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Here's the roll call on the Warner amendment that in effect rebukes the president for the conduct of the war, demanding information that has often been supplied and a transition that will be forthcoming if it makes sense, and won't be if it doesn't.

(BTW: Here's the headline in the Washington Post: "Senate Rebukes Bush on Iraq Policy. Bill Passed Demands Updates on Conflict and Codifies Treatment of Detainees")

Note the "nays" are comprised of both the most clear-eyed concerning the stakes in Iraq and the most relentless of the president's critics, including Senators Chambliss, Kyl, DeMint, Sessions, Coburn (and McCain,) and Byrd, Kennedy Kerry and Leahy, respectively.

UPDATE:

"Bill Frist is dead to me." One blogger's reaction. I doubt very much if he is alone.

UPDATE 2:

Varifrank weighs in.

Here's what Kos is saying:

GOP steals Dem plan on Iraq
by kos
Mon Nov 14, 2005 at 11:35:38 PM PDT
See, this is what plagiarism is all about. From the Nitpicker:

Mr. Warner said he decided to take the Democratic proposal and edit it to his satisfaction in an effort to find common ground between the parties on the issue.

Of course, when a Democrat takes the freely offered talking points of an ally and uses them in a letter, it's called plagiarism. When a Republican just edits a Democratic plan and presents it as a Republican plan, then that's a "grand vision." Right, Glenn?

The good news -- Republicans are finally starting to come around on Iraq, making noise about applying some accountability to the war effort.

And more good news -- Republicans are proving that Democrats are, in fact, the party of ideas and they are, in fact, bereft of them. Otherwise, they wouldn't be stealing our ideas.

The Senate GOP ran from the fight today, passing a resolution that John Kerry immediately branded evidence of crumbling support for the Iraq war, and which the Washington Post described this way:

The Senate-approved Iraq policy proposal calls for _ but does not require _ the Bush administration to "explain to Congress and the American people its strategy for the successful completion of the mission in Iraq" and to provide reports on U.S. foreign policy and military operations in Iraq every three months until all U.S. combat brigades have been withdrawn.

Kerry's e-mail list got this message:

You can feel the ice breaking. For far too long, Republican leaders have refused to challenge the aimless Bush "stay as long as it takes" approach to Iraq. But now, their unwillingness to act has started to crumble.

Today in the Senate, facing a Democratic resolution on Iraq, the Republicans offered their own call for President Bush to come up with a plan. They didn't go nearly far enough, but clearly our call for a concrete plan is gaining momentum.

I will devote most of today's show to this fiasco, but the president is now on notice that his "allies" in the Senate are about as reliable as France.

UPDATE: The New York Times understands the score as well:

The Senate signaled its growing unease with the war in Iraq today, voting overwhelmingly to demand regular reports from the White House on the course of the conflict and on the progress that Iraqi forces are making in securing their own country.

The vote, 79 to 19, came on an amendment to a spending bill that ultimately passed without opposition. The bipartisan support for the amendment sponsored by Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, reflected anxiety among Republicans as well as Democrats.

And Secretary Rumsfeld remarks on the call for "reports":

On the matter of keeping Congress informed, the secretary said that the "Department of Defense and the Department of State send literally dozens of Iraqi-related reports to Congress each year already" and that the Pentagon alone sends Congress "I don't know, it's something over 900 reports total every year" on an array of subjects.

"I hope someone reads them," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Anger is growing over the sudden and stunning desertion by Senate Republicans of the president and the battle for Iraq. But don't e-mail me. E-mail and call the three people who can stop this nonsense:

Senate Majority Leader Frist, (202) 224-3344, e-mail

Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, (202) 224-2541, e-mail

Armed Services Chairman John Warner, (202) 224-2023, e-mail

You can also use the Congressional switchboard: 202-225-3121.

Demand the resolution be withdrawn. At a minimum the Senate must allow a few days for the American people to weigh in on this proposed retreat.

The proposed Senate resolution is an unmistakable vote-of-no-confidence in the Administration, and the best gift the United States Senate could give Zarqawi and his terrorist ranks. It is almost incomprehensible that Senate Republicans could see this in any other fashion.

Suddenly we are back where we were when the Congress turned on the Vietnam War. Hopefully some Republicans will emerge to lead the fight against this ill-advised and deeply defeatist onset of the shakes.

The hard left gets it. See this post at Pandagon:

Cat Killer Frist and John Warner of Virginia want to get their party out of the vortex sucking down the Chimp and are moving, with a non-binding resolution, to solidify their position with the equivalent of a no-confidence vote on Bush's Iraq policy.

This move came after Dems Carl Levin, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and John Kerry took turns pummeling Bush policy on Iraq on the Senate floor yesterday.

Ed Morrissey writes that he "would hesitate in reading [the resolution] as a capitulation in any circumstance."

Sorry, Ed. The left knows what it is. Zarqawi will know what it is. And any fair observer has to see it for it is. Read this:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said he saw the proposal as a potential "turning point" in Congressional deliberation over Iraq and related issues.

There will be no spinning this as a necessary bit of Congressional oversight.

There can be no "timetable" in a war with Islamofascism, and Senate resolutions do nothing to deter the next attack on America.

UPDATE:

Scrappleface gets it:

Zarqawi Backs GOP Call to Unveil War-Ending Plan
by Scott Ott

(2005-11-15) — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, today endorsed a measure introduced by Senate Republicans that would force President George Bush to layout his plan for ending the war against terrorists in Iraq.

“We think it is important for a democracy such as the United States to be transparent with the public,” said Mr. Zarqawi in a video statement released to al-Jazeera TV and CNN. “We’ll all feel better when we learn strategic and tactical details of how Mr. Bush intends to stop al Qaeda from turning Iraq into the first major victory in the global jihad.”

As a show of ‘good faith’ diplomacy, Mr. Zarqawi said he would soon release his own detailed plans for “casting the American infidel and his Zionist conspirators into a lake of burning sulphur.”

Sen. John Warner, R-VA, who sponsored the bill, said Mr. Zarqawi’s backing should help garner votes from Senate Democrats who are typically reluctant to support any Republican measure.

“It’s really a tri-partisan effort,” Sen. Warner said.

The battle for Ubaydi may be a less-well publicized repeat of the battle for Fallujah a year ago. The toll on terrorists is quite high, and the house-to-house combat must be as intense as was last year's showdown.

This year, though, the Marines are fighting against a backdrop of increasingly bitter partisan debate over their mission, and even with an incredible demand from the Senate that the Administration explain its policies in Iraq. From the Washington Times:

The Senate is expected to vote today to demand that the Bush administration "explain to Congress and the American people its strategy for the successful completion of the mission in Iraq."
Republican leaders are resisting Democrats' call for the administration to provide a plan for withdrawal, but in agreeing that the administration must provide more information and a schedule for reaching full Iraqi sovereignty, they are joining Democrats in signaling that the White House and the Iraqi government must produce results in 2006.

I find it hard to believe that the Republican majority would indulge such theatrics at any time, but certainly not when the president is abroad. Majority Leader Frist must have abandoned his presidential hopes, because participating in what is surely going to be perceived as an attack on the president and the Administration's handling of the GWOT --and there is no denying that this is what the Senate's resolution will be understood to be-- is the last way to impress the American voter of either party.

From the New York Times:

Mr. Frist said an important reason for the Republican proposal was to offer an alternative to the Democratic call for a withdrawal timetable. "The real objective was to get out of this timeline of cutting and running that the Democrats have in their amendment," he said.

Mr. Warner said he decided to take the Democratic proposal and edit it to his satisfaction in an effort to find common ground between the parties on the issue.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said he saw the proposal as a potential "turning point" in Congressional deliberation over Iraq and related issues.

Here's an idea: Instead of cowering before the Senate giants like Barbara Boxer and Dick Durbin, bring up the Democratic demand for a withdrawal, debate the war in full view of the country, and then vote the demand for retreat down.

AOL Launching Online Video Of TV's Favorite Oldies

First, given that F Troop is perhaps the most politically incorrect show ever made, I am astonished that AOL is leading with this classic television series as it moves to compete directly with broadcast television.

Second, this is the sound of doom for the networks. Before long their audience will go the way of newspapers' audiences --splintered far beyond their already shattered state as Americans simply call up whatever it is they want to see, whenever they want to see it.

At launch, the available shows will include:

Adventures of Brisco County Jr., Alice, Babylon 5, Beetlejuice, Chico and the Man, Dark Justice, Eight is Enough, F Troop, The F.B.I., Falcon Crest, Freakazoid, Freddy's Nightmares, The Fugitive, Growing Pains, Hangin' with Mr. Cooper, Head of the Class, Histeria!, Kung Fu, La Femme Nikita, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Maverick, The New Adventures of Batman, Perfect Strangers, Pinky and the Brain, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Sisters, Spenser: For Hire, V, Welcome Back, Kotter, and Wonder Woman.

AOL expects to add more shows over time.

My producer contacted to anti-ANWR exploration Congressmen's staffs today to get either David Reichert of Washington State or Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania to appear on the show to defend their positions. Both invitations were declined. They will be renewed again and again, but of course the refusal tells us a lot about the confidence these Representatives have in their positions. We will also be extending invites to Congressmen Shays and Simmons. Don't hold your breath.

On another front, the special election to fill SEC Chair and former Congressman Chris Cox's seat is scheduled for December 6. State Senator John Campbell will win in a walk, but Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist is running on the ticket of the American Independent Party. When Jim Gilchrist appeared on my show a couple of weeks back, I asked him if he would return for a debate with John Campbell, and Jim Gilchrist said yes. Yesterday and today my producer Duane sent the invitation, via phone and e-mail, for a debate on election eve to both Campbell and Gilchrist. Campbell immediately accepted.

Despite his earlier commitment, Glichrist's staff refused the debate he had already accepted. Here's producer Duane's e-mail back to Tim of the Gilchrist team:

tim, i got a call from rick s_____, who said there was a problem with having a debate between campbell and gilchrist on hugh's show, because your campaign is worried about fairness issues, due to hugh having a link to campbell's campaign on his website. Based on that, rick said that gilchrist declines the request for a debate on monday the 5th. I just wanted to get that in writing, so if you e-mail me back to confirm, i would appreciate it. thanks...d

As background, local Los Angeles talk show pot and pan bangers, "John and Ken," are huge Gilchrist backers, in the bag for Jim from day one of the special election. They lie down for Gilchrist whenever he appears on their show, never posed him a single tough question and as a result never got a single bit of non-illegal immigration-related info from their co-host Gilchrist. It was booster radio, pure and simple, and still is.

Nevertheless, Campbell went on their show to debate Gilchirst the night before the primary, which was to Campbell's credit. I guess Jim Gilchrist hopes that he'll get another set-up debate from John and Ken on election eve. Campbell should turn down any such offer. Gilchrist reneged, and shouldn't be given a free pass to appear with his powder puff buddies instead of a real debate.

The offer is still open.

Today Mary Katherine Ham begins a month-and-a-half of guest blogging here at HughHewitt.com. Her first post is immediately below. She will be blogging with me and others BeyondTheNews.com's group effort when that launches in the new year, and it will be great to have someone join me in my Christmas-season blogging.

Perhaps she will even join me in my second annual boycott of target because Target boycotts the Salvation Army?

And be sure to read through The New York Review of Books assessment of the state of media in this era of New Media. There's a second installment coming, but here is how I am presented in part I:

The thick web of connections among right-wing commentators is typified by Hugh Hewitt. A law professor who once served as the director of the Nixon Library, Hewitt hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show from a studio in an Orange County, California, mall. In between chats with studio guests, he posts commentary on his blog, hughhewitt.com, which receives about 40,000 visits a day. He contributes a weekly column to the Daily Standard, the online edition of the conservative Weekly Standard. Hewitt is also an evangelical Christian who sees blogs as an effective way to spread the word of Christ. According to World, an evangelical monthly magazine, Hewitt "may well be the world's leading blog-evangelist." An entire Web site has been set up to record the blogs he has helped inspire; it currently lists more than 250. On his own blog, Hewitt regularly flags what he considers to be instances of anti-Christian bias in the press. In mid-June, for instance, when The New York Times ran an article about the growing number of evangelical chaplains in the armed forces and the tensions they were causing, Hewitt observed that this was the latest installment in the Times's "Drive Evangelicals from the Military" series.[5]

Given that I answered every question the author, Michael Massing posed to me, and that since September 1 I have contributed an op-ed to The New York Times, been interviewed by NPR, guested on Anderson Cooper's CNN show and been profiled by The New Yorker, wouldn't it have been at least as accurate to write that I "typify" the thick web of connections between "right wing commentators" and clueless old lefty media?

Massing has a theory and he's assembling facts to fit it. But what has really happened is the collapse of old media, not the rise of a new network. And as any reader of this blog knows, while I am of course an Evangelical Christian, 95% of my work product as a journalist has nothing to do with my faith, and 95% of the posts on this site are similarly wholly secular.

Old media. Objective as ever.

Good afternoon Hewitt fans. I interrupt your Hugh-blogging to tell you that Hugh is being kind enough to let me invade his space for a while over here. My name is Mary Katharine Ham. You may remember me from such blogs as Townhall's C-Log and an extended guest appearance at Wizbang! I've recently taken a new job with Salem Communications, the radio company that distributes Hugh Hewitt and a bunch of other great conservative talkers (Bennett, Medved, Gallagher, and Prager), which is why I'm here now, blogging between the venerated red columns of HughHewitt.com.

I'm working with Hugh and others at Salem to create a bloggy conservative activism Web site that will serve the great fan bases of all of Salem's conservative talkers, and be a great tool for bloggers, too. The new site, BeyondtheNews.com, is set to relaunch with all its new features next year, but until then I'm a bit of a homeless blogger. Not as homeless as this blogger (let Smantix explain it because I can't) but I need a couch to crash on, so to speak. Hugh has been kind enough to lend me one.

I really appreciate the opportunity to blog here for you guys. I've been a fan of the site for a long time, and there’s plenty for me to learn from Hugh and, as every good blogger knows, plenty for me to learn from the readers. A little bit about me: I'm Red America credentialed-born in Alabama, grew up in North Carolina, and attended the beautiful, one-of-a-kind University of Georgia (cue the e-mails from Auburn fans). There is, as a result, some disagreement between Hugh and me as to which is the GREATEST conference in the HISTORY OF FOOTBALL, but we're confident we can work together nonetheless (there's no sense arguing with me; I believe it with the fervor that Mary Mapes believes in the 1972 version of Microsoft Word).

I grew up in a liberal college town and became a conservative after 13 years in inner-city, public schools convinced me that the welfare state tragically often hurts the very people it is meant to help, and that there had to be a more effective, more empowering way to help folks. A couple years, economics classes, and Thomas Sowell columns later, I'll place my bet for prosperity on the free market and private charity any day over the demoralizing government programs I saw as a kid, and I spend a lot of time explaining to my liberal friends why I feel that way. That's a very short version of my political journey, but that's the gist.

I majored in Newspaper Journalism and English at Georgia and covered sports and features at a small daily newspaper in North Carolina for about two years before deciding to give conservative public policy a try. Since then, I've worked at The Heritage Foundation, Townhall.com, and now Salem. Some folks ask me what the transition was like from NASCAR reporter to political reporter. It's easy. In one, you try to explain to your readers the significance of grown-ups getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to go around in circles indefinitely, always turning left. In the other, you get to interview racecar drivers.

Thanks a lot to Hugh and you guys for letting me hang out with you for a while.

The Washington Times Bill Sammon, who is with me at a Hillsdale College confab on New Media, has quite a scoop this morning:

Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, wrote that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion" in a 1985 document obtained by The Washington Times.
"I personally believe very strongly" in this legal position, Mr. Alito wrote on his application to become deputy assistant to Attorney General Edwin I. Meese III.

Gotta love those Reagan Library document dumps.

This document raises the stakes dramatically for the left, because while the twenty-year old job application says nothing about how Judge Alito would rule as Justice Alito, it does present the first ever case of a nominee with a decisive declaration on the subject of Roe. If Judge Alito is confirmed with such a declaration in his past, it will be a significent alteration in assumed dynamics of SCOTUS nominations.

Again, the old opinion offered by a young lawyer doesn't mean that Judge Alito would vote to overturn Roe/Casey. But it does mean that if the left cannot stop the nomination, they are broken as a force in the confirmation process for as long as the GOP maintains enough votes to threaten convincingly deployment of the constitutional option.

More at ConfirmThem and BenchMemos.

Tools to use in support of the Alito nomination are available at BeyondTheNews.com.

A round-up of violence in Europe is available at Gateway Pundit. (HT: Instapundit.)

GalleySlaves on why Mapes Syndrome needs to be completely exposed and discredited by MSM media critics, and why it isn't hard to do.

And AsiaPundit has a translation of an editorial from within China on Chinese media coverage of avian flu.

This morning Howard Kurtz interviewed Mary Mapes about Rathergate on CNN. Kurtz opened the interview by asking Mapes about the meltdown that immediately followed the airing of the story built on the fraudulent documents:

Howard Kurtz: What was that experience like?

Mary Mapes: It was terrifying.

Terrifying? Only if being exposed as a sham is frightening.

Mapes also clung to her new narrative that those attacking the documents were "anonymous." This is completely bogus, given that Powerline led the charge and all three contributors there were and have always been public. Mapes' attempt to make herself a martyr is a laughable bit of bad drama, and real journalists ought not to allow her to play this role.

She asserted that "what happened to us was part of a larger part of the intimidation of the press" conducted by the Administration. She also asserted that "there is something very odd about the first attack coming from a Republican lawyer in Atlanta." The implication is that Rove etc used an operative to discredit her fake documents. The question has to be asked: Is she this delusional/paranoid or is she willing to say anything to pump a book and land at some hard left alternative weekly?

Mapes also attacked Kurtz for his failure to understand what "authenticate" means and defended her "experts."

Howard Kurtz also said he still isn't taking a position on whether "these documents are real or fake." That's extraordinary. They are of course frauds, and everyone knows that who cares to look even briefly at the record.

UPDATE:

Powerline's Scott Johnson follows on Kurtz's show and shreds Mary Mapes' absurd fable by citing the Thornburg Report.

But CNN puts on opposite Johnson the Huffington Post's Eric Boehlert, a harsh Bush critic who wants to still prove that Bush didn't serve his TANG time, which means CNN thinks it is fair to give Mary Mapes an easy two segments, to have as host a self-described agnostic on the fake documents, and to oppose the only skeptic of the Mapes' myth with a Bush critic.

That's journalism! Keep in mind that there is no reasonable defense of the documents as other than bad fakes.

Up next: The Texas oilmen conspiracy to kill Kennedy!

Today's New York Times Magazine article on Rob Reiner is a howler. Third graph:

Reiner talked authoritatively about weapons inspectors and the National Intelligence Estimate, and he made reference, with evident satisfaction, to a poll showing that just 38 percent of the public thought the country was now headed in the right direction. The decibel level of his voice began to rise in anger, as if it were not I sitting across from Reiner on his couch but the president himself. "To me, the death of people at somebody's hands over the stupidity of this man is astounding!" he shouted at me. "When I hear that on the weekend of the Super Bowl an Iraqi expatriate was explaining to him the difference between Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites, it makes me want to cry. I want to cry!" (Reiner said he recalled hearing this anecdote on cable news or talk radio, though I wasn't able to find any reference to it subsequently.) "How do you send people into a region, the most powerful superpower in the world, when you have no idea what's going on there? I'm not an Arab expert. Fine. So read a book! Sit down and learn something!" At this, Reiner leaned forward and emphasized each word with a nod of his sizable head: "Read! A! Book!"

(Emphasis, and laughter, added.)

Read the whole thing. It is hard to fathom why the New York Times, or Mr. Bai --a rising star in the world of political journalism-- would allow Reiner to launch an argument with a made-up recollection.

But the suspension of disbelief belongs in the movie theaters, not the pages of MSM.

BTW: Bai's biggest bonehead line:

And yet it's also true that Hollywood quickly grasped realities about the war that Washington, for all its gravity and accumulated sagacity, did not.

Really? Which is why I suppose Reiner's guy in Iowa --Howard Dean-- fell flat on his face despite the fact that Reiner did the primary eve bus thing with Dean, and why Bush won overwhelmingly in 2004, and why the elections in January and October and those forthcoming in December saw enormous turnout.

The best thing about this article is that we no longer have to guess about Matt Bai's politics when his byline appears. Though he's working for the MSM, his creed is fever swamp certainty, through and through.

Mr. Reiner, you have an open invitation to co-host with me for a full week. Or a day. Or an hour.

But you might want. To. Read. A. Book. First. Or. Two. Or. Twenty.

More troubling news on avian flu.

"This is a common step on the way for it to become a human strain."

The world did not see the Black Death coming in 1347, and of course possessed nothing with which to combat that plague.

But what will historians of our age write if, fearful of being thought panic-prone, or the reality of simply being cheap, the globe does not adequately prepare for a modern epidemic that, while difficult to forecast in its specific unfolding, looks increasingly like an inevitability?

There may be some sort of continental triage at work here, but what a dangerous game. From the diary of Samuel Pepys, on the outbreak of the Great London Fire of 1666:

Some of our maids sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast today, Jane called up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose, and slipped on my night-gown and went to her window, and thought it to be on the back side of Mark Lane at the farthest; but, being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off, and so went to bed again, and to sleep. . . . By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down tonight by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish Street, by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower; and there got up upon one of the high places, . . .and there I did see the houses at the end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side . . . of the bridge. . . .
So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it began this morning in the King's baker's house in Pudding Lane, and that it hath burned St. Magnus's Church and most part of Fish Street already. So I rode down to the waterside, . . . and there saw a lamentable fire. . . . Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the waterside to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies, till they some of them burned their wings and fell down.

Having stayed, and in an hour's time seen the fire rage every way, and nobody to my sight endeavouring to quench it, . . . I to Whitehall (with a gentleman with me, who desired to go off from the Tower to see the fire in my boat); and there up to the King's closet in the Chapel, where people came about me, and I did give them an account [that]dismayed them all, and the word was carried into the King. so I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of York what I saw; and that unless His Majesty did command houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the fire. They seemed much troubled, and the King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him, and command him to spare no houses. . . .

To St Paul's; and there walked along Watling Street, as well as I could, every creature coming away laden with goods to save and, here and there, sick people carried away in beds. Extraordinary goods carried in carts and on backs. At last met my Lord Mayor in Cannon Street, like a man spent, with a handkerchief about his neck. To the King's message he cried, like a fainting woman, 'Lord, what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses, but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.' . . . So he left me, and I him, and walked home; seeing people all distracted, and no manner of means used to quench the fire. The houses, too, so very thick thereabouts, and full of matter for burning, as pitch and tar, in Thames Street; and warehouses of oil and wines and brandy and other things.

There's plenty of smoke. In fact, there's undeniable evidence of fire. But most local and state governments have done almost nothing to prepare a local response or even organize a decision tree.

Too many people in politics fear a repeat of the "swine flu" episode, even though one account correctly notes:

Still, even the partisan who first branded Ford's program a fiasco, says now that it happened because America's public health establishment identified what easily could have been a new plague and mobilized to beat it amazingly well.

President Bush has put the federal government's planning into motion, but every governor, county board and mayor needs to be doing the same thing.

And we can all hope and pray that it is a costly fire drill. Liek the ones London ought to have been running in 1665.

I am a Numenorean.

Numenorean


To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

Take the test here.

I am guessing Glenn is an Ent.

An outrage that showed the NFL for what it was, and from which it has not yet fully recovered. (HT: Ed Driscoll).

The owner in question will always be remembered as the guy who screwed Cleveland, and for little else, no matter what his pals tell him.

Michelle Malkin did some digging to come up with a list of GOP House members who are reportedly pro-Saudi/Chavez oil dependence and thus anti-ANWR exploration. This list hasn't been verified, but it is a good place to start digging, and the eventual vote on ANWR exploration will depend on this group.

Note that most of these Members come from overwhelmingly Republican districts, and won in 2004 with huge margins, making them indifferent to what their Republican base actually thinks.

But some of them are vulnerable, including especially Gerlach, Reichert, Shays, and Simmons. Those four will no doubt be targeted by serious conservatives and national security-minded Democrats a year from now. The GOP can afford to lose four or five seats to make an enduring point that there are some votes on which national security trumps personal preference. ANWR exploration is one of them.

Take a moment this weekend to contact these four as a way of starting to convey to the GOP caucus that it is expected to govern as a majority party, and to put the interests of the country and the party ahead of their own posturing on caribou.

For reference, here is the "margin of victory" numbers for the anti_ANWR exploration Republicans:

Member, State, District, Margin of Victory in 2004

Charles Bass, New Hampshire, 2nd; 20%

Sherwood Boehlert, New York; 24th; 23%

Jeb Bradley, New Hampshire; 1rst; 26%

Mike Castle, Delaware; 1rst; 39%

Vernon Ehlers, Michigan; 3rd; 36%

Mike Ferguson, New Jersey; 7th; 16%

Mike Fitzpatrick, Pennsylvania; 8th; 13%

Rod Frelinghuysen, New Jersey;11th; 37%

Jim Gerlach, Pennsylvania; 6th; 2%

Wayne Gilcrest, Maryland; 1rst; 52%

Bob Inglis, South Carolina; 4rth; 49%

Nancy Johnson, Connecticut; 5th; 22%

Sue Kelly, New York; 19th; 34%

Mark Kennedy, Minnesota; 6th; 8%

Mark Kirk, Illinois; 10th; 28%

Jim Leach, Iowa; 2nd; 20%

Frank LoBiondo, New Jersey; 2nd; 32%

Jim Ramstad, Minnesota; 30%

Dave Reichert, Washington; 8th; 4%

Jim Saxton, New Jersey; 3rd; 28%

James Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin; 5th; 34%

Christopher Shays, Connecticut; 4rth; 4%

Robert Simmons, Connecticut; 2nd; 8%

James Walsh, New York; 25th; 80% (really)

UPDATE:

Bruce Kesler has a thoughtful post on why an anti-ANWR vote ought not to lead to retribution against GOP Congressmen who walk out of the caucus on the issue.

Thoughtful, but wrong.

If exploration in ANWR does not emerge from the Congress in the next few weeks, an opportunity to take a hugely important step towards securing necessary supply against deeply injurious disruptions will have been missed. When that disruption inevtiably comes --next year, five years or 15 down the road-- we will not be in a position to scramble and start the oil flowing. Our national security and our economy will suffer greatly...because of the pose struck by a handful of self-indulgent GOP caucus members.

Chair of the House Rules Committee David Dreier, himself a proponent of ANWR exploration, explained on the program yesterday that these anti-ANWR exploration Republicans have held these (wrongheaded) views for some time, but that pro-exploration Democrats had bolted to their party's benefit despite their personal views because of the opportunity to mark up a major political defeat against the GOP. The Democrats understand how, on rare occasions, party must trump individual views if the party is to govern effectively and as a majority. Evidently the anti-ANWR exploration Republicans are unwilling to sacrifice their image of themselves to the benefit of the majority remaining a majority --and on a national security issue!

Which is why a defeat on this issue has to lead to retribution. If the party isn't dedicated to being a majority party organized around the core issue of national security seriousness, it won't last as a majority anyway. Exiling the weak-kneed on a national security issue is exactly the sort of action that will underscore the seriousness of the party on these issues.

So would be the stripping of some committee and subcommittee chairs from a couple of unreliable-on-national-security Members.

Pro-ANWR exploration Republicans from competitive districts ought to realize that their "colleagues" are endangering not only the majority but their seats as well. It might be unpleasant to deal out some party discipline, but a whole lot less unpleasant than having Nancy Pelosi as the Speaker.

Couldn't happen? That's what Democrats said in 1994.