Our newest D.C. paper, the Washington Examiner, is online today. With smart guys like Dave Mastio aboard, it should be a great paper. Best of luck to them.

In shockingly abrupt end to the Kaus-Sullivan feud, Andrew Sullivan has simply thrown in the towel and given up on blogging for the medium-term future. Oh sure, he says it’s not because of recent criticism. But you can draw your own conclusions.

Kaus now stands alone on the Interweb, like a little blogging Royce Gracie.

Does this mean that now we’re actually going to have to pay attention to the State of the Union address? Sigh.

Galley Friend P.C. sends along a link to this Dan Shaughnessy column. To paraphrase a certain fictional linebacker, Respect will be paid!

These Philadelphia football fans are crazy. They have a love-hate relationship with their team. They are hardened by history and disappointment. They come from a cold climate. They think they are smarter than everyone else. They will not back down. They care. And they are not going to sit there and listen politely when they hear New Englanders boasting about the genius of Belichick or the clutch kicking of Adam Vinatieri.

Richard Cohen’s column today is not, by far, his worst. Disingenuous, sure: While arguing that things could still go very badly in Iraq, he tries to distinguish himself from commentators who are demeaning this important occasion by arguing that things could still go very badly in Iraq. It’s a bogus trick: Immunize yourself to criticism by criticizing the failing you’re obviously guilty of.

But when it’s bad, it’s really bad. Take this passage: “Just last week I asked one of the architects of the war what sort of day the United States would have on Sunday. He offered no prediction, but his demeanor gave him away. He was steeled for failure.”

This could mean anything. That Richard Pearle blew him off in the men’s room. That some military analyst had knots in his stomach. And how is, demeanor-wise, “steeled for failure” different from “worried, but optimistic,” or “hopeful, yet affected by every reported death,” or a dozen other permutations of concern mixed with unknowability that could have described any number of people?

Bottom line: Cohen is so full of himself that he thinks he doesn’t need to bother with quotes. He can just say what he thinks his interviewee would have said if they had actually agreed to tell him anything.

Last week, I wrote a pithy item (aren’t they all!) about Christopher Hitchens drinking openly at a soon-to-be-televised children’s poetry reading. Kinda reminded me of the trope about the clown who, after working the children’s party, with makeup still on, lights a Marlboro and opens himself a Schlitz. Except that Hitch didn’t wait till afterwards.

En passant, I mentioned who else was on the panel, which brought me to Mary Eberstadt, journalist, mom, and author of Home Alone America, a very brave book on the overlooked consequences—as the subtitle has it—”of day care, behavioral drugs, and other parent substitutes.” But what I said exactly was that Eberstadt was a “professional troublemaker and author of an excellent new book on day care and other ways parents escape their obligations.”

Enter Mr. Anonymous, a GS reader, who in the posting section insists “You may not insinuate that I am “escaping” from my obligations because I send my children to day care. I do not believe Ms. Eberstadt’s book is stating that either. Sure if we were back in the 50’s and 60’s you could attack child care-acquiring parents because back then it was not necessary for both parents to work. But here in the real world, it is.. . .”

Mr. Annoyed Reader then goes on to demand an apology—though first he realizes he’s been wrongly accusing Jonathan Last of having written the item in question. Oh, he says, “apologies to JV,” leaving off the L, “Skinner is the weenie I am angry with. See how easy that is David?”

Easy to apologize, he means. Now, I realize the blog is pretty much a loose-tie forum. Still it strikes me as bad manners to go around calling someone a weenie and bandying about their first name, while hiding behind the “Anonymous” handle. Also having reread Eberstadt’s chapter on day care, I am satisfied that my formulation was faithful if unnecessarily provocative, for which I most certainly do not apologize. As to the rightness or necessity of day care, I will not even consider visiting that topic until Mr. Anonymous tells me who he really is.

“Have some beer. It’ll wake you up.” Now I am certain no one has ever said this to you. But that may change in the near future. According to Peter Carlson in today’s Washington Post, Anheuser-Busch is rolling out its latest beer, one that contains 54 milligrams of caffeine. So is this a good thing or a bad thing? (It technically isn’t a new thing since people have imbibed in Red Bull/vodkas for years and smaller brands of caffeinated beer have appeared in a few local markets.) But as Carlson sums up, “Until now, beer guzzling was a self-regulating activity. Sure, drinking too much made you do stupid things. But drinking too much also tended to make you fall asleep before you got into trouble. Passing out is nature’s way of saying you drank too much, and it has saved many a beer drinker from acute embarrassment. But with caffeine keeping beer drinkers cranked up, there’s no end to the fun. Which could get ugly.”

Kathy Nelson is looking for some book suggestions for a friend who’s a French translator. The call is out for: “Books by North American authors (recent enough to not have been translated yet, and not too famous). The general field is ‘man in politics and society, with family or sentimental background’ and he was told to look for something along the lines of Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen, with strong viewpoints and a good style.”

I’m out of ammo on this one, but if you have ideas, drop by Kathy’s excellent blog with them. Come to think of it, Skinner probably has ten novels which will come to mind instantly. He’s smart like that. David?

Was socializing this weekend with some political friends and the subject turned to ‘08. I brought down a storm of no friggin ways by mentioning my favorite American governor, Jeb Bush, about whom, truth be told, I feel much stronger than I did about Bush pre-2000. When I tired of insisting that I’m no monarchist, I shifted the debate to John McCain’s health. In this incredibly self-selected neocon-to-moderate-left room, the Arizona senator was the consensus candidate, though the first thing we talked about was his age and health. And as Bob Dole knows, it’s not a good thing when voters are fixated by your relative frailty. (McCain will be 72 in 2008; Ronald Reagan was 73 when he ran for reelection.) The liberals in the room were concerned that McCain’s not vicious enough to win (though this may have had something to do with their idiosyncratic view that he basically surrendered to Bush dirty tactics in the South Carolina primary.) After McCain, Rudy was the talk, though with warning signs given his recent weird behavior in the Bernard Kerik-nomination fiasco. A bum nomination is one thing; gloating in your failure afterwards is just bizarre. Hamminess in general, though a good character trait in New York City politics (see Ed Koch), is decidedly unpresidential—though it’s certainly preferable to the all-around lame-O-ness of Governor Pataki, who brings all the liberal politics of, but none of the successes of, none of the character of, and none of the matrimonial difficulty of Giuliani. Actually, Jeb’s looking better all the time.