clark stooksbury

I found this copy in a used bookstore. It's an old one that still has a dedication to Nathaniel Branden, but doesn't yet have one of those cards in the middle.

In the New York Times.

Strangely Enough!, by C.B Colby was my favorite book during the seventh grade until, strangely enough, it disappeared.

I'll be one of the contributors to the new group blog from The American Conservative, @TAC

It's not even out until next month but via Matthew Yglesias I found a review of Bill Kauffman's Ain't My America by Michael Tomasky in Democracy (annoying registration required). I haven't seen the book yet but the mostly positive review (it gigs Kauffman for being nice to America Firsters) makes the book sound familiar to Kauffman fans.

What would a better word be? Well, I don’t quite know, but Kauffman sure would. In fact, I imagine he’d produce a humdinger. Just a few pages into Ain’t My America, his biting history of conservative foreign policy, and all in the space of a little more than one printed page, he employs the words "coruscant," "nescience," temerarious," "adjuration," and, my personal favorite, "tribade." Goodness! As Casey Stengel said, you could look it up. I certainly had to.

Yep. That's our Bill. It's worth registering and reading.

Intrepid (Liberal!) media critic Matthew Balan catches the network news broadcasts . . . broadcasting the news:

The "Big Three" networks’ evening newscasts, marking the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq on Wednesday evening, all chose to air news briefs on the anti-war protests across the United States. The news briefs all aired within the first ten minutes of each program.

Will their treachery never cease?

The first rule of linking to an article is, or should be, read the whole thing even when the part you like is in the first paragraph. That would save "Number 9," Chris Horner (at 'Planet Gore') and Glenn Reynolds from looking so silly when linking to this article from NPR.

They all seem to have read the opening paragraph and saw an opportunity to stick a finger in Al Gore's eye. "Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them."

Gee, things are looking bad for Al and all those crackpot "scientists" until one reads a bit further in the article, like the beginning of the next paragraph which begins; "[t]his is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record."

Even further down it says:

Sea level rises when the oceans get warm because warmer water expands. This accounts for about half of global sea level rise. So with the oceans not warming, you would expect to see less sea level rise. Instead, sea level has risen about half an inch in the past four years. That's a lot.

Willis says some of this water is apparently coming from a recent increase in the melting rate of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

"But in fact there's a little bit of a mystery. We can't account for all of the sea level increase we've seen over the last three or four years," he says.

The article isn't about the existence of global warming, which is no longer an issue; but about the complexity of conducting research on such a large scale.

It's also possible that some of the heat has gone even deeper into the ocean, he says. Or it's possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don't know about. It's an exciting time, though, with all this new data about global sea temperature, sea level and other features of climate.

Read the whole thing, really.

This (via Hewitt, who seems to agree) is a pretty good case for Obama or even Clinton over John McCain:

The success of Hamas and Hizbullah in the region is not only a danger for Israel, but also a threat to US national interests, US Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Tuesday in an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post.

"If Hamas/Hizbullah succeeds here, they are going to succeed everywhere, not only in the Middle East, but everywhere. Israel isn't the only enemy," Arizona Sen. McCain said, in the only interview he is giving to the Israeli media during his visit here.

"They are dedicated to the extinction of everything that the US, Israel and the West believe and stand for. So America does have an interest in what happens here, far above and beyond our alliance with the State of Israel."

He thinks that Hamas is on the brink of world domination if the U.S. isn't deeply involved in the region.

I've been reading The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life. McKibben has become one of my favorite writers in the last year or so, in part for the things that he doesn't write about--I've yet to see him address the Reverend Wright "issue" and don't expect to. Instead, he has a column in the most recent issue of Orion on the importance of neighborliness. I reviewed his previous book Deep Economy last year.

One of the things I admire about McKibben, speaking as a part-time freelance writer, is the broad array of publications that he writers for; a trait he shares with Wendell Berry. He has written for the top tier of intellectual publications: The New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. The book also features articles from Outside, Orion, Christian Century, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones and Yankee. His signiture issue has been global warming, and the book has several articles on the subject. One, a 1993 profile of James Hansen about the early days after he first testified about it before Congress, and other scientists weren't convinced yet is good. It contains the following quote from skeptic Richard Lindzen: "In ten years we'll know a lot more about it and it won't seem a big deal." Not exactly.

How is it that media and political culture in this country manages to focus almost exclusively on trivial non-issues? The kerfuffle of the moment lay in the fact that the recently retired minister of Barack Obama's church appears to be a nut. This is about 1/50,000th as important as the devastating impact of corn subsidies on the U.S. economy, health and environment; a subject that never gets discussed.

When one considers the ongoing quagmire in Iraq and the looming depression, the quality of Obama's spiritual advisors seems even more trivial.

The good news is that Daniel McCarthy is back at The American Conservative after time at ISI and the Ron Paul campaign. He has also been blogging up a storm recently

The not-so-good news is that Volunteer Voters is no more--A.C. Kleinheider is a blogging civilian again.

Update: most of the reaction to the demise of VV has been negative, but I did notice the contribution this guy at Tennessee Free: "I wasn’t fond of Kleinheider. He had the nerve to run a blog, Hard Right, which wasn’t. Soft in the tail, it was. Progressive, Kleinheider seems. Probably from hanging out with Sean Braisted overmuch… Kleinheider bashed Bush as much as William . . ." Can't have a conservative "bashing Bush" now, can we?