And Gore may be a man whose time has come in his party. It was he who warned of climate change and predicted its consequences. Hurricane Katrina was just a fulfillment of the prophesies Gore wrote about in his late-1980s book Earth in the Balance. He has been an energy-conservation nut for years, and his obsessions with alternatives to oil will play better and better as we come to realize how our addiction to oil has led us to dependency on the dealers of this particular drug — Iran, the Saudi royal family and Hugo Chavez.

 

The Democratic base’s anger at Gore’s defeat in 2000 was assuaged by the worse Kerry defeat of 2004. The idea that he was an incompetent candidate has been replaced in Democratic iconography by the idea that he was cheated out of the presidency. The hiatus has healed his reputation with the base in much the same way that the negative rap on Nixon for losing in 1960 was ameliorated by the Goldwater wipeout of 1964.

 

History indicates that candidates who won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College have all come back to win revenge in subsequent elections.

Several weeks ago, former Vice President Al Gore told the Associated Press that he “had no plans to seek the Presidency in 2008.” His words were eerily reminiscent of a quote from another former Vice President, Richard Nixon, who told the same Associated Press in November of 1965 that he “had no plans to seek the Presidency in 1968.”

 

Many years later, in 1992, I chatted with Nixon in his Saddle River, N.J., home. He told me that “no man who narrowly misses the brass ring ever stops dreaming of another shot at it.” If Nixon was right, Mr. Gore may be positioning himself to be the one Democrat who can defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2008 Presidential primaries.

 

Eternity is a long time to go without sex.

 

To many Americans, eyebrows raise at the very idea of suicide bombers believing their heavenly reward will include sex with beautiful virgins. But aren't the 75 percent of Americans who believe in an afterlife concerned that there might not be any sex in their heaven?

 

Mark Twain considered the problem. In Letters From the Earth, he writes of humankind: "He has imagined a heaven and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights - the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the hearts of every individual of his race - sexual intercourse!"

 

For any sane person, he wrote, heaven would be an intolerable bore.

 

Not so in Islam. The Koran describes a lush garden-like heaven in which each man can be married to a bevy of beautiful, dark-eyed females called houri. The passage is open to interpretation, but scholars say these are not earthly girls who died but heavenly creatures, and, it would appear, they can be deflowered and then automatically reflower.

 

"Obviously the houri are there for a reason or they wouldn't be described as ever-virgin," said Tim Furnish, a professor of history at Georgia Perimeter College and author of Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden.

 

One of the inflammatory Danish cartoons played on this idea with a voice from the clouds yelling to would-be suicide bombers to stop, because the supply of virgins was running low. Many articles in the U.S. press refer to a reward of 72 virgins - a number that's not in the Koran, Furnish said, but comes from supplementary writings.

 

"If you take the opposite sex out of the picture, that would not be a heaven where I'd want to go," says Alam Payind, director of the Middle East Studies Center at Ohio State University and a part-time imam. Yes, it's a male-dominated vision, he said, but that was woven into the fabric of Middle Eastern culture.

"the requirements of a constitutional provision or statute that purports to prohibit consideration of gender, race, ethnicity or national origin in admissions or employment decisions is not a justification for a school's non-compliance with Standard 211."  

IN A TRIUMPH of good sense and bipartisan cooperation, the Senate voted on Tuesday to go forward with a bill that would fix the broken asbestos litigation system. Hundreds of thousands of asbestos injury claims have already landed in the courts, contributing to the bankruptcy of more than 70 companies. Without reform, this process will drag on, triggering the bankruptcy of yet more firms, many of which have only tenuous asbestos connections, because the main firms responsible have already gone under. Meanwhile, many who are ill from asbestos-related diseases won't be able to get timely compensation or, in some cases, any compensation. Unless the bill passes, Navy veterans, for example, will go uncompensated for diseases caused by asbestos on ships. Veterans are not allowed to sue the government, and many of the shipbuilders are long since bankrupt.

 

The bill will be debated and amended, and it may face a second attempted filibuster before it gets a vote. Some amendment may be reasonable at the margins, but the bill's central idea -- to replace litigation with a $140 billion compensation fund to be financed by defendant companies and their insurers -- must be preserved.

 

But the truth is that the bill's main opponents are trial lawyers, who profit mightily from asbestos lawsuits and who constitute a powerful lobby in their own right. Mr. Specter and Mr. Leahy are in fact model resisters of special interests who have spent more than two years crafting legislation that serves the public interest. For Mr. Reid to demean this effort in order to fire off campaign sound bites is reprehensible. 

Trial lawyers are advising Democratic Senators that the current proposal to compensate victims of asbestos exposure not only shortchanges their clients, but could curtail future campaign contributions made by asbestos lawyers to Democrats.

Linda Lipsen, a senior vice president for the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, told a Democratic campaign official last week that asbestos lawyers are upset about the legislative fix being advanced by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).

 

“It may have an impact on fundraising from this particular bar,” Lipsen said she told a senior Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee official. “Not that it will, but it might.”

 

* * *

 

Trial lawyers are one of the most reliable sources of campaign dollars for Democrats. In the 2004 election cycle, ATLA donated nearly $2.6 million with about $2.4 million of that total going to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. While it is not clear how much more individual trial lawyers contributed to Democratic candidates, campaign committees and affiliated organizations, the figure is believed to be impressive.

 

* * *

 

Peter Kraus, a partner in the Dallas firm Waters and Kraus, is one of the lawyers ATLA identified as postponing a fundraiser as a result of the asbestos issue.

 

* * *

 

The Dallas lawyer said he needs to focus his time on raising money to help defeat the new proposal, which he said would hurt his business.

 

“I haven’t cancelled anything, but I have pushed stuff back,” Kraus said. “The people I need to go and raise money from for [Democrats] are the same people I go to raise money to help oppose this bill.”

 

Kraus is a prolific contributor, personally giving more than $150,000 to Democrats in the 2004 election cycle, according to PoliticalMoneyLine. He also helps raise money from other people for the party.

 

But Kraus said if the bill is approved, then some of these donors will be unable to make future contributions because their livelihood would be greatly affected.

 

“There are a lot of people I raise money from who will not be making money in this litigation and will not be able to contribute, I am sure, to political campaigns,” he said. “That is not anger or a vendetta kind of thing. That is just the reality.”

 

* * *

 

Another trial lawyer specializing in asbestos cases, John Cooney of Chicago, said he, too, had cancelled an upcoming fundraiser. Cooney, a partner in Cooney and Conway, donated more than $70,000 to Democrats in 2004, according to PoliticalMoneyLine. Cooney said he had to cancel his fundraiser because he is spending all his time in Washington, D.C., trying to fight the bill.

 

A Democratic strategist, who spoke freely on the condition of anonymity, said it is surprising that party leaders are not working harder to protect their political base.

 

“There is an old adage in Washington that you dance with the one who brought you,” said the strategist, who asked not to be be named. “But it is awfully hard to dance with someone whose legs you just cut off. And it is impossible to waltz into the majority dancing alone.”   (emphasis added)

Thomas LaSorda, chief executive officer of the US division of the German-US auto group . . . said the cost of lawsuits - including legal costs and insurance - adds 500 usd to every car and truck sold in the US.

'Perhaps a little 'blue-collar' grounding and manufacturing common sense could go a long way in making sense of the US legal system,' LaSorda told Agence France-Presse at the Chicago Auto Show.

'We need to set some reasonable and fair limits on damages. For every dollar awarded in tort liability, the typical injured party receives only about 46 cents to compensate them for injuries. That means the majority of every dollar goes elsewhere.'

He maintained that the US now spends about 2.23 pct of its gross domestic product on legal fees and other costs associated with litigation while countries such as France, Japan and Canada spend less than one pct of the GDP on litigation.

One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there's very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and Sharia. As a famously sensitive Dane once put it, "To be or not to be, that is the question."

David Warren, writing at RealClearPolitics:

What we have instead is a wave that is building from lesser waves. Each new provocation, each new breakthrough event, such as the 9/11 hit, or the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections, adds to the height of what is actually becoming a single wave.

What should be apparent to every Western observer by now, is the ability of this wave, served by modern technology, including world television and Internet, to wash over national and regional boundaries in the Muslim world. Those boundaries were drawn by European Imperialists in the last two centuries, and have served as bulkheads or firewalls against just this sort of catastrophe. They were partly meant for that purpose, by a Europe that was once more vividly aware of the power an aroused Islam could exert -- on a once-Christian continent entirely surrounded by Islamic empires or sea, that several times came close to being completely overrun.

Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe:

Make no mistake: This story is not going away, and neither is the Islamofascist threat. The freedom of speech we take for granted is under attack, and it will vanish if it is not bravely defended. Today the censors may be coming for some unfunny Mohammed cartoons, but tomorrow it is your words and ideas they will silence. Like it or not, we are all Danes now.

The great British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being 'pushed to an extreme'; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."

The cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten raise the most important question of our times: freedom of expression. Are we in the west going to cave into pressure from societies with a medieval mindset, or are we going to defend our most precious freedom -- freedom of expression, a freedom for which thousands of people sacrificed their lives?

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth.

Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.

"The right to freedom of thought and expression ... cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers"

"Caricatures of prophet Muhammad are an attack against our spiritual values. There should be a limit of freedom of press."

"I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been insulting, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong".

The women said they knew they would be refused when they went to the Wal-Marts in Quincy and Lynn and that the action was planned with the abortion rights groups and lawyers.

It doesn't sound as if Walmart is holding these women hostage and preventing them from taking their business elsewhere or otherwise affirmatively trying to stop them from getting the pill. Walmart is just deciding not to carry a particular product which, it looks to me, they are not required to carry.