The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Kevin Hayden:

The compulsion to chime in with dirty word offerings is obviously enormous, as the number of comments attests to.

Being an old fart, I admit to finding nothing too offensive in any of the suggestions. I know of only two that cause me to shudder and hang my head after uttering: Bush and Cheney.

Here, here, Patrick! That he was a libertarian conservative means he got a very few things right. His reformed racism - after all the blood was spilled - was the convenience of necessity. He was, as Bruce Baugh noted in #29, a rabid McCarthyite, a homo-hatist and an all-around vicious man, the privileged son of an oil baron born with a silver spoon up his ass.

Saying he was better and more principled because he was more erudite than Limbaugh/Coulter/Malkin/Savage, etc sets the bar lower than a worm's knees.

You want a principled conservative? Try James Kilpatrick. Buckley had the best of everything and used it to sow hatred.

Fox says it’s a guy named Troy Stanley. My Google search pulls up a phone number (I won’t publish it) and this incident which was a disorderly conduct arrest on November 6: “6:14 p.m. — Troy Alan Stanley, 44, of Rochester Hill Road, is arrested on a bench warrant for disorderly conduct.â€

Speculation centers around Larry, his brother Darryl or his other brother John Sununu.

James, sure:

1) Does he support Cheney being investigated in an impeachment inquiry?

2) Does he support retroactive telecom immunity for illegal wiretapping?

3) Does he support continued funding to Musharraf and why (either way)?

4) Who does he think represents the top 3 or 4 threats to the US and again, why?

Thanks for the clarifications based on percentage (St Clair) or actual casualties (Antietam). It's certainly worth taking care in defining who Americans were, though, as some have noted the true natives might consider the battle with St Clair's their finest win.

As far as being at our most vulnerable, that was rather a persistent woe in the post-Revolution period. in fact, if I recall correctly, we pretty much lost every battle in the 1812 War. The Brits basically demonstrated that they could defeat us, then withdrew because the process of governing us no longer held much appeal. They simply wanted to dispel any notion that canada could be ours.

As for more recent history, people who served in Nam continue to assert that we actually did win every battle, if viewed on standard terms like most casualties. But we lost the war anyways, which isn't uncommon when the native population - even in the south - is hostile to the foreign forces.

There really were three different mindsets at work with three different incentives for the battle. The natives wanted native rule and liberation from foreign occupation. The US was playing dominoes, fighting Communist expansionism. The South Vietnamese government was composed of capital interests, trying to retain control of their assets and power that communism threatened. But much of the population of the south had interests more closely aligned with the former than the latter two.

Why, when I was in second grade, we used to walk 20 miles in the snow uphill just to get to the homosexual matrimony gift registry. And by God, we liked the kicky shoes and darling window treatments.

But the heretics of humanity always drove us to hard whiskey at lunch time.

I think Patrick summed it up perfectly in Comment #13:

"It's not a blow against the empire, it's slapstick."

Wherefore, let it be decreed to Seekers of Knowledge, it shall henceforth be known to all as 'Slapstikipedia.'

So does that make her Mom Nielsen-Linkmeister or Mom Nielsen-Linkmeister-KevinBacon?

Either way, I wish the couple serious doses of perpetual bliss. Love, after all, is ludicrous unless it's fun.

Actually, I fear the outcome of Strauss' release of the neo-wankers along the Potomac. The critters are especially disgusting as they bring down young bucks, leave it for weeks, feast on the rotted meat then regularly soil themselves. It gets so bad in the summer heat that everyone vacates the city in August.

The formula rightly includes large population areas, government buildings and financial centers, but doesn't include one thing I think matters to Islamicist terrorists: a goodly sized Jewish population.

If that's a factor, places in Connecticut and New Jersey might prove attractive, plus Southern Florida and Beverly Hills.

If media centers are also factored in, NY, DC and Hollywood/Beverly Hills would still be the top three, with the Miami-West Palm Beach corridor a distant fourth.

Population + publicity + key government officials + symbols of capitalism or of America + decadent lifestyles + sizable Jewish populations = my best guess at a formula.

One could make two arguments against that formula:

1) Terrorizing where it's least expected adds an element of surprise, but it's a dubious gain to piss off more of the country that feels relatively safe now. What do they gain if the country says 'screw it, let's go nuclear?'

2) Not wishing to engage more US military or add more allies to our ranks, they're largely containing their global attacks to the US and UK, and maybe Pakistan. But a second attack has to do more than terrorize; it has to cause crippling losses. Which means they wait till they've acquired WMD capacities. Despite lots of speculation about suitcase nukes, that's one of the hardest to achieve, but a dirty bomb spreading radioactivity, or a bio attack (perhaps adding to the spread of the avian flu when it mutates into a h2h transmissible form).

Chilling stuff to contemplate, and hard to defend against the unknown, yet most of Manhattan's targets certainly should be on the list. I do consider Ms. Liberty an unlikely target simply because loss of life would be minimal there.

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