I recorded some Erroll Flynn movies off of AMC last week (Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, The Adventures of Don Juan) and decided to look up what other films Flynn did. I was surprised to find that he did a western called "San Antonio." It was apparently a pulp western (1945) probably filmed on a studio backlot and had little to do with actual San Antonio. Still, I thought it was neat that there was a film called San Antonio that I had never heard of before.
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Looking at state-by-state poll results,
Chris Bowers at Open Left crunches the numbers and determines that even in the worst case scenario, the “weakest” Democrat, Hillary Clinton, would crush the “strongest” Republican, Rudy Guiliani in the electoral college by 335 to 203.
And I hardly believe that Connecticut or Ohio are going to go Red next year.
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The surge is working! That’s the latest hue and cry coming from the warbloggers who are constantly looking at their tea leaves for any signs of “progress” in Iraq. The increased troop levels on the ground in Baghdad have helped to tighten security and have reduced the number of insurgent attacks and corresponding deaths among the civilian population.
But so what?
Sure the surge is “working” in that respect. But that is NOT why we had the surge in the first place. The stated purpose of the surge was not to just heighten security and reduce violence, it was to provide breathing space for the Iraqi government to work out a political solution that would end the Civil War and provide a stable situation so that the U.S. can finally leave. And unfortunately, that is not happening.
Without the political progress that it was meant to foster, the surge is pointless. Its effect will be temporary and as soon as we end the surge the insurgents will rush back in to fill the void and the fighting will continue. We will have accomplished NOTHING.
So NO, in the only area that really matters, the surge is NOT working.
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I am in a complete state of shock this morning after learning that the San Antonio Express-News has canned their local political cartoonist Leo Garza and dumped his popular
“Nacho Guarache” feature from their editorial pages.
I completely missed
this editor’s note that ran in Saturday’s paper:
For the past 20 years, Express-News readers have been accustomed to reading Leo Garza's Nacho Guarache, which appeared here for the last time Thursday.
During those two decades, the number of American newspapers with staff cartoonists has plummeted by more than half. Editor & Publisher recently reported that only about 80 cartoonists remain in staff positions at newspapers.
Throughout those 20 years, the Express-News has enjoyed the rare luxury of two staff cartoonists, Garza and John Branch. But the changing economic environment confronting newspapers across the nation has forced us to make the difficult decision to discontinue Nacho Guarache.
We know Nacho will be missed, but it is no secret that newspapers must adapt to fast-changing times and new market conditions wrought by the Internet.
We remain committed to providing a wide variety of views and comments on our opinion pages.
Bruce Davidson,
Editorial Page Editor
My first clue that anything was amiss was this
string of letters in this mornings paper, most protesting Nacho’s demise.
I have been
critical of Nacho at times
in the past. But I have also been
effuse with my praise. As I’ve said before, Nacho Guarache is/was one of the best things going for the E-N. Having a local cartoonist with that much talent focusing on local issues was, in the words of the Amercian Express commercials, “priceless.”
Even though I disagreed with Garza’s political views about 75 percent of the time, I still thought he was usually (not always) fair in his portrayal of both sides and definitely funny.
Some of the letter writers have suggested that the E-N should have dumped Mallard Fillmore instead. I would be all for that, of course, but the reality is that it wouldn’t save as much money to cut a syndicated strip than it does to eliminate a full-time staff position.
Nevertheless, I think it is clear that the E-N’s priorities are out of whack. If they need to eliminate someone on the editorial staff they should start with the worthless editor Bruce Davidson who has never written a single column that I have found the slightest bit interesting. And now that he has made the biggest boneheaded decision of his career, he certainly merits getting canned. Jonathan Gurwitz is the driving force behind most of the editorials on the page anyway. They should make him the editor and dump Davidson. Maybe that would free up enough money then to hire Garza back.
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