What's good for General Electric isn't good for the USA. TCS: Tech Central Station - General Rent Seeker

A new debate is about to begin: militarizing space, or anticipating future threats? New York Times: Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval for Space Arms

Kofi's selective recollections during the Oil-for-Food scandal investigations seem awfully convenient, and highly questionable. My Way News: Annan Failed to Disclose Key Contacts

Winds of Change links to a story exposing pro-global warming bias at noted scientific journals Science and Nature. I'm shocked, shocked I tell you--not. Winds of Change.NET: "It's All Over for Science"

Was Einstein right when he first said what he postulated, or when he said what he postulated was wrong? We may be getting closer to the answer, or we may not...Fermilab - Press Releases

Another liberal newsman eats his words, and leaves his job amidst a cloud of self-inflicted controversy. AP: Eason Jordan resigns from CNN

Drudge reports another tale of necessity being the mother of invention. Ananova - Man peed way out of avalanche

The Diplomad writes, "Fight Global Warming: Turn on the A/C & Open the Windows" and in doing so provides as fine a fisking on the muddle-headed thinking that is evident in "the independent report [that] was made by the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain, the Center for American Progress in the United States and the Australia Institute" on global warming as I've seen in a long time.

The New York Post Online Edition comments on the glacial pace of government action even in the face of crisis. A person is granted citizenship 3 1/2 years after his death during 9/11. Many of the obvious steps to increase government data quality and hence awareness of threats have yet to be taken.

We have lost one of the greats. He went out the way everyone dreams of going, on top, and leaving them begging for more.

There's no one like him.

Godspeed, Johnny.

Johnny Carson, 30-year king of late night TV, dead at 79

"The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow -- and the bad news is, the world has nearly reached it already."

What a shock.

Why, if there was plenty of time to act, the pace of grant approvals to these bilious idiots for new studies would slow down. The gullible might take time to think about dire predictions of global warming in light of blizzard conditions across the US--hey, don't believe your eyes, believe the doomsayers!

What a bunch of malarkey. The UK Independent: "Countdown to global catastrophe"

On this day of the President's inauguration, nothing can be said, or will be said, better than this.

Both Drudge and InstaPundit link to this excellent story by the WaPo's Howard Fineman about the rise and fall of the Mainstream Media in its recent guise as a political party and king maker. MSNBC - The 'Media Party' is over

While I would prefer not to speak ill of the dead, it is hard to find the good in someone who claimed to influence opinion and culture while holding the views that follow below.

'An early and passionate opponent of the Vietnam War, Sontag was both admired and reviled for her political convictions. In a 1967 Partisan Review symposium, she wrote that "America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent."

In her rage and gloom and growing despair, she concluded that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."

Considering herself neither a journalist nor an activist, Sontag felt an obligation as "a citizen of the American empire" to accept an invitation to visit Hanoi at the height of the American bombing campaign in May 1968. A two-week visit resulted in a fervent essay seeking to understand Vietnamese resistance to American power.

Critics excoriated her for what they regarded as a naive sentimentalization of Vietnamese communism. Author Paul Hollander, for one, called Sontag a "political pilgrim," bent on denigrating Western liberal pluralism in favor of venerating foreign revolutions.

That same year, Sontag also visited Cuba, after which she wrote an essay for Ramparts magazine calling for a sympathetic understanding of the Cuban Revolution. Two years later, however, she joined Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and other writers in publicly protesting the regime's harsh treatment of Heberto Padilla, one of the country's leading poets. She also denounced dictator Fidel Castro's punitive policies toward homosexuals.

Ever the iconoclast, Sontag had a knack for annoying both the right and the left. In 1982, in a meeting in Town Hall in New York to protest the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, she declared that communism was fascism with a human face. She was unsparing in her criticism of much of the left's refusal to take seriously the exiles and dissidents and murdered victims of Stalin's terror and the tyranny communism imposed wherever it had triumphed.

Ten years later, almost alone among American intellectuals, she would called for vigorous Western — and American — intervention in the Balkans to halt the siege of Sarajevo and to stop Serbian aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo. Her solidarity with the citizens of Sarajevo prompted her to make more than a dozen trips to the besieged city.

Then in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sontag offered a bold and singular perspective in the New Yorker. "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" She added, "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

She was pilloried by bloggers and pundits, who accused her of anti-Americanism.

Sontag had never been so public as she became over the next three years, publishing steadily, speaking constantly and receiving numerous international awards, including Israel's Jerusalem Prize, Spain's Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, and Germany's Friedenspreis (Peace Prize). Upon accepting the prize from Jerusalem's mayor, Ehud Olmert, Sontag said of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians: "I believe the doctrine of collective responsibility as a rationale for collective punishments [is] never justified, militarily or ethically. And I mean of course the disproportionate use of firepower against civilians."'

Newsday.com: Author Susan Sontag Dies

Thanks to Instapundit, here's a link to an excellent piece on the new face of Marxism: a movement that depends on uneducated masses to become "useful idiots" and the symbols for liberal mythology like the nobility of the "indigenous peoples" of the earth.The Diplomad: Not Your Father's Marxism . . .

Someone should ask the Principal of this pathetic excuse for an educational instituition the name of the "Holiday" that the party was celebrating. And the Democrats wonder why they are rejected again and again by traditional values voters. Hampton Union Local News: Boy in a Santa suit asked to quit dance

If Kyoto was about idealistic goals and overblown predictions of doom--like the Y2K scare--then the aftermath of the Buenos Aires Climate Change Conference may be marked by a return to more reasonable approaches that don't require global agreement on apocalyptic industrial retrenchment for minimal gain. In short, a rejection of EU-backed policies in favor of technology-based solutions enforced by bilateral agreements--led by the U.S., Italy, China and other pro-growth Asian countries. Tech Central Station: The Kyoto Protocol is Dead

Oh, sure. NOW they tell us!! Times Online UK: Laptops used on the lap may be bad for more than a man's eyesight.

The "Dem" in question is that scurrilous, uncouth cad, Terry McAuliffe. What he said isn't shocking so much--given his past performances--as it is amazing that he can still find reporters willing to listen and print what he says. He's the most spectacularly ineffective head of the DNC ever. UPI: Dem uses Pearl Harbor to slam GOP

With all his ability and his superb resume, you'd think he would aspire to something far beyond Roger Ebert's job. Film critic Powell pans formulaic James Bond plots