End of The Week Non-Baseball Links

An accumulation:
*Gen. Anthony Zinni has a new book out this summer, entitled “Battle Ready,” co-authored by Tom Clancy and chronicling Zinni’s career. Sure sounds like a guy auditioning for VP to me.
*Michael King has some thoughts on a recent Bill Cosby speech that didn’t go down so well with an assemblage of ‘civil rights leaders’.
*Kevin Drum gets in a huff about the Texas state controller ruling that Unitarian-Universalists aren’t a real religion. This is indeed pretty dumb, but only people on the Left could blame it on what evil cretins all Texans are. The problem here is one that’s common throughout government: idiotic decisions driven by fear of litigation, in this case fear that the absence of a clear standard will render the controller vulnerable in future litigation with genuine crackpots. Horror stories are common of government officials – especially at the public school level – overreacting to stuff, especially where religious liberties are concerned, out of misunderstanding of the applicable law coupled with fear of litigation. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the Texans but in our courts.
*Daniel Drezner comes down hard on education school programs.
*Dana at Note-It Posts has some thoughts on abortion (via NGD).
*The MinuteMan comes down real hard on Brad Pitt’s Troy.
*Pejman seeks to correct the common misperception that “being a law student is like being a Jew during the Inquisition.” He has and links to some good advice; I’d heartily second the idea that law school is still less work than having a job (personally, I found that the stress of job-hunting was actually the main anxiety-builder in law school) and that it’s just crucial to spend time with people who are not law students.
*Those swift boat vets just won’t let up on Kerry.
*Venomous Kate is a good place to start for strange theories about Nicholas Berg (link via An Unsealed Room). I just want to know if this Zelig of the Terror War was related to Moe Berg, catcher and spy.
*Speaking of Berg, Michele tears into his father’s fatuous editorial for the Guardian, the left-wing London rag. Read the whole thing. It’s the Guardian that should really be ashamed for printing this drivel. I love this line, which is one of the best things I think I’ve ever read: “let me tell you, Mr. Berg – if George Bush had looked into your son’s eyes, it wouldn’t be while he was slicing his head off.” A sample of the foolishness:

Well, we can respect other humans, or we can respect sovereign states. We can’t have both, not when other sovereign states are run with not the slightest regard for our fellow humans or for us.
Likewise, we can expect others to live up to the same rules we do – or we can accept that they don’t. Again, we’ve gotta choose between the two. It’s astounding how often the Left looks at homicidal dictatorships and assumes that this is how their subjects freely choose to live. If you start with the (rather indisputable) premise that the Saddams and the Zarqawis of the world wish to impose their will on a population that does not want to live that way, all the talk in the world about respecting how other people choose to live falls away to nonsense.
*Anything that gets William Donahue to blast the Vatican is pretty misguided. That’s like Terry McAuliffe ripping Clinton.
*The NY Daily News’ headline from Rudy Giuliani’s testimony before the increasingly farcical September 11 commission: “We did all we could” (Underlining in the print headline on the front page). But that’s not what he said; what Rudy said, which was much wiser and encompassed the failures of 9/11 and why we shouldn’t rush to place blame for them, was “we did everything we could think of … to protect the city.” Ponder that one. We, as a nation, and our governments, federal, state and city, did not do everything we could. We did do, as Rudy said, everything we could think of. The problem was a collective failure of imagination.