Jay Reding.com

Another year is upon us, and with the dawn of a new year comes the typical year-end predictions. So, without further ado, here’s my list of predictions for 2006, in no particular order:

• Apple will release a widescreen Intel-based iBook at MacWorld this year.
• Alito will be handily confirmed to the Supreme Court.
• Rick Santorum will lose to Bob Casey in PA, but by a narrower margin then one would think.
• Saddam Hussein will be found guilty of genocide and sentenced to death by an Iraqi court.
• The New York Times will abandon their TimesSelect experiment and realize that people won’t pay to read Maureen Dowd’s bleatings. In an ironic twist, the NYT will start a blog.
• Video podcasting won’t take off. Video porn podcasting will.
• Downloadable TV will take off big-time as Apple announces a media center device capable of playing downloadable HD-quality video - shows like Battlestar Galactica will top 1,000,000 downloads before the end of the year.
• Firefox’s market share will continue to rise.
• Windows Vista will be released, but will see anemic sales. Meanwhile, Apple’s marketshare will continue to rise with the new Intel-based Macs.
• The balance of power in Congress will remain roughly where it is, but the GOP will lose a few House seats and at least 2 Senate seats.
• Every candidate endorsed by Kos will lose.
• Donald Rumsfeld will resign as Secretary of Defense by Spring. The Democrats, not able to control themselves, will threaten a filibuster of his replacement, causing their polling numbers to plummet.
• By the end of 2006, women will represent a majority of bloggers.
• Iran will test a nuclear weapon.
• Israel will officially announce that they have nuclear weapons, and will state that any attack against Israel will result in nuclear retaliation.
• Al-Qaeda will shift their focus from Iraq to trying to provoke a war between Israel and the Arab world.
• Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi will commit suicide after being cornered by Iraqi troops along the Iraq/Syria border.
• President Emilie Lahoud of Lebanon will be forced to resign as Lebanon continues to fight back against Syria.
• Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will be reelected in Israel, but by a narrow margin, forcing him to work with Binyamin Netanyahu in a tension-filled coalition government.
• Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad will be assassinated, with Iranian officials blaming Israel for his death. A more reformist leader will take his place, but Iran will remain largely totalitarian.
• The Palestinian Authority will collapse as Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and Hizb’Allah end up fighting each other for control. Mahmoud Abbas will be forced to flee as members of his government are rounded up and killed. Israel will announce that they are sealing all borders with Gaza and the West Bank until the violence subsides.
• Osama bin Laden will not be captured, nor will Ayman al-Zawahiri.
• The US GDP will grow at 3+% in 2006. The EU economy will barely grow at all. Western European companies will increasingly rely on outsourcing to Eastern Europe, causing the EU to try and stem the flow, creating an even wide chasm between East and West in the EU.

We’ll see how well I did in late December 2006…

UPDATE: Federal Review weighs on in my predictions. Winston predicts a Kadima-Labour government, and the polls make that seem likely. I could see Sharon conceding on some economic issues in order to keep Labour in and Netanyahu isolated…

UPDATE: How could I forget the most important prediction of all?

• The biggest hit movie of 2006? Forget Superman - think SNAKES ON A PLANE. That’s right - a movie about a plane with deadly snakes on it. If that isn’t pure cinema genius, what is?

Last year I made my annual predictions for the coming year. Let’s just say the old crystal ball must have been a bit cloudy, because I didn’t do all that well. Without further ado, let’s take the Wayback Machine back a year:

The elections in Iraq will have sporadic violence, but will still result in a win for pro-democracy forces. After the elections, the violence in Iraq will steadily taper down although not disappear entirely.

Well, this one was partially right. The Shi’ite list won, there were several months of horsetrading, a constitution was approved, and parliamentary elections were held. The level of violence has decreased in some areas, but increased in others. There’s a lot of good news from Iraq, but the process is ongoing. The new split between the secularist Maram bloc and the United Iraqi List will be the thing to watch over the next few weeks.

After the elections in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld will decide to step down as Secretary of Defense, citing family reasons.

Maybe in 2006.

In the wake of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Vladimir Putin will face increasing calls for his resignation due to the increasing authoritarianism of the Russian government.

Putin, though marginalized internationally, remains popular in Russia despite his increasing authoritarianism.

Fidel Castro will die, causing a brief chaos as his son Raul tries to take control of the government. However, with the help of Cuban exiles in Florida, massive pro-democracy protests will force the Cuban regime to hold free elections in which reformist candidates win decisively. After the elections, the sanctions on Cuba will be lifted and the Cuban economy will skyrocket due to a massive influx of US tourists.

Not yet, although one can hope that the old tyrant will shuffle off his mortal coil sooner or later.

The exodus from Movable Type to WordPress will only increase along with comment spam attacks.

This one was true - quite a number of blogs have switched from Movable Type to WordPress, and as WordPress continues to improve I’d suspect that trend will continue.

The hot gadget of 2005 will be the Motorola/Apple iPhone announced at MacWorld San Francisco in January.

The iPhone wasn’t introduced until late in the year, and it was a rather large disappointment. The iPod remains the gadget of the year, with the new video-capable model being a hot item for the holidays. Get ready for the Intel widescreen iBook in 2006…

Mozilla Firefox will end the year with a marketshare of over 25%. (In some cases, it’s nearly there already.)

On this site, it’s 20-30%. Overall, Firefox usage is probably less than 10%. Still, those of you still using Internet Explorer - what the hell are you thinking?

Iran will become a nuclear power.

Unless Israel or someone else decides to take matters into their own hands, this seems like something that will happen in 2006.

Osama bin Laden will be shot by US forces trying to flee from a raid along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Not yet, although again, one can hope.

Ayman al-Zawahiri will be captured shortly after.

See above.

Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi will be betrayed by Iraqi Sunni clerics seeking an end to the violence in their country. His badly mutilated remains will be found some days later outside Fallujah.

Al-Zarqawi is doing his best to alienate everyone. He’s already been disowned by his own family. One of these days, someone with a beef against him will take him out - unless he goes deep underground. I’m still thinking that this prediction may hold true in 2006.

President Bush will nominate Ted Olson to serve as Chief Justice after Justice Rehnquist succombs to cancer.

Nope…

Michael Moore will marry Anna Nicole Smith in a secret Vegas ceremony. Those two massive walking trainwrecks were made for each other.

Fortunately that prediction didn’t come to pass either. Scientists now believe that such a pairing would result in the creation of an ultra-dense singularity from which no common sense or tact could escape.

President Bush will get serious about cutting the deficit, making him much more popular among conservatives and much less among everyone else. The projected deficit will go down due to lowered spending and increased economic growth.

Sigh… if only that were true. Counting on fiscal discipline from this Administration seems to be a fools errand…

The MoveOn wackos will break away from the Democrats after Howard Dean is rejected as head of the DNC. The organization will disband due to internal squabbles shortly afterwards.

Instead, we get the opposite - the MoveOn wackos now seem to control the Democratic Party. And we have Chairman Howard Dean of the DNC, which is great for comics and GOP pundits, but certainly not a healthy thing for the DNC.

Kim Jung Il will remain in seclusion, fueling speculation that he had died some time ago. No one will know for sure, and the North Korean government will continue to be the most oppressive on Earth.

Kim Jung Il seems to still be alive (and ronery!), and North Korea still remains a Stalinist hellhole. So at least I got the obvious part right.

We’ll all be a year older.

Other than certain Democratic leaders who appear to have regressed into two-year olds, that one’s a given.

Coming later today - my predictions for 2006…

Don’t forget to check out Michael J. Totten’s brilliant essay on being a tourist in Tripoli and his experience in the fascist wonderland of Qaddafi’s Libya.

Captain Ed notes a key Establishment Clause decision from the Sixth Circuit that explicitly rejects the doctrine of a “wall of separation between church and state”. That language appears nowhere in the text of the Constitution, but in a letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association. While Jefferson may have been a brilliant man, the doctrine of the “wall of separation” has been used as a justification for removing all influences of religion from the public square.

Former Justice Hugo Black popularized the “wall of separation” doctrine in the 1947 case of Everson v. Board of Education - a case which ironically upheld the right for public funds to be allocated to transportation to parochial schools.

The late Chief Justice Rehnquist put it best in Wallace v. Jaffree:

The ‘wall of separation between church and State’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned… The crucible of litigation has produced only consistent unpredictability, and today’s effort is just a continuation of the sisyphean task of trying to patch together the ‘blurred, indistinct and variable barrier’ described in Lemon. We have done much straining since 1947, but still we admit that we can only ‘dimly perceive’ the Everson wall. Our perception has been clouded not by the Constitution, but by the mists of an unnecessary metaphor.

The “wall of separation” doctrine should be set aside for the reasons that Rehnquist and the Sixth Circuit elucidated. Jefferson’s private correspondence may be of interest, but it is not a standing legal doctrine. It does not have the force of law, and it argues for an impossible standard - the Founders certainly didn’t perceive such a wall or they would have made it explicit within the First Amendment. There were plenty of issues of contention during and after the framing of the Constitution, but an exegesis of those opinions must always take a back seat to the wording of the Constitution itself. Justice Black’s usage of the Danbury Baptist letters represented an extra-textual judgement that has had a profoundly confusing effect on the state of Establishment Clause jurisprudence.

A reasonable person would not argue that the presence of the Ten Commandments in a government building constitutes an “establishment” of religion anymore than a statute of Hammurabi is an endorsement of worshipping Marduk. It is simply impossible to erase or conceal the profound influence of religious and especially Judeo-Christian themes in American law and society - and an idea is not invalid, unjust, or wrong merely because it has a religious connotation. The doctrine of a “wall of separation” is simply a poor metaphor and unworkable in reality, and the Supreme Court should follow the Sixth Circuit in repudiating it as an operative standard of legal judgment.

Has a prototype of a future iPod based on organic technology been inadvertently released?