Reverend Brill says that I am wrong about the spelling of "Koran". To add insult to injury, in the comments to my earlier article on this subject, Reverend Burgess also disagreed with me. With my luck, Donald Sensing will be along soon to tell me I'm wrong, too.

Having considered the matter deeply, I can only conclude that Satan has bamboozled their synapses. Because, as has already been established for all right-thinking people, DIRAE (Dean Is Right About Everything). It's in the Bible, guys, just look it up. If you haven't found it yet, you probably haven't looked hard enough.

In defense of "Koran," I merely submit John Derbyshire's piece on the onomastic cringe. Yes, yes, he's one of those scary right-wingers, but I think he makes a good point. Don't you?

So far as authentic American conservatism is concerned: strictly speaking, there is no such thing.

Discuss.

Well, I mean, seriously, that is a male cat. Can you dispute it? I don't think you can.

I first noticed Cox & Forkum when I spotted a cartoon called "The Blogger's Cycle." I thought, "Wow. These guys nailed me! I could have written this myself, if only I were that clever and talented."



I immediately read the rest of the Cox & Forkum weblog, where I was astounded by the sharp, professional level of their work. Given the popularity of my interview with Chris Muir earlier this year, I thought it would be fun to interview these guys too.

As their web site explains, Allen Forkum generally writes the cartoons, while John Cox illustrates them. They've been collaborating together on various projects for many years, but have only recently branched out into political cartooning. Their work is currently unsyndicated, but they are self-publishing a book called Black & White World, which I'd put on my Amazon wish list if it were available through Amazon!

I must say, they were a fun interview, and probably the easiest one I've ever done. --Dean

---

Q: Where do you guys hail from? Where do you live now?

FORKUM: I'm from the Nashville area, and that's where I live now.

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Grrr. My new laptop died this morning. I was in the middle of transitioning everything to that laptop so the desktop could be Rosemary's computer. Then this morning, suddenly, the unit would no longer start. At all. I'm going to have to try to figure out how to get it going again.

The reason I'm sharing my tale of woe with you? I have several days' worth of email on that beast. There are quite a few of you who have sent me requests for help, information on setting up new Movable Type blogs (I think there are at least two of you in that camp, John Weidner and one other I think), there was at least one blogger who had an interesting proposal I hadn't fully read or digested yet (Defective Yeti) and quite a few others whose mail I had barely glanced at.

So: if you sent me an email recently and did not receive a response, please give me another day or two and, if you still get no response, please re-send, because it means Mr. Laptop isn't coming back to life and neither is your mail.

(Grrrr. Computers are evil. No one should use them.)

Here's a short summary of where we stand today. Barely four months after decapitating one of the most bloody and oppressive regimes on the planet:

We are scoring huge victories against light resistance from the dwindling remnants of the fascist Baath regime. We are taking light casualties among our all-volunteer forces--indeed, are inflicting almost ten times as many casualties as we're taking. Reports from soldiers in the area are also generally pretty positive, with no more than the usual amount of grumbling that's common to all members of the armed forces. Indeed, to read some of them, you'd have a hard time knowing they're in a war zone if they didn't tell you.

Furthermore, people from all over Iraq are deeply grateful and are, according to some reporters, mostly afraid we'll leave too soon. Beyond just the impressions of some reporters to that effect, in fact, polling shows that a majority of Iraqis firmly want us to stay for a minimum of a year longer.

Despite the pocket resistance we are encountering, the overwhelming majority of Iraq is peaceful. Only in a few small portions of the country are we experiencing any resistance at all. Peace and order are the rule of the day.

The infrastructure and day-to-day lives of ordinary Iraqis continues to improve rapidly, already meeting or exceeding pre-war levels in most of the country. Moreover, democratic reforms are moving ahead very quickly, and are doing much better than many people expected. About a hundred different newspapers are being published. Schools, hospitals, clinics, and shops are open for business.

On the whole, things are going splendidly. Pocket resistance is being mopped up, casualties are light, and Iraq is recovering rapidly. Indeed, it's doing much better than either Germany or Japan were in the first few years after World War II, in just about every area--including, by the way, in the area of establishing democratic rule and civil reform within a pluralist framework.

Funny how you don't get that impression from a lot of the news coverage, isn't it?

* Update * Oh yes, I forgot to mention, terrorism continues to decline in frequency, continuing a months-long downward trend both in the mideast and worldwide.

*Update 2* You should also read this. And, this too. All written by soldiers on active duty.

Reverend Sensing has some news and comments about the Koran that you probably should read. It's in reference to this Newsweek piece. Also worth reading, unearthed by Lexington Green in Sensing's comments, is this Atlantic Monthly piece on the Koran.

By the way: blessings upon the Atlantic Monthly people for spelling it "Koran." This goofball "Qu'ran" stuff really needs to stop. With guns and knives if need be. It's K-O-R-A-N, as John Derbyshire would say.

Dean said, "So tell me my friend: did any music worthy of Barney the Dinosaur ever come out of De-troit? Go on I dare ya: tell me all about it!"

I wondered why Dean would want to judge music by Barney standards, didn't you?

Barney was a Texan!!!

"A six-foot purple dinosaur, Barney is the star of the children's TV show Barney and Friends. Barney began in 1987 as the star of direct-sale videos created by Dallas teacher Sheryl Leach. The tapes caught the eye of the Public Broadcasting System, who put Barney and Friends on the air in 1992. "

I grew up partly in Texas, partly in the South, and partly in Chicago. Yes, that includes where Jake and Elwood grew up, and I'll tell you no lie: I've hung out in both Rock Island and Calumet City.

All told, this means I can claim Lightnin' Hopkins, Z.Z. Hill, Pinetop Perkins, Jake and Elwood Blues, Albert and B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Billy Gibbons, Gregg & Duane Allman, Carla & Rufus Thomas, Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, and Steve Cropper & Duck Dunn as my own. So all I'm asking is this:

Where was music that good ever made?

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Since it seems to be my day to link to Glenn Reynolds, let's play a little game:

Can you spot the sarcasm in a recent soldier's comments about the situation in Iraq?

Bonus if you can answer, correctly, whether or not the New York Times editors were able to spot said sarcasm. (Hint: there's not much evidence in favor, is there?)

(Thanks to Moe for the heads-up.)

It's nice to know that this has been verified as legitimate, eh?

In other news, Reason Magazine has a fascinating article by a Muslim group which insists that Islam is indeed quite compatible with free speech, free religious exercise and free markets. I'm not sure what I think, but I'm dying to know what some of Islam's harshest critics have to say in response. (After they have read the article, of course.)

(Via He Who Must Not Be Named.)

In case you haven't heard it already, Chris Muir returned yesterday. Seems his medical issues worked themselves out better than expected. I'm glad to hear it.

Kelley Blight is up to no good, as usual. But she's about to have her 10,000th visitor. Might that be you? Click to find out.

I also notice that she's getting involved in new Africa blog, which I think is very interesting.

You know, one of the more annoying habits in the blogosphere is so-called "fisking." It's the practice of taking a press release, opinion piece, or other article, quoting all or parts of it, and retorting with snappy rejoinders and cutting remarks.

When done well, it's devastating. Unfortunately, it's rarely done well, and is more often simply an angry rant.

But back in May, Mike Hendrix wrote a fisking of a sandwich that John Cole recently reminded me about. And you know, as fiskings go, it's a pretty good one. He deserves special points (and special sauce?) just for the concept.

(Yes, it was posted back in May. Like there's a statute of limitations on these things?)

The fear of most Iraqis is not that we won't leave soon enough. It's that we'll leave too soon. A few pundits and gloomsayers should try to keep that in mind.

Ditto the fact that what we're doing isn't much more expensive than maintaining those "no fly zones" to protect the Kurds was, and that once Iraq is self-sustaining, it'll actually have been cheaper to do this than the status quo would have been. In all three areas: dollars, lives, and suffering.

Last week, Bill Clinton came to the defense, in strong and ringing fashion, of President Bush on the whole "Bush lied" stuff that's been in the press. Xrlq has the full story in case you haven't noticed, and also tells us what Clinton was really saying. Looks about right to me.

Meanwhile, after realizing that the campaign finance "reform" package that they fought so hard to pass last year hurt them far more than Republicans, Democrats have had a change of heart. It seems that they discovered the perils of believing your own press about being "the party of the little guy" when they realized most of their campaign donations came from multimillionaires, while most Republican fundraising came in much smaller donations. As John Rosenberg reports, Democrats are now fighting hard against donations limits they themselves played the biggest part in establishing. Most amusingly, the ever-Quixotic but lovable John McCain is puzzled by their behavior. (Or is he?)

Maybe we'll one day do the smart thing, ban all corporate and union donations, lift all caps on individual donations (which are an assault on the 1st amendment anyway), and require instant disclosure on the internet of all donations and who they came from.

Now that Democrats have had Lady Reality swat them hard on the nose with a rolled-up copy of the New York Times, maybe they'll actually do the smart thing for once? Let's hope.

Who better to write a fitting remembrance of Bob Hope than an officer currently serving in the sandbox?

His tribute is short and sweet, which is perfectly appropriate for a life so long and admirable.

You'll find a compendium of Sheila "Astray" O'Malley's best work here. I especially liked her Battlefield Earth compendium and her tribute to Jean Kerr. Indeed, I wsh every mother with children still at home would read the latter.

I sincerely hope you had fun this weekend, Sheila. I had fun watching.

So this looks like this will be my last post as a guest-blogger for Dean.

After all, Sunday night is the only night I watch television during the whole week - except that at the moment, I have no television, so I have basically invited myself over to a friend's house in order to watch my absolutely ridiculous and ultimately satisfying Sunday night line-up: Sex and the City, Project Greenlight, and the new reality TV show which completely HOOKED ME IN during its premiere last week: The Restaurant.

Anyway, having revealed myself as a complete and utter MORON, I wanted to thank you all for welcoming me here so heartily, and post two other things before I leave you:

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I think it is perfectly fitting that the photograph of the innovative Cubans trying to escape (pointed to by Jerry in the previous post) would come the week of the 50th anniversary of the revolution in Cuba, the revolution which brought Castro to power. July 26th is the date, to be exact.

Brian Latell of The Washington Post has a good piece up at the moment, entitled "Revolution in Ruins". (I have room in my heart to be grateful that the word 'ruins' is not in scare quotes!)

It may be a cliche that nature abhors a vacuum, but it is a cliche because cliches are often quite true. What will happen when Castro, clearly ill, clearly on a physical decline, passes on? What or who will fill the power vacuum? Who exactly is LEFT? Castro has imprisoned everyone, the intelligentsia are either under lock and key, or they have long since fled to greener freer pastures. Who remains who has any brains at all, who is not just a nodding yes-man to Castro?

Latell writes:

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But we did give some money to Michele. Why don't you give some to Meryl?

Only 8 hours left until the Blogathon's over! (It's 1 am Eastern as I write this.)

(Going back into lurk mode.)

Some Cubans were so desperate to leave their socialist paradise that they turned their '51 Chevy flatbed into a boat. They were doing 8 MPH across the Florida Straits when they were halted by the U. S. Coast Guard, whereupon they were returned to Cuba and their vessel sunk.

Go ahead, smile at the pictures and shake your head in amazement as you read the Coast Guard quote. Those plucky Cubans! Gotta love 'em! Just remember that, even if they aren't punished for trying to leave the island, the only thing these guys have to look forward to upon their return is... more life in Cuba.

The Herald takes a light tone, focusing on the creativity of the migrants. Given the depressing reality, can you blame 'em?

Just look at this picture that I found on Powerline.

On that note, that positive beautiful note: I am going to go out and enjoy this muggy summer day.

I shall return.

Okay, so Mark Steyn is making me laugh out loud. His latest column imagines the BBC reporting on the death of Mussolini, featuring interviews with Harold Pinter, Robert Fisk, Michel Foucault (HA) and others.

The first paragraph gives you an idea of the irreverent tone of the piece:

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So a little bird (You know who you are!) told me to go check out the following post at Jeff Jarvis' blog.

In the post, a member of the Iranian diaspora takes on the anti-American stance of some of his fellow Iranians.

I read the post with mounting excitement.

Here's an excerpt:

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I swore I would post no articles all weekend, but I recently left a comment over at Tim Blair's blog noting my seething jealousy at the fact that someone has set up an Anti-Tim Blair weblog. That's right, a whole blog devoted to attacking Tim Blair.

Who does this Tim Blair think he is, being so important that people hate him enough to set up web sites just to destroy him? The nerve!

Then the amazing Emily let me know she loved me. How so? Why, by creating this execrable yet compelling Dean Esmay Sucks weblog. A most impressive piece of work, wouldn't you say?

My ego restored, I now return you to your lovely host Sheila for the rest of the weekend.

That's the headline on Yahoo News:

"Arabs Shocked by TV Images of Saddam's Sons"

The lead paragraph:

Arabs said "it was un-Islamic to exhibit corpses, however much the brothers were loathed."

(Sigh. It's always something, ain't it?)

Pardon me, but I am now going to rant.

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The New Republic is hosting an in-depth online debate about Howard Dean between Jonathan Chait and Jonathan Cohn, two senior editors at TNR. (I guess your initials have to be JC to work at The New Republic, and you also must have "Jonathan" as a first name).

They take opposing viewpoints, and post back and forth; it's been going on for two days now.

It's juicy stuff. A couple excerpts to wet the whistle:

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Sgt. Hook (one of my faves), has responded to Venomous Kate's survey: 50 Most Defining Moments in American History with his own list.

I am, frankly, baffled at the blunt inclusion of "Louisa May Alcott" on the list, at #46. Now do not get me wrong: Little Women was one of the most formative books I've ever read ... but to see her squashed in between "Martin Luther King" and "The Television" is confusing indeed.

But other than that anomaly, Hook has come up with a damn fine list. And the comments people have left so far, of things they believe he left off, or ignored, are almost as good as the post itself. I read such comments and think, in a purely selfish way, "Ah, I am in good company here. People with a sense of history, with opinions on things ... who have some understanding of where we have come from..."

Anyway, it's a fun list - part serious, part comedic, and should spark up some interesting debates. I'd bump Amelia Earhart off, in favor of Lindbergh. But hey, that's just me.

So everybody is linking to the speech Cheney made yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute. And rightly so.

And Victor Davis Hanson's latest in National Review is a perfect accompaniment.

Nothing in Cheney's speech is news, but I do not think that our leaders can reiterate enough what exactly it is we are doing, and the philosophy behind it. People obviously need reminders. How I see it is: Well, actually, I am going to quote somebody else, but unfortunately I cannot remember who exactly said it. I think it might have been Lileks. The quote was: "To Bush, every day is September 12." To Bush, there is no more September 10 world. The world that existed on September 10 is gone, dead, forever. Buh-bye. There are new rules now. It's a new landscape.

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I've been falling behind on some school work and feeling a psychic drain. I need a break for a few days.

"NO!" you are surely all shrieking. "What will I do without a steady stream of Deanish goodness to sate my addiction?" Fear not, for I have arranged for some cool water to slake your thirst.

Sheila O'Malley has agreed to be my guest blogger for the next few days. She should be along some time today to beguile and entertain you. Give her a big welcome, would ya?

I have long supported the Palestinian cause. I've also long insisted that they will not have any hope of freedom until the thug Arafat is removed, and the terrorist organizations like Hizbullah and Hamas are crushed. Because they are the people ultimately responsible for the plight of the Palestinians.

If the Palestinian militants put their arms down today, they'd have their state tomorrow.

When I read this and this, I got depressed. Because it suggested to me that there's no light at the end of this tunnel.

I don't link to Justene Adamec very often, mostly because I don't live in California and California politics are her raison d'être. But she's really been on a roll lately, with tidbits on the California recall, info on Russians and Saddam and WMDs, and more. You really should visit her some time. Especially if you're a bear-flagger.

Charlie B. recently unearthed a thread full of people who regularly excoriate others for racism, intolerance, and stereotyping. What's funny is, he caught them guilty of exactly that behavior, and at length. It was pretty funny, at least to my warped sense of humor.

Bryan at Media Review makes the obvious point that little real shoe-leather reporting happens on weblogs. Well I certainly don't dispute that. Much of the blogosphere is simply punditry, and probably always will be.

HOWEVER, since no one seems to have acknowledged my examples (which I only linked to obliquely earlier), let me highlight again items which have appeared just on this one weblog, which I submit meet all the criteria for "real journalism," in every sense, including substantial original reporting:

Please examine the following and try to tell me I'm mistaken:

I Had To Be A Part Of It: The Fall of Baghdad.

Interview with an Iraqi.

An Old Warrior Remembers.

North Korean Travelogue.

Interview with Chris Muir.

Every one of those involves original reporting with real shoe leather and real research. I didn't write most of it, but it all appeared here (except the North Korea piece), and I'm damned proud of all of it.

I also submit that the following, while being mostly pieces of historical analysis, involve substantial research and should count as original reporting. Even if they required much shoe leather by others, they required significant work and research of their own:

Genocide.

Famine, Lies and Justice.

I agree that bloggers will always be dependent on mainstram full-time journalists (and historians), and that original reporting will be a minority of what blogs contain. But blogs do contain real reporting, and more of it appears all the time.

(Hey, do you think Jeff Jarvis would like any of this stuff?)

* Update * By the way, how could anyone call what L.T. Smash does anything but journalism?

Summer blockbusters are being hit hard by word of mouth, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Not just ordinary word-of-mouth, but Internet-amplified word-of-mouth. Ang Lee's Hulk nabbed the #1 box-office spot its opening weekend. The next weekend, its take was down a whopping seventy percent, setting a new record for second-week falloff of a film that opened at the top.

Apparently, the studios are scrambling to try to figure out how to market their films in the face of this phenomenon. (They've apparently tried schmoozing Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News, but his site's community collectively has an extremely acute shill detector.) Here's a radical idea: how about making better movies?

via Dangerousmeta

Chris Noble notes that the US and UK are seriously considering hiring mercenaries to help relieve our overcommitted forces overseas. He has the same concerns about it that I do.

Kevin says that Sunday news magazine editors should pay Sid for the rights to reprint this: Denouement.

Kevin's right.

Earlier this week, I was talking to a friend who works for a respected newspaper. He commented that one of the stories recently appearing on this web site was too good to be published in most modern newspapers. He said he knew it the moment he saw it. You'll have to take my word that he wasn't flattering me, nor was I looking for flattery. I didn't write the thing anyway.

This is what came to mind when I read this story on weblogs and journalistic reaction to them. The whole thing reminded me, in fact, of this story about J-school written by Page Minder last year.

Which brings me to my point: without self-flattery I invite you to click here. Read all of it. It's not all all that much material, but tell me: can you pick up the Sunday edition of your local newspaper and find material that greatly exceeds all of it for quality, orginiality, or accuracy? I don't think you can.

Now contemplate that all of it was written by independent citizens working for no reason at all except that they wanted to do so.

In fact, I'll ask this even riskier question: what would you rather read? Honestly?

Which is not to say that Dean's World provides better fare than most newspapers. It doesn't. We have neither the time nor the resources to produce a newspaper's worth of material on a daily or even weekly basis. Indeed, we are highly dependent on the traditional media for material. But real journalism happens here in the blogosphere. Not just on this site, but on many others. Sooner or later, that's going to start mattering to the world abroad. Indeed, only a fool would think otherwise.

Syndicated news services are within a decade of going belly-up. At least, as we know them. Broadcast news services (ABC, CBS, NBC in North America) are already dead and don't even know it.

The news services that will matter most in the future will be supposed "dinosaurs" like the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times--not to mention upstarts like Fox News and CNN. Why? Because whatever their flaws, they're all smart enough to be offering (advertiser-sponsored) news for free on the internet right now, and creating content that matters.

They and weblogs are the future. Although weblogs will change, the basics of what they are and what they do won't change all that dramatically.

*Update* I see I should flesh out my comments here. I'll tell you why I think the wire services are dead:

Prestige organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post do hire a lot of journalists. But more to the point: so do papers and broadcast sources all around the planet. They can now share content in real-time electronically with each other.

Why would you need newswire feeds anymore, when you've got the internet? Weblogs, with features like Technorati, will increasingly tend to drive the news buzz, while local organizations will be more and more able to rely directly on sources in other cities rather than the wire services to tell them what's going on elsewhere. I suspect the wire service concept is simply no longer adequate.

Sheila O'Malley is easily one of my favorite short essay writers. This is, in part, because we think much alike. But she also knows that restraint is part of effective phrasing. Most of all, she knows this: sincerity equals bombasity only occasionally. I'll bet she's devastating on stage.

Anyway, she says we should all read this piece by James Woolsey in The Guardian. Well I read it, and what do you know? She's right.

(Someday I'll write a piece on why I like The Guardian, even though it irritates me at times. Suffice it for now to say that, unlike certain other sources, I never question its honesty.)

The crew over at Winds of Change are featuring some very interesting information on Hong Kong today. There have been recent massive protests and government upheaval in that fabled city. Exciting, frightening, and hopeful all at once is how I feel watching it from afar.

Senator Diane Feinstein has come out in favor of vouchers. In D.C., anyway. It takes a small amount of courage on her part, obviously, but she's in a safe seat and it's becoming more apparent all the time that the ice is cracking on this issue.

Now, will Joe Lieberman find the stones to go back to supporting the idea? I'll never forget how he told the Waters wing of the party that the best way to get him to shut up on school choice was to get him elected as Vice President. I keep wondering if he'll do the same next year. So far he seems mum on the issue.

* Update * By the way, Blaster's got some good insights on this issue, too, including something I'd forgotten: special ed has always worked on vouchers in many parts of the country.

"The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization in the U.S. It is affiliated with the Socialist International. Fifty-four U.S. Congressmen are members of the DSA. Coincidentally (?), 34 of these "socialists" are among the most militant members of the pro-Castro lobby."

"To name just a few, on Capitol Hill we find in the pro-Castro gang Representatives Barney Frank (D-MA), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC-AL), Jesse Jackson (D-IL), Julian C. Dixon (D-CA), James A. McDermott (D-WA), Charles Rangel (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-CA)."

"New York’s Charles Rangel’s love affair with Castro dates back to 1959, when Castro stayed at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa and Rangel sat beside him at the dinner table. Ever since he has been the useful servant and he travels to Cuba often bringing members of the U.S. Congress’ Black Caucus and TransAfrica to marvel at the socialist "paradise," that his friend, Castro - probably the biggest slave master in the history of slavery - has created in Cuba."

"Rep. Waters travels to Cuba often, apparently for guidance or orders from her socialist comrades. She recently was in Havana cutting the ribbon at the opening ceremony of a Medical Convention with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA)."

HR179 BILL TITLE: Stating the sense of the House of Representatives regarding the systematic human rights violations in Cuba committed by the Castro regime; calling for the immediate release of all political prisoners and supporting free elections for Cuba.

Vote passed 414-0 with 10 abstaining Democrats and 1 abstaining Republican. They are:
Ballance
Conyers
Jackson-Lee (TX)
Jackson (IL)
Johnson
Kilpatrick
Lee
E. B. Rush
Waters
Wynn

Paul (R)

· Cuba interferes with US-based television programs broadcast by satellite to Iran, announced the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a federal agency that is responsible for non-military US broadcasts. The jamming was first detected on July 6th. "The act is illegal; a serious threat to satellite communications and it needs to be stopped," said BBG President Kenneth J. Tomilson. (BBG, Washington, July 15)

· Three men were killed and a 10-year-old boy critically injured in the port of La Coloma, when they tried to seize a boat to flee the island. Authorities said the shootings occurred without the intervention of surrounding forces. (EFE, Havana, July 18)

· The US Coast Guard detained 15 Cubans that fled in a ferryboat from Cuba. Havana accused them of "hijacking the boat." Cuban-American members of Congress warned about the "possibility of execution" if they are returned. (Reuters, July 18)

· Six members of Congress (including Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen) asked US Attorney General John Ashcroft what actions the Justice Department is conducting regarding the murder of US citizens in international airspace by Castro’s MIG-29 fighter jets in 1996. ( Press Release and Letter to Attorney General Ashcroft, July 11, 2003)

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[Sniff] They were such fun boys. So full of promise. Where's my hanky?

* Update * Kills confirmed. Iraqis celebrate in the streets, cheering and shooting off guns into the air. (The last one via Tim Blair, who notes that yet another dire prediction turns out to have been false.)

In the following essay, Don Pesci writes that Walter Duranty, The New York Times' notorious and late Moscow correspondent, should have his Pulitzer Prize rescinded.

-- Tim Machesney

FAMINE, LIES AND JUSTICE

by Don Pesci

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I was contacted by a Ukrainian in New Britain, Connecticut who wanted to send me a film on the 1932-33 famine in that country. He asked me to view the film and let him know if I could think of any reason why it should not be shown in the United States. The film, Harvest of Despair, had been widely shown in Canada. That was my first exposure to the greatest man made disaster ever recorded, and the first time in history that famine on such a scale was used as an instrument of war and oppression.

I was stunned by Harvest of Despair. It contained footage of both the famine in 1932-33 and an earlier famine that was stopped in its tracks by Lenin, who imported food into the stricken areas. The 32-33 famine -- the Ukrainians call it the Holodomor, roughly translated as "famine-genocide," the "H" intentionally capitalized to emphasize a parallel with the Holocaust -- was caused by Joseph Stalin, who used the famine to break the resistance of Ukrainians to Soviet rule. The terror-famine, as historian Robert Conquest called it, was caused by Stalin's first Five Year Plan. This was a program designed, its Communist proponents claimed, to modernize an antiquated agricultural community, particularly in Ukraine. Between 6 and 10 million people died.

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So. It appears that Yasser Arafat's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades kidnapped and beat the crap out of the mayor of Jennin, accusing him of being "an Israeli collaborator."

The people who are really oppressing the Palestinians are the thugs running the joint. Sure is good to know that Arafat has that Nobel Peace Prize, isn't it?

(Via James Taranto.)

Mac Swift has a rather disturbing (and fairly well documented) article on the link between brutal thug Charles Taylor of Liberia, Jesse Jackson, and Pat Robertson. Rather astonishing. He also asserts an Al Qaeda link.

What's worse, when a movie's just plain bad, or when it's almost-good and clearly could have been great? Ben Kepple has some thoughts on the matter.

My friend Ed Wagner recently helped me remember my favorite urban legend: Resurrection Mary, from my old stomping grounds on the south side of Chicago.

Here's a good writeup of the story of Resurrection Mary. There are several versions of her story, just like all urban legends. I heard more than one growing up as a good. Wonderful stuff, though, and as a bonus, that page has plenty of links to related legends.

By the way, yes, I've been by that graveyard and seen those bars.