This is why I stopped being a fan of the NBA a long time ago.

And there are no good guys in this situation. The fans acted irresponsibly, as did the players. The NBA has cultivated a cult of thuggishness, which the fans have started to emulate. This is a bad, bad thing. If I wanted to see a fight at a professional sporting event, then I’d go to a hockey game. At least there, I’d be protected by a plexiglass barrier.

Via Blackfive, I found a link to a list on Intel Dump of the 25 most military-friendly employers in America (as rated by G.I. Jobs Magazine).

I want to acknowledge to a local company not on the list: HGTV. Home & Garden Television (the cable channel headquartered here in Knoxville) employs a friend of mine, a member of the Tennessee National Guard, who was called up for active duty several weeks ago. As I write this, my friend has been in Iraq for about a week. HGTV is generously paying the difference between his salary at HGTV and his Army pay, and has also provided him with a laptop, so he can watch DVDs and receive email from his family and friends while deployed, without having to borrow somebody else’s computer or wait for one.

It’s little things like this that will help my friend and his wife (they’ve been married just over a year) get through the next 12 months. So the next time, you’re channel surfing and you bypass – I mean stop to watch – HGTV, just remember, somebody (actually, I’m sure it is a lot of somebodies) over there gets it, and as a company, HGTV is doing right by at least one of our men in Iraq, and his family back here.

It is official. You can now be diagnosed with ”post-election selection trauma” also lovingly referred to as PEST.

In this week’s column Victor Davis Hanson explains who the real humanists are.

If someone wonders about the enormous task at hand in democratizing the Middle East, he could do no worse than ponder the last days of Yasser Arafat: the tawdry fight over his stolen millions; the charade of the First Lady of Palestine barking from a Paris salon; the unwillingness to disclose what really killed the “Tiger” of Ramallah; the gauche snub of obsequious Europeans hovering in the skies over Cairo, preening to pay homage to the late prince of peace; and, of course, the usual street theater of machine guns spraying the air and thousands of males crushing each other to touch the bier of the man who robbed them blind. Try bringing a constitution and open and fair elections to a mess like that.

But that is precisely what the United States was trying to do by removing the Taliban, putting Saddam Hussein on trial, and marginalizing Arafat. Such idealism has been caricatured with every type of slur – from both the radical Left and the paleo-Right, ranging from alleged Likud conspiracies and neo-con pipe dreams to secret pipeline deals and plans for a new American imperium in the Middle East shepherded in by the Bush dynasts. In fact, the effort not just to strike back after September 11, but to alter the very landscape in which our enemies operated was the only choice we had if we wished to end the cruise-missile/bomb-‘em-for-a-day cycle of the past 20 years, the ultimate logic of which had led to the crater at the World Trade Center.

Oddly, our enemies understand the long-term strategic efforts of the United States far better than do our own dissidents. They know that oil is not under U.S. control but priced at all-time highs, and that America is not propping up despotism anymore, but is now the general foe of both theocracies and dictatorships – and the thorn in the side of “moderate” autocracies. An America that is a force for democratic change is a very dangerous foe indeed. Most despots long for the old days of Jimmy Carter’s pious homilies, appeasement of awful dictatorships gussied up as “concern” for “human rights,” and the lure of a Noble Prize to ensure nights in the Lincoln bedroom or hours waiting on a dictator’s tarmac.

In the struggle in Fallujah hinges not just the fate of the Sunni Triangle, or even Iraq, but rather of the entire Middle East – and it will be decided on the bravery and skill of mostly 20-something American soldiers. If they are successful in crushing and humiliating the fascists there and extending the victory to other spots then the radical Islamists and their fascistic sponsors will erode away. But if they fail or are called off, then we will see Days of Sorrow that make September 11 look like child’s play.

Congratulations to NASA for setting a world record of Mach 9.6 with a successful test the X-43A.

An unmanned experimental jet broke a world record for speed on Tuesday, cruising over the Pacific Ocean at just under 7,000 miles per hour in a NASA test of cutting-edge “scramjet” engine technology.

The X-43A aircraft flew at a speed of around Mach 9.6 – nearly ten times the speed of sound – after a booster rocket took it to around 110,000 feet and then separated.

John Fund writes about the Swift Boat veterans and the impact they made on the election.

Here’s a look at possible Supreme Court nominees and the outlook for their confirmation.

Here is a rather pessimistic appraisal of the Iranian nuclear deal I mentioned before. The article takes President Bush and the Europeans to task for giving Iran what amounts to a free pass to tacitly develop nuclear weapons just as North Korea has done.

The only question is whether the world is going to do anything about all this. The Europeans are essentially arguing that any deal with the mullahs is better than nothing, given Tehran’s repeated threats to withdraw altogether from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But what’s really more dangerous: immediate clarity regarding Iran’s real intentions, or the country going nuclear with the quiet blessing of the IAEA and the permanent discrediting of the multilateral arms control system?

President Bush needs to pay some overdue attention to Iran now that the election is over, and put the above case to his friend and ally Tony Blair. The model for disarming Iran ought to be the process the two countries have just gone through with Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi: unambiguous cooperation, including the handover of all nuclear and WMD-related facilities. Anything less–like the Agreed Framework Part II now on offer–deserves only one response in Washington and London: No deal.

The Associated Press is reporting that the President has chosen Condoleezza Rice to replace Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Prof. Reynolds relates several comments about the media reaction–or non-reaction, as it is–to the news.

For what it’s worth, I agree with Rand Simberg: the reason that the press isn’t making a bigger deal about her nomination has everything to do with who her boss is.

The New York Times reports some interesting comments from Bill Frist, Senate Majority leader, regarding Arlen Specter. Frist may have been won over by the anti-Specter crowd:

Senator Bill Frist, the Republican majority leader, said Sunday that he was troubled by Senator Arlen Specter’s recent remarks about potential judicial nominees and that Mr. Specter needed to convince his fellow Republicans that he deserved to be chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Arlen made some statements the day after the election,” Dr. Frist, of Tennessee, said on “Fox News Sunday” in an interview with Chris Wallace. “They were disheartening to me; they were disheartening to a lot of people.”

Furthermore the Times goes on to say: “Dr. Frist pointedly declined to endorse Mr. Specter for the post on Sunday, saying the Pennsylvania senator should lobby his Republican colleagues in the Senate’s lame-duck session this week. ‘The case needs to be made to the leadership of the United States Senate,’ Dr. Frist said, ‘and also to the existing members of the Judiciary Committee.’” Sounds like Dr. Frist is taking a hardline with Sen. Specter.

But wait! Let’s review the transcript of Chris Wallace’s interview with Sen. Frist.

WALLACE: Do you support making Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee?

FRIST: Chris, it’s an issue that we’ll begin to face really this week and we won’t make final decisions on until early January.

First of all, as you know, the Senate is a remarkable institution and it has a system and a program and a plan by which you choose the chairman of various committees like the Judiciary Committee.

The way it works, real quickly, is that you choose the committee. The committee itself has not yet been chosen for the next Congress. They select the chairman. That chairman is taken to the entire conference, 55 Republicans, and they make an ultimate decision on that.

The whole process will begin this week.

Secondly, I think it’s important to understand general feelings and what I’m hearing. Arlen made some statements the day after the election. They were disheartening to me. They were disheartening to a lot of different people. He made those not as chairman of the Judiciary Committee but he made those as an individual senator, and he has the right to make that.

Over the last week, he has taken the opportunity to explain to a lot of people what he meant and what he would do. He’s not yet talked to individual senators one on one.

What he will do over the course of this week is meet with Senate leadership. He’ll then meet with members of the existing Judiciary Committee to explain both what he meant and what he would do as chairman. And then ultimately the members of that committee will choose whether or not he serves as their chairman.

From reading the transcript, it seems to me that Sen. Frist isn’t blocking Specter’s promotion to the chairmanship in any meaningful way. Take this exchange from the interview:

WALLACE: But it seems fair – and let’s just go through a couple of checklist points very briefly, if we can.

It seems clear that Senator Specter has not made a persuasive case to you yet.

FRIST: Not yet. But I’ve talked to Arlen, and he is talking to lots of different people now.

And, first of all, it’s not my selection. It is the selection of the Judiciary Committee. I’m not on the Judiciary Committee, but as majority leader, obviously I’m involved in that.

So the case needs to be made to the leadership of the United States Senate, which he will do – we’re going to be meeting on Tuesday morning – and also to the existing members of the Judiciary Committee.

But the ultimate decision will not be made until the final composition of that Judiciary Committee is chosen in about two or three weeks.

Certainly, Frist refrained from endorsing Specter, but it just sounds to me like he’s reassuring those who have contacted his office that he takes this issue seriously, and also giving Specter every chance to make his case before the judiciary committee members and the Senate at large. I think the Times sees the chance that the Republican majority in the Senate might be induced to start a political pogrom amongst their own ranks, and thus weaken their newly elected majority. Becoming a stillborn Senate of sorts.

Captain Ed links to a similar story from Reuters. The Reuters story pushes the idea that Frist is requiring Specter to back all of the President’s nominees to get his coveted chairmanship. In this exchange from the interview, Frist lays out his vision for what he expects from the Judiciary committee Chairman.

What I expect is for a chairman to understand that they are no longer responsible just to themselves or just to their constituents back at home but, as chairman of the committee, they’re responsible to the feelings, the wishes, the beliefs, the values, the procedures that are held by the majority of that committee. That is, in this case, the Republican caucus on that committee, the Republican committee members.

Secondly, he has a clear obligation as a chairman to take what the president nominates, consult with the president, take that nomination, get that nomination through committee in an expeditious way, a fair way, a way that gives thoughtful consideration but doesn’t spend too much time, gets that nomination to the floor of the United States Senate.

And very importantly, because in the last Congress, you know, it didn’t happen for a whole set of other reasons that have got to change, that every one of these appellate nominees have an up-or-down vote. Our job is to give advice and consent. And in the past we’ve been denied that opportunity, that responsibility, that constitutional obligation. The chairman must make absolutely sure that we get that up-or-down vote in a timely fashion.

Frist is speaking about the role the committee chairman should take getting the President’s nominees through committee, which as Frist sees it, means he puts aside his personal views and does everything possible to see that the nominee gets to the Senate floor, in a timely manner, for a confirmation vote. This is a reasonable expectation for the majority leader to have with members of his own party in control of the Judiciary Committee and the White House, as long as the nominee is fit. Getting the nominees through committee will be easier with a more compliant Chairman, if Specter’s critics are correct and he proves to be a dishonorable man, but getting those nominees confirmed will certainly be more difficult with Senator Specter humiliated and the possible loss of the moderate Republican votes in the full Senate.