What A Genocidal Government Looks Like

To many in the West these days, America is the villain. They scold at every turn, pretty much no matter what we do as a nation. They decry our foreign policies. They moan about our efforts at globalization. They screech at any use of American force. They carp endlessly that we do too much, or too little or the wrong things or don't get the world's permission before we do anything at all.

But they turn a blind eye to the ongoing, self-inflicted genocide that is Zimbabwe.

Suffer the little children is a phrase never far from your mind in today’s Zimbabwe. The horde of painfully thin street children milling around you at traffic lights is almost the least of it: in a population now down to 11m or less there are an estimated 1.3m orphans.

Go to one of the overflowing cemeteries in Bulawayo or Beit Bridge and you are struck by the long lines of tiny graves for babies and toddlers.

A game ranger friend tells me that hyena attacks on humans, previously unheard of, have become increasingly common. “So many babies, not all of them dead, are being dumped in the bush that hyenas have developed a taste for human flesh,” he explains.

Under the weight of the general economic meltdown — the economy has shrunk by 40% since 2000 and is still contracting — the health system has collapsed and a populace now weakened by five consecutive years of near-starvation dies of things which would never have been fatal before. A staggering 42,000 women died in childbirth last year, for example, compared with fewer than 1,000 a decade ago.

A vast human cull is under way in Zimbabwe and the great majority of deaths are a direct result of deliberate government policies. Ignored by the United Nations, it is a genocide perhaps 10 times greater than Darfur’s and more than twice as large as Rwanda’s.

Genocide is not a word one should use hastily but the situation is exactly as described in the UN Convention on Genocide, which defines it as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.

Our homegrown internal critics throw charges of "ethnic cleansing" against our own government. Because it is easier to posture against an internal political opponent and paint him as evil than to actually see the real evils in the world and actually do anything about them. It is easier to carp and moan and poke sticks at countries you know, deep down, will never try to hurt you in return, than it is to address real evil. It is easier to pretend that a thoroughly corrupt United Nations, increasingly dominated by thuggish regimes is effective than to admit they don't actually do much good at keeping monsters down.

Zimbabwe is dying and the West damns America. And when it is dead, they will also blame America.

Nuclear Option

The Times of London is reporting that Israel is drawing up plans to use nuclear weapons on Iranian nuclear facilities. They also report that Israeli Air Force squadrons are actually already in training for the mission.

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.

Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout.

“As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the sources.

The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad’s assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years.

Israeli military commanders believe conventional strikes may no longer be enough to annihilate increasingly well-defended enrichment facilities. Several have been built beneath at least 70ft of concrete and rock. However, the nuclear-tipped bunker-busters would be used only if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene, senior sources said.

Israeli and American officials have met several times to consider military action. Military analysts said the disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, cajole America into action or soften up world opinion in advance of an Israeli attack.

Read the whole thing. My take on this? I strongly doubt that this is meant to do anything but make Iran nervous. And given Ahmadinejad's fanaticism and complete willingness to bring on an apocalypse, I do not think it will accomplish any deterrence. You can only deter the other side when you are dealing with a sane government. I don't think Ahmadinejad's Iran fits that bill. What it could do is goad Ahmadinejad into an off-the-wall response.

Maybe that is the real intent - to make Ahmadinejad show his hand. 

UPDATE: Big surprise - this one is taking off like a rocket in the blogosphere. Others: SevenStripes.com, It Shines For All, Blogs of War, Wizbang, Wake up America, Don Surber, Macsmind, Hot Air, TMV, Flopping Aces, Jules Crittenden, Prairie Pundit,

Roman Road Found

Archaeologists in the Netherlands have made an exciting discovery. A Roman road has been found near the city of Utrecht. Once part of a system of military roads long known to have been in the area, it has been very difficult to actually find the road itself. This section was actually an accidental find by a railroad company.

Known in Latin as the "limes," the road was in use from roughly A.D. 50 to A.D. 350, before it fell into disrepair and eventually disappeared underground, said archaeologist Wilfried Hessing, who is leading the excavations in Houten, about 30 miles southeast of Amsterdam.

The stretch of road discovered in Houten is believed to have connected two forts — Traiectum, which gives its name to the modern city of Utrecht, and Fectio, modern Vechten. Wooden poles were discovered at the site that were used to protect the roadsides from erosion, and experts hoped to use tree-ring counting techniques to determine the exact date they were cut, Hessing said.

"It was used for trade, but it was first and foremost part of a military strategy to guard the border," he said. With a road "you can respond more quickly, so you need fewer troops, just like today."

The road was discovered by the Dutch train company Prorail during preparations to add extra rail lines in the area. Hessing and Prorail will complete excavations of a short stretch in the coming weeks, then carry out exploratory digs to determine the road's route farther to the east, the city of Houton said in a statement.

Also found was a sign promising that road construction would be complete soon. 

Poll Dancing and Potatoes

Well, if you take away someone's livelihood, you probably shouldn't be surprised if there is some political fallout. The state of Maharashtra in India, which includes Mumbai, closed hundreds of "dance bars" in a morality campaign in 2005. The former pole dancers are now performing poll dancing instead in an effort to get elected to the city council to force a reversal of the action.

Authorities in Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, closed down hundreds of dance bars in 2005 saying they corrupted young men and bred crime and prostitution.

The ban saw many of the estimated 75,000 bar girls go away to other states to find work and some reportedly turn to prostitution while many were left jobless.

"We have had enough of begging and pleading for our rights," Manjit Singh Sethi, president of the Mumbai Bar Owners' Association, told Reuters.

"Now we will try to find representation in the administration so that our concerns are addressed."

Sethi said former bar dancers would meet on Sunday to discuss whether they would fight as independent candidates or represent political parties.

"We also have the option of floating our own party," he said, adding that the dancers planned to contest at least 50 of the total 227 seats in Mumbai's municipal corporation vote on February 1.

We'd also suggest the poll dancers might want to take a hard look at political campaigns in Armenia for some pointers on garnering votes. For example, giving away potatoes.

Armenian politicians have been accused of buying votes in forthcoming elections with gifts of potatoes.

The allegations come after the Flourishing Armenia party led by Gagik Tsarukian, one of the richest men in the country, followed other parties by announcing it was giving the vegetables and medical supplies following a drought as acts of "charity".

Potato poll dancing may be a real winner. Pole dancing potatoes, not so much.

Going Medieval

If your high school yearbook allows you to submit a picture of yourself posing wearing something that reflects your interests and hobbies, isn't that a good thing? So an Eagle Scout might want to pose in uniform, a football star in uniform or whatever else reflects your passions or accomplishments. One school Portsmouth, Rhode Island does allow that.

Unless you happen to want to wear chainmail and carry a sword across one shoulder.

PORTSMOUTH, R.I. — Seventeen-year-old Patrick Agin often spends a full week whittling an individual arrow and is learning to make chain mail armor by hand. So when it came time to submit a senior photo for the Portsmouth High School yearbook, he selected a snapshot of himself wearing chain mail and slinging a prop sword over his shoulder.

The school rejected the photo, citing its "zero tolerance policy" for weapons, and Agin and his family sued, claiming the school was violating his right to free speech.

But Agin and others who spend their free time sword fighting and feasting on medieval-style meals also wonder why the school would discourage his passion for a hobby they say offers tens of thousands of people a way to learn about history through hands-on experience.

"It's no different from wanting to appear in a Boy Scout uniform," said Tamara Griggs, a spokeswoman for the Society for Creative Anachronism, a group of 35,000 dues-paying members that hold mock battles, learn arts like calligraphy and conduct demonstrations in shopping malls. Agin belongs to the organization.

Griggs, 36, of Cincinnati, Ohio, who goes by the name Countess Tamara Di Firenze at group events, said an additional 20,000 people are more casual participants in the society, which was incorporated in 1968 and is based in Milpitas, Calif.

Zero tolerance = zero common sense, apparently. Now the school district gets to spend large amounts of money on defending itself from the lawsuit. I've mentioned the Society for Creative Anachronism once before. There are actually a lot of people who manufacture items for medieval enthusiasts. I bought my own sword from one, in fact. Here's the SCA website. Maybe they can organize a siege of the school!

Bucking Conventional “Wisdom”

Something I have said a number of times is that America could have won the war in Vietnam. This has provoked howls of outrage from the usual suspects who flap over to deposit their regurgitation of conventional wisdom imparted to them by, in many cases, those self-same people who helped the US snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Even if the US had managed to help keep South Vietnam in existence and a Korean-like stalemate had occurred, that would have been a victory. I am not the only person to believe this, of course. Some people even write meticulously researched books utilizing original records from that war. And those records do, indeed, seem to back up the theory that we lost a war that we did not have to. Mackubin Thomas Owens, the professor of national security at the Naval War College reviews Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken. Moyar teaches at the Marine Corps University in Quantico and has a doctorate from Cambridge.

Triumph Forsaken is one of the most important books ever written on the Vietnam war. The first of two projected volumes, it focuses on the period from the defeat of the French by the Viet Minh in 1954 to the eve of Lyndon Johnson's commitment of major ground forces in 1965. Moyar's thesis is that the American defeat was not inevitable: The United States had ample opportunities to ensure the survival of South Vietnam, but it failed to develop the proper strategy to do so. And by far our greatest mistake was to acquiesce in the November 1963 coup that deposed and killed Diem, a decision that "forfeited the tremendous gains of the preceding nine years and plunged the country into an extended period of instability and weakness."

Not surprisingly, Vietnamese Communists exploited that post-Diem instability and adopted a more aggressive and ambitious stance. Moyar argues that President Lyndon Johnson rejected several aggressive strategic options available to him, options that would have permitted South Vietnam to continue the war, either without the employment of U.S. ground forces or by a limited deployment of U.S. forces in strategically advantageous positions in the southern part of North Vietnam or in Laos. The rejection of these options meant that Johnson was left with the choice of abandoning South Vietnam, a step fraught with grave international consequences, or fighting a defensive war within South Vietnam at a serious strategic disadvantage.

Nothing illustrates the orthodox/revisionist divide more than their respective treatments of Ngo Dinh Diem. In the orthodox view, Diem was a tyrant losing control of his country, a Catholic running roughshod over a predominantly Buddhist populace. Moyar contends that this is false. In fact, Diem was an effective leader who put down the organized crime empires that had thrived before his rise to power. Nor was he a democrat: His legitimacy, in the eyes of the people, arose from his ability to wield power effectively and provide security for the people who were the target of the Communist insurgency. Indeed, under Diem's leadership, the back of the Communist insurgency had pretty much been broken by 1960.

This is a far cry from the orthodox view, but Moyar has some pretty good witnesses: the Communists themselves. Citing Communist documents, Moyar shows that they were honest enough to acknowledge their lack of success in the period leading up to the 1963 coup, as well as the fact that the Diem government was killing and capturing Communist cadres in unprecedented number, leading many survivors to defect.

I would highly recommend reading the entire review, especially if you plan on leaving a comment. There are a lot of points that completely contradict the picture that has been painted about Vietnam. One of the points that really caught my eye was this:

The primary weakness of the orthodox school, Moyar demonstrates, is its constricted historical horizon. For the most part, orthodox historians have covered the war as if the only important decisions were made in Washington and Saigon. This is an example of what has been called "national narcissism," the idea that history is just about us. Of course, important decisions were also made in Hanoi, Beijing, Moscow, and many other places. Moyar has exhaustively consulted the relevant archives and uses them to demonstrate the very real limitations of the orthodox view. He not only places Vietnam in its proper geopolitical context, but demonstrates the Clausewitzian principle that war is a struggle between two active wills. An action by one side elicits a response from the other that may be unexpected.

Orthodox historians often act as if Hanoi pursued a course of action with little regard for what the United States did. But Moyar demonstrates that the North Vietnamese strategy was greatly affected by U.S. actions.

Longtime readers will recognize that I have made the same point many times. Many of the people attacking American policy act as if we are the only people making decisions in the world. It is narcissism; a cultural set of blinders that discounts or denies other's actions or intentions. Personally, I intend to read this book.

Hawaii Announces Plan To Invade Micronesia

Ok, it isn't actually an invasion. More of one heck of a nice gift to honor the man who has revived the ancient art of Polynesian navigation. Two outrigger canoes will sail from Hawaii to Micronesia using only traditional navigation methods. There, one of the canoes, the Maisu, will be given to Mau Piailug, the renowned master navigator from the tiny atoll of Satawal in the Federated States of Micronesia who has spent many years passing on his knowledge.

The canoe Maisu, launched late last month on Hawaii island, will be accompanied by its more famous sister canoe, the Hokule'a, which made the first modern day canoe voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976.

Maisu was built by the Hawaii-based Polynesian Voyaging Society as a gift to honor Mau Piailug, a renowned master navigator from the tiny atoll of Satawal in the Federated States of Micronesia.

Piailug is credited with inspiring a new generation of Hawaiian navigators and canoe builders.

"It took one man (Piailug) to get the Hokule'a to Tahiti in 1976 and spark pride in Hawaii and throughout Polynesia," said the Voyaging Society's Chadd Paishon, who was in the Marshall Islands capital Majuro to organize the voyage.

"That little spark ignited a fire in so many areas: Hawaii, the Cook Islands, New Zealand and Tahiti," Paishon said Wednesday.

I love stories like this. I have linked in the past to the story of the folks reviving Viking sailing methods. Here is the website for the Polynesian Voyaging Society. They have a LOT of information over there about all the efforts to revive these ancient arts.

Sharp Increase In Moose Muggings

While we're all for suppressing the Animal Uprising™, we aren't sure that Utah's strategy of mugging moose is an effective way to combat the insurrection. After all, moose, being moose, have no pockets and therefore carry nothing worth stealing.

HUNTSVILLE, Utah - It was a rough day to be a moose. Several were stalked by helicopter, captured with a net, blindfolded and then airlifted to trailers for a six-hour drive. The moose woke up in Utah on Friday but were going to sleep in Colorado.

 The strategy helps Utah cure a moose overpopulation while raising the number in Colorado. In return, Utah will get big horn sheep.

Wildlife officers hope to catch 25 moose through Saturday in northern Utah and transplant them to western Colorado.

….

On Friday, wranglers in a helicopter shot nets over the moose. A person called a "mugger" tied the animals' legs and put a blind over their eyes and cotton in their ears.

"I've never mugged a moose, but I guess they're pretty wimpy once they're on the ground," Dolling said.

The moose were then released from the net and wrapped in a large canvas sack to be airlifted to a staging area where veterinarians examined them and gave them antibiotics.

As we said, we aren't real sure this is going to be effective. Besides, officials in Colorado are in the process of catching a few sheep to send to Utah for a vacation. Is that any way to fight animal terrorism? We aren't the only ones to question this tactic, either. Representative Barney Frank has denounced the "ethnic cleansing" of Utah's moose and has said it is all a plot to make the state's animal population more sheepish.

Alien Bombardment Confirmed

Updating an earlier post, scientists confirm that the object that hit the house in Freehold Township, New Jersey did come from outer space. Of course, the authorities are also trying to say it was just a meteorite and not an intentional bombardment by alien spacecraft. They always try to downplay these things.

For now, scientists are calling the dense metallic object "Freehold Township" after the place where it fell. It's about the size of a golf ball but weighs about 13 ounces, as much of a can of soup. Magnets held near it are attracted to it.

Rutgers University geologists Jeremy Delaney, Gail Ashley and Claire Condie and Peter Elliott, an independent metallurgist who studied the object, determined it was an iron meteorite because of its density, magnetic properties, markings and coloration.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have offered photographic evidence of what really happened, of course. We shudder to think about what is coming next for New Jersey. With all those objects hoovering about, it will really suck.

UN Peacekeepers In The Spotlight

Responding to reports in the Telegraph, the UN has admitted that it has investigated 319 individuals in the past three years over abuse allegations. Most of these involved sexual abuse in one form or another. To their credit they are at least acknowledging there is a problem. The question is, are they realistically doing enough to guard against it?

U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Jane Holl Lute said Friday that the U.N. has done more in the last two years than ever before to try to combat sex abuse in its 16 peacekeeping missions "but we're not satisfied with where we are."

With nearly 200,000 people from more than 100 countries rotating through the peacekeeping missions every year, some people "are going to behave badly," she told a news conference. "What's different now is … our determination to stay with this problem … and constantly improve our ability to deal with it."

Between January 2004 and the end of November 2006, Lute said, the U.N. investigated allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse involving 319 peacekeeping personnel "in all missions" — from East Timor, the Middle East and Africa to Kosovo and Haiti.

This resulted in the summary dismissal of 18 civilians and the repatriation of 17 international police and 144 military personnel, she said.

According to the Department of Peacekeeping, during the first 10 months of 2006, 63 percent of all misconduct allegations involving peacekeeping personnel were related to sexual exploitation and abuse, a third of them to prostitution.

While allegations of abuse have dogged peacekeeping missions since their inception more than 50 years ago, the issue was thrust into the spotlight after the United Nations found in early 2005 that peacekeepers in Congo had sex with Congolese women and girls, usually in exchange for food or small sums of money.

Jordan's U.N. Ambassador Prince Zeid al Hussein wrote a report several months later that described the U.N. military arm as deeply flawed and recommended withholding the salaries of the guilty and requiring nations to pursue legal action against perpetrators. It said abuses had been reported in missions ranging from Bosnia and Kosovo to Cambodia, East Timor, West Africa and Congo.

To be honest about this, some of the nations contributing peacekeepers have, to put it delicately, less than stellar human rights records to begin with. Putting some of these soldiers into missions to some of the hellholes the UN is trying to help in is asking for trouble.

It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mahmoud

Michael Burleigh examines what drives Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran. It is a disturbing picture at best. Having an Iranian leader who happens to believe it is his duty to promote an apocalypse isn't a real comforting situation for the world at large. Burleigh looks at what helped form this man and his mad ideas.

One person we will be hearing much about in 2007 will be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He's the hollow-eyed engineer and town planner (and former Revolutionary Guard) who in 2005 went from being Teheran's answer to Ken Livingstone to President of Iran. He's the fellow stringing along the international community while his scientists try to manufacture a nuclear bomb before America or Israel decides to degrade or destroy key experimental sites. He says appalling things with demented glee in his eyes.

According to today's Spectator, Ahmadinejad may actually welcome such an attack, since this will "justify" a retaliatory strike against Israel with nuclear weapons acquired from the former Soviet Union. Certainly, Iran's dark role in arming Hizbollah, and even darker machinations in Iraq, suggest an almost wilful disregard for consequences.

Who is Ahmadinejad? In some respects, he resembles those with whom he consorts to ramble on about American imperialism and the wretched of the earth: Hugo Chávez, Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro. Actually, Ahmadinejad is subtly different: you have to grasp a fusion of apocalyptic piety and politics to get what he is about.

This article is actually pretty important. The West generally has paid little attention to the events in Iran since the 1979 revolution and a lot of people do not understand the fanaticism that drives Ahmadinejad. If you do not know the story of the Basij, you really won't comprehend just what drives this belief structure. (Not that you'll think he's sane afterward, but you really should understand the events that formed this man).

Power Surge

The Washington Post has an article today about resurgent interest in nuclear power around the world. Despite the fact that even the New York Times has recently noticed the reality that wind power is not a cure-all, the Post quotes a number of nuclear opponents who continue to push that pie in the sky. They also keep flogging all the hackneyed objections to nuclear power while offing no alternatives that can actually be used to solve the growing demand for electricity.

Globally, 29 nuclear power plants are being built. Well over 100 more have been written into the development plans of governments for the next three decades. India and China each are rushing to build dozens of reactors. The United States and the countries of Western Europe, led by new nuclear champions, are reconsidering their cooled romance with atomic power. International agencies have come on board; even the Persian Gulf oil states have announced plans for nuclear generators.

"Energy and climate changes can't remain tied to carbon or hydrocarbon," the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said in October. "They are polluting, and we'll have to find substitute energies, including nuclear energy." It creates heat through nuclear reactions rather than combustion, giving off no carbon dioxide, the most important of the so-called greenhouse gases that trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere.

Utilities are dusting off plans for nuclear plants even though most of the problems that shelved those projects remain. Critics say governments have forgotten the crises of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The costs and time to build the concrete-encased plants far exceed those of conventional plants. There still is no safe permanent storage for the used fuel that will remain radioactive for a million years. Added to these problems are the newly realistic worry of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant.

If you are interested in energy, I'd urge you to read the whole thing. The opponents keep bringing up Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. They know full well that the Chernobyl-style RBMK reactor was a bad - and obsolete - design that has nothing to do with current reactors. They also should know that TMI was not a disaster as such. It actually was a testament to the robustness of even that flawed Babcock and Wilcox reactor design. (Even though operators did darn near everything wrong, there was no breech of the reactor vessel.) But the opponents have no good, workable alternative, either. Keep that in mind as you read the article. In a world where there is a projected increased demand for electricity of over 30%, where is it all going to come from?

The Problem With The Neighbors

It just isn't easy living next to some people. Sometimes you get a noisy neighbor who has loud parties. Sometimes you get one that appears to be assembling a very large collection of dead vehicles. Sometimes you can be pretty sure the neighbor is completely insane.

Or you could live next door to a giant snowman.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Snowzilla may be a smash hit with many city residents, but the towering 22-foot snowman has detractors closer to its Anchorage home.

Some neighbors of the two-story snowman say they are fed up with the hordes of gawkers clogging up Columbine Street.

"When you get 20 people out there in their cars, now the whole street comes to a stop and nobody can get through," said Anthony Bahler, who can see Snowzilla from his front window. "They just stand out there, in the middle of road, talking about a snowman."

Bahler's neighbor, Billy Powers, supervised construction of the original Snowzilla last year. Through the Internet, it became a media sensation, drawing crowds of visitors and TV crews from Japan and Russia before it melted in the spring.

This year, with the help from neighbors, Powers resurrected the snowman, with its giant hat made from tomato cages, corncob pipe and beer-bottle eyes. It is six feet taller than its predecessor.

Actually, I could understand why some of the neighbors aren't exactly thrilled with the traffic that the giant snowman generates. Perhaps posting pictures of it on the interwebby tubes would help. Nah, people travel to see balls of twine.

Let’s Rewrite A Headline, Shall We?

Let's do what the AP does and rewrite headlines to reflect certain points of view, shall we? Just as an exercise, of course. Rasmussen Reports has the following shouting headline:

Pelosi: 43% Have Favorable Opinion of New House Speaker

Forty-three percent (43%) of Americans have a favorable opinion concerning the nation’s new Speaker of the House. The first woman to serve in that role, Nancy Pelosi (D) earns favorable reviews from 45% of women and 41% of men. A Rasmussen Reports survey of 800 Likely Voters found that, overall, 39% have an unfavorable opinion of the Speaker.

Very Favorable  18%
Somewhat Favorable 25%
Somewhat Unfavorable  14%
Very Unfavorable 25%

Impressive, no? Let's take a look at something else Rasmussen has up today, shall we?

President Bush Job Approval

The President’s Job Approval Ratings have bounced up slightly in the first week of the New Year. Today, 45% of Americans say they at least Somewhat Approve of the way George W. Bush is performing his role. That's the highest approval rating the President has received since early November.

Strongly Approve 22%
Somewhat Approve 23%
strongly Disapprove 37%
Somewhat Disapprove 17%

So, if we follow the normal AP Handy-Dandy Skewed Headline Writers Guide© and apply the same fine standards evenly, the first headline should read:

Pelosi Less Popular Than Anyone In The Whole Wide World

Well, that's what the guidebook says. Honest.