Paxety Pages

15 of the 19. Get your coffee mug here, your lawsuit here.

The coming war with Iraq - this article makes it seem closer - and raises other important points, such as our future relationship with the Dictators of Saud.

Janet Reno is not popular with Florida Democratic leaders. Most support her opponent in the primary, Bill McBride. She still leads McBride by 30 points in the polls, though.

Maybe there will be no Osama bin Laden trail in Afghanistan. I hope we've learned this lesson from Vietnam.

Our friends the Saudis, on the future course the Dictators of Saud  may take if the U.S. continues to support Israel:

"It is a mistake to think that our people will not do what is necessary to survive," the person close to the crown prince said, "and if that means we move to the right of bin Laden, so be it; to the left of Qaddafi, so be it; or fly to Baghdad and embrace Saddam like a brother, so be it. It's damned lonely in our part of the world, and we can no longer defend our relationship to our people."

Read the whole thing.

April 24

I deeply regret the American bombing of the Canadian soldiers last week. What's the cause? An investigation is about to begin, but I have to wonder if the pilot received inadequate training. I remember a lot of complaints during the Clinton administration from military pilots who said they didn't get enough flight time to keep up their skills. Did the pilot who dropped the bomb get proper training? If not, are there others who are also inadequately trained? And what's being done about it.

Read Megan McArdle's latest from the WTC.

So I've been sitting on the WTC site for seven months now, and it occurred to me today that it no longer looks like a grave. And though I know that there is, as the book says, a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up, it still makes me sad that it now looks like nothing more than the largest construction site in the world.

Every so often those of us who came in that first week play a game of "Do you remember?"

Do you remember how you had to drive through six or seven checkpoints, manned by soldiers with real guns, to get to the site?

April 23

113 Saudi intellectuals say the U.S. and Israel are the axis of evil in the world. Why wasn't this on the national news? (link thanks to den Beste).

There's a lot of talk about the French elections (read Instantman and den Beste). One candidate, Le Pen - a right-winger, anti-crime, anti-immigration - won 17% of the vote and will face current prime minister Chirac in a runoff. There's lots of speculation that Le Pen's voters don't really support his policies but want to send a message to traditional politicians. Another theory says they want Chirac to face an easier opponent. Voters in Georgia once similarly voted in a governor's race - with shocking results. More

April 22

Oh, no. Our favorite geeks.

(But are The Lone Gunman really dead? The caskets were suspiciously all the same size.Very suspicious.)

And an additional treat - for those of us who watch with closed captioning  - when the Gunmen spoke of the woman, closed captioning spelled it "Yves". When the Man In Black (aka Lenny) spoke of her, closed captioning spelled it "Eve."

John McCain as an independent? There's been a lot of talk of that lately. The chattering heads on the Sunday shows are particularly bad about tossing out "Oh, he can run as an independent." It's not that easy - and it's not a matter of ideology, as the pundits are discussing - it's a matter of time, logistics and money.  More

Jacksonville TV wars again. As I predicted, CBS is moving to WTEV-TV 47, the present UPN affiliate. We'll see how Cheap Channel messes up CBS. (Clicking on the link above gets you a good photo of my friend Beverly Brooks.)

Earth Day - Tim Blair style.