When it comes to bloggers, the biggest name in liberal politics on the web is The Daily Kos. He’s raised a lot of money for political candidates, is frequently referenced by campaigns, and Hugh Hewitt has even discussed putting him on the air. All this as a result of his successful web site.

But yesterday Kos stepped over the line and it looks like it may cost him. He posted this about the deaths of four American contractors in Fallujah:

I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

I’d link to the entry but it’s been deleted (and half of his Kos’s political candidate advertisers have demanded their ads be removed), but Friedman got a screenshot.

I won’t go into a huge diatribe about what Kos wrote. Others have done that. I will just note that some are of the opinion that these security personnel were “mercenaries”. I don’t see them that way. But even if they were, it doesn’t make their deaths any less horrific. It’s not just that they were killed — as Kos himself points out, there were regular military personnel who died the same day — it’s what happened afterwards. The contractors were beaten, dismembered, burned, spit on, dragged through the streets, and hung from bridges and telephone wires.

Kos’s error was multiplied by his poor timing, choice of words, and implication of the contractors’ motives. His subsequent post makes an attempt at justifying the deleted entry by leaning on his childhood. Kos didn’t ask my opinion, but a straightforward apology might have been better received and appreciated.

It’ll be interesting to see what long term fallout this has on his rising star.

Mention the word ‘genocide’ or make reference to the systematic murder of millions and most people in the Western world will immediately think of the Holocaust. But that dark period represents only one of three such events to occur in the last century.

During World War I, the forces of nationalism within the faltering Ottoman Empire lead to the 20th century’s first large scale genocide. Between 1915 and 1916, the Turks used the war as a pretense for “removing” all Armenians from Turkey. More than 1.5 million were murdered.

The world must have collectively learned very little from this bloody bit of history, because just two decades later the Germans were crafting their “Final Solution”. Add six million to the tally there.
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Major leage baseball players take a pay cut? I never thought I’d see the day. Of course, if you read carefully, you’ll find this “pay cut” chopped the average salary by 2.7% from $2.56 million to $2.49 million. This definitely belongs on the front page, don’t you think?

Just to show you how skewed this article is, it actually left me feeling sorry for the Milwaukee Brewers. Their team makes a grand total of $27.5 million. Compare that with the Yankees at $183 million. Even the hometown Angels here in Orange County are over $100 million. Of course, with the cost of living being what it is around here, they probably need every penny of that to own a home in Southern California.

One of the RV6 pilots on the Socal RV list was out at Mojave today and witnessed the lastest Scaled Composites rocket powered test flight. Scaled is likely to be the first to make a run at the $10 million X-Prize. The U.S. government has already issued Scaled a spaceflight permit — the first of its kind ever issued.

Seems silly to require government permission to go into space. And it is. The permission they need is to go shooting through all the high altitude controlled airspace used by military and commercial airplanes. Once the spaceship is above 60,000 feet, it’s above all the controlled airspace in the United States. It’s the area between 18,000 and 60,000 that can put others at risk.
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Kooky: Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly thinks it’s high time we redacted the Fifth Amendment:

I’d like to see videotaping required for all police interviews, and in return I’d suggest that the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination be discarded. If police interviews are all recorded and trials are all held in public, it’s not at all clear to me what value the 5th Amendment right to silence has anymore.

And…

Our “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” Tinfoil Hat Award of the Week goes to the Kool Aid loving readers at Daily Kos who are convinced President Bush is going to call off the 2004 election, declare martial law, and block out any web site that disagrees with him. Oh, and Bush is the Antichrist, dontcha know.

As Homer Simpson said, “God bless those pagans.”

I have four free tickets available for a performance of “Pagliacci” and “Carmina Burana” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Anyone interested in these?

We did this production five or six years ago and it was so well received that Opera Pacific decided to bring it back. Pagliacci is a one-act opera, and Carmina Burana is a dance piece — a ballet, really. But in this production, the two are thematically linked. It’s a very accessible show, so if you’re not a big opera afficianado, don’t worry — you’ll still enjoy it.

The show this Sunday, April 18th, at 2:00 pm. They’re outstanding seats: 15th row in the orchestra. I hate seeing tickets to go waste, especially for a show like this. For what it’s worth, these seats go for $191 each on Ticketmaster.

If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll set you up. First come, first served!

Warning: graphic stuff.

This is a 4.7 megabyte mpeg video taken from an Apache AH-64D helicopter in Iraq using the ship’s FLIR (forward looking infrared) camera.

The Apache crew was two kilometers away and spied the Iraqis with weaponry in a field the night. It’s unclear weather the weaponry is a gun, RPG launcher, or what.

Unfortunately for those on the ground, the Apache is equipped with an automatic 30 mm McDonnell Douglas M230 chain gun firing 625 rounds per minute.

Addendum: here’s the full length video (12 MB).

For anyone who owes money to Uncle Sam, April 15th is not a day you look forward to. Even if you’re getting money back, Tax Day can cause a migraine by virtue of the sheer volume of paperwork required to comply with federal and state tax laws.

What’s even worse, though, is hearing people like Kevin Drum claim that a flat tax would be unfair:

It is dishonest to pretend that flattening tax rates has any connection to simplifying the tax code. It is dishonest to pretend that a flat income tax is “fair” while conveniently forgetting to suggest the same for Social Security taxes. It is dishonest to pretend that “income” is the same for everyone while failing to even mention capital gains, tax shelters, corporate perks, deferred compensation, pension contributions, stock options, or the thousand other options the wealthy have for making money that doesn’t quite count as “income.” It is dishonest not to mention that simple arithmetic guarantees that any flat income tax proposal would raise taxes for practically every middle class family in the country.

No, Kevin, a flat tax would be the very definition of honest. Flat means FLAT. Everyone pays the same rate. The problem is you fly off the handle with assumptions about how those at the higher end of the income scale will maintain every bit of legal income deduction they now enjoy.
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Visitors to the Golden State like to joke about “The Big One” turning Las Vegas into oceanfront property. But what if the “Big One” was an economic earthquake rather than a physical one?

Like a salmon swimming upstream, I figured I was the only person to raise an eyebrow when Alan Greenspan stoked the flames of adjustable rate mortages by suggesting that Americans were making a mistake in selecting fixed-rate loans over ARMs.

Since I panned one of Washington Monthly’s columnists recently, I thought it might be worth noting that I don’t always disagree with them. In fact, Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ article is one I could have written myself. I’ll save you the time and myself the effort by just linking to his excellent analysis of Greenspan’s comments and predictions on the fallout.
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After watching Apollo 13 the other day, I was doing some research on the web and discovered an ironic factoid: the defective oxygen tank that caused the explosion aboard Apollo 13 in 1970 was manufactured by none other than Beech Aircraft.

For those of you scratching your heads, Beech (now a division of aerospace giant Raytheon) was renown for producing the highest quality general aviation aircraft in the world. Even today, many consider the Beech A-36 Bonanza the best engineered airplane ever built.

Manish has been kind enough to invite me to join him over at Damn Foreigner. He’s on the other side of the political spectrum, so it should make for interesting reading!

Anyway, I just published my first post.

I like the name he picked for his web site. We’re all “damn foreigners” in one sense or another, aren’t we?

My ninth opera season is officially over. I’m sitting here doing a mental comparison between the 1999 production of Pagliacci & Carmina Burana and the one we just finished.

This one certainly seemed like a lot more work, which is odd because I already knew the music. I think part of it was the running around. Pushing that truck around, unloading it while singing, and so on. Paul said it best: you finish Pagliacci around 9:30 pm and physically feel like you should be going home, not starting another opera.

Part of the difference was also Enrique Diemecke’s unconventional conducting style. But no matter — audiences loved the production as much if not more than they did in ‘99. They always ‘give it up’ for the ensemble shows, but I can’t recall ever hearing such an ovation night after night. Perhaps it had the same “raw” feeling out in the house that it did on stage. Did Maestro DeMain actually make a brilliant yet misunderstood move in tapping Diemecke to conduct? I don’t know. But I can say with absolute certaintly that I’ve never been so glued to a monitor before. (side note: here’s an interesting 1998 interview with DeMain).
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Freezer burn: it’s not just for food anymore.

Nothing brings out the grouch in me like heat. I hate heat with… well, with the heat of a thousand suns. Or whatever.

The past two days have set record high temperatures here in Southern California. And glory be, I’ve got no air conditioning! It’s over 100 degrees today, yet it’s forecast to be 30 degrees cooler tomorrow. The heat wouldn’t be so bad if there was at least some air movement. But when it’s hot and the air is dead still, that’s the worst.

Speaking of heat, it must be causing brain damage at my local gym. I frequently use the sauna there and have noticed a disturbing trend: people working out inside the sauna. Push ups. Sit ups. Exercising with free weights. Jumping rope, even.

I hate to point out the obvious, people, but it’s a sauna. It’s designed for relaxation. Not drying your laundry, exercising, or stretching. Last time I checked, that’s what the rest of the gym is for. If you want to read a newspaper in there, fine. But please don’t come in wearing a heavy track suit and shadow box like you’re Mike Tyson.

We’re not impressed.

I’m officially ready to cast my vote for the world’s most annoying person.

It’s Matthew Lesko.

No one else even comes close. He is living proof that you can get rich by annoying people. (If you ask, he’d probably tell you there’s a government grant available for it, too). His voice is annoying. That idiot suit with all the question marks all over it is annoying. His mannerisms, his products, even his web site is annoying.

As far as I’m concerned, Janet Jackson can do whatever she wants on TV. Just get rid of Matthew Lesko. I’d rather watch a marathon of Britney Spears videos and Homeboys in Outer Space reruns than be subjected to one of his infomercials. Ugh.

One of the upcoming California ballot initiatives asks whether Indian casinos should be required to pay taxes. Thus far, this extremely profitable $6 billion industry (and that’s just here in California) has operated tax-free.

I’ve come to the conclusion that native American casinos should pay taxes.

Those who argue the other side of the issue usually do so because of the treatment native Americans received by the United States in the past. This leaves me wondering what one has to do with the other.

Someone at Tenth Muse brought up the fact that the current generation of native Americans was not the victim of smallpox or wars against the U.S. It’s a critical point. As a Jewish person, I don’t hold any post-war Germans responsible for WWII atrocities. By the same token, I don’t want to be treated punitively for slavery. If today’s generation is punished for the sins of previous ones, where does it end?
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I’m outta here. We’re leaving on a ten day road trip to Auburn, San Francisco, Napa, Monterey, and San Simeon, returning on May 9th.

I haven’t made a road trip of this length in a long time. It’ll be weird sitting in a car for eight hours on the way up to Auburn. My body’s going to be saying “Auburn? Isn’t that like two hours from L.A.??” Spoiled by flying, that’s all it is.

This is a perfect time of year to make a trip of this type. Schools are still in session and the summer travel season doesn’t start for another three or four weeks, so hopefully we’ll have nice weather without all the crowds.