An excerpt:

With Rudy Giuliani crisscrossing the country in support of Republican candidates and raising money for his new political action committee, it is beginning to look inevitable that he will seek the presidency in 2008. Despite his lead in many early polls, skeptics still dismiss his chances of winning the Republican nomination given his personal background and liberal views on social issues. There is no doubt that these will be obstacles for Giuliani, but compared to the forces that will propel him into the White House, they are small potatoes.

As the saying goes, read the whole thing.

According to Hamas, the inciting incident was an errant Israeli artillery shell that killed 7 Palestinian beachgoers in Gaza. A tragedy no doubt, but that's what happens when Israel is forced to respond to the daily rocket attacks directed toward Israel from Gaza.

It's also worth contrasting the way Israelis view innocent life, with the way Palestinians do.

In response to the incident, Israelis expressed deep regret, saying:

"Harming innocent civilians is of course totally unacceptable and we will do whatever we can to avoid civilian loss of life," said Mark Regev, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman.

A skeptic may argue that, "Of course Israel is going to say that publicly for PR reasons, any government would to make themselves look better."

But I know one government that wouldn't issue such a statement--the Hamas-led government of the Palestinians. Back in April, Palestinian suicide bombers specifically targeted civilians, killing nine people by a Tel Aviv fast food stand. Far from condemning the attack, the Palestinian government said it was self-defense:

Hamas spokesman Sami abu-Zohari said that the attack was an act of self defense: "Our public is carrying out defensive fighting and it has every right to use all means to defend itself."

Back then, many Israelis wanted a stronger response to the attack by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's new government, but the government decided to show restraint instead:

Israel's leaders held the Hamas-led Palestinian government responsible Tuesday for the deadliest suicide bombing in 20 months, but decided against a large-scale military operation in an attempt to avoid escalating violence.

Meanwhile, today the so-called militant "wing" of Hamas has vowed more such suicide bombings are on the way:

"The earthquake in the Zionist towns will start again and the aggressors will have no choice but to prepare their coffins or their luggage."

Stay tuned.

The idea of another Gore campaign first aroused my interest last October, and I posted a brief item on it.

I certainly wouldn't rule him out. He has strong name recognition, experience organizing a campaign and the ability to raise money. The left loves him for his unabashedly anti-War and anti-Bush positions and many Democrats still believe he rightfully won the election in 2000. For those who see the Bush presidency as a failure, electing Gore would be a kind of do-over. So yeah, it could happen.

On the other hand...

One of the reasons why people are fond of Gore now is that he isn't running for anything, which has allowed him to be more comfortable in his own shoes and speak as if he is above the fray. However, from the moment he decides to run for office, he becomes a politician again and needs to pander to different constituencies. Once this happens, the wooden, robotic Gore will return and even his supporters will find him as annoying and boring as ever.

But either way, it's a story worth keeping an eye on.

As U.S. and British troops began flooding into Kuwait, Col. Gadhafi grew agitated, diplomats said. Italian press accounts quote then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as saying that Col. Gadhafi had called him to say he feared he would be America's next target. "Tell them I will do whatever they want," said one diplomat, recounting the call. In early March 2003 just days before the start of the Iraq war, Saif and Musa Kusa, a top Libyan intelligence official, contacted the British to say that Col. Gadhafi wanted to "clear the air" about WMD programs in exchange for assurances that the U.S. would not try to topple his regime, according to several accounts.

Gadhafi's renunciation of WMD was a remarkable event and a big victory for the Bush Administration that has received a relatively small amount of attention in the media. Reading about it got me thinking of one of the real public relations obstacles President Bush faces during the War on Terror. Everything that goes wrong in the world is known, but when a potential threat is eliminated, we can only speculate on whether eliminating that potential threat actually saved American lives. We see very real images of Iraq looking like a mess, but we don't know what would have happened if Saddam was still in power. We don't know whether Gadhafi would still be pursuing WMD, and, if so, what he would plan to do with them. People take it for granted that there hasn't been a terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11. Now, maybe this is just luck. Or maybe Al Qaeda is taking its time to plan something big. But it's also a possibility that President Bush's policies have been effective at thwarting terrorist plots and dissuading state sponsors of terrorism.

Sager acknowledges it is difficult to track libertarian voters, but then offers this:

While George W. Bush gained 10 points between 2000 and 2004 among voters who thought government should "do more," he stayed essentially even among voters who felt government should not do more or should "do less."

In other words, despite No Child Left Behind, campaign-finance regulation, steel tariffs, the Medicare prescription-drug bill and exploding government spending generally, libertarians stood by their man. (I should know. I did, too.)

The problem with this analysis is that many (if not most) conservatives would also respond that government should "do less." It is important to recognize that although the Republican Party has come to stand for big government in recent years, by no means are social conservatives leading the charge for more spending. In fact, the few Republican lawmakers who have actually tried to limit spending are also among the most socially conservative (Sen. Tom Coburn, for example). So looking at exit polling data on that one question doesn't give us much insight into the voting patterns of libertarians in the past two presidential elections.

Later in the column, Sager points to two studies in an attempt to quantify how big of a voting bloc libertarians could potentially be. A Gallup Poll places them at 20 percent and a study by Pew Research Center for the People and the Press places them at 9 percent. The problem is that both studies only focus on social and economic issues, and ignore national security, which is in my view far more pressing and the source of a major schism among libertarians post-9/11. As somebody who supports spending cuts, low taxes, entitlement reform as well as the legalization of drugs and gay marriage, I can almost guarantee that I would come up as a libertarian in either one of those studies. (Although for some odd reason, in the Pew study, 80 percent of people defined as libertarians support raising the minimum wage). However, when I read popular libertarian Websites, blogs and publications such as Reason, I couldn't find myself more at odds with libertarians. And I'm sure many if not most libertarians would find my writing just as objectionable.

When it comes to national security, there is severe disagreement among those who otherwise agree when it comes to favoring limited government in the realm of economic and social issues. It's not worth re-fighting all of the battles of the last four and a half years. But suffice it to say, there is a split between those who believe in aggressively projecting military force in fighting terrorists, and those who find America's post-9/11 foreign policy overly adventurous. Some of us aren't spooked by the Patriot Act or the NSA surveillance program, while others find them to be horrific examples of life in a police state. The disagreements go beyond mere policy differences. There is a fundamental disagreement over the magnitude of the terrorist threat and where it ranks for people in the hierarchy of issues. I believe that the fight against radical Islam is not only the defining issue of our time, but a crucial battle in the history of Western Civilization. Many libertarians, I think, would find this view sensationalistic. I get the sense that for many libertarians, the drug war is an equally important if not more important issue than the war on terrorism. While I agree that drugs should be legalized, my concerns about the drug war pale in comparison to my concerns about, say, Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. I'd be much more willing to form a political alliance with somebody who disagreed with me on the drug issue, or on gay marriage, than somebody who disagreed with me with me on national security issues. Because national security will take centerstage for the forseeable future (at least during presidential elections), it's really hard to imagine libertarian voters operating as an organized bloc anytime soon.

concerning Hamas's victory in Palestinian elections, enjoins British academics "to continue to help protect and support Palestinian colleges and universities in the face of the continual attacks by Israel's government" and to "contact the Palestinian Authority government to reaffirm that support."

It’s bad enough for a group of academics to cutoff a free and open exchange of ideas because of their hatred for Israel, but then to want to cooperate with the Hamas-led terrorist government, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, is an absolutely disgraceful double standard. I’m not one of those people that automatically equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but it’s difficult to explain this in any other way.

Reading through the exchange reminded me of a part of the immigration debate that has been sorely neglected: the impact of immigration on food. If not for immigrants, we wouldn't have pizza, hot dogs, Chinese food, to name just a few staples of the American diet. Were it not for post-Colonial immigration, I guess we'd be stuck eating British foods. Ugh!

As the great immigration debate of 2006 continues, I hope everybody will consider the impact that any legislation will have on America's culinary options.