Did my matzos come?

Abe Greenwald offers a great, concise post on a recent poll of Muslims.
 

I'd be luxuriating in schadenfreude. Jonah Goldberg, interviewed by Hugh Hewitt:

It must drive Hillary nuts. Hillary is the one who has this politics of meaning. She is the one who wants to say that you should get your meaning from the state, and that the government should serve as essentially a new church, going back, you know, this dream of creating a religion of government that goes back to the New Dealers. She laid it all out on paper. It is her overriding theme from the beginning of her career. But Obama is the word made flesh in a way. He actually inspires people to behave the way she would like them to. And in many ways, she should really be sort of the Paul to his Jesus in this sense, because she can talk about it, and she can think about it, but she doesn’t inspire people. She comes across as like an assistant school principal who’s going to yell at you for eating too much glue.

The interview, in which Hewitt and Goldberg discuss Goldberg's book, is more serious than the above passage might suggest, and worth reading in full.
 

Rush Limbaugh on Obama's campaign:

[I]t's not a political movement. It's a rock tour. It's a rock concert tour. And if you don't show up at the concert when it happens in your town, you're not hip. It's a cult. It's a religious movement, whatever it is, it has gone beyond politics. These speeches say nothing; they say nothing. These people, I'm telling you, that are gravitating to Obama, at least these people showing up in person, these are people desperately seeking meaning in their lives because they don't have any.

We all want to matter. We all want to have meaning in our lives. We all want to be relevant to something, and a lot of these people don't feel that about themselves. They feel empty, and they're trying to fill the emptiness, fill the void. And Obama does. Obama gives them hope that they're going to be something, but that's even not it. Obama gives them hope that he is going to make their life substantive and have meaning by virtue of his presence, his messianic -- by virtue of his existence alone. They're not going to have to do anything.

* * * * *

All right, here's my question: Will the American people succumb to one of the most demagogic politicians of our modern times? . . . We consider ourselves educated, sophisticated, we consider ourselves stewards of one of the oldest democracies in the world. Is this all it takes to undermine it, a bunch of pap, a bunch of meaningless, nothing platitudes? Is this all it takes to turn our military, economy, our courts over to a recent community activist, Barack Obama? Is this all it takes? You have to understand here, ladies and gentlemen, that the Democrats have been vying, focusing, desiring this kind of reaction from the American people for 50 years. As much of nothing as they will accept, the Democrats will offer. As much misery, tumult, and chaos as they can promote, the Democrats will promote to create this sense of panic, discontent, unsettledness, misery in as many Americans as possible. They have done this with their willing accomplices in the Drive-By Media. Every day a barrage of pessimism, fatalism, doom, destruction, hopelessness, all of these things, in the greatest country in the history of man and woman. Is this all it's going to take, a rookie, to come along and undermine the greatness of this country? It's a question every one of us needs to ask ourselves.
 

Jennifer Saranow in the Wall Street Journal:

Among the 125 million people in the U.S. who visit online dating and social-networking sites are a growing number of dullards who steal personal profiles, life philosophies, even signature poems. "Dude u like copied my whole myspace," posts one aggrieved victim.

Copycats use the real-life wit of others to create cut-and-paste personas, hoping to land dates or just look clever.

Hugh Gallagher, a 36-year-old writer in New York, is one of the copied. Match.com has more than 50 profiles with parts of Mr. Gallagher's college entrance essay, which he penned nearly two decades ago and later appeared in Harper's Magazine. "I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees" and "I write award-winning operas" are among Mr. Gallagher's most popular lines.

They worked well enough for Jim Carey, a 38-year-old pharmaceutical salesman in Bothell, Wash. He says he wanted women to know he was funny but was too lazy to think up anything. So he copied Mr. Gallagher's essay for his online profile. A year ago, he arranged to meet a woman for drinks. She asked about his operas. He confessed. "I felt like a balloon deflating," he says.
 

In one user's case, being plagiarized proved instructive:
 

Finding her profile stolen angered Lavonna Short, of Sitka, Alaska. It also gave her pause. The 47-year-old mental-health professional says the thief used every qualification she'd written about her perfect mate: financially secure, able to take care of himself, not looking for a mother. It read like a shopping list, she says: "When I saw myself through someone else's eyes, I didn't like it." She rewrote her profile -- more mystery, less rigidity -- and found her mate.
 

Ann Hood, in a column titled "I Married a Republican: There, I Said It":

IT was happening again. I was at a cocktail party where the hosts were people I had just met, people I wanted to become friends with, and was sipping chardonnay and nibbling papadum chips when a woman said, “Oh, the people next door! They’re ...,” she paused and lowered her voice, “ ... Republican.”

Everyone grimaced. The conversation quickly turned to complaints about the current administration. Before long it wasn’t just the administration being bashed but Republicans in general.

I stood there nodding, my dirty secret lodged in my throat like a golf ball. . . .

What can I say? Love can sidetrack a person. Still, it did not feel good when I told myself: I love a Republican. It felt, in fact, like I had betrayed someone. Or many people.
 

Fear not. The ending's happy:
 

AND then a few weeks ago I came home from a business trip, pulled my politically correct car into our driveway, and stared hard at the sign in our yard. I blinked. I looked again. It was not a mirage.

The sign said, “Vote Obama.”

I shouted. I actually whooped. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Had one of my children put it there? A neighbor? It couldn’t have been Lorne.

Inside, I approached him cautiously. “There’s a sign in our yard.”

He shrugged and cast a broad smile my way. “He’s the best candidate.”
 

Via Rush Limbaugh ("Story #2"), who supplies a relevant personal anecdote.

Ann Coulter:

A few more primary wins and B. Hussein Obama will be able to light up a cigarette during a televised speech and still get the nomination. It looks like the only thing that can stop him now is an endorsement from Al Gore.

Gore is always lunging into a movement just as it has passed its prime -- the Internet, Howard Dean, global warming, trying to talk black when he campaigns at a black church. He probably bought a big house a few months ago.

More substantively, on the likely GOP nominee:

To be sure, McCain has a relatively conservative voting record -- but only relative to Republicans who have to get elected in places like Vermont. Relative to Republicans from conservative Arizona, McCain's voting record is abominable. . . .

In 2006 -- the most recent year for which ratings are available -- McCain's ACU [American Conservative Union] rating was 65. That year, the ACU rating for the other senator from Arizona, Jon Kyl, was 97. Even Chuck Hagel's ACU rating was 75, and Lindsey Graham's was 83.

Since 1998, only four Republican senators have had worse ACU scores than John McCain -- and none were from Goldwater country: Lincoln Chafee, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter.
 

He could, writes Deroy Murdock, "do for fiscal responsibility what Ronald Reagan did for tax relief":

McCain largely has refused to be led into temptation. He supported 2001’s $143.4 billion No Child Left Behind Act, but fought 2002’s $180 billion farm bailout, 2003’s $558 billion Medicare drug entitlement, and 2005’s $286.4 billion highway bill, which contained 6,371 earmarks worth $24 billion.

"Those were the four biggest budget-busting bills of the Bush presidency," notes Heritage Foundation fiscal analyst Brian Riedl. "And McCain voted against three of them."

. . . McCain courageously opposed the wasteful, environmentally destructive federal ethanol program — while battling his Republican rivals in Iowa.

"I will open every market in the world to Iowa’s agricultural products. I’m the biggest free marketer and free trader that you will ever see," McCain said at the December 12 Des Moines Register debate. "And I will also eliminate subsidies on ethanol and other agricultural products. They are an impediment to competition. They’re an impediment to free markets. And I believe that subsidies are a mistake."

McCain has stayed tightfisted on the hustings. According to a January National Taxpayers Union study of presidential candidates’ promises, McCain wants $6.9 billion in new spending. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee advocates $54.2 billion in government-funded initiatives. Huckabee’s folksy profligacy should worry taxpayers.

"You would not have to look hard for reasons to dislike McCain," says Cato’s Michael Tanner. "But if spending is what you care about, he is far more conservative than either Romney or Huckabee."
 

Anne Korin in a comment to Planet Gore (emphasis added):

Those of us who believe that radical Islam is at war with the rest of the world, and that the strategic status of a commodity controlled by Islamic nations — 75 percent of the world's proven oil reserves [are] concentrated in the Muslim world — poses a clear and present national security threat, think it is quite reasonable to take the automakers at their word, turn their oral commitments to make FFVs into a statutory requirement — thus giving alt-fuel investors confidence to go forward — and speed up the entire process.

(For background, read this.)
 

Because once in a while—almost too long a while—its editors include a poem such as this.
 

"The possibility," writes Bret Stephens, "is not as remote as it may seem":

Egypt — not Israel — is the country that has most to fear from a statelet that is at once the toehold, sanctuary and springboard of an Islamist revolution.

No wonder liberal Egyptians are reacting with near-hysterical alarm to last Wednesday's demolition of the border fence between the Gaza Strip and the Sinai. . . .

As Middle Eastern power plays go, Hamas's decision to dismantle the Gaza-Sinai border was a masterstroke. Gaza's economic woes are almost wholly self-inflicted, but they are real. Dynamiting and bulldozing the border of a neighboring country is legally an act of war, but it was made to seem like a humanitarian necessity and a bid for freedom. Flooding that neighbor with hundreds of thousands of desperate people is a massive economic burden on Egypt, but one that it shirks at its political peril.

Above all, Hamas exploited the myth of pan-Arab solidarity with the Palestinians in order to explode it. . . .

[T]he border with Gaza is again being sealed, bringing the crisis to a temporary end. It won't remain quiet for long, and neither will Egypt — the next great foreign policy crisis on the American horizon.
 

I stopped writing poetry without a clear explanation of why it happened. Later on I came up with lots of convincing reasons: one of the best, as I recall, was the turmoil in my erstwhile homeland, Russia. In some way poetry, no matter how private, is always addressed to an audience, and when a level of noise in that audience exceeds a certain value, the exercise becomes pointless. It is possible to imagine an opera star performing to an empty hall but not to a full and noisy one. . . .

When I abandoned poetry, I went on to dabble in various other genres hoping I’d get closer to the truth. Well, I didn’t, of course, the truth remaining as distant as ever. But I have now rediscovered what poetry is good for. It is the only way I know how not to lie — provided, that is, I stay far enough away from the halls of heroes.

"Leaving Prague: A Notebook," by Alexei Tsvetkov

The sincerest form of flattery is an accusation by one's higher-rated Scrabulous opponent of using an anagram generator. (I got DIVIDER, SULLIES and CANYONS within my first four or five turns.)
 

Nicole Gelinas:

A decade ago, most people started off with enough equity in their homes to make foreclosure irrational from a financial standpoint. . . . Foreclosure was remote, absent a personal financial crisis, for another reason: Every month your mortgage payment would reduce your debt and increase your equity, giving you more room for prices to fall.

But over the past few years -- until last spring -- banks and the mortgage-backed securities investors who bought the loans the banks packaged weren't demanding substantial down payments; they were happy with 5% or even nothing down. They also didn't worry about whether or not borrowers were building up equity. "Interest-only" loans, quick mortgage refinancings to cash out any equity, and other inventions often led to just the opposite.

Now the bloom is off the residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) rose. And some borrowers, even those who can theoretically afford to keep their homes, realize they owe much more than what comparable houses in the neighborhood are selling for -- and think that prices won't rebound anytime soon. So they're walking away, according to anecdotal reports as well as recent statements by top executives of both Wachovia and Bank of America. . . .

It's beginning to dawn on lenders and their agents -- who assumed that borrowers who could afford to do so would make payments no matter what -- that they could be stuck owning hundreds of thousands of houses at a minimum. This realization will pressure the companies administering those mortgage loans to renegotiate more quickly with borrowers in cutting loan balances. Thus, some version of the "Paulson plan" would have happened without Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's pressure on the capital markets in December. . . .

As for Sen. Hillary Clinton and her proposed "moratorium on foreclosures": She may soon find that borrowers, not just lenders, are screaming to let them act within their contractual rights.
 

Maclean's:*

British Columbia has all but lost the war against the mountain pine beetle. More than 13 million hectares of the province's pine forests have been killed by the insect in the 15 years since beetle populations in the Central Interior began skyrocketing. The provincial forest service estimates that up to 90 per cent of B.C.'s pines could be dead in another eight years. With the bug now making incursions east of the Rockies — having already damaged 1.5 million trees in Alberta — and with Jack pine stands in every province in Canada, the beetle is on its way to being a national problem.

Scientists are examining the beetle's genome for vulnerabilities, but

a genetic solution won't come in time to stem the tide in B.C.; hopefully, it arrives soon enough for the rest of the country.

Fingers crossed.

*Support Mark Steyn: Subscribe to Maclean's.

Sam Schechner in The Wall Street Journal:

Ann Tucker is pushing a shopping cart through the produce section of a supermarket in Plainview, N.Y., when she turns to kiss her husband. The supermarket kiss is a regular ritual for the Tuckers. So are the restaurant kiss and the traffic-light kiss. "I guess we do kiss a lot," says Mrs. Tucker, a 39-year-old mathematician at a money-management firm.

Mrs. Tucker is living happily ever after, and scientists are curious why. She belongs to a small class of men and women who say they live in the thrall of early love despite years of marriage, busy jobs and other daily demands that normally chip away at passion.

Most couples find that the dizzying, almost-narcotic feeling of early love gives way to a calmer bond. Now, researchers are using laboratory science to investigate Mrs. Tucker and others who live fairy-tale romances. The studies could help reveal the workings of lifelong passion and perhaps one day lead to a restorative.
 

Maclean's* examines the phenomenon of scrapbooking and "scrapbook widowers":

Some women spend more per week on scrapbook accessories than they do on groceries, says Calgary entrepreneur and mother of two Allison Orthner. Scrapbooking is not only a multi-billion-dollar industry, says Orthner, who organized last November's first all-Canadian Crop and Cruise, "it's the fastest-growing hobby in North America."

The latest Scrapbooking in America survey finds that one in four homes has a dedicated scrapbooker (most likely female, between the ages of 30 and 50). On Orthner's seven-day Mexican Crop and Cruise, the cruise line provided three rooms, open 24 hours a day for scrapbooking. "There were some diehards who didn't leave the ship," says Orthner. "They scrapbooked the whole time."

*Support Mark Steyn: Subscribe to Maclean's.

Thomas Sowell, 11/30/05:

Nightmare for the 2008 Presidential election: Hillary Clinton versus John McCain. I wouldn't know whether to vote Libertarian or move to Australia.
 

Peter Robinson, one of Reagan's speechwriters:

In my own experience, the most vivid example of a decision on principle, not data, involved Reagan's 1987 Berlin Wall address. The critical datum: that the entire foreign policy apparatus of the United States government objected to the line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Reagan overruled them, delivering it anyway. “The boys at State are going to kill me for this,” Reagan remarked, “but it’s the right thing to do.”

Robinson gives a longer account here.