On Friday, I had the honor of speaking at the Heritage Foundation's 28th annual resource bank meeting in Miami. Every serious account of the rise of the conservative movement emphasizes the role of the Heritage Foundation. I was grateful for the opportunity to participate, regretting only that I could not attend both days of the proceedings.

My panel considered, what else, "New Media: the power of the blogs." My talk was well-received, if overshadowed by the excellent presentations of Cliff May, Tom Bevan (Real Clear Politics), and Nick Schultz (Tech Central Station). Tom, who must know more about the world of op-ed than anyone, observed that, in that world, "there's not a lot of heft on the left." According to Tom, leftist opinion writers can turn a phrase well enough, but often struggle when it comes time to actually make an argument. Perhaps they were insulated too long from being expected by their editors to undertake that labor.

It's fun to introduce oneself as a blogger for Power Line at events like this. In the various "day jobs" I've held, the reaction when I introduce and identify myself is pretty uniform -- a reasonably respectful acknowledgment. As a blogger, by contrast, I almost invariably receive one of two reactions, glowing praise or a look of total incomprehension.

Maybe I'm the only one who missed it, but CBS News aired a report Thursday evening, discussed here by AFP, that the fatal encounter between the vehicle taking Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena to the Baghdad airport and American soldiers at a highway checkpoint was recorded by a satellite. American investigators relied on the recording in exonerating the soldiers who fired on the speeding vehicle.

Ms. Sgrena has said that the vehicle approached the checkpoint at around 30 mph, and the soldiers fired without warning. The satellite recording apparently shows that the car was traveling in excess of 60 mph. The AFP description of the recording is ambiguous, but seems to say that the soldiers saw the vehicle when it was 137 yards away--I haven't seen any explanation of how one can tell from the recording hwen the soldiers saw the car--and opened fire when it was 46 yards away from the checkpoint. If that is correct, the car would have reached the checkpoint in around a second and a half. So it seems hard to criticize the soldiers for concluding they couldn't wait any longer for the car to start slowing down.

UPDATE: Patterico notes that the Los Angeles Times apparently wasn't happy about the satellite evidence exculpating the American soldiers, and excised it from its version of the story.

In his radio address for the Democrats today, Mario Cuomo showed himself to be the faithful student of cornpone constitutionalist and former Ku Klux Klan Kleagle Robert Byrd. Thus spake His Honor:

Now, the Republicans in the Senate...are threatening to claim ownership of the Supreme Court and other federal courts, hoping to achieve political results on subjects like abortion, stem cells, the environment and civil rights that they can not get from the proper political bodies: the Congress and the presidency.

How will they do this? By destroying the so-called filibuster, a vital part of the 200-year-old system of checks and balances in the Senate that allows the fullest possible debate before one of the president's choices for the Supreme Court or other federal courts is allowed to take his or her place on the bench. That would be a change so undesirably destructive that it has been called the nuclear option.

The Republicans say it would assure dominance by the majority in the Senate. That sounds democratic until you remember that the Bill of Rights was adopted, as James Madison pointed out, in order to protect all Americans from what he called, the tyranny of the majority. And it sounds nearly absurd when you learn that the minority Democrats in the Senate actually represent more Americans than the majority Republicans do.

How many whoppers, stretchers, flips and flops can you spot in these three paragraphs? It would be cruel to unleash Paul Mirengoff on them, but even I can follow the Cuomo postulates to the inference Cuomo shrinks from drawing explicitly: that the Bill of Rights was adopted to protect us from the tyranny of the Democrats. But then again, I am a Straussian and a believer in "reading between the lines."

DEACON adds: I'm not sure what Mirengoff would say, but Cuomo has always favored the big lie, the better to work his rhetorical magic. Here, the big lie is that Republicans, not Democrats, are looking to use the courts to obtain specific policy outcomes unavailable to them through the political process. In reality, of course, the Republicans favor a judiciary that will grant serious deference to the wishes of our citizens (though not Europeans) as expressed through legislatures. Liberals, who have fared rather poorly when it comes to electing legislators and executives, consistently favor overturning "political" outcomes. For recent examples in Supreme Court jurisprudence, consider the decision that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional, that states may not apply capital punishment to juveniles, and that the sentencing guidlines adopted by Congress are unconstitutional.

ROCKET adds: These are the three most ludicrous paragraphs I've seen in a long time. First Cuomo stands history on its head; as in the classic instances of Roe v Wade and gay marriage, it has always been the Democrats, never the Republicans, who have used the federal courts to force policies on the American people that the "proper political bodies" won't vote for.

Next he stands the meaning of the filibuster on its head, pretending that the device is intended to assure "the fullest possible debate" before a judicial nominee "takes his or her place on the bench." In reality, as Harry Reid explicitly admitted just last week, the filibuster has nothing to do with assuring ample debate; that's why he rejected the Republican compromise that offered 100 hours of debate--more than two weeks--on each and every judicial nominee. In reality, as everyone knows, the filibuster is intended to prevent Republican nominees from "taking their places on the bench," ever.

Finally, he stands the Constitution on its head with the absurd suggestion tbat the minority should run the Senate rather than the majority, apparently on the theory that majority rule is per se tyrannical. It's hard to respond to that except by saying, "Huh?" And he concludes with a stunning non sequitur: Senate Democrats represent more people than Senate Republicans; therefore it's appropriate for the minority Democrats to get their way. We do, of course, have a body where votes are apportioned on the basis of population; it's called the House of Representatives. But population is completely irrelevant to the Senate. It's also irrelevant to the filibuster, which can just as easily be implemented by Senators from the twenty smallest states. And if the question is, where do most Americans stand on the question of who gets to appoint judges to the federal bench, they answered that question last November, when President Bush won by something like three million votes.

The Independent reports on the role payed by "les bloggeurs" in the upcoming French referendum on the EU constitution. For those who are skeptical of the whole EU project, as I am, it's probably good news that the "non" vote seems to be leading. But the "bloggeurs'" chief objection to the EU seems to be that it will disrupt France's decline into self-satisfied irrelevance by promoting Anglo-Saxon free market economics. Would that it were true!

Last night, CNN remembered the fall of Saigon in its own way. The program started out well enough with a feature on what happened to the half-American babies and young children who were rescued from South Vietnam. As one would expect, the answer is, very good things, at least in the case of the individuals profiled.

But then came Bruce Morton. His feature included a clip of fellow relic David Halberstam opining that Vietnam taught us the consequences of sticking our nose is "a war of liberation." Morton chose to focus on the actions of William Calley at My Lai, which also enabled him to slip in a reference to Abu Ghraib. For Morton, the lesson of Vietnam is that as a people we can be as good or as bad as the next people. And he's right. If the next people are willing to fight for a decade at great cost to protect another people from the monstrosity of Communism.

Thinking about what happened 30 years ago brought to mind the phrase that made John Kerry famous. The South Vietnamese people were the last to "die" for the massive mistake that was Communism.

Decision '08 has a progress report on John Kerry's effort to sign a form 180 to release his military records, now entering its fourth month:

In a hastily organized news conference, a spokesman for the Perpetual John Kerry for President Campaign said the initial phases of "Operation Sign Form SF-180" were going better than expected. Specifically, in the 90 days since Kerry promised on national television to sign the form releasing his military records, the following milestones have been achieved:

--a pen has been procured from a Walmart on the outskirts of Little Rock "for substantially less than the $12,000 budgeted";

--a special committee has been formed to discuss the best way to remove the cap from the pen;

--a copy of the notoriously difficult to obtain form has been located on eBay and bidding is underway; and

--a "Dinner With John" fundraising extravaganza is in the works to obtain the necessary postage to mail the signed form, should such a step be required.

UPDATE: Archie Thomas is puzzled:

Strange I mailed a copy with a stamped envelope - addressed to the proper offices - to John Kerry's office in Washington over two months ago with a request for him to complete it. He must be good at filling out forms - is that not the way he got all of those medals?

The new issue of the Weekly Standard has just been posted online. The most entertaining piece in the issue is Cynthia Grenier's review of Jane Fonda's autobiography, but the review is unavailable to nonsubscribers. The Standard has made available its excellent cover story by Stephen Hayes on Paul Wolfowitz: "The Visionary."

In the post below I mention Peter Braestrup's study of the press coverage of Tet, Big Story. Braestrup's book also makes a cameo appearance in Terry Eastland's interesting Wilson Quarterly essay: "The collapse of big media: Starting over." Coincidentally, Braestrup founded the Wilson Quarterly after he left the Washington Post for the Woodrow Wilson International Center, where he wrote Big Story.

Thirty years ago today North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon and the last American troops stationed in Vietnam were airlifted off the roof of the American embassy. South Vietnam was reduced to Communist vassalage as the first wave of Vietnamese "boat people" sought escape from servitude. Today's papers are full of retrospectives; a Google search on Vietnam this morning turns up 16,800 hits on "Vietnam."

For me, the horrible sights of April 29 and 30, 1975 bitterly highlighted the necessity of unlearning the many lies and myths of the American antiwar movement that I had merrily bought. The much-derided doctrine of containment that had more or less led us to resist the Communist takeover of South Vietnam was vindicated within remarkably few years -- crowned with success by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the liberation of its conquered provinces and former satellites.

One didn't need to wait that long for reason to rethink the narrative that American newspapers and networks had imposed on the war. By 1977 former Washington Post Saigon bureau chief Peter Braestrup had meticulously documented the pitiful performance of the American press covering the war in Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington. (Click here for a good account of the book and here for a 1995 oral history interview with Braestrup.) Is there a retrospective on that subject today? Not that I can find.

Standing out among the retrospectives today is one that attempts to rethink the meaning of the war in the light of subsequent history and experience. Thomas Lipscomb's Chicago Sun-Times column is "Prosperous Southeast Asia proof U.S. didn't fight in vain."

You've probably already heard by now that an Arabic site in London has posted a rumor that Osama bin Laden is dead. Apparently there is considerable debate going on among Islamist sites about whether the rumor is true or not. We haven't mentioned it because we have nothing to add, beyond noting the rumor's existence.

I thought bin Laden was dead for a couple of years before he made that last video tape, so any speculation I might offer would obviously be unhelpful.

We reported here on the resignation of two investigators for the Volcker committee investigating the U.N.'s oil for food scandal. The resignations apparently were in protest over the Volcker report's gentle treatment of Kofi Annan. Subsequently, Volcker has apparently directed his former investigators not to talk to others who are looking into the scandal.

The best investigation of the oil for food program is the one being carried out by Senator Norm Coleman, Chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Today Coleman's office put out this statement by the Senator:

I spoke with Mr. Volcker yesterday and expressed my grave and growing concerns about the credibility and independence of the investigation into the criminal misconduct that occurred in the U.N. Oil-for-Food program. Robert Parton and Miranda Duncan's resignation from the Independent Inquiry Committee (IIC), and a lack of adequate explanation for their departure, only fuels concerns about the credibility of the IIC led by Mr. Volcker. His refusal to permit Mr. Parton and Ms. Miranda to cooperate with the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation (PSI) cannot stand. I have directed staff to issue subpoenas as soon as possible to Mr. Parton and Ms. Miranda to compel them to cooperate with PSI investigators. In order to preserve public confidence in the IIC investigation and the United Nations, it is vital to hear from these two individuals immediately.

We contacted St. Thomas senior Katie Kieffer and asked for her report on Ann Coulter's appearance at St. Thomas. Ms. Kieffer's report provides a valuable counterpoint to the columns by the Star Tribune's fatuous columnist as well as to Father Dease's condemnation of the event:

Here are my thoughts on the atmosphere at the Ann Coulter event. Please note that the quotes are accurate to the best of my knowledge, but since there was no recording of the speech, they may not be word-for-word.

About five days prior to the event, several members of the St. Thomas Standard staff and some of the College Republicans made and posted fliers all around campus advertising Ms. Coulter's talk. I had to personally replace these signs around campus every day because they were repeatedly torn down or defaced. The vandals wrote "sad" across Ann's forehead, wrote "man hands" on them, or drew Ann on a leopard-print couch on several of the fliers. These acts foreshadowed the inappropriate manner of several rioters who ended up attending Ms. Coulter's speech.

My sister, Amie Kieffer, the artist for the St. Thomas Standard, and freshman at UST, told me that she felt that the atmosphere prior to, and especially after Ms. Coulter's speech was very oppressive. For example, she said that before the speech, her Old Testament professor told one of the College Republican students in her class--in front of the rest of the class--that she did not hold Ann in high regard--basically degrading the speech before it happened, and saying she wouldn't go. When her roommate had another student ask her if she was going to the speech, and she said she didn’t know, the guy said: "I'm gonna go just because I hate her." Another guy told her that Ann sucked, and Amie asked why.

He said, "I don’t know that’s just what I’ve heard...and Amie said, "So what do you know about her?"..and he was like, "she is blond"… so that conversation didn’t really go anywhere because he didn’t have any facts....no one seems to!

My sister and I are both tired of repeatedly hearing from students who tell us that they did not attend the event, but think that Ann went over the line—that she’s mean, she’s a hater, she’s full of it, that she said things that were inappropriate, etc. None of these people can point to anything specific that she said...it’s all hearsay. Example: Amie’s other roommate—who hadn’t gone—came into her room saying: "Do you know this girl (Ann)? She is so racist...someone went to her speech and said all she did was diss black people...and who would want to listen to that?"

The truth is that Ms. Coulter was politically correct and professional. Students are spreading outright lies about Ann’s performance, and so, everyone has an opinion on the event--even students who did not attend!

There was a standing-room-only audience (meaning 750+ in attendance). Overall, the majority of the crowd was very pro-Ann, and very respectful--clapping and cheering loudly for her throughout the speech. The atmosphere was tense, however, because of a few inappropriate outbursts and cackling from the audience—especially in the balcony areas. At least one individual had to be escorted out of the room by security.

Ms. Coulter was very respectful and would respond with facts to those audience members who asked her questions. Sometimes she would respond with her quick wit, or would move on to the next person, if the questioner became extremely obnoxious.

At the beginning of Ms. Coulter's speech, one man in the third row stood up and started yelling things like "Bush is a Liar!" The first few rows were all reserved seating--mainly for students who had attended the reception with Ann prior to the event—so he should not have been there. Public Safety escorted him out of the room, as he yelled: "Someone told me to sit here!"

Also toward the beginning of her talk, Ms. Coulter made a reference to Bill Clinton. Upon hearing his name, several people in the balcony kept obnoxiously clapping and cheering for an extended period of time.

There were two individuals in the balcony who stood out for their inappropriate conduct during the question and answer session. The first one was a student who asked her: "What do you think about the Bible and especially the Sermon on the Mount?" Ann responded that she agreed with them, but before she was able to continue speaking, he interrupted her and said, "Well if that's all you can say, then Fuck you." He gave her the finger with both hands, and then stomped up the stairs.

The second individual waited in line to talk to Ann, and when he got to the microphone, said something like: "How can you call yourself a Christian since Jesus said 'Blessed are the Peacemakers'?" Ann looked a bit confused...he then added: "And I love my Muslim Friends too!" Ann responded (as he quickly walked away) that his statements seemed a bit contradictory, and then added: "Is this young man a student at this university, and if so, what are the SAT requirements to get in?" This student left the microphone right after he finished talking. He did not wait to hear Ms. Coulter's response, but immediately walked up the balcony stairs and left. This young man clearly was not interested in having any kind of respectful dialogue with Ms. Coulter. Rather he just wanted a platform to make his own personal--and confusing--statement.

The second to last person to ask Ann a question was a Vietnam veteran. He shared that he had served our country for over 30 years and said, "Thank you from the troops in Iraq" to Ms. Coulter. Before he was finished talking, someone in the audience obnoxiously shouted, "What is your question?" Not only did the audience fail to respect the speaker—Ms. Coulter—they had the boldness to mock a man who had served his country, and the rest of the U.S. troops!

After the event, I submitted a letter to the editor twice to the Star Tribune, which they never printed, in response to Nick Coleman’s first column. I thought that they would want to hear my perspective, since I had organized the event!

Here is the Letter to the Editor I received from one student who was upset that there was no similar response on the part of the University after Al Franken spoke here:

The liberal response to Ann Coulter's visit here at UST was distasteful and lacked any sort of intellectualism. Only a short time ago the champion of the left wing radio, Al Franken, visited our school and spoke about his political beliefs. Now someone on the right comes to school and the liberals go up in arms about her presence. This is a clear cut case of hypocrisy. I should remind my liberal counterparts about what liberal truly means. The basic premise of liberality is tolerance, open-mindedness, and diversity. Yet they not only ignore, but completely reject another point of view that varies from their own. When Ms. Coulter did arrive she was met with great negativity and rude behavior. These liberals are supposed to be part of the party for the lower classes, they should instead be known as the party of low class.

Dillon Donnelly--Sophomore, University of St. Thomas

I was very disappointed with the way that the other student newspaper, the Aquin, responded to the event. The editors said that Ann Coulter’s speech “concentrated on widening the divide that exists within our student body as well as within our community,” while the two peace activists who had also spoken that same week: Arun Gandhi and Francis Bok, were praised for having given “intriguing” speeches. The editors complain that she is an example of “pure negativity,” and then go on to complain about the immaturity of some of the members of the audience.

Although in reality the only ones in the audience who acted immature were liberal rioters, the Aquin editors claim that “the conservatives were so wrapped up in themselves that they had no tolerance for any liberal there on the mere basis that they were a liberal.” I have no idea what immature conservative words or actions the editors could be referring to in this comment! The editors complain that Coulter’s words were above “all the children” who were in the audience: In response, I would say: Shouldn’t speakers at a university speak at an adult’s not a child’s level, and secondly, the vast majority of the audience were students and community members—there were only handful of a middle-school-aged children—who found seats near the front! The editors conclude by saying that “People like Ann Coulter thrive on stirring up trouble so that everyone forgets the important issues we should be focusing on. People this close-minded are not going to help us come to rational solutions about social justice or learn to work as one. They are too focused on instructing us how to hate each other.” Actually, I think that the only ones who are close-minded in this picture are the editors of the Aquin.

It might have been a thoughtful gesture for the president of St. Thomas to contact Ms. Kieffer for her perspective on the event before he issued his condemnation of it. Her perspective might have given him pause; it might even have made him want to shift the identification of the source of the "hateful speech" he sought to condemn.

As we noted yesterday, Bill Frist's offer of a compromise on judicial nominations was a statesmanlike effort. It was scrupulously fair to both parties, constrained the majority just as it would the minority--more, really, since absent the compromise, the majority, Republican or Democrat, would always have the Constitutional option at its disposal--and effectuated the principle, endorsed by an overwhelming majority of Americans of both parties, that all judicial nominees should be voted on.

Harry Reid's response, as reported by the Washington Times, was childish and incoherent. Unable to deny the fairness or the logic or Frist's offer, Reid descended into babble:

[T]he Senate's top Democrat immediately expressed doubt about the proposal, calling it "a big wet kiss to the far right."

"I don't really like the proposal given, but I'm not going to throw it away," Mr. Reid said. "I'm going to work on it."

In his floor speech, Mr. Reid called Mr. Frist's proposal a "slow-motion nuclear option." "After 100 hours, the rights of the minority are extinguished," he said, acknowledging that the purpose of the filibusters hasn't been to continue debate on nominees, but simply to stop them.

"I say to everyone within the sound of my voice: 'Test us,' "he said. "Let's see how we can do in the future. I can't say there won't be any filibusters, but I think we're going to have a much better situation."

Reid's incoherence couldn't conceal what he didn't dare say out loud: obstruction is the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.

The Times also reads Frist's speech as confirming our prediction that Priscilla Owen will be the nominee whose case is used to break the filibuster.

On April 18 Ann Coulter spoke at the University of St. Thomas campus in St. Paul, Minnesota. When the Minneapolis Star Tribune's fatuous columnist wrote a characteristically bullying column accusing Coulter of "hate speech," he provoked a reaction among the administrators on campus. Before long, university president Father Dennis Dease issued a statement condemming Coulter's speech as "hateful," despite the fact that he had not attended it or deigned to designate what in the speech warranted his opprobrium.

I called Father Dease to ask exactly what he was condemning, and was referred to university spokesman Doug Hennes. Hennes seemed to have written Father Dease's statement on the speech and described himself as one of those in attendance on whom Father Dease had relied for a description of the speech's content. Hennes referred to "the way she treated people," ridiculing students who asked her critical questions, and certain elements of her speech that "crossed the line" and were "real controversial." He said that Coulter had advocated the invasion of "every Muslim country," for example, although he had not taken notes on the speech or listened to any recording of it. No report on the speech includes a quote advocating invasion of every Muslim country. Although Coulter might have been asked about her post-9/11 column on the subject, I don't think her speech included the statement Hennes immediately cited to me.

In the middle of the conversation Hennes asked me, "Did you see [the fatuous Star Tribune columnist's] column on the speech?" Dancing to the columnist's tune seemed to have more to do with Father Dease's statement than the merits of Coulter's speech.

The St. Thomas College newspaper is the Aquin. The Aquin news account of Coulter's speech (click here and here for the article in PDF) describes absolutely nothing that could fairly be characterized as "hateful speech." The Aquin's editorial (available only in PDF) on Coulter's speech equally criticized the behavior of both liberal and conservative students attending the speech: "One of the most disappointing things about Coulter coming to campus was how immature people acted. Both conservatives and liberals were on the defensive, yelling sarcastic comments at each other. The liberals knew what to expect from Coulter and unfortunately just reenforced the stereotypes she was trying to prove."

See also the report of St. Thomas law student Karin Moore, who attended the event and posted her observations on the Fraters Libertas site, and the report of Douglas, who posted a detailed account of the question-and-answer exchanges at Belief Seeking Understanding. Nothing in these reports tends to support Hennes's description of Coulter's alleged misconduct either.

On February 24 of this year, Al Franken spoke at the University of St. Thomas Law School in Minneapolis. I am informed that Franken bashed President Bush in Franken's usual style and that he spoke with "a potty mouth." In any event, I asked Hennes about Franken's speech. Hennes said that Franken's speech was not one of St. Thomas's "bright shinging moments" either. (Hennes hadn't attended Franken's speech.) I believe, however, that there was one notable difference. The funds for Franken's speaking fee came from St. Thomas, whereas Coulter's fee -- on which the Star Tribune's fatuous columnist harps -- was covered in full by Young America's Foundation. It involved no payment by the school or its students.

Coulter's appearance on campus was in part the handiwork of the admirable St. Thomas senior Katie Kieffer, who introduced Coulter before her St. Thomas appearance. Ms. Kieffer is a leader of the St. Thomas chapter of the College Republicans and the founder of the new conservative periodical The St. Thomas Standard. I met her a few weeks ago at the spring dinner of the Minnesota College Republicans. She is the kind of delightful, spirited, engaged student who makes St. Thomas such a successful school. Somebody owes her an apology for castigating her event; perhaps Father Dease will get around to it when he manages to fit a meeting with Ms. Kieffer into his schedule next month.

What is such a student to make of the spinelessness and double standards of her school's adult leadership? And what are we to conclude from the fact that the student editors of the college newspaper have rendered a judgment of Coulter's speech that is more measured than that of the school's president?

...was delivered by Ken Salazar, Democratic Senator from Colorado. In a television interview, Salazar called James Dobson and his group, Focus on the Family, "the anti-Christ." Salazar now says:

I spoke about Jim Dobson and his efforts and used the term 'the anti-Christ.' I regret having used that term. I meant to say this approach was un-Christian, meaning self-serving and selfish.

Oh, OK. Not the "anti-Christ," just "un-Christian." Glad you clarified that point, Senator. Salazar is a political novice, which may explain his ham-handed climb-down. But his explanation for his intemperate outburst does not inspire confidence:

Salazar added that his statement came after "being relentlessly attacked" in telephone calls, e-mails, newspapers and radio stations across Colorado.

This is a very curious rationale. If you run for the Senate (or the House, or pretty much any political office) you are guaranteed to be "relentlessly attacked." Indeed, in today's world, even amateur commentators like us are relentlessly attacked. The fact that one is "attacked" hardly justifies referring to one's political opponents as "the Anti-Christ" or "un-Christian." Imagine, for example, the outcry if President Bush so referred to those who attack him.

What is really striking about this controversy is the mildness of the "attack" to which Salazar refers. James Dobson was one of several leaders who participated in the "Justice Sunday" telecast, intended to rally support for the idea that the Senate should fulfill its Constitutional responsibility by voting on the President's judicial nominees. This, in itself, is hardly a controversial, let alone "un-Christian," political position. And it was expressed with extraordinary civility.

Radioblogger has transcripts of the principal speeches given on "Justice Sunday" by Bill Frist, Charles Colson, James Dobson and others. They are a model of rational discourse, replete with references to the Federalist Papers and other similarly unimpeachable authorities. No one ever suggests that the Democratic obstructionists are "the Anti-Christ," or "un-Christian," or any other epithet. Neither Ken Salazar nor any other Democratic Senator is mentioned by name. The general tenor of the discussion is far above the norm for contemporary American politics; in particular, it is more intelligent and more civil by light-years than would ever be observed at any gathering of Democrats, MoveOn fanatics, Kosites, etc.

Yet the mere fact that a group of people banded together to advance a political position in opposition to his own was enough to send Ken Salazar into a paroxysm of hate, calling them first "the Anti-Christ," and then, upon sober reflection, "un-Christian."

Salazar's meltdown can only be seen as another symptom of the radical dysfunction that now dominates the Democratic Party. One can't help noticing, too, how newspapers cover for the Democrats. The Denver Post doesn't question the logic of Salazar's excuse for his bizarre slander of James Dobson's organization. What's more, it offers a weirdly inept explanation for the benefit of those who may not have known what Salazar was talking about:

Salazar uttered the theological term ["the Anti-Christ"], popularized in the 1970s movie "The Omen," in an interview with a Colorado Springs television station about his war of words with the conservative Christian group.

Sure, that's where it came from. A 1970s movie.

UPDATE: A reader points out that Salazar's revised insult is bigoted:

Salazar's apoIogy is worse than the original. I am an un-Christian. Why does that make me "self-serving and selfish"? Can you imagine the outcry from liberal groups if a conservative Christian leader called opposition "un-Christian, meaning self-serving and selfish"?

Good point. The kindest thing we could say is that Ken Salazar is not ready for prime time.

Dartmouth alum John MacGovern writes in answer to questions regarding the irregularities that have plagued the trustee election whose deadline has now been extended to May 6 (references to email attachments in the message have been omitted):

There have been all sorts of election irregularities in the Dartmouth trustee election, extending the election deadline was NOT one of them. I, for one, sent a strongly worded email to John Walters, chairman of the Ballot Committee of the Association of Alumni, asking for an extension till May 6. My primary reason was that paper ballots had gone out two to three weeks late. Now that’s a big deal in a seven week election period. He relented.

Let me list some of the irregularities.

1) Voting period began on March 7 (and was to end at 5pm on April 22). March 7 was the day one could vote electronically. However, paper ballots weren’t mailed out till two to three weeks later and the voting period was nearly half over. (You and I know that, as a general rule, members of older more conservative classes would not have or be nimble with email and would require instead paper ballots to vote.)

2) On March 10, I received two candidate emails from the Association of Alumni. One was from Ric Lewis, backed by the administration; the other was from Todd Zywicki, a petition candidate. Many alumni received the Ric Lewis email and not Zywicki’s. This was called a “glitch” by Patsy Fisher-Harris and John Walters. Isn’t that what Nixon’s secretary said when asked about the gap in the White House tapes? “There was a glitch”.

3) I sent a letter to 2200 alumni asking them to let me know if they had NOT received either a paper ballot or the election email allowing them to vote electronically. I received dozens of responses. Some said though they had constantly received fundraising letters from the College they received no paper ballot.

4) The Ballot Committee met today and voted not to answer some basic, public information kind of questions about the third party vendor being used to do the mailings and validate and tabulate the votes.

5) The candidates are forbidden from “campaigning.” However, [Dartmouth President] Jim Wright is campaigning, the administration(deans, provost) is campaigning, and members of the faculty are campaigning. Former trustees, former presidents of the Council, a current member of the executive committee of the Association of Alumni(the court of final appeal in this election), the whole array of former party bosses, all are campaigning through Alumni for a Strong Dartmouth. For three months the pictures and bios of the administration backed candidates were up on the official Dartmouth College website. Also, for three months, on the same website there was an official ‘steaming video’ endorsement of these same candidates by the current president of the Alumni Council. No wonder they have this rule against “campaigning”. It is meant to make it impossible for petition candidates to win.

Only there is a small problem, it isn’t working. TJ Rodgers won last year, in spite of these restrictions and with, a whopping, 55% of the vote in a four-way race.

And, again this year, I am convinced that, if the votes are tabulated accurately, Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki will win.

Best,

John MacGovern, President
Hanover Institute

Last night we noted that Dartmouth College has hired its first "sustainability director," Jim Merkel. The Dartmouth Daily story on Merkel's hiring reported that Merkel -- "who is currently bicycing through Spain to promote his book 'Radical Simplicity'" -- has lived "on only $5,000 a year -- close to the global average income -- for the past 14 years."

We have been flooded with email responding to our post on Mr. Merkel. Speaking most concisely for several of our readers is Mark James, who observes of Mr. Merkel's budget: "All the more remarkable when you consider that the round trip to Spain alone is about $1,000 from New York."

Roger Simon spills the beans, I guess. What does it all mean? Beats us. We'll keep you advised as events occur. Basically, we're looking at a banding together of the blogosphere to try to inject some economic benefit into the enterprise for everyone. If you're a blogger, check with Roger to sign up.

...by President Bush tonight. President Bush can be his own best spokesman. For whatever reasons, he doesn't like doing press conferences. But if I were advising him, I would tell him to do a press conference every thirty days. He stands head and shoulders above his Democratic rivals, intellectually, politically, and morally. What I don't know is, was anyone watching?

Some will be upset about his suggestion that Social Security could be means tested, and understandably so, since if that proposal were enacted, the people who pay the most into the Social Security program will get the least out of it. Frankly, however, I think some kind of means test is inevitable. More than twenty years ago, I began retirement planning on the assumption that all of my Social Security payments have been a complete waste, and I will never get a nickel out of the program. I'm willing to accept that outcome, in exchange for a system in which everyone, not just upper-income workers, can save money and accumulate wealth instead of relying on checks from the government.

Senator Bill Frist has just delivered a speech on the Senate floor, proposing a compromise to end the threat of judicial filibusters. His proposal, in a nutshell, is that the parties agree that 1) no Supreme Court or Court of Appeals nominees will be filibustered by the minority, and 2) no such nominees will be blocked in the Judiciary Committee, presumably by the majority. The effect of the agreement would be that all appellate court nominees would get an up or down vote on the Senate floor. The speech is here. He has also written a letter to Harry Reid, communicating the proposed compromise.

The proposal sounds like a good idea to me. The idea of assuring a vote is supported by the vast majority of Americans. Bottling judges up in the Judiciary Committee was a principal excuse the Democrats used for the filibuster. The quid pro quo seems fair, regardless of which party is in the majority at any given time. And the compromise would ratify what has actually been the practice in the Senate for most of its history.

Will the Democrats accept? I think they might, since they know (at least, I think they know) that the Republicans have the votes needed to change the Senate rule and ban the filibuster with respect to judges. For the Democrats, it comes down to a political calculation. The first part of the calculation is, if they reject the compromise and force the Republicans to proceed with the Constitutional option, do they gain or lose votes? Notwithstanding their bravado, my guess is that the Democrats fear they will be the political losers if they go to the wall for the principle that a minority should be able to block a judicial nominee from receiving a vote.

But the calculation has a second stage: whatever the general public may think, do Democratic Senators risk losing the support and enthusiasm of important elements of their base if they stop short of doing everything possible to block President Bush's judges? I suspect that they do. Among the Democrats' richest and most fervent supporters, this may be the number one issue. So Senator Frist's proposal puts the Democrats in a very difficult position.

That's how it looks to me at first glance, anyway.

Last night we noted that Dartmouth College has hired its first "sustainability director," Jim Merkel. The Dartmouth Daily story on Merkel's hiring reported that Merkel -- "who is currently bicycing through Spain to promote his book 'Radical Simplicity'" -- has lived "on only $5,000 a year -- close to the global average income -- for the past 14 years." The article also notes the students instrumental in Merkel's hiring, including Jessie Doyle '05, co-chair of the Environmental Studies Division of the Dartmouth Outing Club.

Reader Michael Dudley has a few related questions:

Has Jessie Doyle volunteered to live on $5K per year, following in the footsteps of his hero?

If it is true (read on) that Professor Director Merkel lives on $5K/year, does he accept the Earned Income Credit when he files his tax return? (Would it not be a fascinating thing to actually look at his return?)

If he biked through several states, as he is now “bicycling through Spain”, and earned more than $300 in each state, was he required to file state returns?

Is it really possible to live on $5K/year without taking advantage of the “commons” of others? As the IRS considers “trading” of valuable things to be a production of income, was Merkel’s income, at $13.00 per day, underreported?

Where did Merkel live, or, more properly, how did Merkel put a roof over his head, purchase food and clothing, and pay for all those expensive bicycle tires on $13.00 a day? After all, the mere fact that a motel has a sign out front that says “Motel 6” does not mean you can get a room for $6. In fact, it now means you can get a room for $41.99 per day if you wish to stay in Senatobia, Mississippi (per Motel 6’s website).

How did he not starve? Even if you eat at one of my favorites, Waffle House, three times a day, it is just plain ‘ol gonna’ cost ya’ more than 13 bucks a day to eat, it you count tippin’ the waitress (sorry, “wait-person”).

Obviously, Mr. Merkel is one of the oft-lamented “uninsured” who visits the emergency room when he falls off his bike, as there is no possible way in Hades he has health insurance on the 20 cents he has left over each day after paying for food and lodging. Therefore, I pay for Merkel’s health care when he busts his “sustainable” head.

Further, I am very pleased that Mr. Merkel, after his retirement, will certainly receive more dollars from the Social Security system that he has paid in. It is only fitting, after all, that we “sustain” him in his dotage, as he is such a role-model for us all.

In opposing the filibuster in 1993 and 1994, the Minneapolis Star Tribune apparently led the way for its betters among the mainstream media. Free Republic has posted the text of the still-timely January 1, 1995 New York Times editorial: "Time to retire the filibuster." Here is the Times's 1995 teaching:

The U.S. Senate likes to call itself the world's greatest deliberative body. The greatest obstructive body is more like it. In the last season of Congress, the Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, that he is now willing to forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him.

For years Senate filibusters--when they weren't conjuring up romantic images of Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Smith, passing out from exhaustion on the Senate floor--consisted mainly of negative feats of endurance. Senator Sam Ervin once spoke for 22 hours straight. Outrage over these tactics and their ability to bring Senate business to a halt led to the current so-called two-track system, whereby a senator can hold up one piece of legislation while other business goes on as usual.

The two-track system has been nearly as obstructive as the old rules. Under those rules, if the Senate could not muster the 60 votes necessary to end debate and bring a bill to a vote, someone had to be willing to continue the debate, in person, on the floor. That is no longer required. Even if the 60 votes are not achieved, debate stops and the Senate proceeds with other business. The measure is simply put on hold until the next cloture vote. In this way a bill can be stymied at any number of points along its legislative journey.

One unpleasant and unforeseen consequence has been to make the filibuster easy to invoke and painless to pursue. Once a rarely used tactic reserved for issues on which senators held passionate convictions, the filibuster has become the tool of the sore loser, dooming any measure that cannot command the 60 required votes.

Mr. Harkin, along with Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, now proposes to make such obstruction harder. Mr. Harkin says reasonably that there must come a point in the process where the majority rules. This may not sit well with some of his Democratic colleagues. They are now perfectly positioned to exact revenge by frustrating the Republican agenda as efficiently as Republicans frustrated Democrats in 1994.

Admirably, Mr. Harkin says he does not want to do that. He proposes to change the rules so that if a vote for cloture fails to attract the necessary 60 votes, the number of votes needed to close off debate would be reduced by three in each subsequent vote. By the time the measure came to a fourth vote--with votes occurring no more frequently than every second day--cloture could be invoked with only a simple majority. Under the Harkin plan, minority members who feel passionately about a given measure could still hold it up, but not indefinitely.

Another set of reforms, more incremental but also useful, is proposed by George Mitchell, who is retiring as the Democratic majority leader. He wants to eat away at some of the more annoying kinds of brakes that can be applied to a measure along its legislative journey.

One example is the procedure for sending a measure to a conference committee with the House. Under current rules, unless the Senate consents unanimously to send a measure to conference, three separate motions can be required to move it along. This gives one senator the power to hold up a measure almost indefinitely. Mr. Mitchell would like to reduce the number of motions to one.

He would also like to limit the debate on a motion to two hours and count the time consumed by quorum calls against the debate time of a senator, thus encouraging senators to save their time for debating the substance of a measure rather than in obstruction. All of his suggestions seem reasonable, but his reforms would leave the filibuster essentially intact.

The Harkin plan, along with some of Mr. Mitchell's proposals, would go a long way toward making the Senate a more productive place to conduct the nation's business. Republicans surely dread the kind of obstructionism they themselves practiced during the last Congress. Now is the perfect moment for them to unite with like-minded Democrats to get rid of an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose.

The Free Republic thread includes Senator Cornyn's March 10, 2005 letter to the editor regarding the Times editorial earlier that week. We yield the floor to Senator Cornyn:

"The Senate on the Brink" (editorial, March 6) supports the "historic role of the filibuster," which is a curious position for a newspaper that 10 years ago said filibusters were "the tool of the sore loser" and should be eliminated ("Time to Retire the Filibuster," editorial, Jan. 1, 1995).

Federal judicial appointments have certainly been controversial, but surely all Americans can agree that the rules for confirming judges should be the same regardless of which party has a majority.

Now you praise the filibuster as a "time-honored Senate procedure." In 1995, when Bill Clinton was president, you called it "an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose."

You disparage the Republicans' view that 51 votes should be enough for judicial confirmation. Yet the 51-vote rule is a consistent Senate tradition. By calling for an end to filibusters, the Senate is simply contemplating restoring its traditions by traditional methods you disparage as "nuclear," even though they were once endorsed by such leading Democrats as Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Charles E. Schumer and Robert C. Byrd.

Senator Cornyn, don't forget the leading Democrats who man the editorial board of the Minneapolis Star Tribune!

Paul Greenberg in the Washington Times identifies the latest Democratic Senator to attack the rights of Christian fundamentalists. It's Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, who finds it inappropriate for Christians (or at least a certain type of Christian) to invoke religion in support of a certain kind of political position (conservative). He fears that doing so could "make the followers of Jesus Christ just another kind of special interest group."

The problems with Pryor's position is that it treats the followers of Jesus Christ as inferior to members of ordinary special interest groups. Members of every other group can invoke their core values and beliefs in public policy discussions. But certain kinds of Christians are told by Pryor, his fellow Democrats, and the scolds in the MSM that they shouldn't do so.

Greenberg isn't too concerned though:

Anyone, including a U.S. senator, who thinks he can keep religious ideas out of the political arena here must be talking about, well, a different country. France, maybe, or the old Soviet Union. Or Mexico in one of its anti-clerical seizures.

Or the United States our liberals are striving to create.

It isn't just the Minneapolis Star Tribune that's suffering from memory loss when it comes to past positions about filibustering judicial nominees (see John's post below). Senator Joe Biden has the same affliction, and even less of an excuse since he's an individual, not an institution (an individual with a history of problems regarding what he did and did not say or write). The Washington Times notes that, in an appearance on ABC's "This Week," Biden flatly denied having said in 1997 that judicial nominees are entitled to an up-or-down Senate floor vote. Yet according to the Congressional Record, Biden stated just that on March 19, 1997:

I respectfully suggest that everyone who is nominated is entitled to have a shot, to have a hearing and to have a shot to be heard on the floor and have a vote on the floor. . . .It is not appropriate not to have hearings on them, not bring them to the floor and not to allow a vote.

The Strib has acknowledged its error. Will Biden? If so, how will he explain the inconsistency in his substantive position.

I've been a fan of former Georgia Senator Zell Miller since early 2003, when I posted my first in this long running series of notes and explanations for my assessment of him. This is the seventeenth in a series that began in March of that year.

I wrote then that the list of acceptable Democrats was admittedly a short one, but I provided a list of reasons why Miller rated his status as our favorite. I pointed to the terrific Wall Street Journal column that he had recently published ("Mr. Moonves, call off your hillbilly hunt"). The piece made me reflect that I had liked everything I've read by and about Senator Miller.

I found more reasons to like him when I took a look at his incredible (now removed) Web site. First, Senator Miller featured his support of the president's proposed tax cut right from the git-go on his home page, with what appeared to be his trademark good humor: "Just as that first tax cut passed in 2001 with bipartisan support, I have no doubt the same will happen with this one. As the line in that old hymn says, when the roll is called up yonder on the President’s tax cut, I will not be the only Democrat voting for it, I guarantee it."

Second, the guy has an awesome life story. The highlight: "Miller's passions are education, history, baseball and music. He is a walking baseball encyclopedia who is equally at home at the Grand Ol' Opry or Symphony Hall. When he learned that the classical music he loves could help foster development in newborns, he distributed classical music CDs to parents of newborns in a nationally acclaimed program called 'Beethoven for Babies.' He has written five books, including 'Corps Values: Everything You Need To Know I Learned in the Marines' about how his three-year enlistment in the Marines turned his life around as a young man in the 1950s."

Third, the guy has good taste in people. His photo gallery included shots with the following "good people": Billy Graham, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Isaac Hayes, Barbara Mandrell, Dolly Parton, Little Richard, "James Brown, the godfather of soul," Emmylou Harris, and Dale Earnhardt. Above is the photo of Senator Miller with Earnhardt from the mid-1990s.

Fourth, the guy has read enough books to have ten favorites. And they're good ones too, substantial books like A Stillness at Appomattox and Lonesome Dove, not The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

In anticipation of Senator Miller's keynote speech at the Republican Convention last September, NRO posted John Miller's interview with Senator Miller: "Raising Zell." Quotable quote:

NRO: Why aren't there more Zell Millers in the Democratic party?

MILLER: The Democratic tent has shrunk to the size of a dunce cap. There's no room for conservatives like me. We used to have moderates and conservatives in the party. Then they ran us all out.

One more:

NRO: Cynthia McKinney, the former congresswoman, has reemerged in Georgia as the Democratic nominee in Georgia' 4th congressional district.

MILLER: Yes, she has.

NRO: Any thoughts on that?

MILLER: They're not printable.

And here's the quote that necessitated part 15 of our continuing series on Senator Miller:

NRO: Who will win the presidential election?

MILLER: Bush is going to win and it will be wider than we think right now. As more and more people turn on this election, George W. Bush is going to look better and better and his opponent is going to look weaker and weaker. Who is it we feel more secure with in the White House? The answer to that is President Bush. I have never been more proud to support a president. I admire his leadership and character. I'm glad to have lived long enough to vote for a person like him.

Last October the Washington Times carried Senator Miller's terrific column, necessitating the sixteenth in our series of posts dedicated to Senator Miller: "Iwo Jima, if covered by media today."

Tonight RealClearPolitics has posted "A letter to Chris Matthews" by Cecil Stanton, requiring this latest installment in our series:

Mr. Chris Matthews
Host, MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews
400 North Capitol Street, Suite 850
Washington, DC 20001

Dear Chris,

We understand that you will be airing tonight on Hardball, the famous segment from the Republican National Convention in which former Senator Zell Miller challenged you to a duel. It was a dramatic moment in television and we’re so pleased that you have been able to use the segment as a promo to boost the show’s ratings for the last 9 months.

We are even more pleased that you will be playing it again tonight as it will be a great publicity hit for Senator Miller’s new book A Deficit of Decency.

The only question is, in Senator Miller’s absence tonight, will you tell the whole story as to why he was angry with your comments? In chapter 6 (Hardball Huff) of A Deficit of Decency, Zell explains that the reason he challenged you is that before he came on the set you claimed he was an “old time seggy.”

Will you renounce your baseless claim that Senator Miller is a segregationist?

As you may know, following Senator Miller’s challenge, CNBC took and online poll in which they asked who would win the duel. You, of course, received 14% of the vote while Senator Miller garnered 86%.

We wonder if that will be part of the discussion tonight.

Sincerely,
Cecil Staton
President
Stroud and Hall Publishers

Check out the letter as posted on RCP for links to the original Hardball transcript and to the site for Senator Miller's new book.

On Monday, we did this post about the fact that the Minneapolis Star Tribune was fervently anti-filibuster during the Clinton administration ("the putrid flood of verbiage known as a filibuster"), but has changed its tune now that the Democrats are using the filibuster to block President Bush and the Senate's Republicans. Our post drew an outraged respose from the Strib's Deputy Editor, Jim Boyd, who claimed that the paper had never advocated changing the filibuster rule. We responded that this was plainly untrue, inasmuch as, in our original post, we quoted a Strib editorial dated September 30, 1994, which said: "[Reformers] should crusade for changes in Senate procedures that would prevent an obstructionist minority from delaying action indefinitely."

Today we got an email from Jim Boyd, titled "Oops." It said:

John: Re. the filibuster: I was looking only at the one 1993 editorial about filibusters. There was a second editorial in 1994, in which we endorsed a Don Fraser proposal for revising senate rules. We'd missed the second one in a search we did before running our Sunday editorial. We found it about half an hour ago. I think you actually have caught us in a contradiction. We can change our mind, as we did on light rail, but in this case, we really didn't. We simply missed the precedent and, like a court, if we make such a shift, we owe readers an explanation for why we did it.

They would have found the 1994 editorial a lot quicker, of course, if they'd actually read our post before attacking it so vociferously. We not only quoted from the 1994 editorial, but reproduced it in full. But that's OK. To err is human, and we've made a mistake or two ourselves. We appreciate Jim's candid communication. We have good friends at the Star Tribune, and cordial relationships with many reporters and editors there. We're happy to accept his acknowledgement in that spirit.

I really do wonder, though: is the Star Tribune's editorial board actually going to try to explain why it advocated terminating the filibuster when the Republicans were in the minority, but considers it a bulwark of democracy now that the Democrats are using it? If so, it should be interesting.

Catching up with the dead tree version of yesterday's Wall Street Journal, I found one of the best interviews I've read in the Journal in quite a while. Journal staff reporter Steven Gray interviewed Burger King chief executive officer and turnaround artist Greg Brenneman regarding the progress he has made in improving the company's performance over the past year. Brenneman is a 43-year-old Harvard MBA with an already impressive track record. What struck me about the interview was Brenneman's straight talk.

The interview ran under the heading "Flipping Burker King" and is available online only to subscribers. Here are just a few highlights:

WSJ: Do you feel the need to change the menu to appease fast-food critics?

Mr. Brenneman: No pressure at all. You should be able to come to Burger King and get a healthy, low-calorie, low-fat meal. You can. Beyond that, I don't think it's my job to tell Americans what they should eat. We might as well go back to communism.

Well, that's what caught my attention, and it is the highlight of the interview. But I also enjoyed the follow-up:

WSJ: Do you think fast-food makes people fat?

Mr. Brenneman: Life is about everything in moderation. But you can eat at Burger King at every single meal, every single day and actually have a moderated diet, depending on what you eat. Or, you can eat at Burger King or McDonald's or Wendy's or Subway and not have a moderated diet. It's choice.

WSJ: When do you expect to have a trans-fat-free product mix?

Mr. Brenneman: The trans-fat-free issue is an interesting one, and one we're working on, both in Europe, which is a little ahead of the US, and here. The real question is: How do you do that? Do you come up with a trans-fat-free oil? Or do you have a substitute product that's trans-fat-free? I think us and most of our competitors have found it's hard to do something trans-fat-free that tastes good. We're working on a trans-fat-free oil. I don't think we'll get left in the dust on this one.

WSJ: What do you eat?

Mr. Brenneman: I'm a Double Whopper fanatic. What I go in for on a regular basis is the salad. With chicken on it, it's terrific. You can put reasonable dressing on it and have a terrific meal if you need to watch your girlish figure.

WSJ: Haven't you lost weight since you've been at Burger King ?

Mr. Brenneman: I've lost about 25 to 30 pounds. If you eat Burger King three times a day, it's amazing, it's great dieting [laughs]....A few months back, after I gained my Burger King 10 [pounds], sampling products...I just started cutting back and eating the salads a lot.

Having conceded he put on his Burger King 10 eating the good stuff, Brenneman pours it on with the claim that he lost 30 pounds eating salads at Burger King. I buy it completely!

We have closely followed events involving the pending election of two trustees to the Dartmouth College board. Today National Review Online catches up with the story in a big way, with Alston Ramsay's detailed report on the Dartmouth administration's flagrant violation of the applicable rules: "Getting hell from Hanover." Given mysterious foul-ups in the delivery of ballots by mail, the deadline for voting has been extended from April 22 to May 6. We support petition candidates Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki. If you're a Dartmouth alum and you haven't yet voted, please do so now.

On a note related to the critique of the Dartmouth administration advanced by Robinson and Zywicki in their candidacies, Dartlog reports that Dartmouth has added a bureaucratic "sustainability director" to its payroll. This particular sustainability director believs in restructuring society to contract our "ecological footprint." Robinson and Zywicki, on the other hand, believe in contracting the Dartmouth administration in order to increase the number of teachers in the classroom and sustain the college's traditional teacher-student ratio. The Daily Dartmouth covers the story in "Merkel appointed first sustainability director."

I'm home again after subbing for Hugh Hewitt, along with Mitch Berg and Captain Ed Morrissey. It was a fun show, and one of the highlights was an interview with Senator Norm Coleman. He had a very clear message: President Bush's judicial nominees are going to get an up or down vote. All of them. I asked Senator Coleman point-blank whether he was telling our listeners that the Republicans have the votes to end the filibuster. Norm answered: "Yes, we've got the votes." To my knowledge, that's the most direct confirmation yet, by a Republican in a position to know, that the votes are there.

Norm also confirmed that he's a regular Power Line reader, and commented on our post showing that the Minneapolis Star Tribune has changed its position on the filibuster, now that the Senate Democrats are in the minority. More about that in a moment.

We're all big fans of Tony Snow here at Power Line, and that goes twice over for our wives. So the good news of the month is that Tony has returned to work at Fox News Radio with his nationally syndicated talk show. And the good news is supplemented by the udpates posted on his Tony Snow site. Today Tony is pressing the important story of the independent counsel report that some would prefer to see deep-sixed: "Coverup?"

The editors of the Wall Street Journal explain that, given the outcome of the various trials and investigations of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, one of two things is true. Either the story was over-hyped last year or our government -- the Bush administration, the U.S. military, and independent investigators such as former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger -- has perpetrated a massive cover-up.

The Journal thinks it's a case of the former -- an overhyped story, in an election year, with the goal of "stripping the Iraq War of moral authority and turning President Bush into another LBJ." Ted Kennedy, among others, apparently thinks it's the latter -- a perfidious refusal to punish the guilty. But, given the outcome of the many inquiries and legal proceedings on the matter and the evidence presented therein, the burden should rest with Kennedy and his fellow leftists to substantiate their claims of whitewash. Until they do, we should assume that these claims are asserted a priori, based on a combination of desire for political gain and raw contempt for the military and for our government in general.

The Trunk noted earlier today that the President of St. Thomas University, where Ann Coulter gave a speech last week, issued a statement denouncing her talk, and branding it as "hate speech." (This was without the benefit of having heard the speech, of course.) A local newspaper columnist wrote, I believe, two columns making the same charge.

Meanwhile, some actual hate speech has occurred on Air America, where--not for the first time--the program's liberal hosts have encouraged the assassination of President Bush. Matt Drudge has the story:

The announcer: "A spoiled child is telling us our Social Security isn't safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here's your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little bastard. [audio of gun being cocked]."

The audio production at the center of the controversy aired during opening minutes of The Randi Rhodes Show.

"What is with all the killing?" Rhodes said, laughing, after the clip aired.

We have commented a number of times on the frequency with which liberals advocate the assassination of President Bush. Sometimes it's supposed to be funny. Sometimes it's supposed to be art. Sometimes it's just flat-out, unvarnished hate. But I'm not aware of a single Democratic official who has criticized those who advocate assassinating the President.

It will be interesting to see whether the President of St. Thomas and our local columnists will take an interest in actual hate speech, as opposed to speech with which they disagree.

The New York Post reported this morning on the capture of Zarqawi's laptop in a special forces ambush that almost netted the terrorist himself. Supposedly, the laptop is a treasure trove of information about Zarqawi's international terror network.

The story that has appeared about the ambush is that Zarqawi was riding in a vehicle with one of his top aides. They apparently got wind of the ambush and turned around; the American soldiers pursued them and did capture the vehicle and the aide. But by that time Zarqawi was gone, apparently having escaped from the vehicle. It does seem odd, though, that if the laptop had so much information about his network, he didn't take it with him.

Fox News picked up on our post about the Minneapolis Star Tribune's shifting attitude toward filibusters, depending on who is doing the filibustering. Brit Hume talked about it on his Special Report show last night, and it's on Hume's Political Grapevine on Fox's site as well. Brit also covers the attack on John Bolton by Frederick Vreeland, which we wrote about here and here, and the bogus Washington Post/ABC News poll that we discussed here. Tony Snow talked about the Strib's flip-flop on his radio show yesterday as well.

Tonight from 5 to 8 central time, Mitch Berg, Captain Ed and I will be filling in for Hugh Hewitt on his radio show.

And this afternoon at around 4:40 central time I'll be on Larry Kudlow's CNBC program discussing Bolton, the filibuster, and Social Security. I was excited to learn that Steve Forbes will be on, too; I've been a fan of his for a long time.

The Los Angeles Times reports on the information received by the government from "milliennium bomber" Ahmed Ressam who was apprehended by an alert American customs agent when the bomber tried to enter the United States: "Records show man in LAX plot gave U.S. key terrorist details." The article also reports that Ressam has apparently stopped talking. The information reported in the Times story has become available in connection with the pending sentencing of Ressam:

The documents filed to influence [sentencing Judge] Coughenour's decision offer details about Ressam's central role in the U.S. counter-terrorism campaign.

They also indicate that senior Bush administration law enforcement and intelligence officials remain convinced that Islamic terrorist organizations pose a grave threat to U.S. interests here and abroad despite four years of aggressive measures.

Tony Blankley's Washington Times column today makes the related observation that "it seems both Washington and the public have hit the snooze button." Blankley's column is "Political attention deficit disorder."

Undergraduate students at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul had the temerity to invite Ann Coulter to speak on campus last week. Coulter was the guest of the St. Thomas chapter of the College Republicans and the Standard, the new campus conservative publication. The local papers didn't actually cover Coulter's St. Thomas speech, although the Star Tribune's fatuous columnist wrote a characteristically fatuous column on her talk in which he called it (what else?) "hate speech." I guess he should know.

On Monday the president of St. Thomas (Father Dennis Dease) issued a statement condemning Coulter's speech: "Coulter's talk tests controversial issues statement." Father Dease himself didn't attend the speech, but he heard about it:

[T]he reports I have heard from people whose views I respect suggest that her performance went far beyond the bounds of what is commonly accepted as civil discourse. Although her presentation may have been meant as an “act” or “shtick” to entertain by provoking those who disagree, such behavior unfortunately contributes to the growing dark side of our culture — a disrespect for persons and their sincerely held beliefs. Such hateful speech vulgarizes our culture and goes against everything the University of St. Thomas stands for.

As an adjunct professor at St. Thomas, I'm curious whose reports Father Dease heard before issuing this statement. I also wonder what specifically in the reports of Coulter's speech exceeded the bounds of civil discourse. Yesterday the Star Tribune reported Father Dease's condemnation of Coulter's speech: "St. Thomas president denounces Ann Coulter's speech as hateful." Star Tribune reporter Matt McKinney apparently didn't find it necessary to ask any follow-up questions of Father Dease concerning his condemnation; anyone looking for reference to the offending passages of Coulter's speech won't find it in McKinney's article. Blogger Matt May comments in "Journalism 101." (Thanks to reader Gerald Sabatini.)

UPDATE: Reader Cedric Long writes to advise us that the Star Tribune has removed Matt McKinney's story from its site and replaced it with an AP story that includes brief quotes from Coulter's speech deriving from the unidentified Star Tribune column to which we alluded in the post above.

UPDATE 2: Mckinney's story is available here, and I have changed the bad link in the post above to reflect it. (Thanks to Hiram Hover, who thinks that calling Ted Kennedy a "human dirigible" and Barbara Boxer "learning disabled" qualifies as "hateful speech." He apparently thinks he can speak for Father Dease on that score.)

In his great 1838 Lyceum speech "The perpetuation of our political institutions," Abraham Lincoln decried the dangers of mob rule represented by recent lynchings in Mississippi and St. Louis. Foremost on his mind, however, seems to have been the lynching at Alton, Illinois on November 7, 1837 of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy.

Recent events at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois have picked up where they left off in Alton with Mr. Lovejoy. The lynching in progress involves SIU history professor Jonathan Bean. Bean's crime? Nowadays in southern Illinois it apparently takes far less to provoke the mob than something as radical as preaching abolitionism in 1837. Bean's provocation was the assignment as optional reading for his history class the 2001 Frontpage column on the Bay area black-on-white serial killings of the early '70s ("Remembering the Zebra killings" by James Lubinskas).

Bean is the SIU history department's only Republican; the leader of the mob against Bean is one of the department's flaming Marxists. The extreme wrongdoing on display in this Frontpage article almost defies belief: "Academic witch hunt."

UPDATE: Reader Blake Mahan directs us to today's article in the Daily Egyptian for the latest installment in this saga: "History department struggles with article issue." The last sentence of the article describes the purported basis for the ferocious assault on Professor Bean: "Professors against Bean said the debate revolves around the use of improper sourcing and not whether or not he had a right to distribute the article."

Although I've been skeptical, it really is starting to look like the French voters will reject the EU Constitution. At least that's how the Weekly Standard's Christopher Caldwell sees it. Since the EU is an essentially French creation, and its proposed constitution a quintessentially French document (it contains 448 articles compared to seven in the U.S. Constitution), its defeat at the hands of French voters would be monumental, though not necessarily dispositive.

President Chirac went on television recently to try to rally support. The nation was mostly uninterested -- his ratings barely exceeded those of the Clint Eastwood movie "Pale Rider" and, among younger viewers, lagged behind "Nouvelle Star," the French version of American Idol. Given Chirac's performance, though, he may have been lucky that more didn't watch.

According to Caldwell, Etienne Chouard, a French "shop" teacher at a high school in Marseilles, now leads the charge against the constitution through his website, which resembles a blog. Chouard appeals to readers with lines like this one: "I believe that it is fundamentally undemocratic to propose a constitution that is so difficult to read." If only the drafters of the EU constitution had been able to write this directly.

The Democrats put on a sad spectacle at the Capitol today, rallying their armies of the ignorant to oppose any reform in the Social Security system:

This really is demagoguery at its worst. Federal employees already have a private contribution plan. No member of Congress relies on Social Security for his or her retirement. I doubt whether any Democratic member of Congress really believes that Social Security reform would be a bad thing. But naked politics rules, and the Democrats are once again betting that the ill-informed will be a majority on this issue.

In a pitifully inadequate counterpoint to the Democrats' raucous, partisan demonstration, Secretary of the Treasury John Snow participated in "Teach Children to Save Day" by giving a talk on the importance of being thrifty to a fifth-grade class in the District:

Of course those children would be better off saving than hoping to someday receive government checks. But the Social Security program makes it impossible for many millions of Americans to save, by sucking up the 15% of their incomes that otherwise could be available for saving. By making saving impossible, it relegates millions of Americans to retirement on the dole, at the whim of Congress. This doesn't apply to wealthy or prosperous Americans, who save through 401(k) programs and other vehicles, and essentially ignore the Social Security system, but Social Security destroys the potential for a secure, independent retirement for many millions of blue collar and middle-income Americans. The Democratic Party's cynical exploitation of these people is one of the scandals of the current political era.

E.J. Dionne writes about the "revolt of the middle." He's referring to the alleged turning away by moderate voters from President Bush as the result of Bush's alleged decision to interpret the 2004 election as a mandate to implement immoderate policies. There are a few problems with this theory. One is the author himself, a liberal Democrat known more for wishful thinking than for being in-tune with moderate America. The second is the lack of evidence that Bush has moved to the right since the election. Dionne cites the president's attempt to reform social security. But that's something Bush has been promising to do since he ran in 2000. Hard to see a betrayal of the moderates here.

The president has filled a number of high level positions since being re-elected. But the elevation of first administration players like Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzales does not reflect a move to the right. Indeed, no one disputes that Gonzales (sadly) is more moderate than his predecessor, John Ashcroft. The controversial judges Bush wants the Senate to vote on are the same ones he has asked them to vote on for years. John Bolton was an immoderate choice for U.N. ambassador. But was nominating him a less moderate act than going to war without the U.N.'s approval? Finally, Bush signed a law granting the federal courts jurisdiction over the Terri Schiavo case. But Dionne cites no evidence that the rather perfunctory act of signing a bill passed by Congress has alienated the middle.

Dionne relies on a poll taken by a Democratic consortium. But Dionne cites no result from this poll that allows any conclusions about Bush's current standing with voters, much less a comparison of that standing to "pre-revolt" levels. If one looks, by contrast, at the president's approval rating, one finds that it's at 48 percent (on average), which is about where it has been for the past year. To the extent it was any higher on election day (and I don't think there's any statistically significant evidence that it was), the difference likely has more to do with gas prices than any policy-driven revolt.

Last night I did a post about the latest attack on John Bolton, by a former State Department official named Frederick Vreeland. Vreeland embodies the failed anti-American and anti-Israel ideology that infected the State Department for a generation, but which, happily, is now in retreat as a result of the efforts of people like Bolton. A Google search this morning reveals that dozens if not hundreds of news outlets have repeated Vreeland's charges against Bolton, while, as far as I can tell, Vreeland's obvious political bias has been reported nowhere outside the blogosphere.

Meanwhile, Slublog notes that Vreeland was a member of, and financial contributor to, a group called "Diplomats & Commanders for Change," which opposed President Bush in November's election. The organization's mission statement says that its members "are deeply concerned by the damage the Bush Administration has caused to our national and international interests."

That's what this is about: the attack on Bolton is being orchestrated and carried out by the administration's political enemies, as part of their effort to subvert the President's foreign policy.

A new development, also, in the strange case of Melody Townsel, another anti-Bush activist who has come out of the woodwork to attack Bolton with a weird story about him chasing her down the corridor of a hotel in Russia because he was angry at her. Little Green Footballs notes that she has written her close friends at the Daily Kos to alert them to a history of plagiarism which she says will be used against her by Republicans. I haven't seen any sign of that yet, but it's certainly fair to say that if a Republican made an otherwise-unsupported charge against a Democrat, and turned out to have a documented history as a plagiarist, that fact would be considered relevant. What's more significant to me, though, is her close self-identification with the nutjobs at the Daily Kos.

This morning's ABC News/Washington Post poll is getting a lot of press, with its apparently bad news for Republicans. The Post itself headlines its story "Filibuster Rule Change Opposed," and begins its coverage of the poll with that issue:

As the Senate moves toward a major confrontation over judicial appointments, a strong majority of Americans oppose changing the rules to make it easier for Republican leaders to win confirmation of President Bush's court nominees, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

[B]y a 2 to 1 ratio, the public rejected easing Senate rules in a way that would make it harder for Democratic senators to prevent final action on Bush's nominees.

Sounds bad. But here is the question the pollsters asked: "Would you support or oppose changing Senate rules to make it easier for the Republicans to confirm Bush's judicial nominees?" That is an absurd question, to which I would probably answer "No," too. The way the question is framed, it makes it sound like a one-way street, as though the Republicans wanted to change the rules to benefit only Republican nominees. If they asked a question like, "Do you think that if a majority of Senators support confirmation of a particular nominee, that nominee should be confirmed?" the percentages would probably reverse.

Of course, the poll contains bad news for Republicans across a broad range of issues, including Social Security. Which raises, as always, the question of the poll's internals. Sure enough: they over-sampled Democrats. If you look at page 16 of the poll data, which can be downloaded from the Post's article, it discloses that 35% of the poll's respondents were Democrats, while only 28% were Republicans. Given that slightly more self-identified Republicans than Democrats voted in last November's election, this represents an egregious, seven-point over-sampling of Democrats. No wonder the poll data are bad for Republicans.

Today's Wall Street Journal carries an excellent essay from the spring issue of the Claremont Review of Books that we've been featuring here. The essay by Claremont Institute Research Fellow William Voegeli is one of the issue's highlights: "FDR's card trick."

Aaron Solem writes:

I'm president of the Campus Organization of Bloggers (C-MOB, for short) and Vice-President of CFACT at the University of Minnesota.

I'm contacting you guys to let you know that CFACT, which is a conservative environmental group, is bringing National Review writer Jonah Goldberg to campus to speak on ANWR and the failures of the environmental movement, today, April 26 at 7PM. The event is being held in the electrical engineering/Computer Science building, room 3-115 at the U of M. It’s free and promises to be good entertainment.

Click here for a map locating the building where our event will be held. And there is parking in the Washington Ave. Parking Ramp (access via Harvard St.).

Brian Anderson is the managing editor of City Journal magazine, the quarterly publication of the Manhattan Instititute, and the author of the new book South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias.

In the first part of the interview yesterday, Brian discussed the phenomenon of liberal media bias, the rise of conservative talk radio, and the impact of FOX News. Here we conclude the interview with Brian's discussion of the blogosphere, the emergence of the "South Park conservatives" who give the book its title, the rise of conservative publishing and campus conservatives, and the prospects for the future.

PL: What role does the blogosphere play in the revolt?

BA: I needn’t remind Power Line readers of the influence blogs have accumulated in an amazingly short time.

In my chapter on the Internet, I analyze the specific ways that the medium has helped the Right. First, it has vastly increased the range and amount of information and opinion reflecting or expressing right-of-center concerns at everyone’s fingertips. Everyday, there’s a new blogger out there unpacking the latest New York Times poll for hidden distortions. And the blogosphere has allowed a highbrow politics and culture magazine like City Journal, which makes its articles available online, to reach hundreds of thousands of readers, dramatically increasing our influence. Second, it has given the Right the opportunity to respond swiftly to breaking news before elite opinion forms, taking advantage of what Dan Drezner calls the Web’s “first-mover” advantage. Third, it can collect and make readily available enormous amounts of decentralized local knowledge and expertise, sometimes superior to the reporting of mainstream outlets, as we saw with Rathergate and even with the coverage of election returns in 2004. Fourth, it reaches an influential readership, including just about everybody who works in the broader mediasphere, and a young one too: I believe the emergence of the blogosphere is one reason many college students have rejected the doctrinaire leftism of their professors. About 12 percent of Americans are now reading political blogs—26 million people using a medium that didn’t really exist five years ago. It’s an amazing information mutation. The blogosphere may be helping the Right indirectly, too, in that the rise of a left-wing presence on the Web is pushing the Democratic Party to the Left, hurting its electoral chances nationally.

The blogosphere has helped shape our national politics since 9/11. The cancellation of the CBS documentary "The Reagans"; Howell Raines’s downfall at the Times; Eason Jordan’s departure from CNN; the Swifties; Trent Lott stepping down as Senate majority leader; Richard Clarke’s attempted takedown of the Bush administration; of course Rathergate—the list of national controversies is long and growing in which the blogosphere has played a key role. The liberal media has been the big loser to date, since it has seen its metanarratives for events rewritten again and again, but the long-term influence of blogs will keep all news sources on their toes. Some critics, like Cass Sunstein, fear that the rise of new media is leading us to a situation in which everyone just hears what “news” they want to hear, not the true news they should hear (which, for a liberal prof like him, presumably means from unbiased sources like the New York Times). I think, on the contrary, that over time we could see an improvement in reporting and argument. Imagine being at Fox in 2005, with so many on the left trying to bring you crashing down. You’re going to make damn sure you don’t air something seriously wrong, or if you do, correct it quick.

PL: Do you think that the Empire will strike back against those of us exploiting the freedom of the Internet? What threats are there on the horizon?

BA: I am very worried about the extension of onerous FEC rules to cover blogs, as obviously are bloggers themselves. And John Kerry just a few weeks back was lamenting the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. A New York congressman, Maurice Hinchey, wants to restore it. Doing so would obliterate talk radio. A key theme of my book is that the Right has benefited from the extension of a free media, and so should fight any efforts to impose new regulations on it—and that includes placing broadcast content restrictions on cable and satellite transmissions, I’ll add.

PL: Who are the South Park conservatives?

BA: As I use the term loosely—the coinage “South Park Republican” is Andrew Sullivan’s, and had been written about by a web writer Stephen Stanton on Tech Central Station—it refers to an anti-liberal: someone who may not be traditionally conservative, especially concerning popular culture and censorship, but who looks at today’s Nancy Pelosi Left and is repulsed by it. In the book, I describe the rise of this anti-liberal, anti-PC attitude in a current of contemporary topical humor—South Park itself leading the way, Dennis Miller, the stand-ups Nick Di Paolo, Colin Quinn, and Julia Gorin, websites like Scrappleface, and so on. I found this attitude also characterized many of the college students I interviewed for SPC. Cranking Eminem on the I-pod while working on a GOP get-out-the vote effort, so to speak.

South Park is as funny as anything we’ve seen in popular culture. Conservatives take their lumps too on it, but there’s nothing new in that—topical comedy has regularly taken aim at conservatives and traditional values for decades. What’s weird and subversive about South Park is its mix of libertarianism and middle-American common sense. It has satirized hate-crime legislation, multiculturalism, abortion rights, radical environmentalism, anti-smoking campaigns, and scores of liberal celebrities.

Some South Park fans argue that the show is libertarian, but it’s more complex than that.

There’s a populist streak too. I quote the show’s co-creator Trey Parker, interviewed by Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner in their excellent recent book Hollywood Interrupted: “People in the entertainment industry are by and large whore-chasing drug-addict fuckups,” he said. “But they still believe they’re better than the guy in Wyoming who really loves his wife and takes care of his kids and is a good, outstanding, wholesome person. Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they’re the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.” I love that very true observation and I think it captures the spirit of anti-elite revolt you see in South Park, and in many of things I talk about in South Park Conservatives.

PL: Mainstream book publishers seem only recently to have discovered that conservatives buy books, and have even begun to cater to them. Is that right? Which development is more surprising?

BA: It’s an amazing, happy development. Just several days back Simon & Schuster announced it was going to start publishing right-of-center books, with a new imprint headed by Mary Matalin. That new enterprise joins Penguin’s Sentinel and Doubleday’s Crown Forum as recently launched right-of-center imprints.

The publishing industry finally woke up and realized that there’s a huge market for right-of-center books. That Regnery (my publisher) has had a steady stream of conservative bestsellers over the last five or years made it hard for the big New York publishing houses to continue to ignore this market. New York’s publishing scene tends to be reflexively liberal, but here, as Adam Bellow puts it, “business rationality has trumped ideological aversion.”

What’s encouraging is that the New York houses have launched relatively autonomous right-of-center imprints, with their own editorial teams, made up of conservatives. This cuts down on the chances for liberal editors to water down or derail good right-of-center projects. It’s a great time—the greatest time ever—to be a conservative author.

PL: Your final chapter is devoted to campus conservatives. What is your assessment of the college campus? What advice do you have for conservative students taking non-science classes taught by doctrinaire liberals?

BA: Several recent studies have confirmed again what everybody already knows: professors are overwhelmingly on the Left, not just politically but in their anti-Western, trendy approaches to scholarship. Many will be perfectly open to discussion and balanced in their presentation of the subject matter. Sadly, though, some will use their classrooms as left-wing agitprop sessions. I had a few in my time. My advice would be to steer clear of such courses. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute publishes a helpful college guide that can direct students away from the PC profs. If you’re stuck in such a class, or can’t find any good professors in a subject you’re interested in, use the Internet to find out what books and magazines and blogs to read to get what you’re missing. It’s never been easier or less expensive to educate yourself.

Academe will be the last institution where the Left’s power will remain mostly intact. In SPC, I show how that power is showing its first signs of weakening, but the change is coming primarily from the students and outside groups like David Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom, the Young America’s Foundation, and ISI, not from professors or administrators. Until tenure rules change and more upholders of the Western ideal of liberal education go into academe, the schools will remain a bastion of the Left.

Nevertheless, a majority of students does not consider itself liberal these days—53 percent of college students identifies itself with the center or the right according to a brand new Harvard Institute of Politics study, for example. That’s striking: you’ve got to figure that if students are starting out on the center or right or anti-Left, they’re only going to move further right as they graduate, get married, start paying taxes.

The prevalence of the PC police on campus and in classrooms and in the media mainstream, I argue in the book, has a lot to do with the Left’s diminishing sway with America’s youth. My book could have been subtitled “The Death of Political Correctness.” One of the reasons the show South Park is so popular with young adults is its withering contempt for all forms of PC.

PL: The tone of your book is upbeat and optimistic, and your prognosis is guardedly optimistic. Is that fair?

BA: Yes, I’m celebrating in SPC the shattering of a liberal cultural monopoly, and that’s one of the most exhilarating, important stories of our time. I remember what it was like when I first came to the American Enterprise Institute back in 1994. It really was still a liberal monoculture, just ten years ago, though the talk radio revolution was starting to have a real impact. If you were a conservative like me, you felt a constant sense of frustration that right-of-center ideas and arguments had to fight through a kind of media force field before they reached the broader public. You had influential conservative magazines, of course—I can’t tell you what Commentary, First Things, National Review, and other journals meant to my intellectual development. But every morning you woke up and felt the weight of the New York Times.

Now I get up, and before I come to my City Journal office I read the latest Times front page piece trying to drag down the Bush administration and realize I can turn on my computer and read you guys dissecting the article I just read or Instapundit or RealClearPolitics or any number of exciting, informative sites and know that the liberal press doesn’t have the last word. Jeff Jarvis has a wonderful formulation: news is becoming a conversation, not something handed down from on high by our betters. That nails it.

I’m not arguing, however, that the Right has won the battle—and this is especially important to emphasize when it comes to the entertainment industry—only that it is no longer losing and that some of the most interesting and consequential debates are now playing out on the Right. I think, too, that you’ll start to see more films and television programming that isn’t knee-jerk liberal in sensibility. I note this season of "24" portrayed an Amnesty International lawyer as a repugnant abettor of terror. That was close to unthinkable on television until quite recently. The market is on the side of creators who want to break with the liberal mindset of the entertainment industry. With technology making available so many channels now, opportunity awaits.

PL: Have we failed to ask anything you'd like our readers to know
about the book?

Only that there’s a free chapter available at southparkconservativesbook.com. It’s my riff on anti-liberal humor and it’s hilarious. Not because I am--Laura Ingraham, who was kind enough to have me on her radio show and made SPC a “must read,” ribbed me a bit, saying I sounded on the phone more like a “Russell Kirk Conservative” than a South Park one, which isn’t right but isn’t completely wrong either—but because the people I’m writing about are so funny. Your readers will get a few laughs, and if they like what they find in the chapter they’ll probably like the rest of the book too.

Tonight the Associated Press reports that a "former colleague" of John Bolton, Frederick Vreeland, sent an email to Senator Joe Biden that was critical of Bolton. The email was then leaked to the press, either by Vreeland or by Senator Biden's office. The AP says:

A former colleague of John R. Bolton says President Bush's nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations "has none of the qualities needed for that job."

Bolton "has all the qualities needed to harm the image and objectives in the U.N. and its affiliated international organizations. If it is now U.S. policy not to reform the U.N but to destroy it, Bolton is our man," Frederick Vreeland, a former U.S. ambassador to Morocco, said in an e-mail to the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Vreeland, who worked with Bolton in the early 1990s under the first President Bush, said Bolton "dealt with visitors to his office as if they were servants with whom he could be dismissive, curt and negative."

"He spoke of the U.N. as being the enemy," Vreeland added...."It is totally erroneous to speak of Bolton as a diplomat."

This extraordinarily bitter attack caused me to wonder who Mr. Vreeland is, and what his connection with John Bolton was. As to the latter point, I assume it must be true that Vreeland "worked with Bolton in the early 1990s," as the AP says, but it isn't clear in what capacity. Bolton was the Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs at the State Department from 1989-1993. From 1993 to 1999 he was a partner in a New York law firm. Vreeland was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East and South Asia from February 1991 to February 1992, and the Ambassador to Morocco from 1992 to 1993. While it's certainly possible that their paths could have crossed at the State Department, their resumes don't explain why Vreeland would have any particular familiarity with Bolton.

As to the first question--who is Frederick Vreeland?--Google is a little more revealing. Vreeland appears to be a virtual caricature of a career CIA and State Department official. He is rich, socially connected--his mother was the fashion icon Diana Vreeland--and liberal. Vreeland's views on key foreign policy issues are typical of career State Department Democrats, which is to say, the precise opposite of the views held by the Bush administration and John Bolton.

After the terrorist bombings in Morocco in May 2003, Vreeland wrote an article for the International Herald Tribune. Most Americans, like President Bush, blamed the bombings on the Islamofascist terrorists who perpetrated them. That wasn't how Vreeland saw it:

The irony is that these terrorist acts, like the similar ones a few days earlier in Saudi Arabia, are collateral damage from the U.S. strategy designed to rid the world of terrorism. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, anti-terrorism has become a vital and valid national objective, but if it is pursued in a counterproductive manner, Americans could soon find themselves living in a perpetual state of red alert.

Got that? Terrorist bombings in Morocco are "collateral damage" from America's anti-terrorist efforts. But it gets even worse: Vreeland can't talk about Morocco for four paragraphs without changing the subject to--you guessed it--Israel:

Israel's lifestyle of constant terrorist threat is exactly what Americans want to avoid. And yet the United States is gradually following the path of successive Likud Party governments, trapped in a vicious circle of repressing terrorism and then being terrorized anew by the scourge this repression is meant to exterminate.

My Israeli friends say that only the U.S. government can persuade Israel's leaders to ease up on repressing Palestinians and begin addressing Palestinian complaints. Now it looks as if the opposite is happening, with Washington adopting Israeli tactics of fighting fire with fire - retaliation justified by America's right to act in self-defense, regardless of whether it opens Pandora's box.

This muscular policy has served the Likud well; it has kept them in office, with their large majorities at election time assured because they stand relentlessly for patriotism, decisive leadership and defense of national values.

What on God's green earth did Israel have to do with the terrorist attacks in Morocco? Absolutely nothing. But this isn't argument, it's obsession. Vreeland concludes with the mantra that so many State Department hands of his generation could never put aside: what America must do, to protect itself against Arab terrorism, is sell out Israel. He concludes:

Americans must act in their own defense. This will require examining what Muslim extremists are complaining about, what arguments Al Qaeda's recruiters are using - and what can de done to destroy their arguments and cut the ground out from under the fundamentalists. Americans must show Arabs and Muslims all over the world that America stands for justice, work and dignity. America's fight against Muslim terrorism must include not only strong security measures but also enlightened actions giving hope for a decent future to the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Israel - and thus to ourselves.

Vreeland thinks that we need to listen to what Muslim extremists are "complaining about." This is precisely the tired, dead-end thinking that the Bush administration has finally put to rest. Yet the essence of the attack on John Bolton is that he doesn't buy it. He doesn't blame America for terrorism, and he isn't going to the U.N. to look for opportunit