Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"...in 1787, two days before their work was done, the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention 'adjourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 of whiskey, 22 of port, 8 of hard cider and 7 bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them.' "Then they went back to work and finished founding the new Republic." The rest is here .

I was reading a book on Jefferson and Burr tonight and read, "Justus Bollman sent a message from his cell to the President's house." 'What?!' I thought. 'He was texting Jeffereson?!' Then I realized he had been in jail at the time.

You can economize on your time by just reading the transcripts ( I and II ). If you already know the people, it's pretty easy to reconstruct how it must have looked when it happened. It is really stunning how bad on economics a lot of these candidates are. The best is Duncan Hunter saying we should "buy American" this Christmas season to create jobs. And Giuliani and Romney both refused to take up a questioner who wanted them to end federal subsidies for agriculture, because we need to ensure a domestic food supply. What's funny is, most of the candidates were posturing about how they were going to use the federal government to crack down on the flow of illegal immigrants. So we're worried about foreigners sneaking in illegally, and we're also worried about us not being able to import food legally. Makes sense. I do have to say I was impressed with McCain on illegal immigrants--reminding everyone that they are God's children too--and with Huckabee o...

Sheldon Richman on the new American aims in Iraq : "Finally, the 3.0 agenda aims to get a law passed to let Ba’ath Party members back into government jobs. “This last goal was described by a senior Bush administration official as largely symbolic, since rehirings have been quietly taking place already without a law,” the Times reports." So now one of our war aims is to re-install the government we went to war to expel!

In tonight's debate, a viewer asked,"Do you believe every word of the Bible?' Now, my answer would have been "What the hell business is it of yours?" Huckabee said, "I believe that the Bible is exactly what it is." I guess he's holding some sort of Tarskian theory of truth, whereby "It is raining out" is true whenever it is the case that it is raining out. (Which I've found to be the least helpful philosophical truth ever propounded.)

At NRO Andy McCarthy writes : "The greatest blown opportunity in recent political history[?] I'd have gone with Clinton's chance to take out al Qaeda right after the 1998 embassy bombings — which would have been good for the country, won the 2000 election for Gore, and spared us the Cole bombing and 9/11." But of course, at that time , anytime Clinton acted against al Qaeda, the right screamed "He's just distracting the people from Monica! Wag the dog! Wag the dog!"

On November 7 Alan Dershowitz--the epitome of a civil liberties loving liberal, in the eyes of many--wrote a WSJ column on "Democrats and Waterboarding" (page A23). A reader took issue and wrote a Letter to the Editor complaining, and on November 14 Dershowitz replied (in the Letters section), writing: Douglas A. Johnson premises his letter to the editor on Nov. 12 on the factual assertion that I am "passionately promoting the use of torture." Did he not even bother to read the column to which he was responding in which I stated unequivocally that "I am personally opposed to the use of torture." [sic on punctuation--Bob] This assertion runs through all of my writing about torture. Being the head of a do-gooder organization does not give one a license to make up the facts. ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ Cambridge, Mass. Wow, them are some strong words. Let me take some ex...