As promised, here are some photos and details of my marriage proposal.

Bea and I enter the room

Down on bended knee

Putting on the ring

Congratulatory photo with champagne

[Some background info after the jump]

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Group C
I covered Argentina’s victory over the Ivory Coast last night, and today I’ll add my observations on the Netherlands 1-0 victory over Serbia and Montenegro. Call it the vans vs. the ‘vics. Not only did the vans win, but their bright orange jerseys are put them in contention with Sweden’s all yellow jerseys for the Human Highlighters contest. The Oregon Ducks would be proud.

The Dutch more or less controlled this game. While they had trouble finishing, their dominance of possession and constant creativity on transition and attack unsettled Serbia and Montenegro’s vaunted defense. Serbia and Montenegro are not a bad team; they went through World Cup qualifying ceding only one goal and finishing with no losses. However, they lack creativity and inspiration on attack in the first half, and they played real tight today–tactics which earned the coach scorn from some of his players.

The second half was a bit of a different story. Serbia and Montenegro played more aggressively, disrupting Holland’s control-oriented style but also earning them four yellow cards, which could come back to haunt them in the next two games. While they couldn’t find that elusive equalizer, they were able to penetrate the Oranje’s defense and test the goalkeeper. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to overcome their one defensive gaffe in the first half, and many are wondering if Serbia and Montenegro might have been able to salvage a tie if they had their star defender, who was forced to miss the World Cup opener because of a red card in their final qualifying match.

Meanwhile, though I was very impressed with how Holland was able to dictate the pace of the match, I can’t shake the impression that they are not quite equals with Argentina and are potentially vulnerable to an upset by the Ivory Coast. Without a doubt, this group is this year’s Group of Death (the Americans’ group is no biergarten picnic either). I also can’t shake the feeling that, although Serbia and Montenegro are a much tougher squad than I expected to see, they will nevertheless be incredibly lucky to earn a victory in group play and will likely go home early.

I don’t see Holland advancing as far as many are claiming they will. While their ball control is superb and they have quite the attack, I still think their defense and goalkeeping is highly suspect. I’d give Ivory Coast a better than 50/50 shot at pulling off the upset, and I simply don’t think they can hang with Argentina. If the Dutch can’t pull off at least a draw with Ivory Coast, the Oranje may need more than a tie against Argentina to advance in the last match of group play.

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Group A
Nick has already covered Germany’s impressive 4-2 victory over Costa Rica, so I won’t comment further except to also agree that the German defense will need to tighten up quite a bit if they hope to advance deep into the tournament. As for Ecuador, their 2-0 victory over Poland is certainly a major upset. The fact is, though Poland is not a strong side, they are experienced and very near their home turf, while Ecuador limped into the World Cup after struggling mightily away from their 9000-ft altitude home pitch in Quito. Alas, I was unable to see much of either game, catching only a few minutes at a time while taking breaks during a Boeing offsite meeting on Friday.

Group B
How about Trinidad & Tobago? Their incredible unlikely feat of maintaining a 0-0 draw versus European giant Sweden is thus far the cinderella story of the tournament. Nil-nil draws are precisely what sets off American sports authorities on their anti-soccer rants, but this game was about as exciting as it gets. Sweden had so many chances, so many close shots, and there were so many brilliant and breathtaking saves by second-string keeper Shaka Hislop, I was on the edge of my seat the whole morning. Trinidad & Tobago faced an uphill battle, with Sweden known for their high-powered attack led by Henrik Larsson (FC Barcalona) and Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Juventus). Then, disastrously, Avery John was sent off for a rough tackle, which earned him his second yellow card and the expulsion. Down to ten men, the smallest nation in the tournament held on for dear life and even had a couple entertaining scoring chances of their own.

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I am very pleased to announce that, on Friday night, Miss Beatriz Duque accepted my marriage proposal!

More details and pictures are to come, once Brendan enables me to upload pictures onto the website. :-)

By the way, Bea and her brother Jaime should be arriving soon in Frankfurt, Germany, where they will begin their travels through Germany over the next two weeks to see all three First Round USA games. Don’t forget to look for them in the stands when you watch the games on TV, as I hear they’ll be dressed in full patriotic garb with face paint to boot! Needless to say [so why say it? –ed. Go away, diction nazi!], I wish I was there with them, but alas, I had to spend my money on a ring instead of on summer travel plans, so I’ll have to sit this World Cup out. But hey, who’s in for South Africa 2010? :-)

From “Best of the Web” today, here’s a beaut that stands on its own:

Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
From Mike Hume in London’s Times:

Edward Atkinson, a 75-year-old anti-abortion activist, was jailed recently for 28 days for sending photographs of aborted foetuses to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn, Norfolk. That draconian sentence was not deemed punishment enough: the hospital has banned Mr Atkinson from receiving the hip replacement operation he was expecting.

Why do the same people who don’t trust the government to spy on terrorists, lest dissenters get caught up in the web, so often also urge giving government control over our health care?

Indeed. I look forward to seeing whether Sean Vivier and Joe Loy is the first to identify who said the following:

“Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.�

If there had been any doubt left that California is run by nutcases, it has been removed by the recent decision of the CA legislature to mandate “‘age appropriate’ lessons on the historical contributions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people”. State Senator Sheila Kuehl, the bill’s lesbian author and Bea’s roommate Camille’s boss (who is, incidentally, a Domer)*, defends her bill by saying, “”All we’re saying is let us also be reflected in history.” The bill was purportedly introduced “on the belief that presenting positive role models could help ease negative feelings and battle high suicide rates among gay and lesbian students.”

Now, I’m all for doing the best we can to increase tolerance of gays and lesbians and lower their suicide rates (though I wonder where they’re getting their data), but isn’t this going a little too far? I mean, should school textbooks note there was a gay rights movement and discuss its goals and accomplishments? Absolutely. But now we should start noting “gay firsts” (”the first gay CEO;,the first lesbian lawmaker, etc.) like we’ve done with African-Americans, religious minorities, and women? To an extent this makes sense, but creating chapters and lessons focused on this topic seems rather ludicrous. Should us short people start clamoring for recognition of short people in history? Napoleon Bonaparte seems to get a lot of publicity, but it’s usually not very positive. In fact, from the connection between Napoleon’s famous height (or lack thereof) and his warmongering exploits we have the derogatory term, “Little Man syndrome”, a syndrome which no doubt exists perhaps, but imagine the outcry if we started talking about “Terrorist Muslim syndrome”….

In any case, passage of the bill into law appears to be almost a fait accompli, so allow me to look for a silver lining. One unintended consequence I am hoping for is a newfound recognition of just how exemplary a historical institution Great Britain’s parliament is, as well as a growing appreciation for the benefits of British colonialism, given that British MPs and Britain’s upper class white men have been historically notorious for being cross-dressers and closeted fagalas. Is that too much to ask, or am I being dreamy?

CORRECTION: Camille’s boss is State Senator Christine Kehoe, not State Senator Sheila Kuehl. Sen. Kehoe is much more moderate, but is also a lesbian. I apologize for the mistake; I apparently confused my lesbian Democratic California senators whose last names begin with K.

In the next few days and weeks, I strongly suspect that the growing political consensus will be that the “Day without an Immigrant” march/boycott backfired. I list the reasons why, in no particular order:

1. Americans will not appreciate the association with May Day, communism, ANSWER, other left-wing groups like MECHA, and groups that go around shouting, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!”

2. It’s one thing to wave your country’s flag at the World Cup or on Cinco de Mayo; it’s quite another to wave the Mexican flag when you’re marching to demand citizenship in America.

3. Americans are turned off by the entitlement mentality these marchers were exhibiting; most Americans’ ancestors came here humbly and doing everything they could to be in good graces with the law and to secure a better future for their children. In contrast, these illegal immigrants were boycotting work, pulling their kids out of school, and demanding they be handed a piece of the citizenship pie after cutting in line ahead of all the legal immigrants. Americans do not appreciate feeling like they must “appease”, although certain politicians are more than glad to offer promises of government largesse in exchange for political support and votes (this is typical of liberals, but increasingly Republicans like Bush are engaging in this mentality as well).

4. Americans don’t respond positively to protests and boycotts. The Civil Rights movement led by Dr. MLK Jr. was an exception: although the majority of white Americans did not support ending segregation and granting equal rights to blacks at first, they were forced to see the brutal evil of Jim Crow in the South on TV. MLK Jr. said all the right things and asked for opportunity and equality, couching his demands in religion and appeals to our nation’s highest ideals. No other major movement has followed that tactic, and thus no other major movement has gained the implicit support of “the silent majority”. The silent majority were turned off by the Vietnam protesters and and reelected Nixon in a landslide; the silent majority defiantly crushed the anti-globalization movement in the 1990s; the silent majority only gave more support to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and rallied behind President Bush when protesters filled the streets; and the silent majority will now turn against yesterday’s protesters and deal a fatal blow to their goals. Solid public support will now swing in favor of strong border enforcement, more employer crackdowns, and a strict path to citizenship (if any form of amnesty is accepted at all).

5. The boycott failed in its stated purpose: To show that “a day without an immigrant” would hurt the U.S. economy. Not only were the economic effects slight, the areas hardest hit were the ethnic immigrant enclaves, as many stores that serve and hire members of those communities were closed and/or lost money. As for the rest of society, Americans saw traffic ease, commutes shorten, 911 calls decrease, emergency rooms empty, and gang activities quiet down. For American educators in the inner cities, class sizes were advantageously smaller for the day, and the students who came to school were disproportionately more eager to succeed and learn than their peers whose parents pulled them from class. For most average Americans, yesterday had precisely the opposite effect of that intended by the organizers.

Republicans have an excellent chance here to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and pass immigration reform that heightens our nation’s security, severely cracks down on the incentives to come here illegally by going after employers, and bring 10-20 million people out of the shadows in a way that pays for itself by making illegal immigrants not only earn their citizenship, but pay monetarily for the right to live here, receive government services, and/or remit income to their families abroad. The path to citizenship is key: Make the process difficult enough and bound with enough strings, and you’ll separate the wheat from the chaff. Simultaneously though, Republicans would be doing this nation a great disservice if they did not overhaul completely the process by which we let in immigrants legally. A great deal of face can be saved if Republicans do these two key steps:

1. Show their pro-immigration bonafides by making legal immigration much easier, smoother, fair, and better designed to help strengthen America; and

2. Make the path to citizenship for illegals sufficiently difficult that only true Americans will take that path, humbly and willingly paying restitution for coming here illegally for the right to be a part of our great nation.

Anything short of those two options risks ceding the middle to Democrats who would gladly offer amnesty to illegals and change the Pledge of Allegiance to Spanish to pick up a quick 10 million votes nationwide. Republicans are also at risk of alienating their base, and when the base doesn’t show up to the polls, GOP victories like we saw in 2002 and 2004 simply will not continue in 2006 and 2008. Doing the first step will satisfy the concerns of the American middle, while the latter will craft a balance between the sympathetic Center with the angry anti-illegal immigration base of the GOP.

As the immigration debate rages on, one key criticism has been continually ignored by the supporters of the pseudo-amnesty and guest-worker plans circulating in Congress. Nobody seems to want to acknowledge that the argument that the illegal immigrants are merely doing jobs that Americans won’t do is a blatant lie. The truth is that these undocumented workers merely displace American workers who simply refuse to work for such low wages. There’s a great example of this occurring right now in decimated New Orleans, where construction contractors–many of them funded by FEMA and other government agencies–are dumping black resident workers, who are told “Go home!” as soon as they can get the chance to replace them with illegal immigrants (listen online or download the podcast segment entitled “Go Home!” under Bill Handel). Of course, not only are the Mexicans cheaper, but they speak little English, don’t unionize because of fears of deportation, and (as many will confirm anecdotally) are much harder workers than the Americans they replace.

Still, many don’t see this as a problem: This is simply the global labor market at work! Now, although I give the Wall Street Journal props for finally coming to the defense of this argument that illegal immigrants are simply filling jobs Americans won’t take, their reasoning is a little weak. Essentially their position is, “If they don’t come here, our jobs will go there”–except in neither case are they “our” jobs anymore, so what’s the point?

Imagine, for a minute, that China was our northern border, and India was our southern border. Would we continue to have no problem with 3 billion neighbors ready to come to America at a moment’s notice willing to work for as little as $5 a day–far more than they earn in their own countries? Mexico is poor to be sure, but Mexico’s got nothin’ on rural India or rural China.

Considering that a frighteningly high percentage of African-Americans are either high-school dropouts or not college graduates (not to mention the lower rates of white workers who fall into this category that nevertheless constitute millions of people in raw numbers), how can anyone morally justify displacing these people from a chance to work because unskilled immigrants are willing to work for less?

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With all due respect to Mike, who by all accounts is a most exceptional and good-natured scientist, I’d like to point to two recent of examples of why many of us non-scientists find many of the field’s practitioners to be of ill-repute.

The first example comes courtesy of the Associated Press, which today ran a story discussing some apparent fossil evidence for the evolution of fish to becoming land creatures. What caught my eye was this beaut:

Scientists have long known that fish evolved into the first creatures on land with four legs and backbones more than 365 million years ago, but they’ve had precious little fossil evidence to document how it happened.

Now, admittedly, more of the fault lies on the lazy reporter here, who is chiefly responsible for asserting that these scientists have “long known” as fact that fish evolved into land creatures circa 365 million years ago. And while Mike will undoubtedly remind us of the distinctions between hypotheses and theories and facts and truth, I will go ahead and remark that while the reporter is being lazy with his language here, he is also undoubtedly expressing the consensus view among scientists. In that vein, I find it mind-boggling how reporters and/or scientists can assert something so readily as fact and in the same breath mention that there is “precious little fossil evidence” to support their view!

So let us agree that evolution is the popular view and makes a lot of sense, but let’s take a breath before going around and asserting its indisputability, shall we?

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So Cardinal Roger Mahoney today called a special Mass to kick off a period of fasting and protest against the current immigration reforms being debated on Capitol Hill. The special Mass follows his earlier precedent of having a special Mass for the victims of the sex abuse scandal… oh wait, no, that never happened because Cardinal Mahoney completely refused to cooperate with any of the victims whatsoever and did everything he could to cover up for the priests under his purview who were responsible.

So, apparently Cardinal Mahoney’s stance is consistent: In each case, he stands for lawbreakers and seeks to shirk the rule of law; in each case, he does what is in his and his diocese’s best financial interest (fighting the victims instead of making settlements; fighting for the hoardes of illegal immigrants that are the only thing standing in the way from his diocese’s total demographic collapse) instead of what is moral and just.

In case you’re wondering, I have a special disaffinity for Cardinal Mahoney, who was given an honorary degree at my USC commencement ceremony in 2002 for being a “champion of dialogue and understanding”. Unfortunately I will be forever linked to that scumbag.

There’s been quite a bit of fuss in some circles over Francis Fukuyama’s new book, America at the Crossroads. The most immediate reaction for me is, it’s disappointing that such an acclaimed public intellectual has resorted to posturing and fuzzing of the truth in his latest tome, a critique of U.S. foreign policy that is as noteworthy and important as any of his previous works. Fukuyama is part and parcel of the famed “neocon cabal”, so his opinion on foreign policy definitely matters. So what is his new position, why is it so controversial, and what should we think of it?

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Ms. Wilson was compared to James Bond in the early days of the scandal, but it turns out she had been working for years at C.I.A. headquarters, not exactly a deep-cover position. Since being outed, she’s hardly been acting like a spy who’s worried that her former contacts are in danger.

At the time her name was printed, her face was still not that familiar even to most Washington veterans, but that soon changed. When her husband received a “truth-telling” award at a Nation magazine luncheon, he wept as he told of his sorrow at his wife’s loss of anonymity. Then he introduced her to the crowd.

And then, for any enemy agents who missed seeing her face at the luncheon but had an Internet connection, she posed with her husband for a photograph in Vanity Fair.

Mr. Wilson accused the White House of willfully ignoring his report showing that Iraq had not been seeking nuclear material from Niger. But a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that his investigation had yielded little valuable information, hadn’t reached the White House and hadn’t disproved the Iraq-Niger link - in fact, in some ways it supported the link.

Mr. Wilson presented himself as a courageous truth-teller who was being attacked by lying partisans, but he himself became a Democratic partisan (working with the John Kerry presidential campaign) who had a problem with facts. He denied that his wife had anything to do with his assignment in Niger, but Senate investigators found a memo in which she recommended him.

Karl Rove’s version of events now looks less like a smear and more like the truth: Mr. Wilson’s investigation, far from being requested and then suppressed by a White House afraid of its contents, was a low-level report of not much interest to anyone outside the Wilson household.

So what exactly is this scandal about? Why are the villagers still screaming to burn the witch? Well, there’s always the chance that the prosecutor will turn up evidence of perjury or obstruction of justice during the investigation, which would just prove once again that the easiest way to uncover corruption in Washington is to create it yourself by investigating nonexistent crimes.

For now, though, it looks as if this scandal is about a spy who was not endangered, a whistle-blower who did not blow the whistle and was not smeared, and a White House official who has not been fired for a felony that he did not commit. And so far the only victim is a reporter who did not write a story about it.

Courtesy of the New York Times, fresh crow–or newt, as it were–is now being offered for all of you who have been up in indignant arms about Karl Rove and the Valerie Plame kerfuffle. As usual, the line forms on the Left.

For the uninitiated and the overinitiated, here’s the rundown on Gitmo:

Gitmo is the gulag equivalent of a Ben Affleck movie: no one’s seen it, but everyone has an opinion about it. Given all the rhetoric that’s been spilled about this sorta-kinda-not-really Death Camp, it’s time we re-examine the facts, and remind ourselves what’s really at stake. Herewith a summation.

Q: What is Gitmo?

A: Contrary to what some suggest, it does not stand for “Git mo’ Peking chicken for Muhammad, he wants a second portion.” It stands for “Guantanamo,” a facility the United States built to see if the left would ever care about human rights abuses in Cuba. The experiment has apparently been successful.

Q: Who’s in Gitmo?

A: Operation Scoop Up The Little Lost Lambs plucked men from distant countries and brought them to Gitmo to beat them deaf for no apparent reason. There are between 400 and 30 million people at Gitmo, and somewhere between zero and 15 million people have died there.

Q: That’s quite the range. Do we have precise figures?

A: Well, technically, no one has died at Gitmo. Metaphorically, millions have perished, since Gitmo is the spiritual heir to assorted thug regimes — except Saddam’s, of course.

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A 19-year-old man from Texas was sentenced to life in prison for fetal homicide. Excerpt:

Nineteen-year-old Gerardo Flores of Lufkin was sentenced to life in prison Monday in a landmark test case of a state fetal protection law. An Angelina County jury deliberated just under four hours, finding him guilty on two counts of capital murder for his part in killing his unborn twins.

The case will be appealed, possibly all the way to the Supreme Court, defense attorney Ryan Deaton said after the verdict.

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Last summer, Howell Raines said the following:

Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I’m sure the candidates’ SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead.

Some on this blog still probably subscribe to this meme.

Unfortunately, the evidence now shows otherwise:

During last year’s presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences.

But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago.

In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.

…

Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D’s in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.

This, on the heels of an argument from last October that Bush has a higher IQ than Kerry, should help Democrats come to terms with what some of us have been saying for a very long time now: The Left has so intensely deluded itself that its distorted views of Bush and this administration have caused them to lose touch with the vast majority of American voters–and reality.