Francis Coppola is now selling champagne by the can.

Some of you may have heard of Michael Miranda, the Republican senate aide who stole thousands of strategy documents from Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, and is now the focus of a federal criminal investigation. Unethical, right?

Well, apparently some conservatives don't seem to think so. Miranda has just been appointed the head of a new organization founded by one country's leading conservative advocacy groups. Now, what sort of organization is this that Miranda is now heading? That's right, it's an ethics group.

Here's an excerpt from an AP article on the drunk driving arrest of Cincinnati basketball coach Bob Huggins. I'm including it here because I think there is something funny in each paragraph.

He had slurred speech, red and watery eyes, and there was vomit on the driver's door when his car was stopped for drifting out of its lane late Tuesday, the police report said. When officers pulled Huggins' car over, he said, "Don't do this to me," but was cooperative, according to the report by Sgt. Jeff Bronson.

Officers said Huggins told them he had a "couple" of beers. He denied he was under the influence of alcohol.

Officers said Huggins "staggered" out of the car and couldn't keep his balance during the sobriety test.

Asked to recite the alphabet from the letter "E" through "P," Huggins said, "E, F, G, H, I, K, L, N, Z," according to the police report. Asked to count backward from 67 to 54, he counted from 62 to 52, the report said.

Officers tried to give a breath analyzer test, but Huggins couldn't complete it, the report said. He was arrested and brought to the police station, where his wife picked him up, police said.

During Huggins' 15 seasons at Cincinnati, numerous players have been arrested or cited for offenses ranging from domestic violence to punching a police horse. Several were later acquitted or had the charges dropped.

Have you ever heard of Operation Bagration? Me neither. But this is amazing: (From the Guardian)

But what American has ever heard of Operation Bagration? June 1944 signifies Omaha Beach, not the crossing of the Dvina River. Yet the Soviet summer offensive was several times larger than Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy), both in the scale of forces engaged and the direct cost to the Germans.

By the end of summer, the Red army had reached the gates of Warsaw as well as the Carpathian passes commanding the entrance to central Europe. Soviet tanks had caught Army Group Centre in steel pincers and destroyed it. The Germans would lose more than 300,000 men in Belorussia alone. Another huge German army had been encircled and would be annihilated along the Baltic coast. The road to Berlin had been opened.

Thank Ivan. It does not disparage the brave men who died in the North African desert or the cold forests around Bastogne to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried not in French fields but on the Russian steppes. In the struggle against Nazism, approximately 40 “Ivans” died for every “Private Ryan”. Scholars now believe that as many as 27 million Soviet soldiers and citizens perished in the second world war.

Again, I don't mean to detract anything from what the Brits and Americans did in Normandy, but this Operation Bagration should really be taught more in the schools. Read the full article for more. It's very good.

New Update: Don't read this crappy entry. Yahoo keeps changing their links on me and I can never hold on to the right pic.
*Gasp*. Junichiro and Silvio, I had no idea... (pic)

UPDATE: You too, George? (pic)

And now for something really important. Dozens of recent Monkey College graduates of are waiting for you to hire them. (link - 11 pics in all)

Another fine editorial from the Washington Post, here, demanding that the Bush administration disclose the interrogation techniques it approved for detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This brings to mind one of the best things I've ever heard come out of a senator's mouth: "When you are the good guys, you've got to act like the good guys." - Lindsay Graham (R-SC). Somebody ought to make a bumper sticker out of that.

Did Fox News really have to include all of the "uh's" in the transcript of its interview with O.J. Simpson?

The highlights: (Try reading them aloud.)

• "They, they are afraid to, uh, uh, uh, uh, once they know they have been seen by the public, uh, people get afraid."
• "I think they, you are gonna get a true and honest, uh, uh, uh, uh, a vote, a decision."
• " Uh. And, uh, and, uh, in situations like that, I, I don’t know."
• "Very, very, very capable. Um. Um. Uh. She is probably as bright as any girl I have ever dated. Um. Um. Um. Pfft."

Matt's final response, here.
If you need to catch up, here's the exchange:
Matt
Chris
Matt
Chris
Matt

Matt writes that I misread his previous post, and that he never considered a restructured blank slate Middle East a real objective, as I had surmised. So I take back anything directed at that option.

But Matt offers nothing attractive in the way of alternatives. He seems to think that the same redrawing of nations can be accomplished by diplomatic pressure, which I find highly dubious. And I still stand by my claim that massive ethnic cleansing will follow, no matter how the redrawing is done. There is plenty more that I would like to say, but I have already promised that I would stop arguing about this. The realization that nobody is reading this is also sinking in...

Matt has responded to my last post. [For those who need to catch up, read 1) Matt's initial post 2) my post below and then 3)Matt's follow-up before you read this.] The follow-up is even more impressive than the original, and I doubt Xanga has hosted anything like it before. It is a must-read.

Now, neither of us wants to drag this debate out for too long, and I promise that this will be my last post directed to Matt on the matter. I will try my best to keep this post short, but I at least have to say something about his ideas, which really are on the far right fringes of neoconservative thought. Take this passage, for example:

As far as intervention in the Middle East goes, Chris's points are well taken. But he is still thinking in terms of the states as they exist now, rather than what I was going for--something of a tabula rasa in the region. For instance, let's imagine that each of the current Middle East countries was broken into ten or more administrative entities ("states"), each with a xerox of the United States constitution where the state's own name has been written in everywhere it says "United States." This is the sort of abstraction I'm interested in using to deal with the problem--forget current personalities and the United States' history with the region. So even if Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the places that seem to best approximate the model I have sketched, that doesn't mean that I think Egypt and Saudi Arabia are exemplary. I'm talking about totally new geographic expressions, with new people and new rules. Consider also that I am imagining that the United States does this with a coalition of Western nations, rather than alone--the interest extends beyond the United States. This might go some way in addressing the results of the United States' current occupation of Iraq.

I'm not exactly sure if Matt's tabula rasa is meant as a real objective or just some hypothetical abstraction. In any case it is clear that Matt desires a massive redrawing and restructuring across the Middle East together with the imposition of Western-style and Western-controlled government.

Does he have any idea how much blood will be shed for this? I think it would be unprecedented. Not to sound sensationalist, but what Matt is proposing is nothing less than the initiation of World War III, in a region of 1 billion very pissed off people, many of whom would stop at nothing (including death) to terrorize their occupiers and possibly their neighbors and ethnic rivals.

On paper, the war in Iraq sounded like a cakewalk compared to what Matt is endorsing. In Iraq the original plan was to replace an extremely unpopular tyrant with a democratic government controlled by the Iraqis, with no redrawing of borders. Guess what? They didn't like it, and they're not going to let us hear then end of it. We did not and will not accomplish what we wanted to; the war was simply a failure. What looked good on paper fell apart in the face of reality. Now imagine how much messier it will be to do the same thing across the entire Middle East, and this time with redrawing of borders and the imposition of a government directly controlled by the West. Massive ethnic cleansing would be inevitable, and I mean massive.

Nor do we have the resources to do it. We are already stretched thin between Iraq and Afghanistan, and while a coalition of more Western nations would have been helpful in Iraq, it would still be far too little for a Middle Eastern sweep, even if it were to proceed serially (which it can't). Matt might say that a broad Western coalition would also add to the operation moral legitimacy in the eyes of the Arabs. But this is unlikely. Although it is true that the United States is particularly reviled in the region, the rest of the West is deeply mistrusted as well. Western imperialism of any sort is the worst type of insult for the Arab nations, and they aren't going to take it sitting down. Bottom line: not only is this plan unfeasible, it is also morally reprehensible for the amount of blood that will be shed.

All that being said, Matt has shown in his response that some of the ideas I was leaning towards are also untenable. I'll have to think about them some more. In the meantime, do check out his response, if you haven't already.

I encourage all of you to check out my good friend Matt Sekerke's tribute to Ronald Reagan, which is a pleasure to read. Matt's erudition really comes out, as it does throughout the rest of his blog. I only wish he would update it more.

There are, however, two points of contention I would like to raise, a minor one and a major one.

First, the minor one: Take a look at what Matt writes here. The italics are mine.

His approach, therefore, stands far apart from the practice of politics in our time. Gone are debates and principles, and in are the opinion polls, sloganeering, vacuous terminology and fluid commitments. Bill Clinton gave us the era of feel-good politics and conquered public opinion with the force of his personality. By contrast, George W. Bush repeats the same formulaic phrases, speaks in bullet points, and appeals to messianism or eschatology.

Matt is right to be concerned about the end times language that sometimes pops out in the president's speeches. There is some anecedotal evidence that Bush wants to accelerate the Second Coming by paving the way for the rebuilding of Solomon's temple on the highly contested Temple Mount. I find it deeply troubling that Biblical prophecies could play any role in Bush's ardent support of Israel.

But, contra Matt, if there was a president who really went too far with the eschatology, it was not Bush. It was Reagan. Look at what Reagan said at a California state senate banquet in 1971. (This was quoted for memory in San Diego Magazine by former California state senate president pro tempore James Mills.)

"In the 38th chapter of Ezekiel, it says that the land of Israel will come under attack by the armies of the ungodly nations, and it says that Libya will be among them. Do you understand the significance of that? Libya has now gone Communist, and that's a sign that the day of Armageddon isn't far off.

"Biblical scholars have been saying for generations that Gog must be Russia. What other powerful nation is to the north of Israel? None. But it didn't seem to make sense before the Russian revolution, when Russia was a Christian country. Now it does, now that Russia has become communistic and atheistic, now that Russia has set itself against God. Now it fits the description of Gog perfectly.

"For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. It can't be too long now. Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God's people. That must mean that they will be destroyed by nuclear weapons."

Wow. OK. Think that was just how he felt before taking office? He was at it again in a 1983 People magazine interview:

"[T]heologians had been studying the ancient prophecies -- what would portend the coming of Armageddon-- and have said that never, in the time between the prophecies up until now, has there ever been a time in which so many of the prophecies are coming together. There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never anything like this."

These are things that George W. Bush would never say in public, although he might believe them privately. While Matt is correct in saying that Reagan's ideas were based on principle, these principles were often tied to some of the wildest religious fantasies ever known to the presidency. So much for my first point.

My second point concerns Matt's favorable treatment of the approach he thinks Reagan would have taken to the war on terror. (If you still haven't read his entry, read it now.) According to this idea, the nation-state as we know it has failed in the Middle East. Countries such as Iraq do not constitute a social organizing unit. The only meaningful organizations in the region are supranational and subnational, and it is to these that people turn. This is how terrorism develops. Thus, the best way to combat terrorism is to "reestablish the supremacy of the state as a form of social organization." Moreover, "we should run the states ourselves. Yes: Like an empire."

I think that this strategy is the exact opposite of what we should be doing. Consider two Arab states which have come closest to this model: Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Both have relatively homogenous populations and strong central governments with close ties to the United States. Egypt gets more money from us than any other country except Israel, and the Bush family's cozy relation with House of Saud is well known. While our influence in these countries is nowhere near the level of empire, it is arguably closer to Matt's ideal than it is in any other Arab country in the region.

Now let's take a look at the 19 hijackers on 9/11 and their country of origin. Fourteen of them were Saudis, the ringleader was Egyptian, and the rest were mostly from the United Arab Emirates, which is also closely tied to America and as far as I know has a strong central government!

Terrorism thrives in these countries not because the state is too weak, but because it is too strong; more importantly, not because America is not involved enough, but because it is involved too much. Consider another example, this time Matt's own: Before the Iraq War, the United States had no internal influence in the Baathist government. And what was Iraq's contribution to terrorism? Nothing. Now we rule Iraq, and look what's happening. There is a terrorist attack at least once a week. Iraq under Saddam might provide a good example of a strong state's control of sub- and supranational terrorism, but get the United States involved and the example goes out the window.

For those who still don't understand why we are facing a terrorism problem (and there are still some people in the government who think it is because terrorists 'hate freedom') you have to look no further than Osama bin Laden's own speeches. It's all in there. He has been trying for years to get the American military out of Saudi Arabia. More recently, and perhaps as a recruitment tactic, he has condemned the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The message is clear: He and his terrorist followers want America out of the Middle East. Increasing our presence over there, as Matt suggests, is only going to piss these guys off even more. It's the exact opposite of what we should do.

Microsoft has successfully patented the double click for PDAs and mobile phones. The control that this company has over the courts and its competitors is just unbelievable.

Via MemeFirst: Planning a trip to the Middle East anytime soon? Consider buying one of these t-shirts first.

Via Dan Froomkin: Take a look at the White House website "How to be an Intern" FAQ. Oh my God! Is that... Monica? Oh, nevermind, it's just some random girl named Ann Gray. (link)