William Saracino is still upbeat about Bill Simon’s chances against Grayout Davis:

Virtually every registered voter knows and has an opinion about Gray Davis, and all he can pull is 41 percent and 37 percent. Bill Simon is still a cipher to many voters, which is one reason Davis has spent so much trying to define him. Both the PPIC and Field polls indicate that, so far at least, Davis?s money has not been well spent: it has pulled the incumbent down as fast or faster than it did Simon.

To summarize: Simon has had a horrendous six-week run of negative coverage (perhaps the worst six-weeks of bad press in my memory, which goes back farther than I care to admit). Davis has spent $25 million and his share of the vote is lower than at the first of the year. He has spent more than $15 million attacking Simon and portraying himself as the lesser of two evils ? and can barely break 40 percent. Until a few days ago, Simon had spent virtually nothing in response ? and is within 11 or six points.

And in another Simon story, the Wapo is trying to spin the brilliant E-Gray web site as a Simon negative, because it says that Ebay is thinking about suing for trademark infringement.

I’m not a lawyer, but I doubt if they have a case. It’s clearly a parody, and should constitute fair use. I wonder if Gray’s offered them any favors, though…? The best part was this:

Simon’s campaign told the Associated Press that it has no plans to take down the site. A Davis spokesman, meanwhile, said he does not believe the site will win many converts.

Sounds like he might be whistling past the gra(y)ve yard…

In another display of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the American left, an Israeli-American college student tells of being called a Nazi at a protest against neo-Nazis, because she proudly carried an Israeli flag.

I must admit that I, like many young Jews and Zionists my age, feel betrayed by American liberals. With regards to the Middle East, there seems to be no appreciation of the moral ambiguity, the political nuances, the multiple layers of media spin. Faced with such a complex situation, young people too often ask others to chew it, swallow it and digest it for them, and then tell them in absolute terms which side is most appropriate to their general belief structure.

Are you in favor of affirmative action? Are you for civil liberties and women’s rights? Why, then, you must be pro-Palestinian! Anti-Globalization? Humanitarian? Pro- Palestinian! Ever voted Democratic/ Libertarian/Socialist or even abstained from voting for a Republican? Then Palestine is the side for you!

No one would believe me if I tried making this stuff up.

I hope that Jeb’s decision to keep the polls open later will allow more idiotarians time to get there, and figure out how to vote for Reno.

Sorry, Yoko, but we already gave peace a chance. We saw where it got us a year ago. Now, as Hawkgirl says, it’s time to give war a chance. The Afghans seem to be glad we did.

I got an email about this earlier today, but now Instantman has the link. I’m not generally in favor of fisticuffs, but knowing Buzz, I’m sure that he had had more than he could reasonably take from this idiot.

Clowns like this, who go around impugning the honor of the men who walked on the Moon, and the men and women who sent them there, have freedom of speech, but it’s distressing that their wacko theories get press attention. Fox network should be ashamed of themselves for ever airing his tripe, and lending it any credence at all.

Unfortunately, the nutball will probably continue to try to press charges for assault. I hope that the Beverly Hills cops ignore him.

[Update at 2:34 PM PDT]

Over at sci.space.policy, Mark Whittington notes that it brings a whole new meaning to Ralph Kramden’s old lines from The Honeymooners, “One of these days, Alice, one of these days. I hope they like your little jokes on the Moon, because that’s where you’re gonna be going. Bang, Zoom!”

[Another update at 5 PM]

A couple of the folks at this forum (thanks to Alan Boyle for the link) have a great idea.

If the case goes to trial, Buzz should just claim that it’s all a hoax, and that it never actually happened. It’s not physically possible for a seventy-two-year-old man to deck a much younger man like that.

You say there’s video evidence? Faked in a sound studio, with an artificial fist…

Margaret Carlson said on the Capital Gang this weekend that Hillary is running for president, and that she just left cleat marks on Andrew Cuomo’s back.

Actually I’m not being sarcastic. I am shocked.

Not that Hillary would do such a thing, but that Margaret Carlson would remove her lips from Hillary’s keester long enough to actually admit it.

We’ll see how long she stays angry. Don’t expect it to last beyond the time that Hill actually wins the Democratic Party nomination…

Margaret Carlson said on the Capital Gang this weekend that Hillary is running for president, and that she just left cleat marks on Andrew Cuomo’s back.

Actually I’m not being sarcastic. I am shocked.

Not that Hillary would do such a thing, but that Margaret Carlson would remove her lips from Hillary’s keester long enough to actually admit it.

We’ll see how long she stays angry. Don’t expect it to last beyond the time that Hill actually wins the Democratic Party nomination…

Margaret Carlson said on the Capital Gang this weekend that Hillary is running for president, and that she just left cleat marks on Andrew Cuomo’s back.

Actually I’m not being sarcastic. I am shocked.

Not that Hillary would do such a thing, but that Margaret Carlson would remove her lips from Hillary’s keester long enough to actually admit it.

We’ll see how long she stays angry. Don’t expect it to last beyond the time that Hill actually wins the Democratic Party nomination…

Jonah takes issue with Susan Sontag’s editorial, in which she frets about “war without end.”

But wars never have a certain ending at the beginning, now do they? That?s why they?re so scary; we never know when they?ll end. Who knew when ? or how — World War Two was going to end? Does that mean it wasn?t a “real war” until it ended? The Hundred Years War must have seemed pretty endless to a few people with life-expectancies under 40. My dictionary?s definition of war doesn?t mention anything about a deadline.

He misses the point (surprising, because it’s one that he’s made himself in the past). While he’s right in arguing with her notion that this isn’t a real war, she isn’t demanding a schedule–she’s asking for a condition that will determine when the war is over. So am I.

A “war on terrorism,” which Jonah has rightly said is a misnomer, truly does have no end, because there will always be terrorists, just as we can never win a “war on drugs,” because there will always be some people who use drugs, regardless of how much of the Bill of Rights we shred.

As I said a couple of posts down, this war is really very similar to World War II–it just has different tactics (well, and strategies). If we declare war on Iraq, or on Saudi Arabia, or even on the ideologies that drive the current governments of those nations, then the war will be over when those governments that support those ideologies are defeated and overthrown.

There are individual Nazis and communists (and even Communists) still in the world, but there’s a broad consensus that Nazism and Communism have been defeated, and the war with them over, because we defeated their power and their expression, their instantiation, in the form of the Nazi regime of Germany and the Communist regime of the former Soviet Union.

Similarly, when we have defeated Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and Syria, and any other regimes that continue to harbor the toxic ideologies that support, encourage, and succor terrorists, then the war will be over, even if terrorism per se has not been eradicated from the earth (as it probably never will be, in any society with human liberties). But in order to do that, we must clarify who the real enemy is. As long as the simplistic answer is “terrorist,” then it will truly be a war without end, and a continuing danger to our civil liberties at home.

Amidst pointing out why the Soviet Union was deterrable, and Saddam may not be, Eugene Volokh makes an important point this morning on the subject of deterring Iraq.

Finally, we should recognize that while deterrence worked during the Cold War, it was a very high-risk strategy. We relied on deterrence because we had no choice. Right now, it seems like we do have a choice; we can preemptively strike against Iraq much more cheaply than we could have preemptively struck against the USSR. And if we miss this opportunity, we might be placed in a situation where deterrence won’t work nearly as well as it fortunately did work against the Soviets.

I’ve posted before on the problem with the argument that toppling Saddam puts us on a slippery slope (e.g., if Saddam, why not Mugabe, who is apparently as vicious, or Pakistan, which also has nukes), and that the response to this is that a number of factors go into the decision–no single one can justify it.

Professor Volokh points out one more. In addition to all the other reasons, like the dog that licks his own privates, we should take out Saddam because we can.

If we could have defeated the Soviet Union earlier at an acceptable cost and risk to ourselves, the Cold War would, and should, have been a hot one. We lived for over forty years in a very high-risk state (which also prevented us from decisively defending, for example, the people of northern Korea from communism) because we had no other choice, not because we had no cause to defeat the Soviets. Because they had nukes and the ability to deliver them, we could not risk an actual war with them. Had Hitler gotten them, we might very well have ended up with a stalemate in Europe just as long-lasting as the one with the Soviets.

The longer we wait to take out Saddam (and the other toxic governments of the region) the greater the risk that the risk of taking him out will become unacceptable. The notion that we should wait until he is closer to having nuclear weapons, or actually has them, before we respond to him, is simply bizarre.