HOW HARD IS IT TO SINK THE MAINE?

Some Iraqi Scientists Are Cooperating, CIA Weapons Adviser Says: 'Solid Evidence' of WMD Programs Being
Gathered, Kay Tells Senate Committee (Walter Pincus, July 31, 2003, The Washington Post)

Some Iraq scientists are cooperating in the hunt for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, including leading searchers to sensitive sites, according to David Kay, the CIA's adviser on the search for weapons.

After appearing this morning for three hours before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay told reporters, "We are gaining the cooperation, the active cooperation of Iraqis who were involved in that program. We are, as we speak, involved in sensitive exploitation of sites that we are being led to by Iraqis."

While Kay said "solid evidence" is being produced, it would not be made public "until we have full confidence it is solid proof of what we're to talk about."

Kay took issue with a story in today's Washington Post that quoted administration sources as saying the Iraqi Survey Team, which Kay is helping direct, is studying documents but not visiting sites.

Kay said sites being visited are new and "almost every one of them is one that we did not know about until we were led to it by Iraqis or the documentation we have seized."

Just plant some stuff and come home.

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FROM WICKED CARRY US AWAY

Six Jews airlifted to Israel from Iraq (Debbie Berman, July 27, 2003, Israel Insider)

Six elderly Iraqi Jews were airlifted on a Jordanian jet from Baghdad to Israel in a secret immigration mission this weekend.

The mission, entitled Ezra Me'Zion [Help from Zion], was jointly coordinated by the Jewish Agency and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which have been investigating the status of the Jewish community in the country since the American war against Iraq. [...]

Jews were exiled 2,700 years ago by King Nebuchadnezzar to Babylonia, where they formed one of the most influential Jewish Diaspora communities whose crowning achievement was the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud. In the early 1950s some 130,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to Israel during the "Ezra and Nehemiah" campaign, named after the Babylonian Jewish leaders referenced in the Bible. An additional 10,000 Jews gradually the country gradually left the country during the ensuing years. [...]

Although the remnant of the once-flourishing Diaspora community now live in poverty and fear, 29 Iraqi Jews declined the offer to relocate to Israel.

The remaining Jews do not function as a community, do not attend services in Baghdad's Meir Tweig Synagogue, and have almost no contact with each other. Most rarely leave their homes in fear that their Jewish identity will be discovered.

HIA Vice President Rachel Zelon described the poor living conditions of Iraqi Jews, whose possessions were confiscated by the state during Saddam Hussein's regime: "Most of them live in bitter poverty in subhuman conditions...The small Jewish community has been living in a society that hates Israel and despises Jews. Most of them tried to hide their Jewish identities, telling only close friends."

No truth to the rumor that the plane flew the whole way with its left turn signal on.

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IF HE WERE ANY DUMBER...PART II (via John Resnick)

Ideology and the courts (William F. Buckley Jr., July 30, 2003, Sacramento Bee)

The observer I write of is a liberal, even though he is very bright and has been extensively educated (Yale, Rhodes scholar, Supreme Court clerk). What brought him to utter despair was the nomination a fortnight ago of Janice Rogers Brown to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. What is wrong here, in his view, is the following:

-- The D.C. Circuit is the second most influential court in the United States. Its decisions are often if not themselves dispositive, way stations to the Supreme Court on constitutional issues. An ill-advised nomination to a relatively obscure court of appeals is less damaging, potentially, than a nomination to this court.

-- Ms. Brown's deliberative qualifications are inconspicuous. She sits now on the California Supreme Court, where she has done nothing of note. Before that she was legal affairs secretary to Gov. Pete Wilson. There she exercised administrative responsibilities and served as legal liaison between the governor's office and the executive departments. Before that, she practiced law, specializing in transportation and housing.

-- She has ruled against affirmative action and against abortion rights.

-- Ms. Brown is an African-American. She would be the third woman appointed to the Supreme Court, if she traveled from the D.C. Court upstairs, that being the implicit logic in her nomination. To filibuster against a black woman would test the mettle of the hardiest liberal, leaving us with a journey undertaken that would land an(other) ideologue on the Supreme Court of the United States.

The administrative experience bodes well for making her Chief.

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THE BURNING TIME

King of Morocco outlaws Islamic parties on fourth anniversary of his reign (Elizabeth Nash, 01 August 2003, The Independent)

King Mohammed of Morocco has declared that Islamic parties will be banned, insisting he is the North African country's only representative of Islam. [...]

On the eve of King Mohammed's anniversary, Algeria offered to end decades of tension with its neighbour, and to re-establish links. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika told Morocco that he wanted "to close ranks and strengthen relations ... between our two countries".

Both countries want to please the US and are likely to be responsive to American desires to secure oil and gas supplies, and to guarantee stability in the region. The rapprochement is thought to augur a possible solution to the Western Sahara conflict...

Morocco is one of the nations that Fareed Zakaria mentions in his Future of Freedom as potentially becoming a liberal democracy in the not too distant future. One of the key elements--and it's startling when you hear the statistic--is that it has a per capita GDP between $3,000 and $6,000. Amazing, isn't it, that such a low standard of living by our terms offers such stability by the rest of the world's?

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IF HE WERE ANY DUMBER... (via Mike Daley)

State Dept. Sees North Korea as Ready for 6-Way Negotiations (DAVID STOUT, July 31, 2003, NY Times)

North Korea now appears to be ready to talk to the United States and four other nations about its nuclear weapons program in what could be a significant diplomatic thaw, Bush administration officials said today.

The North Korean government has long insisted on one-on-one talks with Washington on nuclear issues, but the Bush administration has always rejected that idea, saying it would not give in to what it called "blackmail."

So if North Korea has indeed shifted its stance, and if the shift is more than momentary, the way could be open for talks that would include not only diplomats from Pyongyang and Washington but representatives from China, South Korea, Russia and Japan as well. There was no immediate word on where or when these new talks might take place

What does that make the score?

Shrub--12

Conventional Wisdom--0

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THE EMPIRE EXPANDS AS THE LEFT COLLUDES

West African leaders pledge peace force, Taylor's departure (Alexandra Zavis, 7/31/2003, AP)

West African leaders committed Thursday to deploy the first peace troops to warring Liberia by the start of next week, and said President Charles Taylor would go into exile three days later.

The leaders, meeting in Ghana, agreed to send a vanguard of 1,500 peacekeepers, expected to be two battalions from Nigeria. Ghana, Mali, Benin, Senegal and Togo also have promised 3,250 soldiers for an eventual 5,000-strong force. [...]

In Monrovia, tens of thousands of Liberians emerged from hiding places Thursday to welcome a West African-U.S. advance team they hoped signaled the imminent arrival of peacekeepers.

People in Liberia's capital passed one of the quietest nights in the last two months of rebel offensives against government forces. Gunfire rattled, but there was some relief from the rocket and mortar volleys of recent days, allowing starving families to scurry out in search of food.

The advance team of 10 West African and U.S. officials, which is led by a Nigerian commander and has one American, set off jubilant celebrations in Monrovia as it passed shacks with tin roofs peeled back by explosives. Unexploded shells laid in the streets.

''This is a sign of peace coming,'' refugee Hamilton Woods said with a smile.

Let's hope Mr. Woods is right.

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NO PRIDE HERE

Bush Says He Respects Gays, But Opposes Their Marrying (AP & Wall Street Journal, 7/31/2003)

"I think it is very important for our society to respect each individual, to welcome those with good hearts, to be a welcoming country," Mr. Bush said....

"I am mindful that we're all sinners, and I caution those who may try to take the speck out of the neighbor's eye when they got a log in their own," the president said, invoking a biblical passage from the Gospel of St. Matthew....

Gay-rights activists took offense at Mr. Bush's comment that "we're all sinners," interpreting the remark as directed at them.

"While we respect President Bush's religious views, it is unbecoming of the president of the United States to characterize same-sex couples as "sinners,'" said Matt Foreman, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's executive director. "It's also sad that, at a moment in history that cries out for leadership and moral courage, President Bush has instead opted for the divisive, anti-gay politics of the past."

We'll get right on those revisions of Christian theology, Mr. Foreman, now that we know that gays, like Christ, do not sin.

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THE NEW DEMOCRATS?

Backers pressure Gore to run again next year (Alexander Bolton, 7/30/03, The Hill)

Former Vice-President Al Gore is coming under pressure from political supporters and friends to jump into the 2004 presidential campaign even though he ruled himself out in December.

Gore’s spokesperson denied that there was any change of plans, but a former Democratic National Committee official close to Gore told The Hill he believes the former vice president may enter the Democratic primary this fall. [...]

A Time/CNN poll conducted between May 21 and 22 showed that if Gore changed his mind and ran for president, 40 percent of Democrats and Independents who lean Democratic nationwide would vote for him. The Democratic runners-up, Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.), Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), and Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.), would each draw 7 percent of that vote. [...]

The fluid situation has apparently kept a core group of Democratic fundraisers who played key roles in Gore’s 2000 campaign to remain aloof from the current candidates despite being courted intensely.

As visions of Adlai Stevenson dance in his head.

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MEDIEVAL McCARTHYISM

Who Burned the Witches? (Sandra Miesel, October 2001, The Crisis)

Since the Enlightenment, rationalists have liked to cite witch-burning as a prime example of medieval ignorance and religious (usually Catholic) bigotry run amok. (Leftists today still denounce it as a cynical plot by the strong against the weak.) Writing history that way was simple: Historians catalogued horrors, disparaged religion (or at least someone else's religion), and celebrated the triumph of science and liberal government. The history of witchcraft seemed a settled issue in 1969 when Hugh Trevor-Roper published his classic essay, "The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries."

[H]istorians have now realized that witch-hunting was not primarily a medieval phenomenon. It peaked in the 17th century, during the
rationalist age of Descartes, Newton, and St. Vincent de Paul. Persecuting suspected witches was not an elite plot against the poor; nor was practicing witchcraft a mode of peasant resistance. Catholics and Protestants hunted witches with comparable vigor. Church and state
alike tried and executed them. It took more than pure Reason to end the witch craze.

Nor were witches secret pagans serving an ancient Triple Goddess and Horned God, as the neopagans claim. In fact, no witch was ever executed for worshiping a pagan deity. Matilda Gage's estimate of nine million women burned is more than 200 times the best current estimate of 30,000 to 50,000 killed during the 400 years from 1400 to 1800-a large number but no Holocaust. And it wasn't all a burning time. Witches were hanged, strangled, and beheaded as well. Witch-hunting was not woman-hunting: At least 20 percent of all suspected witches were male. Midwives were not especially targeted; nor were witches liquidated as obstacles to professionalized medicine and mechanistic science.

This revised set of facts should not entirely comfort Catholics, however. Catholics have been misled-at times deliberately misled-about
the Church's role in the witch-hunts by apologists eager to present the Church as innocent of witches' blood so as to refute the Enlightenment theory that witch-burning was almost entirely a Catholic phenomenon. Catholics should know that the thinking that set the great witch-hunt in motion was developed by Catholic clerics before the Reformation. [...]

Slowly, the critics were vindicated, and ashes cooled all across Europe during the 18th century. This was no simple triumph of Enlightenment wisdom. Witch beliefs persisted-as they do today-but witches no longer faced stakes, gallows, or swords. The great witch-panics had left a kind of psychic weariness in their wake. Realizing that innocents had been cruelly sent to their deaths, people no longer trusted their courts' judgments. As Montaigne had written 200 years earlier, "It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have a man roasted alive because of them."

After a 20th century unmatched for bloodshed, the world today is in no position to disparage early modern Europe. Witch-hunts have much in common with our own political purges, imagined conspiracies, and rumors of ritualized child abuse. Our capacity to project enormities on the enemy Other is as strong as ever.

The truth about witch-hunting is worth knowing for its own sake. But the issue has added significance for Catholics because it has provided
ammunition for rationalists, pagans, and radical feminists to attack the Church. It is helpful to know that the number of victims has been grossly exaggerated, and that the reasons for the persecutions had as much to do with social factors as with religious ones.

But although Catholics have been fed comforting errors by overeager apologists about the Church's part in persecuting witches, we must face our own tragic past. Fellow Catholics, to whom we are forever bound in the communion of saints, did sin grievously against people accused of witchcraft. If our historical memory can be truly purified, then the smoke from the Burning Times can finally disperse.

They were witches though, right? So what's the problem? By what logic is a state or society obligated to tolerate those who are so alienated from its organizing principles that they would seek to undermine them? Are constitutions and social covenants in fact suicide pacts?

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NOT IN MY SCHOOL YARD

School Vouchers and Suburbanites (Frederick M. Hess, American Enterprise)

Proponents of school choice today find themselves in much the same position that the social-engineering Left inhabited after LBJ's sweep a generation ago. Their ideas are ascendant, they stand on the side of social justice, they have strong allies and spokespersons, and are winning prominent legal battles. Yet amidst the fruits of victory, something is missing: full approval from the mass of the American middle class.

Like the architects of LBJ's Great Society, voucherites express puzzlement as to why many suburbanites don't share their enthusiasm for school choice. Increasingly, I find myself in education reform meetings where voucher advocates end up quietly berating white suburban families for showing insufficient regard for the education of disadvantaged urban children. Conservative school choice proponents nod along as compelling advocates for the urban underclass--like Howard Fuller, Robert Aguirre, and Floyd Flake--voice frustration that suburban whites have not fully embraced choice as a way to free minority children from failed urban schools.

That's no way to win a policy fight. Thirty years ago, the Great Society's champions berated and nagged middle-class America smack into the arms of the opposition. Enthralled by their own virtue and the elegance of their domestic policy prescriptions, Great Society liberals forgot about simple democratic notions like self-interest, concern about unintended consequences, and the public's natural risk aversion. They tried to guilt-trip the public into supporting their bold reforms. But showing the caution and good sense typical of a democratic majority, voters eventually opted for Republicans and moderate Democrats who were less likely to belittle their reservations.

Conservative advocates for school vouchers risk repeating this mistake. The dominant wings of the voucher movement are free-marketers on the one hand, and urban minorities tired of waiting for public school improvement on the other. The result has been a sometimes awkward marriage that has permitted conservatives to claim the potent language of civil rights, and tempted Republicans into believing they could make political inroads with black and Latino voters.

What these advocates have overlooked is the resistance to vouchers and other choice plans among suburban homeowners. While vouchers routinely win the support of 70 percent or more of urban populations, support levels are barely half that in the suburbs, even in favorably worded polls. This resistance has made voucher proponents increasingly frustrated. Are suburbanites just too naive and timid to see the problems with today's inefficient school monopolies? Or do they not care about issues of equity and equal opportunity?

It's time for choice proponents to recognize that suburban resistance to school choice is entirely rational, based largely on self-interest, and unlikely to go away. Otherwise the political clumsiness of voucherites could eventually create an unfortunate suburban backlash against school choice--in much the same way that ramrodding the Great Society programs through did in the late 1970s.

A number of folks wrote to quarrel with the assertion that the main stumbling block to school choice, at least on the Right, is the fear of Republican legislators that their white constituents don't want inner-city black kids being brought into their kids' schools. Here are a bunch of stories about the phenomenon, which is not particularly a matter of dispute. Please note that our assertion is not an accusation of racism per se: it is entirely reasonable to want to defend the quality of your own child's school and to be worried that an influx of undereducated poor kids will have a negative impact. Their race, though a factor at some level, is to a greater degree incidental.

The broader point remains though: if widespread voucherization of public schools does not become a reality it will not be because of liberal teachers' unions, but because of mainstream Republicans.

MORE:
-School Choice Plans Need Suburbs (Case Western Reserve, 7/10/02)
-The Political Economy of School Choice (James E. Ryan and Michael Heise, Yale Law Journal)

This Article examines the political economy of school choice and focuses on the role of suburbanites. This group has received little attention in the commentary but is probably the most important and powerful stakeholder in choice debates. Suburbanites generally do not support school choice pol- icies either public or private. They are largely satisfied with the schools in their neighborhoods and want to protect the physical and financial independence of those schools, as well as suburban property values, which are tied to the perceived quality of local schools. School choice threatens the independence of suburban schools by creating the possibility that outsiders, especially urban students, will enter suburban schools and that local funds will exit local schools.

When suburbanites face threats to their schools, they fight back, and they usually win. As this Article documents, sub- urbanites succeeded in insulating their schools from prior education reforms, including efforts to integrate schools and alter school funding regimes. A similar pattern is emerging in school choice plans, almost all of which work to protect the physical and financial autonomy of suburban schools and residents. If this pattern continues, school choice plans will be geographically constrained, will tend to be intradistrict, and will exist primarily in urban districts. These constraints will limit the ability of school choice to stimulate student academic improvement, racial and socioeconomic integration, and productive competition among public schools. Simply put, limited school choice plans will have limited impact, so that school choice will be neither a panacea, as its proponents argue, nor a serious threat to traditional public schools, as its opponents contend. To achieve the full theoretical benefits of school choice, we suggest that the choices offered to students must be broadened, especially in ways that will pro- vide greater opportunities for socioeconomic integration. In the final Part of the Article we consider ways to do so, including through increased access to government-funded, though not necessarily government-operated, preschools.

-The Influence of Race in School Finance Reform (JAMES E. RYAN, June 1999, University of Virginia Law School, Legal Studies Working Paper)

Abstract:
There is some evidence, from past social science studies, that school finance reform is seen by citizens--and especially white parents--through a racial lens. This Article picks up that point--which is nothing more than a hint, really--and tries to explore the role of race in school finance reform by surveying the history and success of minority districts in school finance reform litigation. The Article examines how predominantly minority districts have fared in school finance litigation (and subsequent legislative reforms) as compared to predominantly white districts, and concludes that minority districts fare worse than their white counterparts both in court and before the legislature. Based on this and other evidence, this Article contends that there are strong reasons to believe that the racial composition of the school district plays an influential role in determining success or failure in school finance litigation and legislative reform.

As the Article explains, this evidence has important academic, historical, and practical implications. Indeed, if the Article is correct in asserting that race plays an influential role in school finance reform, school finance scholars and practitioners should begin paying closer attention than they have to the dynamics of race relations and school desegregation; historians and legal scholars should recognize with added confidence the wisdom of the NAACP's desegregation strategy; and civil rights attorneys, courts, critical race theorists, and conservative critcs of desegregation should hesitate before abandoning the goal of desegregation.

-School Data and Suburban Power (David A DeSchryver, October 9, 2002, The Doyle Report)

In "The Political Economy of School Choice," James Ryan and Michael Heise make a compelling argument that suburbs have little tolerance for anything that impinges on their safe haven. Through white-flight and bright-flight they chose to live in the suburbs and send their children to better public schools. They are not about to relinquish the advantage and, under the law, they cannot be forced to take part in another district's school choice program. It's each district for itself. "Suburbanites, by and large, are not wild about school choice, either public or private. Suburban parents are generally satisfied with the public schools their children attend, and they want to protect both the physical and the financial sanctity of these schools." It is a position, say the authors, that contributed to the failure of school finance litigation which sought to shift education dollars away from the local tax base to a uniform system of allocation; and it will likely make school choice little more than a passing trend. Pockets of intra-district choice may appear, but the movement will remain isolated and do nothing to encourage soci-economic mixing and inter-district choice programs.

Ryan and Heise make another insightful political observation that could prove quite important. There are gaps between the leadership and the core constituents of the Democratic and Republican parties on the matter of school choice. The leadership of the Democratic Party remains opposed to school choice while African Americans, especially the younger generations, consistently express strong support for vouchers. Republican leaders support more competition in public education and more school choice, but white collar suburb constituents tend to oppose the idea. It is classic "not in my backyard" (NIMBY), to be sure. It appears to be an incongruity, say the authors, that will not soon go away and that comports with the idea that "crisis exists in the cities but not in the suburbs and that some efforts should be made to address those crises, provided that doing so does not simultaneously threaten suburban school autonomy."

Best Chances for Vouchers Lie in the Cities (ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS, 6/29/03)

In New York, as in other states, Republican voters are concentrated in the suburbs. Although vouchers have been a bedrock conservative issue, suburban voters support their public schools, and Republican candidates may find support for vouchers politically risky.

"I think it's ripe if you have that minority voice come forward in New York," said Joseph P. Viteritti, director of the program on education and civil society at New York University. "It's going to emerge from the cities, not the suburbs, and it has to be a Democratic issue, not a Republican issue."

In Cleveland and Milwaukee, which have voucher programs, a similar dynamic has been at work. In both cities, the impetus for vouchers came from urban minority communities.

In Milwaukee, the fight for school vouchers was led by Polly Williams, a black single mother forced by unemployment to go temporarily on welfare. Drawn into politics by her unwillingness to have her child bused to a school outside her neighborhood, she was elected to the Wisconsin Assembly from the predominantly black Near North district of Milwaukee.

In Cleveland, one of the leaders of the voucher movement was Fannie Lewis, also the black mother of a school-age child, who was elected to the City Council from the low-income community of Hough.

-School Vouchers Urged For Minorities (Anjetta McQueen, August 24, 2000, AP)

Virginia Walden-Ford grew up a true believer in public schools. Her father was a top administrator in the District of Columbia school system and her sisters taught there.

But she now thinks blacks should get government financial aid to attend private schools. On Thursday, she joined a group of black parents, educators, pastors and politicians to launch an ad campaign for the idea that's been championed by Republican presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush. [...]

Critics have little to worry about, said David Bositis, an expert on black voting patterns with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington.

"The Republican Party is not viewed by African Americans as a viable alternative, and vouchers are not going to change that," he said.

Even if more blacks do support voucher initiatives, that wouldn't be enough to get them enacted, he said. "Look at who will vote against it ... senior citizens, white suburbanites and the teachers unions. That's a winning combination."

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MAN MADE MEN

What it means to be a man (Margaret Wente, 7/26/03, Globe & Mail)

Johnnie's pep talk uses basketball as a metaphor for the game of life. It's part of an intensive program to show these kids what it takes to succeed. Around the room are other adult mentors who have volunteered their time to shoot hoops with the kids, take them to sporting events, and supply informal coaching on the game of life. Many are teachers or principals in the Toronto school system, and all of them are black. One of the principals wears his hair in dreads, tied up in a ponytail. The school system is definitely doing something right.

But this program wasn't started by a bureaucrat. It's the brainchild of Chris Spence, a remarkable educator who is now, lucky for us, a school superintendent. He's an education entrepreneur, a passionate, committed leader determined to make a difference. The program he founded is called Boys to Men, and it's really about values, not just education. Its most important message is what it means to be a man. And the three key words are Pride, Dignity, Respect. [...]

Before this program, some of these kids have never been out of their own neighbourhoods. And far too many of them believe they'll live there all their lives. And doing well in school attracts suspicion, not respect.

"People say, 'You're selling out,' " says Andre Patterson, the school principal with the dreadlocks. "But I say, 'You're negotiating the system.' "

The other message the kids get drummed into them is that they will not wind up in the NBA. "The first thing black males identify with is their athletic ability," says Mr. Patterson. "We have to break down that image. The fact is that they have a better chance of becoming a doctor or lawyer than an NBA player. We need more mentors to come out and say it and do something about it."

Chris Spence always knew he wanted to teach in what are known as "special-needs" schools. When he walked into his first classroom 12 years ago, he recalls, the kids could scarcely believe their eyes. "I told you, I told you. . . . He is black and he is our teacher," they marvelled. The kids were in middle school, but some of them could barely write their names. He and some of the other teachers were deeply dismayed. They also were unwilling to settle for the status quo. "I never made peace with the fact that these kids were almost out of the race of life at such an early age because they lacked an education," he writes in his recently published school memoir. (It's called On Time! On Task! On a Mission!) "Our response to this was to have school on Saturdays, during vacations, and at night to make up the difference -- whatever it takes."

This was the start of Boys to Men, a program that has now expanded to two dozen schools. No bureaucrat dreamed it up. No one waited for a government grant to get it going. It's entirely a grassroots movement, and Chris Spence believes that's its strength.

Whatever it takes...

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REVENGE OF THE SANDINISTAS

A Good Idea With Bad Press (HAL R. VARIAN, July 31, 2003, NY Times)

The Iowa Electronic Markets, www.biz.uiowa .edu/iem/, has been predicting election results for 12 years using a system very much like the one that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon proposed.

One of the markets the Iowa exchange offered was in vote shares: what fraction of the vote went to the Democratic or Republican candidate. It is particularly easy to assess the outcome of such a market and to compare it with alternative forecasts, like public opinion polls.

As it turns out, these political stock markets provided somewhat better forecasts than polls right before the election--and they provide much better (and less volatile) forecasts several months before the elections. Thus, markets do best exactly where the public opinion polls and expert opinion polls are weakest.

This is not an isolated example. Similar markets have been organized to predict shifts in Federal Reserve monetary policy, the outcome of political conventions and sales of consumer products. The results are that markets typically perform at least as well, and generally better, than feasible alternatives, and they are much cheaper to organize. [...]

There is good reason to believe that a market set up to forecast the sort of political instability that leads to terrorism might work well, too. At least, there is enough reason to warrant an experiment, given the high payoff to having better forecasts of these events.

This is why the Pentagon thought it was important to finance research in this area.

The objections raised by politicians and opinion writers were generally based on misunderstandings of what was actually proposed.

Unfortunately, the objections were just based on misunderstanding of the proposal, but on hatred of the proposer. As confirmation hearings for folks like Otto Reich demonstrated and as the hysterical reaction to appointments of folks like Admiral Poindexter and Elliot Abrams confirms, many on the Left remain unreconciled to the victory of the Reagan administration-backed contras over the Sandinistas in the 1980s. Any chance they get to attack a Poindexter project they will take advantage of, regardless of the underlying value of the idea.

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PAGING DICK GEPHARDT

In Defense of "Trade Deficits": A nation isn't harmed when it imports more than it exports, which is why the trade deficit is the most dangerous statistic collected by government. (Daniel J. Mitchell, March 22, 2003, Capitalism Magazine)

It is people who trade, not countries, and people trade because it makes them better off. This is true if someone in Virginia trades with someone in Maryland, and it is also true if someone in Kansas trades with someone in Singapore.

Protectionists usually will admit that free trade is a good idea, at least in theory, but then argue that the "trade deficit" shows there's an imbalance that must be corrected. Yet, they offer no evidence for this hypothesis. I have trade deficits with my local supermarket, movie theater and gas station: I buy lots of things from them and they never buy anything from me. Why is that bad? Should politicians and bureaucrats be allowed to limit my freedom to make these purchases in order to "protect" me from a trade deficit?

The same analysis applies to the overall economy. At any given point in time, Virginia may have a trade deficit with Maryland and the United States may have a trade deficit with Germany. But these deficits are merely the result of millions of voluntary transactions between producers and consumers. And unless we're willing to assume that people are idiots, those transactions benefited both buyers and sellers. Would these people be better off if politicians and bureaucrats used quotas and trade taxes to hinder trade?

The evidence clearly says no. The 1930 Smoot-Hawley legislation was supposed to protect American jobs, but instead it helped cause record unemployment and the Great Depression. Countries today with high trade barriers - like Japan - suffer from anemic growth, while free-trade jurisdictions prosper. Unfortunately, protectionists won't heed economic arguments. They seem convinced that a trade deficit is like cancer, something that's always bad news.

How can it still be necessary to convince people that freer trade is good for economies?

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OOH, OOH, OOH, PICK ME, PICK ME

Rice Takes Responsibility for Bush Speech (WILL LESTER, 07/30/2003, AP)

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that she feels responsible for the questionable statement in President Bush's State of the Union address about Iraqi plans to buy uranium in Africa.

"I certainly feel personal responsibility for this entire episode," she said in an interview on PBS' "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." "What I feel most responsible for is that this is detracting from the very strong case the president has been making."

Rice was the latest administration official, including CIA Director George Tenet and the president himself, to take responsibility for the
now-discredited claim. Rice has come under mounting criticism in connection with the speech, and has also been accused of making misleading remarks about what the White House knew before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Forgive us our cynicism, but bureaucrats fight over credit, not blame. It seems increasingly likely that they think they're going to be vindicated.

MORE:
U.S. May Already Have Iraq?s WMDs (Joel Mowbray, July 31, 2003, Town Hall)

As WMD hysteria reaches a frenzied pitch, comments by the head of the U.S. team searching Iraq for WMD evidence should give pause to the "Bush lied" crowd.

Dr. David Kay--the 63-year-old former U.N. weapons inspector now heading up the American WMD team--recently remarked that the United States will be "starting to reveal" WMD evidence in six months.

Though he was circumspect at best, Dr. Kay?s comments could indicate that U.S. investigators know quite a bit more than they have revealed thus far.

Buzz inside the beltway has been intensifying in recent days that the administration may have significantly more evidence than it has publicly
released, and Dr. Kay's comments have triggered even more chatter. Some of it may be wishful thinking, but considering that some of the people doing the talking are administration officials, declarations that there are no WMDs may be premature.

Why would the Bush folks keep such politically high-value information secret?

The bigger question is how do they so consistently manage to exercise the internal discipline required to keep things secret until they choose to announce them. Think, most recently, of the Africa AIDs initiative.

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IF YOU SEND IT THEY WILL SPEND

In One Florida Town, Parents Getting Refund Checks Fulfill Bush's Hopes (MICHAEL JANOFSKY, 7/31/03, NY Times)

The refund checks have started arriving, and for many residents here, the $400-a-child tax credit, part of President Bush's latest effort to stimulate the economy, could not come at a better time.

Matt Ross, a father of two, said he intended to pay a few bills and, with school starting in a few weeks, buy new clothes for his children. Robert and Sharee McCutcheon, who also have two children, said their money would go for school supplies and Christmas presents. Roger Kintz, father of two girls, including an aspiring Olympic gymnast who is competing this week in Detroit, said his money would help pay for the trip.

Bridgett Bedwell, the mother of two boys, was thinking about her family dentist. "I'm fixing to have braces for my kids' teeth," she said. "That check really helps me out, especially when the braces are costing me $4,000."

Spend. Spend. Spend. This is precisely what President Bush and Republican lawmakers were hoping for in enacting tax cuts that included an increase to $1,000 from $600 in the tax credit for children. Against concerns about the rising federal deficit (now projected at a record $455 billion) or the cost of maintaining troops in Iraq (almost $1 billion a week), supporters of the tax cuts, which passed the House largely on a party-line vote, argued that a sluggish economy was best improved by Americans' keeping more of their money so they could spend it. On Friday, the Treasury Department began mailing out the first of more than 25 million checks, $400 for each child who was 16 or younger in 2002.

25 million checks. It's a good start.

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MYSTERY TRAIN I RIDE

Rock 'n' roll pioneer producer Sam Phillips dead at 80 (AP, July 31, 2003)

Record producer Sam Phillips, who discovered Elvis Presley and helped usher in the rock 'n' roll revolution, died Wednesday. He was 80.

Phillips died at St. Francis Hospital, spokeswoman Gwendolyn McClain said. No details were immediately available about the cause of death or how long he had been hospitalized.

Phillips founded Sun Records in Memphis in 1952 and helped launch the career of Presley, then a young singer who had moved from Tupelo, Miss.

In the summer of 1953, Presley went to the Sun studio to record two songs for his mother's birthday. Phillips noticed him and decided Presley deserved a recording contract.

Phillips produced Presley's first record, the 1954 single that featured "That's All Right, Mama'' and "Blue Moon of Kentucky,'' and nine more.

"God only knows that we didn't know it would have the response that it would have,'' Phillips said in an interview in 1997.

"But I always knew that the rebellion of young people, which is as natural as breathing, would be a part of that breakthrough,'' he said.

Phillips was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. In 2000, the A&E cable network ran a two-hour biography called "Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll.'' [...]

Born Samuel Cornelius Phillips in Florence, Ala., Phillips worked as an announcer at radio stations in Muscle Shoals, Ala., and Decatur, Ala., and Nashville, Tenn., before settling in Memphis in 1945. Before founding Sun Records, he was a talent scout who recommended artists and recordings to record labels such as Chess and Modern. He also worked as an announcer in Memphis.

Is it just us, or has this been a particularly tough year for genuinely talented and important folks from the arts dying?

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FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

Minority Republicans play their hand to partial victory (Alexa H. Bluth, July 30, 2003, Sacramento Bee)

They control no statewide offices and are the minority party in both legislative chambers.

But for one month in California -- including a dramatic and exhausting 29-hour finale -- political strategists, lawmakers and others agreed: Republicans held all the cards.

"They won," declared a weary Democratic assemblyman, Lloyd Levine of Van Nuys, after the Assembly on Tuesday afternoon approved an overdue budget following an all-night session.

The central victory was simple. The $100 billion plan that will be sent to Gov. Gray Davis does not include the tax increases that Democrats, including Davis, had previously said they would insist upon to help fill the $38.2 billion budget deficit. [...]

[H]anging over this year's debate was the ongoing effort to recall Davis, focused largely on what his critics call his mishandling of state spending. Just as the Senate leaders finished a deal last week, state officials announced that the recall had qualified for the ballot and that an Oct. 7 election would be held.

"There was a political cloud over the whole debate," said Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento.

Then came a stumble that many considered key to pushing lawmakers into a budget deal.

A group of liberal Democrats were caught discussing the potential political gain from holding up a budget and the implications of the delay on the recall race.

Before the incident, observers say, Democrats may have been persuasive in their complaints that Republicans were holding up the budget to help the recall.

"I think that exposed Democrats," said Assemblyman John Campbell, R-Irvine. "I think it made a difference for them."

Which all goes to show you: Sometimes, nothin' is a real cool hand.

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SUGAR-COATING THE BITTER TRUTH

Why the US fears Cuba: Hostility to the Castro regime doesn't stem from its failings, but from its achievements (Seumas Milne, July 31, 2003, The Guardian)

[U]S hostility to Cuba does not stem from the regime's human rights failings, but its social and political successes and the challenge its unyielding independence offers to other US and western satellite states. Saddled with a siege economy and a wartime political culture for more than 40 years, Cuba has achieved first world health and education standards in a third world country, its infant mortality and literacy rates now rivalling or outstripping those of the US, its class sizes a third smaller than in Britain - while next door, in the US-backed "democracy" of Haiti, half the population is unable to read and infant mortality is over 10 times higher. Those, too, are human rights, recognised by the UN declaration and European convention. Despite the catastrophic withdrawal of Soviet support more than a decade ago and the social damage wrought by dollarisation and mass tourism, Cuba has developed biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries acknowledged by the US to be the most advanced in Latin America. Meanwhile, it has sent 50,000 doctors to work for free in 93 third world countries (currently there are 1,000 working in Venezuela's slums) and given a free university education to 1,000 third world students a year. How much of that would survive a takeover by the Miami-backed opposition?

The historical importance of Cuba's struggle for social justice and sovereignty and its creative social mobilisation will continue to echo beyond its time and place: from the self-sacrificing internationalism of Che to the crucial role played by Cuban troops in bringing an end to apartheid through the defeat of South Africa at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988. But those relying on the death of Castro (the "biological solution") to restore Cuba swiftly to its traditional proprietors may be disappointed, while the Iraq imbroglio may have checked the US neo-conservatives' enthusiasm for military intervention against a far more popular regime in Cuba. That suggests Cuba will have to expect yet more destabilisation, further complicating the defence of the social and political gains of the revolution in the years to come. The greatest contribution those genuinely concerned about human rights and democracy in Cuba can make is to help get the US and its European friends off the Cubans' backs.

Cuba GDP per capita: $2,300

United States GDP per capita: $36,300

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THE DEMOCRATS' LITMUS TEST, FOR EACH OTHER (via ef brown)

Democratic rivals spar over Bush's tax cuts (AP, 7/30/03)

Presidential rivals Howard Dean and John Kerry, who have been at odds over national security, quarreled Wednesday over what Democrats should do with President Bush's tax cuts.

Poised to deliver remarks on the economy in Iowa and New Hampshire later in the day, the primary foes rushed to criticize each other, even if it meant upstaging their own speeches. Kerry fired the first salvo.

"Real Democrats don't walk away from the middle class," the Massachusetts senator said. "They don't take away a tax credit for families struggling to raise their children or bring back a tax penalty for married couples who are starting out or penalize teachers and waitresses by raising taxes on the middle class."

The Kerry campaign provided an advanced text of his remarks to The Associated Press, assailing Dean's call for a repeal of Bush's tax cuts.

Kerry's speech did not mention Dean by name, but aides made sure the speech was provided to the media before Dean addressed the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union in Iowa. Contacted for a response, Dean answered back in an interview.

"Real Democrats don't make promises they can't keep," the former Vermont governor said. "Working Americans have a choice: They can have the president's tax cuts or they can have health care that can't be taken away. They can't have both." [...]

Dean contended that Kerry's plan to retain some of the tax and provide health coverage will make him vulnerable to the other common complaint about Democrats: Big spender.

"That's one of the problems of the Democratic Party," Dean said in his speech.

Kerry's response: "Real Democrats are straight about who they'll fight for."

Since their dialogue has reached the "Yo Mama" level, instead of the next debate maybe they could just play the dozens.

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THE ANTI-HUMANISTS

Master and Pupil (Robert Royal, Crisis)

[A] touching relationship, long known to students of Camus's work, can be traced more fully now with the publication of Albert Camus & Jean Grenier: Correspondence 1932-1960 (University of Nebraska Press), translated by Jan F. Rigaud. These letters record a lifelong intellectual and spiritual friendship. Grenier began it by going out of his way as Camus's teacher to visit him in his poor home. Camus was encouraged by this show of respect to exert himself in order to become a worthy conversation partner. More concretely, Grenier convinced Camus's poor family to let him continue his education.

This had intellectual as well as personal dimensions. Grenier oversaw Camus's thesis on "Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism," a subject that attracted master and pupil alike for its intrinsic interest--a comparison of two high points of the human spirit, one Christian, one pagan--but also because it was a subject that had engaged a great ancient predecessor in the region, St. Augustine. Both were open to a larger horizon than was typical among contemporary intellectuals. Or as Camus was to formulate it later, Grenier "prevented me from being a humanist in the sense that it is understood today--I mean a man blinded by narrow certainties. ' Contrary to almost the whole of modern French thought, Camus believed that it was better to be "a good bourgeois than a bad intellectual or a mediocre writer," and he and Grenier strove to avoid the vanity and self-deception endemic to French intellectuals.

Both had intermittent attractions to Christianity, especially Catholicism, because, as Grenier put it, it reflected the principle that there is "no truth for man that is not incarnated." And Grenier could be merciless toward what he believed was a "dilettantism of despair" among many French intellectuals. But they were also put off by the harsh tone of many people in the French Church at the time, which seemed particularly offensive because of the Church's historical failings, as they saw it. Camus confesses at one point: "Catholic thought always seems bittersweet to me. It seduces me then offends me. Undoubtedly, I lack what is essential." That may be true, but it is also a sad commentary on Catholic history in France that these two good men, flawed and perhaps blinded as they may have been by certain modern intellectual currents, felt such ambivalence. The sense of guilt (personal and universal) in the later Camus is so palpable and profound that many people believe that had he not died at age 47, he would have eventually become a Christian. It1s a pious wish, but I have always thought it ignored certain invincible circumstances. These letters have not changed my mind.

But what a wonderful record of human honesty and affection they offer, especially for our time. Both had seen the results of murderous philosophies of human perfection, and Camus would be pilloried by the French intellectual establishment, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre, for his deep critique of Marxism in his L'Homme Revolte (The Rebel). In it, Camus argued that we have an obligation to rebel against injustice but must never allow that just impulse to become absolute revolution against the human condition. Because when we do, we turn into perpetrators of injustices worse than those we seek to eliminate. Or as he put it in the opening sentence of that work, a line that could almost serve as a motto for his and Grenier's work in the face of so much that was--and is--simply mad among French intellectuals: "There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic."

A lynching or a pogrom is a crime of passion. The Holocaust was a crime of logic. Both kinds of crime are terrible, but the difference is significant. It's a distinction the humanist must deny.

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STEVEN PLAUT MEET <~text text="PAUL TIBBETTS">

King Sweeney Meets Bin Laden (Steven Plaut, July 30, 2003, Israel National News)

One of the unchallenged axioms of American civic religion is that each and every group of people on earth must consist of an "overwhelmingly vast majority of decent, hard-working, honest people, who want peace and are tolerant and freedom-loving and anti-violence."

It is an unchallengeable presumption of this theology that "vast majorities" of not only each and every racial/religious/ethnic group may be so described, but even vast majorities of each and any subgroup within society. Hence, we even sometimes hear assertions that the vast majority of prisoners, prostitutes, drug users, gang members, etc. are also decent, honest, peace-loving, honorable people.

The one imponderable in American civic theology is the idea that somewhere out there someplace there just might be a group of people - the majority of whom are not peace-loving or honest or tolerant. This belief in universal peacefulness in the minds of Americans is the main obstacle to Americans ever understanding the Middle East. The simple fact of the matter is that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Arabs, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of Moslems, are not peace-loving and are not opposed to violence. [...]

The vast majority of Moslems do not personally engage in violence and terror in their daily lives. The vast majority of Germans did not take personal part in the Holocaust. Indeed, as a blanket statement regarding Arabs in Israel, I would say that most Arabs behave in a far more polite daily manner than Jews, exhibiting on average far better manners and more consideration than do Jewish Israelis. But, of course, that is hardly the point.

What a positively bizarre assertion to make about an America that treated the Indians rather brutally, enslaved Africans, segregated African-Americans, imprisoned Japanese-Americans, fire-bombed the Germans and the Japanese (then nuked the Japanese for good measure), has the highest proportion of its population in porison of any nation on Earth, etc., etc., etc. If anything, Americans seem to--because we determine our nation's policies--hold entire nation's, whether free or not, responsible for the actions of their governments. There's been much made of the Administration supposedly trying to tie Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda--here's something to consider: the difference between our waging a war of liberation with minimal casualties in Iraq and our waging a war of extermination, with Baghdad irradiated, was probably only a function of our not believing they were involved in 9-11. If Israel fought the Arabs the way America fights its wars there might be no Palestinians, never mind a Palestine.

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BEST OF A BAD LOT

Edwards Advances Health Insurance Plan in N.H.: Focus Is on Children, Low-Income Adults (Jim VandeHei, July 29, 2003, Washington Post)

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards today proposed mandating government-subsidized health care coverage for all Americans under 21 and providing assistance to millions of lower-income adults.

The North Carolina senator, seeking to boost a campaign trailing badly in the polls, called for a new tax credit that parents could use to help buy health insurance for their children, either through private plans or the government's existing program for children. Every child would be required by the government to have insurance, which would be heavily subsidized for the poorest Americans. A family of four making around $60,000 would pay $30 per month to cover both children, Edwards said.

"If we are going fix this broken health care system, the responsible place to start is with the greatest injustice -- uninsured kids," Edwards said after touring a children's health facility here. More than 9 million Americans under the age of 18 do not have health coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

This at least approaches being sensible. How about just requiring that every child have $2000 per year going into an MSA--with contributions coming from parents' employers and/or parents' pre-tax income and/or a federal subsidy for those who work but are below the poverty level and/or anyone else (grandparents, etc.) who cares to contribute, with pre-payments allowed?

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SO CONFUSING.

Foreign Office stands by uranium claims (Telegraph, 7/30/03).

The Foreign Office has again defended the Government's contraversial claim that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium for its nuclear weapons programme from the west African state of Niger.

In a letter to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC), it insists that there had been no need to include a 'health warning' on the claim in the Government's dossier on Iraqi weapons as it was confident in the underlying intelligence.

There has been growing controversy over the claim since the US Central Intelligence Agency publicly cast doubt over its validity, saying it should not have been included in President George Bush's State of the Union address.
Even before the war, the International Atomic Energy Authority said that documents it had received relating to the allegation had been crude forgeries.

Britain, however, has insisted that it received separate intelligence from a third country - widely assumed to be France - which it could not share with the Americans.

Now, on NPR this afternoon, they said (I'm paraphrasing) that "the President had taken responsibility for a widely discredited statement included in the State of the Union. The President had justified the war on Iraq largely on the basis the it had weapons of mass destruction."

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DISMALISTICS

Economic Turnaround? (Robert J. Samuelson, July 30, 2003, washingtonpost.com)

On the economy, we're all dunces. There's so much conflicting evidence that almost any story -- hopeful, dismal or in between -- can be told with conviction. You, too, can play Alan Greenspan. Although he's better informed, your story could turn out right. [...]

One problem is that we don't always know which numbers to believe. Consider jobs. Two government surveys disagree sharply. One asks businesses how many workers are on their payrolls; the other questions households about who's employed. Since early 2001 the payroll survey shows a job loss of 2.6 million; that figure is widely quoted. But the household survey shows a loss of only 108,000 since early 2001 and a gain of 1.9 million over the past year. Most economists trust the payroll survey, but David Wyss of Standard & Poor's thinks the household survey may be more reliable. He suspects that companies have hired "contract" workers who aren't on firms' payrolls but who count themselves as employed.

Who knows? Everyone's guessing. Confusion is the only honest conclusion.

Nice look at the conflicting reasons to be either hopeful or pessimistic.

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I AM NOT A POTTED PLANT (via John Resnick)

Elderly Activist Faults News Network for 'Misleading' Audience (Marc Morano, July 30, 2003, CNSNews.com)

The latest complaint regarding the habit of television news networks describing liberal political lobbyists as typical retirees complaining about the cost of prescription drugs comes from one of the lobbyists herself.

Barbara Kaufman, president of the senior citizen lobbying group, the Minnesota Senior Federation, was featured on ABC World News Tonight Friday, complaining about the high cost of prescription drugs. But there was no mention about her affiliation with organizations currently advocating a federal prescription drug entitlement, according to a Media Research Center transcript of the program.

Kaufman calls ABC's decision "misleading."

"I would have preferred it if [ABC News] had...identified me as the president of the Minnesota Senior Federation because I think that lends more credibility," Kaufman told CNSNews.com.

Credibility?

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MUCH ADO

Bush takes responsibility for Niger claim (The Guardian, July 30, 2003)

The US president, George Bush, today accepted personal responsibility for citing a controversial claim that the former Iraqi regime tried to obtain nuclear material in Africa.

"I take personal responsibility for everything I say, absolutely," the president said at a White House news conference when asked about the now discredited accusation.

In one of those great, albeit unintentional, moments that demonstrate how silly the President's critics sound, NPR today ran a commentary by Eric Liu, who is apparently a former Clinton speechwriter (given that he never gave a good one, would you put that on your resume?), wherein Mr. Liu chided Mr. Bush for not accepting responsibility for the uranium claim, just 15 minutes after the President had done so. There's an interesting assumption at work here: the Left thinks he was ducking responsibility because the claim is obviously an intentional lie and will be a big deal. Mr. Bush, on the other hand, has largely ignored the issue, and now accepted responsibility, seemingly because he believed it to be true at least at the time and quite insignificant.

MORE:
Responsibility: A Capital Minuet (Dana Milbank, July 29, 2003, washingtonpost.com)

For President Bush and the press corps that covers him, the month of July has been one long cat-and-mouse game. Five times, questioners have invited the president to take responsibility for the Iraq-uranium allegation that found its way into his State of the Union address. Five times, Bush has deflected the question.

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MR. MISUNDERESTIMATABLE

Text: Bush News Conference on Iraq (July 30, 2003)

QUESTION: Thank you, sir. Mr. President, many of your supporters believe that homosexuality is immoral. They believe that it's been given too much acceptance in policy terms and culturally. As someone who's spoken out in strongly moral terms, what's your view on homosexuality?

BUSH: Yes, I am mindful that we're all sinners. And I caution those who may try to take the speck out of the neighbor's eye when they've got a log in their own.

I think it's very important for our society to respect each individual, to welcome those with good hearts, to be a welcoming country.

On the other hand, that does not mean that somebody like me needs to compromise on an issue such as marriage. And that's really where the issue is headed here in Washington, and that is the definition of marriage. I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman. And I think we ought to codify that one way or the other. And we've got lawyers looking at the best way to do that. [...]

QUESTION: Mr. President, you often speak about the need for accountability in many areas.

I wonder then why is Dr. Condoleezza Rice not being held accountable for the statement that your own White House has acknowledged was a mistake in your State of the Union address regarding Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium? And also, do you take personal responsibility for that inaccuracy?

BUSH: I take personal responsibility for everything I say, of course. Absolutely. I also take responsibility for making decisions on war and peace. And I analyzed a thorough body of intelligence--good, solid, sound intelligence that led me to come to the conclusion that it was necessary to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

We gave the world a chance to do it. We had--remember, there was--again, I don't want to get repetitive here but it's important to remind everybody that there was 12 resolutions that came out of the United Nations because others recognized the threat of Saddam Hussein. Twelve times the United Nations Security Council passed resolutions in recognition of the threat that he posed. And the difference was is that some were not willing to act on those resolutions. We were, along with a lot of other countries, because he posed a threat. Dr. Condoleezza Rice is an honest, fabulous person, and America is lucky to have her service. Period.

QUESTION: Mr. President, with no opponent, how can you spend $170 million or more on your primary campaign?

BUSH: Just watch.

(LAUGHTER)

Here are just three moments from the press conference that make you wonder what the President's opponents are thinking. The Democrats think they're winning on the uranium isse, but their victory puts Mr. Bush in the position of defending a black woman's honor. The Right thinks he's not been shrieking loudly enough about the recent Supreme Court decision, even though such whining wouldn't change the ruling. Meanwhile, one of the main stories coming out of the press conference will be his support for a measure to bar gay marriage, but he handled it with great sensitivity [for example, Bush Looking for Means to Prevent Gay Marriage in U.S. (DAVID STOUT, July 30, 2003, NY Times)]. Last, the press thinks that people really care about how our campaigns are financed and run. Mr. Bush's taunt suggests he understands the people better.

MORE:
And here's one for the Islamicists and the civil libertarians:

You know, let me talk about Al Qaida just for a second. I made the statement that we're dismantling senior management, and we are. Our people have done a really good job of hauling in a lot of the key operators. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Abu Zubaida. Ramzi--Ramzi alshibh or whatever the guy's name was.

(LAUGHTER)

Sorry, Ramzi, if I got it wrong.

(LAUGHTER)

Binalshibh. Excuse me.

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BABY STEPS...BUT STEPS

Iraq council names first president to serve one-month rotation (Steven R. Hurst, 7/30/2003, Associated Press)

After weeks of struggling to choose a leader, Iraq's American-picked interim government Wednesday named its first president -- a Shiite Muslim from a political party banned by Saddam Hussein. He will be the first of nine men serving one-month rotations leading postwar Iraq. [...]

Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite Muslim and chief spokesman for the Islamic Dawa Party, will serve as council president for August. The party once was based in neighboring Iran.

So, how many of the "40 lies" does that dispel?

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)

President Bush: A radical with a plan (Steven E. Schier, 7/30/03, The Hill)

Bush's goal is a big one--to make the Republicans the natural, default party of government. Karl Rove, the president's chief political strategist, frequently mentions durable GOP dominance as a major goal of the Bush presidency. Bush seeks lasting conservative rule over American politics, completion of the rightward revolution begun by Ronald Reagan. The Bush administration is working steadily to create conservative dominance over political institutions, party and interest group alignments and the terms of policy debate.

In the terms of Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek, Bush is an "orthodox innovator" trying to adapt the Reagan approach for the 21st century. As James K. Polk restored the Democratic Party in the 1840s and Teddy Roosevelt reinvigorated the GOP at the turn of the 20th century, so Bush hopes to create a new Republican political coalition than can dominate national politics long after he leaves the White House.

The risk for such orthodox-innovators, according to Skowronek, is that their innovations split their coalitions and end their party's dominance, as Roosevelt's progressivism divided the GOP in 1912. So far, Bush has avoided that fate.

It's actually even more radical than that, because what TR and John McCain (who consciously patterned himself after Roosevelt) both tried to do was to widen the Party's appeal by moving it Left, towards where non-Republicans were. What Mr. Bush proposes is to move the Party to the Right and move people who aren't now Republicans to the Right with it. One example may suffice to demonstrate: vouchers. The mainstream of the Party--at least the elected officials--is ill-disposed towards educational vouchers, because they fear their constituents anger at a system that would allow blacks kids from the inner-city to attend what are now predominantly white schools. Mr. Bush, by pushing vouchers, is using a conservative idea--bringing market forces to bear on education and fostering private options--that appeals to those voters who are least likely to vote Republican at this point: blacks. The difference between the TR approach and the Bush approach makes the latter's plan even more audacious and potentially revolutionary. Had TR succeeded he'd have changed the GOP and the nation for the worse (Wilson proved the latter). If Mr. Bush succeeds he may transform the Party and the country for the better.

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DOOR NUMBER ONE? OR DOOR NUMBER TWO?

Billions and billions of demons (Richard Lewontin, January 9, 1997, The New York Review)

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Mr. Lewontin, with admirable honesty, identifies the most dangerous error that rationalists make, their belief that reason compels reason, that it is sufficient unto itself. In fact, as he acknowledges, reason follows only after one has made a choice of faiths, in this case the faith that the world is entirely material. Having made this choice for oneself, then none of the inconsistencies of reason matter, because one simply assumes that one has not reasoned deeply enough. This is the best of all possible worlds because there must be some rational explanation for everything that happens, and that explantion must ultimately be accessible to man, the creature who reasons.

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"UNPARALLELED BATTLE"

Cruiser Sunk, 1,196 Casualties; Took Atom Bomb Cargo to Guam (NY Times, July 30, 1945)

After a tremendous double explosion, believed caused by one or two torpedoes fired by an undetected Japanese submarine in a moonlit sea, the Indianapolis sank within fifteen minutes near Peleliu just past midnight July 30 [East Longitude date].

The 315 survivors were picked up 100 hours and more later after an unparalleled battle with the sea in which the only armor for most of the men were kapok lifejackets and courage. At least 200 lost the battle and drowned, some insane from exhaustion and the effects of sea water, sun and thirst. The remainder went down with the ship.

The ship's commander, Captain McVay, son of a retired admiral, was saved by one of the rescue vessels summoned to the scene when a Navy plane on routine anti-submarine patrol happened to sight some of the men in the water three and a half days after the ship had gone down. Captain McVay was one of the fortunate few in a life raft; the vessel sank so rapidly that only six rafts were released in time.

The Indianapolis was traveling without escort. This had been her frequent practice, and the men aboard were in the habit of saying to each other, three-fourths in jest, that "some day she was going to get it."

And "Get it she did," a haggard survivor, his skin blotched with the great running scabs of "immersion ulcers," remarked grimly today.

Like, we're sure, most of you, we first heard of the USS Indianapolis and the horrific events surrounding its sinking in the movie Jaws.  You'll recall the Robert Shaw character telling about being adrift in the waters of the Pacific as sharks circled and attacked the helpless men.  This story has such a compelling fascination that it has spawned a series of books, documentaries and even a TV movie.  Doug Stanton's In Harm's Way can take its place with the very best of them.  Drawing heavily on interviews with survivors and on Captain Charles Butler McVay's account of the sinking and the ensuing ordeal, Stanton
presents the story with an immediacy and intimacy that makes it all the more terrible. Most recommended.

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THE CONTRADICTIONS HAVE BEEN FORCED

Gulf Arabs: Window of opportunity for reform (Sean Foley, 7/30. 03, Asia Times)

While many of the international and domestic problems of Gulf Arab monarchies have been building for years, the US overthrow of Iraq's government puts these issues in a different context. On the regional scene, this change has improved the security of these countries yet it has also opened new pressures - or opportunities - for domestic reform.
There were few states in the world that looked on the 2003 war in Iraq with greater fear and anticipation than the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). On one hand, the US-led military operation promised to overthrow a regime that had occupied one of their fellow states and repeatedly threatened the region's stability. On the other hand, it strained an already difficult situation for GCC states in balancing their need for close ties with Washington with the opposition of their peoples and the wider Arab-Islamic world to US policies in the Middle East. [...]

The GCC benefits as well from the new balance of power in the Gulf, in which the United States dominates without deployments to a set of sensitive regional bases. An Iraq that is stable, unified, democratic, wealthy, and in which Shi'ites participate in government in proportion to their demographic majority, could be a real force for stability in the region and a long-term check on Iranian power. Finally, recent US government commitments to reinvigorate the Palestinian-Israeli peace process and negotiate free trade treaties between the United States and the Middle East could help GCC states justify their close ties to Washington.

The new dynamic created by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government also presents a number of long-term challenges to GCC states. Many of these challenges may exacerbate the long-standing problems that each GCC state faces, to differing degrees, in foreign affairs (military weakness in relation to neighboring states and the desire to balance domestic views on foreign policy with close US ties), domestic politics (reconciling tribal and autocratic governance with demands for liberalized, consultative political institutions; politically-inspired violence and Islam; and succession), and social-economic affairs (heavy dependence on petroleum exports and expatriate works, privatization, population growth, and the budgetary issues).

Serious economic and political disputes among GCC states have already exacerbated these problems and limited the ability of the states to speak in a single voice on international affairs. Any of the following scenarios - US failure to both rebuild Iraq and form a legitimate government in a timely manner, sustained Iraqi resistance to the US administration, a significant increase in Iranian influence with Iraq, and the emergence of a Shi'ite theocratic state in Iraq - together or individually could lead to a degree of instability in Gulf Arab societies larger than that of any period since the Iranian revolution in 1979.

The impact of such a future might even be worse than that of past impacts because of the ability of Arab satellite news networks and the Internet to deliver uncensored news rapidly and the close ethnic, tribal and religious linkages between the Gulf Arabs and Iraqis. A democratic Iraq would also be a more compelling client for the United States in the Gulf than the monarchies of the GCC, as well as a very potent symbol for Shi'ites and other groups pushing for change in Arab Gulf societies.

While it is still too early to make any definitive judgments as to what form the long-term impact of the war in Iraq will have on Gulf Arabs, this essay will argue that the governments of the GCC states and their peoples have an enormous amount at stake in the development process in Iraq and the need to reform their own societies generally. Though no GCC state is threatened by invasion or economic collapse in the near or medium term, Gulf Arabs must begin to reform their societies and develop new collective, integrated institutions with their allies to guarantee a secure and prosperous future.

As Ralph Peters had argued long before the war, in cases--like the Middle East--where the status quo does not favor America and its beliefs, embracing instability may be our best policy.

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SIKH AND YE SHALL FIND (A MAJORITY) [via Mike Daley]

Vote for a turban and a beard: The Sikh knocking at the door of the Senate (The Economist, Jul 24th 2003)

WITH Lake Michigan sparkling in the distance and long beards flapping in the evening breeze, they clutched their turbans or ties and vowed to unite behind Chirinjeev Singh Kathuria. An assembly of Sikhs and Hindus and even a token Muslim set aside their differences and turned out on July 22nd on the roof of a posh downtown high-rise to endorse the first American from the Indian subcontinent ever to run for the Senate.

It is not going to be easy for Mr Kathuria, a millionaire Sikh businessman and a Republican. He remembers the insults he faced in airliners and on street corners after the terrorist attacks of 2001, when his Sikh turban and beard got him mistaken for a Muslim. He still carefully keeps an American flag pinned to his lapel.

There is also the fact that he is a Republican. Grover Norquist, a Republican anti-tax campaigner with influential friends in the White House, claims that “Indian-Americans are natural Republicans and natural conservatives.” They are on the whole well-educated and well-to-do; they respect family values, and like working for themselves. Bobby Jindal, a young Indian-American, is the leading Republican candidate for the governorship of Louisiana. Still, about 70% of them voted Democrat in the 2000 election.

The Indian-American community more than doubled in size in the 1990s, and now totals over 1.6m. That makes it America's third-largest Asian group. Mr Norquist and Karl Rove, George Bush's main strategist, have urged their party to embrace Muslim-Americans and Americans with roots in other parts of Asia. At the moment all seven Asian-Americans in Congress—five in the House and two senators—are Democrats.

If it's hard to figure out why Jews are still voting in lockstep for Democrats, it's impossible to figure out--aside from the parties' respective reputations on race--why Asian-Americans don't vote Republican.

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PRYOR RESTRAINT

Dems plan Pryor filibuster: Assail GOP charge of anti-Catholic bias by opponents (Jonathan E. Kaplan, 7/30/03, The Hill)

"There will be a filibuster and we will prevail," Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said following a weekly luncheon meeting of Senate Democrats. "I would be surprised if there was not a filibuster." [...]

Meantime, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) scheduled cloture votes throughout this week in an effort to allow the Senate to vote on several other federal appeals court nominees. A cloture motion, which requires 60 votes, failed yesterday to overcome the filibuster of Judge Priscilla Owen of Texas. The Senate will take a cloture vote on Pryor Thursday; its failure would signal that the filibuster has begun.

[Alabama Attorney General William Pryor Jr.]'s nomination has been slowed because of an ongoing investigation into whether he lied about his fundraising activities while he led the Republican Attorneys General Association.

The Judiciary Committee voted 10 to 9, along party lines, last Wednesday to advance the 41-year-old Pryor's nomination. All nine Democrats voted "no, under protest."

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a former U.S. attorney for whom Pryor once worked, ignited the firestorm over religion at last week's committee vote.

"Can a person with orthodox Catholic views on abortion be affirmed as a federal judge? [Pryor's nomination] raises that question," he told The Hill yesterday.

Even Mark Shields has acknowledged that the Party is in fact anti-Catholic at this point because the only issue it truly cares about is abortion, Dems doing worst to lose 'Catholic vote' (Mark Shields, 7/22/02, CNN)

in a deliberate act of political bigotry, the Democratic National Committee is daily telling Catholic voters to get lost. Do you think I exaggerate? Then go to the Democratic National Committee website. There you will finds "links of interest from the Democratic National Committee."

If your interests include the environment or veterans or Gay and Lesbian or Jewish-American or pro-choice or African-American, the DNC will happily suggest dozens of places for you to spend time. There is under "Catholic" only one Democratic Party-endorsed site to visit: the absolutely unflinching champions of abortion on demand, "Catholics for a Free Choice." [...]

It does make you wonder if any national Democrat even bothered to read the Los Angeles Times national exit poll taken on Election Day 2000, which found that 14 percent of the electorate -- that translates into14.7 million live voters -- named abortion as the most important issue in deciding their presidential vote.

That same group of voters chose Bush over Gore by 58 percent to 41 percent, which translates into a Bush advantage on the abortion issue of 2.5 million votes in an election in which Gore nationally won 540,000 more votes. [...]

Uncritical, unrestricted access to abortion for all has become the litmus test for the national Democratic Party. The DNC may be run by single-issue voters. But Catholics, as they have shown to the consternation of conservatives time and again, are anything but single-issue voters. Will any national Democratic leader have the decency and the intelligence to apologize to Catholic voters for the Democratic National Committee's insults? I wonder.

It seems fair to ask whether it's possible for any religious person of even mildly orthodox persuasion to in good conscience be a Democrat.

MORE:
The Democratic Delay Democrats attack the Pryor nomination with questions, questions, and more questions. (Byron York, June 20, 2003, National Review)

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THE REAL COMMODITY IS INFORMATION

What Peculiar Futures Can You Buy?: A guide to online prediction markets (Brendan I. Koerner, July 29, 2003, Slate)

The Pentagon has scrapped its plans to operate the Policy Analysis Market, which would have allowed online traders to wager on the likelihood of future terrorist attacks. Aside from commodities like pork bellies, what sorts of futures can wannabe brokers buy and sell?

A whole galaxy, thanks to the proliferation of Internet-based prediction markets, also known as decision markets. These online bazaars allow punters to plunk down money, real or imagined, on the potential of films, ideas, or the U.S. military's success in snagging Saddam Hussein. It may sound like nothing more than glorified sports gambling, but many economists believe that such markets can suss out vital, hidden information about future events—much in the same way that a soaring stock on Wall Street can indicate that good things are afoot for the company in question. That's why the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been funding so much research on the topic, hoping that prediction markets can assist military planners.

The granddad of online prediction markets is the Iowa Electronic Markets, which was started in 1988 to forecast the fortunes of presidential candidates; the market now covers the Fed's interest rate decisions as well. IEM participants can use real money, with starting accounts capped at $500. The market is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. [...]

The Foresight Exchange Prediction Market allows traders to bet on the likelihood of a range of events, from the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld by October to a devastating earthquake in the western United States by 2010. (A celebrity version of the Foresight Exchange is Long Bets, where pundits are encouraged to lay down a few thousand bucks on such outré prophecies as whether there'll be a four-day work week in the year 2070.)

If you ever had trouble making sense of the blogosphere, Blogshares may help separate the wheat from the chaff. No money's exchanged on this market—though there is a $500 contest taking place right now—but it does give bloggers bragging rights as to the popularity of their daily thoughts among Web surfers.

These markets on politicians and bloggers are delightfully ironic, since many of the folks complaining most loudly today about the commodification of terror may in effect be commodities themselves.

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KICKIN' BACK IN CRAWFORD

Bush headed to Crawford for August (Chuck Lindell, July 29, 2003, Austin AMERICAN-STATESMAN)

President Bush will spend most of August at his Crawford ranch, but frequent trips will take him to key electoral states in the Midwest and on the West Coast.

Bush will be in Crawford's "Western White House" from Aug. 2 to 31, but at least seven of those days will be spent outside Texas on trips that combine fund-raisers with events promoting two key policy areas - conservation and the economy.

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0 for 10

Judging the Courts: Ninth Circuit strikes out (Susan Blake, Charles Hobson, July 29, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco is holding up the parade. The parade of justice, that is. A review of the significant decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court this last term reveals that an inordinate amount of judicial attention was directed to correcting bad decisions from the Ninth Circuit. Although sympathetic court commentators have skewed the particulars in order to make the Ninth Circuit appear mainstream, in terms of criminal law the court could hardly be worse.

Of 72 cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2002-03 term, 28 of them were criminal cases or directly related to issues of criminal law. Ten of these 28 were from the Ninth Circuit and all 10 were reversed. That means the Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit 100 percent of the time when considering criminal cases. The Supreme Court had to expend more than one third of its attention in criminal law just curing judicial defects from the Ninth. Two of these cases were reversed summarily, meaning the decisions were so obviously wrong that the high court did not even need to hear oral argument.

By comparison, the Supreme Court took 10 criminal cases from the remaining 10 U.S. circuit courts of appeal and reversed nine of them. From state courts, the Supreme Court took eight criminal cases, reversing five. While these reversal rates are nearly as high, bear in mind that the cases came from the rest of the nation. The Ninth Circuit contributes as much trouble as all the other circuits -- and more than all the states combined. [...]

While other circuits have had cases reversed, none have even come close to the magnitude of 10 for 10. The Supreme Court took no criminal cases from the First, Third, Tenth or Eleventh circuits. The court took only one criminal case from each of the Fourth, Seventh and Eighth circuits and two criminal cases each from the Second, Fifth and Sixth circuits. Evidently, all the other circuit courts of appeals are deciding criminal cases with legal consistency. It is the Ninth that is so frequently rewriting criminal law that the Supreme Court must step in and correct the problems.

The Ninth--which most folks will remember for the reprehensible Pledge of Allegiance ruling--has been a national embarrassment for a long time now, but going 0 for 10 is really appalling.

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DOWN AND DIRTY

Dancing the "Down-Low" (Frank Leon Roberts, July 22, 2003, Pacific News Service)

African American men who are on the D.L., "down-low," have sex with men unbeknownst to their girlfriends (if they have one) and families. They don't consider themselves gay, and they identify with hip-hop despite the music's homophobia. They've been a source of controversy in the black community.

Black Entertainment Television ran an entire special on the "growing" presence of D.L.s, complete with "how-to-know" guides for black women questioning their man's sexuality. A recent episode of "E.R." featured an HIV-positive D.L. brother who "risked" infecting his girlfriend. The black literary world is rife with D.L characters, subplots and sensibilities. Author James Earl Hardy's" B-Boy Blues" and "The Day Eazy-E Died" got things started. E. Lynn Harris' series -- "Invisible Life," "Just as I am" and "Any Way the Wind Blows" -- is still insanely popular.

The controversy swings from seeing the D.L. brother as the primary spreader of AIDS in the "mainstream" black community to an insistence that they "come out of the closet" so they can be "out and proud." But as the brother at the train station told me, he was out, but in a new kind of way. Moreover, he was going to get his groove on at the sex party, safely.

Behind these AIDS fears lies the heterosexist assumption that AIDS is born and bred in gay communities and then venomously spread outward. Much of the anti-D.L. rhetoric from the black media hides the painful fact that many straight black women and men are HIV-positive and spread the disease among themselves, without any help from "evil" gay black men.

Heterosexist assumption? Where does Mr. Roberts think AIDs was born and bred? The late Randy Shilts wrote a terrific book tracing the trail of AIDs through the gay community and the horrific toll it took--starting with the predatory flight attendant known as Patient Zero and ultimately taking even Mr. Shilts's own life. And Michael Fumento described in his book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDs, how many HIV-positive men--particularly black and Hispanic men whose communities are more hostile to homosexuality--would routinely lie about their sexuality or, like the men in this story, did not consider themselves gay or bisexual even though they routinely had sex with men.

Mr. Roberts suggestion that AIDs is instead primarily spread by women--a near impossibility--and straight men--equally unlikely unless they are or were intravenous drug users--is not only ridiculous but irresponsible for a journalist.

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BUT WHAT DOES IT DO TO PEPPERED MOTHS?

The butterfly flap: In 1999, research suggested that genetically-modified corn might be killing off the monarch butterfly. What followed was exactly the kind of argument that is good for public health (Peter Pringle, July 2003, Prospect uk)

In the spring of 1999, as the monarchs embarked on their return flight north, a young Cornell University entomologist named John Losey reported in the journal Nature that the monarch's future appeared to be endangered; not from urban sprawl or toxic waste, but from eating the pollen of genetically-modified corn. At the time, 20m acres of American farmland, representing a quarter of the US corn crop, had been planted with seeds that included a toxin-producing gene from the common soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt. The insect-poisoning power of Bt had been known for over a century and the first commercial spray was developed in Europe during the second world war. It even became a favourite of organic farmers. Half a century later, there were 182 Bt products registered by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Two other big crops-cotton and potatoes-had also been fitted out with the Bt gene. But in corn, the Bt toxin was designed primarily to kill the European corn borer, a caterpillar that destroys more than $1bn worth of the crop each year. The toxin punctures the delicate membranes of the caterpillar digestive tract, causing it to wither and die.

Most of the monarchs born in the midwest corn belt start life on a milkweed leaf in or around the edges of a farmer's land. When the corn sheds its pollen during July and August, pollen grains containing the Bt toxin are blown by the wind onto milkweed leaves. From earlier studies, Losey knew that Bt toxin could harm butterflies and moths, and he wondered if the monarch larvae might also suffer.

In a no-frills experiment at his laboratory at Cornell in upstate New York, he fed monarch larvae with Bt pollen. If they showed signs of harm, he intended to do more research in the field. In his lab, he misted milkweed leaves with water and sprinkled on the Bt corn pollen to a density that looked like the pollen he had observed on the milkweed in a cornfield. He then placed five three-day-old monarch larvae-caterpillars no bigger than a raindrop-on each milkweed leaf and watched them feed. The experiment was repeated five times. After four days, nearly half of the larvae were dead. Those that survived were half the weight of his control group feeding on milkweed leaves with no pollen. Larvae fed on leaves sprinkled with conventional hybrid corn pollen were still munching away, apparently no worse off. [...]

To test public reaction to their experiment, Losey and his co-researchers at Cornell first shared the results with colleagues. All were in favour of publication. However, a senior entomology professor at Cornell, Anthony Shelton, warned the younger researcher that he didn't have a "story." Shelton, a believer in biotech, would become increasingly unhappy that Losey's experiment had been confined to a laboratory. The results, he would complain, were "not pertinent to the real world." [...]

In a Cornell University press release, Shelton attacked Losey's experiment: "If I went to the movies and bought a hundred pounds of salted popcorn, because I like salted popcorn and then I ate those salted popcorn all at once, I'd probably die," Shelton was quoted as saying. "Eating that much salted popcorn simply is not a real-world situation, but if I died it may be reported that salted popcorn was lethal. The same thing holds true for monarch butterflies and pollen. Scientists need to make assessments that are pertinent to the real world... Few entomologists or weed scientists familiar with the butterflies or corn production give credence to the Nature article."

well, you can probably figure out where that's hheaded, eh? But you read the long and fascinating article,about a process driven at least as much by politics as science, and you get to this conclusion:

[M]ost of those involved-academics, industry and other environmentalists-thought the monarch case was a "blueprint" for how to do research in the public interest. Margaret Mellon of the UCS agreed. "It brought scientists, environmental and government folks together with industry, found a pot of money, set a research agenda and got it done."

And because of what has come before, whether you agree with that assessment or not is likely to be determined almost entirely by your politics, not by the underlying science.

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THEY'RE JUST FRESH AIR KIDS WITH AN ATTITUDE PROBLEM

No Choice but Guilty: Lackawanna Case Highlights Legal Tilt (Michael Powell, July 29, 2003, Washington Post)

Even now, after the arrests and the anger and the world media spotlight, the mystery for neighbors in this old steel town remains this: Why would six of their young men so readily agree to plead guilty to terror charges, accepting long prison terms far from home?

"These knuckleheads betrayed our trust, and we're disgusted with their attendance at the camps in Afghanistan," Mohammed Albanna, 52, a leader in the Yemeni community here, said of the six men who have admitted to attending an al Qaeda training camp two years ago. "But the punishment doesn't fit the crime, or the government's rhetoric. It's ridiculous."

But defense attorneys say the answer is straightforward: The federal government implicitly threatened to toss the defendants into a secret military prison without trial, where they could languish indefinitely without access to courts or lawyers.

That prospect terrified the men. They accepted prison terms of 6 1/2 to 9 years.

Okay, we'll bite: what should be the penalty for attending the training camp of a terrorist organization that's trying to destroy your country?

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WHISTLING PAST THE GRAVEYARD.

Church strives to lose fuddy-duddy image on sex (Jonathan Petre, Telegraph, 7/30/03)

The Church of England sought to shed its puritanical image on sexual issues yesterday in a report that could pave the way for further liberalisation.

Its Doctrine Commission admits that the Church has 'acquired a reputation for being negative about sex'. It should celebrate it as 'a wonderful gift from God'.

Pejorative language, such as the phrase 'living in sin', is absent from the report, which instead encourages 'covenanted relationships'.

The Rt Rev Stephen Sykes, the commission's chairman, says that any man and woman who make a lifelong commitment to each other are in such a relationship, whether or not they are married.

Is the Church of England allowed to be Puritanical?

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HOME, HOME, ON DERANGE

Bring 'em On!: The Bush administration's top 40 lies about war and terrorism (Steve Perry, 7/30/03, City Pages)

1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward. [...]

2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to the U.S., a belief supported by available intelligence evidence. [...]

8) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the plotting of 9/11. [...]

9) The U.S. wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East. [...]

11) The United States is waging a war on terror. [...]

12) The U.S. has made progress against world terrorist elements, in particular by crippling al Qaeda. [...]

13) The Bush administration has made Americans safer from terror on U.S. soil. [...]

15) U.S. air defenses functioned according to protocols on September 11, 2001. [...]

23) The Bush administration is seeking to create a viable Palestinian state. [...]

24) People detained by the U.S. after 9/11 were legitimate terror suspects. [...]

25) The U.S. is obeying the Geneva conventions in its treatment of terror-related suspects, prisoners, and detainees. [...]

39) "The Iraqi people are now free." [...]

40) God told Bush to invade Iraq.

Not long after the September 11 attacks, neoconservative high priest Norman Podhoretz wrote: "One hears that Bush, who entered the White House without a clear sense of what he wanted to do there, now feels there was a purpose behind his election all along; as a born-again Christian, it is said, he believes he was chosen by God to eradicate the evil of terrorism from the world."

No, he really believes it, or so he would like us to think. The Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz that Bush made the following pronouncement during a recent meeting between the two: "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."

Oddly, it never got much play back home.

This is a terribly strange collection of things no one ever maintained (that Saddam helped plan 9-11?), things only paranoid conspiracists believe (that the "real" events of 9-11 are being covered up), things that are indisputably true (it is reasonable to believe Saddam had WMD, the U.S. has made progress against terror), and things that are now and may ultimately be unprovable (that America is safer, that President Bush truly wants a Palestinian state, that God told him to invade Iraq). The couple of statements that may indeed be lies--that we had credible reports that Iraq tried to buy uranium or that it was capable of launching WMD on 45 minute notice--are so obscured by these other scurrilous and sometimes lunatic charges as to fatally weaken the rest of the case.

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WHY DID ADMIRAL POINDEXTER WANT AN INFORMATION MARKET?

Managing Uncertainty (Jim Surowiecki, January 22, 1997, Motley Fool)

We live in a world in which events -- whether they be jumps in the price of Microsoft or blizzards in the Midwest or Super Bowl victories for the Cowboys -- are caused by certain things and not by others. The nature of those causal relationships, though, often remains obscure. We may feel comfortable drawing some conclusion about the market from a rise in Microsoft's stock price, but we would probably feel much less comfortable saying that one thing had caused that rise.

More importantly, even if we can state with some certainty why something happened, that leaves us a long way from being able to state with similar certainty what will happen. We can read the past for portents of the future, but we can never be sure that we're looking at the right evidence, which is just another way of saying that we can never be sure we're looking at the right past. Those disclaimers at the bottom of mutual fund ads are not, in the end, there simply to keep the funds from getting sued. Past performance is no guarantor of future performance, either for the market or for money managers. Things change. Things always change.

The problem, then, is that we want -- and have -- to make decisions about the future, but we do so without perfect knowledge. Peter Bernstein's new book, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, takes on this problem by constructing a kind of history of risk management. [...]

In a curious way, in fact, Bernstein has written a history of risk management that ends by leaving us more aware than ever of the impossibility of fully managing risk or comprehending the workings of complex systems. There's always something just beyond