Peggy Noonan is urging President Bush to lower his voice and use the SOTU to take us into his confidence about Iraq.

In an odd way Mr. Bush's passion about Iraq is getting in the way of his message on Iraq. It's not carrying the message forth forcefully, which is what passion is supposed to do. At this point his passion seems to be distracting from the message. ...

Presidents are always bound by the need not to compromise sources or operations, and rightly so. But at this moment, on the brink of war, an immediate and situational new flexibility would seem to be helpful. If you lose a source or an operation and gain more of the understanding of the people of the world and the people of your country--well, that would seem to be a reasonable deal.

As someone who suspects that the Administration does have good reasons for its hard-line Iraq policy, I hope he takes the advice.
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"Anti-Semitism is the stupid answer to a serious question: how does history operate behind our backs?"
Stephen Eric Bronner as quoted by Richard L. Cravatts in a timely op- ed denouncing anti-Semitism -- and the paranoia that underlies it -- in today's Asia Times

Best of the Week: Tim Noah's Meme Watch series in Slate (er, MSN Slate Magazine) has evolved from a rather glib jab at a certain kind of brain- dead Republican politics into a smart and stealthily serious (Good, and good for you!) analysis of national tax and spending policy. This week's entries (here and here) win The O'Toole File's first Best of the Week award hands down.

One I Missed: Somehow I overlooked this smart post two days ago on the difficulties that Democratic presidential candidates are running into as they try to actively campaign in The O'Toole File's home state of South Carolina while respecting the NAACP's ongoing economic boycott.
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"We value women's health. ... Those are our values. ... American values. ... Constitutional values. ... Constitutional and American values. ... Neither side has a monopoly of values ... an American value ... an American value ... an American value. ... I am pro-values."
Joe Lieberman's speech to NARAL Pro-Choice America, as remembered by TNR's Ryan Lizza

Shameless Self Promotion: Sorry about the light posting the past few days, but I've been busy trying to get the redesigned Jack O'Toole & Associates site up and running at its new address.

After all the Internet hype of the past decade, we wanted to keep the site and its contents as simple and straight-forward as possible. Please take a look, and let me know how you think we did.

Barring any last-minute problems with the new site, I should be back to regular blogging this afternoon.
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Jeff Jarvis is absolutely right about the importance of protecting intellectual property rights in a free society, and the moral imperative of allowing creators to control and benefit from their creations.

Property is property -- all the more if I create it. If I own and exploit the property I create, it's capitalism. It's American. If you make me give up my creation, my grain, my property, to the collective, it's communism. Moscow, 1918. ...

But note also that Linux is not a consumer product. I can't effectively run my own computer (or my kids' or my father's) on Linux. There are not nearly enough good consumer products to run on it. Why? Because the creators of such products cannot make enough money to make it worthwhile to create them.

Well said.
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The O'Toole File is facing a Monday morning project deadline for a client, so expect light to non-existent posting today and over the weekend.
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After reading this article in the WP on the steroidal growth of the budget deficit, I was about to write a tough post on budget director Mitch Daniels. Then I remembered I'd already taken care of that.

Just as Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld have come to represent the best aspects of the Bush presidency to date, budget director Mitch Daniels is the perfect exemplar of all that's worst -- the arrogance, the smug self-satisfaction, and (in the domestic policy arena) the breath-taking intellectual dishonesty.
The O'Toole File -- Dec. 31, 2002

Welcome Back: Virginia Postrel gets back to blogging today with several new posts, including this one on North Korea:

Here's my crazy idea: North Korea has 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that could be converted to plutonium for weapons. Let's save the North Koreans the trouble and buy the fuel rods and the plant that reprocesses them. (To seal the deal, maybe we could get some Hollywood types to entertain Kim's thoughts on cinema for an evening or two.) Yes, buying the spent fuel rods would be giving into nuclear blackmail. But that's probably going to happen anyway�nuclear blackmail is tough stuff ...

Read the rest here.
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There's a saying in politics: All process is bull#$&%! In other words, pols are at their least sincere when they're screaming at each other about how things should be done rather than what things should be done. (Remember Democratic outrage at the prosecutorial abuses of Ken Starr? Suppose for a moment he'd been trying to force a mother to testify against her own child in order to prove the Bush brothers stole Florida in 2000...) The current wrangling in the Senate over office space and staff resources, with all its attendant wailing and gnashing of teeth, is a reminder of just how true that old cliche is.
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One fact to consider if you're among those who believe that Joe Lieberman, the latest Democrat to enter the fray, is "too conservative" to win the Democratic nomination: Since 1984, the candidate who has raised the most money during the primary process has ended up being his party's standard-bearer every single time.

Three things make it likely that Lieberman will be that man in this cycle: (1) His recent VP campaign; (2) his proven ability to bring in "new money" from Jewish voters; and (3) his leadership position in the DLC, which is (among other things) a corporate fundraising machine.

That scenario, as the record shows, would not only make Joe Lieberman a credible candidate for his party's nomination -- it would make him the Democrat to beat in 2004.
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