…the NY Times would like to make you feel guilty. Seems that prime Ecuadoran roses are making Ecuadoran rose farm workers sick. Europe, of course, is furious. But then, given Europe’s ridiculous farm subsidies and trade protections, I doubt many Ecuadoran roses find their way to Europe, anyway.

There is a solution of course. We could try to engineer roses big and beautiful as Ecuadoran roses, but which emit their own pest repellent, thus making the wheeze-inducing insecticides used in Ecuador unnecessary.

Ah…but Europe doesn’t like that idea, either. Guess the only thing for the sophisticated, worldly, sensitive gentleman to do is opt for daisies.

Apparently, some women prefer those, anyway.

…economists don’t have much sex.

Speaking generally, of course.

So I'm moving this weekend. For the second time in a month.

The forecast?

Eight to sixteen inches of snow by Sunday night.

From Clarence Young:

In my international business travels and learning experience I know that McDonalds put heavy amounts of capital, training and created thousands of jobs in Russia before it opened its first restaurant. I also know that President Vincente Fox of Mexico worked his way up through Coca-Cola driving delivery trucks, training for sales and ultimately a management position with the company before being elected as president of his country.

As for dissent, well, here's one slightly different take on things.

And I really don't know what to make of this, a suit alleging that Coca-Cola hired right-wing paramilitary thugs to knock off union organizers in its Columbia bottling plants. My guess is that if there's any merit at all to the suit (and consider that the source is a far-left activist news network), it was done by the individual bottling plants, without Coke's involvement.

Bottling plants are largely independent from Coca-Cola, Inc. But who knows. If any of you have any dirt on this suit you'd like to share, I'd be much obliged.

In my opinion, this guy won.

At life. That's it. He won. If I'm 85 and I get arrested for boinking my girlfriend in public, that's what my epitaph will say.

"He won."

Amusing.

But my favorite part is the soundtrack.

So Alina invites my scrutiny with this link from Nerve, a Valentine's Day list of the best love songs from the last, um, 69 years. I can't resist.

Glaring admissions, there are.

Among them:

Jackie Wilson, "Your Love" -- If forced to pick just one, this would be my favorite song. Ever. In the history of songs.

The Temptations, "My Girl" -- Obvious, yes. But how could any list exclude sunshine, on a cloudy day?

Otis Redding, "My Lover's Prayer" -- Otis at his achiest.

Nick Cave and Johnette Nopalitano, "The Ship Song" -- "I must remove your wings, and you, you must learn to fly..." Cave's creepy barritone and Nopalitano's angelic cry mingle with rapturous results.

Solomon Burke, "Flesh and Blood" -- Written by Agitator.com favorite Joe Henry. From Burke's new CD, which you should now run -- don't walk -- run to go purchase. Play it tomorrow as you wine and dine your inamorata. You will get laid. I promise.

Billie Holiday, "My Man" -- Her sultry, playful, seductive best. Wish I could've have seen her live.

Madonna, "Live to Tell" -- OK, ok. Before you ask me to hand over my penis, let me explain. This really is a great song. And I was turned on to it a few years ago while at an Evan Dando show. Opening act was Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago, doing a solo thing. He covered the song, and it was spectacular. Listen to it again. Go ahead. I won't tell.

Louis Armstrong, "A Kiss to Build a Dream On" -- Easy, laid-back romance. Really the only way Louis' raspy wail could've pulled "romance" off.

Van Morrsion, "Tupelo Honey" -- Bob Dylan once said this song has been around since the beginning of time, Van just happened to have been the mechanism the Gods chose to find it and deliver it to us.

Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman" -- Speaking of Dylan, I guess I'd pick this one if I had to choose just one, by a hair over "Most of the Time." Like most of his bests, it's beautiful in its simplicity. "She makes love just like a woman,/But she breaks just like a little girl."

Woody Guthrie, "Ingrid Bergman" -- As performed by Billy Bragg and Wilco. Guthrie's randy but lovely tribute to the Swedish Godess/actress.

Sam Cooke, "You Send Me" -- At first I thought it was just infatuation...

Velvet Underground, "Pale Blue Eyes" -- Captures love's frustrations, and, ultimately, helplessness -- all in cool, minimalist VU fashion. Linger on.

Chris Isaac, "Somebody's Crying" -- You want "longing?" We've got "longing."

Elvis Presley, "Suspicious Minds" -- My favorite from the King.

The Black Crowes, "Girl From a Pawnshop" -- Had to include something from my favorite band. An overlooked gem. Also, check out the bluesy "Bad Luck Blue Eyes Goodbye."

Stevie Wonder, "Isn't She Lovely?" -- A love song to the mother of Wonder's child, where the "she" is Wonder's baby daughter, "less than one minute old."

Led Zeppelin, "Thank You" -- Big wedding song way back when I was just a wee little Agitator.

Sinead O'Connor, "Nothing Compares 2 U" -- "Haunting" is usually the word used to describe this song. Would be even better if Prince had spellcheck.

Elvis Costello, "Alison" -- His aim is true.

Guns n' Roses, "Estranged" -- More of a breakup song than a love song. But Jesus, what a song.

I'm sure I'm overlooking dozens more. If it's sex songs you're after, check here. We covered that months ago.

On the subject of "Republicans were just as bad as Democrats," here's a piece I wrote a few years ago on Justice Ronnie White, who was balled by Republicans for really, really stupid reasons.

Some on the left have suggested that President Bush renominate White as a gesture of good will. I agree. I think it would give him and the GOP an enormous PR boost with blacks, and it would make it enormously difficult for the Democrats to continue to pull what they're pulling with Estrada.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Republicans too played obstructionist to President Clinton's judicial nominees (and to several important DOJ appointed positions, most notably Bill Lann Lee). Given my growing contempt for the Republican Party, it causes me no great pain to say that the GOP was just as belligerent then as the Dems are now (though in general, I'd say GOP-appointed judges do less damage than Democrat-appointed judges).

Clinton's solution was a nifty little end-around called a "recess apointment." That is, he'd wait until congress went home, then he'd make his appointments. Said appointments could then serve for one full year without a confirmation vote. Once ensconced in their positions, it became difficult for the GOP-controlled congress to vote them down.

Laura Ingraham, whom I normally find a little annoying, had a delicious suggestion on Imus this morning. Given the Democrats' obstruction of the Estrada nomination, she said that Bush too should make a recess apointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals -- but that he should appoint....are you ready?....Robert Bork! -- the judge whom the Democrats blackballed back in the Reagan administration to start this fifteen-year game of good-for-the-goose in the first place.

I'm not crazy about Bork. But my respect for Bush would jump to the stratosphere were he to attempt such a ballsy move. And I bet Bork would do it.

Also, I just have to draw attention to this wonderful line from lefty blogger Daily Kos's coverage of the Estrada filibuster, heaping praise on Senator Handsome:

The opposition is being plotted by Daschle, Reid, and the Dems on the Senate Judiciary Committee. As a member of that committee, John Edwards is taking a laudable high profile on the issue.

I'm sure you can come up with a few of your own.

So former President Clinton's chief of staff for the solicitor general (Ron Klain, whose mug you might remember from the Florida recount), the ABA, and every living former solicitor general of the United States has signed off on the nomination of Honduran immigrant-to-Harvard Law Review Editor Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Still, the Democrats plan to fillibuster his confirmation vote -- an underhanded parliamentary move unprecedented in U.S. history.

Why? They say it's because he has "refused to answer questions." But as Byron York reported yesterday, it's really because he's conservative, and it will be nearly impossible for the Democrats to block the nomination of a qualified, Hisapnic, but very conservative Supreme Court nominee once he's already aboard an appeals court.

Senator Mary Landrieu announced her support for Estrada during the 2002 campaign in a Spanish-language commercial. She won, thanks largely to big support from Hispanics. Not three months after Election Day, she's flipped. She'll vote with the fillibustering Dems -- and break rank with fellow Louisiana Sen. John Breaux. She says her flip was due to "a misunderstanding" between her campaign staff and the Hispanic advocacy group who ran the ad supporting. Funny how she waited until three months after the election to clear that up.

What should we learn from this?

If you're Hispanic, and you want some political power in this country, it is simply not permissable to have political opinions of your own. Check with Tom Daschle first. He'll tell you how you're supposed to think.

UPDATE: Classic hypocrisy from Sen. Hillary "Billing Records" Clinton. She says she's upholding the filibuster because Estrada "wasn't forthcoming" in his answers to judiciary committe questions. She's also demanding the White House release internal briefs Estrada wrote while working in the Clinton Justice Department! (Estrada, incidentally, also argued in favor of using RICO statutes to prosecute anti-abortion protesters -- hardly the undertaking of a militant "anti-choicer"). And yes, this was the same Clinton administration that claimed "executive privilege" any time a congressional oversight committee asked for so much as an 8x10 glossy of Janet Reno.

Said Hillary:

When you stonewall the Judiciary Committee ... when you act as if you just came out of nowhere and don’t have an opinion on anything, everybody knows that’s a charade.

V-Day disaster.

Link goes to audio.

My latest Fox column is an ode to Coca-Cola and McDonalds.

....so what the hell happened to the monkey?

I guess there really is an Internet site for every twisted fetish.

This is just wrong.

A much-needed and remarkable defense of libertarianism on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal! Dammit, I wish I had more time. There's so much in this piece that's worth examining. Here's an excerpt, but I strongly recommend reading the entire piece.

Conservatives are against gay marriage, they are often ambivalent toward immigrants, and patronizing toward women; they view popular culture as mostly decadent and want to censor music, movies, video games and the Internet. They crusade against medical marijuana. For their part, libertarians argue for legalizing drugs; they are in favor of abortion and against the government prohibition of sex practices among consenting adults. They abhor censorship. In the conservative caricature, libertarians believe in sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll--but it is not far from the truth. Unfortunately, these debates are often animated by the fact that conservatives see libertarianism only as the face of what it defends: transgendered persons adopting children, video games of violent sadism and, yes, cloning. Simply put, the shocking and repellent decline of civilization. But for libertarians, these are merely some of the many aspects of a civilization that is advancing through vast and minute experiments. The exercise of freedom trumps the discomforts of novelty.

Here's Washington Times coverage of the D.C. gunlawsuit brought by Gene, Tom Palmer and the gang.

Send it to one you love.

So what the heck does it mean?

Well, it's bastardized Latin for "against the world." It's actually the name of the first Internet column I wrote about five years ago for a website called JournalX. The publisher of that site later ripped off his friends and family and did some time in the pokey. But that's another story.

I kept the name because I liked it, and because I like holding on to some small piece of my first sort-of crack at a regular gig, even though it was unpaid, and I'm fairly certain no one read it.

But the important question -- as Dave Barry might point out -- is, wouldn't "contramundum" be a great name for a rock band?

The answer is yes, it would.

I have much to say on Powell's UN presentation. Unfortunately, spare time for indulgent rants is at a minimum for a little while. I will say, however, that the timing and coincidence that comes with this story stretches credibility to it's mozarella-stringy thinnest.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said a new message has surfaced, believed to be Osama bin Laden claiming a "partnership with Iraq."

Powell said he reviewed a transcript of the message, which he said was to air on the Al-Jazeera Arab news satellite television channel, which operates out of Qatar. "(Bin Laden) speaks to the people of Iraq and talks about their struggle and how he is in partnership with Iraq," Powell said.

Asked for reaction to Powell's claim, Al-Jazeera denied it had such a message from bin Laden, saying news of it was a rumor that has been circulating for several weeks.

Color me skeptical.

Fellas -- the perfect V-Day gift.

Here's more eBay wierdity. Who pays four bucks for this?

Joe Bob Briggs mourns Lana Clarkson, allegedly shot dead by music God Phil Spector.

An anti-war advocate after my own heart.

Tech Central contributor Marni Soupcoff doesn't like blogs.

O.K., I know. I shouldn't start a web log.

But sometimes the fiction of an audience rapt and captivated by my inane musings and favorite web clips just seems too hard to resist. For the sake of everyone in cyberspace, however, I will try to withstand the temptation to fulfill my delusional blogging dream.

Too bad some of today's more recent snooze-inducing bloggers didn't resist the urge, too.

If you don't like blogs....

a) don't start one of your own,

and,

b) don't read them.

I don't really see what the problem is. It's not as if someone's sitting next to you on the bus, whispering blog posts in your ear.

Damn am I proud of that title.

Mark Hemingway reviews Neal Pollack's latest book.

Gene Healy, Bob Levy, Tom Palmer and several others are filing suit for the rights of D.C. residents to defend themselves with handguns. Currently, D.C. bans handguns, and imposes ridiculous restrictions on most all firearms (one party to the suit is a D.C. Special Police Officer who guards the Thurgood Marshall center by day, but is prohibited from taking his gun home with him at night).

Probably not coincidentally, D.C.'s is consistently among the highest murder rates in the country (nearby Arlington, Virginia, you may be curious to know, has much more relaxed gun laws -- and a much lower incidence of violent crime: not necessarily a cause and effect scenario, but compelling nonetheless).

It's time to put to bed the idea that making guns illegal leads to fewer guns. It doesn't. It means the people who abide by the law can't have them, and are then at the mercy of people who flout the law.

The scaremongers over at CASA have found a new gateway drug: caffeine! A new report from CASA says a disproportionately high number of girls who drink coffee move on to cigarettes and alcohol (and we all know that it's a short shute to crack from there). Excerpt:

The report reveals that caffeine is a little known risk factor. Girls and young women who drink coffee are significantly likelier than girls and young women who do not to be smokers (23.2 percent vs. 5.1 percent) and drink alcohol (69.8 percent vs. 29.5 percent). Young women who drink coffee began smoking and drinking at earlier ages. Parents are the first line of prevention. CASA's Formative Years survey showed that most girls (61.6 percent) who had conversations with their parents about substance use said that the conversation made them less likely to smoke, drink or use drugs.

Prevention programs should target girls at times of highest risk and be sensitive to the reasons why girls use drugs, how they get them and conditions such as depression that increase their risk.

Health professionals should screen young female patients for substance use, depression, sexual and physical abuse, poor school performance, eating disorders, and stress and provide appropriate referrals.

Government should invest resources in research, prevention and treatment that focus on the special needs of girls and women.

The media should refrain from presenting glamorous images of women smoking and drinking or making positive associations between smoking or drinking and thinness or sex appeal; refuse to accept alcohol advertisements for television and for magazines with high proportions of young female readers; and include more programming and articles that convey prevention messages against smoking, drinking, drugging and excessive dieting.

As for media outlets glamorizing smoking, Gene Healy, this means you.

(Link via Hit and Run)

Again, you'll probably find less blog for your buck (or lack of buck, I guess) this week. If all goes to plan (and over the last two weeks nothing has gone to plan), I'll be moving again over the weekend, which means most of my free time will be spent packing.

Actually, the number of entries will probably be the same. Just more linking, less writing.

A friend sends this, pilfered from the FreeRepublic boards:

So I floated a gimmick idea to the ever-talented Brian Kieffer about a new toy I wanted to try. It's called the "GW Bush LibertyMeter." Basicially, it's a measure of how well our president is protecting our freedom.

Here's what he came up with.

Hell of a job, no? On the far right, you have "State," or complete government control. On the far left, "Anarchy." The scale runs from 1 (total state control) to 100 (absence of a state). Somewhere between 80 and 90, you have "Utopia," or, ideal, constitutionally-limited government (yes, I know, such a society would be far from utopic, but it would be ideal, and I wanted to give the somewhat-clever nod to Nozick).

I'm still trying to figure out how to mount the LibertyMeter on a page with my site's includes, but in the meantime, I have a question for you:

Where should we set the meter to start? In other words, on the 100-point scale I've outlined above, where would you say we are now?

Keep in mind, we'll need some meneuverability if we're going to have fun with this thing.

So here's the obligatory dip into narcisism.

One year of TheAgitator.com. I guess we should first play the "where did we start" and "where are we now" game. I started by hosting the site on an Internet advertised server. About six weeks later, P.J. Doland offered to host the site on his servers, for a generously agreed-upon fee that I'm fairly certain can't be beaten.

So the first traffic reports I have are from early March, not early February. The site was registered on February 8th, though my first post wasn't until February 13th. Also, note that the archives begin in April. That's because I lost my February and March archives when I switched to Blogger Pro. PJ was able to salvage them in text form, but I can't bring myself to take the time to repost six weeks of year-old posts that I doubt will ever be read.

Also, note that I moved to Moveable Type last summer. Therefore, headlines before, say, August, were generated automatically. So some of them are merely the first six words or so of each post.

The numbers below are traffic numbers for late March of last year (which, to be fair, didn't include the traffic I get from a Fox column), from April of last year, and for comparison, the latest numbers from January of this year:

March 2002.
April 2002.
January 2003.

Or you can just click here, and peruse all the numbers.

Not bad. From about 15 unique visitors per weekday to about 2,000.

As of yesterday, the Blogstreet website ranked TheAgitator.com number 377 out of 80,614 weblogs. By my calculations, that puts us in the top .46 % of blogsites on the web.

Alexa says we're ready to break into the top 100,000 of websites on the Net.

And we just had our 4,000th comment.

OK. So there's the gloating.

Now, how 'bout some "greatest hits?" These would be the posts and columns that generated the most buzz, traffic, comments, etc. They are:

Social Security: Nursing Gen-X Apathy
My first Fox column. Actually, it ran in December of 2001, a couple of months before I started up the website.

A Day at the Protests, April 20, 2002.

Firsthand account of my day amongst the anti-globo protesters.
Part I
Part II
Here's the Tech Central Station column that came of the day.

Wealthy? Give Me a (Tax) Break!, April 10, 2002.

Fox column describing my surprise at being deemed "wealthy" by the IRS. Triggered lots of email and this appearance on Fox News Channel.

Drug War Casualties, May 23, 2002.

Way too much went on with this one to summarize. Investigative piece I wrote for FoxNews.com that generated a ton of mail, eventually was pulled from Fox, and damn near got me sued. I'd have won, of course. If you have a few hours and want to fill yourself in, the approporiate links are below.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI (this is the column itself)
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX
Part X
Part XI
Part XII
Part XIII
Part XIV
Part XV
Part XVI
Part XVII
Part XVIII
Part XIX

There will be a part XX, too. A major magazine will be running a lengthy piece on the Straight, Inc. saga in May.

Soda, Pop or Coke?, July 7, 2002

A map breaking down which regions of the country use which words struck me as similar to the Election 2000 map. I did a poor man's anaylsis. Ended up being my post trafficked post to date.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V

Pork Addicts and Hypocrites: The Fallacy of HOV Lanes, May 23, 2002

What I thought was a fairly dry, but journlism-heavy piece for Tech Central somehow caught some key links and sent a swarm of traffic to the TCS site.

Trying to Throw His Arms Around the World: Bono and Foreign Aid, June 17, 2002.

Generated mountains of hate mail from Bono-philes.

Tomorrow's News, Yesterday, July 17, 2002

I'm including this satirical bit just because it's one of my favorite pieces I've written. It didn't really generate much buzz, but parts of it (read the graphs about Trent Lott) proved fairly prophetic -- even better when you consider that the whole piece was about the day the Net (and blogs) became prophetic.

Government Worse Accountant Than Corporations, August 1, 2002

I wrote this during the brouhaha over corporate governance. This, and the column below mustered close to a thousand email responses.

Paycheck Withholding: A Con on Taxpayers, August 29, 2002

Sent Charlotte Twight's book to #25 on Amazon.com.

Freedom Rock!, October 17, 2002

The libertarian's mix CD. Made lots of listservs and libertarian portals. I got feedback on this one from lots of smart, prominent libertarians, many of whom I never thought I'd get the opportunity to speak to, much less have reading my blog. Was fun to write, too.

The Swedish Invasion, November 27, 2002.

I've been meaning to ask Tech Central to pull this. This might be called a "lowlight." In an effort to be cute, I made a number of mistakes in this piece (I misread the Swedish unemployment charts for one. Not to mention that I credited Sweden for having produced the Vines -- it was Australia.) Yes, I need to tell Tech Central to pull it down. The mistakes aren't excusable, but I still don't think they seriously undermine the premise of the piece.

Targetting the Social Drinker is Just MADD, December 9, 2002.

First hit with a big paper.

Trent Lott's Lost Power, December 18, 2002.

Lots of hate mail.

Tiger Woods: Inactivist of the Year

Pretty proud of this one, too. One of my better conceived and tighter columns, I think. A little humor thrown in, too.

I guess that's about it. Unless you have requests. I'll leave you with my very, very first post, on February 13th of last year:

I guess today marks the unofficial launch of "The Agitator." A few thoughts on the name. I thought about "radleybalko.com," but decided it didn't have much marketing potential. So I faced the dilemma of trying to come up with something fairly catchy that hadn't already been thought of and/or bought up by the couple hundred or so million people who already have Web pages, or who squat domain names for a living. I've been reading quite a bit lately on Thomas Paine. Save for a few regrettable positions he took late in life, Paine's become something of a hero of mine. And one root almost always associated with Paine is "agitate." He was an "agitator for freedom," he "agitated" the crown, he was pretty much an agitator of power wherever he found it. He helped convince a nation of Calvinists to along with the American Revolution, then pissed most of them off in "Rights of Man," where he warned against theocracy.

I got to thinking that most of the people I admire throughout history have geen agitators of one kind or another. The founding fathers of course agitated to the point of revolution. Abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights leaders -- all were pests -- hornets at somebody's picnic. When you think about it, most of the people throughout history who we remember fondly, we remember because of discoveries, statements, writings, art or acts that irritated the kings, clergy or intelligensia.

Of course, the move to agitate has to be of pure motivation -- knowlege or liberty, I'd say. Some of history's great bastards are agitators, too. Today, the writers and political leaders and pundits I like most tend to be contrarians. The people who keep power on its toes. Not always. But mostly.

So "The Agitator" makes sense. More importantly, it was available.