The NFL combine took place earlier this week. Some players, like Hall of Famers Marcus Allen and Jerry Rice, would never have wowed anyone at the NFL combine. And some who never make the cut in the NFL make headlines at the NFL combine. The fastest player at the rookie showcase? Running back Chris Johnson from East Carolina, who ran an amazing 4.24 40-yard dash. Highest vertical leap? Kentucky receiver Keenan Burton, who went 38.5 inches airborne. The strongest? A tie between Michigan offensive lineman Jake Long and Ohio State defensive end Vernon Gholston. So who is the most impressive physical specimen among rookies? Vernon Gholston is a 270-pound man who runs a sub-4.7 40, can bench 225 pounds 37 times, and boasts a vertical leap of 35.5 inches. It is incredible to be that big and that athletic. He gets my vote. If you meet Vernon Gholston, before you deliver the obligatory male greeting, "Dude, how much do you bench?," tell him that you did 225 for 38 reps in your mom's basement.

Unfortunately, the results of the most interesting test at the combine are a secret. The best performer ever in it, gasp, was a punter out of Harvard, which probably gives away what kind of test it is. The Wonderlic test measures intelligence, and it's the "dumb" offensive linemen that generally score best while the so-called "skill" positions generally score poorly. The test, as administered to prospective NFL players, consists of 50 questions of ascending difficulty answered (or not) in 12 minutes. A score of 20 indicates average intelligence. Colt Dwight Freeney (35), Eagle Kevin Curtis (48), and Patriot Ben Watson (41) are among the league's brightest. One of the highest recent scorers on this test, perhaps not coincidentally, is the reigning Super Bowl MVP. Still higher, than Eli Manning's 39 is Drew Henson's 42. He plays baseball too. Make your own inferences.

In lamenting the passing of William F. Buckley yesterday, the adjective my editor used to describe Buckley was the same word floating through my brain: gracious. I witnessed Buckley's graciousness first hand. I briefly met Buckley for a few hours in the Spring of 1999. I had helped organize a conference at the University of Chicago, and met Buckley at the terminal at Midway, walked him to his hotel, and later dined with him, David Horowitz, and a group of students. The students were deferential, save one whose awe drifted deep into sycophancy, appearing as Chris Farley to Buckley's Paul McCartney in that famous SNL sketch. Buckley handled his not-so-secret admirer with tolerance and, what else, grace.

He took interest in young people, which stands as a major reason why his imprint survives. He appointed a twentysomething to edit his magazine. He scooped up a teenage Richard Brookhiser to write for National Review. He discovered David Brooks after he had lampooned Buckley in college. Young Americans for Freedom's Sharon Statement, the best short expression of conservative principles that I've encountered, was written at Buckley's house by Stan Evans and a bunch of activist upstarts.

Buckley's was a conservative, not a Republican, movement. He sat out the 1956 election rather than hold his nose and vote for Eisenhower. His magazine endorsed Richard Nixon's primary challenger, John Ashbrook, in 1972. He helped found a third party, New York's Conservative Party, and challenged liberal Republican John Lindsey for mayor in the Big Apple. He wasn't afraid to go against the movement grain, as his support for legalization of drugs and ceding the Panama Canal to Panama, and belated criticism of the Iraq War, demonstrate.

For critics on the Right he could become Pope Buckley, issuing excommunications (Randians, Birchers, Rothbardians) to those who strayed and dispensations to semi-believing converts. Though he is often credited with cleaning out conservatism's fever swamps, it's worth noting that he also championed causes unpopular--America First, Joe McCarthy--with those cheering his work in cleaning up conservatism.

The charming aristocrat with elastic eyebrows, the pencil chewer issuing sesquipedalian words from the same mouth, the novelist, polemicist, movement leader, politician, harpsichordist, sailor, magazine editor, brilliant conversationalist, William F. Buckley we would be lucky to see the likes of you again. Rest in peace.

It's snowing today where I live. What else is new? Concord, New Hampshire, Madison, Wisconsin, and points beyond have endured record snowfalls this winter. There's still nearly a month to go. Snow cover over the continent is the most expansive it has been in forty years. This doesn't surprise people who look out their window. It does surprise people who look to Al Gore.

The earth is not getting warmer. It's getting cooler. At least that's been the case for the last year, which has witnessed a most rapid cooling. "The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C--a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years," reads a piece from the Daily Tech. "All in one year time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down."

The cause, say some scientists, is the sun. That doesn't surprise me. I'm not a scientist, but my stays at Holiday Inn Express qualify me to say that solar activity plays a greater role in climate than, say, gasoline or styrofoam cups. In other words, I think the sun is a more important variable in climate change than man. This was true when the mercury hit above-average temperatures and it is true now that the mercury is hitting below-average temperatures. Alas, the man-centered universe is as difficult a myth to overturn as the geocentric universe was.

Perhaps one year is too short a sampling to measure cooling. The same could be said about the thirty or so years of data proponents of man-made global warming are prone to rely upon. Taking the long view--55 million years long, to be exact--one can definitely say the earth is cooling. Back then, frogs, snakes, and other critters roamed within the Arctic Circle. Then an ice age hit.

"During the past billion years, the Earth's climate has fluctuated between warm periods--sometimes even completely ice-free--and cold periods, when glaciers scoured the continents," writes University of Maine geologist Kirk Maasch. "The cold periods--or ice ages--are times when the entire Earth experiences notably colder climatic conditions. During an ice age, the polar regions are cold, there are large differences in temperature from the equator to the pole, and large, continental-size glaciers can cover enormous regions of the earth." Do you notice what he's describing? He's saying we are living in an ice age, even if we are experiencing a warm respite.

"Between 52 and 57 million years ago, the Earth was relatively warm," Maasch notes. "Tropical conditions actually extended all the way into the mid-latitudes (around northern Spain or the central United States for example), polar regions experienced temperate climates, and the difference in temperature between the equator and pole was much smaller than it is today. Indeed it was so warm that trees grew in both the Arctic and Antarctic, and alligators lived in Ellesmere Island at 78 degrees North." Did SUVs cause all that?

The world doesn't revolve around people, as much as some people think it revolves around them. If it didn't happen today, if it didn't happen to them, it never happened. But climate change predates not only our existence, but the existence of all humans. The only constant with weather is change, which applies from day to day, season to season, and age to age.

For anyone still living under the delusion that George W. Bush is a conservative, I urge you to read his administration's amicus brief (PDF) to the Supreme Court on the DC gun case. If you haven't already guessed, they're on the side of the DC gun grabbers. The logic is tortuous, at once holding that the Second Amendment guarantees individual gun-rights and allows the government to take those "rights" away without due process. "Congress has enacted numerous laws regulating firearms," write the Bush Administration's friends of the court but enemies of the Constitution. "Those statutes include restrictions on private possession of types of firearms that are particularly susceptible to criminal misuse. The United States has a substantial interest in the constitutionality and effective implementation of those laws."

Three years ago, when Floyd Mayweather, Jr. was fighting the likes of Henry Bruseles in half-empty arenas, I thought him the worst-marketed fighter in boxing. He was an elite fighter taking on mid-card competition and he appeared as a villain to boot. With his amazing $20 million payday for a match with The Big Show at Wrestlemania, Mayweather shows what a difference a few years makes. An appearance on Dancing with the Stars, the megafight with De la Hoya, and the "Born in the USA" entry against Ricky Hatton prove that Mayweather has become one of those rare fighters who can transcend boxing and appeal to a mass audience. I'd rather see him go phone-booth toe-to-toe with Miguel Cotto, but I'm glad he at last has become an ambassador for the sweet science.

Last year, I saw one picture in the theaters, No Country for Old Men. It won best picture at the Academy Awards last night. The year prior, I also saw one movie in the theaters, The Departed. It also won the Academy Award for best picture. I have good taste, I guess. Though I left the theater puzzled after No Country for Old Men (thinking maybe it was a message about the persistence of evil), for the two hours previous my eyes fixated upon the screen. This was particularly true of Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, whom I have heard described as a "psychopath." I think that word doesn't do him justice as he posesses a logic and a morality, just not ones we're accustomed to. Particularly engrossing was his dialogue with the rural shopkeeper. Movies are supposed to make you watch, and I have never watched a movie as intently as No Country for Old Men. I don't know if this makes it a great film, but it's certainly an arresting visual narrative--highlighted by its non existent soundtrack--that keeps you in your seat.

When Gorbachev lost his grip on the Soviet Union, it reflected the zeitgeist. In Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, and elsewhere, the people rejected Communism. Fidel Castro has handed over power to his brother, not to the people of Cuba. In Nicaragua, retread Daniel Ortega is again the president. In Venezuala, Hugo Chavez has reinstituted socialism. In Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the founder of the nation's Worker's Party, is the head of state. In other words, Castro hands power to his brother when Latin America is heading towards, not away from, his ideology. As America fights to institute democracy half-way round the world, the dictators in our own neighborhood have multiplied. Castro's departure should have been a moment of celebration. It is, but for the wrong people. Cuba is still a Communist dictatorship, and its official state religion has been exported to various nearby states.

It's interesting that all the people clamoring about Ron Paul's "connections" to various unsavory types, or John McCain's "ties" to a female lobbyist (don't you love those ambiguous weasel words), haven't said a peep about Barack Obama's friendship with the two most notorious and unrepentant terrorists of the '60s and '70s. Bernardine Dohrn praised the Manson Family in 1969. Bill Ayers bombed the Pentagon the next year. A generation later, they're intimates of the man who would be president. "In 1997, Obama cited Ayers' critique of the juvenile justice system in a Chicago Tribune article on what prominent Chicagoans were reading," writer Ben Smith notes. "He and Ayers served together on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago for three years starting in 1999. In 2001, Ayers also gave $200 to Obama’s state senate reelection campaign." To judge by the piece, the former Weathermen gave Obama a political coming out party of sorts to local donors. If these were, say, neo-Nazis instead of bomb-touting communists, if his name were John McCain instead of Barack Obama, this would derail his candidacy. But it's the Weathermen and he's Barack Obama, and being a leftist means never having to account for the past.

I'm not in the habit of posting pictures of superhot girls on my site, but looking at Sports Illustrated's beach pictures of Danica Patrick makes me think that I should be. She drives cars faster than 200 mph. She's better looking than any movie star. But what really seals the deal is that Danica Patrick has an American Flag tramp stamp. Here's St. Thomas's proofs of the existence of God. Here's Danica Patrick's. Forgive me for finding the latter more persuasive.

Turn off the F.M., as in frequency modulation. Turn on the F.F., as in FlynnFiles. An awesome new song about summer camp, some superfreaky memories set to music, and nostalgia about some band from Liverpool highlight this edition of radio free FlynnFiles. Listen. Watch. Enjoy.

R.E.M.--Supernatural Superserious
Tom Petty--Square One
Willy Mason--Oxygen
Luna--Superfreaky Memories
Ringo Starr--Liverpool 8

When I was a child, any kid riding a bicycle with a helmet would automatically have been assumed to be mentally retarded. Today, of the few kids I see riding bicycles, nearly all wear helmets. The bike riding habits, or lack thereof, of children reflect two trends--overprotective parents and outdoor-averse children--in the overall transformation of what it means to be a child.

The Boston Globe a few weeks back ran an interview with CUNY professor Roger Hart who studies the changing nature of childhood in America. Hart notices a "tight intermeshing between parents' and children's lives" and the rarity of children involved in unstructured play. Children get treated like children without getting to act like children.

When was the last time you saw a group of children engaged in a pick-up game of stick-ball or an all-neighborhood game of chase or some other hide-and-go seek variant? Children now go on something termed "play dates," in which parents schedule meetings between children and watch over them. This is all too structured, all too lacking in sponteniety, no? It's almost enough to make you welcome the return of kids lighting off M-80s, getting into fistfights, and, well, maybe not. But between there is a happy medium.

Children walked to school. Now, their parents drive them, even if the school is within walking distance. Children used to play football, tackle football even. Now they play Madden. Children used to work paper routes. Now they homework. Paid activity apparently is considered exploitative. What happened?

Part of the problem is that people are having fewer and fewer children. Roaming bands of adolescents don't roam because the adolescents have been decimated by abortion and birth control. It's an adult's world, and children just live in it. Homework is often onerous. Adult-organized after-school activities absorb time. Molestors, drugs, bad kids, and other boogeymen haunt parents into becoming Big Brother instead of Mom or Dad. This monitoring and uber-involvement, some argue, is good parenting. But can children become adults if they're not even trusted to be children?

In the aftermath of the illegitimacy boom of the 1960s and '70s, society discovered what happens to kids without fathers and with neglectful mothers. What happens to the sheltered kids who never got to be kids? Check back in fifteen years.

"This is where ideology comes in--the longing for a purpose, for communion with the people, for something controlled by an idea and a will. The feeling of belonging to the elect, the security provided by a closed system in which the whole of history as well as one's own person find their place and their meaning, the pride in joining the past to the future in present action--all this inspires and sustains the true believer, the man who is not repelled by the scholasticism, who is not disillusioned by the twists in the party line, the man who lives entirely for the cause and no longer recognises the humanity of his fellow-creatures outside the party."
--Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, 1955

Thirty-eight years ago, Cathy Wilkerson and her friends plotted to blow up soldiers at a dance at Fort Dix. Instead of killing servicemen and their dates, the Weathermen blew up Wilkerson's father's Greenwich Village townhouse. How did the sons and daughters of privilege become amateur revolutionaries? Read my review of Cathy Wilkerson's memoir Flying to Close to the Sun at First Principles, ISI's new webzine.

Northern Democrats are 1-7 in eight presidential runs since FDR. Whether it's the senator from New York or the senator from Illinois, the Democrats will again go down this much travelled road less travelled. But there's reason to believe that one of these candidates has learned from the mistakes of his many loser-prone antecedents.

"I think there is an individual right to bear arms," Barack Obama noted in response to the Northern Illinois University murders. "[W]e make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people's lives.... Americans are a religious people," he chided fellow liberals two years back. He even has a kind word or two for the patron saint of conservatives, Ronald Reagan. Rhetorically, at least, Obama has thrown up the white flag on issues that inflame conservative voters and guarantee liberal defeats on a national level. He does not come across as the offensive culture warrior that his primary opponent comes across as. In November, this will win him votes and disarm opponents.

Judging from former Catholic University of America School of Law dean Douglas Kmiec's "Reaganites for Obama?" piece, Obama's conciliatory rather than confrontational approach has already disarmed some natural opponents. "Since I served at one time as Reagan's constitutional lawyer, it would be natural for me to fall in line behind John McCain," Kmiec writes. "Don't worry about his conservative lapses, says President Bush, the foremost expert on lapsed conservativism." But Kmiec worries. "John McCain will have many Catholics in the pews a little while longer, but more than a few of us are thinking of giving him up for Lent."

That Obama supports abortion and also, remarkably--given his professed support of the Second Amendment--votes for gun control won't much undermine the effect of the conciliatory words he chooses. He may not win the votes of many conservatives, but, and this is important, he will not win their venom, either. He will not inspire conservatives to rush to the polls, and rally round whatever Republican suit is nominated, the way Hillary Clinton would have. This should scare the conservatives who chose to believe Bush's conservative rhetoric while ignoring his liberal policies over the last seven years. As they know all too well, words trump actions in politics.

"All members of the university community are entitled to freedom from suffering, deliberate hurt, injury, or loss," reads Northern Illinois University's code of conduct (PDF). "Access to the university must be available to all in a nonhostile and nonthreatening atmosphere." Yesterday, at least a half-dozen members of the NIU community were killed. Didn't the gunman read the policy? The same code of conduct forbids firearms. People who want to use firearms on people don't abide by such rules. Since prohibitions against murder don't deter them, what made NIU think that its code of conduct would? Regulations of that sort are designed to make people feel good, not keep them safe. What keeps people safe from people with guns are other people with guns--the people such a policy targets. Multiple-victim-public shootings, as John Lott documents in his study, More Guns, Less Crime, disproportionately affect institutions that forbid guns, such as schools. When was the last time, for instance, that you heard of a mass shooting at a gun range? There are a lot of guns there, so by liberal logic a gun range should be a prime site for a mass shooting. But they're not, for the obvious reason that everyone there has a gun. And schools and churches are, for the obvious reason that few people there have guns.

Senior citizens milk the federal government for more than $27,000 annually, USA Today reports. Yet, the newspaper insists that this isn't about government overspending, but rising health-care costs, ostensibly oblivious to the former resulting in the latter. Liberals, and so-called big-government conservatives, credit themselves with solving a problem by subsidizing a basic human need. The providers of that need, benefitting from the subsidy and realizing their customers can now afford to pay more, charge more. Then, liberals and big-government conservatives, never learning from their first error, repeat the process. The inflationary effect has followed Medicare and Medicaid, the Higher Education Act of 1965, and, now, President Bush's prescription-drug giveaway, which, usurprisingly, accounts for a quarter of the growth since 2000 in Medicare, the program accounting for the largest spike in federal money to seniors. "We have a health care crisis," the paper quotes the AARP's David Certner. "We don't have an entitlement crisis." We have both.

It's Valentine's Day, which means a special edition of Radio-Free FlynnFiles. Tracks include an awesome cover of an Everly Brothers song, a slowed-down version of a top-ten hit from a guy who had just one top-ten hit with his more famous band, and a musical "valentine" from one of the most underrated guitarists around. Listen and send a long-distance dedication to your sweetie through the wonders of email.

Robert Plant & Allison Krause--Stick With Me Baby
Nils Lofgren--Valentine
Elvis Presley--Love Me Tender
Pete Townshend--Let My Love Open the Door
Cheap Trick--The Flame

Isn't it sweeter to de-leg a rival in the championship round than to see the adversary go down to inferior competition long before then? Not John McCain, not Mitt Romney, not Fred Thompson, but Barack Obama has ended Hillary Clinton's presidential dreams. He destroyed her in Virginia, Maryland, and DC, making a seven-straight-state streak. Forget the delegate count, Obama's got money and momentum. Hillary, whose greatest strength was the inevitability factor, doesn't have that anymore. So is her early defeat bittersweet? Or, are you singing this song with as much glee as you would have had it happened in November?

"If the projections are correct," Madison, Wisconsin mayor Dave Ciezlewicz ominously warned, "we won't be able to have Wisconsin maple syrup any longer in ten to twenty years." In a 2006 PBS documentary, the mayor predicted that through global warming his state's climate would resemble central Oklahoma's within two decades. Madison, Wisconsin broke its winter snowfall record today.

"To think of NATO as a great alliance makes about as much sense as thinking of Pittsburgh as the Steel City or of Detroit as the car capital of the world," Andrew Bacevich writes in the Los Angeles Times. "It's sheer nostalgia." The treaty founding the organization considers an attack on one member state an attack on all member states. But it hasn't worked out that way for the United States in Afghanistan. As Bacevich points out, many member states, including Germany, provide support of a "nominal" variety. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO's raison d'etre has disappeared. With its milquetoast reaction to 9/11, NATO's member states show that the collective security agreement is a one-way street, if even that. And can you much blame the Germans or the French for not rushing to our defense? If, say, Stanistan bombed France or Germany, would you be much enthused about sending Americans to die in their defense? Even the Cold War wasn't permanent. The institutions pledged to fight it are another matter.

Victor Milione, president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute from 1963 to 1988, died on Monday. To remember his life, ISI's new web journal First Principles has posted a wonderful essay from Milione called "Why I Am a Conservative." "[C]onservatism is so hyphenated at present that no one has any idea of what one is signing on to," Milione wrote last year. "The reason I believe this to be the case is that conservatism has been overly politicized." This is an important point to remember, particularly when this election or that vote doesn't go your way. It's the Left, not conservatives, who put faith in government to solve our problems. Milione reminds us that passing on a tradition involves something beyond capturing a government. The organization he led reminds us of that too.

If John McCain at the head of the Republican Party wasn't enough to depress party conservatives, Hillary Clinton dethroned as the Queen of the Democrats before she had her maximum impact on Arbitron ratings and direct-mail intakes certainly did so. Barack Obama's wins this weekend were impressive. He swept--Washington, Nebraska, Louisiana, Maine, and points beyond--yes, but he did so in 2-1 fashion in several instances. Bill Clinton certainly can't make inferences regarding the racial composition of the voters of say, Maine or Nebraska, the way he did about South Carolina. Senator Obama has demonstrated an ability to win everywhere. If his momentum leads to another sweep in the DC-Maryland-Virginia primary tomorrow, the pressure will mount on Senator Clinton to end her candidacy.

If Obama becomes the first black president, he will have accomplished the feat by running not as an African American for president, but as an American whose race (that word seems an unscientific relic of a bygone era committed to "scientific" classifications) is incidental to the success of his candidacy. He has been smart to steer clear of the professional African Americans--Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Kweisi Mfume--and run on his appealing personality, opposition to the war, and promise of change. Unlike his internecine opponent, Obama is hard to dislike, which would make for a fall campaign above the nastiness. He speaks in platitudes, but his record speaks liberal. Though his style has trumped his substance in the fight for the nomination, Republicans will expose that liberal record in making the fight for the presidency about substance over style. They will have to, as the septuagenarian McCain's style is no match for the dynamic Mr. Obama's.

The conservative movement, which is not to be confused with conservatives, is the big loser in the 2008 Republican contest for the presidential nomination. Conservatives did not field a credible alternative to John McCain. Instead, they coalesced behind a candidate as flawed, from a conservative perspective, as McCain. Their indignation at McCain's divergences from conservatism came across as phony. Mitt Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, enacted a Hillaryesque health-care program, cut not a single tax, presided over the codification of gay marriage, supported abortion so much as to give them out at taxpayer expense, and opposed the Second Amendment. There's a lot to criticize in McCain, but when the criticism comes from people willing to overlook all that it does not come across as genuine. The feigned purity was enough to make you cheer for McCain.

Romney may have been moving in the right direction with the reinvention of himself as a Reagan conservative, and McCain may have been moving in the wrong direction with his penchant for embracing media-driven causes (while he still plays the maverick), but McCain's record in public office, and rhetoric in past campaigns, is far more conservative than Romney's. Would a Romney presidency have been better than a McCain presidency? I doubt it. Though each has strengths and weaknesses, the pair seems, at least from a conservative's perspective, a wash.

John McCain has problems with the Republican wing of the Republican Party. His past support for open borders, state intrusions to fight off the global-warming phantom menace, and limits on political speech have enraged conservative voters who somehow forgave these faults in George W. Bush. Ann Coulter says that she'd vote for Hillary Clinton over McCain. Rush Limbaugh says the Republican Party will be "over" in its present form should McCain win. Part of the audience at CPAC booed the Arizona senator.

Party conservatives, the people who worship in the church of Republican, are responsible for a moderate as Republican nominee. Their failure to even scold the current president when he embarked on a spending spree, nationalized airport security, created a new federal department, or any number of other liberal initiatives sent the message that you could walk all over their principles as long as you kept them close to power. They enabled President Bush's big-government "conservatism" by playing lapdog instead of watchdog.

Republican politicans observed the last seven years. They know they can get away with governing like liberals. They know party conservatives, the people who used to be known as "movement conservatives," like being flattered, like feeling close to power. As far as cutting government, that's tertiary.

McCain's biggest sin to movement conservatives, it seems, is not kissing their ring. Now it's the turn of party conservatives to abase themselves and kiss his. Here comes the groveling. It's coming, no matter what party conservatives say now. It's coming because power matters more than principle to such people. George W. Bush prepared party conservatives at CPAC by encouraging them to rally round the presumptive nominee. "[O]ver the past seven years, you've been with me," George W. Bush told the fawning audience. "I appreciate your support." The crowd responded with chants of "four more years." Four more years, precisely, as John McCain and George Bush share such anti-conservative positions as speech limits through campaign finance reform, rewarding law breaking through amnesty for illegal aliens, and continuing the nation-building venture in Iraq. But Bush, strangely, gets a pass while McCain is compared unfavorably to Hillary Clinton. I don't get it.

Bush calls McCain a "true conservative." This tells us something about both men.

When real conservatives have objected to the liberal direction George W. Bush took the GOP, party conservatives demanded resignations and fired them. When party conservatives took money to promote Bush administration policies they had previously opposed, the repercussions, at least within the movement, were non-existent. Bush dropped the right names ("Jesus," "Reagan"), had the right enemies (The New York Times, ABCCBSNBC), and made a few genuflections to conservative policy (tax cuts, judges). What he did best of all was assure party conservatives that he was one of them, that they had something invested in the success of his presidency. John McCain doesn't do this and conservatives hate him for it. His success proves the lie of conservative movement success. They're not as powerful as they like to think.

In a drive for power conservatives abandoned their principles over the last seven years. Now they are left with neither.

George W. Bush was the first to preside over a $2 trillion budget. Now he's the first president to propose a $3 trillion budget. To put this in perspective, the size of Bush's budget is roughly the size of Germany's gross domestic product. It swallows almost a quarter of the U.S. economy for the never satiated federal government. Yet, for its restraint, some Democrats call the budget "dead on arrival." The San Jose Mercury News editorializes that "Bush's Budget Takes Money Away from Health Care." Ms. magazine notes "broad cuts from many vital domestic programs." The St. Petersburg Times editorializes, "Bush shows his contempt for entitlements and other domestic programs such as environmental protection and veterans care with his spending cuts." One wishes all of this were true. If George W. Bush were as frugal when it comes to spending as his critics imagine, then he might have made a pretty good president.

"For the sort of virtue that belongs to character is concerned with pleasures and pains, since it is on account of pleasure that we perform base actions, and on account of pain that we refrain from beautiful actions."
--Aristotle, Nichomachian Ethics, 350 BC

I cast a proud ballot for Ron Paul on Tuesday. I voted for Dr. Paul because he is the only candidate in this race who would not be committing perjury in his first act as president. From federal limits on political speech, to a federal smoking ban, to jettisoning the requirement for a congressional declaration of war, to abolishing the Second Amendment by fiat, the positions of the various non-Ron Paul candidates in this race show an irreverence, nay, a contempt for the Constitution. There was an old joke in the Goldwater campaign about what would happen should the Arizona senator win the presidency. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren administers the oath of office, and, upon hearing President Goldwater pledge to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution," responds: "You're under arrest!"

FlynnFiles has been experiencing some technical difficulties over the past four days. This started on Saturday, when my URL redirected to a health care site. Two days after that, the company that acts as my server was able to direct the URL back to its proper location. Alas, the main page has been unable to post changes--new comments or posts--until now. This has been the longest FlynnFiles has been down since its inception almost four years ago. It's been stressful. It's been a nightmare. But it's over--almost.

The site was not hacked. Last year, my current server absorbed the company that I signed up with. From what I can gather, the lack of continuity between the old server and the new server resulted in the problem. Basically, the new company maintains the old company's server from which they currently host a number of carry-over websites, but the technical intricacies of the old server are a bit funky to them. Atop this, my current server is not primarily in the business of hosting sites. Thus, I was advised that it would be a good idea to make a new hosting arrangement within the next two months.

There will likely be, then, more technical difficulties. If it were radio, I'd alert you by playing a message from the Emergency Broadcast System. If it were television, I'd display those color bars on the screen. It is Internet, so there's not much I can do to alert you that the site is having problems other than to let the problems speak for themselves. Hopefully, problems won't happen often. But, if they do, thank you in advance for your patience and for sticking by FlynnFiles. Web surfers are creatures of habit, so a few days offline can be devastating to a site.

Dear readers, do you have any recommendations for server hosting? I am quite ignorant of technical matters. What should I be looking for? What price is appropriate? What problems might arise from switching servers? I look forward to reading your advice.

If you have any doubt about who the bad guys are in the Iraq War--which is a different question than "Should we be there?"--then just ask yourself which side deceives mentally retarded women into blowing themselves up in a public market? I'll give you a hint: it's not the United States.

The Berkeley city council terms U.S. Marine recruiters "uninvited and unwelcome intruders." Such hostile receptions come with the territory of being a Marine. The elected officials voted to give the Code Pink protest group a sound permit and free parking space in front of the Marine recruiting station. "I believe in the Code Pink cause," Berkeley's Mayor Tom Bates announced after the vote. "The Marines don't belong here, they shouldn't have come here, and they should leave." Can't one believe in the Code Pink cause and tolerate the presence of Marines?

I got shouted down and witnessed a book burning of my writings at Berkeley, so I know something about the local intolerance. I joined the Marines from Amherst, Massachusetts, so I know something about signing up for the military in a place largely hostile to it. One thread connects both: freedom of expression. What's so threatening about a guy giving a speech or a Marine talking to a young person about career options? If the speech is bad, disagree or leave. If the Marine is selling snake oil, the potential recruit has the right to turn down the entreaty. It's his life, not Code Pink's. Why do uninterested third parties care so much about the words of others that they go so far as to silence them? A lot paternalistic, no?

Berkeley boasts of being the home of the Free Speech Movement. Back in the 1960s, when Mario Savio histrionically implored fellow students "to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop," it's telling that the words, seldom quoted, that followed were: "Now, no more talking." It's also interesting that two years after Savio uttered those famous words, he was arrested when he, and a number of cohorts, surrounded U.S. navy recruiters in a sucessful attempt to block the servicemen's on-campus recruiting table.

Such tables, manned in 1964 as they were by activists Savio sympathized with, were a catalyst of Savio's red-faced exhortations. When people with a message he disliked manned such tables, Savio's knight-errant of free speech act changed dramatically. As Nat Hentoff put it, "free speech for me, but not for thee."

It is now as it was then: brownshirts masquerading as civil libertarians, hypocrites demanding the rights they deny others.