DiMasi, Burris, Gaza, etc. etc.
It's roundup time for DiMasi, Burris and other subjects. Reader BK is keeping score of Hub Blog edicts that are followed or not followed:

These are tough, tough days for Hub Blog. ... Roland Burris' Effort To Get Seated By The U.S. Senate: 1. ... Hub Blog's Efforts To Stave Off (In Any Way Possible) Massachusetts' Hack-Progressive Allaince: 0. I'm still high-high-high on Hub Blog, though!

Technically, Burris isn't seated yet, so I'm 0-2, when you add in DiMasi's winning reelection as speaker. Senate Democrats are shamlessly trying to squirm out of their previous position that Burris shouldn't be seated by kicking the issue back to Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, a genuinely good guy who has refused to sign Burris's appointment papers. Jesse is taking needless heat for a symbolic decision Senate leaders know is meaningless.

Peter Porcupine sums up with a quote the DiMasi reelection and the moral status of our Legislature:

Endeavor, as much as you can, to keep company with people above you.... Do not mistake, when I say company above you, and think that I mean with regard to their birth; that is the least consideration; but I mean with regard to their merit, and the light in which the world considers them. - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

The public is down on DiMasi. But Statehouse Dems suck up to DiMasi. Tells you something about the different 'worlds' the two sides inhabit.

Reader BK also sends in this NRO article on media coverage of the Israeli action in Gaza. I'm of two minds about the article. First, I think the media is indeed biased against Israel (in the U.S., less so, in Europe, more so). Second, the article, while correct in general about biases, is nevertheless annoying. It's another example of the right fixating on media coverage. Sometimes the fixation is justified. Most of the time it's a dangerous distraction. The right whined for years about media coverage of the Iraq war -- and in the end the righty media critics were simply and tragically (for GIs fighting a stupidly run war via Rummy) proven wrong. ...

... Reading about Iran's 70,000 suicide-bomber volunteers, the Hub Blog mind skips back to a previous post on books by Max Hastings (Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945) and Maxwell Taylor Kennedy (Danger's Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her). Hastings makes clear his contempt for a Japanese militry culture that sunk to a level of depravity that glorified death and suicide attacks. I'm no fan of many of Israel's policies (driven partly by religious nutcases). But when dealing with a culture that glorifies death and suicide attacks, Israel is put in an awful position of confronting a form of depravity.

Update -- Joan on DiMasi: "This is what passes for moral clarity on Beacon Hill."  ¶ 6:15 AM