My rental car has Sirius Satellite radio on board. I give it a mixed review. The technology will need some improvement before I could adopt it. I live on a road with lots of leafy trees. The reception was very spotty while driving down that road. I suppose the target customer is someone who spends most of their time on the highway, but overpasses would also cause an outage - though not every time, and I guess due to the stream buffer, a few seconds after passing under. I remember that with AM radio when I was small, but even AM doesn't do that anymore under a single overpass. But being able to listen to one station for 250 miles straight is nice, but the Audiovox receiver in my rental makes it very difficult to change stations, so it is also good that you are not required to switch stations.

Programming, though, is a different matter. I was on Sirius Stream 22, First Wave. Yes, music from my youth. For the whole four hours, I heard about a handful of songs that had not been in my cassette case or record or CD collection at some point. The first artist to play a second time was The Clash. The second was REM.

One of my first inclinations was that maybe there is something to this whole ClearChannel thing, that the reason why radio sucks is because of a big corporate machine, let's go kick in the windows at Starbucks!!!

But that's just wrong. Radio has always sucked. Even back in the day, I wouldn't hear ABC's "How to be a Zillionaire" on the radio. I heard Journey or Foreigner or some other crap that wasn't what I wanted to listen to mixed in with the few songs I liked. Radio couldn't narrowcast to my tastes even before ClearChannel.

Sirius had several news streams, too, but no talk radio streams. Seems to me that if XM or Sirius signs Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the big talkers, they'll be here to stay for sure.

But back to the First Wave. I think Instapundit had a post a while back pointing to someone else saying that the Boomer lump had worked its way mostly through the snake,and that means that Gen X is now in the marketing driver's suite. I am at the top of the Gen X food chain (I mostly saw it defined starting with people born in 66, though I saw some define it as 64, but noone says Gen X anymore anyway), and I drive a Volvo wagon that I dutifully load up with recyclables, and worry about my retirement accounts and the foundation of my house. The famous Boomer TV show was called "thirtysomething." And I am on the backside of thirtysomething.

At any rate, the point of all that is that the music of the Boomers was a big focus, and while I do actually like Motown, I didn't realize what it was all about until I listened to 10 of my old favorite songs coming out of the radio (commercial free!) the nostalgia that goes along with music. It's very powerful. I found myself remembering things I hadn't thought about for a long time, and just laughing when I heard a song come on. I've seen people who think it is cool that they can listen to Aerosmith with their kids, but I realize now that though they may both like the music, it won't mean the same thing to the children. (Little Blaster, an opinionated 2, likes REM, but will run over and turn off the CD player if something like Depeche Mode is on.)

Maybe these satellite people are on to something, though. I hate hearing my music on an "oldies" station, though I guess in the 80's, 60's music was oldies music, so it is only fair. But I really liked hearing the music played on a living channel. Makes me feel less old. I bet advertisers would kill to get on there.

I think Michele was going to be blogging about nostalgia, etc., during the blogathon, and I didn't go by and see, but I was busy and sick this weekend, so sue me.

On the road again, this time I am in the Poconos and depending on where I am, I have some wireless connectivity and I can make a long distance call to get 26.4 kbps dialup. Sweet. Anyway, I was thinking about some of the blogging tools out there. I know that the cool thing about the web based tools is that you can use them anywhere you have connectivity, but the problem is, of course, that if you don’t have connectivity, you can’t use them. I know Steven den Beste brags on City Desk (I would link to the post here if I had my broadband. Note to hotels – I do choose lodging on that criterion when I can, but in locations that see more tourists than business travelers, that is not always possible.) but I was wondering if there are any tools that work with Movable Type that work offline. I have used BlogBuddy and another tool whose name escapes me with Blogger that were editors, but weren’t really offline because you couldn’t save to a file – you had to save to Blogger. The only way to do that was cut and paste into Notepad – which meant you might as well just use Notepad, or Word, as I am doing right now before I dial up. Anyone have any ideas?

PS – ooh hideous! I just saved this thing as html out of Word, and the styles that are added in are worse than what FrontPage does. Back to Notepad.

Senator Kennedy on the deaths of U&Q:

"It's progress," said Senator Ted Kennedy, about news that the Hussein brothers had been killed in a US military air raid. "But I still think we need an overall strategy," the Massachusetts Democrat said.

"American servicemen are at risk every single day, and it seems to me we ought to find ways working through the United Nations and Nato, as we did with Bosnia and Kosovo, to help provide relief for our servicemen, and help construct Democratic institutions," said Kennedy.

You'd think he'd be a bit happier, but I guess he's a little concerned about the fact we are bringing guys who pick up women and then leave them for dead to justice.

Something I have seen around the net is a negativity about the attention that PFC Lynch has received, a backlash of sorts. Some of it seems to be engendered in the whole Hate Bush thing, where any positive feeling about something from the Iraq war must immediately be quashed or discredited for fear that something positive may accrue to Bush. There is also a sentiment among some service members that PFC Lynch is receiving an inordinate amount of attention, and that it is unfair. (And it is unfair, as people who made greater sacrifices are unremembered by the public, like the two soldiers killed today.) In both cases, Lynch's receiving a Bronze Star Medal is derided with "you're not a hero for getting in a car crash." You can see both here. You can also read my comment at the bottom, which I am expanding on a bit below.

About Lynch's Bronze Star, let's review, shall we?

The criteria for award of the Bronze Star:

a. The Bronze Star Medal is awarded to any person who, while serving in any capacity in or with the military of the United States after 6 December 1941, distinguished himself or herself by heroic or meritorious achievement or service, not involving participation in aerial flight, while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States; while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force; or while serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict against an opposing armed force in which the United States is not a belligerent party.

b. Awards may be made for acts of heroism, performed under circumstances described above, which are of lesser degree than required for the award of the Silver Star.

c. Awards may be made to recognize single acts of merit or meritorious service. The required achievement or service while of lesser degree than that required for the award of the Legion of Merit must nevertheless have been meritorious and accomplished with distinction.

Let us go through those for PFC Lynch and her fellow soldiers of the 507th Maintenance Co who also received the Bronze Star.

In the military. Check.

After December 6, 1941. Check.

Engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force. Check.

Not involving participation in aerial flight. Check.

Those are all the AND parts of the equation, and also the non-subjective parts. Now there is an OR, which also contains the subjective part:

distinguished himself or herself by heroic or meritorious achievement or service

Heroic OR meritorious achievement or service.

I have not seen that she was awarded the Bronze star with a "V" device for valor. That is how it is awarded if your Bronze Star award is for heroism. Without the "V" device, it is for meritorious acheivement or service.

Was her service meritorious? The people who made the award thought so, along with all of the other soldiers involved. You might say "well anybody can get captured," and I suppose that is true enough, and doubly true of someone who was unconscious and injured in the course of a firefight.

The Bronze Star, sans "V" device, is about like an ARCOM (Army Commendation Medal, a good but not great peacetime medal) in the course of a war. Anyone who was in the service during Desert Storm might remember the talk that Bronze Stars were handed out like candy. I have friends who worked in Battalion Adjutant shops - the personnel offices - that received the word the BN would receive X number of BSM's. and then they did the citations from there. Not the other way around. So don't get the idea that the BSM means that a person is a hero. I have other friends who received the BSM during ODS, and they never fired a shot. They didn't even get in a "car accident."

I get perturbed when people, especially soldiers, get all bent out of shape over the attention paid to PFC Lynch. I would ask if any of them would trade the conditions for the attention. I suspect none of them would. And I don't begrudge anyone medals - hell, they don't cost anything in the grander scheme of things, and it is the least the service can do for its members. It can't pay them more, and can't necessarily promote them, but they can give them colored bits of cloth they can wear on their uniform.

And if that colored bit of cloth helps bring young people like PFC Lynch and SGT Miller (who received the Silver Star) into the service and recognize them for what they have done and help them feel proud of it, then let's go ahead and hand them out like candy.

Don't get me wrong, they can't be given for nothing, or their perceived value goes away. But if there is something there worth recognizing, then let's go ahead and do so.

I read the Washington Post and I wonder if these guys live in the same world I do. This morning, for example.

On the op-ed page, a former Clinton cabinet member recommending that we appease the North Koreans. How cliché. And some bit from Harold Meyerson, editor at large at American Prospect that explains in full detail the problem with the Democrats, though what he demonstrates is not exactly what he meant:

If anyone has personified the failure of the Democratic establishment to provide the party with a distinct profile during the Bush presidency, it's Gephardt. As House Democratic leader, Gephardt clung to Bush's Iraq policy until it all but unraveled over the past month. Gephardt's endorsement last fall of the administration's war resolution effectively derailed a bipartisan effort in the Senate to require the White House to win more international backing.

There was supposedly a method in this madness: By taking the war issue off the table, Gephardt argued, the Democrats could turn the midterm election campaign to questions of domestic policy, presumably their strong suit. We'll never know if this could have worked, because Gephardt and his fellow congressional leaders never developed a domestic message.

Note well - the Democrats position on the war on Iraq was not about national security - defending the United States - but it was a political message. Even to a liberal it is not considered possible that a Democrat's support of the war could be based on the principle of keeping Americans safe. That is very telling.

And then, finally, the front page story about Uday and Qusay is about how it will affect Bush's popularity. If you want to find out about why it is a good thing (beyond the domestic political angle) that those wild and wacky Hussein boys are graveyard dead, you have to turn to the Style section. Yeah, wouldn't want to put something that bolster's the President's position up there in front of the paper. No, let's put it back in the fluff, with the gossip column and comics.

Well, at least it isn't the New York Times.

UPDATE: Jonah notes the Meyerson piece, too, and makes more trenchant observation:

one might ask why Bush is denounced by folks like Begala, Krugman and McAuliffe as a Hitler-like aggressor who went to war to distract from domestic problems while Gephardt gets a free pass for endorsing a war (and giving it all the bipartisan cover it needed) simply so he could focus on domestic issues.

And a link to the op-ed.

First, a poem:

gellin chaos commercial uday rape overlord felon like nations coalition hussein white wear sailors scholls list why the central iraq were hey and iraqi french ted rall information minister wood you chipper chickens moron majority midget embedded monkeys faction war are prowar special redneck forces reporter air france monkey bongs

From here.

Can't figure out how I got referred from here or here. I think it's a glitch.

That should boost my google ratings. And for all those who complain "How come you don't give away mp3's like the cool bloggers?" I have my answer - I do!

Check out Mirrors of Venus. Tell me what you think. No, it isn't me.

That heading is a bit like Instapundit's "cats and dogs living together" all by itself. Reading the op-ed in the Washington Post was almost shocking.

I worked on a project with DC schools for a year and a half, and they have huge problems that vouchers are not going to fix. But they will help kids escape from a school system that is failing them.

One of the things I learned while working with DC schools was that there are already Federally funded vouchers in the District. In fact, these vouchers are available across the country. They are part of "Special Education." If you don't believe me, check out this memo from Virginia. It explains the process for processing and reporting reimbursement for students that attend private K-6 programs under the auspices of special education.

Basically, the purpose behind this is that there may be a determination that a student's needs are not able to be met by the public schools, and that they may only be met by a private institution. Now it is different from vouchers because the school districts actually administer the money, and not the parents. But the bottom line is that this is public money going to private institutions, and it has yet to destroy public education. And Special Education is beloved by Democrats who hate vouchers.

But there is a dirtier secret about this program in DC. Parents will go to court to get their children declared special education so that they can then get them into these private programs. There are lawyers who specialize in suing the schools, and by the way, operate assessment centers that provide expert testimony that the student cannot be accomodated in the public schools. Sometimes the programs that are then ordered by the court cost $150,000 a year. Compare that with the average $10k plus average that Senator Feinstein refereces (and if you take the FY 2004 budget of $847M, it's more like $12k per student), and you see that it doesn't take too many of these court ordered cases to impact the other students.

There is also a private voucher program in DC funded by philanthropists. It has a limited number of slots that it can provide. Parents in DC wait in line overnight when the applications are made available.

It is obvious that the parents of DC realized long ago what Mayor Williams and Senator Feinstein have - the DC schools are not educating their children. What also appears to be dawning on these Democrats is that giving people what they want is kinda like democracy.

I watched O'Reilly last night (the bloom is definitely off his rose, by the way) and there was a discussion about how the President's poll numbers were falling due to "the chaos in Iraq." Larry Sabato was on as a guest, and he suggested that the President "wasn't getting his message out."

O'Reilly opined that the President ought to come on his show (or, humbly, on some other venues) and admit that he made a mistake in his estimate of the aftermath.

Now of course this was last night, prior to the news on Odai and Qusay or however you spell them. But the problem wasn't one of the message not getting out, but having the wrong message. Up to now, the message has been, 1) that we are winning overall, and 2) things aren't as bad as they seem.

Those are true, and letters like this one support that. (Sullivan must have watched Fox last night, too, with that mention of Dick "Chicken Little" Morris.) But, if you think about it, "things are not as bad as you hear" is not great PR. Even if it is absolutely true, it just doesn't sound good. It sounds like spin. And it is defensive.

We are making great progress in the War on Terror, but the story of "soldier killed in an ambush" every other day sounds like we are losing the battles - in the absence of another story.

This is not just the President's problem. This is the Army's problem, or more accurately, CENTCOM's problem. In the absence of a story of a win, stories of losses will proliferate. And while long term we are making a difference in Iraq, without concrete achievements, people who don't spend a lot of time thinking about it may not grasp the larger story. Concrete achievements like today's firefight that killed Saddam's sons.

Obviously those events cannot be planned that way. They can't announce "next Tuesday we will capture or kill Saddam Hussein." But they can establish modest goals for the near term that can be achieved and shown to be victories. Things that have to be done and would be done anyway. But that happen now unheralded.

The best way to get the message out that we are winning is to win. And that has import in Iraq, and here.

I was stuck in my computer room cleaning up, and since radio is so old tech, I went to the website of one of the local talk stations where normally from 7-10 one can hear Laura Ingraham. Her show isn't great, but sometimes she gets interesting guests. And instead of Laura, I hear Arianna Huffington.

Yikes! That is just frightening. The good news is the show is about as good as you might expect. I am sure something else will be filling that slot soon.

I have this great idea for a TV show. Five fraternity brothers go to SOHO, and help a gay man out by giving his loft a real lived in look, teach him how to drink beer out of longnecks, get him the football package for the Dish, and throw out all of his eyeliner. That would be great TV!

IMAO is a regular stop for me, and I read even if Rummy doesn't make an appearance. So I was glad to help Frank out when he needed a little video editing done - I got this new VAIO with lots of neat software and lots of horsepower.

Frank sent me a video of him doing some aikido that I did a little touch up on. This is in Windows Media format, so other OS's, sorry.

My little thought about how the lack of WMD would be bad for those who think Rove is the puppetmaster could have come right out of "Best of the Web" - last month! Honestly, I didn't read that way back when.

I'm gonna misuse James Lileks. Today's Bleat has a theme that people ought not to "lump" a whole set of beliefs to a whole set of people. But I'm going to take a quote from there and do just that. Because of one my themes is the differences in the way the Right and Left treat each other, and treat themselves.

Some elements of the right went through this in the 90s. A recent column by Ted Rall darkly suggests that Bush will suspend the 2004 election, claiming national security issues. Uh - right. This reminded me of the guys who called Art Bell at 1:47 AM back in the pre Y2K days, insisting that Clinton would use the global computer crash as a pretext for suspending the Constitution and making us all march to FEMA collection stations to have barcodes tattooed on our necks. The difference is that those guys had ugly web pages with GIANT LETTERS on orange backgrounds, and Rall has a deal with a mainstream syndicate.

That's one heck of a nutshell, there. Like the difference between Ann Coulter and Al Franken. Ann get's fired upon from Right and Left. Not only does Franken get adulation from the Left, he gets protection from them. The Right has no problem with either eating their own, or throwing them to the wolves.

I listened to Michael Savage last night just because all the controversy intrigued me in what he would say in the face of it all. A lot of talk hosts would avoid it. Or a real provocateur would revel in it. He didn't do either. But he made a point that the Right does need to think about, even if it comes from an evil hatemonger insert whatever else people on the Right side of the aisle have written about him - that the Right is letting the Left pick off guys on our side, one by one. Not just letting, helping.

Sure, there is a measure of "doing the right thing," of standing on principle, etc. But skewering our own doesn't buy us any credibility on the Left. Think someone on the Left is going, that Andrew Sullivan may want lower taxes and support President Bush on most things, but he is okay because he doesn't like Ann Coulter's book? By the same token, is anyone on the Left going "Carville and Begala are over the top, they are hurting our message."

The questions, they answer themselves.

Not sure why LT Smash wasn't in there before. He is now. Balloon Juice is too. Evidently he caught the "Africa is about oil" thing prior to my posting.

Ann Coulter is getting a bad rap, lately. I haven't read Treason (or any of her books), so I have no idea if it is as bad as they say. Of course, even if it isn't, the world would come down on her for defending Joe McCarthy anyway - even though she was right. At any rate, Andrew Sullivan (in uncharacteristically untimely fashion) takes off on her for saying something catty about Hillary.

Again, this represents part of the double standard between the Right and the Left. When Al Franken wrote Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, his partisans loved it. I still remember when the publisher advertised on NPR (I'm sorry, there is no advertising. When they got a sponsorship announcement.) that Laura Wertheimer took such delicious joy in announcing the book title. Franken is still considered by many as the choice for the talk show host of the Left.

And don't get me started about Michael Savage. Kinda interesting that at the same time the Dixie Chicks are testifying before Congress about how they were oppressed for simply "expressing their opinion," and receiving sympathy even from Senator John McCain, the rest of the world, including on the Right, is gleefully waving the torches and dancing on Savage's coffin. Just because he expressed his opinion.

UPDATE: I just saw that Tobacco Road Fogey noticed that about Savage already. Yesterday.

Instapundit sez:

No doubt we'll be hearing that Liberia is all about oil, soon.

And at Time Magazine:

He may even be poised to commit troops to Liberia to help prevent yet another catastrophic African fratricide, a substantial expansion of military humanitarian peacekeeping of the kind for which he had once sharply criticized his predecessor. But while AIDS, trade, investment, democracy, development and the moral obligation of preventing mass bloodshed may dominate many of the speeches, Mr. Bush is first and foremost a national-security president. His agenda in Africa remains grounded in his priority of defending the realm, and the increased U.S. engagement in Africa is driven by two familiar strategic concerns: Oil and terrorism.

Well, this explains why the press wasn't covering Bush's Africa policy - they hadn't figured out the spin to make it something bad yet. But Time is on the case.

UPDATE: Jinkies. I informed Glenn, and didn't even get a link!

UPDATE II: Note to self: if you blog it, and send it to Instapundit, send the link to your blog entry, not just to the item!

The Commonwealth of Virginia, which throughout the 90s had been solidly Republican, voted for a Democrat governor in 2001. There was some "time for a change" in the mix, some "this guy is a right-wing extremist rhetoric," and James Gilmore, the last Republican governor, made his own mistakes. Mark Warner ran as that kind of centrist Democrat that they like to pretend to be - not against guns, and of course he wasn't planning to raise taxes:

Warner, who managed Wilder's campaign for governor in 1989, has spent much of the past few weeks rebutting the assertion that he is a fiscal liberal and echoed that theme in thanking Wilder today. 'The ability to manage a budget without raising taxes is a model I'll emulate,' Warner said.

Of course not. That was just the scare tactics of the Republican party.

Of course, our moderate governor is proposing new taxes. Including a tax on Internet sales. Who could have seen that coming? Certainly not the press in Virginia:

Earley strategists said tonight that the GOP candidate may again focus on Warner's money, but they said he was more likely to focus on the suddenly harsh tone of the new Warner ad. Its narrator said: "The press says Earley is lying. . . . The press says he's dishonest -- a hypocrite. Earley's shamed himself. It's desperate politics as usual. . . . No positive plan, more false negative attacks. That's why we just can't trust Mark Earley with our future."

Talk about your false negative attacks. But anyone who expected differently was horribly naive.

I've trimmed off some folks who have dropped out. One of the one's I'll really miss is Patrick Ruffini. I have it on good authority that he is actually on a secret mission. Speaking of secret missions, maybe he would like the post below.

Or all those lefties were who used to preach the "W is a moron manipulated by his puppet masters" line but are now on the "Bush is an evil mastermind who is able to hoodwink even really smart guys like John F. Kerry, who served in Veitnam," what if they were right the first time?

You know, what if all of statecraft is really a Rovian plan to roll back the clock and all that. Wouldn't he deliberately suppress information about WMD so that the wild-eyed Left could get all whipped into a frenzy, and then later look just plain silly? I mean, you let it go on just long enough so there could be a real frontrunner among the 9 Democratic candidates for President, let him build up a head of steam, and suck all the money out of the pockets of the Left. Wait for there to be a real buzz around him, and when it is all at fever pitch, drop the bomb - literally?

Imagine where Dean would be 2 weeks or a month from now, still without conclusive evidence of WMD or al Qaeda. Imagine all the summer doldrum stories, the calls for Congressional investigations, spurred or seconded by the Dean wing.

Imagine what that would look like when a bunker full of VX artillery shells is unearthed. When al Ani confesses he met with Atta in Prague in April of 2001.

Not saying this is one of those rope-a-dope deals. Just the Democrats better hope their first take was wrong.

Today is supposed the big day. Or a big day, anyway. It's still early here, so the blogosphere is still asleep, apparently. But the major news has nothing on it. This is an eerie silence.

UPDATE: Well this explains it - plans cancelled due to a police state. Link via Instapundit.

On a similar note, next time someone argues that we have walked away from Afghanistant, read this:

Since 2001, the United States has spent or committed to $2 billion on aid to Afghanistan, The European Union has spent or committed to $450 million.

...

Another positive sign: There were fears before the U.S.-led war that Afghanistan might explode as its religious and ethnic groups made power grabs after the Taliban was removed. But there have been no serious uprisings. And work continues on a new constitution and toward national elections in June.

Spotted at Andrew Sullivan.

Mullings, by Rich Galen, today:

The pilot said for the most part the people with whom he had come into contact were "extremely friendly, and reminded us that the "power is on, people are conducting business in the markets; it's not the smoking ruins that you think."

Read it, and remember to be be optimistic about Iraq. There are people, Americans even, who want us to "lose the peace" for their own petty reasons. One way they could succeed is making the rest of us think that we've already lost. It just isn't so.

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Over at Vodkapundit, Stephen Green thinks Michael Kinsley has a sensible idea about marriage in this Brave New World.

I'm guessing he hasn't run this by the wife yet.

I actually agree with Dean on something. This story about Dean on Liberia was linked off of Drudge:

"I would urge the president to tie our commitment to assist in this multilateral effort to an appeal to the world to join us in the work that remains to be done in Iraq," Dean said.

That is actually a good idea. Basically, it is levelling with the rest of the world - you wanna play along, you gotta play along. I mean, we are probably going to end up with troops there anyway. Might as well twist some French arm while we are at it.

Of course all the rest he says is just blather. But this is a good idea.

They know that eventually, evidence of WMD will be found in Iraq. The argument that Hussein didn't have them is just not defensible. So they reached back to Camelot, and sent out Sir Schlesinger to lead this new war. Finding WMD in Iraq will not be enough he says.

And if a cache of WMD is found buried somewhere in Iraq, that is not sufficient to rescue the president. The bottom-line question is: Why were the WMD not deployed? When Saddam Hussein was fighting for his regime, his power and his life, why in the world did he not use his WMD against the U.S. invasion? Heaven knows, he had plenty of warning.

Unearthing buried WMD would not establish Iraq as a clear and present danger to the United States. Deployment of WMD would have come much closer to convincing people that Iraq was a mortal threat.

I think this is a sign that they know the evidence is coming.

Governor Dean, are you listening?

Reading all these pieces about Secretary Rumsfeld having to say there is no quagmire in Afghanistan shows that those cheering for American failure are still out there. He said something that should be self evident to those who ask the question, but apparently isn't:

"There are so many cartoons where people, press people, are saying, 'Is it Vietnam yet?' hoping it is and wondering if it is. And it isn't. It's a different time. It's a different era. It's a different place," he said.

And yet people do want this to be Vietnam, where the US lost a war. I guess because they were wrong about us losing the war, that now they want us to "lose the peace." The handwringing is going on in earnest. Like in this editorial from David Ignatius in the Washington Post today- he writes this:

The worst possible outcome in Iraq would be for the United States to cut and run, leaving behind a California-size version of Lebanon.

But spends most of the article worrying that a Syrian says:

America was about to make a mistake of historic dimensions, warned Sidawi, who made his fortune in the oil business and now runs Petroleum Intelligence Weekly and other industry publications. He likened the Bush administration's implacable march into Iraq to Britain's mobilization for the deadly morass of World War I and America's self-inflicted wounds in Vietnam.

Of course, Vietnam. I don't know Ignatius' politics. I mean, you don't have to be a liberal to editorialize for the Post, but it helps. But the problem with "cutting and running" from Iraq is not that it becomes a big Lebanon - which is ironically, and unmentioned by Ignatius, occupied by Syrian troops (that seems to have made things better!) - but that it proves to the terrorists and their nation-state supporters (like Syria!) that the United States will abandon its national defense in the face of a few casualties. On a utilitaritian basis, a Lebanon-like Iraq that spends all of its time fighting itself instead of nationalizing oil wealth to power its threat to its neighbors and the US is infinitely prefereable to Hussein's Ba'athist regime. But the message that America under President Bush is no different than America under President Clinton would be a huge mistake. "Cutting and running" from Somalia was bad for the US not because it left a country in a shambles, but because it emboldened our enemies.

So the "we cannot abandon Iraq the way we abandoned Afghanistan" crowd - which is in itself based on the false premise that we have walked away from Afghanistan, bound to be a surprise to the troops still on duty there and the Congress which has authorized hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent on reconstruction efforts - is busy beating the drums that we are failing, just like in Vietnam. Today, on the front page of the Washington Post, is the headline "U.S. Vehicles Attacked; Explosion Kills 5 in Fallujah." Of course the 5 killed were not Americans, but if you read no further than the headline, you wouldn't know that.

Overdramatizing the continued operations in Iraq as "Vietnam" shows the true agenda of those who do it. Opposition to Vietnam was never that we should "do it better," at least not from the Left. The opposition always was that we should never have been there in the first place, and that we should leave immediately. Even when people claim that the US will fail if it abandons Iraq, they continue to present reasons why we should do just that.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, they are turning on the TV....