Wyoming Senator Craig Thomas, who has been battling leukemia since November, has died, CNN confirms.

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The first recorded Category Five storm in the Arabian Sea, Tropical Cyclone Gonu, is barreling toward Oman and the Persian Gulf region. Check out the satellite views:

According to this tracking map, it’s expected to reach the coast of Oman late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, Eastern time. (Hat tip: Andrew Leyden.) So it looks like there will soon be more than one “surge” happening the Middle East.

What’s worse, Oman may not know what hit it: according to Global Surf News, “While tropical storms have hit Oman in the past, they are rare, and there is no record of a hurricane-strength cyclone striking the country. The last tropical storm to smack the nation was in June 1996.” Hopefully Gonu weakens a bit before making landfall!

There could be economic impacts, too. Dr. Jeff Masters writes, “Gonu is the strongest storm ever seen in the Arabian Sea, and could cause big trouble for the Persian Gulf oil rigs and tankers.”

Speaking of Dr. Masters, he’s jumped on the anti-Barry bandwagon — and I’m not talking about Barry Bonds, but rather the dearly departed Tropical Storm Barry, which formed on Friday (the opening day of hurricane season), soaked Florida, then winked out of official existence after a mere 24 hours. Masters writes, “Was Barry really a tropical storm? I think it should have been named ‘Subtropical Storm Barry’, and I hope NHC looks at the storm carefully to consider redesignating it after the season is over.” Margie Kieper is more emphatic:

Putting aside the unwelcome hype and “cry wolf” potential, maybe it’s best to just remember the ROFL moments associated with this chapter of the Atlantic 2007 hurricane season: that initial just-home-from-work oh-they-didn’t! moment when seeing the word “Barry” in the inbox (after which I generated a blog entry in record time — five minutes — then got on the phone with the equally-unbelieving Steve Gregory, where we hypered each other into a frenzy)…the comment by NWSFO Miami in their local discussion when Barry was named by NHC…the inability to provide Dvorak intensity estimates because there was nothing there except a LLCC (ok — that was hysterical — when has “shear” ever prevented Dvorak analysis, or, in the case of a subtropical cyclone, H-P technique)…just pick your favorite. Maybe NHC will quietly change it to subtropical in the post-season analysis.

Just to clarify, my take on Barry was that it tried to become tropical — obs showed that, although they also showed the extratropical nature of the disturbance — but there wasn’t persistent convection near the center, so it never developed, and did not fit the NHC definition of a TC. …

[I]s the situation with the generate-fear-and-hype media so out of control, that Barry was named, rather than risk some kind of media backlash, because no one believes that Florida residents can handle some minor coastal flooding, significant rain, and 25 mph winds, without framing it as a tropical storm? Or is it that no one thought they would prepare adequately unless it was called a tropical storm? Too bad for those who really did think they experienced one, because those folks will be caught unprepared when the genuine article shows up.

Alan Sullivan agrees: “[T]his was a marginal call for designation, following the even more marginal call last month. NHC has turned into a bunch of drama queens. There was a hybrid storm in the Gulf on day one of the official season, and it just had to get a name.”

LATER UPDATES ON GONU: here, here, here and here.

Just got my Tennessee driver’s license… and had to surrender my Connecticut license. Sniff, sniff.

Sources: U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-Louisiana, indicted on more than a dozen charges related to corruption.

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According to the New York Times, an internal military assessment concludes that so far, the “surge” isn’t going too well:

Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.

The American assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to “protect the population” and “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods.

In the remaining 311 neighborhoods, troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face “resistance,” according to the one-page assessment, which was provided to The New York Times and summarized reports from brigade and battalion commanders in Baghdad. …

The operation “is at a difficult point right now, to be sure,” said Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the deputy commander of the First Cavalry Division, which has responsibility for Baghdad.

In an interview, he said that while military planners had expected to make greater gains by now, that has not been possible in large part because Iraqi police and army units, which were expected to handle basic security tasks, like manning checkpoints and conducting patrols, have not provided all the forces promised, and in some cases have performed poorly. …

When planners devised the Baghdad security plan late last year, they had assumed most Baghdad neighborhoods would be under control around July, according to a senior American military officer, so the emphasis could shift into restoring services and rebuilding the neighborhoods as the summer progressed.

“We were way too optimistic,” said the officer, adding that September is now the goal for establishing basic security in most neighborhoods, the same month that Bush administration officials have said they plan to review the progress of the plan.

Anti-war, paleo-conservative blogger Daniel Larison says this is yet another example of the dangers of optimism:

Frankly, Americans are suffering from an overdose of confidence-boosters. They could stand some plain, matter-of-fact talk right about now. Support for the war would have bled away at a slower rate had the administration and military been more cautious in their pronouncements of progress and much less optimistic about the time it would take to get things done. Of course, the truth would be unpopular, but inflating everyone’s hopes and then having them disappointed exacerbates the problem of an already unpopular war. Having heard from the usual suspects that violence was waning, Sadr was on the run and so on, the public will take the relative lack of substantial progress in securing all of Baghdad that much worse than it would have done had those in authority talked down the “surge.” Perhaps it is inimical to a military ethos to do this, but with this administration it seems like the safe advice for managing expectations is “aim low.”

Indeed.

While jumping from blog to blog following random links, I somehow stumbled upon this 14-month-old post from a blogger called “The Glaivester.” In it, he articulates something that I’ve long instinctively believed: that the commonly expressed truism “rape is not about sex” is, um, not true.

I’m not sure why it feels so politically incorrect to say this — it’s not like admitting that rapists are usually motivated in large part by sexual urges somehow makes rape less horrible — but it does. And yet P.C.-ness isn’t a good enough reason to keep spouting a piece of received wisdom that doesn’t seem to be supported by anything in particular. Excerpt, quoting from an even older post:

Men who rape women don’t do it because they hate women, but because they don’t give a **** about women (at least, not the women they rape). They want something, they take it, and they’re by-and-large indifferent to how the person they “take” it from feels.

This is why the “rape isn’t about sex, rape is about violence” analysis falls short. It’s not true - not from the point of view of many rapists - and it denies the true horror of the situation. Many rapists don’t rape because they hate and want to hurt women; it’s not that personal. Rapists rape because they want sex; they don’t consider the woman’s feelings at all.

I think that’s right. Of course, as The Glaivester points out, there are exceptions — plenty of them. But as a rule, I think it’s instinctively obvious that rape is usually, from the rapist’s perspective, about sex first and foremost. This is especially true when one considers the prevalence of “date rape,” which cannot plausibly be described as being “not about sex.” (Is the frat boy who slips a roofie in some girl’s drink thinking about “control and power”? Or does he just want to stick his you-know-what in something?)

[UPDATE: The more I think about this post, the more I feel like I should modify my position slightly. The reality is, I don’t know what are “usually” the underlying motivations of “most” rapists. I know that some rapes are extremely violent in nature, and those are probably motivated more by violence than by sex. I also know that some rapes, particularly “date rapes” and “acquaintance rapes,” generally involve a lot less overt violence, and are more clearly focused on the sexual aspect. I don’t know what the percentages are, though. I assume the latter are more common, but I don’t actually know that, and I wonder if my assumption breaks down when prison rapes, wartime rapes, etc. are taken into account.

Here’s the thing, though. The standard position — “rape is about violence, not sex” — is an absolutist position. It denies, implausibly, that any rape can ever be about sex. It posits that rape is, by definition, about violence, power and control, rather than (not in addition to) sex. That’s what I really object to. So, in the absence of clear evidence one way or the other, I retract my assertions, both above and below, that rape is “usually” primarily motivated by sex. I don’t know that. But I do know that it is sometimes primarily motivated by sex, and that’s enough to disprove the absolutist “rape isn’t about sex” school of thought.

END UPDATE, back to original post…]

Of course, it should go without saying that rape is an unspeakably horrible act, regardless of the rapist’s motivation. And as The Glaivester says, “This is not to say that rape isn’t an act of violence, power, and control, but to say that these are usually tools used to get sex rather than ends in and of themselves.” Nor is it an attempt to somehow normalize or de-stigmatize rape; clearly, there is nothing “normal” about pursuing sexual urges through violent, coercive, or otherwise nonconsensual means. Rapists are fulfilling their sexual desires in an extremely f***ed up way. But they’re still fulfilling their sexual desires! The end goal of their chosen act is still to have sex, no? (If it were just about violence, why not beat up the victim, or stab her, or shoot her? Why sexually assault her, unless the motivation is not just violence, but… sex?)

Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but if so, I’d like to hear some actual evidence for the “rape isn’t about sex” idea. (Remember, it isn’t enough to point out exceptions, because I’ve already acknowledged that there are plenty of those. I want evidence that most rapists are primarily motivated by something other than sexual urges.) Just saying it doesn’t make it so, and I feel like this particular counterintuitive axiom has survived too long without serious scrutiny.

(Incidentally, you should really read the whole thing.)

P.S. Here’s a post which, I guess, explains why it’s considered un-P.C. to admit that rape is largely about sex. In it, a blogger called “Dubhe” uses a comment by an idiotic chauvinist pig — who absurdly suggests that men are justifably driven to rape when they are denied sex by frigid women — to demonstrate “why feminism can NOT say ‘Rape is about sex and power’” (but must instead say that it is only about power). Ultimately, writes Dubhe, “When rape is about sex, rape becomes a woman’s fault. If women just gave men sex, there would be no rape. … [T]o say that rape is about sex is to say that women are responsible for their own rapes.”

Obviously, rape is never the victim’s fault; women are never responsible for their own rapes. The barbaric notion of blaming rape victims should be loudly and universally condemned. But how does it therefore follow that “rape is not about sex”? Is it simply that feminists have made a strategic decision to pretend that “rape is not about sex,” in order to deflect the heinous, detestable lie that sexual urges can justify rape? Are they using a little white lie (rape isn’t about sex) to defend against another, more sinister lie (rape is the woman’s fault)?

In a later post, Dubhe writes: “I don’t believe that rapists are after ’sex’, they’re after the ‘win’ or the control that they will get knowing that they ‘wore down’ the woman involved. They conquered her, they have won. THAT is what they’re after, the sex is merely the way they go about getting it.” But he offers no evidence for this belief, and I see no reason to credit it. It might be convenient if it were true, but I don’t think it is. And it certainly isn’t necessary that it be true. Just because sexual urges may underlie or motivate rape, does NOT mean they justify it!!

Given the long history of indefensibly horrible attitudes toward rape, I can understand the motivation behind obfuscating the truth to achieve a desirable end, namely, preventing women from being blamed for rape. But wouldn’t it be better to take the honest course, and remind people of what is obviously true (that rapists, even when motivated by sex, are solely responsible for their own despicable actions) instead of trying to convince them of what seems obviously false (that rapists are never motivated by sex)?

P.P.S. Another good post on this topic, here. Money quote: “I submit that the primary motivators for date rape are sex and utter, reptilian selfishness.”

There’s also this, from a self-defense website (quoted at length after the jump):

(more…)

Um, is this a good argument for passing a law?

The bill’s authors, as well as advocates of comprehensive immigration legislation, have been arguing that flawed as it is, the measure must go forward legislatively and eventually it will be fixed.

Yeah, that’s a good idea! Let’s replace a flawed system with another flawed system, and leave it to some other Congress to “fix” it! That way, at least we can claim credit for doing something. Because the appearance of progress is the same thing as progress!

[/not expressing an opinion about the bill, just saying that’s a dumb argument for it]