Month: June 2007

Byron York makes the case against Edwards.

I’ve long thought the president’s position on the matter is eminently sensible. The use of human embryonic tissue for medical research is ethically very dubious (I’m against it, period). Under such circumstances, a coherent conservatism of doubt would bar government funding, while allowing the private sector to do what it wants to do. There’s no contradiction here, whatever Matt claims, as Kevin Drum points out. What is bizarre is bragging about the private sector research, while declaring it immoral.

Now a tourist attraction. And, remember, Hamas is worse.

Addiction to Motorhead is now a formal disability in Sweden.

I’m sorry but I don’t see the problem. The notion that journalists should be political and ideological eunuchs is absurd. There should be disclosure, but I don’t see the source of all the fuss. So NYT "ethicist" Randy Cohen gave to Moveon.org. Big whup. The one tiny benefit of being denied U.S. citizenship solely because of my HIV status is that I can simply tell campaigns any donation I could give would be illicit. But if it were legal, and HIV-positive immigrants weren’t deemed beneath citizenship, I’d give freely. And disclose freely.

It really has been a disgraceful episdoe with the vilest quarters of left ad right finding ways to excuse another act of Islamist blackmail. Johann Hari gets it right:

Rushdie brought it on himself. He wrote things he knew were "provocative". George Galloway, completing his journey to the theocratic far right, has sneered that his novel is "indeed positively Satanic", and said "he turned 1.8 billion people in the world against him when he talked about their prophet in a way that can only be described as blasphemous."

This is exactly analogous to saying a woman wearing a short skirt is responsible for being dragged into an alley and raped. It is also flecked with a form of soft racism, since Galloway assumes all Muslims are excitable children who can only react to querying of the Koran with attempted butchery.

Not all Muslims, of course. Just the fundamentalist fanatics – with very little public opposition from Western Muslims.

Mark Jenkins has more street installation photographs here.

If you think the Russian president didn’t order a hit-job, the evidence is worth a new look:

Litvinenko’s widow Marina and his friend, Alex Goldfarb, have written a compelling narrative account of the story. Not to beat around the bush about this, they prominently name the president of Russia as a suspect in the homicide investigation. New Scotland Yard has formally named and is seeking the extradition of one covert FSB agent, Andrei Lugovoi, and is possibly after two more in connection with the killing. And links between the crime and the Kremlin are at this point irrefutable.

Still, this book offers some unexpected treasurers. Most significantly, it gives us an internal account of the rise of Vladimir Putin and the role that Boris Berezovsky played in that process. The entire story of Litvinenko is inextricably entangled in Putin’s rise to power: how Putin resurrected the KGB, how he endeared himself to Boris Yeltsin, became Yeltsin’s seventh prime minister, and then emerged as his dark horse successor. At each of these steps, Berezovsky is on the scene, and Litvinenko is not far away either. Once you’ve worked your way through this, you’ll realize how absurd are the Kremlin’s dismissals of Litvinenko’s importance. He is the man who knew too much. And he was viewed, very early on, as a traitor to the KGB.

We need to deal with Russia. They are critical to any successful Iran policy. But that doesn’t mean we have to be in denial about who’s running the place.

A lot of us have been excited about this for a while. My own estrangement from the Vatican hierarchy doesn’t prevent my ingrained thrill at the thought of a former British prime minister defecting to Rome. He’s visiting the Vatican this weekend, and the Guardian has a report on the PM’s spiritual journey:

In another clear sign that the Roman Catholic church in Rome is preparing to welcome the outgoing prime minister into the fold, it is planned that he should go directly from his audience with Pope Benedict XVI to a lunch hosted by the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, at the Venerable English College in Rome. He will be the first serving prime minister to set foot in the college, which centuries ago trained Roman Catholic priests for a clandestine return to protestant England and, often, an agonising martyr’s death at the hands of their Anglican persecutors.

We’ve added another 69 window views to the interactive map of Dish reader window views. Among the new additions: Sumgayit, Azerbaijan; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Tbilisi, Georgia; Islamabad, Pakistan; and Cusco, Peru. But my favorite part of the map is going to a single city, say London, and clicking through multiple window views. It’s like visiting a city through the living rooms of the people who live there, people who only share one thing in common: this blog. The window above is in Jakarta, Indonesia, at 11 am. My thanks to Shaun Raviv who created and maintains the page. Check it out.