The European Space Agency has just announced that its Huygens probe has landed on the surface of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, and was still transmitting at least two hours after landing.  This means that it landed on dry land and was not destroyed on landing or by Titan's atmosphere. 

Follow more here and here.

Scientists confirm that any life on Titan is liable to be smarter than George W. Bush.

Really?

During a round-table interview with reporters from 14 newspapers, Bush acknowledged that his tough language "had an unintended consequence."

“Sometimes, words have consequences you don't intend them to mean," Bush said Thursday. "'Bring 'em on' is the classic example, when I was really trying to rally the troops and make it clear to them that I fully understood, you know, what a great job they were doing. And those words had an unintended consequence. It kind of, some interpreted it to be defiance in the face of danger. That certainly wasn't the case."

"I want justice," Bush said. "And there's an old poster out West, that I recall, that said, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive.'"

Recalling that remark, Bush said Thursday: "I can remember getting back to the White House, and Laura said, 'Why did you do that for?' I said, 'Well, it was just an expression that came out. I didn't rehearse it” 

No shit.

Dear Tony:

I see that the Bush Administration refuses to foot the bill for security and other parts of Bush's own inauguration.  Now I know that you must provide security for everyone--you can't protest by skimping on that.  But they also want you to spend $3 million on reviewing stands.  I sure think it would be funny if all of those Republican bigwigs had to stand on the sidewalk like the rest of us little people.

Sincerely,

The Iron Mouth

From the Comments section of Grammar Police, J. Scott Barnard offers up a terrifying view of moral ambivalence in a discussion of the “Death Squads“ option now being put on the table by the Pentagon: 

Negroponte is a hero of the Americas for his contributions in the struggle against murderous marxists. And if his contributions against terrorists are as effective, we'll all be safer because of his involvement in the middleeast.

I don't want to live in a world where communists who murder Mosqito indians indiscriminately or islamists who blow up men standing in line for a job are coddled by guilt-ridden liberals from the security of their desktops.

Negroponte. American Hero.

I reply with a rant:

J. Scott: I see you read Instapundit. Iran-Contra has everything to do with it. First off, the background briefer was the person connecting El Salvador to the new plans being thrown around.

As I'm sure you know, the death-squads program operated in both Honduras and El Salvador. Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to Honduras during this period. Honduras was where the Contras were being trained and where the money from Iran-Contra was going.

The problem with the program is that it doesn't work and pours gasoline on the fire. As we have already seen, locals "informing" on suspected insurgents in both Afghanistan and Iraq have used the U.S. military as an unwitting tool of revenge against people they don't like. Nothing will increase this problem like a Phoenix Project-style assassination squad program designed to eliminate suspected insurgents in Iraq.

Needless to say this doesn't help us combat what the Iraqi Interior Minister described this week as a 40,000 strong insurgency supported by 160,000 helpers, not to mention the many tens of thousands of others who look the other way.

Like all moral questions, at bottom it isn't in our interest to behave like the terrorists who attack Americans and Iraqis. This is exactly what they want: moral equivalence between themselves and the Americans. Then the argument gets real simple for them: "We may use bad methods, but so do they and they are foreign devils." We can't win against that argument. Ever. And if we don't have the support of the populace in Iraq, we cannot win. For all of your yapping about "guilt-ridden liberals," you fail to ask the first question needed: Will this work? The answer, of course, is no.

Finally, however we have to ask ourselves: Is it morally right to engage in torture and semi-random killing in order to reach our goals? Are we to be completely unmoored from our own values in order to subjugate another country? At some point, we must either acknowledge and follow our professed values or frankly admit that they are no longer the principles we follow.

Conservatism used to provide the country with important moral reminders about the fact that our exercise of power at home and abroad must be tempered with a thorough understanding of how good intentions can result in a human disaster. Now it merely consists of Liddy-style posturing to soothe the anxieties of those who dislike change and bad news.

I see now that J. Scott is heaping more effusive praise on the masthead of his blog, Burton Terrace.

Here they come, the parade of former Republican Hawks who are now saying that the war is unwinnable: 

Start with one Andrew Sullivan, who heaped bile and scorn on those of us who opposed the war from the start.  Now Andrew is posting snippets from Stratfor, (Subscription) “Your Source For Actionable Intelligence” which now tell us that the war is lost.

According to Andrew:

We have to hope and pray that a democratic miracle really will emerge. There have been darknesses before dawn in history before. And then there have just been darknesses.

Try “I was wrong.“  Works a lot better than the Lord of the Rings speech.

Following Andrew is Rep. Howard Coble, a former GOP hawk, now calling for a pullout:

Coble voted to grant Bush the sweeping war-making powers believing that the administration had a "post-invasion strategy." Apparently, there was none, he said.

"If there was, I wish someone would tell me what it is or show it to me," he said. "I'd like to see it."

Coble said that if he had known there was no post-invasion strategy at the time of the vote on the war-powers resolution he would have "insisted that we keep our powder dry while we do some probing and planning."

Coble said he simply assumed that the administration had a post-invasion plan.

Isn't it the place of pundits like Sullivan and Congressmen like Coble to ask the right questions before the war?  Guess not.

Death Squads.  That's right, Rumsfeld's newest solution to the Iraq problem are “Salvadoran“ style death squads.  Crazy tinfoil hat conspiracy theories from nutjob leftist websites?  No, its straight from Pentagon background briefers to the pages of Newsweek:

[O]ne Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

Desperation at work.  The Phoenix Project, redux.  That program really worked well as well.

I'd start setting up the cameras pointing at the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad right now for the shot of the last U.S. helicopter out.

From blogger The Conservative Cajun:

I've never been afraid to admit when I've misjudged or have been wrong about a situation, and the Iraq War is no different. Now, I'm not saying I was wrong about going there in the first place. We needed to take out Saddam Hussein, and we did. We needed to take out his barbaric and disgusting sons, and we did. We needed to go in there and eliminate any current WMD program. I believed that Saddam did have an existing WMD program, so did Bush, so did Clinton, so did Tony Blair and Putin. Who really knows if I, and the other mentioned men, we wrong? Who's to say Saddam didn't destroy the programs or move some across the border during the build up to the war?

Whose to say?  Everyone in touch with reality.

The thought processes of a wingnut:  From Andrew Sullivan's E-mail of the Day yesterday--a winger with a brother who served in the Fallujah area lets us know how he weighs information on Iraq.

My brother was a reservist near Fallujah (who thankfully came home just this past year, although he is still technically under contract until December), who reports that coercion was encouraged, and abuse (not the same as coercion) was greeted with a blind eye. Now, he and I don't see eye-to-eye on Iraq, because I pay attention to Chrenkoff's reporting in addition to what I hear from my brother and from the MSM. Thanks to Chrenkoff, I know that there are large areas in Iraq where things are going right. Thanks to my brother, I also don't automatically discount everything that MSM says (even a stopped clock is right twice a day).

Who is Chernkoff?  Some reporter on the scene in Baghdad?  Of course not!  He's a wingnut blogger in Australia! 

So, let me get this straight--you'd rather trust the analysis of some person who you have never met, who lives on another continent, who as far as we know, has never been to Iraq, and who is a mere casual observer, over the views of your own brother, who was there and saw with his own eyes the state of war?

Not to mention the fact that this pro-war nut is “thankful” his own brother is no longer there.

I do not make this shit up people.  

Tom Riley, the spokesman for the Administration's Drug Czar, John Walters, commented on the retirement of Keith Stroup, longtime leader of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) by quoting the Big Lebowski:

 "The '60s are over, Lebowski. The bums lost. My condolences."

I'm not sure Riley really got the quote--the speaker in the film was  the millionaire Lebowski, a guy who moralized all of the time and got all of his money despite having never worked a day in his life.

Then again, maybe Riley did get the quote.

I have not read a better description of what it is to write than this, from Richard Wright’s lecture on his Native Son, “How ‘Bigger’ was Born” (both works 1940). If one isn’t writing like this, physically like this, I can’t see how one is writing:

“That was the deep fun of the job: to feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perceptions, making new and — until that very split second of time! — unheard-of and unfelt effects with words. It had a buoying and tonic impact upon me; my senses would strain and seek for more and more of such relationships; my temperature would rise as I worked. That is writing as I feel it, a kind of significant living.”

And then, the writer’s devil-and-angel appears — why Dionysus was god of wine and art:

“The book was one-half finished, with the opening and closing scenes unwritten. Then, one night, in desperation — I hope that I'm not disclosing the hidden secrets of my craft! — I sneaked out and got a bottle. With the help of it, I began to remember many things which I could not remember before.”

And all of this left the world changed utterly:

“True, we have no great church in America; our national traditions are still of such a sort that we are not wont to brag of them; and we have no army that's above the level of mercenary fighters; we have no group acceptable to the whole of our country upholding certain humane values; we have no rich symbols, no colorful rituals. We have only a money-grubbing, industrial civilization… if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.”

I am waiting for the Last Supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer. A new rebirth of wonder. Yours — E.K.

The year 2004 was one of the worst in living memory for the Republic.  Let us move forward with the hope that 2005 will be a year of national renewal and political change.