I have never been a big fan of Dick Cheney, but here’s a reason to like him. He pissed off Robin Givhan of the Washington Post because he didn’t dress well enough for an event.

The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.

Cheney, flanked by his wife and Israeli President Moshe Katsav at the Holocaust memorial event. (Herbert Knosowski — AP)

Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood. It is embroidered with his name. It reminded one of the way in which children’s clothes are inscribed with their names before they are sent away to camp. And indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults.

Like other attendees, the vice president was wearing a hat. But it was not a fedora or a Stetson or a fur hat or any kind of hat that one might wear to a memorial service as the representative of one’s country. Instead, it was a knit ski cap, embroidered with the words “Staff 2001.” It was the kind of hat a conventioneer might find in a goodie bag.
…
There is little doubt that intellectually Cheney approached the Auschwitz ceremony with thoughtfulness and respect. But symbolism is powerful. That’s why the piercing cry of a train whistle marked the beginning of the ceremony and the glare of searchlights signaled its end. The vice president might have been warm in his parka, ski cap and hiking boots. But they had the unfortunate effect of suggesting that he was more concerned with his own comfort than the reason for braving the cold at all.

Thanks for reminding us again Robin that liberals only care about symbolism, and happily forget the real world and real outcomes. All that matter is the symbols to Robin Givhan and people of her ilk. Damn the symbols–what matters to people in the real world are results and outcomes.

I haven’t followed the Larry Summers’ situation, but George Will wrote a great article about it:

Forgive Larry Summers. He did not know where he was.

Addressing a conference on the supposedly insufficient numbers of women in tenured positions in university science departments, he suggested that perhaps part of the explanation might be innate — genetically based — gender differences in cognition. He thought he was speaking in a place that encourages uncircumscribed intellectual explorations. He was not. He was on a university campus.

He was at Harvard, where he is president. Since then he has become a serial apologizer and accomplished groveler. Soon he may be in a Khmer Rouge-style reeducation camp somewhere in New England, relearning this: In today’s academy, no social solecism is as unforgivable as the expression of a hypothesis that offends someone’s “progressive” sensibilities.

Someone like MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, the hysteric (see above) who, hearing Summers, “felt I was going to be sick. My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow.” And, “I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill.” She said that if she had not bolted from the room, “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”

Is this the fruit of feminism? A woman at the peak of the academic pyramid becomes theatrically flurried by an unwelcome idea and, like a Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines until revived by smelling salts and the offending brute’s contrition?

…
The vehemence of the political left’s recoil from this idea is explained by the investment political radicalism has had for several centuries in the notion that human beings are essentially blank slates. What predominates in determining individuals’ trajectories — nature or nurture? The left says nature is negligible, nurturing is sovereign. So a properly governed society can write what it wishes on the blank slate of humanity. This maximizes the stakes of politics and the grandeur of government’s role. And the importance of governing elites, who are the “progressive” vanguards of a perfected humanity.

The vehemence of Hopkins’s recoil from the idea that there could be gender differences pertinent to some cognition might seem merely to reflect a crude understanding of civic equality as grounded shakily on a certain identical physicality. But her hysteria actually expresses the left’s ultimate horror: the thought that nature sets limits to the malleability of human material. Summers should explain this to her, over lunch, when he returns from camp.

If you are interesting at looking at the Left’s view of people as blank slates, read Jack London. London was a socialist and his views on human nature are obvious if you are read his books looking for that (and they are fun reads).

According to the BBC:

Lance Armstrong will decide at the end of April whether to defend his Tour de France crown – but has pledged to go for a seventh title in 2005 or 2006.

The Texan has hinted he may not compete this year, and on Monday said he will decide after the spring classics.

“The deal was I was going to do the tour in 2005 or 2006,” said Armstrong at his Discovery Channel team’s launch.

At the moment I can’t say if I’ll take part. We’re not ruling anything out, but will see at the time.”

The 33-year-old looks set to compete in the Tour of Flanders on 3 April and Liege-Bastogne-Liege on 24 April.

Armstrong’s major rival, Jan Ullrich, however, has dismissed speculation Armstrong will not ride this year’s Tour de France.

But Ullrich, who could only finish fourth last year, told German television: “I don’t really believe it.

“He will want to defend his title. I believe he still targets the Tour – if it wasn’t his goal anymore, he’d stop.”

Ullrich has one Tour win under his belt – in 1997 when Armstrong did not compete – and would prefer to have the American in the race.

He said: “It would be good for the sport and it would be good for me too.

“To win against the man to beat for the last six years is a great motivation and challenge especially to me.

“Final victory at the Tour de France is always very valuable, even without him, but it will count for more if he’s there, that’s for sure.”

What makes me most excited is that Lars Ullrich seems fired up to beat Armstrong and that bodes well if Armstrong rides the Tour de France.

According to Drudge:

CNN hemorrhaged more than half their audience from the 2001 Inauguration, overnights show. The troubled news network only averaged 779,000 viewers during yesterday’s Inauguration coverage from 10am-4pm with just 168,000 of those viewers landing in the coveted 25-54 demo.

Like CNN, MSNBC also suffered major losses, only averaging 438,000 viewers throughout yesterday’s coverage (141,000 in 25-54), down a whopping 68% over 2001 and faring even worse in primetime with just 385,000 viewers.

In contrast, Fox News averaged 2,581,000 viewers from 10a-4p (up 30% over 2001) and their 25-54 demo average of 705,000 came close to CNN’s total coverage ratings yesterday.

PRIMETIME:

FNC — 2,439,000 (up 57% OVER ’01)
CNN — 1,353,000 (down 14% over ’01)
MSNBC — 385,000 (down 47% over ’01)

I think one reason for CNN’s decline is it’s bias. In case you missed it, CNN didn’t dump the audio when a guy in a crowed repeatedly yelled “f*ck Bush” while a CNN reporter was talking. Ever since the Janet Jackson’s boob made it’s appearance on live TV, the networks have been using a delay so that they could dump the video or audio–just as happens on live call-in radio shows. I could understand the guy at the switch missing the first “f*ck Bush” and maybe the second time, but the guy the background says it SIX TIMES and because of the crowd noise it was easier to hear the protestor than it was to hear the CNN reporter. It seems to me that CNN didn’t dump the audio so they could be hip and because it was “newsworthy.” These shenanigans are just one reason why CNN’s viewership is flagging.

If you aren’t in the depths of dispair, then you are rejoice! According to a British reseacher January 24th is the “most depressing day of the year.” So even if you are feeling black today, be happy, it’s only going to get better!

I like Colby Cosh’s take on the Airbus A380:

Unlike Boeing’s next-generation rival — the sleek, still-incomplete 7E7 Dreamliner, which will trade passenger capacity for extreme fuel efficiency — the A380 has a pretty traditional profile. It’s just a little bit larger through all dimensions than the familiar jumbos of today. What’s really traditional here, though, is the old-fashioned “bigger is better” approach to industrial development. The European leaders could barely contain their phallocratic, chauvinistic glee at having a plump new toy to show off; their delight was somehow … very American. “When we look at this monument of human achievement, we see that Europe can’t be stopped,” said Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, adding that “We’re capable of being a leader in science and technology when we are highly determined.”

One feels a little embarrassed at the “See? Europeans aren’t entirely pathetic” part. And, after all, the A380 still does need to get off the ground. But in an age of exaggerated environmental and geopolitical anxieties, it is encouraging to see a feat of engineering and business flair celebrated without apology.

I love to rip on Paul Krugman and he makes it awfully easy. The man has no intellectual integrity as Just One Minute points out in this post. Here’s a piece:

But hold on! Didn’t Paul Krugman just ask for a “reasonable” estimate, and throw out 20% to 30% in Britain as a comparison? Based on the CBO number and some mental math, we came to 7%, which was quickly confirmed by a more elaborate calculation. Why, oh why is Prof. Krugman off by a factor of 300% to 400%? How can it be that he is misrepresenting the intelligence and hyping his case?

You’ve got me. Possible answers might include: (a) this was too complicated a calculation for a prospective Nobel Laureate; (b) this was an easy calculation but not a helpful result for polemical purposes; or (c) his beer was warm, and all the folks in Princeton speak English, so he thought he was in Britain.

I’m not responsible for any time lost playing this game.

Ann Althouse has a great post about Posner’s fisking of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink.” Read it.

Richard Poser is incredibly prolific. Not only is he a judge on the Seventh Circuit, is he also a lecturer at University of Chicago Law School, and he writes voaciously. Here’s his review of the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Posner destroys the author of this book. He writes:

As Exhibit A for the superiority of intuitive to articulate thinking, Gladwell offers the case of a purported ancient Greek statue that was offered to the Getty Museum for $10 million. Months of careful study by a geologist (to determine the age of the statue) and by the museum’s lawyers (to trace the statue’s provenance) convinced the museum that it was genuine. But when historians of ancient art looked at it, they experienced an “intuitive revulsion,” and indeed it was eventually proved to be a fake.

The example is actually a bad one for Gladwell’s point, though it is a good illustration of the weakness of this book, which is a series of loosely connected anecdotes, rich in “human interest” particulars but poor in analysis. There is irony in the book’s blizzard of anecdotal details. One of Gladwell’s themes is that clear thinking can be overwhelmed by irrelevant information, but he revels in the irrelevant. An anecdote about food tasters begins: “One bright summer day, I had lunch with two women who run a company in New Jersey called Sensory Spectrum.” The weather, the season, and the state are all irrelevant. And likewise that hospital chairman Brendan Reilly “is a tall man with a runner’s slender build.” Or that “inside, JFCOM [Joint Forces Command] looks like a very ordinary office building…. The business of JFCOM, however, is anything but ordinary.” These are typical examples of Gladwell’s style, which is bland and padded with clich