Want to look and feel younger? Glenn Reynolds has the best answer since Vitameatavegamin.
--------

According to Robert Novak, a post-election Democratic Leadership Council memo by Al From and Bruce Reed had the following advice for Democrats. [Full disclosure: In a former life, I did a little consulting work for the SCDLC, the DLC's South Carolina affiliate.]

Close the cultural gap that, left unchecked, will give Republicans back a virtual lock on the Electoral College and doom any chance of Democrats taking back the Congress. Half that battle is simply respecting the values of mainstream America in the first place. We will never be the party that loves guns most, but we can respect law-abiding citizens' rights to own them. We will never be the pro-life party, but we can show that we want abortion to be rare as well as legal.

That's true, and it's good advice, but the Democrats probably need to lose another election before they'll be ready to listen.
--------

Peggy Noonan's column in today's OpinionJournal displays all that's best in her work: fine writing, incisive commentary, a strong and supple wit. Unfortunately, it also contains the rest of the Noonan package: the intellectual dishonesty, the sense of self-importance, the transparent political hack-work.

Let's start with what's best -- in this case, her clear and persuasive restatement of an important American idea.

In the America of 50 years ago and a 100 years ago and 1776, this is how it went:

This is not a good way to convert people. It is however a good way to push people around.

Powerful stuff, that, and a principle worth fighting for. But there's the rub. Ms. Noonan isn't fighting for principle, here; she's fighting for simple ideological advantage. And in the process, the "rest of the Noonan package" that I discussed above becomes all too apparent.

For starters, an intellectually honest columnist would have looked her largely conservative readership in the eye and spoken some unpopular truths. She would have pointed out that Tom Daschle, Anna Quindlen, and an atheist Eagle Scout (the only examples of this whine-and/or-sue mentality she managed to work into a 1500-plus word column) are just the tip of this particular iceberg. She'd have written that private institutions like, say, Harvard, have every right to enforce wrong-headed policies such as speech codes and racial preferences, and that the young men and women damaged by these regulations should stay out of court because "they [Harvard] have their rules and this is America." In short, she would have aimed her verbal fire at a diverse group of deserving targets, not just convenient targets of partisan opportunity.

Second, a less self-involved columnist could probably have found a way to take Tom Daschle to task for his silly post-election whining about talk radio without telling us of her own stoic courage in the face of cruel liberal invective. She certainly would never have implicitly compared the nasty letters and the unpleasant shunning she receives on the Upper West Side to the concerns, however misplaced, of a man who has actually received weapons-grade anthrax in the mail.

And a columnist who had more than hack-work in mind would have had the courage to take on an element of the Republican base. She might even have gone so far as to exhort religious conservatives to quit complaining about their consistently unfair portrayal as simple-minded misogynist yahoos in too much of the mainstream media, and to simply accept the fact that "you pay a price for where you stand."

Yes, a different, better columnist would have done all these things, and more. And as someone who genuinely admires her enormous gifts, I hope someday that different, better columnist is named Peggy Noonan.
--------

Is the US economy about to fall off the same deflationary cliff Japan's did in the 1990s? The signals are mixed, but serious people are starting to get seriously concerned.
--------

"They came here with three children and they went back to Israel with only one."
Dr. Yoel Donchin, an Israeli physician in Mombasa, on one family's losses in yesterday's terrorist attack in Kenya
--------

Christopher Hitchens struggles toward a definition of the term "anti-American," and winds up getting it just about right.
--------

"Was Robert MacNamara busy?"
Mickey Kaus, on Henry Kissinger's appointment to head the independent 9/11 inquiry
--------

Personally, I find the whole Bush-is-a-moron canard tiresome, and more than a little, well, ... moronic. But censoring it is even dumber.
--------

Dana Milbank reports in today's WP (via Jim Romenesco) that the WSJ has banned the acronym "GOP" from its pages because it "may seem baffling (or even spin-doctored) to some new readers."
--------

An interesting article in today's Washington Post examines the pattern of campaign contributions by business interests in recent years, and correctly concludes that the Democratic Party is in trouble.

Major industries such as accounting, aerospace, commercial banking, defense, HMOs and pharmaceuticals have abandoned their tradition of bipartisan campaign contributions in favor of a commitment to the GOP, a trend that could deepen the problems of a Democratic Party rocked by this month's elections.

An analysis of political donations by industry groups shows that over the past decade, 19 major sectors have shifted from a roughly 50-50 split between the two main parties -- or in some cases, a slightly pro-Democratic tilt -- to a solid alignment with the Republican Party, which now enjoys advantages exceeding 5 to 1 in some of these sectors. The shift has produced at least $78 million in additional GOP support from these groups over 10 years, while donations to Democrats have declined slightly.

While cozying up too closely to any one political party is probably a short-sighted policy on the part of Big Business, Democrats -- and I mean rank-and-file party members, not the Terry McAuliffs of the world -- need to take this problem seriously, and to understand that they have no one but themselves to blame for it.

For years, professional fund raisers have understood that one of the bedrock truths of American politics is that most Democratic activists would rather take a bath in acid than write a small check in support of the candidate of their choice. (Yes, this changed somewhat during the Clinton years, but Republicans still enjoy an enormous advantage in low-dollar contributions.) This has had the ironic effect of pushing the Party closer to the corporate types most Democrats distrust, while, at the same time, heightening the level of resentment toward the Party among many business leaders, who have come to see the whole relationship -- money in exchange for "access" when their industry is under the regulatory gun -- as a legal protection racket. Given these circumstances, should anyone really be surprised that business contributions have dried up now that the only access the Party has left to sell is a backstage pass to yet another Barbra Streisand fund-raiser?

The simple truth is that the Democratic Party will never straighten out its financial situation until its most vocal members stop complaining about campaign finance, and start financing campaigns.
--------

So if Bandar bin Sultan is Gatsby, his wife, Princess Haifa, must be like the careless Daisy, her voice full of money that could have ended up supporting two of the Saudi hijackers. And those 15 Saudi hijackers would be "the foul dust that floated in the wake" of the Arab Gatsby's dreams.

His new dream is that Saudi Arabia will help America get rid of Saddam, and then the anger over Saudi involvement in 9/11 will fade and the cozy, oily alliance between the countries can get back on track.
Maureen Dowd, in this morning's NYT
--------

According to this morning's Washington Post, McCain-Feingold is already having unintended consequences; in effect, it legalized bribery. "The Federal Election Commission voted yesterday to allow challengers in congressional races to pay themselves a salary from their campaign funds, a move designed to enable more people with modest incomes to run for the House and Senate."

Enlarging the pool of potential candidates may be a noble goal, but allowing them to literally become paid employees of the interests they represent isn't. Besides, we already have plenty of people who perform that function. They're called lobbyists.
--------

Over at NRO, David Frum looks at the recent NYT/CBS poll and opines: "Let me hazard an interpretation of the 2002 election based on these poll results. That election looks more and more like a referendum on this single question: Is the United States at war or not? The Democratic answer was �not.� ... The Republicans, by contrast, argued that war and peace were the supreme issues and that everything else fell into second, third, and fourth place. The public agreed -- and that�s why the GOP won."

He's right, of course, but he's only telling half the story. The other half involves the GOP's remarkably successful strategy of co-opting traditional "Democratic" issues -- like a massive new Medicare drug benefit -- by passing bills in the House that they knew would never get through the Senate. It will be interesting to see whether they carry through on these promises now that they're firing with real bullets.
--------

In an article in this morning's Washington Times (via Drudge), Pat Robertson has this to say about Muslims in the United States: "I have never advocated ferreting out Muslims in America. They are citizens like I am. But if they are funneling money to Hamas, organizing terrorist cells or holding anti-American rallies, they ought to be deported."

Huh? I was under the impression that we were arresting people who finance and organize terrorist activities, not giving them bus fare home. And while organizing anti-American rallies is certainly odious behavior, how (and to where) do you deport American citizens for exercising their constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and assembly?

It's yet another example of how 9-11 has turned American politics on its head, I guess; I don't know whether to criticize the good Reverend from the left or the right.
--------

For the past several months, the PPC website has been on an extended hiatus of sorts due to a personal situation that demanded virtually all my time and attention. Thanks for your patience (and kind e-mails) during this period.

I'm happy to say that things have now changed, and the site will return tomorrow. I hope that you'll enjoy the revivified PPC half as much as I'll enjoy bringing it to you.
--------