After doing the time for doing the crime, Martha Stewart was released from prison tonight. I had a rather grand chuckle when I read the quote that the Associated Press chose to represent Martha’s West Virginia fans, from a certain Mr. Keith Bennett…

Keith Bennett braved the 16-degree temperature to see Stewart leave.”I don’t care about any of her stuff at Kmart or her flowers, I just think she’s hot for her age,” said Bennett, 43, of nearby Ronceverte.

Good call, Keith. There’s nothing like ending up in national news for a penetrating insight like that. You’ve done well to change the image of your state… instead of rednecks, I’ll now think of folks from “Ronceverte” as perverts.

Read the story for yourself.

Hat tip to Andrew over at the House of Vaughan for highlighting a redeeming moment from yesterday’s Super-Bowl-industrial-complex. I was in-n-out during the game and missed the original broadcast of the “Anheuser Busch: Thanking the Troops” ad; thankfully, the folks over at iFilm are offering a free second helping.

Also of note, Doogie and Ray over at the Swingline Stapler are covering a poignantly hilarious story of “Capture an Illegal Immigrant Day” at the University of North Texas. I’d say that invention is even more ingenious than the College Republican BBQ next to the camp of the anti-war hunger strikers that happened at CSU a few years back…

Two recommended links to start this week off right:

Left-leaning Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown offers some genuine candor in asking, “What if Bush has been right about Iraq all along?” Job well done, Mark. In writing with such honesty, you’ve earned far more of my respect than many of those with whom I’ve agreed all along.

Although there are some odd choices in the bunch, TIME Magazine offers an informative look into the marquee names claiming the title “evangelical” in this week’s piece: The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals In America. While there are certainly some personalities listed that’d I’d be content to never hear from again, who didn’t make TIME’s cut that should be on the list? Responses in the comment section.

Michael Crichton, the man whose work on the silver screen instilled in me a healthy fear of zoos and whose television drama made me realize I’m a better patient than doctor, articulates an insightful frame of reference from which to consider the concept of environmentalism:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

The entirety of his comments on the subject are available at his website. (HT: Cheese and Crackers)

To ponder: what other political/social movements fit the bill of “religion”?

“Those who say that we’re in a time when there are no heroes, they just don’t know where to look.”

–Ronald Reagan

January 20, 1981

Pearl Harbor survivor Houston James of Dallas embraces Marine Staff Sgt. Mark Graunke Jr. during a Veterans Day commemoration in Dallas. Graunke lost a hand, a leg and and eye when he defused a bomb in Iraq last year. (HT: Airwarriors)

The news in this new year has been grim. Disaster in Southeast Asia has plunged into chaos the lives lining that mighty ocean.

This evening’s check to Drudge raised the tally making laps in my mind to 147,000. I can’t wrap my mind around that figure, nor can I reconcile the fact that the same Thailand I toured weeks ago is now ravaged in hellish proportion. It ain’t pretty.

Any glimmer of good news in this circumstance comes in the pride of being a part of this, a nation enabled and willing to respond: a government that has commanded leadership in relief, a military that has flexed its muscle of peace through strength, and a nation that has given in tectonic amounts to a people we will never meet.

My pride is not in the dollars or helicopters of my nation’s response, though: it is in the grief shared by my fellow Americans. Yes, tangible help is both required and heroic. But the fact that we remain a people willing to join in sorrow is firmly reassuring.

Whatever made me doubt America’s ability to embrace and respond to loss beyond our shores? The chorus of voices, seemingly a majority at times, that refused to engage the decomposing fact that the liberation of Iraq uncovered a toll twice as harsh as this tsunami: 300,000+ claimed by a wave of evil lasting decades. Does a nonexistent or insufficient prior response justify idleness today?

No, this nation cannot–and dare I say in the grip of realism, should not–free from danger every innocent life. But when opportunity collides with responsibility, we must do justly and serve humbly. The shortfall of perfect justice is not an alibi for the irresponsibility of neglect.

Should your Turkey Day hiatus grant you a few extra reading minutes, I highly, highly recommend USS Clueless’ Strategic Overview of the Global War on Terrorism. This document is highly unique in its complete perspective combined with intellectual honesty and accessible narrative. If you don’t read it, at least print it out for your kids. They’ll be curious to know how history unfolded on our watch.

As an added bonus, consider it as some talking points for the “what-we-have-to-be-thankful-for” dinner table discussion this year.

Hat tip to Pops, once again. He seems to be the source of all the juicy stuff.

This can’t be happening.

Seriously. Though it would be one heck of an incentive to roll out bed every morning if I would be sitting next to a certain Ms. Spears in class, in the context of a lifetime–THIS CAN’T HAPPEN! Four years of hard work on a degree will instantly vaporize when my diploma is relegated to being a souvenir “from the college Britney Spears goes to.”

Props for expanding your academic horizons beyond liner notes, Britney… but, please… not in my backyard.

This project isn’t intended to be political. It is, however, American. And today is an American day that demands pause and remembrance, but also a look toward the future. Please forgive the deviation from my usual subject matter, but given the context of the lesson we find ourselves remembering today and the world that will still surround us tomorrow, I thought the following were some prudent words for the occasion. Disagreements of the past aside, we find ourselves with a job to do. Let’s remember why we’re doing it.

November 25, 2003

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20031125.shtmlDear American Soldier in Iraq:

I am writing to you simply as a fellow American.

In just about every way, I am quite typical. I am a married man with three children, believe in God and love my country. I differ, however, from many Americans in a couple of ways. First, my vocation — radio talk show host and columnist — makes me a professional communicator. So I might be able to say things that most other Americans feel but could not communicate quite as clearly. Second, and more important, I suspect that more than some Americans, though hardly more than President Bush and his administration, I am keenly aware of the fragility of civilization, of the monumental evil you are fighting, and of the historic mission of America.

For these reasons, I am writing to you. Though you may already know everything I am about to say, I need to say it for those of you who, after seeing fellow soldiers blown up or severely injured, may sometimes wonder whether these sacrifices are worth it.

So, first, let me set the record straight. Not since World War II have the stakes been this great. This is a war for the future of civilization every bit as much as the war against German Nazism and Japanese Fascism was. If we had lost that war, the world would have devolved into barbarism.

If we lose this one, the same will happen.

It was a war for civilization then; the war against Islamic Fascism is such a war today.

Of course, there are hundreds of millions of fine people among the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims. But that is, unfortunately, as irrelevant to understanding today’s war as the fact that there were millions of fine Germans living in Hitler’s Germany was to understanding World War II.

It is not the fine Muslims who rule most Muslim countries, some of which are among the cruelest on earth. It is not the fine Muslims who dominate the Islamic schools around the world that teach that it is right to subjugate women and to slit Christians’ and Jews’ throats. It is not the fine Muslims who wish to impose a violent, hate-filled religion on others. It is not the fine Muslims who burned 13 churches in Nigeria just last week.

And sadly, most of the fine Muslims, including those in America, rarely condemn their civilization-threatening co-religionists.

Iraq is the battleground for civilization. That is why our enemies are throwing everything they can at you. If you help create the first free and tolerant Arab country in the heart of Islam, they are doomed. If we fail in Iraq, we are doomed. Our enemies know this. We need to know this.

Second, don’t be discouraged by America’s relative aloneness in the world. The world is not, by and large, a good place. And the United Nations, which reflects the world, reflects that fact. That is why Libya, a police state that ordered the mass murder known as the 1988 bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, is not only on the U.N. Human Rights Commission, it is the head of the commission. And Syria, which is worse than Libya, judges us on the Security Council.

As for Europe, Britain and a few other Western states aside, the folks who gave us Auschwitz and Communism and who now bankroll Iran and North Korea hardly have a claim to moral superiority. Americans like you died for their errors. They never died for ours. And they err again. Instead of learning to fight evil, they have only learned that fighting is evil.

Third, we Americans are relatively alone because from our founding we have believed that we have a mission to better the world. And for this we are hated. We are not hated for our power; we are hated for our values and our sense of chosenness — just as the never powerful Jews have long been hated for their values and their chosenness.

In sum, you are carrying the great burden of history on your shoulders every day you serve in Iraq. That some of your fellow citizens do not understand this only means that the war for civilization is taking place as much here at home as it is in Iraq.

We pray for you not only because you are our sons and daughters risking your lives, but because if God is good, and if we humans can discern between good and evil, you are doing God’s work. It is as clear as that. No American war has ever been clearer.

A great day to be alive. Tonight, I go to bed knowing that millions of my fellow citizens of planet Earth will also go to bed after inhaling their first breath of freedom after decades of suffocating despotism. Manifest destiny ain’t just for this continent.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

“This is an amazing victory, a victory over a monster who gassed civilians, jailed children, sent millions into fruitless wars, harbored poisonous weapons to threaten free peoples, tortured thousands, and made alliances with every two-bit opportunist on the planet. It’s a victory over those who marched in the millions to stop this liberation, over the endless media cynics, over the hate-America crowd, and the armchair generals. It’s a victory for the two countries in the world that have always made freedom possible and who have now brought it to another corner of the world made dark by terror. It’s a victory for the extraordinary servicemen and women who performed this task with such skill, cool, courage and restraint. It’s a victory for optimism over pessimism, the righting of past wrongs, the assertion of universal truths against postmodern excuses, and of political leadership over appeasement. Celebrate it. Don’t let the whiners take this away from you or from the people of Iraq.”