I don't doubt that Malkin can be and has been warm-hearted and frivolous, but I bet it has nothing or little to do with the stands she espouses. At the very least, I like to think that the positions I hold are semi-well thought out and designed to make a better world for my kids (and now grandkid.) Pulling up the drawbridge just flat doesn't do that.

BTW, I had to giggle at this: Danger or opportunity. Danger IS opportunity. I want to be over there, too.

Actually she has on occasion posted somewhat less-serious items -- I remember one where she wrote about how much she loved her new Roomba (that little automatic vacuum cleaner that operates by itself). But considering the sort of things freakish lefties have said about her it's no wonder she doesn't say more about her personal life, and her blog seems to be more a political blog than a personal one (which would be more of a venue for "frivolous" postings).

Another thing: there are a lot of political blogs run by men that don't seem to ever have anything "lighthearted or frivolous" posted in them either. I hope you're not falling into the trap of becoming disturbed at the spectacle of a woman only showing her serious side, and thinking that means she only has a serious side. This is a mistake both men and women seem to make all the time. No one complains about a man not showing us anything but his "public" face, because the underlying cultural assumption is that 1) men are supposed to both focus, 2) they are supposed to hide or disregard superfluous personal feelings in public, 3) they don't have any personal feelings about anything anyway. But women are still seen as that half of the human race with "feelings," so they get stuck with people asking them about their kids and their hair and clothes when the subject is something else entirely.

And I forgot to add: being accused of being "cold" when they try to turn the subject back to the one at hand.

Well, I HOPE I'm not falling into that trap, Andrea.What I think I'm getting at are that her two big topics are illegal immigration (and any immigration, I suspect), and the evils of the Moslem world.

And both these topics are about people. And one of those groups I occasionally run into, and the other I encounter in various ways through the Internet. Both have lots of people you or I would be happy to have as friends or neighbors. But you would never guess such a thing from reading Malkin.

And Malkin gets named, because no one else is quite so obsessive, but I see the same pattern elsewhere. Bill Quick springs to mind. He recently said that democracy won't last 10 minutes in Iraq if we pull out.

That repels me, both as blanket scorn for a lot of people, but also as contempt for the idea of human possibility, of change for the better. Similarly for the many who are claiming that the Palestinians will never grow out of terrorism. They bombard us with stories of Palestinian perfidy, and God knows there's a lot of it. But if they encountered a story about some ordinary Palestinians who wanted to live peaceably, it would never be blogged.

And it's a "cold" outlook to me, because it only sees things and people getting worse. That kind of change they believe in. "Cold" is probably the wrong word to use (I don't know a term for what I mean). But I look out and see a world where Africa is sending missionaries to evangelize Europe, and India is giving foreign aid to poorer countries, and winning the Deming Prize, and I think, well, "the last shall be first." And I'm happy about such amazing changes...

there are a lot of political blogs run by men that don't seem to ever have anything "lighthearted or frivolous" posted in them either.

I call those "boring."

In this ports case, it's not politics so much as principle, which shouldn't be boring. It's the only reason I read her, to see what that clique had to say about what I think of as a first principle. I wasn't impressed, and her reasoning was faux-passionate (Security!) but extremely cold in reality.

I'll say it again -- she's got her mediot gig, Boeing (and by extension, the rest of us little globalist shopkeepers) can go hang. It's not rare, man or woman, in the shrieking head class, and it filters into the rest of her work. That I've read, of course.

She convinced me of her "conversion syndrome" when she turned on her heritage and tried to justify the internment of US citizens of Japanese origins during WW II. Anybody who could write a book like "In Defense of Internment" as having any relevance to today's National security/civil liberties issues is simply deranged. Basically she uses some sketchy evidence of a domestic spy ring to justify internment of over 100,000 people, most of whom she acknowledges were innocent, and then has the audacity to say they were offered just compensation for lost homes and businesses after the war. The woman is a witch.

Well, her heritage is Filipino, so she probably has some excellent reasons to detest both Japanese and Moslems. BUT, her heritage is also immigrant, and that feels fishy to me. (And her parents came from a country with lots of terrorists. Maybe we should intern Filipinos, to guard against another Ramzi Yousef.)

And the argument of that book is pure BS--The largest group of Japanese-Americans, in Hawaii, was NOT interned because they were needed in the labor pool there! And you deal with spy rings by turning them, and using them to feed false information to their masters. The Allies did a lot of that in WWII.

And when I think about that book, which argues that an alien and inscrutable Asian ethnic group was dangerous, written by a person from another Asian group that seems odd and opaque to many of us. (and I mostly like and appreciate the many Filipinos around here, but they do seem strange and kooky at times.) And written by someone who obsesses over the dangers from brown-skinned hordes flooding over our borders, and obsesses over the alien evilness of a billion or so Muslims...

I have to suspect that there's something very odd going on in her head...