TG caught this in the paper today, and I decided something in it made it eminently bloggable:

Dear Amy: My husband and I have lived in our quiet suburban Denver neighborhood for six years.

About two years ago two young gay men moved in across the street. They’ve taken the ugliest, most run-down property in the neighborhood and remodeled and transformed it into the pride of the street.

When it snows, they shovel out my car and are friendly, yet they mostly keep to themselves.

Last month I went out to retrieve my newspaper and watched them kiss each other goodbye and embrace as they each left for work.

I was appalled that they would do something like that in plain view of everyone.

I was so disturbed that I spoke to my pastor. He encouraged me to draft a letter telling them how much we appreciate their help but asking them to refrain from that behavior in our neighborhood.

I did so and asked a few of our neighbors to sign it.

Since I delivered it, I’ve not been able to get them to even engage me in conversation.

I offer greetings but they’ve chosen to ignore me.

They have made it so uncomfortable for the other neighbors and me by not even acknowledging our presence.

How would you suggest we open communications with them and explain to them that we value their contributions to the neighborhood but will not tolerate watching unnatural and disturbing behavior. – Wondering

Dear Wondering: You’re lucky that these gentlemen merely choose to ignore you.

Your neighbors could respond to your hospitality by hosting weekly outdoor “gay pride” barbecues and inviting all of their friends to enjoy life on our quiet suburban street.

I can hold out hope that they will choose to do this, but I’m spiteful in that way. Your neighbors sound much more kind.

In your original petition to these men, you basically stated that while you value them when they are raising the standard on your street and shoveling your driveway, you loathe them for being who they are.

The only way to open communication with your neighbors would be to start by apologizing to them for engaging your other neighbors in your campaign. Because you don’t sound likely to apologize, you are just going to have to tolerate being ignored.

And embarassed in print as well…somehow I keep thinking of the classic line in Blazing Saddles, where the elderly woman brings an apple pie to Bart, the black sheriff, after he’s saved the town from Mongo and then comes back to remind him to have the decency not to tell anyone she’s talked to him.

[Update: Irving has been sentenced to three years.]

As you can probably imagine, I don’t have a lot of love for Nazi apologists, or Nazis themselves, especially Illinois Nazis (see here).

But reading the London Times about the trial of right-wing Holocaust denier David Irving, I felt a twinge.

He’s on trial for what is – essentially – a thoughtcrime. I haven’t read his stuff directly, but from all reports, he denies the existence of the Holocaust.

He’s now on trial for that.

Mr Irving faces a maximum sentence of ten years in jail under Austria’s 1946 Banning Law which makes it an offence to publicly diminish, deny or justify the Holocaust. He has been held without bail since November on charges stemming from two speeches he made to Austrian rightwingers in 1989.

And having pled guilty, and facing the issue of sentencing, the issue isn’t his actions but his thoughts.

“Irving walked in with a swagger but soon ended pushed up against the wall in cross-questioning by the judge that forced him to apologise or express regret for almost every utterance he had made over the past 20 years.

“He admitted saying in 1989 that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. But he is saying that since he saw various documents in 1992 he has changed his mind and now accepts that Jews were killed.

“It’s a jury trial and Irving keeps on making references to his daughter, hoping that he will get a suspended sentence so he can leave Austria tonight. But the judge is pushing him all the time, demanding apologies – he’s being even tougher than the prosecutor.

Now I don’t know about you, but there’s something deeply creepy about this to me. I accept that we’re in an ideological battle more than a military one – it’s about the War on bad Philosophy, after all. But having spent the weekend reading reviews of the latest movie Sophie School: the Final Days about the White Rose, a short-lived student protest group in Nazi Germany, I’m just damn uncomfortable to be reading about a judge demanding to know that in his heart, David Irving has changed his mind.

I’ve followed and written for a long time about issues with the mechanics of voting – the concern that in a highly polarized polity like ours, the legitimacy of elections is going to be tested, and to the extent there are valid grounds to doubt them, the outcomes will not be accepted.

It’s the old “it’s not the voting, it’s the counting” issue.

Bloggers to the left of me (Brad Friedman at Bradblog is all over this issue), and to the right of me (Instapundit) are all equally concerned about this.

We ought to be more concerned. A lot more concerned.Right now is a four-month window before the June elections when many states are trying to decide how they will comply with the federal HAVA act. Here in California, we are about to be locked in a battle to decide if our votes will be processed – I won’t say counted – by poorly designed voting machines and systems.

Friday, the California Secretary of State conditionally approved (pdf) the use of the fatally-flawed Diebold voting machines, subject to some rather sketchy conditions. Take a look at the attached report (pdf) for the testing he commissioned.

This independent testing that the SoS commissioned found still more flaws – but suggests that it’s OK to use these machines anyway while we cross our fingers and hope.

I don’t think so, and I’ll be working hard to get as much attention paid to this as possible. Over the next few days, I’ll post some specific suggestions about what can be done.

Here are some of my earlier posts on this:

* Whose Vote Is It, Anyway?

* The #1 Priority

* Electronic Voting: Truly, Deeply Stupid

* e-Voting: One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

* Stalin: “It is not the votes that count, but who counts the votes.”

The normally-sensible Kevin Drum gets all Wimbleton on the ass of what he calls the ‘Pseudo-Sports’ we’re seeing in the Olympics – halfpipe, snowboardcross, etc.

By coincidence, we’re sitting and watching the prelims on women’s snowboardcross – an event where four competitors on snowboards race down a narrow track – at the same time – jostling, passing, falling, all kinds of crazy stuff.

It’s the opposite of elegant, it’s wild and wooly. And the competitors – unlike the programmed athletic cyborgs we see at the highest levels of most sports – are pretty out of control as well.

The top American woman, Lindsey Jacobellis, lost her gold when, leading at the final jump, she stunted and fell – a showboat move which infuriated Kevin.

I loved it.

It’s the Olympic Games, not the Olympic Job.Look, I spent two years racing bicycles full-time. I know how hard people work to get to the level where they can seriously try and get to the Olympics. I know what it’s like to get up at 5:30 every morning and train for three hours, and then go to the gym at night. I feel a pang whenever the camera tightens in on the fallen athlete – a closeup on the realization that twelve years of pain and effort was wasted in one slip of a ski or skate.

But it’s still supposed to be fun; the moments I connect most closely with are those where the sheer pleasure of performance comes through.

In the women’s halfpipe, Hannah Teter the gold medalist had won the event before her final run. She could have sideslipped down the whole pipe and walked up to the podium. Instead, she threw down a brilliant performance – out of the sheer joy of doing it.

Let’s have more of that, please.

[Update: I just caught this editorial in the NYT:

Meanwhile, the potential champions in sports like figure skating grimly go about their business, trying to pretend that it’s all for the love of the sport, that the whole world isn’t watching, that a king’s ransom in endorsements doesn’t hang in the balance.

At times, the atmosphere gets downright gloomy. When the American figure skater Johnny Weir missed the bus to the rink, he got upset and skated badly, and finished without a medal. “I didn’t feel my aura,” he said. “Inside I was black.” Meanwhile, the Russian skater Yevgeni Plushenko accepted his gold medal with a stone-faced stare, “looking completely unamused,” as The Times’s Juliet Macur reported. “I tell the truth, this is my dream, yeah, and I am so happy,” Mr. Plushenko said unconvincingly. “Believe me, I am so happy.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Jacobellis had an amazing race, built a huge lead, got exuberant and went splat. What did she think these were — Games?

]

This is too cool not to share.

Gerard Van Der Leun, the funniest person I’ve ever sat in a car for an hour with, links across to his friend Robert Fulghum’s website.

I was always too cool for Fulghum’s homilies, which in retrospect may reflect worse on me than on him, because this piece is spot on and wonderful.

No permalinks, just look for Feb 12, 2006 and “Are You A Player?”

Definition: Persons with enough nimbleness of mind to accept a surprise invitation to jump into a quick game of imagination.

Example: Here’s a city bus driver standing in the door of his vehicle, staring into the rain. An invitation from me, passing by: “OK, here’s the deal: I’ll pay for the gas, and you’ll drive us straight to the beach at Santa Monica.”

He smiles. “OK, meet me here at midnight. It’s the end of my run and they won’t miss me or the bus until morning. I’ll get some barbecue.”
A player.

…

Example: Early morning. Lady standing at a bus stop. All seven people waiting with her have wires coming out of their ears. Radios, I-pods, Walkmans, or something. All seven are in a zone – nodding heads in time to music or staring off into space. As I pass, I say to the lady: “They’re all alien robots, you know. Their souls have been sucked out of them.” The lady gives me a hard look and moves closer to the curb.
Not a player.

A man who has just walked up says, “Yes, but they aren’t useless. They’re a street-theater company and I’m their manager. We’re on our way to a gig downtown.” “Really? What’s the name of the performance?” “Bus Stop Stupor. Look for us everywhere.”
A player.

Right on target. Those are the people I want in my tribe.

Two posts from MyDD and one from Kaus; the first from Matt Stoller:

The RNC cannot afford to embrace their netroots as an audience because of the increasingly extreme and racist nature of their base. It’s not Redstate specifically, it is, as Glenn Greenwald notes, their entire pundit class. Actually, it goes beyond that, to their leadership. For instance, it’s not just James Dobson embarrassing Republicans anymore; Senator Jeff Sessions, Senator Sam Brownback, and Senate candidate Michael Steele have all compared stem cell research to the holocaust.

But the right-wing blogosphere is where racist and extreme sentiment is most obvious and trackable, it is a veritable steady diet of the stuff. No matter how persuasive Patrick Ruffini might be, and he seems like a smart fellow, the RNC cannot afford to be tagged with their base sentiment, whether it’s Little Green Footballs calling for nuclear attacks on Muslims (or ‘constitutionally protected hate speech’ as advertisers who don’t want to be associated with the site see it), right-wing and neo-Nazi embraces of extremist groups like the Minutemen, voxday calling rape victims ‘stupid’, or front-pager Blanton at Redstate calling Coretta Scott King’s funeral which President Bush spoke at a ‘Def Comedy Jam spectacle’ with ‘demands for handouts’.

The second from Chris Bowers:

Later yesterday, I wrote a post arguing that what the progressive netroots wants in Democratic candidates is also what the general public wants. Now, I would like to point out that the topics and issues the netroots focuses on are the same issues on which the general public and / or the Democratic Party is focused.

…

Mainstream issues, mainstream candidates, and mainstream ideology. For all our carping about the “MSM” (and I really hope we can all dump that term), it turns out that within the world of politics, we, the progressive netroots are as mainstream as any institution comes.

Mickey Kaus perfectly explains why I shake my hands in the air in frustration when I read things like this:

2. The Heartland Breakout Meme seems like B.S. of the sort that consistently hurts Democrats (and others who believe it): B.S. is B.S.. Bloggers are allowed to point it out (he says defensively)–especially if it’s B.S. the mainstream press has no particular interest in pointing out (because it kills the story, or because they’ll seem homophobic).** But this B.S. falls into a special category: the sort of gratifying myth that in the past has helped lull liberals (and gay rights activists who may or may not be liberals) into wild overconfidence. Remember when Democrats actually believed that Fahrenheit would help push Bush out of office? It didn’t work out that way. Moore’s film didn’t change many minds in part because, as York puts it, it “never reached audiences that had the power to defeat the president at the polls.” Despite all the “heartland” hype, it was a blue-state movie. York notes that Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ–a mirror-image “red state” movie that did well where Fahrenheit did badly, badly where Fahrenheit did well–prefigured the 2004 results, in that it attracted an audience roughly three times the size of Fahrenheit‘s (or four times Brokeback‘s!).

Much of Democratic politics seems to now consist of embracing and fanning similarly comforting, but ultimately deceptive, liberal memes. Enron has fatally damaged Bush, Abu Ghraib has fatally damaged Bush, Katrina has fatally damaged Bush, Abramoff has fatally damaged Bush, the Plame investigation will fatally damage Bush–you can catch the latest allegedly devastating issue every day on Huffington Post or Daily Kos (and frequently in the NYT). If you believe the hype–if you don’t compare Michael Moore’s box office with Mel Gibson’s box office, in effect–you’ll believe that Democrats don’t need to change to win. They just need to push all these hot memes forcefully. If you don’t believe the hype–if you think that netroots Dems are too often like the Iraqi Sunnis who think they’re a majority–you’ll look for a Bill Clinton-like alternative with greater red-state appeal.

I looked at it a little less calmly:

I don’t like a lot of what the Republican party has to offer; that’s OK, I think we need a national dialog to make good policies. It takes two.

But given that, it may be puzzling to some (hey, JC, how’ re you?) why it is that I bash the media for their blind partisanship toward establishment liberalism, instead of cheering them as an ally.

It’s because I find myself in a risky place surrounded by people who have lost the ability to tell bullshit from reality. Our party is wounded, leaking ideologically and demographically, and we sit here drinking quack nostrums made from apricot pits and listening to fake spirit mediums tell us everything will be OK because our dead ancestors FDR, JFK, and LBJ are looking over us.

They’re not.

Trent is positive that Iran has or will shortly have one or more working nuclear weapons, and that they will test them soon (within months) and then blackmail us with those tests.

I’ll skip over the notion that his position represents the absolute-worst case possibility, and that there are much higher-probability states for the situation, that no one who is likely to know is acting like this is true, and that the actors most likely to know – and act – the Israelis – haven’t acted.

So I don’t see a lot of evidence that supports his case.His specific claim as I read it is that Iran has bought fissile materials, or a working bomb from the Norks, and that they are likely to test it this spring or summer.

Again, a possibility, but not a probability much less a certainty, and I’d suggest that we’d see Israeli action – diplomatic and military – if they believed it to be the case.

So I don’t think it’s true.

Having said that, let me take it to another level – what difference does it make?

Trent doesn’t have a specific set of actions he proposes in his post, so I’m assuming he’s simply echoing what Tom H or Joe suggested a while ago – that we invade or bomb Iran.

And I’ll reply now, as I did then – ‘then what?’ Because the issue simply isn’t going to solved by defeating Iran alone, and alone we don’t have the power to defeat – as opposed to kill – everyone we’d have to defeat in order to make the problem go away.

We know for a fact that the Iranians have an interest in getting a bomb; they have said so. We believe that they are taking actions in the direction of researching and developing nuclear weapons capability. We know for a fact that they are taking actions that would support making a bomb – in the form of enrichment, at minimum.

So pretty much anyone reasonable is aware of the direction things are taking. I’m going to put aside the folks who take the Iranian claims at face value – I flat don’t believe that they are entering into a nuclear enrichment program solely for peaceful purposes. There are substantial differences between the “it doesn’t matter if they get a bomb” group and the “it’s better to go to war than let them get a bomb” group, and those differences are well worth exploring – another time.

Right now, the issue is what to do to keep from getting to that crossroads, and there’s a simple question I’ll toss out. If you were Iran, and you had three nuclear weapons, what would you do with them?

Here’s what I’d do.

I’d put them in cargo containers, after a lot of driving and shuffling around, and ship them to Rotterdam, Haifa, and Los Angeles. And I’d set them off.

And I’d do it while there’s still a lot of doubt about my ability to build a bomb, so I could deny it.

Iran gets nothing for a test except a war. What else would Europe, Israel, and the US do? And Saudi Arabia would be happy to see it happen – just as they were happy to see the US invade Iraq.

The only defendable position (i.e. position that leads to stalemate) for Iran is one where, like France, they acquire a nuclear weapons capability strong enough to really sting an opponent – France’s ‘force de frappe’ was meant to allow them to deter a Soviet invasion by plausibly hitting the Soviet Union with 10 or more hydrogen bombs – on a mix of manned bombers and SLBM’s. At that point, they have the equivalent of the Israeli ‘Samson option.’ Until Iran gets that capability, they can’t realistically deter foreign invasion with a conventional nuclear capability. By conventional, I mean ‘acknowledged’ as in the French nuclear forces which are acknowledged to be a part of the French military.

An unconventional nuclear capability – one that can put hard-to-trace nukes in shipping containers or trucks that can be driven across borders – is a time-limited opportunity for them as well, because once you obviously appear have the capability to build bombs, you’ll get blamed for them anyway. If nukes go off in Red Hook next week, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that they’ll be going off in North Korea and possibly Iran shortly thereafter.

So the wall they have to climb to get to ‘stalemate’ is a tall and steep one. They’re not nearly there yet, and won’t be this year.

I’m not suggesting that this problem – of a hostile theocracy working to obtain nuclear weapons – isn’t incredibly serious. I’m not suggesting that the click isn’t ticking. I am suggesting that it unlikely that the breakout will consist of saber-rattling in the form of a test, followed by demands (and I’ll suggest that the war in Iraq is part of the reason why – they know we have the will to invade), and most of all what I’m suggesting is that the actions we need to take in a matter of months don’t involve mobilizing troops, but recruiting and training them.

Today, we only have five levels of options: diplomacy, sanctions, bombing, invasion, and nuclear attack.

Trent, Tom, and Joe are pushing for moving ahead toward levels 3 & 4. I’m suggesting we move up option no. 5, put some clear tripwires around it in the sense of ‘if a bomb goes off in New York, you’re getting bombed’ while we work hard on 1 and 2 and build a stronger base for 3 & 4.

We have to deter them – if that’s possible – from a nuclear terrorist strike, not prevent a nuclear test.

This is a scary time, for sure.

But, to recap what I said when we discussed this before:

Let’s remember that Iran is 30 minutes away from becoming a sheet of glass at our command. That power is real, and gives us both the space to maneuver and the responsibility to use it wisely.

You know, those Powerline guys lead more interesting lives than I’d imagined…

National Review Online kindly invited me to participate in its “Women we love” symposium in honor of Valentine’s Day. After getting clearance from my wife and her husband, I wrote about Star Tribune metro columnist Katherine Kersten. The ladies weigh in with “Men we love.”

[emphasis added – A.L.]

I’m hammered pretty regularly for claiming that the core of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy “cloud” really doesn’t do a good job of standing for American interests. I’m reminded that Kos isn’t the Democratic Party, Cindy Sheehan isn’t the Democratic Party, Michael Moore isn’t the Democratic Party.

Well, Al Gore is actually pretty damn close to the epicenter of the Democratic Party.In case you’ve missed it, here’s what he said in Saudi this weekend:

Gore said Arabs had been “indiscriminately rounded up” and held in “unforgivable” conditions. The former vice president said the Bush administration was playing into al-Qaida’s hands by routinely blocking Saudi visa applications.

He was in good company in donning kneepads:

Also at the forum, the vice chairman of Chevron Corp., Peter Robertson, said President Bush’s desire to cut U.S. dependence on Mideast oil shows a “misunderstanding” of global energy supply and the critical role of Saudi Arabia.

In his State of the Union address this month, Bush pledged to cut U.S. dependence on Middle East oil by 75 percent by 2025.

“This notion of being energy independent is completely unreasonable,” Robertson said at the economic forum, which opened Saturday.

I can forgive Chevron – he’s an oil company executive; if he wasn’t venal and shortsighted, I’d worry.

But what the hell is Gore thinking? I know that the House of Saud owns a substantial portion of Congress, but I didn’t think they invested in has-been candidates.

And where is someone, anyone in the Democratic Party to smack some sense into him? This is just embarrassing.

There’s not much I can say about Vice President Cheney’s dumb accident?

Well, for starters, it’s simple; as a shooter, you own everything that goes downrange.There’s nothing else to say; yes Whittington was wrong to walk away from the shooting party without everyone going ‘guns down.’ When I’ve gone field bird shooting, I’ve gone in groups of three or four, and we were all careful to stay in line, not break a 90-degree wedge in front of us. When someone had to leave the line – usually to go answer a call of nature – we all went guns down and wait, usually mocking the absentee.

But Cheney pulled the trigger.

A couple of comments. The press account says that Whittington was wounded in the chest, neck, and face; assume he’s a normal sized guy, that’s about 12″ – 14″. So the minimum distance is probably 8 – 10 yards, since an improved choke patterns to about that size. I think that’s too small a distance – at that range, Whittington would have been hit by most of the load of 200 – 300 pellets. My guess is that he was probably 15 – 20 yards away; at 30 yards or more, I’d say winter clothes would have blocked the small birdshot pellets – so no wounds to the chest – so he was likely closer than that.

But Cheney pulled the trigger.

Having pulled the trigger, there’s just no freaking justification for the evasion of the press. It’s a recurring theme; the Administration is awesome at controlling the message; not so good at learning how to use the press to actually connect with the American people.

And we’ll go right ahead and wait for the inevitable jokes about Cheney shooting a man in Texas just to see him die.