This would qualify for investors as a "good day" (emphasis mine):

Google Inc. continues to confound the skeptics who thought the online search engine leader would sputter after striking it rich in a closely watched IPO last summer. The Mountain View-based company reported Tuesday that its fourth-quarter profit improved sevenfold from the previous year, much to Wall Street's delight. Investors appeared ready to push Google's stock to a new high when trading begins Wednesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Google's likely to look at Microsoft's unveiled search engine less as a challenge than motivation to do better. I'm considering a slight investment.

If two leftists, one a prominent comedian-turned-cavalier and the other a Chicago columnist, are publicly revealing doubt in their world view, we can be sure millions more — political devotees and true-'til-death, FDR/JFK Democrats alike — are doing the same. President Bush's victory was strong enough a domestic repudiation of leftism that relativism's soft bigotry in matters of polity overseas, its assertion that culture restricts governance, is simply unsustainable in the wake of the Iraqi people's stunning success. Absent applicable principles against a president bursting with them, the left has spent the last five years playing contrarian, throwing caution, logic and taste to the wind.

It's a lucky leftist who has the sense to at least consider divesting his identity from an ideological loser. The resemblance of leftism's internal logic and dictated behavior to that of typical adolescence is uncanny. The Western left flourishes in privilege and ensconces itself in a routine of impugning, heckling and disrupting the very forces that provide it privilege (and the means to impugn, heckle and disrupt). Leftism unfurled is an endless replay of teen rebellion; America and the Anglosphere as Mom and Dad, capitalism as the summer job you're forced to take. The military as those mean, lazy cops. It's so easy: Pick your 7-inch B-side anthem about the world hating you, you hating the world, you hating the world and yourself, and go. (Where else but teen angst-rock and leftism does one find so much self-loathing?) Choose a problem and blame those with the most responsibility yet the least culpability. Adopt the vague desire that you want to be somewhere else, telling everyone around you, but instead of leaving, stay home — cozy, free to complain and massage your non-falsifiable propositions. Until 2001, you were always lucky enough that no one put you in your place, since they figured you had time to grow the hell up.

Time ran out nearly four years ago.

ONE REASON FOR BEING UNEQUIVOCAL: Some people don't appreciate the first free election of their lives begrudged "a kind of legitimacy," and they're exactly right not to.

UNLIKELY REFLECTION: When even the morally confused, irritating Chris Matthews, talking with Don Imus about the Democratic Party, wonders "if they're grown ups," we can be certain we're talking about the same thing.

Good economic news just keeps rolling off the assembly line:

The manufacturing sector grew for the 20th consecutive month in January, though at a moderated pace, a private research group reported Tuesday, affirming the rebound in activity at the nations' factories. ...Although the index declined [to 56.4], the fact that it remained above 50 indicates that the sector continued to grow last month but at a somewhat slower pace. A reading of 50 or above in the index means the manufacturing sector is expanding, while a figure below 50 represents a contraction.

Norbert J. Ore, chairman of the institute's survey committee, said the January index reflects continued strength in manufacturing, with both production and employment picking up.

"January sets the tone for a strong first quarter. Even though the (index) is slightly lower, the month-over-month growth is still quite strong, and will provide significant momentum for the remainder" of the quarter, Ore said. "Demand for exports continues to be quite strong, with a number of industries reporting significant growth."

Elsewhere in the market, construction is in its best shape since 1996. It's as if — out on a limb, here — the economy were nothing like the dud journalists described to us through nearly all of last year!

I'm philosophical by nature — which is just as well, as I find those who pore over details risk dwelling on them at the expense of larger proceedings. When critics of the Bush administration's war room descend to the operational level I stop listening — it's too great an insult to assume that the fine minds in uniform and out aren't daily observing, collecting, analyzing, adjusting, thrusting or retracting. The leftist media's mischaracterization of our forces as passive and ineffective has been, in the absence of such a clear victory as Election Sunday's, as irriguous as it is ubiquitous, leaving even the most well-intentioned commentators with popular premises ranging from distorted to fictional. All have the right to speak, of course, if not to be believed.

Before the Iraqi campaign began I was more critical of events because I feared that diplomatic and bureaucratic inertia would halt President Bush's effort to resume progress after a decade of "sabbatical," as Bush himself put it. I champed while President Bush and Tony Blair wandered through the circular halls of Secretariat and I strained at their simplification of the Allies' case for war against Saddam Hussein.

Two thoughts. First: it is apparent that some of that disappointment was well-founded. Wretchard of Belmont Club, skillfully balancing fact with principle and wielding history not as a harangue but as a guide to the future, drew a straight line from fourteen months of inaction to the greatest challenges facing our troops' victory over Iraq's former and would-be oppressors. He reiterates today:

Faced with an invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam carried out his own sideslip maneuver into a redoubt. The Duelfer report notes that Saddam may have begun moving his WMD materials into Syria as the US vainly attempted to get UN authorization to topple his regime. ...At least some of that was the key munition of modern terrorist warfare — money.

...About 600,000 tons of munitions were dispersed throughout the country of which 100,000 tons — five Hiroshima bombs worth of explosive — were taken to Anbar province in the Sunni Triangle alone.

Second: if the President's State of the Union is to be as unapologetic a rejection of old geopolitics as his inaugural address, his administration will have — like the military — learned from experience.

A fatter wallet spells higher sales:

Personal income, boosted by a large dividend payment from computer software giant Microsoft Corp., shot up by a record 3.7 percent in December. That helped to boost consumer spending during the all-important holiday season by 0.8 percent. The Commerce Department reported Monday that the income gain would have been a smaller 0.6 percent in December without the one-time $3 per share dividend payment Microsoft made on Dec. 2. Even that reduced figure would have been an improvement over the 0.4 percent rise in personal incomes in November.

...For all of 2004, personal incomes increased by 5.4 percent, the largest annual advance since an 8 percent jump in 2000, the last full year of the decade-long economic expansion.

One could even argue that 2000's increases were still a reflection of the "irrational exuberance" filling the stock market bubble — and that this expansion is for real.

If the equality of all men under God is to carry any meaning, we must accept the passion of those who today do not live in freedom as an unlawful but temporary deprivation.

So justice has arrived in Iraq, riding on a ballot.

VICTORY COMES IN THREE-QUARTERS?: Initial reports have Iraqi election officials estimating 72% voter turnout. [Subsequent returns suggest about 60% turnout, equal to or greater than America's "historic" turnout for the 2004 elections.]

DEFEND THE MANDATE: Recognizing political defeat, the left has already begun to shift from undermining the elections to undervaluing their earth-moving success. We will hear how voting will do nothing to stop the authoritarian invasion in Iraq — how, after all that has been won by men and women of all banner and creed, all is still lost.

So we should not dwell on the fact that the left continues to spin a new web but on why the left is spinning a new web. Why? They lost: a British election, an Australian election, an American election.

And now the first constitutionally authoritative Iraqi election.

The caption reads:

Seventy-year-old Iraqi exile Mehsin Imgoter leans on the ballot box and weeps after casting his vote in Iraq's National election at a polling place in the Detroit suburb of Southgate, Michigan, January 28, 2005. Voters are electing a 275-member Assembly, which will draft Iraq's Constitution. As Imgoter wept, he said he wished his [deceased son] was here with him. His son was killed in Iraq during the 1990-91 Iraq uprising that was crushed by Saddam Hussein's regime.

Imgoter's son is gone, but the dream is not. (Thanks to Powerline.)

Spirit of America's coverage of the Iraqi elections begins at 2:00 PM EST on C-SPAN. For the C-SPAN habitués I know, this is the making of history you want to watch.

STENOGRAPHERS: Friends of Democracy will be providing web-based coverage from Iraq. Via Roger Simon, a political debate in the Japanese-protected city of Samawah.

DETAILS: Upon closer inspection Jim Hake's outfit was negotiating with C-SPAN for broadcast. At a quarter after two, the network is playing a recent, droning diatribe of failed presidential candidate John Kerry's. [Of course it wasn't on, it was Saturday! Oh. Forgive a man for his excitement, eh? — ed.]

Ali Fadhil defies his detractors. He hasn't got time for such corn. He's about to vote:

All my life like all Iraqis, I was not in control of my life. I started looking to myself as a humanist many years ago. Maybe it's because I lost belief in my government and even sometimes in my country and my people. My country was just a stupid large piece of dirt that meant nothing and offered nothing to me but suffering and humiliation. I decided many times to leave my country although it was risky as doctors were not allowed to travel outside Iraq except for minor exceptions. I decided to search for a better living outside that hell of a country and away from any tyranny and on one occasion I even got a faked passport and was about to leave when I changed my mind at the last moment. I asked myself how could I call myself a humanist when I run away from my responsibilities towards my fellow humans (not Iraqis) when things get tough. And if I run away and all those who care and who long for a change do the same, who's going to stay and at least try to make the change. I saw that I was being a hypocrite by trying to leave Iraq. I decided that this piece of dirt is my home not because I was born in it but because I can be more useful to humanity here.

Now, and thanks to other humans, not from my area, religion and who don't even speak my language, I and all Iraqis have the real chance to make the change. Now I OWN my home and I can decide who's going to run things in it and how and I won't waste that chance. Tomorrow as I cast my vote, I'll regain my home. I'll regain my humanity and my dignity, as I stand and fulfill part of my responsibilities to this part of the large brotherhood of humanity. ...Tomorrow my heart will race my hand to the box. Tomorrow I'll race even the sun to the voting centre, my Ka'aba and my Mecca. I'm so excited and so happy that I can't even feel the fear I though I would have at this time.

I can't wait until tomorrow.

Through the challenges of murderers, the doubt and contempt of the selfish and cold-hearted, Ali and his countrymen continue forward. For that, they cannot and will not be defeated.

DAWN: Says Ali's brother, Mohammed, "On Sunday, the sun will rise on the land of Mesopotamia. I can't wait, the dream is becoming true and I will stand in front of the box to put my heart in it."

The Fox News website lead at 9:00 EST:

MSNBC's website lead at 9:00 EST:

How interesting. One news network believes it is reporting on the defense of democracy, while the other is sure there won't be any democracy to defend.

It's striking to note that:

Despite that provision of uninviting news, Fox News informs us of the breakthrough captures of associates of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, measures taken by Iraqi citizens in response to curfews and vehicle lockdowns, and the daily and growing cooperation between Allied and Iraqi armed forces.

MSNBC, meanwhile, leads with a questionable comment made by President Ghazi al-Yawer, whose prediction of "low turnout" is contradicted by incredible empirical and anecdotal evidence. Its "MSNBC TV" tease answers the question some have asked of Senator Ted Kennedy's bilious speech of surrender and abandonment: why now? So that sympathetic press outlets could use its incoherent content in place of serious discussion. Furthermore, Rich Lowry's prediction, based on discussions with insiders, that the leftist media would try to undermine elections with the notion that any measure of Sunni participation was too little and that terrorist violence would grow in severity, is an accurate one.

However the election turns out, Iraqis and their friends must always remember that they were betrayed and left for dead — by small but influencial numbers of noneother than those living and thriving in freedoms for which Iraqis were daily sacrificing their lives.