A world without chocolate?

Political unrest in Africa, one expert says, has put us in a situation in which the world may no longer have a sustainable supply of cocoa after 2014.

Which means that chocolate may be a thing of the past.  And can life survive here on Earth without chocolate?

President Obama sticks his foot in his mouth. Again. And the media ignore it. Again.

President Obama continues to make gaffes that would have had the media- and the rest of the Left- rolling in the aisles and howling in derision if President Bush had made them.

His latest: confusing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama- the most diplomatically inept president in memory- only weeks ago insulted the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain by saying that France (France!) is "our closest ally."

Nor is the President's remark an affront only to Britain; Australia has, if anything, stuck by our sides even closer than the English have.

France?!?

He doesn't do these things on purpose. Foreign leaders don't necessary feel that they're at odds with Mr. Obama, the way they sometimes did with Mr. Bush.

They just don't take Barack Obama seriously.

HT: Drudge

The worst to end up first

In an article guaranteed to give sports fans all over North America (and a few in the UK) apoplexy, here's an interesting list of the 50 least worthy champions in sports history.

Since most of my least favorite teams- the Packers, Red Wings, White Sox, Mets, and Cardinals- are represented here, I personally rather enjoyed it.

Especially the richly deserved inclusion of the hugely overrated 1969 Mets.

Ursine shopping list

Here is an interesting article on what the Bears need to do in order to reverse the outcome of this year's NFC Championship Game next time out.

There's Rahm on the ballot for Emanuel after all

The Illinois Supreme Court has unanimously overturned a lower court's ruling that former Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel is not a Chicago resident within the meaning of Illinois election law, and cannot run for mayor.

Emanuel has a wide lead over a field including two Hispanic candidates- former Daley chief-of-staff Gery Chico and City Clerk Miguel De Valle- and former U.S. Senator Carol Mosley Braun, an African-American. There are two minor candidates in the race.

Were I back home, I think I'd vote for either Chico or De Valle.  Certainly not Rahm, and certainly not for the lady who messed up so badly in the Senate.

But then, being on the losing side in Chicago elections is a major part of my life story.

The election is February 22.

HT: Drudge

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that it have a credible running game

I expected yesterday's defeat at the hands of the Packers, but losing to the Cheeseheads is never acceptable-especially two out of three times in a season. All the Mold and Gold they needed, it seemed, was a credible running game.

The season is a failure. Nothing else counts.

Perhaps Caleb Hanie will push Cutler for the starting job next year. We'll see. But in the meantime.... can't Lovie PLEASE get visibly upset about SOMETHING???!!!

In the meantime... GO STEELERS!

Isles snatch Nabokov from the Wings. Whew!

I got a fright this week when I read that Evgeni Nabokov had left Russia to play for the Red Wings.

The dude is a pretty good goalie, and- as fond as I am of Antti Niemi- I personally would not have let Nabokov walk in order to sign him, as the San Jose Sharks did. I was stunned that nobody claimed him on waivers when they did. But it's a big relief that the Islanders have claimed him, thus keeping him away from Daytwah.

Nabokov would have been the best goalie the Wings have had since Dominic Hasek. The thought of their having him between the pipes with their present roster is frightening.

Of course, Nabokov is no Corey Crawford. Hawks 3, Wings 1 after two... and don't be surprised if, despite the hits the Hawks took due to the salary cap and their slow start, with Corey in goal they make a spirited run at repeating as Stanley Cup champs.

ADDENDUM: Final: Champs 4, Wings 1. Two goals for Kopecky.

ADDENDUM II: Apparently Nabokov is refusing to report to the Isles. Stay tuned for further developments.

Ok. Let's get this straight.

This is a sore point for people with my particular hobby, so please carefully note the following.

Astronomy is the science that studies the stars, the planets, comets, asteroids, and all the other stuff out there in space.

Astrology is a pseudo-science upon which the superstition called the horoscope is based.

Parke Kunkle is a Minnesota scientist, not an astrological charlatan. He recently caused a furor by pointing out what real scientists- astronomers- have known for centuries: first,  that the horoscope's supposed correspondence of the signs of the zodiac (the constellations through which the Sun's "path-" the ecliptic, which from another perspective is simply the plane of the solar system) seems to travel when seen from Earth) with the calendar is in fact an entire month off, and has been for centuries; and, secondly, that the sun's path actually travels through thirteen constellations, and not only twelve (Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer, is also a zodiacal constellation, though omitted for some reason from the astrological "zodiac").

In other words, that the entire basis of astrology and the horoscope is sheer bunk.

Here's the straight dope. There's nothing new in all this, mind you; just something that those who are interested in the scientific study of the heavens, rather than superstitious hokum, have taken as a given for a very long time.

"Tone down the rhetoric," the Left pleads- while brandishing a gun

When I wrote this entry on the movie The Death of a President, which I happened to see last week, I wasn't particularly thinking of the hypocritical Leftist attempts to somehow blame the Right for the lack of political civility which supposedly resulted in the recent massacre in Arizona. Imagine my surprise to discover that Leftist columnist David Corn- the man who, the day after conservative Robert Novak merely mentioned that Corn's friend Valerie Plame was " a CIA operative," actually became the first to publicly reveal that she was an undercover agent in the process of accusing Novak of having made that revelation- has had the unmitigated gall to suggest that the American Right is somehow more "extreme" than the American Left. Strident Leftist columnist Paul Krugman has written in much the same vein.

Corn- whose hysterical personal attacks on President Bush leave him little room to chide anyone for lack of civility- attempts to demonstrate his dubious premise by quoting an assortment of isolated and very unrepresentative people on the very, very far Right indeed- coupled with a very occasional example of incivility in an elected Republican official which, while regrettable, is no different than the kind of excessive rhetoric which politicians on both sides of the aisle have occasionally engaged in since the founding of the Republic.

Corn gets upset- and rightly so- when Republican members of Congress like Michelle Bachman suggest that their Democratic colleagues are somehow "anti-American." But such  rhetoric (comparaviively mild compared to some of the things Democratic members of Congress have said about President Bush), comes nowhere near being as universal as the Bush-hate was among Democrats and other "Progressives"during the last administration, and remains to this day.  Nor is it nearly as vitriolic.

Former Rep.Paul Kanjorski, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was defeated for re-election this year. He wrote a moving and very reasonable piece in the New York Times the other day calling for civility in the face of the Arizona shootings.

During the campaign, he had this to say about Florida's new Republican governor,  Rick Scott:

That Scott down there that's running for governor of Florida. Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he's running for governor of Florida. He's a millionaire and a billionaire. He's no hero. He's a damn crook. It's just we don't prosecute big crooks.

I am willing to acknowledge that there are a great many people on my side of the aisle who are not only uncivil, but stone crazy. I am embarrassed by those who humiliate all of us on the Right by inane charges that President Obama was not born in America, is a Muslim, and so forth. And I am mortified by isolated nut jobs such as the ones Corn quotes as his contribution to the hypocritical efforts of Democrats and their allies to somehow turn the lack of civility in our national discourse into an issue that can somehow work for rather than against them.

But consider the following inane comment by Corn:

There is indeed over-the-top talk on the left. During the Bush years, far-left protesters at anti-war rallies referred to Bush and Dick Cheney as fascists. Conspiracy theorists on the left claimed the Bush-Cheney crew had started the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to enrich their pals in the oil and contracting industries. Some lefties (and righties) accused the president of having staged 9/11 -- or of allowing it to happen -- so he'd have a pretext for war. It was hateful stuff. But this rhetoric tended not to imply violence or insurrection. More to the point, such excessive rhetoric was not adopted and/or accepted by Democratic leaders

Mr. C, are you for real? John Kerry, for example, is not "a Democratic leader? How about that Florida Democratic official who called for Donald Rumsfeld to be physically assaulted?

Where were you during the years when Leftist commentators and Democratic leaders were routinely calling for physical violence against members of the Bush administration and leaders of the Republican Party- and sometimes the actual assassination of the President? For crying out loud, the rank-and-file still are calling for violence against Mr. Bush, Sarah Palin and other Republican leaders! 

Do you remember the public prayers for Rush Limbaugh's death when he was hospitalized a while back? Do you recall that in several Blue State venues, the announcement of Ronald Reagan's death was cheered?  Do you actually pay any attention to the rhetoric of your own people?

What truly concerns me about the rhetoric of the Left is not  the kind of nonsense Corn is talking about- or even for example, the  lies about Mr. Bush's National Guard record, discredited within days of first being spoken back in 2000 but repeated by Democratic politicians and even by their 2004 nominee for President for eight years even so. It's not the slanders Corn himself, among others, have aimed at Mr. Bush due to their malicious refusal to believe that Mr. Bush (and every intelligence agency in the world) could have been mistaken about the state of Saddam Hussein's WMD program, rather than intentionally deceptive. "Bush lied" has a nice ring to it, in a hysterical sort of way. But it won't  pass as a slightly more malicious version of  the the garbage espoused by the "Birthers or the other nut jobs on the Right whose crazy rhetoric Corn quotes. The malicious rhetoric about Bush  wasn't limited to the Democratic fringe.It was the stock in trade of pretty much the whole Democratic party.

It's not even the absurd whining about the allegedly "stolen" elections of 2000 and 2004, which  the Democrats lost fair and square- but as a group, and not merely in the case of extreme individuals, could summon neither the maturity nor the grace to accept in the absence of any credible evidence to support their whining. This cannot be stressed enough: the  rhetoric of petulance and hate was not merely indulged in by extremists in the Democratic party during the Bush years; not only was it precisely the bread-and-butter of Democratic officials and office holders, but at times, it seemed  to be virtually their party's entire program.

Nor is it even the near unanimity of the Left's ugly bile and malice- a commodity far, far more universal on the Left than it ever was on the Right- that disturbs me. True, at times  there's a specific kind of rhetoric which is particularly significant in light of the Arizona massacre- and which, whether Corn and Krugman and the rest see fit to acknowledge it or not, is predominantly to be found on the Left.

I hold no brief for the haters of either party, and I freely acknowledge the ugliness of the hate some feel toward President Obama. But it is nowhere near as universal or as consistently extreme among Republicans as the rhetoric you guys engaged in- and still engage in- not only toward Bush, but toward Republicans and conservatives generally. At least Corn had the grace to admit at the end of his regrettable piece that there is no evidence that the Arizona gunman was motivated by politics of either the Right or the Left. But surely even Corn and Krugman and the others can see that their own rhetoric in the face of precisely that admission is an appalling example of the malicious rhetoric at which the Left excells. It even tries to make conservatives responsible for an event they parenthetically admit cannot as yet even be linked to partisan politics of any kind!  

Corn claims that the hateful rhetoric of the Left toward President Bush was "not intended to imply violence of insurrection." I commend to him this article by Jay Nordlinger of the National Review. A brief exerpt:

Even before Bush was elected president, the kill-Bush talk and imagery started. When Governor Bush was delivering his 2000 convention speech, Craig Kilborn, a CBS talk-show host, showed him on the screen with the words “SNIPERS WANTED.” Six years later, Bill Maher, the comedian-pundit, was having a conversation with John Kerry. He asked the senator what he had gotten his wife for her birthday. Kerry answered that he had taken her to Vermont. Maher said, “You could have went to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone.” (New Hampshire is an early primary state, of course.) Kerry said, “Or I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.” (This is the same Kerry who joked in 1988, “Somebody told me the other day that the Secret Service has orders that if George Bush is shot, they’re to shoot Quayle.”) Also in 2006, the New York comptroller, Alan Hevesi, spoke to graduating students at Queens College. He said that his fellow Democrat, Sen. Charles Schumer, would “put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.”


A columnist in Britain’s Guardian, Charlie Brooker, wrote, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?” Betty Williams, the Irishwoman who won the Nobel Peace Prize, said, “I have a very hard time with this word ‘non-violence,’ because I don’t believe that I am non-violent. . . . Right now, I would love to kill George Bush.” A novelist, Nicholson Baker, was so filled with rage at Bush, he wrote a novel mulling the question of assassinating him. In Britain, there was a TV movie — a “fictional documentary” — that was a kind of fantasy: on the assassination of Bush. (It was called Death of a President.) Etc., etc.

I rented the video of that regrettable film out of curiosity. But only the most self-deceived can doubt for a moment that its attraction for the greater part of its audience is as an exercise in wish-fulfillment.

I know of no Republican member of Congress who has ever jokingly suggested that he should kill President Obama. John Kerry had the bad taste to joke about killing President Bush. The worst excesses of Rush Limbaugh have never involved suggesting, as an Air America radio radio personality once did, that it would be well for somebody to take Mr. Bush fishing and, while out on the boat with him, put a bullet into his brain ala Fredo Corleone. I am unaware of any Republican party official to ever suggest that any Obama administration official be physically beaten, as an official of the Democratic Party of Florida suggested be done with Donald Rumsfeld a few years ago.

I seriously doubt that when Sarah Palin- a hunter whose personal mage is wrapped up in the imagry of the great Alaskan outdoors and the culture of hunting- uses "lock and load" as a metaphor for girding one's loins for political battle, or even uses a symbolic target as a way of marking districts (including Rep. Giffords' district) which she is "targeting" in an election on a map, that many people- however crazy- are encouraged thereby to start shooting Democrats. On the other hand, had she (or someone else) come right out and said, in so many words, that Rep. Gifford should be assassinated, that would be another issue.But when Palin used the word "blood libel" to confront the lie that the rhetoric of the Right was somehow responsible for the Safeway massacre (even Corn admits that his motivations and even his politics are murky at this point), the nutroots responded as they are in a habit of doing.Within hours, Twitter was awash in suggestions that Palin be "assassinated" or "shot." And hey- I have never heard of a conservative film maker making a movie about the assassination of President Obama!

When it comes to the rhetoric of violence and assassination, Mr. Corn, we are discussing a phenomenon far more of the Left than of the Right. And on those occasions when it happens on the Right, it tends to be confined to a relatively few extremist nut cases.

The scary thing is not just that it seems to happen a great more on the Left. It's that even presidential nominees and political commentators seem to feel such little compunction about the popular Leftist game of calling for the murder of people they disagree with.

Yeah, it's often done "jokingly." But it isn't funny- and the side of the political aisle that does most of it has no business trying to blame the other side for whatever atmosphere of violence may be developing because of it.

Note that we're not talking about the exercise in Chicken Little rhetoric Democrats engaged in during the Tea Party demonstrations a while back, when they complained about violence and threats of physical harm by demonstrators which they were unable to document even in a single instance. Whining about being picked on by the "violent" Right is a standard tactic for the snarky Left. We're talking here about the very words of Democratic leaders and elected officials

Pots and kettles, to use the politically incorrect metaphor.

But Corn is right about one thing: it simply will not do to suggest that both sides are equally engaged in overtly homocidal rhetoric. Its predominance on the Left is overwhelming. Yes, I know all about that tiny minority of Tea Partiers who had gun-related innuendoes on their signs during the Washington demonstration- during which the  victim of the only documented case of actual violence against a member of Congress was conservative Republican Eric Cantor. And yes, I know about the militias.There is no shortage of really scary nut jobs on the fringes of conservatism.

But when actual threats of violence and appeals that their political opponents be killed- "joking" or not- come so disproportionately from Rush Limbaugh's equivalents on the Left, and from Democratic presidential nominees and party officials, any attempt to evade the obvious fact that the rhetoric of violence is far more pervasive on the Left than on the Right is simply disingenous.

And perhaps the scariest thing of all is that a columnist of David Corn's stature can be so out of touch with reality that he doesn't realize it- and in fact denies that his side even engages in such garbage.

Get a clue, Mr. C!

The Bears just might do it after all

And suddenly the Bears find themselves in the NFC Championship- and against the Green Slime, at that! I continue to see us as underdogs to the Packers. But I am convinced that we can beat them. We did so once, and played well enough to do so the second time.

Moreover, I'm sure that we can beat either the Jets (in fact, we've already beaten them) or the Steelers.

For the first time, I actually see a strong possibility of Da Bearss not only gong to the Super Bowl, but winning it. But in a real sense, the Green Bay game is the real Super Bowl. Winning that would make losing in Dallas a whole lot easier to take.

Of course, winning both would be even better.

BEAR DOWN!

A distasteful reality

When I was in seminary, I briefly worked in the mail room. A mailing arrived from a pro-life group featuring lurid and bloody pictures of aborted fetuses and parts thereof.

"Well," a pro-choice classmate said, "so much for reasoned discussion!"

I didn't have time to point out that until we confront the fact that what those pictures portrayed is what abortion is, reasoned discussion is on the topic isn't possible.

Apparently former President George W. Bush was moved to his pro-life position by his mother, Barbara, showing him the fetus of a miscarried sibiling.

Disgusting? Perhaps. But grounds for coming to grips in a way that many Americans refuse to with just what that nice, clean, sanitary word "abortion" actually means.

It's official: statues of Hull and Mikita will be erected at the UC

It seems that whoever makes such decisions has finally gotten around to decreeing that statues of Blackhawk greats Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita will join that of Michael Jordan at the United Center. About time, in my opinion.

It's easy for the current generation of Chicago sports fans to forget that NBA basketball is a relative newcomer to Chicago. There was, somewhere in the late Cretaceous Period, a team called the Chicago Stags (named, I presume, more or less in memory of Amos Alonzo Stagg, the legendary coach of the University of Chicago's great early football teams) in the NBA. It failed in 1950, the year of my birth. I remember another  failed franchise, called (shudder!) the Chicago Packers (pardon the language!) starting up in my youth. Its owners quickly realized their lapse and had the good taste to change the team's name to the Chicago Zephyrs (Windy City. Get it?). Alas, it didn't help much. The team only lasted two years, going out of business in 1963. It was three years later that the Bulls were founded.

The Blackhawks, however, were founded in 1926- and trace their lineage even earlier, to a team called the Portland Rosebuds (isn't that sweet?). They  had their rough spells in the early years after Major Frederic McLaughlin started the franchise, named after the "Blackhawk Division-" the 86th Infantry, in which the Major fought during World War I.  They managed to win the Stanley Cup in 1934 and again in 1938, but the years between those victories and their next Cup in 1961 were often lean. Curiously, not so the even longer draught between the 1961 Cup and the one they won last Spring; it featured some pretty good hockey teams. Hull and Mikita were fixtures on these teams, and- along with Glenn "Mr. Goalie" Hall- the cornerstones of modern Blackhawk history.

 I saw my first NHL game at the Stadium during his rookie year, 1957, when the eighteen year-old future star wore, not his famous number 9, but number 16, Hull, often regarded as the greatest left wing in hockey history, possessed a slapshot so vicious that it was pretty much a done deal that if it was on net, it was in. Goalies couldn't see it, much less stop it. He lead the league in both goals and scoring by his third season, and on March 12, 1966 he broke the record jointly held by Maurice "The Rocket" Richard and Bernie "Boom Boom" Geoffrion for the most goals ever scored by a player in a single year. His record 51st goal briefly earned the man better known as "the Golden Jet" the alternate nickname "the Babe Ruth of hockey."

That record has, of course, been subsequently broken by Phil Esposito (briefly a teammate of Hull and Mikita on the Hawks) and, of course, by the incomparable Wayne Gretzky. But Hull's greatness is beyond dispute. The most feared scorer of his era and, at the zenith of his career, the best-known hockey player in the world, he deserves to be far better remembered, not only in Chicago but wherever hockey is played. Hull was not only a great player himself, but is the father of another pretty fair scorer: Brett Hull, who had the best years of his career with the St. Louis Blues and has his own statue in front of their arena.

Mikita, who was born Stanislav Guoth in Slovakia, joined the Hawks two years after Hull. "Stosh" was a scoring machine in his own right, but more of a assist specialist  than a goal scorer. In the 1966-67 season, he tied another Hull record: that for most points (goals plus assists)  in a season, at 97.

Mikita was the cornerstone of the Hawks' number two line, the "Scooters," during the championship season of 1961. Hull was the star of the team's first line, the "Million Dollar Babies." The two stars led the Hawks to the Finals a total of five times, in 1961, 1962, 1965, 1971, and 1973. The 1965 and 1971 defeats were heartbreakers, going the full seven games. The two Chicago stars could easily have led the team to at least three Stanley Cups instead of just one.

Now that the dark days of the Bill Wirtz era is over, and Chicago hockey fans are finally filling a new stadium the way they used to fill the old one  to watch Hull and Mikita play, it's only fitting that their greatness be commemorated the same way Michael Jordan's has. In some ways, it's even sweeter than that Stanley Cup we won last Spring  to this further evidence that the team I love is back, and that hockey has once again resumed its rightful place in the hearts and minds of Chicago sports fans.

Taking nothing away from the great Jordan, like I said... it's about time.

A sick movie indeed

A couple of years ago, some parishioners gave me a portable DVD player for Christmas. It's been a much-appreciated source of entertainment ever since then, especially given the opportunity afforded by the Des Moines Public Library to rent movies and TV programs I've missed through the years for a dollar a week.

Yesterday I picked up a few to tide me through the weekend. Two in particular are worthy of comment. The first is Death of a President, a British "mockumentary" on the (obviously fictional) assassination of George W. Bush in Chicago on October 19, 2007.

The film was broadcast on the BBC in 2006. At the time, I commented on how disgusted I was by the premise- a reaction shared by people as diverse as Hillary Clinton and Kevin Kostner. If I had a dime for every sick Democrat and Leftist I've heard wishing precisely for Mr. Bush's death over the past eleven years, I'd be financially much better off than I am today. To actually make a film about such an ugly premise struck me as the height of bad taste.

But when I saw it at the library, curiosity got the better of me. It's actually rather well-done, and goes to great lengths to portray Mr. Bush positively- at least from a personal point of view. The number of hate-filled nut cases among his critics is even acknowledged. For most of the film, I was surprised to find Rex Reed's observation that the film lacked a political agenda actually plausible.

The size of the anti-war movement seemed to me to be greatly overestimated by the film. Certainly the size of the demonstration which greets Mr. Bush on the way to his "final speech" is way, way over the top. But as I said earlier, no attempt was made to conceal or disguise the number of vicious nut cases in it. When Mr. Bush is shot from the window of a Clark Street building while exiting the Sheraton Hotel after a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, suspicion initially falls on one of the organizers of massive demonstrations which earlier had forced the emergency alteration of the President's route from O'Hare to the Sheraton. As the media and the President's official family hold vigil at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the FBI and the Chicago Police Department clear the organizer, who is clearly depicted as a despicable and hate-filled creep. Evidence seems to point to a Syrian-American who was, by sheer coincidence, present at the shooting, but actually played no role in it.

"President" Cheney initially is shown as perseverating on the idea that Syria's Ba'athist regime orchestrated the shooting. But the film goes to such great lengths to avoid the appearance of an anti-Bush hatchet job that Cheney- one of the crazy Left's favorite villians- is depicted as abandoning that idea when the evidence fails to support it.

Others in the government do not, however, and the Syrian is convicted of the President's murder on the basis of circumstantial (though plausible) evidence adduced by law enforcement officials who are depicted throughout the film as decent, honorable and competent. Eventually, however, it developes that the actual assassin is a veteran of the First Gulf War who lost one son to an IED in the second, and whose other son is suffering from PTSD and an ongoing struggle with drug addiction after returning from Iraq. Mr. Bush, the assassin's suicide note charges, is responsible for "murdering" truth, justice and the American way- all the things the assassin fought for in the First Gulf War- through the prosecution of the Second. Alas, it seems that, for all its elaborate attempts to seem fair and reasonable, the film has an anti-Bush agenda after all.

As the film closes, the innocent Syrian-American is on death row at Statesville. The government is dragging its feet in exploring the conclusive evidence-including a confession and secret documents concerning proving the President's movements the day of the shooting found among the papers of  the veteran who, as the film makes clear, was the actual shooter. The honest cops, FBI agents, and prosecutors involved in the case have, in several cases, resigned in protest. But the implication is that an innocent man is going to be executed, largely because he happens to be a Muslim.

As the Iraq war winds down, our victory in Iraq becomes manifest, and history vindicates Mr. Bush, films like this one are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The massacre in Arizona the other day certainly illustrates the consequences of having allowed our political discourse to become so polarized and extreme. But this movie, with its tasteless theme, cannot pose as a mere indictment of the trend, though I sense that its makers would like to argue that such is the case. It's not merely an indictment of partisan hatred and extremism; it's an example of them. Tt the end of the day, no matter how competently done and actually engrossing at times, Death of a President remains a disgusting piece of partisan trash, all the more despicable for its elaborate attempt to make its accusations against Mr. Bush palatable by its restrained and even sympathetic portrayal of the man personally.

The point, I think, is made quite well by simply asking onesself what the reaction of the Left would be to a movie made by a conservative- however sympathetically it might portray Barack Obama personally- which, at a moment at which the hate-filled nuts of the Right are engaging in precisely the same kind of sputtering and bombast their cousins on the Left made a way of life throughout the previous administration, depicted him as being assassinated by an Afghan War veteran angry at his willingness to endanger the success of our arms by creating a deadline in advance for our withdrawal in the face of the Taliban.

Can you even imagine the outcry?

Back in business

Apparently my Google account was hacked the other day. Google shut down my email and blog for twenty-four hours (the dreaded "suspicious activity"), but as you can see I'm back- though with three spam emails from myself.

Anyway, it's good to be back in communication with the cyber-world.

Half a loaf

The Ursine Warriors looked better yesterday than I expected. Especially given the psychological factors involved, losing 10-3 at Lambeau isn't all that bad.

And since we beat the Packers at Soldier Field, the season wasn't a complete loss even if- as I continue to fear- we make a relatively early exit from the playoffs.

Here's hoping... though the odds are against us

The Bears play Green Bay at Lambeau in the last game of the regular season this afternoon.

The Bears have little or nothing to gain. The Packers have everything to lose. A Green Bay defeat means the end of their season. A Bear victory wins them the off-chance of having an essentially meaningless first seed in the NFC (if Atlanta loses, and the moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars).

The Good Guys will have a hard time being motivated. The Bad Guys will have no trouble at all. And if the truth be told, the Packers are a considerably better football team than we are.

For realistic Bear fans like myself- who realize that we're going nowhere in the playoffs, no matter what seed we get- beating Green Bay twice in the same season is close enough to a Super Bowl to get us through the summer But I have a feeling we're going to have a hard time taking down the Mold 'n' Gold this afternoon.

Here's hoping, anyway. Bear down!

ADDENDUM: There seems to be considerable sentiment at the Bears Yahoo group I run that I'm wrong, and that we do have a legitimate shot at the Super Bowl. I still think this is a case of mass hysteria, but I hope that they're right and I'm wrong.