to pen ad hominem attacks on people with whom I disagreed. Second, I knew of your father, State Senator Nick Coleman. He would never have stooped to such personal attacks.

Evan Coyne Maloney spots something of significance amidst the rantings and false accusations that make up Nick Coleman's Strib diatribe against Power Line. Coleman said:

Powerline is the biggest link in a daisy chain of right-wing blogs that is assaulting the Mainstream Media while they toot their horns in the service of ... what? The downtrodden? No, that was yesterday's idea of the purpose of journalism.

Maloney responds:

That's funny; I always thought the purpose of journalism was to describe noteworthy events, to tell what happened. No, in Coleman's world, the purpose of the media is to "toot their horns in the service of [...] the downtrodden." Of course, they get to decide who's downtrodden, they get to decide how the downtrodden should be served--it always seems to be through the election of liberals or the support of big government programs--and they get to decide what facts to leave out and what details to spin in order to further their goals.

Coleman has thus acknowledged that he and his MSM brethren practice the "agenda journalism" Hugh Hewitt described in his Weekly Standard column. Coleman's grievance amounts to nothing more than the fact that people who don't share his agenda can now reach the public, thus forcing him, if he hopes to remain relevant, to defend both his agenda and his shoddy work.

HINDROCKET adds: Evan Coyne Maloney wrote us in an email today:

I suspect Coleman is getting far more attention by attacking you than he ever would have in his tiny little outlet. If I were conspiratorially minded, I'd think he's purposefully attacking you all just to get some name recognition.

I'm afraid that's right. Coleman is a little-read, third-rate columnist for a second-tier daily newspaper. We'll probably do a brief round-up of commentary on this contretemps at some point, but otherwise, we'll treat poor Mr. Coleman as we did his equally obscure colleague Jim Boyd earlier this year: leave him in our rear-view mirror.

ONE MORE: Several lawyers have written to offer their services in suing Coleman for defamation. We don't have any present intention to bring such a suit; reader David Tweeten gives one reason why:

Sorry. You'll never be able to prove damages in any libel action against Nick Coleman. Though your case is otherwise rock-solid, somehow, you'd have to prove that Coleman's pathetic article hurt your reputations. Unfortunately for you, the only people whose reputations were damaged were Coleman's and the Star Tribune editorial staff's.

...following the earthquake/tsunami have been released. These might be old news, but I've just seen them for the first time. The photo on the left shows a portion of the coast of Sri Lanka shortly after the tidal wave hit on Sunday. The photo on the right was taken yesterday and shows Thailand's tourist island of Phuket. Click to enlarge:

...check out The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami. It is an extraordinary collection of data of all kinds relating to the earthquake disaster, including but not limited to information on how to help, and lots of links. That a site like this can spring up in a matter of days is an extraordinary testament to the power of the medium we work in.

All across America, newspaper editors have racked their brains trying to think of ways to blame the tsunami on the Bush administration. Our friend Chad, the Elder at Fraters Libertas, imagines one such conversation at the offices of the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

"If it was atmospheric, it would be a no-brainer" Managing Editor Scott Gillespie replied, "just yell 'Kyoto' and it's a done deal."

"But, this is geological. I mean, as evil as he is, I don't think even he had anything to do with this one. But no way are we going to let him off the hook." said Jim.

"Oh, no, we won't. But it's pretty clear we have to come up with an angle that makes sense." Scott answered. "Is there anything the U.S. has been doing in the last four years that could have caused a seismic disturbance of this caliber?"

"You mean like drilling for oil, or underground nuclear tests?" Asked Susan Albright, The OpEd Editor.

"Yeah, stuff like that. Or that low frequency noise the Navy uses to bother dolphins. There's lots of things our military is doing to the ground."

Susan took a sip off her Venti skim half-caf one Splenda sugar free vanilla extra hot latte. "How about something along the lines of global warming causing the ocean to be more full of water and that made the waves bigger than they should have been? That way we can nail Bush and the SUV drivers for thousands of unnecessary deaths."

Read it all; it's one of the funniest things I've ever read on the web.

Our email shows that we have at least a dozen readers who are interested in English Premier League soccer. That's all the pretext I need to present my EPL mid-season all-star eleven.

Dean Kiely (Charlton Athletic)

Matthew Upson (Birmingham)
John Terry (Chelsea)*
Olaf Mellberg (Aston Villa)

Frank Lampard (Chelsea)
Steven Gerrard (Liverpool)
Thomas Gravesen (Everton)
Ryan Giggs (Manchester United)

Thierry Henry (Arsenal)
Andy Johnson (Crystal Palace)
Jermaine Defoe (Tottenham)

*player of the (half) year

HINDROCKET adds: I wouldn't have believed it, but our email inbox is filling up with missives from soccer fans commenting on Deacon's choices. Soccer fans--they're everywhere!

Now it's the agency's deputy director for intelligence, Jami Miscik, who has been forced out by Porter Goss. This is good news, I think; the previously announced departures have focused on operations, but the agency's most obvious failings in recent years have been in intelligence.

Miscik has only held her post since 2002, so she can't be blamed for the CIA's most notorious errors in regard to Iraq. Nevertheless, Goss obviously thinks the situation has not been improved sufficiently, and putting his own person in charge of intelligence is an important part of his effort to retool the agency.

The liberal media are doing some hand-wringing over Goss's changes at the CIA, but there's not much they can say in view of their own relentless (and often unfair) criticisms of the agency over the last several years. Thus, the New York Times is reduced to writing that Goss's changes "have prompted unease within the C.I.A." Yes, I'll bet they have. The Washington Post goes a bit further, citing "concerns among some lawmakers and others that Goss was purging intelligence professionals and replacing them with political appointees." Those "others" presumably include the career CIA Democrats who constantly leak anti-administration tidbits to the Post. For the moment, at least, the leakers seem to be unusually quiet. I wonder why.

In his timely column for the Standard Online today, Hugh Hewitt explains "how the old media went left into a deep ditch of agenda journalism" and in the process opened the door to the blogs: "A unified theory of the old media collapse."

Hugh adds this intriguing subhead to the title of his column: "Asymmetrical tolerance and the collapse of Big Media credibility: How 2004 brought doom to legacy media." At the outset Hugh kindly notes how "On Sunday last Power Line's John Hinderaker undressed the New York Times biggest big foot, Thomas Friedman, for all the blogosphere to see..."

In his Star Tribune column today Nick Coleman criticizes us in part for being unconcerned about disclosing conflicts of interest, unlike responsible members of the mainstream media such as he holds himself out to be. Although we have rarely mentioned him or his column on this site, it so happens that we have written about him here six times this month.

In our six posts about Coleman this month we have taken issue with his columns and his related correspondence with readers in both a straightforward factual manner and in a satirical vein. Yet Coleman omits any mention of our recent criticisms of his columns and correspondence in his column today. He only vaguely acknowledges that he "gets ripped a lot on the site." In none of our comments on Coleman, however, have we "ripped" him in the abusive personal manner that he "rips" us today. He also alludes to the fact that we have described him in connection with his column as a reliable partisan hack. Today he returns the favor; on that score, fair enough.

Rather than making any mention of the attention we have paid to his columns this month, however, he uses his column today to launch a vicious personal attack while pretending to administer justice to us in his capacity as the voice of the people. Isn't a journalist's particular stake in the subject matter of his columns something journalists are to recognize as a conflict of interest and disclose appropriately? Coleman himself suggests that it is.

I first wrote about Coleman this month on December 12 in "A case study." The first two paragraphs of that post are as follows:

I preface this post with these personal notes. I am a member of the board of directors of Minnesota's Center of the American Experiment. Former Minnesota Education Commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke is now a senior fellow of the Center; I became a fan of hers during her service as Education Commissioner and consider her a friend. This story involves Dr. Yecke and Minnesota's dominant newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Some of the information included here derives from Dr. Yecke.

Over the years the Star Tribune has published many of the columns that Rocket Man and I have submitted to the paper as op-ed columns. Our experience with the op-ed page has been uniformly pleasant, with the single exception of the vicious personal attack on us this summer by deputy editorial page editor Jim Boyd. This fall I was also the subject of critical comments by Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman, who is one of the protagonists in this case study. I ask that you take into account all the cautionary notes above in considering the following.

I then went on to take issue with one of Coleman's recent columns.

We next wrote about Coleman's two columns on homelessness in "The tragedy of mindlessness" and in "The tragedy of mindlessness, Act II." We subsequently commented in a satirical vein on Coleman's correspondence with his readers in "Epistles of Saint Nick," "Judgment of Saint Nick," and "The gospel according to Saint Nick."

For Coleman to wield his column in the state's dominant newspaper as a weapon to punish those who have taken issue with his work, and for him to do so in the knowingly false manner he has done so today, is a matter that should be of concern to those within the walls of the Star Tribune and beyond. It certainly is to me.

Poor Nick Coleman, the Minneapolis Star Tribune's worst columnist, devotes his entire column in tomorrow's newspaper to attacking us. I'd like to respond to his charges, only I can't figure out what they are.

Coleman says we "pursu[e] a right-wing agenda cooked up in conservative think tanks funded by millionaire power brokers." If by that he means that we're conservatives, we plead guilty. The think tank in question appears to be the Claremont Institute, with which we have an extremely loose affiliation. And if he means to suggest that we share Claremont's respect for the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we can only plead guilty once again.

Beyond that, it's hard to say what Coleman's point is, other than the fact that he doesn't like us, or, I guess, any other conservatives, which is hardly news. This is one of his more coherent sentences: "[L]ike talk radio, they are dominated by the right and are only interested in being a megaphone without oversight, disclosure of conflicts of interest, or professional standards." I have no idea what Coleman means by "conflicts of interest," and he never provides a hint. As to "professional standards," he never cites a single instance in which we have misrepresented a source, tried to pass fake documents off as genuine, or, for that matter, even made a mistake. So, again, it's hard to make much of a substantive response.

Coleman seems to be obsessed with our site, even though we rarely mention him. He went so far as to count the number of times we "shilled for votes" in the Wizbang Best Blog contest. (I'd explain the relevance of this to his tirade, only I don't understand it.) It's remarkable that even though he has obviously spent a lot of time poring over our site, he cannot identify a single substantive error that we have made.

Coleman concludes his tirade, which should be an embarrassment to his employers, by purporting to "fact check" us. In the course of his "fact check," he says "If I had the money they think I do..." Again, I have no idea what in the world he is talking about. We have never written anything that suggests we think that Nick Coleman has a lot of money. Indeed, speaking for myself, I have never spent a single moment thinking about Coleman's bank account. Bizarre references like this one have, however, caused me to wonder about his mental health.

Coleman concludes:

[D]oes Powerline or its mighty righty allies take money from political parties, campaigns or well-heeled benefactors who hope to affect Minnesota's politics from behind the scenes? We don't know, and they don't have to say. They are not Mainstream.

I can't speak for any "mighty righty allies," but as far as we're concerned, we don't take any money from any parties, campaigns or "benefactors." We don't even have a tip jar. But here is what I think is curious: Coleman pretends to be a journalist. As such, doesn't he occasionally do research in the course of writing his columns? I assume the Strib provides Coleman with a desk and a telephone. We publish our telephone numbers on this site. Coleman says "we don't know, and they don't have to say" whether we get money from parties or campaigns. But, Nick, you didn't ask. If you really thought this was a burning question that needed to be investigated, why didn't you pick up the phone and call one of us? We'd have been happy to fill you in.

I'm not surprised, however, that Coleman didn't bother to do research to verify his slur against us. He's done the same thing before. On December 13, Coleman was a guest host on the far-left Air America network; he unleashed a tirade against us. Among other things, he described us as paid political operatives--the same charge he makes in tomorrow's column. We responded to it by writing:

[W]e have, in general, no objection to being paid. On the contrary. As it happens, though, we are not being paid by anyone, although we do get a little revenue through Blogads. Again, Nick Whoever's [we later learned it was Coleman] research skills seem primitive at best.

Now, if Coleman were the responsible journalist he claims to be, don't you think he would have done a little investigation before slandering us again? And, given that we know he scoured our site to count the exact number of times we mentioned the Wizbang contest, doesn't it seem almost certain that he saw the above post--which was, after all, about him--and therefore knew that the charge that he makes against us tomorrow was false?

It's been a long time since I went to law school, but I think there is a technical term for journalists who make charges that they know to be untrue.

Writing for Slate, Phillip Carter and Owen West argue that, in terms of casualties, Iraq in 2004 looks like Vietnam in 1966. The fact that more than 6,000 U.S. servicemen were killed in Vietnam that year, compared to about 900 in Iraq this year, is no impediment to Carter and West. If one adjusts for the fact that we had nearly three times as many troops in Vietnam as we have in Iraq and for the fact that wounds tend to be less lethal now due to technological (body armor?) and medical advances and for the fact that virtually no pilots were killed in Iraq this year, one can reduce the 6-1 difference in fatalities to about 3-2.

But what sense does it make to engage in these contortions? Carter and West say they want to refute the notion that casualties in Iraq are "light." But who is referring to them in that way? The authors cite an old news story in the Telegraph in which a U.S. general stated that casualties during two days of fighting in Fallujah were "light," a claim that is consistent by the facts set forth in the story (10 Americans killed in two days of intense fighting). I don't know of anyone who is saying that, overall, our casualties in Iraq are "light."

Thus, Carter and West seem to be creating a straw man for the purpose of drawing a specious analogy to Vietnam. Sure, if the war in Iraq were three times its actual scope, and being fought in a jungle 38 years ago it would look a lot like Vietnam. By the same token, if the public can be made to feel about our effort in Iraq the same way it felt about the war in Vietnam, then perhaps our retreat from the former will look a lot like our retreat from the latter.

E.J. Dionne takes a good-natured look at his "hate mail" (but what about his blogger critics?).

It turns out that Dionne has something in common with this critic-- we both drive Saturns.

That's what Ross Douthat wrote, filling in for Andrew Sullivan. Roger Simon takes Douthat to task:

Anyone who doesn't think Saddam would have delighted in nuclear weapons, and in the post A. Q. Khan world was only a phone call or two away from them, is not thinking straight. Who does Mr. Douthat believe was going to monitor those calls? The United Nations?

The problem is that Douthat et al have no answer other than the snide to [Michael] Ledeen's optimism because they have no answer, no proposal, at all. They offer fashionable hard-boiled realism which, in the end, is only laziness. Whoever said democracy would be easy in those places? ... We are in this for the long haul, the very long haul. I would suggest Mr. Douthat suck it up and give the optimists their due. They're the ones driving the car forward... unless he has a better concrete suggestion.

This is, of course, the fundamental political debate of our time. It is between those who are willing to roll up their sleeves and try to make the world a better place, and those who offer no alternative but prefer to stand on the sidelines and sneer.

Roger is one of the most interesting people I know, and he offers what I think is a highly relevant personal observation:

Special note to Mr. Douthat: I was fairly involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties, went down South on all the Freedom Ride stuff. (Yeah, I'm that old.) As I recall that took a long time, but it was worth it. Give the Iranians a shot too. They're worth it. Remember John Donne... No Man is an Island... I know it's optimistic, but think about it. Or as they say in zen--you don't get there by trying, but you can't get there if you don't try.

It's always easy to throw stones at the optimist, but at the end of the day, what's the alternative?

BIG TRUNK adds: Pejmanesque also comments on Douthat in "The growing political apathy."

UPDATE: Michael Ledeen has posted a reply to Douthat on The Corner.

This is in the "Stupid Hate Crime" category, via Michelle Malkin:

Police said a 22-year-old man was charged with filing a false report about a hate crime.

Floyd Elliott, of Independence, told police that on Dec. 14, two subjects attacked him in the parking lot of his apartment complex. He said the attackers cut him in the stomach, branded him with a hot knife, and attempted to carve the word "Fag" on his forehead.

Investigators were suspicious about the report because the head carving was backwards, as if done while looking into a mirror.

Later, Elliott admitted to police that the injuries were self-inflicted. He said he falsely reported the attack to increase the police presence in his neighborhood.

My instinct is to be very slow to blame governments and other human institutions for the consequences of natural disasters. (Likewise, when our country was attacked by terrorists, I wanted to destroy the terrorists, not to attack my own government for failing to stop them.) We linked this morning--just scroll down--to an AFP story that blamed the victims of the tsunami for their own demise, on the ground that they destroyed mangrove swamps and foolishly lived (or vacationed) near the sea.

Reader Mike Weatherford wasn't impressed with the AFP "expert:"

"What has made this a disaster is that people have started to occupy part of the landscape that they shouldn't have occupied," [Jeff McNeely, chief scientist of the World Conservation Union] told AFP in a telephone interview from Paris. "Fifty years ago the coastline was not densely occupied as now by tourist hotels."

True, and 50 years ago, the poverty of the region was ten times what it is today. As for "shouldn't have occupied", that's idiotic. There are few places on Earth that aren't prone to one kind of natural disaster or another. According to this idiot, we probably shouldn't live on the Great Plains, because they're so prone to tornados, or in Flordia, where we had four major hurricanes this season.

The hotels did not replace traditional villages because the villagers built inland, McNeely said.

That's not what I saw over there. The villagers built back in the first line of trees, away from the beach where it was so hot, but where there were cool breezes from the water to keep the mosquitos and other bugs away.

"What has also happened over the last several decades is that many mangroves have been cleared to grow shrimp ponds so that we, here in Europe, can have cheap shrimp," he added.

BIG problem with this statement. Mangroves ONLY grow in tidal marshes. They don't grow on beaches. Nobody builds a resort on a tidal marsh. As for shrimp ponds, you usually don't build those in a tidal marsh, either. Tidal marshes are too prone to disease, flooding, and invasion by unwanted species. All the shrimp ponds I saw in Thailand were well back from the sea, on dry land.

What you have here is a man with an agenda blaming the wrong people for the wrong problems. The people of India have always lived along the coast, and have always fished the waters. The same is true of Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, and a hundred other places. Three things combined to make this the disaster it is: a larger than normal quake (9.0), striking offshore, in a poor part of the world where crowding and poverty are rampant. If the nations of the Indian Ocean had installed tidal buoys, the alert could have saved thousands. If they had an effective communications system, the warning they DID receive could have saved thousands. If they had an installed tsunami warning system, there is a good possibility that tens of thousands could have been saved. Poverty, not "man's ruthless destruction of the natural environment" was the root cause of the massive loss of life in South Asia. The idiot interviewed by Agence France Press is just a useful tool for the "hate people" propaganda movement.

Another reader agrees, blaming the tsunami disaster on our persistent refusal to assess risk rationally:

What's lost in the horror at the death toll from the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami is the world's penchant for focusing on theoretical risks rather than real ones. In the 1883 Krakatoa volcanic explosion which took place in the same region of South Asia, a tidal wave resulted leading to an estimated 36,000 deaths. Even as a once in a hundred years event, this seems like a real risk that could have been addressed in advance by the world's governments, international bodies and NGO's. Instead, these groups, while claiming to look out for the public good, have focused on a myriad of theoretical risks, from global warming to genetically engineered corn, on which a treasury has been spent.

An example is the dioxin scare of the 1980's which lead to the expenditure of billions of dollars, public and private, to investigate, clean up and control releases of the substance. This expenditure was made even though one would be hard pressed to find one person in all of human history who died from exposure to dioxin. (Oh yeah? Name him!)

If these billions, along with others, had been spent intelligently instead of chasing the latest ecological hype, 50,000 or more innocent people would be alive today.

No doubt a lot will be written, in the days to come, about missed opportunities to warn coastal residents about incoming tidal waves, and other ways in which the tragedy could have been lessened. Hopefully at least some of this conversation will be constructive. In the meantime, here is a list of places to go to send help.

As inevitable as the attempt to blame the natural disaster in Asia on human greed and stupidity (see below) is the rejection by a third world government of help from an Israeli aid mission. Israel was prepared to send a 150-person team to Sri Lanka. The delegation was "planning to assemble a medical facility comprised of specialist doctors, and to set up emergency, internal medicine and pediatric departments, as well as laboratory and X-ray facilities in the southern part of Sri Lanka." However, Sri Lanka refused to accept the mission. Israel nonetheless is dispatching supplies at Sri Lanka's request, including 10,000 blankets contributed by the Israeli army, along with tents, nylon sheeting and water containers.

Via Tom von Gremp

UPDATE: A small team of Israelis will accompany a convoy carrying emergency supplies to Sir Lanka, according to the BBC.

The death toll is rising toward 50,000, in what is shaping up as the worst natural disaster in a long time. Video footage of a wave hitting a resort in Thailand is available here. Less familiar amateur footage taken by a Norwegian who was on vacation, I believe also in Thailand, can be viewed here. (Thanks to Wes Roth for the tip.) Notwithstanding my all-Norwegian heritage, I can't read the web site; maybe some of our readers can.

The blame game has begun, as nowadays there is no such thing as a purely natural disaster. There is nothing, it seems, that can't be exploited for political profit. Thus, some have already attributed the death toll at least in part to global warming.

This AFP story strikes me as rather repellent:

Human activities, notably the building of coastal resorts and the destruction of natural protection, contributed to the enormous loss of life from killer tidal waves that hit the shores of the Indian Ocean after an earthquake, an environmental expert said.

"What has made this a disaster is that people have started to occupy part of the landscape that they shouldn't have occupied," [Jeff McNeely, chief scientist of the World Conservation Union] told AFP in a telephone interview from Paris. "Fifty years ago the coastline was not densely occupied as now by tourist hotels."

The hotels did not replace traditional villages because the villagers built inland, McNeely said.

"What has also happened over the last several decades is that many mangroves have been cleared to grow shrimp ponds so that we, here in Europe, can have cheap shrimp," he added.

The same thing has been happening with the coral reefs that also provided protection to the coast, he explained.

"When a tsunami comes in, it first hits the coral reef which slows it down, then it hits the mangroves which furthers slow it down. It may get through that but by then a lot of the energy has already been dissipated."

So, in areas where aquaculture and tourism are two of the few ways in which people can earn a living, the proper course would be to abandon the coastline and huddle behind rows of mangrove trees in hopes of being protected from a possible tsunami.

You might be worried that if humans followed such a course, it would expose animals to danger. (Actually, this particular fear hadn't occurred to me.) Don't worry: animals are too smart for that:

On the other hand, Sunday's quake would not have been a disaster for local wildlife still left in the affected areas, he added.

"Those living along the coast are seldom particularly rare, that's not a rare habitat, the mangroves are not particularly rich in species, the species that live there are used to typhoons, to storms and all that.

"Animals are smart enough to move."

So there you have it: what you thought was a natural disaster was really caused by human greed and stupidity. Thanks, AFP, for that insightful and sensitive analysis.

UPDATE: The article that accompanied the Norwegian video turns out to be very intersting. Thanks to Fredrik Nyman and Alan Macomber, who sent us almost identical translations:

A Norwegian and a Swede fought feverishly against the mass of water to save an older man. See the video.

Article text:

Swede Fredrik was thoughtful this evening. Together with Norwegian Olivier, he may have saved a human life in the frothing water wave that poured in over Phuket yesterday.

"We tried to drag an elderly English couple out of the water. But then the cement fence broke that they were clinging to. We managed to find the man afterwards, but we haven't seen the woman", said Fredrik to Dagbladet at the Bangkok Hospital in Phuket.

He has just been to visit the elderly Englishman that he rescued.
The man is in a coma at the hospital.

The Norwegian who helped him has not been seen since. Everything is chaos in Phuket right now.

Another Swede filmed the wave when the two men tried their best with the rescue attempt. Thanks to that, you can see for yourself how strong the mass of water was when the second wave come in.

Most people thought that after the first wave, everything was over, and that the water had settled down.

They were wrong.

"I ran down to see if I could help anyone. I saw the first wave come from the window in my hotel room. When the second wave came in, I didn't have chance to get away " he said to Dagbladet.

Something which may have saved a life.

MORE VIDEOS: Jordan Golson has collected several amateur tsunami videos here.

FURTHER UPDATE: Jack Risko has more on Mr. McNeely, who turns out to be as much of a jerk as you might have suspected from his interview with AFP. His credentials as a "scientist" also appear to be minimal at best, which raises the question why AFP thought it was appropriate to base an article on an interview with him. Other than political partisanship on AFP's part, there isn't any obvious explanation.

RealClearPolitics has posted an entertaining year-end column by Russ Smith lamenting the disappearance of the brief journalistic moratorium on nastiness that used to be the custom of the season: "Enough with the bitching." According to Smith, the period between December 15 and January 5, like the rest of the year year, has now become one of "all bile, all the time, fair, unfair, balanced and not really fit to print."

Smith doesn't even get around to citing the treatment of Donald Rumsfeld by the press this month as an example, but it seems to me to fit his theme. At the Spectator Online Jed Babbin makes a powerful case that Rumsfeld has been the victim of a bilious and unfair attack this month: "Let the big dog run."

Smith mentions in passing an incident involving Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter David Chanen that I had meant to discuss at the time it occurred in mid-December:

A Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter, David Chanen, was disciplined by his superiors for sending an email (written in haste, Chanen says) to the city's black police inspector using the phrase "colored officers." Police Chief Bill McManus article was quoted in the paper's Dec. 17 as saying the email "displayed at a minimum a shocking insensitivity and racism."

Maybe I'm a bit obstinate, but how is "colored officers" all that much different from the widely used alternative, "people of color"?

The Star Tribune story is still available online: "Star Tribune reporter disciplined over racial wording in e-mail." There is a little bit more to the story than Smith discusses. Here's the Star Tribune's December 17 account:

A Star Tribune reporter was disciplined Thursday after he disclosed that he wrote an e-mail to a Minneapolis police official that contained racially insensitive language.

David Chanen, a police reporter, told editors that he used the term "colored officers" in an e-mail sent Wednesday to Minneapolis Police Inspector Donald Banham, who is black.

Star Tribune Managing Editor Scott Gillespie sent a letter Thursday to Minneapolis Police Chief Bill McManus saying that the newspaper "owes you and your department a deep and sincere apology" for the language used in the e-mail.

McManus said Thursday night that the newspaper's apology "should be made to Minneapolis Police Department officers of color, not to me. Certainly, they are all offended by it. This isn't the 1960s anymore."

Gillespie and Chanen said the reporter had intended to use the term "officers of color," but made an error in rushing to send the e-mail. Gillespie said he couldn't comment on the details of the discipline because it was a personnel matter.

When a person who had heard about the e-mail called him, Chanen said he reviewed it and "was shocked to learn I had written language ... that is terribly offensive. I was writing the e-mail in haste, but that's no excuse, and I deeply apologize for what I did."

Chanen said he wrote the e-mail because Banham had sent a letter to the newspaper criticizing Chanen's Dec. 11 story about the replacement of Lt. Mike Carlson as head of the homicide unit by Lt. Lee Edwards. Carlson is white and Edwards is black.

Chanen said he wrote the e-mail to set up a meeting with Banham to discuss the inspector's concerns.

In a letter to the editor Tuesday, McManus said the story was biased and left the impression that Edwards was chosen to head the homicide unit only because he is black.

Gillespie said in his letter to McManus that he wished the Dec. 11 story had included more information about the accomplishments of Edwards and another black officer, Sgt. Mike Davis, who was assigned to succeed Edwards as head of the department's internal affairs unit. McManus said he commented on the story and the e-mail Wednesday night at a meeting of the Police Community Relations Council.

"I think these two incidents -- first the article, and then the e-mail -- displayed at a minimum a shocking insensitivity and racism, even if it was unintended," he said Thursday.

Chanen's offending story is also still available online: "Minneapolis police chief reassigns top cops." The racism imputed to Chanen as a result of this story appears to derive from these paragraphs and to be based on Chanen's reliance on the observations of black Minneapolis civil rights activist Ron Edwards:

[Lt. Carlson] will be replaced by Lt. Lee Edwards, who was in charge of the department's internal affairs unit. While several community activists said they thought that Carlson did a good job, they understand the move is part of Chief Bill McManus' commitment to further diversify top positions. Edwards and Sgt. Mike Davis, who will be taking over internal affairs, are black...

The personnel moves are consistent with what [Minneapolis Chief of Police] McManus said when he was hired: that he wanted to shape the department in his own image, said activist Ron Edwards (no relation to Lee Edwards). He said the new head of homicide is one of the best qualified officers of color in the department to run the unit.

McManus has promoted Inspectors Val Wurster and Don Banham and is planning to appoint Inspector Don Harris to deputy chief. All are black.

"I have no knocks against Mike Carlson," Edwards said. "With budget restraints making it hard to hire new officers of color, Chief McManus has to work with the pool within the department."

According to McManus, Lt. Edwards's color was not his only qualification for the job. Based on McManus's own words, however, Lt. Edwards's color appears to have been the necessary condition of his promotion by McManus. Isn't that news? Isn't Chanen's offense nothing more than the failure to sugarcoat McManus's race-based appointments?

I did not mean to fall into the trap set by Smith's column and contribute to the continuing circulation of all bile all the time. But shouldn't someone be asking what's happening here?

There has been a lot of buzz about the fact that the next Harry Potter book, which isn't even out yet, is already #1 on the Amazon best seller list. But, hey, how about Hugh Hewitt's Blog? It is now available, I guess, but just barely--and it is currently #62 on Amazon's list. Pretty amazing, considering that the mainstream media have no idea that it even exists. Yet. As we've already said, Hugh's book is the best discussion so far of the blogosphere, its current significance, and its long-term potential. So, now that it's actually available, you should consider buying it!

The January issue of Commentary is out, and it contains a disturbing piece by two Duke University graduate students, Eric Adler and Jack Langer called "The Intifada Comes to Duke." The authors are referring to Duke's recent hosting of the annual conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM). One of PSM's stated principles is that it refuses to denounce any terrorist act committed by Palestinians. But that doesn't mean PSM is agnostic about such terrorist acts. One of the scheduled speakers at the Duke conference, Charles Carlson, has openly called for lethal attacks against Israelis -- "each wedding, Passover celebration, or bar mitzvah [in Israel] is a potential military target." (The seminar Carlson was scheduled to lead eventually was cancelled with no explanation). One PSM organizer, Fadi Kiblawi has written of his urge to "strap a bomb to his chest and kill those Zionist racists." Another spokesperson, Hatem Bazian has called for "an intifada in this country." And Sami al-Arian, who has been active in the movement, is awaiting trial in Florida for racketeering and terrorism.

None of this was of concern to Duke president Richard Brodhead. He found the decision to host the pro-terror organization to be "an easy one" given "the importance of the principle free expression." It is true that after the PSM's statements and deeds were spelled out in detail for Brodhead, he modified his position. Now the "deepest" reason for hosting the conference was no longer free speech, but "the principle of education through dialogue."

The dialogue, as Adler and Langer show, was a one-sided and darkly anti-Semitic affair. Keynote speaker Mazin Qumsiyeh (a Yale professor of genetics) presented a short history of the virulent Zionist "disease." Israel was pronounced "racist" and a greater abuser of human rights than South Africa in the days of apartheid. One speaker defended the terrorist acivities of Hamas. At a workshop, Huweida Arraf of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) urged students to join her group, which she acknowledged cooperates with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and offered them tips on how to enter Israel surreptitiously. Thus, in the name of dialogue, did Duke University assist in the recruitment of accomplices to terrorism.

When it was all over, and after the dialogue had inspired a columnist on the Duke student newspaper to attack American Jews and their "shocking overrepresentation" in academia, President Brodhead pronounced himself satisfied. More than that, he expressed gratitude and pride at seeing his university involved in such a "constructive event."

UPDATE: Many thanks to Davi Bernstein of Commentary for kindly emailing us the link to the Commenary article by Eric Adler and Jack Langer that did not appear in our original post.

Check out this Military Times poll:

Among active duty military, 63% approve of President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq. Two-thirds of combat vets think the war is worth fighting. A whopping 87% are satisfied with their jobs. And one of my favorites: "60% blame Congress for the shortage of body armor in the combat zone."

None of this is a surprise to those who have been paying attention. But if all you read is the mainstream media, wouldn't you be puzzled as to how all of these military personnel could be enthusiastic about a war in which nothing good ever happens?

Tom Friedman's pop quiz, which Rocket Man debunked so masterfully, was not the only piece in yesterday's New York Times arguing that the U.S. is on the wrong track and heading for trouble. Fred Kaplan had a similar piece called "China Expands, Europe Rises, and the United States. . ." The title leaves it for the reader to fill in the blank, but the article strongly suggests that the missing word is "declines."

And that looks like this year's theme from the left. For the past two years, it was all about une