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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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?

---

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

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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?

---

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."

---

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...

---

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.

---

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?

---

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.

---

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.

---

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?

---

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.

---

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

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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?

---

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."

---

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.

---

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?

---

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.

---

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.

---

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?

---

)

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.

---

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.

---

"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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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)

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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?

---

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?

---

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.

---

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 our grasp, something of which we will be unable to make sense. Risk itself, after all, is the product of uncertainty. That said, some risks are better than others.

How, then, can one know which risks are better? We can take a pretty good stab at predicting, for example, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average is going to be in five years, and we can base that prediction on specific reasons. If we could actually foresee those reasons and those results, we could either make an enormous amount of money or protect ourselves against losing an enormous amount of money. Bernstein quotes a fund manager's thoughts about information as it pertains to investing:

The information you have is not the information you want.

The information you want is not the information you need.

The information you need is not the information you can obtain.

The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay.

But sometimes the information you have is precisely the information you need, and sometimes the information you can obtain is priced perfectly, and you catch a glimpse of what the market is going to do.

The problem is that you don't know you've caught a glimpse until after it's all over. The hope is that the more information you have, the more work you do, and the better attuned you are to the underlying realities of the businesses in question, the better your chances of prediction.

Listening to the various Senators bloviate about the terrorism market today was even more painful than usual. On the one hand, these guys want the national security agencies to produce better information to protect against terrorist attacks. On the other, introduce a new but not even innovative means of generating that information and they squeal like stuck pigs. Makes it awfully hard to take them seriously.

---

WHY CAN'T THEY LEAVE POOR JESUS ALONE.

Ala. Gov.: Christian Duty to Boost Taxes (AP, 7/29/03).

Alabama's new governor is trying to persuade voters to approve the biggest tax increase in state history by telling them it is their Christian duty. And for a state in the Bible Belt, that might seem like a winning strategy.

Instead, Republican Gov. Bob Riley's $1.2 billion tax package is alienating even the Christian Coalition and other supporters, who see Riley as a Judas. Riley had consistently opposed new taxes while in Congress. . . .

Riley, a Southern Baptist, says Alabama has taxed its poorest too harshly for too long.

"According to our Christian ethics, we're supposed to love God, love each other and help take care of the poor,'' he said. "It is immoral to charge somebody making $5,000 an income tax.''

When Jesus said, "Render unto Caesar", He wasn't praising Caesar.

---

THE LEFT'S TIN EAR

What's Wrong with Twinkling Buttocks? (Theodore Dalrymple, Summer 2003, City Journal)

It is in the arts and literary pages of our newspapers that the elite's continuing demand for the erosion of restraint, and its unreflective antinomianism, is most clearly on view. Take for example the June 8 arts section of the Observer, Britain's most prestigious liberal Sunday paper. The section's two most important and eye-catching articles celebrated pop singer Marilyn Manson and writer Glen Duncan.

Of the pop singer, the Observer's critic wrote: "Marilyn Manson's ability to shock has swung like a pendulum in a high wind . . . . He was really scary at first, when [he] burst out of [his] native Florida and declared war on all Middle America holds dear. Manson spun convincing tales of smoking exhumed bones for kicks. . . . But . . . Manson's autobiography revealed a smart, funny man-even if he did enjoy covering hearing-impaired groupies in raw meat for sexual sport. He turned into an artist, rather than the incarnation of evil. Church groups still picketed his gigs, which often echoed Nazi rallies (they still do). But any fool could see that Manson was making a valid point about rock `n' roll gigs and mass behavior, as well as flirting with fascist style."

The author of this review...fastidiously balks at using the word "deaf" for the hearing-impaired but appears not to mind too much if they are exploited for perverted sexual gratification...

---

)

Old Europe Cannot Be a Counterweight to the American Imperium (Paul Kennedy, Summer 2003, New Perspectives Quarterly)

My basic problem with the Derrida-Habermas proclamation is neither their concern about unrestrained American power, nor their real hope that Europe should have greater unity, identity and common policies. My problem is that their document isn't practical enough; that is to say, the authors hardly ever indicate what an alternative (European) superpower would do if it existed and, more importantly, what should be done-apart from constitutional "deepening" measures-to get there. The American plans for a Middle East may be floundering right now, but at least they have a "road map." The way to a powerful Europe is not even sketched out. It is an aspiration, not a policy. [...]

But the real issue raised by the Derrida-Habermas appeal is the extent to which the movement should be defined by the mass anti-White House protests that burst out on February, and are seen as historic and symbolic (in fact, the title of their article reads, in English, February 15th, or What Binds Europeans Together). For if the real aim is to create a deliberate counterweight to the United States, the policy is unlikely to succeed-it will lose Britain and Spain, possibly Italy and the Netherlands, and certainly most of the Central and East European states. And here is another obvious problem. The fact that this call for a "core Europe" comes from a French and a German scholar-a sort of philosophical echo of the Chirac and Shroeder criticisms of the White House-will not only amuse or irritate the Americans, but it also will seem to other Europeans like a rehash of the de Gaulle-Adenauer axis, which was not popular outside of Paris and Bonn. All the rather thoughtless assertions by their successors today that France and Germany have a special, elevated and "core" role, with the other European states following, just gives ammunition to the anti-federal critics within Europe itself. To add that this Franco-German biumverate will lead the charge against America will make the discontents all that stronger.

Moreover, all this misses the point. The fact is that, whether Europe is to become an effective counterweight to a unilateralist America in the years to come, or an amiable and near-equal world partner, it really has to make some tough practical decisions, and achieve tough practical policies, in order to move ahead. Constitutional decisions, like creating the office of a single foreign minister, go part of the way, but that is almost like the icing on the cake if Europe itself is not made stronger.

So, here, for consideration, are a half-dozen nettles that might be grasped in order to make Europe stronger, to raise her in the eyes of the world, and to contribute to the greater sense of European identity which professors Derrida and Habermas yearn for: [...]

But, here's the rub, and why the Derrida-Habermas and Chirac-Schroeder strategies look doubtful. The resistance to these tough reform fields is deepest, not in the so-called "new Europe" and pro-American countries like Britain, Spain and Poland but precisely in the "old" or "core Europe" countries like France, Belgium and Germany.

Mr. Kennedy had the bad fortune to write a very fine book about why we should not have been fighting the Cold War at the very moment Ronald Reagan was ending it successfully. The basic truth of his thesis was therefore lost in the obvious inaccuracy of his prediction that America would decline. What's most interesting in this essay is that it's basically a plea for Europe to breakout of its decline, in fact to re-engage itself in many of the behaviors that Mr. Kennedy in that earlier book argued end up leading to decline--large military expenditures, entangling alliances, etc.. The other "nettles" essentially consist of a set of free market reforms. He's basically saying that Europe, in order to counter-balance America, needs to become more like America. But, even setting aside the complete improbability of their doing so, one wonders why--if they somehow were to Americanize--these two similar powers seek to balance one another instead of work together to achieve precisely the things America, nearly alone, is doing today?

---

"WHEN I ANALYZE THE STENCH"

REVIEW: of Buffalo Soldiers (James Bowman, July 29, 2003)

Though it may have been bad for the filmmakers, there is at least one good thing for audiences in the fact that Miramax had to postpone the release of Buffalo Soldiers after the events of September 11th, 2001 - and then again the following spring when focus groups tested badly, and then again earlier this year as the Iraq war loomed. For two years ago it would have been just a routine example of Hollywood's bashing of the American armed forces and military life in general. Now it is a perfect time capsule from a vanished era of movie history.

You will never again see a picture quite as bad as this one, or at least not bad in the same way.

It's easy to forget, now, the unrelieved bleakness of the cinematic prospect when it came to soldiers and soldiering between M*A*S*H (1970) and September 11. For more than three decades there was hardly a military hero to be found, unless he was first and foremost a victim of the time-servers, thugs and psychopaths that were supposed to have made up the preponderance of any military organization, or of the alleged insanity of military discipline itself.

To be sure, by the 1990s the anti-war, anti-military ethos showed signs of degenerating into a parody of itself in such preposterous idiocies as The Rock or The General's Daughter, but even the otherwise pro-military Saving Private Ryan was marred by a depiction of war as fundamentally senseless, apart from its eponymous rescue mission. Buffalo Soldiers, adapted from a book by Robert O'Connor and directed by the Australian Gregor Jordan, is solidly in the tradition of the preposterous idiocies.

Let's go out on a limb and predict that you won't see that blurb on the video package: "Buffalo Soldiers...is solidly in the tradition of the preposterous idiocies."

---

YOUR OWN PERSONAL JESUS?

Gays Help Reclaim Jesus' Words (Fenton Johnson, July 29, 2003, LA Times)

I began my return to Bible study with the notion that the liberal left had allowed the term "Christian" to be hijacked. I believed that the word ought properly to describe someone who was more like - well - me. Then I actually reread the Gospels, only to discover that they made me squirm. [...]

Regarding the issues that threaten Episcopalian schism, the presumed challenge to marriage is the more easily addressed. The convention is being asked only to ratify blessing of same-gender unions, a rite distinct from its official marriage ceremony. In addition, the Gospels refer only obliquely to marriage, which in Jesus' time was generally a private transaction arranged between families and individuals. Western Christianity did not institutionalize marriage until more than 1,000 years after Jesus' death, at which point it defined marriage as a sacrament consummated by the couple, with sex as its sine qua non. Technically, the Christian church does not marry anyone; rather it officiates at marriages that the couples themselves create. To do so, it employs rites that emerged for reasons that had as much to do with enhancing ecclesiastical power as encouraging stable households.

Homosexuality presents a greater challenge, since here the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are explicit in their prohibitions. Prominent Christians, notably Harvard Memorial Church minister Peter J. Gomes, have constructed elaborate arguments that these passages have been mistranslated or misinterpreted, but their arguments miss the point. Once the Bible passed from oral tradition into writing, religion faced the task of keeping its traditions alive, rather than treating them as preserved in stone at some date shortly before Jesus (for Jews) or in the late Roman era (for Christians).

The Jews developed the Talmud and, later, ongoing rabbinic commentaries that in effect keep the Hebrew Bible alive. Christians have no equivalent and must work instead to keep Jesus' teachings alive by seeking to recognize how each generation challenges their reinterpretation. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Christians struggled with and rejected the Bible's condoning of slavery. Now we are struggling to reinterpret pronouncements about sexual behavior.

The notion that each generation or each of us individually should get to re-interpret the Gospels so that we're more comfortable with them is obviously insipid. What is the point of religion and morality if the demands they place on you do not make you squirm? if they say you should do or think whatever you want?

---

WHERE'S WALL? D'OH!

The Sleepy Superpower Awakes: The U.S. is on the move again around the globe, and it's about time (CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, Aug. 04, 2003, TIME)

The Great Wall of China, roughly defining the northern contours of the Chinese empire, has stood in the same place for 2,200 years. The Great Wall of America--the barrier of bases set up around the world to define the contours of the free world and hold back the Soviet empire--is about to disappear after just 50 years.

We are living a revolution, and hardly anyone has noticed. In just the three months since the end of the Iraq war, the Pentagon has announced the essential evacuation of the U.S. military from its air bases in Saudi Arabia, from the Demilitarized Zone in Korea and from the vast Incirlik air base in Turkey--in addition to a radical drawdown of U.S. military personnel in Germany, the mainstay of the Great American Wall since 1945.

For a country that is seen by so much of the world as a rogue nation, recklessly throwing its weight around, this is a lot of withdrawing. The fact is that since 9/11, when America awoke from its post--cold war end-of-history illusions, the U.S. has not, as most believe, been expanding. It has been moving--lightening its footprint, rationalizing its deployments, rearranging its forces, waking from a decade of slumber during which it sat on its Great Wall, oblivious to its immobility and utter obsolescence. [...]

We are in the midst of a revolution, and it has two parts. The first is leaving places where we are not wanted. America is moving out of old Europe, which sees its liberty as coming with the air it breathes, and being welcomed in the new Europe of Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, which have a living memory of tyranny and a deep understanding of America's role in winning their liberty. South Koreans regularly demonstrate against the U.S. presence in their country. Since the reason for that presence is for Americans to die in defense of Seoul, one has to ask oneself at what point strategic altruism becomes strategic masochism.

The second part is leaving places that mark the battle lines of a long-dead war.

The lesson that the Buchanacons correctly urge us to learn here is that sixty years from now we may well just be defending a new Great Wall, even though the new threat will have long since vanished.

---

THE BEST LAID PLANS...

Riordan Is Closer to Recall Run: Schwarzenegger's candidacy appears less likely. Former mayor meets with strategist. (Michael Finnegan, July 29, 2003, LA Times)

With rising doubts over whether Arnold Schwarzenegger will run for governor, another moderate Republican, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, edged closer Monday to becoming a candidate to replace Gov. Gray Davis.

Noelia Rodriguez, press secretary to First Lady Laura Bush and Riordan's former close aide, spent Monday at his house in Brentwood helping him assemble a possible campaign team, sources said.

President Bush supported Riordan when he ran for governor last year. But until now, White House officials have kept their distance from the recall.

For Riordan, the Oct. 7 recall election offers a chance at revenge against the Democratic incumbent. Davis' scathing television ads helped to crush Riordan's candidacy last year in the gubernatorial primary.

For moderate Republicans, a Riordan campaign would also be a boost. They often have blamed the power of conservatives in GOP primaries for their party's repeated losses to Democrats. [...]

Schwarzenegger and Riordan had planned to hold a news conference Monday to make a joint announcement: Schwarzenegger would not run, but Riordan would, according to a top Republican, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. But the event did not occur.

Schwarzenegger "wants to pass the baton to Riordan, but Riordan doesn't seem to be quite ready for that," the Republican said.

Davis has based his strategy on the recall being a right-wing plot, with himself as the wronged party. Meawhile, Riordan is a moderate, if not a liberal, and is widely perceived as having been subjected to a hatchet job by Davis in the 2002 election. Now what does Mr. Davis say?

MORE:
Assembly approves new budget: Governor Davis is expected to sign the $100 billion spending plan (TOM CHORNEAU, July 29, 2003, The Associated Press)

The state Assembly today approved a compromise budget that alleviates a record deficit by slashing spending, raising fees and relying on borrowing, but still leaves the state facing a big deficit to solve next summer.

The deal approved in the house's longest session in history avoids raising sales and income taxes, but counts on a $4 billion annual car tax increase that state officials triggered earlier this year and on the elimination of a tax break for manufacturers.

After more than 27 hours of negotiations, the budget bill passed 56-22 after $300 million was added in spending to benefit local governments, law enforcement, schools and farmers. [...]

Republican Leader Dave Cox claimed victory, saying his party was "able to get a budget that didn't increase taxes for Californians. It was a victory for our side." [...]

The monthlong deadlock was caused by a disagreement between Democrats and Republicans over tax increases and spending cuts. The final vote received support from 45 Democrats and 11 Republicans. Two Assembly members, one from each party, were excused and did not vote. Two Democrats voted against the budget.

Democrats, who hold big majorities in both houses but need Republican help to muster budget-approving two-thirds votes, wanted a half-cent sales tax to help close the budget gap. Republicans said the gap could be closed using existing revenues and deep cuts.

---

WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BE JEWISH TO BE BAR MITVAHED?

What Marriage Is For : Children need mothers and fathers. (Maggie Gallagher, 08/04/2003, Weekly Standard)

IN ORDERING GAY MARRIAGE on June 10, 2003, the highest court in Ontario, Canada, explicitly endorsed a brand new vision of marriage along the lines Wolfson suggests: "Marriage is, without dispute, one of the most significant forms of personal relationships. . . . Through the institution of marriage, individuals can publicly express their love and commitment to each other. Through this institution, society publicly recognizes expressions of love and commitment between individuals, granting them respect and legitimacy as a couple."

The Ontario court views marriage as a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that government stamps on certain registered intimacies because, well, for no particular reason the court can articulate except that society likes to recognize expressions of love and commitment. In this view, endorsement of gay marriage is a no-brainer, for nothing really important rides on whether anyone gets married or stays married. Marriage is merely individual expressive conduct, and there is no obvious reason why some individuals' expression of gay love should hurt other individuals' expressions of non-gay love.

There is, however, a different view--indeed, a view that is radically opposed to this: Marriage is the fundamental, cross-cultural institution for bridging the male-female divide so that children have loving, committed mothers and fathers. Marriage is inherently normative: It is about holding out a certain kind of relationship as a social ideal, especially when there are children involved. Marriage is not simply an artifact of law; neither is it a mere delivery mechanism for a set of legal benefits that might as well be shared more broadly. The laws of marriage do not create marriage, but in societies ruled by law they help trace the boundaries and sustain the public meanings of marriage.

In other words, while individuals freely choose to enter marriage, society upholds the marriage option, formalizes its definition, and surrounds it with norms and reinforcements, so we can raise boys and girls who aspire to become the kind of men and women who can make successful marriages. Without this shared, public aspect, perpetuated generation after generation, marriage becomes what its critics say it is: a mere contract, a vessel with no particular content, one of a menu of sexual lifestyles, of no fundamental importance to anyone outside a given relationship.

The marriage idea is that children need mothers and fathers, that societies need babies, and that adults have an obligation to shape their sexual behavior so as to give their children stable families in which to grow up.

Which view of marriage is true?

Ms Gallagher has started a blog devoted to this topic. And we've a review of Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal that addresses the topic at some length.

MEANWHILE:
Poll shows backlash on gay issues (Susan Page, 7/28/03, USA TODAY)

Americans have become significantly less accepting of homosexuality since a Supreme Court decision that was hailed as clearing the way for new gay civil rights, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll has found. After several years of growing tolerance, the survey shows a return to a level of more traditional attitudes last seen in the mid-1990s.

Asked whether same-sex relations between consenting adults should be legal, 48% said yes; 46% said no. Before this month, support hadn't been that low since 1996. [...]

Conservative social activists see a backlash to those developments and the growing visibility of gay characters in entertainment, including such TV shows as Will & Grace. "The more that the movement demands the endorsement of the law and the culture, the more resistance there will be," says Gary Bauer, president of American Values. [...]

Those making the biggest shifts included African-Americans. On whether homosexual relations should be legal, their support fell from 58% in May to 36% in July. [...]

By 49%-46%, those polled said homosexuality should not be considered "an acceptable alternative lifestyle." It was the first time since 1997 that more people expressed opposition than support.

---

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE OIL

Diwaniyas and democracy (Charles Rousseaux, 7/28/03, The Washington Times)

Thanks to the billions that flow in from its oil reserves, most of the citizens [of Kuwait] live comfortable, well-subsidized, fairly cool lives (even when the thermometer reaches 120 degrees). There are no taxes, the state pays for male and female citizens' educations through the university level and the government gives out other generous subsidies. Citizens' life expectancies are comparable to those in the West, and no one, aside from the 1.5 million guest workers, has to labor too hard.

However, that prosperity has seemingly had a downside. Because citizens don't have to work very hard, not many do, instead being content with quasi-sinecures. Ninety-five percent of Kuwaitis are employed by the government--postal service jobs with exponentially better pay scales. Yet pushing paper is not necessarily any more meaningful than stamping envelopes, and it seems to show. Many of the Kuwaitis I talked to spoke of national stagnation. They didn't attribute it to their sudden, easy oil wealth, but it's a likely reason.

That wealth has brought modernization and Westernization. The former trend seems to have cemented into the foundations of the Burger Kings and designer clothing stores that dot the cityscape. The society seems largely liberated, even though women don't have the vote. Kuwait City's streets are lively despite the ban on alcohol. However, the winds of Westernization could turn into a stiff breeze Eastward, if Islamists continue to grow in strength or the ruling Sabah family abandons its tack towards reform.

Yet, more than the pragmatic ideology of Islamists or the hopes of progressives, Kuwait's dependence on oil seems likely to be the most dominant force driving the nation's politics. Oil wealth is the central fact of the Kuwaiti economy and the fundamental support of its successful welfare state. Time will tell how all of the contradictions resolve themselves.

You can only pity these nations that begin their transition to liberalism with the worst problem that plagues democracy--welfare statism--already in place.

---

PLANNED PARENTHOOD

Bias for Boys Leads to Sale of Baby Girls in China (ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, 7/20/03, NY Times)

With two daughters already, Liu Yihong was crystal clear several years back about what he would do if his pregnant wife was carrying yet another girl.

"You can take medicine to end the pregnancy," he explained matter-of-factly. "Otherwise you have the baby and if it's a female, you try to find another family who will take it, or you just put it up for sale."

This practical philosophy is deeply ingrained in this rural backwater in southern China, a lush but poor area where the preference for sons overwhelms all other impulses, and family planning laws strictly limit how many children a farmer may have.

In March, the police here in Guangxi Province found the shocking fallout of son worship packed away in the back of a long-haul bus: 28 unwanted baby girls from Yulin, 2 to 5 months old, being transported like farm animals, for sale. [...]

Because of the selective abortion of girls in China, some researchers estimate there are 111 males for every 100 females in the country, making it difficult for poor farmers to persuade women to marry into their villages.

How does that mantra go again? "Abortion empowers women." "It is inappropriate for the religious, who happen to believe in human dignity, to seek to impose their personal morality on others who may believe differently." "Just because I'm pro-choice doesn't mean I bear any responsibility for how those choices are used." "Slippery slopes are a figment of conservative imaginations." ...

---

I STAND CORRECTED

Bilateral deals no threat to global trade (Daniel Griswold, July 27 2003, Financial Times)

The belated efforts of the US to sign bilateral agreements with Chile, Singapore and a few other small partners threaten, we are told, to destroy the entire trading system. A "selfish hegemon", as Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya call it (Bilateral trade treaties are a sham, FT, July 14), is conspiring with special interests to distort the global system. Such arguments themselves distort reality.

To begin, the US is hardly treading on new ground. The multilateral system makes room for free-trade areas through Article 24 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The World Trade Organisation's charter allows customs unions or free-trade agreements between members, recognising "the desirability of increasing freedom of trade by the development, through voluntary agreements, of closer integration between the economies of [those] countries". More than 250 such agreements have been negotiated; if the Chile and Singapore agreements become law, the US will be party to exactly five.

Beyond their economic impact, free-trade agreements of the sort the US is pursuing can benefit the parties involved, the global trading system, and the world at large in many ways.

Here's someone from the Cato Institute acknowledging, though grudgingly, the worthiness of the Administration's free trade efforts and never once mentioning steel tariffs. Maybe there's hope for the libertarians after all. Now, if the Buchanacons can just get over Ted Kennedy supporting No Child Left Behind...

---

WILL BANNING TRANSFATS LEAD TO A STRONGER DOLLAR?

McCurrencies: Hamburgers should be an essential part of every economist's diet (The Economist, 4/24/03).

THE past year has been one to relish for fans of burgernomics. Last April The Economist's Big Mac index flashed a strong sell sign for the dollar: it was more overvalued than at any time in the index's history. The dollar has since flipped, falling by 12% in trade-weighted terms.

Invented in 1986 as a light-hearted guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level, burgernomics is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP). This says that, in the long run, exchange rates should move toward rates that would equalise the prices of an identical basket of goods and services in any two countries. To put it simply: a dollar should buy the same everywhere. Our basket is a McDonald's Big Mac, produced locally to roughly the same recipe in 118 countries. The Big Mac PPP is the exchange rate that would leave burgers costing the same as in America. Comparing the PPP with the actual rate is one test of whether a currency is undervalued or overvalued. . . .

Many readers complain that burgernomics is hard to swallow. We admit it is flawed: Big Macs are not traded across borders as the PPP theory demands, and prices are distorted by taxes, tariffs, different profit margins and differences in the cost of non-tradables, such as rents. It was never intended as a precise predictor of currency movements, but as a tool to make exchange-rate theory more digestible. Yet in the early 1990s, just before the crisis in Europe's exchange-rate mechanism, it signalled that several currencies, including sterling, were markedly overvalued against the D-mark. It also predicted the fall in the euro after its launch in 1999.

Academic economists are taking burgernomics more seriously, chewing over the Big Mac index in almost a dozen studies. Now a whole book has been written about the index . . . .

In a comment below, I wrongly stated that the Economist had stopped following the Big Mac index. As this article shows, not only do they still keep track of it, but it continues to be predictive. Given the generally poor quality of most economic statistics, the corruption endemic to most third world govermental statistics and the lag in announcing more precise statistics, the Big Mac index might actually be the world's most useful predictive economic indicator.

---

CENTRIST CANUTIFYING

Centrist Democrats Warn Party Not to Present Itself as 'Far Left' (ADAM NAGOURNEY, 7/29/03, NY Times)

The moderate Democratic group that helped elect Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992 warned today that Democrats were headed for defeat if they presented themselves as an angry "far left" party fighting tax cuts and opposing the war in Iraq. [...]

"It is our belief that the Democratic Party has an important choice to make: Do we want to vent or do we want to govern?" said Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, chairman of the organization. "The administration is being run by the far right. The Democratic Party is in danger of being taken over by the far left."

When a reporter asked a panel of council leaders whether Democratic woes were a result of Republican attacks or Democratic mistakes, Senator Bayh responded with a curt two-word answer that silenced the room.

"Assisted suicide," he said. [...]

Mark J. Penn, a Democratic pollster who worked for Mr. Clinton and is now advising Senator Lieberman, offered polling data to show that Mr. Bush was vulnerable but that the Democratic Party was also in a politically perilous position.

"We're at a postwar historic low of Democratic Party membership," he said.

Mr. Penn said that the Democratic Party now trailed the Republicans among people who earn more than $20,000, and that just 22 percent of white men called themselves Democrats.

"Among middle-class voters, the Democratic Party is a shadow of its former self," Mr. Penn said.

The perception, he said, is that Democrats "stand for big government, want to raise taxes too high, are too liberal and are beholden to special interest groups."

Most important, Mr. Penn said, the party has to prove itself credible on the issue of national security--something that many Democrats attending the conference here said would be impossible to do if the party were perceived as opposed to the war on Iraq.

Their pleas remind us of the frog who was prevailed upon by a scorpion to provide a ride across a river.

The frog protested, "But you're a scorpion; you'll sting me."

"No, I won't. I can't swim; that's why I need a ride. If I were to sting you, we'd both die.

So the frog let the scorpion climb on his back and started out across the river. On reaching the midway point, he felt a burning pain and realized the scorpion had stung him after all.

As they slipped under the water, the frog wailed: "Why did you do that? Now we'll both die."

The reply? "I'm a scorpion--it's my nature."

---

FURTHER DEMOCRATIC DERANGEMENT

Who Profits from Erasing Iraq's Debt? (Heather Wokusch, July 28, 2003, CommonDreams)

Outspoken Pentagon advisor Richard Perle recently called for Iraq's debt to be cancelled as a way of teaching banks about the "moral hazard of ... lend[ing] to a vicious dictatorship."

Fair enough. Other countries with "odious debt" incurred under nasty regimes may be granted debt forgiveness. Why not Iraq?

Why not indeed. A war profiteer like Perle lecturing on morality is doubtful enough, but who in today's occupied Iraq will really profit from debt forgiveness, the Iraqi people or companies like Halliburton?

At stake is more than $184 billion of pending contracts and debts against Iraq, many of which transpired before the 1991 invasion of Kuwait. In other words, even deals inked when Saddam Hussein was considered a US ally could now be considered odious debt.

No small coincidence that the countries slated to lose most from an Iraqi write-off include Russia, France and Germany: Bush's axis-of-just-as-evil for opposing the recent invasion of Iraq. [...]

Bottom line, until a stable government is in place, truly representative of the Iraqi people, there should be no debt cancellations - reschedulings or delayed payment allowances perhaps, but no write-offs.

To oppose a policy that you'd otherwise support, just because you're worried that your fellow advocates are more odious than the debt, and even though your opposition will hurt the people you're supposedly trying to help, is very nearly clinically insane.

---

JOHN NASH SAYS, "IT'S NOT SO CRAZY" (via The Mother Judd)

Pentagon Prepares a Futures Market on Terror Attacks (CARL HULSE, July 29, 2003, NY Times)

The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has a new experiment. It is an online futures trading market, disclosed today by critics, in which anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups.

Traders bullish on a biological attack on Israel or bearish on the chances of a North Korean missile strike would have the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on a new Internet site established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The Pentagon called its latest idea a new way of predicting events and part of its search for the "broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks." Two Democratic senators who reported the plan called it morally repugnant and grotesque. The senators said the program fell under the control of Adm. John M. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser.

One of the two senators, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, said the idea seemed so preposterous that he had trouble persuading people it was not a hoax. "Can you imagine," Mr. Dorgan asked, "if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in--and is sponsored by the government itself--people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?" [...]

The Pentagon, in defending the program, said such futures trading had proven effective in predicting other events like oil prices, elections and movie ticket sales.

"Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information," the Defense Department said in a statement. "Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often better than expert opinions."

It sounds like they need tighter controls on who could play the market, but it's really just a way to use games to distribute information more efficiently. And the military's used game theory since it was invented. Does anyone doubt, for instance, that such a device would have had the WTC at or near the top on 9-10 and thereby, at least potentially, focussed the government's attention better?

---

"EVERYBODY WON'T BE TREATED ALL THE SAME"

With MTV nomination, another generation discovers Cash's cool (Renee Graham, 7/29/2003, Boston Globe)

The first time I heard Johnny Cash, I had nightmares for weeks.

When his granite-hard voice poured out of my grandmother's radio, it arched my 10-year-old spine. He sang of a wild young man who, though he had murdered 20 men by the age of 10, was due to hang for a killing he didn't commit. As serious and sobering as a news dispatch, the song sounded like nothing I had ever heard before, and I was completely unnerved as it cut through the gummy summer air.

What most affected me -- other than the grim, sharp thunk of the gallows' trapdoor swinging open as the warden sang ''Happy Birthday'' to the condemned man who turned 20 the day he died -- was Cash's voice. Every syllable sounded like a cold truth, as real and stirring as a Sunday sermon. It both frightened me and made a fan for life. Years later, I would learn the name of the song was ''Joe Bean,'' and it remains a favorite, especially since the nightmares have subsided.

Now, the MTV generation has discovered what I learned on that summer night three decades ago: Johnny Cash rules.

If Hurt doesn't bring back the nightmares, The Man Comes Around surely will--it's the most apocalyptic pop tune ever:

And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder:
One of the four beasts saying: "Come and see."
And I saw.
And behold, a white horse.

There's a man goin' 'round takin' names.
An' he decides who to free and who to blame.
Everybody won't be treated all the same.
There'll be a golden ladder reaching down.
When the man comes around.

The hairs on your arm will stand up.
At the terror in each sip and in each sup.
For you partake of that last offered cup,
Or disappear into the potter's ground.
When the man comes around. 

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers.
One hundred million angels singin'.
Multitudes are marching to the big kettle drum.
Voices callin', voices cryin'.
Some are born an' some are dyin'.
It's Alpha's and Omega's Kingdom come.

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
The virgins are all trimming their wicks.
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

Till Armageddon, no Shalam, no Shalom.
Then the father hen will call his chickens home.
The wise men will bow down before the throne.
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crown.
When the man comes around.

Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still.
Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still.
Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still.
Listen to the words long written down,
When the man comes around.

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers.
One hundred million angels singin'.
Multitudes are marchin' to the big kettle drum.
Voices callin', voices cryin'.
Some are born an' some are dyin'.
It's Alpha's and Omega's Kingdom come.

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
The virgins are all trimming their wicks.
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

In measured hundredweight and penny pound.
When the man comes around.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts,
And I looked and behold: a pale horse.
And his name, that sat on him, was Death.
And Hell follwed with him.

---

EPCOT ON THE TIGRIS

INTERVIEW: Swimming against the mainstream (Christopher Horton, 7/26/03, Asia Times)

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the man widely considered as the top investigative journalist in the United States is persona non grata in his own country's media. For Greg Palast, an accidental journalist, this is not upsetting. "Our news is like Pravda," he stated matter-of-factly from his New York office in a recent interview with Asia Times Online.

Palast is content to continue his investigative reports into what he perceives as an American oligarchy - a nexus between politicians and corporations in which the line between the two is increasingly blurred - an endeavor which he pursues across the Atlantic in the British media. However, he is gradually being "discovered" by Americans tired of channel surfing only to find the same version of events coming out of the mouths of different talking heads. [...]

Finished with the book tour, and working on an edited US version of his investigation into the Bush dynasty which aired on the BBC under the name "Bush Family Fortunes" ("America can't take it straight up," he said), what is Palast up to next?

"I have a document from before the war, an official State Department document about the plan for Iraq's economy. This includes the privatization of the oil industry. The plan is essentially to turn Iraq into a corporate Disneyland," Palast said.

There's a great scene in Tony Horwitz's Baghdad Without a Map, where he's stuck in the street during the chaotic funeral rally for the Ayatollah Khomeini:

One of the demonstrators peeled off to rest by the curb, and I edged over to ask him what the mourners were shouting.

'Death to America,' he said.

'Oh.' I reached for my notebook as self-protection and scribbled the Farsi transliteration : Margbar Omrika.

'You are American?' he asked.

'Yes. A journalist.'  I braced myself for a diatribe against the West and its arrogant trumpets.

'I must ask you something,' the man said.  'Have you ever been to Disneyland?'

'As a kid, yes.'

The man nodded, thoughtfully stroking his beard.  'My brother lives in California and has written me about Disneyland,' he continued.  'It has always been my dream to go there and take my children on the tea-cup ride.' With that, he rejoined the marchers, raised his fist and yelled 'Death to America!' again.

Our biggest problem in Iraq isn't the rather desperate resistance of the Ba'ath remnants and a few imported Islamicists, but that the great majority who are glad we're there seem to think we can turn it into Disneyland. If Mr. Palast has seen the plans, maybe there's hope.

---

THE KURDS GET IT

A voice of sanity amid Iraq's chaos (Syed Saleem Shahzad, 7/28/03, Asia Times)

One man, Dr Faud Masum, has emerged nationally in the post-Saddam period as a powerful political personality.

He is also the most prominent figure in Kurdistan right now and is tipped as the president of its next joint parliament. (He was the first prime minister of the joint parliament, but resigned immediately because the Kurdish factions could not develop consensus on issues). Currently he is a member of a committee in Baghdad which is pondering a constitution for Iraq.

Masum, 65, has had a dynamic career. A PhD in Islamic Philosphy from Cairo University, he wrote his thesis on Iqwan-u-Sifa (a group of sufis in 10th century Iraq who believed in secularism). He was a teacher at Basra University but later he chose to be a peshmerga , a member of a Kurdish volunteer force and which means "a person who faces death" in the Kurdish struggle. He says that he fought for Kurdistan and carries many old wounds, but he never wounded anybody.

This correspondent had a chance to speak to Masum at his modest house in a middle-class district of Sulaimaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan, where he outlined his political perspective on post-Saddam Iraq. [...]

ATol: The US' aims in the Middle East seem to be obvious. It plans to change the dynamics of Middle Eastern society and wants broad democratic and economic reforms in the region. How do you see these developments?

Masum: Of cource, the situation in Iraq will have a direct impact on neighboring countries, and that is why these countries are afraid. Interestingly, they already have US troops on their land, but they are afraid of US designs for political and economic reforms in the region. The US has a clear line of interest behind these policies, but we too have our interests. Let's see what happens in the future.

ATol: There is an impression that the US would not allow a big local army and it would continue to dominate the region through its presence. Do you think this is part of its colonial thinking on Iraq?

Masum: I do not think so. Colonialism is history now. The US cannot directly rule in Iraq. I think they will keep their presence through some of their bases in Iraq.

Now, if Iraq just had a few hundred men like Mr. Masum...

---

ALL I SEE ARE TREES

Dietary Demons (Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan, 7/25/03, Tech Central Station)

What are we to get in return for the higher costs (and, presumably, more limited food choices) that will come with the labeling and phasing out of trans fats? The government estimates that perhaps 250 to 500 coronary heart disease deaths (out of the total 500,000 that occur annually in the U.S.) will be prevented. But those numbers are purely hypothetical: The real number of lives saved might be zero.

While trans fatty acids are certainly not good for your health, focusing on them as a cause of heart disease is surely near-sighted. It's like a two-pack-a-day smoker worrying about second-hand smoke in a restaurant.

Surely someone should investigate the intelligence estimates that are leading the FDA down this path.

---

THE STUFF OF LEGENDS

Our Man in the Orient (Nate Barksdale. Spring 2003, Regeneration Quarterly)

Prester John was not, despite what you might think from the name, a circus performer nor the founder of a chain of fried-food restaurants. Nor was he a magician, though he did have the trick of vanishing only to reappear in unexpected places. And if his name, once you say it a few times, seems at once both obscure and familiar, there may be a reason. For nearly half of the last millennium, Prester John was a genuine celebrity in Western Europe: the mysterious ruler of an impossibly rich and powerful kingdom just over the horizon, somewhere in Asia, or maybe Africa. He was, as the saying goes, the stuff of legends, like Elvis or Brando or the Sultan of Brunei. He was wealthy, he was powerful, and--best of all--he was a Christian.

His first authenticated appearance is in the twelfth-century chronicle of Otto of Freising, who tells of the military victories of a priest-king living in the far east. This king, known as Prester John, had defeated a combined force of Persians, Medes, and Assyrians in a glorious three-day battle and then marched to the aid of Jerusalem, which had lately been recaptured by Saracen Muslims. The journey didn’t go well for Prester John. He marched his army to the Tigris and, unable to cross it, followed the river north in hopes it would freeze during the winter. After waiting several years for the promised ice to appear, he decided that the climate was too temperate, and, his army decimated “on account of the weather to which they were unaccustomed,” the priest-king headed home. Though not much for boats or bridges, Prester John was nonetheless, even in this early account, an intriguing character: “He is said to be a descendant of the Magi of old,” Otto’s chronicle reports. “He governs the same people as they did and is said to enjoy such glory and such plenty that he uses no scepter save one of emerald.”

A couple of decades later, the story got even more impressive. In 1165, copies of a letter from Prester John to the emperor of Byzantium started making the rounds in Europe. The letter, reconstructed from later copies, began something like this: “I, Johannes the Presbyter, Lord of Lords, am superior in virtue, riches and might to all who walk under Heaven,” and went on from there. Seventy-two kings paid him tribute. Thirty thousand subjects dined daily at his table. When he rode into war, he was proceeded by three crosses of gold. On other occasions, he went forth behind a single cross of plain wood—that he might recall the humble death of Jesus Christ, whom he served.

As for the kingdom he ruled, it was a storehouse of wonders: elephants, dromedaries, mute griffins, wild oxen, and wild men. There were pygmies, giants, Cyclopes and their wives, not to mention a more or less complete collection of natural resources: emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolites, onyxes, beryls. There was a plant whose very presence in the realm frightened away demons. A spring which, if you drank from it three times, would keep you thirty years old for the rest of your life. And since it wouldn’t be the East without spices, of course there was lots of pepper.

Now it seems obvious enough, given certain details, that the letter was at least partly fictitious. And, as the novelist Evan S. Connell notes in his delightful essay on Prester John (collected most recently in The Aztec Treasure House), the leading men of Europe—being no more or less gullible than we—were doubtful even at the time. A translation of the letter by one of Richard Lionheart’s knights included a caveat familiar to anyone who has received a forwarded e-mail: This might not be true, but I thought you’d want to read it anyway. The letter was most likely seen as a veiled dressing-down of the rulers of the day, or perhaps as an attempt to revitalize the Crusades with the hope of an inter-empire coalition. Nevertheless, twelve years later Prester John and his epistle were still on everyone’s minds, so to quiet the murmurings and instruct the masses Pope Alexander iii penned a response praising John for his apparent piety and gently restating the Christian duty of submission to papal authority. Sealed and signed, the letter was entrusted to the pope’s personal physician who, as Connell dryly notes, “obediently marched off in the direction of Asia and right off the pages of history.”

Some legends are so compelling, it's no wonder folk believed them.

---

)

Battling for the High Ground (Washington Post, 7/28/2003)

Roll Call and the Hill ... serve as community newspapers for Capitol Hill ...

This year, both newspapers boosted the number of times they publish, deployed more reporters to the Capitol and stepped up their competition for the lucrative market in advocacy advertising....

[I]n January ... Roll Call, under editor Tim Curran, added a third day, Wednesday, to its weekly publication schedule ... Roll Call added about nine employees in the process, publisher Laurie Battaglia-Skinker said.

The Hill countered by bringing in new executive editor Hugo Gurdon, 46, a veteran of London's Fleet Street ... Gurdon has increased publication to two days a week, redesigned the newspaper's appearance, nearly doubled the reporting staff to 13 people and is ready for more....

Now Roll Call plans by September to publish four times a week when Congress is in session, Monday through Thursday, and the Hill said by the end of the year it will be up to three issues per week.

Fueled by the large market for advocacy advertising, both newspapers are profitable and their expansions typify the explosion of journalistic coverage on Capitol Hill.

Pages of help-wanted advertising have traditionally been used as a leading indicator of the economy. Let us hope that pages of "advocacy ads" are not a leading indicator of the regulatory state.

---

NEVER RETREAT

Drudge is reporting that the Clintons intend to campaign for Gray Davis in California against the recall. It seems to me that Democrats have recently shown a senseless tendency to defend their officeholders -- any officeholder -- against attack, no matter how incompetent or unpopular he might be, and even if a Democrat would replace him. Democrats I knew were outraged at the Clinton impeachment and passionate in their defence of Clinton, even though Gore would have replaced him and Clinton wasn't doing anything for them in his last years in office. They seem similarly inclined to go to the mat for Gray Davis even though a Democrat would probably be his replacement. Outside of politics, we've see the New York Times cling to partisanship even as its reputation suffers.

In each case this stubbornness seems to me against their best interest. Gore would have had a leg up in 2000 as a sitting President; the Democrats would have seemed more moderate and less dangerous. Similarly any number of California Democrats would be more attractive to the voters than Gray Davis, who is widely regarded even among Democrats as corrupt. Likewise the Times would have more credibility and influence on the big issues if it were occasionally willing to retreat from tendentiousness on small issues.

The Democrats resemble a general who is incapable of ordering a retreat, or indeed of issuing any order except "Attack!" Why is this? It may be evidence in support of John Jay Ray's psychological theory of leftism.

---

COGITO ERGO ?

Putting Our Faith in Science: When it comes to spirituality, biologists and physicists are in over their heads (Andrew Klavan, July 25, 2003, LA Times)

[N]othing science has come up with challenges our inner experiences of the divine. Most scientific arguments against these experiences boil down to the mistaken idea that if the mechanics of an internal phenomenon - the mind, say, or religious ecstasy - can be detailed, the phenomenon itself has been explained away. That is, if the "mind" is caused by the behavior of brain cells, then our experience of our selves is an illusion. If religious ecstasy can be photographed in a scan, then there's nothing real to be ecstatic about.

This line of reasoning is what physicist-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead termed "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," in which the abstract understanding of an event is mistaken for the event itself. "This is the ultimate irony of some modern science," British theologian Keith Ward says, "that it begins by trying to explain and understand the rich, particular, concrete world as experienced by humans, and ends by seeing that phenomenal world as an illusion."

It is this fallacy that ultimately confounds MIT psychologist Steven Pinker in his book "The Blank Slate." Pinker derides the notion that human nature might be part of anything like a soul - the "ghost in the machine," as he calls it.

Yet even he can't finally disentangle his materialistic explanations from the mysterious phenomena they supposedly explain.

"These puzzles have an infuriatingly holistic quality to them," he writes with touching frustration. "Consciousness and free will seem to suffuse the neurobiological phenomena at every level. Thinkers seem condemned either to denying their existence or to wallowing in mysticism."

It's strange that the faithful are so often dismissed as small-minded when it's the rational who can't wrap their minds around this conundrum.


MORE:
New-yet-old ideas about the soul: Thinkers who question if there's a self separate from the body say they're faithful to biblical roots. (Tirdad Derakhshani, July 20, 2003, Philadelphia Inquirer)

Some scholars, primarily liberal Protestants but also some evangelicals, insist the Hebrew Bible presents an integrated picture of the self that does not draw sharp distinctions between soul and body. This has led some of them to reject the concept of the soul as a separate substance.

"What we are saying is that there is no such thing as a soul," said Murphy. She and Warren S. Brown, a neuropsychologist and director of Fuller's Travis Research Institute, are coeditors of Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, a provocative collection of essays.

They say they are committed to evangelical Christian teachings, yet believe developments in cognitive science and evolutionary biology call into question a dualistic definition of humans.

"As neuroscientists associate more and more of the faculties once attributed to mind or soul with the functioning of specific regions or systems of the brain, it becomes more and more appealing to say that it is in fact the brain that performs these functions," Murphy writes in the book's introduction.

"Nearly all of the human capacities or faculties once attributed to the soul are now seen to be functions of the brain." [...]

Brown, whose research has focused on the structure connecting the left and right brain, said, "I basically believe that humans are physical beings and would not think that the soul is a psychical entity, a little ghost in the machine."

He defends a complex position called "non-reductive physicalism," which holds that human beings are physical through and through. But he also maintains that we have developed cognitive and emotional capacities that cannot be reduced to biological or chemical processes.

These capacities, which he calls our "soulishness," enable us to be relational beings. "Soul language in traditional religious talk is suggestive of relationship with one another and our internal self-relationship, and our relationships with God," he said.

---

A DIVINE WIND BLOWS NO GOOD

Japanese sun in overcast world (Martin Hutchinson, 7/25/2003, UPI)

Shortly after The Economist magazine first produced its signature Big Mac index, in 1989, the Japanese yen, at 145 yen to the dollar was 38 percent overvalued against the dollar, by the index; a Big Mac cost 38 percent more in Tokyo than in New York. This overvaluation increased to 100 percent by 1995, at which point the yen touched its all time high of 80 yen to the dollar. Today, at 119 yen to the dollar, it is by the Big Mac index 19 percent undervalued compared to the dollar; a Big Mac is 19 percent cheaper in Tokyo than in New York.

At first sight, this is very strange. The yen has appreciated by about 18 percent against the dollar since 1989, at a time when inflation in both countries has been modest, yet a Big Mac has moved from being 38 percent more expensive in Tokyo to 19 percent less expensive.

The explanation for it is not the alleged evil monster of deflation, or at least it is only deflation in the purely technical sense of prices dropping. The Japanese distribution system was in 1989 the most inefficient in the developed world, particularly for foreign goods, with layer upon layer of importers and wholesalers each charging a markup on the goods that moved through their hands, and price competition at the retail level being hopelessly restricted by the highly protectionist Large Scale Retail Store Law. Consequently, an item such as the Big Mac, which was partly imported, partly sourced from inefficient Japanese agriculture, and wholly distributed to the consumer through retail outlets, was far more expensive in Tokyo than it needed to be. Any foreign visitor paying a Japanese restaurant bill in the 1980s will confirm this; the place was outrageously costly, through excessive costs at all levels including and notoriously the real estate on which the restaurant rested, which was so expensive that the Emperor's palace grounds in central Tokyo were in 1989 worth more than the entire state of California.

All that has now changed. [...]

The Japanese economy is now poised to move forward. By U.S. standards, its rate of GDP growth may appear unexciting, for demographic reasons -- unlike the U.S., whose population is growing by about 1.2 percent per annum, thorough births and immigration, Japan's is shrinking, by about one percent per annum, because of tight immigration policies and a low birth rate. But for the Japanese people, this is a good thing; it means that a 2 percent per annum growth rate in the Japanese economy can in the long run translate into a 3 percent per annum improvement in Japanese living standards. And of course, with low immigration, the social tensions of immigration are also very largely absent, with violent crime rates in Japan far lower than those in the U.S. or Western Europe

According to current projections, 1 in 2.8 Japanese will be over 65 years old by 2050. Just 8% of the population will be under 15 years old. Big Macs could cost a nickel and it wouldn't change the fact that Japan will literally be a dying society.


MORE:
Japan sinks under rising crime rates (Hiroshi Osedo, 26nov02, Courier & Mail)

A JAPANESE Government white paper on crime released last week has demolished the myth that Japan is the safest country in the world.

According to the document compiled by the Justice Ministry, the number of criminal cases in 2001 was a post-war record.

Excluding traffic offences, the number of crimes rose to 2.73 million, up 12 per cent from the previous year.

The white paper attributed the rise in violent crime to moral degeneration among Japanese people and to decline in the crime prevention functions traditionally provided by the family, schools and local communities.

---

THE GEORGIAN JACK KEMP

Q & A: GEORGIAN POLITICIAN PROMISES "FIGHT TO CHANGE THE TAX CODE" (Daan van der Schriek: 7/25/03, EuAsia Week)

Gogi Topadze, a beverage magnate who leads the Industry Will Save Georgia party, says he wants to stimulate growth by simplifying the tax code. He spoke to EurasiaNet about his platform, the upcoming elections, and his willingness to work with the Shevardnadze government.

EurasiaNet: Dissatisfaction with the tax code has characterized the Industrialists. In your opinion, what is wrong with it?

Topadze: It's not possible to point at one or two paragraphs in the tax code that we're not happy with. The whole code is detrimental to the Georgian economy. It is oriented towards the import of goods and kills possibilities in Georgia to start businesses that could successfully compete with Western products.

The tax code, which reflects recommendations from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and [others], doesn't allow for the opportunity to modernize the industry and agriculture of the country. We have proposed to parliament three different variants of the tax code that would stimulate Georgian business. Their main principles were liberalization, the use of more understandable language in the code and a simplification of taxes. Instead of the current 80 different taxes there would be only four, three of which would be national and one local.

With such a simplified code, you could fight corruption. The current code is so cumbersome and opaque that it is easy for bureaucrats in the tax department to take what they want if they are inclined to do so. Therefore, the [Ministry of Tax and Finance] doesn't want to [simplify] the law. Big companies have a whole group of lawyers to fight back. But small businesses don't.

The party name is a tad prosaic, but the platform is poetry.

---

THE VERY VISION OF A MODERN TORY

My hero: David Cameron, the young Tory MP, has all the qualities needed to rescue the party (Bruce Anderson, 7/26/03, The Spectator)

In his political views, David Cameron is on the real-world Right of the Tory party. A Eurosceptic, he believes in smaller government and personal freedom; he abominates political correctness and the nanny state. But he also understands that most people depend on public services and do not necessarily trust the Tories to look after them. David Cameron is a modern Tory, who sees the need to adapt old principles to new circumstances. Without being a populist, he has a feel for public opinion. He likes pop music as well as opera; football as well as deer-stalking.

Above all, he has a robust and incisive mind. I have rarely met a politician who can expand a complex issue with such clarity while spotting every political nuance. He is also a good speaker, who charms audiences without condescending to them and who makes jokes while remaining serious.

If there is a fault, it is an unconcealed impatience. One or two of David Cameron's Tory contemporaries, not negligible figures themselves, have complained that he does not take enough trouble with the likes of them. In the febrile world of competitive politics there may be an element of jealousy in that criticism, but it is something which he will have to watch. The day will come when he needs his fellow Tory MPs' votes.

At this point, any Tory who's actually more conservative than Tony Blair is a hopeful sign.


MORE:
It's time to fight back: Now we're told the Tories are even responsible for making more people commit suicide (David Cameron, September 20, 2002, The Guardian)

A column in the Guardian might be the wrong place to ask this question. But does anybody out there ever feel sorry for us Tories? We may be in our fifth year of opposition, languishing in the polls and virtually invisible in the media, but we're still getting blamed for everything. And I mean, everything. The state of the railways. Privatisation. Hospital waiting lists. Two decades of under-investment. Shortage of housing. The Tory sale of council houses. When will anyone start blaming the government?

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, an academic study is showing that the suicide rate tends to rise during Tory governments. No, seriously. According to the study, if Labour or the Liberals had ruled uninterrupted this century, 35,000 fewer people would have died. [...]

But I think I have the key. On election night in 1997, when I crashed and burned as the Tory candidate in Stafford, an old lady came to me in tears and said: "I don't want to die under a Labour government." Perhaps there were thousands of others like her who didn't wait for the final results and took pre-emptive action.

Another look at the figures over the past century would seem to back up this thesis. There was a spike in the figures just before the first Labour government in 1924 and another in 1945. Churchill may not have expected the Labour landslide, but others clearly did.

The figures were relatively flat during Ted Heath's premiership, presumably on the basis that people thought (quite rightly as it turned out) that a Labour government couldn't be much worse. On this basis, the rise in the early 1980s wasn't down to Margaret Thatcher's tough policies, but simply because, before the Falklands war, people couldn't see how she could win another election.

---

FORCING AMERICA TO GO JACKSONIAN

THE SEARCH FOR OSAMA: Did the government let bin Laden?s trail go cold? (JANE MAYER, 2003-07-28, The New Yorker)

[Richard Clarke, the country's first counter-terrorism czar,] said that in October, 2000, when the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, off the coast of Yemen, Clinton demanded better military options. The Department of Defense prepared a plan for a United States military operation so big that it was dismissed as politically untenable; meanwhile, General Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concluded that, without better intelligence, a smaller-scale attack would be too risky. (Indeed, according to the Congressional Report on September 11th, Shelton said, "You can develop military operations until hell freezes over, but they are worthless without intelligence.") The Navy tried stationing two submarines in the Indian Ocean, in the hope of being able to shoot missiles at bin Laden, but the time lag between the sighting of the target and the arrival of the missiles made it virtually impossible to pinpoint him accurately.

The first promise of an intelligence breakthrough came in the fall of 2000, when Clarke, and a few allies in the C.I.A. and the military, recognized the potential of the Predator, a nine-hundred-and-fifty-pound unmanned propeller plane being tested by General Johnny Jumper, the Air Force's head of air combat at the time. It could supply live video surveillance-day or night, and through cloud cover. Clarke said that the plane, which was tested in Afghanistan, supplied "spectacular" pictures of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists, including one of a tall, white-robed man who closely resembled bin Laden and was surrounded by security guards as he crossed a city street to a mosque. At the C.I.A.'s Global Response Center, analysts who were used to receiving fuzzy satellite photographs and thirdhand reports were now able to watch as live video feeds captured the daily routines inside Al Qaeda training camps. They watched as men did physical exercises, fired their weapons, and practiced hand-to-hand combat. Two or three times that fall, intelligence analysts thought they might have spotted bin Laden himself. The man in question was unusually tall, like bin Laden, and drove the same model of truck that bin Laden preferred, the Toyota Land Cruiser. (The images weren't clear enough, however, to allow analysts to discern facial features.) The C.I.A. rushed the surveillance tapes over to the White House, where the President, like everyone else, was stunned by their clarity. Later that fall, however, fierce winds in the Hindu Kush caused the Predator to crash. The accident led to recriminations inside the C.I.A. and the Air Force and quarrels about which part of the bureaucracy should pay for the damage.

By early 2001, Clarke and a handful of counter-terrorism specialists at the C.I.A. had learned of an Air Force plan to arm the Predator. The original plan called for three years of tests. Clarke and the others pushed so hard that the plane was ready in three months. In tests, the craft worked surprisingly well. In the summer of 2001, an armed Predator destroyed a model of bin Laden's house which had been built in the Nevada desert. But Clarke said, "Every time we were ready to use it, the C.I.A. would change its mind. The real motivation within the C.I.A., I think, is that some senior people below Tenet were saying, `It's fine to kill bin Laden, but we want to do it in a way that leaves no fingerprints. Otherwise, C.I.A. agents all over the world will be subject to assassination themselves.' They also worried that something would go wrong-they'd blow up a convent and get blamed."

On September 4, 2001, all sides agree, the issue reached a head, at a meeting of the Principal's Committee of Bush's national-security advisers, a Cabinet-level group that includes the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the director of the C.I.A., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Attorney General, and the national-security adviser. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also attended that day. As Clarke, who was there, recalled, "Tenet said he opposed using the armed Predator, because it wasn't the C.I.A.'s job to fly airplanes that shot missiles. The Air Force said it wasn't their job to fly planes to collect intelligence. No one around the table seemed to have a can-do attitude. Everyone seemed to have an excuse."

"There was a discussion," the senior intelligence official confirmed. "The C.I.A. said, `Who's got more experience flying aircraft that shoot missiles?' But the Air Force liked planes with pilots." In looking back at the deadlock, Roger Cressey, Clarke's deputy for counter-terrorism at the N.S.C., told me, "It sounds terrible, but we used to say to each other that some people didn't get it-it was going to take body bags."

We'd all like to have someone to blame for 9-11, but the brutal reality is that it does take the body bags to focus all our attention. The question is: given the lethality of our response once you get it, who would want our attention?

---

TOO BAD THE US HAS UNDERMINED INTERNATIONAL COMITY.

Blair accused by Greeks of crimes against humanity (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph, 7/29/03)

Tony Blair was accused yesterday of 'crimes against humanity' in a lawsuit lodged at the International Criminal Court in The Hague by Greek lawyers.

The Athens Bar Association filed 22 charges against the Prime Minister and senior Cabinet members, alleging that they invaded a sovereign country on a dubious pretext.

'The repeated, blatant violations by the United States and Britain of the stipulations of the four 1949 Geneva conventions, the 1954 Convention of The Hague as well as of the International Criminal Court's charter constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity,' said the group.

The case is based on press clippings and news reports, many from Greece's anti-American media.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, and Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, were among those named, but the Bush administration was spared because America has refused to sign up to the ICC.

Washington fears the court could degenerate into a political circus and subject US officials to constant harassment.

Where would Washington get a silly idea like that?

---

NOT MILTON

Bad debt: Why Bush's deficits will slow America's growth (Benjamin M. Friedman, 7/27/2003, Boston Globe)

The root of the problem is that America has always been a low-saving country. The fraction of our incomes that we put aside, together with the fraction of earnings that our companies retain rather than paying out in dividends, adds up to a smaller share of our national income than what the typical European country saves, and a smaller share than what some of the fast-growth countries in East Asia normally save.

When the government spends more than it takes in from taxes-that's what running a deficit means-the Treasury has to borrow in the financial markets to cover the overage. This borrowing absorbs some of the saving done by families and firms, saving that otherwise would have remained available to finance investment in productive new plant and equipment. People who put their savings into banks, or money-market mutual funds, don't think of themselves as financing the government's deficit. But when these institutions use the deposited funds to buy Treasury securities, that's exactly what they are doing.

If we had a saving rate like Italy's (11 percent) or Korea's (above 13 percent), having the Treasury absorb an amount of our saving equal to a few percentage points of our national income would be of little concern. But over the last 10 years the total amount of saving done by the private sector of our economy, beyond the amount needed merely to replace the factories and houses that are wearing out (in other words, the saving that is available to enable the economy to do more than just keep running in place), has averaged not even 6 percent of US national income. If the government's deficit averages 2 percent of national income later this decade, as the latest Bush administration predicts, it will therefore take up more than one-third of America's net saving. More likely, the deficit will be larger and so will the share of our national saving it absorbs.

When a similar situation occurred during the Reagan administration (when the deficit averaged 4.2 percent of national income), defenders of the president's policy offered a variety of stories about how the saving rate would rise, or how business could be productive and wages rise without new investment, or how some other break with prior experience would solve the problem. Those ideas were intellectually interesting. But they also proved wrong. During the big-deficit years of President Reagan and the first President Bush, the share of US national income devoted to net new investment in plant and equipment fell to the lowest average level in the postwar period, and real wages-and therefore the income of the typical US family-stagnated.

To make matters worse, in order to finance even the meager investment we were able to make during the Reagan-Bush years, with the government absorbing so much of our saving, America borrowed so much from abroad that we became the world's most highly indebted country. During the last few years, the United States has again been running a large trade deficit, and consequently has been borrowing heavily from foreign lenders, for reasons having little to do with the budget deficit. Business here may be weak, but it is stronger than in Europe or Japan or Latin America. We buy more than $100 billion in goods each year from China, but sell the Chinese little in return. If our government is still running a sizable budget deficit after our economy returns to full employment, that will only make the situation worse.

What's wrong with continual large budget deficits, maintained year after year even at full employment, is that they take away the economy's means of achieving economic growth.

Two salient facts make it nearly impossible to take this essay seriously:

(1) Repetition of the national savings rate canard--we've all heard these dire numbers before and there's some healthy residue of Puritanism that makes us want to flagellate ourselves for squandering our money instead of saving it. You'll have noticed that we are always compred to the notoriously drone-like Japanese and Germans, in order to make the numbers seem more plausible. But they are, of course, completely misleading. In order to arrive at such an absurdly low number for America's savings rate you have to exclude two rather significant things from the calculation: the home and the 401k. Factor these assets back into the equation and we actually have one of, if not the, highest savings rates in the world. Americans too save like worker bees, its just that, unlike many other countries, we both own our own hives and help fund our own golden years.

(2) Twenty years of uninterrupted growth at a higher rate than any other Western nation--the last two "recessions" (1991, 2001) were so shallow and so brief and economic numbers are so notoriously amorphous that folks have already beguin to question whether they even qualify as such or were merely periods of slowdown. But this much seems certain, that when you plot out the trend of the American economy over the last twenty years it certainly looks like a continuous, though somewhat unevenly paced, ascent. Moreover, if you plot out the annual debt against that growth line you'll find bno correlation between lower debt and faster growth. In fact, the latest slowdown corresponded precisely to the return of surpluses. This is not necessarily to argue--though I would--that the surplus led to or was a main contributor to the 2001 slowdown, but it does suggest that our budget deficits and surpluses have a more complicated relationship to our economic growth than Mr. Friedman allows.

---

THE PRIVATIZATION of PUBLIC EDUCATION AND SOCIAL SERVICES

President Addresses Urban League (Remarks by the President to the 2003 Urban League Conference David Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 7/28/03)

Equal education is one of the most pressing civil rights of our day. Nearly half a century after Brown versus Board of Education, there's still an achievement gap in America. On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, on the reading test, 41 percent of white 4th graders were proficient and better readers, but only 12 percent of African-Americans met that standard. That means we've got a problem. Both numbers are too low.

I think too many of our schools are leaving too many children unprepared. And so we acted. I worked with Congress to pass what we call The No Child Left Behind Act. It says every child can learn. We must challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations. And you know what I'm talking about.

And as Rod Paige will brief you, states are beginning to respond. We said, in return for record levels of education spending at the federal level, we expect results.

You see, if you believe every child can learn, then you ought to be asking the question to those who are spending our money: are you teaching the child? That's what we ought to be asking all across America. And now there's accountability plans being put in place in 50 states, plus Puerto Rico and the District. I know people are concerned about testing. I've heard this debate a lot. They say it's discriminatory to measure and compare results. I say it is discriminatory not to measure. I think it's important to know whether or not our schools are succeeding. We simply have got to stop shuffling our children from grade to grade without asking the question, have they been taught to learn to read and write and add and subtract?

I believe it is those who believe certain [children] can't learn that are willing to shuffle them through. And the No Child Left Behind Act ends that, in return for record levels of money, you've got to show us whether or not the children can read and write and add and subtract. And when schools don't measure up, parents must have more options. It's one thing to measure, but there has to be consequences for failing schools. So in that Act parents are able to send their children to a different public school or a charter school, or get special tutorial help.

I also believe it makes sense to explore private school choices, so I'm working with the leadership in Washington, D.C. This isn't a Democrat issue or Republican issue, this is an issue that focuses on children. [...]

Our opportunity in society must also be a compassionate society. As Americans, when we see hopelessness and suffering and injustice, we will not turn our backs. And one of the best ways to build hope is to recognize where some of the great works of compassion are done. You see, a government can hand out money -- and sometimes we do a pretty good job of it -- but what it can't do is put hope in people's hearts or a sense of purpose in people's lives. That happens when people who have been called to love a neighbor interface with a neighbor in need.

You see, every day across America, faith-based and community groups are touching people's lives in profound ways -- give shelter to the homeless and provide safety for battered women; they bring compassion to lonely seniors. America's neighborhood healers have long experience and deep understanding of the problems that many face. And many of them have something extra besides experience. They have inspiration, as they carry God's love to people in need.

I like to call the neighborhood healers America's social entrepreneurs. And they need the support of foundation America and corporate America. They need the support of individuals and, of course, congregations. And, when appropriate, they deserve the support of the government.

Government has no business endorsing a religious creed, or directly funding religious worship. But for too long, government treated people of faith like second-class citizens in the grant making process. Government can and should support effective social services provided by religious people, as long as those services go to anyone in need. And when government gives that support, faith-based institutions should not be forced to change the character of their service or compromise their principles.

Neighborhood healers have not been treated well by the federal government, so I signed an executive order banning discrimination against faith-based charities by federal agencies. I created a special offices in my key Cabinet departments to speak up for faith-based groups, and to help them access government funding. I've asked the departments to report to me on a regular basis to make sure the old days are gone, to make sure we challenge and harness the great strength of the country, the heart and soul of our citizens. We're changing the focus of government from process to results. Instead of asking the question, is this a faith-based program? We're now asking the question, does the program work? And if so, it deserves our support. [...]

Our journey toward justice has not been easy and it is not over. Yet I am confident that we will reach our destination. We have been called to great work in our time, and we will answer that call. We will defend our freedom, and we will lead the world toward peace. And we will unite American behind the great goals of opportunity for all, and compassion for those in need.

I want to thank each of you for serving this cause in your own lives. May God bless your work, may God bless the Urban League, and may God continue to bless the United States of America.

Of course the brilliance of the approach is that by making results the measure of the programs, you get to change the process.

---

THE FREE TRADE WING OF BUCHANACONSERVATISM

Mercantilism, USA (Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., July 26, 2003, Mises.org)

Should Americans be able to buy American-made prescription drugs from other countries at cheaper prices than they would have to pay in the US? Of course, the answer is yes. All that free traders are asking is that US firms be willing to let Americans buy US drugs at market prices when they are imported from other countries. The only possible reason to pay more would be if you want to dump vast sums of money on the US drug industry for no good reason. Consumers might want to-they can send Eli Lilly a fat check--but they shouldn't be forced to.

And yet some free traders have gotten on board with the desire to use protectionist means to boost prices and thereby add fuel to the fire of socialized medicine. It's expected that politicians sell their souls. But what about think tanks? The American Enterprise Institute, Cato, Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the National Center for Policy Analysis, National Review, and many other organizations and "free market" publications have come out for banning re-importation. Why? They say that re-imported drugs are unsafe, would undercut US drug makers, dry up research funds, and make drugs more difficult to regulate.

Doug Bandow of Cato, for example, argues that because foreign countries do not have free markets for drugs, they shouldn't be permitted to export to the US which does. Of course that is precisely the same rationale used by the catfish and textile industry to ban competitive products. If anything, the claim is even more absurd since we are not talking about competitors but the very same firms that already sell in the US. So hysterical has been the campaign that re-imported drugs are said (by Michael Krauss) to be "an
invitation to terrorists."

As with other protectionist schemes, it is really about taxing Americans and imposing price floors to benefit a politically influential industry. Krauss actually admits this when he says: "Do we want pharmaceutical progress? Then we must pay for these goods, even if other nations don't do their part." But protectionist profits are not the reason for pharmaceutical progress. The reason is innovation, which depends in no way on patents and protectionism in drugs any more than with any other form of innovation. The proof is precisely that American firms are willing to sell at such low prices to foreign nations; they must be making a profit.

The Republican leadership is fighting a losing battle here and for not much reason. The argument that Americans should pay higher prices so that drug companies can make their profits here assumes a generosity on our part that is inconsistent with human nature. Sure, we're richer than anyone else, so it's been nice of us to help hold their prices down, but such a system couldn't last, especially as global markets loosen. If ending that regime leads to higher prices in other countries, so what? If it leads to less innovation, well, conservatives aren't exactly thrilled with the way medical experimentation is trying to change human beings anyway, are we? And if the quality of re-imported drugs can't be guaranteed, if they might even be fake, that seems like a risk folks should be allowed to assume for themselves. Besides, most of the effect of the far too many drugs folks take nowadays is probably just placebic anyway, isn't it? Stacked against these paltry objections is one big benefit that we'd do well not to turn up our noses at in a country where health care is already 14% of GDP: re-importation will reduce medical costs. What's not to like?

---

)

Official: Killing ants is punishable by law (The Scotsman, 4/30/2003)

Gerhard Schroeder’s unpopular government has acted decisively ... to protect the humble German ant from the nation’s over-zealous gardeners ...

German homeowners and gardeners who attempt to destroy an ant hill or subterranean nest will be subject to hefty fines if caught.

They must now apply for a permit from their local forestry office to have the ants carefully moved to local woods.

"People with an ant hill in their garden must under no circumstances resort to the use of poison," said ant officer Dieter Kraemer.

This is the kind of progressive environmental legislation that could energize the liberal base and revive John Edwards's faltering presidential campaign.

---

SEPARATE BUT EQUAL

City's first public gay high school to open in fall (Associated Press, 7/28/2003)

A small alternative public school program has been expanded into a full-fledged school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students.

The Harvey Milk High School, an expansion of a 1984 city program consisting of two small classrooms for gay students, will enroll about 100 students and will open in the fall.

''I think everybody feels that it's a good idea because some of the kids who are gays and lesbians have been constantly harassed and beaten in other schools,'' Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a briefing Monday. ''It lets them get an education without having to worry. It solves a discipline problem. And from a pedagogical point of view, this administration and previous administrations have thought it was a good idea and we'll continue with that.''

This kind of moral segregation seems entirely sensible and suggests that private individuals and businesses should be able to follow suit.

AND IN RELATED NEWS:
HIV Cases Climb Among Gay, Bisexual Men (Paul Simao, 7/28/03, Reuters)

The number of gay and bisexual men diagnosed with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, climbed for the third consecutive year in the United States in 2002, fueling fears the disease might be poised for a major comeback in this vulnerable group.

Overall AIDS diagnoses rose 2.2 percent to 42,136 last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said on Monday at the 2003 National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta.

Some AIDS experts worry that the increase could indicate a more complacent attitude toward the disease and a willingness to engage in riskier behavior by some vulnerable groups, such as young gay and bisexual males.

As a pathology loses its moral and social stigma the problems associated with it are exacerbated; go figure.

---

CAN THE DEMOCRATS HAVE A DO-OVER?

Economy flashes more signs it has turned the corner (MARTIN CRUTSINGER, July 28, 2003, Associated Press)

"We think almost all of the child tax credit payments will get spent," said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo in
Minneapolis. "Those checks will be arriving just when families will need the money for back-to-school items."

By giving Americans more disposable income, the tax cuts are also expected to help lift consumer confidence. Analysts believe that Tuesday's report on consumer confidence could show a gain to around 85 for June, up from 83.5 in May. That would be the highest reading since last fall and an indication that consumer optimism is rebounding from the jittery days before the Iraq war. [...]

David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York, said he expected the sub-par GDP growth of the past nine months will be replaced with much stronger growth of around 4 percent in the second half of this year. Many analysts believe that growth in the first half of next year will hit 4.5 percent or better, given the kick expected from the new tax cuts.

Even with growth improving, it will still take time to make much of a dent in unemployment rate. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, said the country isn't likely to see a significant rebound in employment until next year. But the improvement should still come in time to give Bush a boost in his 2004 re-election campaign.

Republicans did something foolish in 1993: they argued that the Clinton tax increase would lead to recession, despite its being vastly outweighed by the inevitable post-war boom that had to follow the Cold War. This was not quite as foolish as George Bush Sr. passing a tax increase despite that coming boom, but it did end up allowing Mr. Clinton to take some credit for the growth of the latter '90s and particularly for the eventual balanced budget, even though it was exclusively a function of the cut in defense spending and the growth cycle. The lesson that should have been learned by both parties is that you can't fight the laws of economics with partisan political rhetoric.

The Democrats seem not to have been paying attention to the lesson, as they have spent months draping the economy around President Bush's neck, making him solely responsible for it, even as he's cut taxes repeatedly, the Fed has cut interest rates repeatedly, and Americans' sense of personal security has recovered in the wake of two successful post-9/11 wars. Whether he deserves it or not, they've created a political environment in which Mr. Bush will get exclusive credit for the coming period of robust growth. Any chance they had to keep the '04 election competitive, and there was never much of a chance, was squandered as the Democrats for some reason decided to paint themselves into the same corner that Republicans occupied at the end of Bill Clinton's first term. Not too bright.

---

DID MEN JUST BECOME ANGELS?

This Is Direct Democracy Run Amok (Leon E. Panetta, July 27, 2003, LA Times)

Out of frustration, various groups have turned to the reform tools established in California's progressive history. But these tools were not designed to substitute for governing, they were developed to protect against abuses.

Instead, in the last 25 years, the initiative process has fundamentally changed the governing structure of the state. Between 1978 and 2000, more than 600 statewide initiative petitions were circulated, 118 appeared on the ballot and 52 passed. Policies from prison terms to car insurance rates to property taxes to dedicated funds for education and conservation have been enacted not by the governor and Legislature but by the initiative process.

And if groups and partisan interests can afford to put their particular initiative on the ballot, then why not use the same process as a partisan weapon to go after unpopular political leaders regardless of when they were elected? The current recall effort is in many ways the culmination of direct democracy run amok.

But the initiative and recall processes are not the real problem. They are merely symptoms of a much larger problem: the breakdown in trust that is essential to governing in a democracy.

The more the elected leadership of California engages in partisanship and gridlock, the more the public will take governing into its own hands regardless of the consequences.

The only way to avoid runaway initiatives and recalls is for the elected leaders and the voters to recognize their common responsibility to effective self-government.

Leon Panetta is very much the best the Democrats have to offer. He'd be a better governor than anyone who will be contending for the office in the coming recall election, including any of the Republicans. He would, in fact, be a great Treasury Secretary for Mr. Bush. But this is a ridiculous op-ed, one that reflects the kind of Leftish utopianism that seldom otherwise clutters his thinking.This is not "direct democracy run amok"; it is direct democracy. It is an archetypal example of why the Founders abhorred direct democracy.

Here's a handy rule of thumb: at the point where you find yourself depending on the assumption that people will voluntarily recognize that they have a "common responsibility to effective self-government", you've wandered into Fantasyland.

---

DESPITE?

States Face Growing Prison Population (CURT ANDERSON, July 28, 2003, Associated Press)

America's prison population grew again in 2002 despite a declining crime rate...

Just in case anyone believes that the general liberal bias in the media has been even remotely affected by the rise of conservative alternatives, perhaps no single line in newspaper history has been more ridiculed--nor more justly--than the original NY Times version of the above. Yet here it is repeated by the AP and thereby appears today in thousands of newspapers across the nation and the world. Consider how much differently that sentence reads if you just swap out the word "despite" and replace it with "causing" or even just "paralleling".

---

WELL, THE BOYS DID OWN IT, RIGHT?

The great diversity of Australian life is lost in the boy's own view of history. (Ann McGrath, July 24, 2003, Online Opinion)

Captain Cook and cricket caps. The review of the National Museum of Australia, with its heartfelt yearning for the return of great-white-bloke stories, makes for rather vexing reading.

Predictably, the review team's maiden voyage of museum discovery washes them up onto the familiar shore of great male discovery narratives. This lost white Australian dreaming doesn't get messed up by facts about the usurpation of Indigenous land and human rights and doesn't foreground women. In their proposed upstairs/downstairs narrative of Australia, terra nullius stays downstairs where it belongs. Captain Cook and other ocean-going discoverers get reified upstairs. Non-British immigrants go altogether, unless they can make good cappuccinos.

The panel's plan starts with Circa, the multimedia introduction to contemporary Australia that's extremely popular with all age groups. Circa is criticised on various grounds but mainly for presenting a diverse range of opinion. The three majority panelists recommend replacing the two major galleries Nation and Horizons with two chronological "white history" exhibitions - "European discovery to Federation" and "Federation to contemporary Australia".

The first would begin with Burke and Wills; the second with a 1961 world record Test crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The previous track record of such themes at inspiring Australians is weak. Remember the Centenary of Federation? Maybe not. While making Federation a central framing device for two main gallery treatments, even the review panel suggests that Federation is a bit too boring.

The review's findings are influenced by an undisguised yearning for a grand, if somewhat schoolboyish, national narrative. Commending the "courageous warrior hero" stories of Homer's Iliad or the American Wild West, they mistakenly believe coloniser cowboy epics are deeply unifying narratives. Although few references are cited, the report's intellectual underpinnings conform with Keith Windschuttle's Quadrant article of September 2001, which lamented the absence of grand historical narratives in the National Museum. The review panel has obligingly filled in the dots with the outlines and textures of a highly exclusionary and tired formula.

In its vision of nation, the panel does not reject differing versions of history, but it certainly rejects multiple identities, contested identities, interrelated identities of nation.

The Left makes two contradictory arguments about Western history: on the one hand, they point out--seemingly correctly--that a variety of prejudices and chauvanisms led to a culture overwhelmingly dominated by white Christian males, with all others being discriminated against, even oppressed; but, on the other hand, they argue that the study of what is important in Western history should not predominantly focus on those men and the culture should not primarily be attributed to them.

The motivation driving this incoherence is fairly obvious: Western culture is mankind's greatest achievement and everyone wants to be able to claim not just a piece of it, but a major piece. Sadly for them, their first argument has convincingly proved that the second is false.

However, it is one of the crowning accomplishments of Western men that though our past has not been the product of a terribly diverse group of people, our future will be, precisely because of the ideology the non-diverse ancestors handed down to us and the inevitable and eventual triumph of the idea that all men are created equal. Women, blacks, etc., have shaped our recent past and will continue to shape our future and will do so because they have been empowered by the ideas of dead white Western males. Why not then celebrate those men and their ideas?

---

DO FENCE ME IN

An ugly idea whose time has come (Hillel Halkin, 7/28/03, Jewish World Review)

After three years of Palestinian violence, the prevalent attitude among Jews in this country is that the less Palestinians have to be seen, heard from and dealt with, the better. No wall that keeps them out can be too high, no obstacle too thick. Let's draw a curtain on the Arab world, turn our backs to it, and face across the sea to Europe and the West: Put that in a petition and you could get a million signatures in a month.

There is something to be said for this. The Middle East has not, in the 125 years since Zionist settlers first tried striking roots in it, been very
hospitable to us. It continues to be one of the most backward regions of the world, ruled by despotic regimes and fundamentalist clerics. We Jews, on the other hand, have been, for the past century and a half, at the cutting edge of Western civilization. Backs to the Arab world and faces to the West seems a natural posture for us--at least until that world undergoes basic changes that are not in the offing right now.

And yet think of the price, the diminishment.

The real question we now have to answer--that we have not answered since 1967--as prepared or unprepared for answering it as we may be, is quite simply this: Do we, assuming a degree of choice exists, want to live with the Palestinians in a Land of Israel or Palestine that is open to us all, or do we want to live without them and in only part of it?

Curiously, as I have said, the immediate logic of both a "yes" and a "no" answer to this question is the same: Get on with The Fence, as awful and ugly as it is, and go on building it as fast as possible. Only as it nears completion will we and the Palestinians have to decide. But the decision, when it comes, will be radical and drastic. Both sides had better start thinking, as hard and deeply as we can, about its implications right now.

A Palestinian state is inevitable, but that doesn't mean Israel has to stand naked before her enemy. If the fence may contribute to a more peaceful coexistence then it is worth building.

---

MERCENARY VOTING

Bush, GOPers losing support of retired vets (Jewish World Review, 7/28/03)

Veterans have two gripes.

One is a longstanding complaint that some disabled vets, in effect, have to pay their own disability benefits out of their retirement pay through a law they call the Disabled Veterans Tax.

Since 1891, anyone retiring after a full military career has had their retirement pay reduced dollar for dollar for any Veterans Administration checks they get for a permanent service-related disability. However, a veteran who served a two-or-four-year tour does not have a similar reduction in Social Security or private pension.

A majority of members of Congress, from both parties, wants to change the law. A House proposal by Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Ga., has 345
co-sponsors.

But it would cost as much as $5 billion a year to expand payments to 670,000 disabled veterans, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld earlier this month told lawmakers that the president would veto any bill including the change.

The proposal is stuck in committee. A recent effort to bring it to the full House of Representatives failed, in part because only one Republican signed the petition.

"The cost is exorbitant. And we are dealing with a limited budget," said Harald Stavenas, a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee.

The second complaint is over medical care. After decades of promising free medical care for life to anyone who served for 20 years, the government in the 1990s abandoned the promise in favor of a new system called Tricare. The Tricare system provides medical care, but requires veterans to pay a deductible and does not cover dental, hearing or vision care.

This is why conservatism can't win in the long run and democracy may not last: at the end of the day, the checks you want from the government are the single strongest determinant of your politics.

---

KILL THE COUSINS FIRST

Iraqis warn of revenge on 'traitor to country': 'The cousins of Uday and Qusay are arranging to kill the family. The family will be killed': U.S. informant (Michael Mathes, July 28, 2003, Agence France-Presse)

Angry residents of this northern city yesterday warned Nawaf al-Zaidan, the tribal chief who owned the mansion where Uday and Qusay Saddam Hussein died in a blistering gunbattle, that revenge is coming to him.

"He's a traitor to his country and religion," said a shopkeeper across from Mr. Zaidan's gutted home, destroyed in the long but one-sided battle between Saddam Hussein's sons and U.S. forces last Tuesday.

And whether they loved Saddam's regime or not, many here view Mr. Zaidan, the suspected informer who tipped off the Americans, as a traitor for the sake of a US$30-million pricetag on Uday and Qusay's heads.

"Nawaf and his son and the money he received will all end up in a grave," predicted Mr. Zaidan's old neighbourhood shopkeeper.

The Americans will not say whether Mr. Zaidan is the man who turned in Saddam's sons, but neither will they deny it.

Asked yesterday about the fate of the informant, a senior officer from the U.S. Army's 101 Airborne Division in Mosul said: "We'll take care of our sources."

The problem isn't revenge killings, but that we are stopping the Iraqi people from pre-emptively revenging themselves upon the Saddam family and other Ba'athists.

---

IF YOU DRAW THE SWORD... (via Oswald Czolgosz)

Sword of honour: Paul Robinson on the ancient code of insult and revenge that is still prevalent in the American South (Paul Robinson, July 2003, The Spectator)

In a much discussed recent book, Walter Russell Mead identifies four strands of American foreign policy: Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Wilsonian and Jacksonian. Jacksonians follow the ideas of President Andrew Jackson, the archetype of ante-bellum, aggressive southern honour, who fought more than a dozen duels. They see the pursuit of national honour as the prime purpose of policy. Right now, Jacksonianism reigns triumphant in the halls of American power. The South’s political influence has possibly never been greater. It was Al Gore’s failure to win a single state in the old Confederacy that lost him the presidency, and George Bush Sr’s nemesis came in the form of Ross Perot, a Texan who in 1953 almost singlehandedly devised the current Honour Code of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis.

Jacksonian rhetoric has spearheaded America’s recent wars. The word ‘honour’ is rarely used, but substitutes such as ‘credibility’ abound in official speeches. Nato had to bomb Yugoslavia because the ‘credibility of the alliance was at stake’. Coalition forces had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was ‘undermining the credibility of the UN’. Saddam was not a threat to the USA, but he was a living insult to its honour. Despite all the efforts of the most powerful state on earth, he had for ten years continued to survive and defy America’s wishes. For an administration driven by sentiments of honour, such an insult could not be permitted. Just as the South could not allow Lincoln to become their President, so George W. Bush could not allow Saddam to continue humiliating his country. Only war could satisfy honour.

As the ancient Greeks knew, the pursuit of honour often leads people to attack others, to drive them down, in order to inflate themselves. The Greeks called such behaviour hubris, and believed that hubris inevitably resulted in disaster. It certainly did for the Confederacy.

Mr. Robinson has understood far less here than he might have, or else is using an entirely valid concept--American Jacksonianism--to score cheap political points. Compare the desultory nature of our actions in Yugoslavia, our inaction for a decade in Iraq, and our failure to move to actual confrontation with the Soviets in the Cold War to our immediate (or proximate) entry into wars following the shelling of Fort Sumter (Civil War), the sinking of the Maine (Spanish-American), the sinking of the Lusitania (WWI), Pearl Harbor (WWII), Tonkin Gulf incident (Vietnam) and 9-11 (Afghan War and Second Iraq War)--none of the latter incidents was a necessary cause of war, but were physical insults that were seized upon by those who desired war as a pretext to say that our honor had been challenged and must be defended. In the face of such actions by our foes, Jacksonians, who tend to be rather isolationist as a rule, can be whipped into an interventionist frenzy and we always are. On the other hand, although Jacksonian blood was up throughout the Cold War, there was unfortunately never such an incident--though JFK squandered a potential one during the Cuban Missile Crisis--and never a president willing to provoke one--though Truman easily could have as Nazi Germany fell and the USSR took over great swathes of Eastern Europe. The capacity of Americans to withstand innumerable slights to their pride in that doleful era without ever starting a shooting war, pretty clearly suggests that the additional element of a physical assault--no matter how minor--is required.

Mr. Robinson's final sentence implies that America today resembles the Confederacy--apparently he's been reading too many Harold Meyerson columns--but he's missed a key point about the Civil War. It was not the South that started the War to defend its honor, but the North that was brought into the war to defend its. Suppose for a moment that the South had seceded and merely said that it wished nothing further to do with the North--would President Lincoln have had the political support in that event to pursue a war of reunification? It seems an open question at best. Similarly, suppose that we concede the validity of the view that George W. Bush and the neocon cabal with which he has surrounded himself had all along harbored the desire to go to war with Islamicism generally and Saddam Hussein specifically. The question is, wouyld they have had the political support to do so in the absence of 9-11? The answer to that is obviously not. But the South and the Islamicists did both--just as the Germans, Japanese, etc. before them--foolishly attack America and learned (or are learning) the truth of Admiral Yamamoto's probably apochryphal statement: "I fear that all we have done is awaken a sleeping tiger, and filled him with a terrible resolve." The lesson to be learned from America's historic tendency to Jacksonianism is that it is better to bear any humiliation America offers than to throw down the gauntlet and have America crush you in the ensuing duel. The problem is not our sense of honor, which we always successfully defend, but the sense of our enemies, which always leads to their suicide.

MORE:
-REVIEW: of Special Providence by Walter Russell Mead (Brothers Judd)
The Jacksonian Tradition (Walter Russell Mead, Winter 1999/00The National Interest)
-ESSAY: Braced for Jacksonian Ruthlessness (Walter Russell Mead, September 17, 2001, Washington Post)

---

STAND ON THAT TRAPDOOR WHILE I FIGURE OUT WHAT THIS BUTTON DOES.

Democrats Not Shying Away From Tax Talk (Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post, 7/28/03).

Democratic presidential candidates are following the politically risky strategy of embracing tax increases as key parts of their economic agendas, hoping to make mounting federal deficits and President Bush's economic stewardship major issues in the 2004 campaign.

When Bush signed his third tax cut into law last month, the legislation was supposed to put Democratic candidates in a political bind. They could no longer say they favored delaying or canceling future tax cuts, because the legislation put those planned cuts into law immediately.

But the candidates have shown little reluctance to reverse tax cuts already in force. Although they couch it as 'rolling back' Bush's tax policies, virtually all the major Democratic candidates say they would raise taxes on some or all of those who pay income tax. The proposals range from repealing all the tax cuts enacted in the past three years to raising taxes only on the wealthiest Americans.

Fritz Mondale, yesterday, today and tomorrow.

---

AT LEAST THEY'RE SUBTLE.

DNC eyes leadership worries (Corey Dade, Boston Globe, 7/27/2003)

The Democratic National Committee tomorrow will appoint two minorities, including New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, to leading roles in its national convention in Boston next summer, in a response to concerns among local blacks that people of color would not share prominently in all facets of the event.

Richardson, the highest-ranking elected Hispanic official in either party and a possible vice presidential candidate, will be nominated as convention chairman. Alice Huffman, president of the California NAACP, will chair the convention committee.

The appointments come after African-American leaders in Boston late last week questioned the expected naming of Rod O'Connor as convention chief executive, or the person to run daily events. O'Connor, a one-time aide to former Vice President Al Gore, is white and has no Boston ties, even though Democratic Party officials have insisted that the convention will showcase the emergent racial diversity of Boston.

The Republicans could do worse than make sure that this article is reprinted in every newspaper in the country.

---

BY WHAT RIGHT DOES A CANADIAN CALL POLAND A "RENT-A-NATION"?

Terms of engagement: Herewith, definitions to keep on top of current events (ERIC MARGOLIS, July 27, 2003, Toronto Sun)

It's very difficult keeping up with Mideast news due to the Orwellian newspeak coming from Washington.

So here's a handy list of key terms, translated into simple English.

+ Liberation - Invasion.

+ Coalition - The U.S. and British invaders, plus some troops from rent-a-nations like Romania and Poland. In the past, "the coalition" would have been called imperial forces and mercenary auxiliaries.

+ Dictator - A ruler you don't like, or who does not cooperate.

It goes on like that for more than long enough to prove that Leftism is incompatible with humor. A more productive exercise than Mr. Margolis's is to try and define some of the terms from Iraq yourself:

(1) Saddam Hussein?

(2) Qusay and Uday Saddam?

(3) Ba'athism?

(4) Halabja?

(5) Scud missile?

(6) The invasion of Iraq by the United States, Britain, and a very few others?

(7) The pre-invasion form of government in Iraq and the form that will exist in a year's time?

There are various ways you can answer each, but the following answers seem inarguable:

(1) A homicidal dictator

(2) Sociopaths

(3) Totalitarianism

(4) An act of genocide (a mass killing based on ethnicity)

(5) a WMD

(6) An essentially unilateral war to depose a homicidal dictator, prevent his sociopathic sons from following him to power, and dispose of WMD--with a more than incidental liberation and democratization thrown in.

(7) pre-war: Totalitarianism

post-War: that's for the people of Iraq to decide.

None of those, to Mr. Margolis's mind, may be adequate justification for the war, but they're at least accurate definitions.

---

THE WAR IN IRAQ IS THE WAR ON TERROR (via <~text text="Random Jottings">

A note of thanks to those who serve (Christy Ferer, Air Force Print News, 9/30/03).

When I told friends about my pilgrimage to Iraq to thank the U.S. troops, reaction was underwhelming at best. . . .

But the reason seemed clear to me: 200,000 troops have been sent halfway around the world to stabilize the kind of culture that breeds terrorists like those who I believe began World War III on Sept. 11, 2001. Reaction was so politely negative that I began to doubt my role on the first USO/Tribeca Institute tour into newly occupied Iraq where, on average, a soldier a day is killed. . . .

One mother of two from Montana told me she enlisted because of Sept. 11. Dozens of others told us the same thing. One young soldier showed me his metal bracelet engraved with the name of a victim he never knew and that awful date none of us will ever forget. . . .

What I was not prepared for was to have soldiers show us the World Trade Center memorabilia they'd carried with them into the streets of Baghdad. Others had clearly been holding in stories of personal 9/11 tragedies which had made them enlist. . . .

One particular soldier, Capt. Vargas from the Bronx, told me he enlisted in the Army after some of his wife's best friends were lost at the World Trade Center.

When he glimpsed the piece of recovered metal from the Towers that I had been showing to a group of soldiers he grasped for it as if it were the Holy Grail. Then he handed it to Kid Rock who passed the precious metal through the 5000 troops in the audience. They lunged at the opportunity to touch the steel that symbolized what so many of them felt was the purpose of their mission -- which puts them at risk every day in the 116 degree heat, not knowing all the while if a sniper was going to strike at anytime.

Ms. Ferer's husband Neil was killed in the World Trade Center on September 11.

It is easy to be cynical about democracy or, even if not cynical, to conclude that its many virtues do not include subtle reasoning or powerful analysis. But the people of the United States collectively understand something that many pundits and politicians don't understand: the liberation of Iraq is an effective direct response to 9/11, regardless of whether Saddam supported Al Qaeda, or had any role in the attacks.

---

GRINGOS, NO! GRINGO DOLLARS, SI!

Puerto Ricans Lament Loss of Vieques Dollars (Fox News, July 27, 2003)

File this one under "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it."

The people of Puerto Rico are facing some unanticipated consequences from a victory they won in 2001.

For several years, Puerto Rican protesters demanded that the U.S. Navy leave the island of Vieques. Groups staged violent protests outside the main gate of "Camp Garcia," saying they were sick and tired of the live-fire bombing exercises.

The violence resulted in the gates of the base being torn down. Several U.S. troops and police dogs were injured in the demonstrations.

In response to the years of protest, former President Clinton agreed to stop Navy exercises there. Congress and President Bush ratified the deal and live-fire exercises were halted last May. But with its mission muzzled after 60 years, the Navy has decided to pull out of Puerto Rico completely.

That means the largest employer on the island, the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, is now slated for closure that could come as early as October.

Island workers are accusing the Navy of economic revenge.

"You dedicate all your talents, all your efforts. You're loyal to your employer, this case being the U.S. Navy, and what do you get in return?  A kick in the you-know-what," said Ana Angelet of the Puerto Rican chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees.

Maybe they wouldn't get kicked if they didn't act like "you-know-whats".

---

AS YE SOW

PHOTO (AP, 7/25/03)

Two-year old Khalil Shehada plays with a real gun as Palestinians mark the first anniversary of his uncle, military leader Sheik Salah Shehada's assassination, in Gaza city, Friday, July 25, 2003. Arabic writing on headband reads Arabic ' No God but God and Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah, Izz el-Deen al-Qassam brigade, military wing of Hamas'. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

---

WAR IS THE ONLY HUMANE SOLUTION

Were Sanctions Right? (DAVID RIEFF, 7/27/03, NY Times Magazine)

As the war in Iraq recedes, the challenges of occupying and rebuilding the country seem to grow more daunting with every passing day. It is becoming clear, though, that Iraq's devastation is not primarily the result of American bombing during the war or of the looting that followed it, but of the economic crisis that befell the country before the first shot was fired. There is still little consensus about what happened in Iraq during the years before the war or who is to blame. But the quest for answers has reawakened a fierce and bitter controversy over Iraq policy in the 1990's.

For officials in Washington and London and for American administrators now in Iraq, that country's postwar woes are essentially the legacy of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical, cruel and corrupt rule. As L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian administrator of postwar Iraq, recently said of Hussein, ''While his people were starving -- literally, in many cases, starving -- while he was killing tens of thousands of people, Saddam and his cronies were taking money, stealing it, really, from the Iraqi people.''

But others argue that the fundamental reason Iraq is in such terrible shape is not Hussein's brutality but rather the comprehensive regime of economic sanctions that the United Nations Security Council imposed on Iraq for almost 13 years, sharply restricting all foreign trade. It was these sanctions, they claim, that brought this once rich country to its knees.

For many people, the sanctions on Iraq were one of the decade's great crimes, as appalling as Bosnia or Rwanda. Anger at the United States and Britain, the two principal architects of the policy, often ran white hot. Denis J. Halliday, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq for part of the sanctions era, expressed a widely held belief when he said in 1998: ''We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that.'' Even today, Clinton-era American officials ranging from Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, and James P. Rubin, State Department spokesman under Albright, to Nancy E. Soderberg, then with the National Security Council, speak with anger and bitterness over the fervor of the anti-sanctions camp. As Soderberg put it to me, ''I could not give a speech anywhere in the U.S. without someone getting up and accusing me of being responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.''

The end of the war has at last made it possible to find out what the effects of sanctions on Iraq really were.

Is it not the lesson of the two easily successful Iraq Wars and the failure of the sanctions regime that rather than try "peaceful" means we should more readily resort to force? War saves lives; it's "peace" that kills.

---

"ATTEMPTS TO BRIDGE"?

10 Questions For Ted Kennedy: After more than 40 years in the Senate, Ted Kennedy, 71, is still the icon of American liberalism. Yet he has also been at the center of recent attempts to bridge the party divide over issues ranging from education to prescription-drug benefits. TIME's Matthew Cooper talked to him about the art of compromise, as well as his famous family. (MATTHEW COOPER, 7/27/03, TIME)

[Q:] What should we be doing differently in Iraq?

[A:] I'm concerned that we have the world's best-trained soldiers serving as policemen in what seems to be a shooting gallery. It's hard to see how the situation will improve, unless the President is willing to involve NATO. There are 2 million troops in NATO with some of the most impressive and well-trained police units in the world--units that understand rioting, explosives, crowd control, and maintaining law and order.

There's what Democrats think American leadership should look like: it's a shooting gallery so we should get out and send in our allies instead.

---

IS IT ALL CONDI'S FAULT?

Iraq Flap Shakes Rice's Image (Dana Milbank and Mike Allen, Washington Post, 7/27/03)

Just weeks ago, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, made a trip to the Middle East that was widely seen as advancing the peace process. There was speculation that she would be a likely choice for secretary of state, and hopes among Republicans that she could become governor of California and even, someday, president.

But she has since become enmeshed in the controversy over the administration's use of intelligence about Iraq's weapons in the run-up to war. She has been made to appear out of the loop by colleagues' claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged.

The remarks by Rice and her associates raise two uncomfortable possibilities for the national security adviser. Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false. . . .

Democrats, however, see a larger problem with Rice and her operation. "If the national security adviser didn't understand the repeated State Department and CIA warnings about the uranium allegation, that's a frightening level of incompetence," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), who as the ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee has led the charge on the intelligence issue. "It's even more serious if she knew and ignored the intelligence warnings and has deliberately misled our nation. . . . In any case it's hard to see why the president or the public will have confidence in her office.

Are we supposed to believe that it's just a coincidence that the Democrats are always attacking blacks, women and Catholics?

---

IS IT ALL APRIL GLASPIE'S FAULT?

US Ambassador April Glaspie's Interview with Pres. Saddam Hussein, July 25 1990 (New York Times International, 9/23/90)

APRIL GLASPIE: I thank you, Mr. President, and it is a great pleasure for a diplomat to meet and talk directly with the President. I clearly understand your message. We studied history at school That taught us to say freedom or death. I think you know well that we as a people have our experience with the colonialists.

Mr. President, you mentioned many things during this meeting which I cannot comment on on behalf of my Government. But with your permission, I will comment on two points. You spoke of friendship and I believe it was clear from the letters sent by our President to you on the occasion of your National Day that he emphasizes --

HUSSEIN: He was kind and his expressions met with our regard and respect.
Directive on Relations

GLASPIE: As you know, he directed the United States Administration to reject the suggestion of implementing trade sanctions.

HUSSEIN: There is nothing left for us to buy from America. Only wheat. Because every time we want to buy something, they say it is forbidden. I am afraid that one day you will say, 'You are going to make gunpowder out of wheat.'

GLASPIE: I have a direct instruction from the President to seek better relations with Iraq.

HUSSEIN: But how? We too have this desire. But matters are running contrary to this desire.

GLASPIE: This is less likely to happen the more we talk. For example, you mentioned the issue of the article published by the American Information Agency and that was sad. And a formal apology was presented.

HUSSEIN: Your stance is generous. We are Arabs. It is enough for us that someone says, 'I am sorry. I made a mistake.' Then we carry on. But the media campaign continued. And it is full of stories. If the stories were true, no one would get upset. But we understand from its continuation that there is a determination.

GLASPIE: I saw the Diane Sawyer program on ABC. And what happened in that program was cheap and unjust. And this is a real picture of what happens in the American media -- even to American politicians themselves. These are the methods the Western media employs. I am pleased that you add your voice to the diplomats who stand up to the media. Because your appearance in the media, even for five minutes, would help us to make the American people understand Iraq. This would increase mutual understanding. If they American President had control of the media, his job would be much easier.

Mr. President, not only do I want to say that President Bush wanted better and deeper relations with Iraq, but he also wants an Iraqi contribution to peace and prosperity in the Middle East. President Bush is an intelligent man. He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq.

You are right. It is true what you say that we do not want higher prices for oil. But I would ask you to examine the possibility of not charging too high a price for oil.

HUSSEIN: We do not want too high prices for oil. And I remind you that in 1974 I gave Tariq Aziz the idea for an article he wrote which criticized the policy of keeping oil prices high. It was the first Arab article which expressed this view.

TARIQ AZIZ: Our policy in OPEC opposes sudden jumps in oil prices.

HUSSEIN: Twenty-five dollars a barrel is not a high price.

GLASPIE: We have many Americans who would like to see the price go above $25 because they come from oil-producing states.

HUSSEIN: The price at one stage had dropped to $12 a barrel and a reduction in the modest Iraqi budget of $6 billion to $7 billion is a disaster.

GLASPIE: I think I understand this. I have lived here for years. I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.

I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60's. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly. With regard to all of this, can I ask you to see how the issue appears to us?

My assessment after 25 years' service in this area is that your objective must have strong backing from your Arab brothers. I now speak of oil But you, Mr. President, have fought through a horrific and painful war. Frankly, we can see only that you have deployed massive troops in the south. Normally that would not be any of our business. But when this happens in the context of what you said on your national day, then when we read the details in the two letters of the Foreign Minister, then when we see the Iraqi point of view that the measures taken by the U.A.E. and Kuwait is, in the final analysis, parallel to military aggression against Iraq, then it would be reasonable for me to be concerned. And for this reason, I received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship -- not in the spirit of confrontation -- regarding your intentions.

This is an Iraqi transcript and cannot be taken at face value. Ambassador Glaspie claims that it is not complete and, in parts, not accurate. But it in no way supports the argument that April Glaspie on her own, or on behalf of the US government, gave Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait. Rather, she is saying that the US has no position on the proper outcome of the border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait, other than that it should be resolved peacefully. This came in the context of a written communication to the Iraqis stating that we were committed to the territorial integrity of our friends in the Gulf and a statement by Dick Cheney, a few days earlier, that the US would defend Kuwait.

Now, our message to Iraq was not unambiguous. We never said to Iraq: If you invade, we will go to war. But we certainly never told Saddam he could invade Kuwait with our blessing.

Finally, the transcript makes clear that Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was all about OIL.

More

Tales of the Foreign Service: In Defense of April Glaspie (Andrew I. Killgore, WRMEA.com, August 2002).

AMBASSADOR APRIL GLASPIE TESTIFIES TO THE HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS CMTE. (C-SPAN, March 21, 1991). I highly recommend watching Ambassador Glaspie's testimony. If you can't watch it all, start at 9 minutes and watch the balance of her opening statement, and then jump to 25 minutes and watch the next 5 minutes or so of Lee Hamilton's questioning.

---

FROM THE ARCHIVES (on Joe Mitchell's Birthday)

All You Can Hold for Five Bucks (Joseph Mitchell, 1939-04-15, The New Yorker)

Classical beefsteak meat is carved off the shell, a section of the hindquarter of a steer: it is called "short loin without the fillet." To order a cut of it, a housewife would ask for a thick Delmonico. "You don't always get it at a beefsteak," Mr. Wertheimer said. "Sometimes they give you bull fillets. They're no good. Not enough juice in them, and they cook out black." While I watched, Mr. Wertheimer took a shell off a hook in his icebox and laid it on a big, maple block. It had been hung for eight weeks and was blanketed with blue mold. The mold was an inch thick. He cut off the mold. Then he boned the shell and cut it into six chunks. Then he sliced off all the fat. Little strips of lean ran through the discarded fat, and he deftly carved them out and made a mound of them on the block. "These trimmings, along with the tails of the steaks, will be ground up and served as appetizers," he said. "We'll use four hundred tonight. People call them hamburgers, and that's an insult. Sometimes they're laid on top of a slice of Bermuda onion and served on bread." When he finished with the shell, six huge steaks, boneless and fatless, averaging three inches thick and ten inches long, lay on the block. They made a beautiful still life. "After they've been broiled, the steaks are sliced up, and each steak makes about ten slices," he said. "The slices are what you get at a beefsteak." Mr. Wertheimer said the baskets of meat he had prepared would be used that night at a beefsteak in the Odd Fellows' Hall on East 106th Street; the Republican Club of the Twentieth Assembly District was running it. He invited me to go along.

"How's your appetite?" he asked.

I said there was nothing wrong with it.

"I hope not," he said. "When you go to a beefsteak, you got to figure on eating until it comes out of your ears. Otherwise it would be bad manners."

That night I rode up to Odd Fellows' Hall with Mr. Wertheimer, and on the way I asked him to describe a pre-prohibition stag beefsteak.

"Oh, they were amazing functions," he said. "The men wore butcher aprons and chef hats. They used the skirt of the apron to wipe the grease off their faces. Napkins were not allowed. The name of the organization that was running the beefsteak would be printed across the bib, and the men took the aprons home for souvenirs. We still wear aprons, but now they're rented from linen-supply houses. They're numbered, and you turn them in at the hat-check table when you get your hat and coat. Drunks, of course, always refuse to turn theirs in.

"In the old days they didn't even use tables and chairs. They sat on beer crates and ate off the tops of beer barrels. You'd be surprised how much fun that was. Somehow it made old men feel young again. And they'd drink beer out of cans, or growlers. Those beefsteaks were run in halls or the cellars or back rooms of big saloons. There was always sawdust on the floor. Sometimes they had one in a bowling alley. They would cover the alleys with tarpaulin and set the boxes and barrels in the aisles. The men ate with their fingers. They never served potatoes in those days. Too filling. They take up room that rightfully belongs to meat and beer. A lot of those beefsteaks were testimonials. A politician would get elected to something and his friends would throw him a beefsteak. Cops ran a lot of them, too. Like when a cop became captain or inspector, he got a beefsteak. Theatrical people were always fond of throwing beefsteaks. Sophie Tucker got a great big one at Mecca Temple in 1934, and Bill Robinson got a great big one at the Grand Street Boys' clubhouse in 1938. Both of those were knockouts. The political clubs always gave the finest, but when Tammany Hall gets a setback, beefsteaks get a setback. For example, the Anawanda Club, over in my neighborhood, used to give a famous beefsteak every Thanksgiving Eve. Since La Guardia got in the Anawanda's beefsteaks have been so skimpy it makes me sad.

"At the old beefsteaks they almost always had storytellers, men who would entertain with stories in Irish and German dialect. And when the people got tired of eating and drinking, they would harmonize. You could hear them harmonizing blocks away. They would harmonize 'My Wild Irish Rose' until they got their appetite back. It was the custom to hold beefsteaks on Saturday nights or the eve of holidays, so the men would have time to recover before going to work. They used to give some fine ones in Coney Island restaurants. Webster Hall has always been a good place. Local 638 of the Steamfitters holds its beefsteaks there. They're good ones. A lot of private beefsteaks are thrown in homes. A man will invite some friends to his cellar and cook the steaks himself. I have a number of good amateur beefsteak chefs among my customers. Once, during the racing season, a big bookmaker telephoned us he wanted to throw a beefsteak, so we sent a chef and all the makings to Saratoga. The chef had a wonderful time. They made a hero out of him."

A piece from the New Yorker archives by perhaps the greatest American essayists ever, Joseph Mitchell, who became even more famous for not writing. A few years back they come out with a collection of his work, Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories, and there was recently a fairly good movie about him and his most notorious subject: Joe Gould's Secret.

---

BOOKNOTES

Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield by Kenneth Ackerman (C-SPAN, July 27, 2003 , 8 & 11pm)

In post - Civil War America, politics was a brutal sport played with blunt rules. Yet James Garfield's 1881 dark horse campaign after the longest-ever Republican nominating process (36 convention ballots), his victory in the closest-ever popular vote for president (by only 7,018 votes out of over 9 million cast), his struggle against feuding factions once elected, and the public's response to its culmination in violence, sets a revealing comparison with America approaching a new campaign year in 2004. Author and Capitol Hill veteran Kenneth D. Ackerman re-creates an American political landscape where fierce battles for power unfolded against a chivalrous code of honor in a nation struggling under the shadow of a recent war to confront its modernity. The murder prompted leaders to recoil at their own excesses and changed the tone of politics for generations to come. Garfield's own struggle against powerful forces is a compelling human drama; the portrait of Americans coming together after his assassination exemplifies the dignity and grace that have long held the nation together in crisis.

MORE:
-Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield by Kenneth Ackerman (Amazon.com)
-James A. Garfield (WhiteHouse.gov)
-James A. Garfield (American Presidents: Life Portraits)
-James A. Garfield (Internet Public Library: POTUS)
-The Avalon Project : Inaugural Address of James A. Garfield
-James A Garfield National Historic Site (National Park Service)
-REVIEW: of Dark Horse by Kenneth Ackerman (Michael Kenney, Boston Globe)
-REVIEW: of Dark Horse by Kenneth Ackerman (William Anthony, Washington Times)

---

VELOCIRAPTURE

Armstrong Nears Title as Ullrich Falls (SAMUEL ABT, July 27, 2003, NY Times)

Lance Armstrong did it.

Riding in heavy rain on a slick course with traffic circles and some tight curves, Armstrong played it safe and virtually sewed up his fifth successive victory in the Tour de France today.

"It was extremely dangerous," he said after finishing the 30-mile individual time trial in third place. "It wasn't necessary for me to take any risks."

That was because his closest rival, Jan Ullrich, skidded and crashed at a left turn on the treacherous road and lost a dozen seconds, more than twice his lead on Armstrong at that point in the time trial. Shaken, he turned prudent and lost even more time.

Officials of the United States Postal Service team, which Armstrong leads, relayed news of the fall by radio to the earpiece he wears. "When I heard that Ullrich fell," Armstrong said, "I said: `Take it easy. Ride safely.' "

He coasted the rest of the way...

Congratulations to both men, on a great race.

---

EVEN TED KENNEDY MAKES A MISTAKE ONCE IN AWHILE

The GOP's New Deal: Big tent, big government, big mistake (Timothy P. Carney, July 28, 2003, The American Conservative)

The starting point of this summer's Medicare prescription-drug debate should cause concern for Republicans with any political memory. The drug bill that hit the Senate floor was the offspring of a deal between President Bush and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), the "liberal lion" of the U.S. Senate. This seems an odd partner for a Republican president to choose. Kennedy, after all, is the most straightforward advocate in Washington of a universal health-care system mandated and funded by the federal government. Bush and the Republican Party believe this would be a disaster.

But the White House appears to believe that it can get political mileage out of Rose-Garden signing ceremonies with Ted Kennedy in attendance. We've seen this play before, with Bush's premiere policy initiative: the "No Child Left Behind Act."

In the eyes of conservative education reformers, policy-wise, this bill started off as a bad one with some good elements and ended up a disaster. From a fiscal perspective, it was a disaster from the start. Politically, it was no better. But Bush had campaigned as "The Education President," and he needed a bill to live up to that reputation. Congressional Republicans gave his education bill a top spot on the agenda, with the bills in the two chambers garnering the numbers H.R. 1 and S.1 in the 107th Congress. (In the 108th Congress, those numbers adorn the prescription-drug bills.)

In the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, liberal Democrat George Miller (Calif.), the ranking member, effectively took control of the bill markup. This shouldn't have been surprising-drafting a bill on expanding the federal role in education is moving the ball onto the Democrats' turf. The committee, effectively under Democratic control, stripped out Bush's school-choice provisions, added to the costs, and passed it with a five-year cost of $132 billion. It grew to $135 billion before Capitol Hill was done.

On Jan. 8, 2002, Bush signed his prized education bill into law with a grinning Kennedy and Miller over his right shoulder. A week later, at a rally in Boston, Bush said, "I told the folks at a coffee shop in Crawford, Texas that Ted Kennedy was all right. They nearly fell out." Those shocked folks at the Crawford diner very likely had their suspicions confirmed just a few weeks later, when Kennedy and Miller launched an attack on Bush for not providing even more money in his education budget. "The President's budget deals a severe blow to our nation's schools," Kennedy said in a March press release.

In October, as the midterm elections approached, Kennedy smacked around Bush and the GOP a little more. "Today, the President and the Republican leaders in Congress are cutting funding for our schools," Kennedy said. Since Republicans took over Congress, Department of Education funding has risen by 132 percent. The White House seems to hope it can feed the liberal lion to keep him quiet. The story of the education bill should have shown that Republicans can never spend enough to satisfy Kennedy or even to keep him from attacking them.

The attempt to disarm the Left by co-opting their issues fails in the end.

Until they can get past their irrational hatred of George W. Bush, the Buchanacons aren't going to be able to figure out what's really going on in Bush's America and they'll keep aping the Democratic line, even after the Ted Kennedy's of the world have realized they were had,trading their principles for money.

---

IT'S ANTI TIME

Returning to the founders: the debate on the Constitution (Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., September 1993, New Criterion)

Anyone who wishes to know about American politics has much to learn from contemporary events; but there is no substitute for careful reflection on the founding. Everything begins from the founding, and the subsequent changes have occurred to America as founded. Even the attributes of our politics said to have changed since 1787--democratization, heterogeneity, complexity, centralization, bureaucracy--were either set in motion then or took their particular character from the founding. Even when ineluctable necessities such as bureaucracy are imposed on us, we submit to them in our own way, creating an American bureaucracy. Here I have been speaking in Aristotelian terms because the American regime is not simply a theoretical, impartial republic modeled on mankind's necessities. It has its own character and has made its own culture.

Abraham Lincoln described the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in biblical language (Proverbs 25:11) as the apple of gold in the frame of silver. The apple is the natural principle of human equality; the frame surrounding it is the conventional or cultural structure that displays the principle, gives it life, and makes it ours. The two together are a whole, necessary to each other. But they are also separate parts: one that in 1776 declared the principle, another that in 1787 made it work politically. Their separateness makes a point of the act of constituting, done with calm and, despite the heated words, with a certain noble elevation in both the deliberation of the Constitutional Convention and the debate over ratification afterward.

We can be glad that the Federalists won the debate. As I said above, by the standards of contemporary political debate the argumentation was unattainably higher on both sides. But the Federalists were clearly superior. The essential question between Federalists and Anti-Federalists was over the source of great danger to republics: does it come from the many or the few? The Anti-Federalists consistently (if variously) maintained the traditional republican opinion that the few are the main enemy of republics. But the Federalists disagreed with this bromide. They offered the paradoxical judgment that the many are their own worst enemy, that the bane of popular government, in the statement of Federalist 10, is "majority faction"--a phrase that sounds like a contradiction in terms to traditional republicans. The ambitious few are also dangerous, but mainly because they can get the backing of an aroused majority. For their innovative view the Federalists were accused by their opponents during the constitutional debates, by Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s, and by later historians of lacking faith in the people, of being unrepublican. But they were intelligent republicans looking for ways to make republics more viable, and so raise them in the esteem of respectable opinion in the civilized world.

The Federalists accepted the risk of appearing to be doubtful republicans; they were a party concerned to reduce the partisanship of republics. In their Constitution they created an introspective republicanism not preoccupied with denouncing the enemies of republics but alive to the dangers from within the principle. In their view the worst faction in a republic was the one that looked like a republican majority, and they fashioned a republic that could defend itself against the republican danger, using "republican remedies."

This seems a strange argument from Mr. Mansfield, particularly given the way another, more authoritative where the Anti-Federalists are concerned, Straussian has described their thought:

[W]e shall also find, at the very heart of the Anti-Federal position, a dilemma or a tension. This is the critical weakness of Anti-Federalist thought and at the same time its strength and even its glory. For the Anti-Federalists could neither fully reject nor fully accept the leading principles of the Constitution. They were indeed open to Hamilton's charge of trying to reconcile contradictions. This is the element of truth in Cecelia Kenyon's characterization of them as men of little faith. They did not fail to see the opportunity for American nationhood that the Federalists seized so gloriously, but they could not join in the grasping of it. They doubted; they held back; they urged second thoughts. This was not however a mere failure of will or lack of courage. They had reasons, and the reasons have weight. They thought--and it can not be easily denied--that this great national opportunity was profoundly problematical, that it could be neither grasped nor let alone without risking everything. The Anti-Federalists were committed to both union and the states; to both the great American republic and the small, self-governing community; to both commerce and civic virtue; to both private gain and public good. At its best, Anti-Federal thought explores these tensions and points to the need for any significant American political thought to confront them; for they were not resolved by the Constitution but are inherent in the principles and traditions of American life.

If the Federalists were correct at the Founding--as it seems they were--that a strong central government was necessary to secure the survival of the new nation, the Anti-Federalists seem to have been proved right in the long run. That Republic, however well-intentioned and cannily devised, has indeed eaten away at self--governance, the states, community, civic virtue, and the notion of public good. In fact, it is the Anti-Federalists who have the most to say to us these days, because it is around their critique that we will have to structure reform. It will be appropriate to use "republican remedies" but they must be used to reverse the all-consuming process of centralization that even the Federalists knew they were setting in motion.

---

)

Right side up: With their ranks swelling on college campuses, young conservatives say they are revolutionaries fighting a liberal establishment. They're meeting in D.C. this week to promote the cause. (Beth Gillin, Jul. 23, 2003, Philadelphia Inquirer)

While College Democrats of America has disappeared altogether from 20 states, its chapters dwindling from 500 in 1992 to fewer than 300 now, the College Republican National Committee has 1,148 campus chapters, and its membership has tripled since 1999. [...]

Studies have shown that campus conservatives are increasingly female and middle class. They admire Ronald Reagan and are more patriotic since 9/11.

They oppose speech codes, set-aside student government seats for racial minorities, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender groups, and what they see as political correctness.

Increasingly, they are for school prayer and the public funding of church groups and against abortion, a recent study by University of California Berkeley and University of Alabama professors found.

More of them are hawks than doves, the Harvard University Institute of Politics reported in May, noting that support for the war in Iraq outpaces opposition 66 percent to 30 percent. The Harvard study also found that 61 percent of college students like the way President Bush is doing his job.

They aren't into casual sex, according to the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, which has been surveying incoming freshmen since 1966. Only 42 percent of freshman approve of it, down from 51 percent in 1987.

It's an interesting question, just what a generation of young people raised under three or four pro-free market presidents in a row will end up looking like politically. When is the last time a person under 32 would have heard a responsible public figure offer a robust defense of statism?

---

WHAT WOULD LINCOLN DO?

Did Lincoln Violate the Constitution?: A Review of Daniel Farber's Lincoln's Constitution (RODGER D. CITRON, July 18, 2003, Find Law)

Farber...examines Lincoln's record with respect to civil liberties. Again, he is supportive of many of the president's contested actions. And he concludes that "[m]any of the acts denounced as dictatorial - the suspension of habeas at the beginning of the war, emancipation, military trials of civilians in contested or occupied territory - seem in retrospect to have reasonably good constitutional justifications under the war power."

Farber does acknowledges that, on occasion, the actions of Lincoln or the military were excessive. As examples, he cites measures to suppress free speech - and in particular, a case in which a gentleman opposed to the Civil War was convicted and sentenced to death for what may have been no more than associating with another individual who wanted to take armed action against the Union. After the war, in Ex Parte Milligan, the Supreme Court granted the gentleman's habeas corpus petition. [...]

Lincoln's Constitution concludes with a brief discussion of the current relevance of the constitutional questions surrounding Lincoln's Presidency.

Farber believes that Lincoln's conduct of the war demonstrates the need for a strong federal government in wartime. But he also contends that it is strong evidence that we need not circumvent the rule of law, or ignore constitutional protections, in dealing with such a crisis.

During our greatest constitutional crisis, Farber demonstrates, the nation was extremely fortunate to have Lincoln as its leader. He recognized the significance of the challenge posed by secession; acted decisively in responding to it; and nevertheless maintained a sense of perspective about the proper institutional role of the presidency.

In the midst of the war on terrorism, at least one disputed issue in the Civil War - how to balance individuals' constitutional rights against governmental claims of national security - remains quite germane. Regardless of one's political affiliation, it is undisputed that Lincoln set the bar rather high for his successors.

Without being too cynical, it seems safe to say that had the South won the Civil War history might render a different verdict on Lincoln's actions. Similarly, if the war on terror succeeds and George W. Bush doesn't suspend the next election and impose fascism, one would think that even actions that may seem constitutionally dicey to some--keeping prisoners at Guantanamo or trying them before military tribunals--will be seen to "have reasonably good constitutional justifications under the war power". Indeed, given that FDR is forgiven the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, an act which had absolutely no good constitutional justification, we can be certain Gitmo will be accepted. The question this raises is whether we're all constitutional relativists when it comes to actions we desire, or is it necessary for the continuance of the Republic, when threatened, to allow a little leeway in the Constitution that we would not grant in times of peace?

---

TOO GOOD TO BE UNTRUE

Why ethical criticism can never be simple. (Wayne C. Booth, Summer 1998, Style)

This essay is one of many recent efforts, by myself and others, to challenge two critical schools popular through much of this
century: those who think ethical judgments have nothing to do with genuine "literary" or "aesthetic" criticism, and those who think that ethical judgments about stories can never be anything more than subjective opinion. My thesis is thus double: ethical criticism is relevant to all literature, no matter how broadly or narrowly we define that controversial term; and such criticism, when done responsibly, can be a genuine form of rational inquiry. It is true that it will never produce results nearly as uncontroversial as deciding whether it rained in New York yesterday, or even whether President Clinton lied. What's more, many of its judgments, such as Plato's exaggerated attacks on Homer, will be rejected by most serious ethical critics. Yet when responsible readers of powerful stories engage in genuine inquiry about their ethical value, they can produce results that deserve the tricky label "knowledge." [...]

Why did the authors of the Bible choose mainly to be storytellers rather than blunt exhorters with a moral tag at the end of each story? They did not rest with the laying down of bare codes, like a list of flat commandments. Though they sometimes tried the brief commandment line, they more often told stories, like the one about a troubled abandoned-child-hero who, as leader of his liberated people, almost botches the job of obtaining some divine rules printed on a tablet, and about a people who largely botch the job of receiving and abiding by them. The pious preachers did not just print out the sermons of a savior; they placed the sermons into a story, and they surrounded them with other stories, especially the one about how the hero himself grappled with questions about his status as savior, and about how he told scores of radically ambiguous parables that forced his listeners into moral thought. They did not openly preach that for God to be incarnated as a man entails irresolvable paradoxes; they told a story about how the God/man at the moment of supreme moral testing is ridden with doubt and cries out, as any of us would have done, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

All those biblical authors must have known, perhaps without knowing what they knew, that serious stories educate morally - and they do so more powerfully than do story-free sermons. Just imagine how little effect on the world John Bunyan would have had if he had put into non-narrative prose the various messages embodied in Pilgrim's Progress.

In short, the great tellers and most of us listeners have known in our bones that stories, whether fictional or historical, in prose or in verse, whether told by mothers to infants or by rabbis and priests to the elderly and dying, whether labeled as sacred or profane or as teaching good morality or bad - stories are our major moral teachers. Some stories teach only a particular moral perspective, one that can be captured with a moral tag, as in some of Aesop's fables and the simpler biblical tales. Many of them teach a morality that you and I would reject. But all of them teach, and thus in a sense they are open to moral inquiry, even when they do not seem to invite or tolerate it.

In the face of this general acknowledgement of the power of stories, how could it happen that entire critical schools have rejected criticism that deals with such power? One obvious answer is that critics have wanted to escape the threatening flood of controversial judgments we land in as soon as ethical judgments are invited into aesthetic territory. Ethical judgments are by their nature controversial: the very point of uttering them is to awaken or challenge those who have missed the point. Consequently whenever a feminist critic, say, judges a novel or poem to be sexist, she can be sure to be attacked by someone who sees her values as skewed. To praise or condemn for political correctness is widely scoffed at as absurd: political judgments are merely subjective. To judge all or part of a poem according to religious values is seen as even more absurd, since religious views are widely seen as even less subject to rational argument.

A second powerful reason for suppression is the fear already mentioned: that ethical criticism of any kind, even when critics agree with the proclaimed values, is an invasion of "aesthetic" territory. As Charles Altieri reports in "Lyrical Ethics and Literary Experience" (above), to be seen as an ethical critic can trigger thoughtless responses from purists who fear that the "lyrical" or the "beautiful" will be sacrificed to preaching.

One of the points we've argued for in our book reviews, to vociferous objections, is that a story can't be beautiful if it is not true.

---

BRITAIN'S STATE RELIGION? THE CULT OF MULTI-CULTI

Thought for the day: you're fired because you're too religious: The BBC's agnostic head of religion is under fire for his dumping of long-standing presenters. (Elizabeth Day and Chris Hastings, 20/07/2003, Daily Telegraph)

Alan Bookbinder, the corporation's head of religion and ethics and a self-confessed agnostic, has sparked outrage by dispensing with some of the programme's most popular voices.

Among those who say that they have been unseated are Lavinia Byrne, the former Roman Catholic nun who has presented the popular two-minute slot on more than 100 occasions, and the Rev Eric James, a former chaplain to the Queen. [...]

Other regular presenters such as the Rev Annabel Shilson-Thomas, the chaplain of Robinson College, Cambridge, fear that they have also been discarded as the station has not been in contact for some time. "I won't say I am not disappointed by it," she said. "But, from speaking to Christine Morgan, the executive producer of the programme, and one or two other people in the BBC, I hear that they are trying to give it a more secular, more multi-cultural and more multi-faith approach."

George Carey would seem to have been right after all, at least where the elites are concerned.

---

'TAINT NECESSARILY SO

Governor looks to taint recall as a costly ploy by the right (Laura Kurtzman, Jul. 26, 2003, San Jose Mercury News)

Gov. Gray Davis is so unpopular that his advisers don't plan to persuade voters to like him. And he may face so many rivals in the Oct. 7 recall election that he won't be able to win the way he's always won before, by attacking his opponent.

So, to save his job, the governor, his wife, campaign staff and supporters have begun to march in rhetorical lock step, trying to taint the recall as a vast right-wing conspiracy -- in Hillary Clinton's famous phrase -- to take over the state. Davis advisers say Bill Clinton may even come to California soon to make the argument himself. [...]

Instead of defending the governor, his longtime pollster Paul Maslin said, the Davis team will try to shift the blame by putting the heat on Republicans, including Bush in the weeks ahead, accusing them of trying to orchestrate a "right-wing coup.''

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq, the president was too popular to touch, Maslin said. But with doubts swirling about Bush's reasons for taking the nation to war, it will be easier to pin blame on the president and his friends in the energy business for California's energy crisis -- and whip up fears of a Republican takeover.

"He ain't riding high anymore,'' Maslin said, noting that Bush's approval rating slipped to 49 percent in California, the lowest point since Sept. 11. "His policies are getting more unpopular every day.''

Great strategy if the economy slides into recession and there's another terrorist attack or Iraq turns into Vietnam. But if September is a good month economically and we produce the bodies of Saddam and or Osama and Iraq quiets down a little, then what exactly is the Governor running against?

MORE:
-Long, strange ride toward recall election (Dion Nissenbaum, Jul. 26, 2003, Mercury News)

---

)

U.S. usually beats guerrillas, historians say (Tom Squitieri and Dave Moniz, 7/17/03, USA TODAY)

The thought of U.S. forces being drawn into a guerrilla war in Iraq may send shudders through many Americans and give the Pentagon public relations jitters. But military historians and counterinsurgency experts say that the United States has excelled at battling guerrillas throughout its history--the Vietnam War an obvious exception--and that the Marines wrote a manual on how to fight such wars that continues to be used by friends and foes alike.

The manual, written in 1941, says occupying forces must stay on the offensive, hunting down rebels wherever they hide. At the same time, the economic welfare of the local population has to be improved, repression should be avoided and native troops should be used as soon as possible.

U.S. troops followed that advice with a great deal of success in battling guerrillas in 20th century wars in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, as did the British in Malaysia after World War II. In Vietnam, by contrast, the lessons were mostly ignored in favor of a big-unit approach coupled with poor relations with the native population. [...]

Stan Florer, a retired Army colonel and Special Forces instructor, says that if there is a guerrilla war in Iraq right now, it is an unusual one. He describes the Iraqis as a smart, well-educated people who want to embrace democracy and therefore are unlikely to support guerrillas ideologically or materially in attacks against U.S. troops in large numbers.

"I don't think you're going to find the cooperation a nationalist (guerrilla) movement would have," Florer says.

Even Vietnam was a military victory--an overwhelming one against the domestic insurgency, no worse than a draw against the North--though a political bloodbath.

---

IT'S NOT JUST CATHOLICS

Accusation of Bias Angers Democrats (ROBIN TONER, July 27, 2003, NY Times)

In a recent newspaper advertising campaign, run by groups supporting the Bush administration's judicial nominees, a closed courtroom door bears the sign "Catholics Need Not Apply." The advertisement argues that William Pryor Jr., the Alabama attorney general and a conservative, anti-abortion nominee to the federal appeals court, was under attack in the Senate because of his "deeply held" Catholic beliefs. [...]

Republicans and their conservative allies argue that the Democrats have created a de facto religious test by their emphasis on a nominee's stand on issues like abortion. "It's not just Catholics," said Sean Rushton, executive director of the Committee for Justice, one of the groups that paid for these advertisements, which are running in Maine and Rhode Island. "I think there's an element of the far left of the Democratic Party that sees as its project scrubbing the public square of religion, and in some cases not only religion but of religious people." [...]

Behind the anger of many Democrats is the suspicion that this advertising campaign is part of the Republican Party's courtship of Catholics, an important swing vote. In general, Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said Mr. Bush was "doing pretty well with white Catholics" lately.

It is all part of a politics that has changed radically since 1960. Among the nine Democrats on the Judiciary Committee accused of working against the interests of Catholic judicial nominees is, of course, John Kennedy's brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

How can the Democrats even argue with a straight face that, though they oppose any nominee who is strongly pro-life, they aren't predisposed against the religious? As for the supposed Catholicism of some Democratic committee members, which Ms Toner would seem to think is dispositive of the bias charge, J. Bottum had a terrific piece on their moral confusions in this month's Crisis.

MORE: (via Mike Daley)
No Religious Test Shall Ever Be ... (Robert Musil, 7/20/03)

---

ALL THAT FRETTING ABOUT THE INQUISITION CAN'T BE HEALTHY EITHER

Pray often and live longer (Uwe Siemon-Netto, 7/23/2003, UPI)

Four years ago a review showed that 20-year old Americans can expect to live 6.6 years longer if they attend religious services at least once a week. Now Harold G. Koenig, who teaches psychiatry at Duke University, reports that elderly people who are not disabled run a 47 percent greater risk of dying before long if they are not engaged in regular prayer, meditation or Bible study.

Koenig is the director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Spirituality and Health and editor-in-chief of Research News in Science and Theology. Discussing his long-term study with a sample group up 4,000 men and women above the age of 65, he related in an interview that praying and attending divine service regularly seem to result in a "40 percent reduction in the likelihood of high blood pressure."

Of course, science cannot prove divine intervention or miracles. But it can point to more tangible causes. Religiously active Americans of advanced age smoke and drink less than others, feel more at peace with themselves and - as Koenig phrased it -- "at least perceive to have more social support."

"When people pray, their fear of death goes down," Koenig went on. Equally important, active faith mitigates the grief over the death of a husband, wife, relative or friend. "The believer can cope better with a loss because he knows the loved one to be in God's good care."

Loneliness is perhaps the most horrible experience in old age. Here again, a life of worship helps, according to Koenig: "When you know that God is present you no longer feel that lonely."

Here's a prayer that fits the parameters we've discussed in the past:

O almighty God, infinite and eternal, thou fillest all things with thy presence; thou art everywhere by thy essence and by thy power; in heaven by glory, in holy places by thy grace and favour, in the hearts of thy servants by thy Spirit, in the consciences of all men by thy testimony and observation of us. Teach me to walk always as in thy presence, to fear thy majesty, to reverence thy wisdom and omniscience; that I may never dare to commit any indecency in the eye of my Lord and my Judge; but that I may with so much care and reverence demean myself that my Judge may not be my accuser but my advocate; that I, expressing the belief of thy presence here by careful walking, may feel the effects of it in the participation of eternal glory; through Jesus Christ. Amen.
-Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), Holy Living

---

BUT HE DIDN'T SAY WE WANTED TO LIBERATE THE IRAQI PEOPLE.

NOW: Transcript - Bill Moyers Talks with Joseph C. Wilson, IV (PBS, 2/28/03)

MOYERS: President Bush's recent speech to the American Enterprise Institute, he said, let me quote it to you. 'The danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons cannot be ignored or wished away.' You agree with that?

WILSON: I agree with that. Sure. I…

MOYERS: 'The danger must be confronted.' You agree with that? 'We would hope that the Iraqi regime will meet the demands of the United Nations and disarm fully and peacefully. If it does not, we are prepared to disarm Iraq by force. Either way, this danger will be removed. The safety of the American people depends on ending this direct and growing threat.' You agree with that?

WILSON: I agree with that. Sure. The President goes on to say in that speech as he did in the State of the Union Address is we will liberate Iraq from a brutal dictator. All of which is true. But the only thing Saddam Hussein hears in this speech or the State of the Union Address is, 'He's coming to kill me. He doesn't care if I have weapons of mass destruction or not. His objective is to come and overthrow my regime and to kill me.' And that then does not provide any incentive whatsoever to disarm.

MOYERS: All of us change in 12 years and obviously Saddam Hussein has changed since you last saw him. But what do you know about him that would help us understand what might be going through his mind right now?

WILSON: [G]iven that his worldview is limited, there is a tendency to develop a logical argument where the premise is skewed. . . . So he will, for example — four days after he invaded Kuwait when I saw him in August of 1990 — he said that the United States lacked the intestinal fortitude and the stamina to confront his invasion in Kuwait. And it was clear to me that he was drawing upon his interpretation of our experiences in Vietnam, Beirut and possibly Tehran. And he had drawn exactly the wrong lessons from that.

We, in fact, stayed in Vietnam far longer than we should have perhaps. We were there for 15 years. And we suffered 50,000 casualties. We did not cut and run. We did spill the blood of our soldiers for many, many years. Give you another example, the whole decision to go into Kuwait was, from his perspective, rational based upon his understanding of the region and of what the international community would do.

OK, but he didn't buy yellowcake from Niger, right?

---

CHALK UP ANOTHER FOR THE POPE

A Revolution In Ruins (Brian Latell, July 26, 2003, The Washington Post)

The Faustian bargains Castro made then in the aftermath of widespread popular unrest have resulted in the abandonment of the revolution's once vaunted egalitarian principles. The legalization of dollars in 1993, for example, has created a caste system in which Cubans with access to dollars live vastly better than the much larger numbers who have none. Parallel economies have developed, with an ever-deepening polarization between rich and poor, urban and rural, black and white. By some accounts, Cuba now ranks near the bottom in income distribution among the Latin American countries.

The often desperate competition to somehow acquire dollars from Western visitors has also led to other social and moral distortions that Castro previously deplored. University enrollment is less than half of what it was in 1990 because young Cubans see greater advantage in hustling tourists. Prostitution is rampant. Crime has increased. Resentments are growing too, because average Cubans, even those with dollars, are prohibited from visiting most tourist locations. But Castro's greatest concern, and a major source of his wrath, is that over the past few years a large and determined pacifist opposition has developed on the island. The Varela Project, operating entirely within Cuban law, gathered more than 11,000 signatures on petitions seeking democratic opening. Many of its leaders are now serving long prison sentences.

Several librarians and independent journalists also have been incarcerated. All "prisoners of conscience," according to Amnesty International, they were guilty of lending books from their private collections to neighbors or of writing cultural and other articles and then sending them abroad for dissemination. None of those imprisoned advocated violence, organized anti-regime demonstrations, conspired or uttered inflammatory language against the regime. They know better than to ridicule Castro on the record in any way at all.

This opposition is an entirely home-grown phenomenon with few connections to the Cuban Diaspora. The activists came to oppose Castro's regime in the early 1990s after its compromises, economic failures and refusal to reform as other closed societies evolved. Many were inspired by Pope John Paul II during his 1998 visit. "Don't be afraid," he told a large Cuban audience. It is their persistence and spiritual detachment in the face of repression that especially angers Castro. But most of all he fears that the leaders of a democratic Cuba will emerge from this new opposition after he departs.

And so yet another iteration of rationalism falls before the moral authority of Catholicism.

---

ON NOT MARKING TIME

Remarks by Bush-Cheney '04 Campaign Manager Ken Mehlman to the Republican National Committee (GeorgeWBush.com, July 26, 2003 )

On January 22, 2001, President Bush swore in the commissioned officers who would serve in the White House. He reminded us, "We are not here just to mark time."

From his first days as a candidate to his first term as President, George W. Bush has done much more than mark time. He has seized the moment.

His leadership has transformed challenges into opportunities. Because President Bush has confronted great challenges, our nation has overcome some of the greatest tests in our history. Because he has insisted on solving those problems—not just passing them on, future generations will have more security, prosperity and opportunity. And because our President has developed solutions based on compassionate conservative principles, our party today has the greatest opportunity in generations.

Victory November 2, 2004 would be the first time in 80 years the party of Lincoln has re-elected a President and returned majorities to the House and Senate. The last time this happened Calvin Coolidge was running for re-election. [...]

Just as the Truman doctrine provided a roadmap to contain communism, President Bush has put forward principles to protect our nation and the world by defeating terrorism where it grows.

First, we will treat terrorists and those who support, harbor, finance, and assist terrorists the same. All will be brought to justice.

Second, that justice will be done where the terrorists gather. We will bring the battle to them, not wait until they attack our homeland. As long as George W. Bush is President, the front lines on the war on terror will be Baghdad and Kandahar, not Boston and Kansas City.

Third, America will lead global efforts to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. We will strengthen our intelligence and law enforcement to look for and break the links between dangerous regimes, weapons of mass destruction and terrorist organizations.

And, finally, we will confront terror with hope, fear with freedom. Our President will work to bring freedom and democracy throughout the world.

The President has done more than just talk principles. He has made these our national policies. While much work remains to be done, al Qaeda's leaders are now hiding in caves, and Afghan girls can attend school.

The dictator of Iraq has been deposed, and his cruel sons no longer torment the Iraqi people. Twenty-four million once captive Iraqis now taste freedom.

Some criticize this war on terror as unilateral or pre-emptive. But didn't September 11 teach us that we cannot wait while threats gather? That we must connect the dots, even if other nations refuse to see the pattern? That pre-empting terrorists before they acquire weapons of mass destruction, before they come to our shores, before they can harm America is the goal?

The President has transformed the federal government to protect our homeland.

Our President has turned challenges into opportunities at home as well. To confront a recession and protect jobs, our President passed two of the three largest tax cuts in history. To ensure prosperity in the future, these tax cuts encourage investment and assist those trying to enter the middle class.

The President's plan allows America's working families to keep more so they can do more for themselves and their communities.

The most comprehensive corporate responsibility reforms since the New Deal are now the law of the land. For the first time in a decade, our President has fast track authority to negotiate free trade.

We've passed the most significant education reforms in a generation with high standards and testing to make sure every child is learning. We're relying on programs that work like phonics.

Presidential leadership is making prescription drug coverage a real possibility for seniors, not just a campaign tactic used to frighten our parents and grandparents.

President Bush is working for a more compassionate America. From helping AIDS victims in Africa to faith-based initiatives and welfare reform at home, President Bush has helped make sure the party of Lincoln has an agenda worthy of our party’s founder.

The American Dream has always rested on the twin pillars of ownership and opportunity. Our President has an agenda to accomplish both: closing the gap between minorities and non-minorities in home ownership, promoting small business development, allowing younger workers to own a portion of their retirement if they choose. [...]

Last year, President George W. Bush's leadership, your efforts and the incredible Republican candidates transformed this political landscape. The President's party approaches its first midterm election as a challenge to be overcome. We approached it as an opportunity to be seized.

Despite how closely our country is divided, last year, the President's party won back the U.S. Senate in a first midterm election for the first time in history. While the White House party usually loses House seats, we won them in our first midterm -- the only other time a President's party has done that was 1934.

Despite having to defend 23 out of 36 governor’s mansions, Republicans still maintain a majority of Governor's mansions. And while the President's party loses an average of 350 net seats in state legislatures in midterm elections, we won 175. There are more Republican legislators than Democrats for the first time since 1954.

Republicans broke the 49% nation barrier in 2002. Republican candidates received 51% of the vote in the House and nearly the same in races for the Senate, and for governor. [...]

Ladies and gentlemen: this next election will be tough. It will be an incredible challenge. It will include difficult days.

But think about how our President has handled the unbelievable challenges he's faced. By leading on principle, by doing what's right, and by insisting on solving tough problems, not just passing them on, our President has transformed challenge into opportunity.

In his seminal work, The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk wrote the need for conservatives to embrace change. "Conservatives inherit from Burke," Russell Kirk wrote, "a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time."

By applying conservative principles to take on challenges like global terrorism, a recession, a school system that was leaving too many children behind and so many other challenges, President Bush has made history and ensured a better tomorrow.

He's also provided our party and all who share our convictions with an opportunity--one that we realized in 2002 and we must work for again in 2004.

Members of the RNC: we have an opportunity not seen in our lifetime or our parents' lifetimes. Let us work together to seize this incredible moment. And let us start today.

The contrast with the platform the Democratic contenders are running on and the despair in their party is quite striking.

---

PSYCHE-COUNTRY?

Decent Folk: Summer Hymns' summer hymns define the purdy South (NATE CAVALIERI, 7/24/03, Dallas Observer)

"I'm finally able to do the things that I've always wanted to do," [Summer Hymns leader Zachary] Gresham says. "I started doing this because I liked being in front of people, and it's something that I guess I've gotten good enough at to pursue. I try not to think about it too much. I try not to analyze it."

Talking to Gresham, it seems impossible to believe that he loves being in front of a crowd. He mumbles and stutters with an endearing mountain of nervous energy. He doesn't suffer from the pretentious, typically self-important hubris of a burgeoning cult hero; he bears the weight of a wealth of humility. At one point he even fields a compliment with a bashful "geez Louise." But Gresham's candor defies the slack-jawed naivete of his country-boy demeanor.

"I grew up in a Baptist church. That's enough to make anyone not religious by the time they are 21," he says directly. "Music is my religion. Creativity is my communion."

His work fronting Summer Hymns makes this statement immediately evident. With the band's latest, Clemency, Gresham's high-pitched narratives are confessional and literate, and--like the name of his band--constantly hinting at the ethereal. Sonically, Gresham leads the band through poppy psyche-country that places him alongside like-minded contemporaries like Clem Snide, Sparklehorse and Centro-matic.

Opting out of the band's usual home-recorded tradition, they migrated to Nashville to record Clemency with Mark Nevers, a member of Lambchop whose production credits include Vic Chestnutt and the Silver Jews. Under Nevers' guidance they abandoned some of the spacey elements of their two earlier efforts and built the record on simple sounds: weepy pedal steel licks, swaying beats, acoustic guitars and lofty vocal melodies. In "Be Anywhere" he croons, "I don't want to believe," again and again over a wash of pedal steel. It's one of the most defining moments of the record, rich with emotional weight and simple, disarming sincerity. Think of it as Neil Young and Crazy Horse for the Starbucks generation. Or maybe not.

Anyone ever heard of them?

---

MONOPOLY MONEY

Willing to do a deal on school vouchers (E.J. DIONNE, July 25, 2003, Houston Chronicle)

Like many Americans, I struggle with the voucher question. I admire public school teachers and support unions. My late mother taught in public schools and so, early in her career, did my sister. They cared passionately about the kids in their classrooms. The often-maligned teachers' unions have fought to bring up the pay of a profession whose importance to our future is not matched by the compensation its members receive.

But it should also bother us that liberals who send their kids to private schools would tell poor parents who want their children to escape failing public schools: "Sorry, our principles require your kids to stay right where they are."

For years, I have argued with my friends in the teachers' unions that they should support voucher experiments. Doing so would prove that they are on the side of the poor kids they teach. And if their unions are so certain that vouchers will fail, why not allow experiments that in all likelihood will prove that vouchers are no substitute for fixing the public schools?

Listen to Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, a group dedicated to the proposition that poor and minority kids deserve much better teaching.

Vouchers, she says, are "a sideline, a marginal issue." Vouchers could help some inner-city kids get "tickets into Catholic schools" and those kids would be "better off, though not hugely better off." The problem, she says, is that "there's not a lot of excess capacity" in Catholic schools or "in the non-Catholic school sector, and no excess capacity in the really high-end, independent schools."

In any event, Haycock adds, "tony private schools don't want to submit to the requirements that policy-makers are attaching to voucher programs." Not to mention that tony schools cost more than most voucher programs would provide.

And the notion that vouchers would create a large supply of new schools is nonsense.

At the end of the day the fight over vouchers really comes down to the Democrats' fear of the teachers' unions and of money going to religious schools and to Republicans' fear of black kids invading the white suburban schools of their constituents, but Mr. Dionne brings up one other key difference: Democrats, despite Bill Clinton's best efforts, don't really believe in free markets. Mr. Dionne really doesn't believe that turning millions of parents and kids into informed education consumers would bring pressures to bear that would result in better educational opportunities. He truly believes that a government monopoly--or near-monopoly--is necessary and good. That idea seems to be contradicted by the 20th Century.

---

TANCREDO & MOSELEY-BRAUN IN '04!

How Dean Could Win: The Vermont governor would do well to make immigration reform a Democratic issue. (Scott McConnell, July 28, 2003, The American Conservative)

Dean's weakness is the weakness of every Democrat in the last 30 years-a tepid appeal to working- and middle-class white voters, especially males, especially in the South and border-states. The Vermonter has acknowledged the need to "get white males to vote Democratic again," but federal health insurance and balanced budgets, which he brings up when the question is raised, won't do it. What could?

The obvious choice is immigration.

The idea that white men are going to abandon the Republican Party in considerable numbers over just one issue that really affects only a couple of states--one of which, California, the Democrats already dominate--is truly ridiculous. Meanwhile, the risk to the Democrats, of losing the already-Christian and naturally-conservative Latino vote to the GOP for at least a generation, would have to be terrifying. What Mr. McConnell is proposing here is combining the politics of Pat Buchanan and Lenora Fulani. We saw how badly that sold with the public last election...well, outside of Palm Beach.

---

BAD NEWS OR BUST

DOWNER DEMS IGNORE GOOD NEWS (DEBORAH ORIN, July 24, 2003, NY Post)

THE elimination of Saddam Hussein's evil sons Uday and Qusay was the biggest success in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, but the Democratic 2004 presidential wannabes just didn't want to talk about the good news.

They're all quick to fire off a statement to every reporter on the Internet at the drop of a hat, but for some reason only Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) thought this was worth a statement. And his was grudging, with a focus on the "unfinished" work in Iraq.

Oh yes, other Dem wannabes did comment when asked, but it wasn't an issue they sought to raise on their own. That's particularly odd, considering that four of the five would-be presidents now in Congress actually voted for the Iraq war. You'd think they'd be happy.

The danger for Democrats now is that their strategies all seem to count on bad news from Iraq.

In fact, the buzz in Dem circles was how unlucky it was for Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.) that he gave his big Iraq-gone-wrong speech on Tuesday, choosing the day that Saddam's sons were killed to claim President Bush has made America "less safe."

At this rate, on the day the Dow tops 10,000 again, the Democratic cloakrooms on the Hill are going to look like the compound at Jonestown.

MORE "BAD" NEWS:
'THE NOOSE IS TIGHTENING' (SkyNews July 26, 2003)

American forces in Iraq are insisting that the noose is tightening around Saddam Hussein following the deaths of his two sons.

The number of raids carried out by troops hunting the deposed dictator has increased dramatically across the country.

The US says more people are coming forward with information now that Uday and Qusay are dead, tempted by the huge rewards on offer.

It has been confirmed that the informant - believed to be Saddam's cousin - who led forces to the house in Mosul where they made their last stand will get the full 20m reward.

The increasing number of "walk-ins"--Iraqis who feel safe enough to come forward on their own and volunteer information without being propmted--is an especially good sign.

MORE:
Latest Carville Memo Blasts Bush on Foreign Policy, Economy (Bobby Eberle, July 25, 2003, Talon News)

Democrat strategist James Carville released a memo through his organization, Democracy Corps, which claims that President Bush has suffered "major political
damage" on "multiple fronts." According to the memo, "dramatic changes" are now taking place in the "electoral landscape."

The Democracy Corps memo from Carville, along with Stan Greenberg and Bob Shrum, says that President Bush is "taking so much water" because he is "losing ground" on three fronts: the economy, the war and foreign policy, and on trust." The memo goes on to state that the scope of the losses "should produce a Democratic Party much more confident of its ability to challenge and win on its ideas." [...]

The memo does note that, according to their poll, 64 percent of the respondents still want to continue the "Bush direction" when it comes to the war on terror. "Similarly, on homeland security, by two-to-one, voters think the Bush administration is providing the resources necessary for homeland defense," the memo states.

---

PACIFISM--AN IDEAL WORTH FIGHTING FOR?

Japan agrees to send troops to Iraq--but not before a fight (AP, July 26, 2003)

Lawmakers voted Friday to send Japanese forces to Iraq to help with reconstruction, despite delaying tactics by the opposition that deteriorated into a wild shoving match. [...]

Opposition parties criticized the legislation, saying such peacekeeping missions could violate Japan's pacifist constitution and put troops in the line of enemy fire.

During an upper-house committee meeting--during which the bill passed--outraged opposition legislators shouted and tried to push their way through a ring of ruling party lawmakers to get at the committee chairman, who had cut short the debate. The chairman called a vote amid the grappling and tackling.

Where's Bill Thomas when you need him?

---

PYRAMID SCHEME

Christians face rising bias in Middle East (H.D.S. Greenway, 7/25/2003, Boston Globe)

Even though the Koran teaches that Christians and Jews are ''people of the book,'' and therefore to be respected, there is no question but that Christians in Egypt today are facing increasing discrimination and rising fear since the Islamists have not explained where nonbelievers would fit into an Islamic state. As for Jews, whereas historically Islam was much more tolerant of Jews than Christendom ever was, this has been reversed since the advent of Israel. [...]

What happens in Egypt is important, because almost one in three Arabs is an Egyptian, and Cairo is the traditional capital of Arab learning. What happens to religious tolerance in Egypt will speak libraries about the future of tolerance in the Middle East. But Christians in other Middle East countries have had it as bad or worse. Christians have been pouring out of the occupied West Bank for years, and the irony is that Christians will probably come under more pressure from Islamists in the new Iraq than they did under Saddam Hussein. Christians fare best in Syria, where religious tolerance is, ironically, enforced by dictatorship.

Further afield, Pakistan's tiny Christian minority finds itself under increasing discrimination from Islamic groups, and Christians are under assault in Indonesia, too. The trouble doesn't all come from Islam either. In India, Hindu nationalists are making life difficult not only for Muslims, but for Indian Christians as well, many of whom trace their arrival on the subcontinent to the third century.

Unfortunately, there is no reason for Western society to feel smug. Muslims are being daily demonized in the United States by Christian right groups, and our traditional tolerance is being tested.

When folks like Mr. (?) Greenway do things like compare the systematic repression and violence towards Jews and Christians in portions of the Islamic world to pronouncements by American religious leaders that Islam is dysfunctional, do you suppose they know how silly they sound? Here's a little thought experiment that may answer the question: would you feel safer if you were a Muslim in Lynchburg, VA or a Jew in Islamabad?

On a broader point though, it's long past time we stop subsidizing the Egyptian state.

---

ONLY THE GERMANS WOULD USE DOGS FOR BAIT

Legendary Dog-Eating Catfish Dies (Reuters, Jul 25, 2003)

A giant catfish that ate a dog and terrorized a German lake for years has washed up dead, but the legend of "Kuno the Killer" lives on.

A gardener discovered the carcass of a five-foot-long catfish weighing 77 pounds this week, a spokesman for the western city of Moenchengladbach said on Friday.

Kuno became a local celebrity in 2001 when he sprang from the waters of the Volksgarten park lake to swallow a Dachshund puppy whole. He evaded repeated attempts to capture him. [...]

Several fishermen identified the carcass as Kuno, but doubts linger.

"That's not the Kuno we know," said Leon Cornelius, another member of "Kuno's Friends." He said he had seen several huge catfish in the lake.

Central Command is going to release autopsy photos of the victim to convince skeptical Germans.

---

ROOM TO THE RIGHT

Growing Number of Americans Say Islam Encourages Violence Among Followers (The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, July 24, 2003)

The new nationwide survey of 2,002 adults, conducted June 24-July 8 by the Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, shows that there has been an important shift in public perceptions of Islam. Fully 44% now believe that Islam is more likely than other religions "to encourage violence among its believers." As recently as March 2002, just 25% expressed this view. A separate study by the Pew Research Center in June 2003 found a similar change in the number of Americans who see Muslims as anti-American: 49% believe that a significant portion of Muslims around the world hold anti-American views, up from 36% in March 2002.

In the new survey, most Americans continue to rate Muslim-Americans favorably, though the percentage is inching downward. A declining number of Americans say their own religion has a lot in common with Islam--22% now, compared with 27% in 2002 and 31% shortly after the terrorist attacks in the fall of 2001. Views of Muslims and Islam are influenced heavily by a person's ideology and religious affiliation. White evangelical Christians and political conservatives hold more negative views of Muslims and are more likely than other Americans to say that Islam encourages violence among its followers.

As the presidential campaign takes shape, religious divisions over some controversial social issues--homosexuality in particular--are as wide as ever. Overall, 53% oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally compared with 38% who support the idea. Opposition to gay marriage has decreased significantly since the mid-1990s, from 65% in 1996. But notably, the shift in favor of gay marriage is seen in nearly every segment of society with two significant exceptions--white evangelical Protestants and African-Americans. While a higher percentage of white evangelicals (83%) than blacks (64%) oppose legalizing gay marriages, neither group has changed its views significantly since 1996.

The numbers suggest just how much room the GOP has to its right. Congress can pass, and the President sign, restrictions on gay marriage with impunity and the failure to reckon with the anti-Western extremism in the Islamic world would appear to be a greater liability than any perceived over-aggressiveness.

---

ANOTHER RENTAL FOR THIS WEEKEND (via Oswald Czolgosz)

Remember the Dragon: How Bruce Lee changed America. (Kenneth Silber, July 25, 2003, National Review)

It has been three decades since the untimely death on July 20, 1973 of Bruce Lee, the martial-arts expert and movie star. The "dragon" (as he is known for his starring role in the film Enter the Dragon) has long been a cult hero to fans of martial-arts movies. But Lee deserves broader recognition for his contributions to American culture and society.

Lee served, in fact, as an important counterpoint to some of the negative cultural and social trends that were ascendant in the years when he attained fame. At a time when crime was soaring, Lee developed and popularized techniques that ultimately would help millions improve their self-defense abilities. In the face of a counterculture that derided self-discipline, Lee stood as a veritable embodiment of that virtue. In contrast to the pious (and often hypocritical) pacifism that arose against the Vietnam War, Lee's films were a reminder that force can be legitimate depending on how and why it is used.

The equally magnetic Jason Scott Lee several years ago starred in an excellent biopic, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, that relates Bruce Lee's struggles against both white and Asian prejudice.

---

GRUDGE MATCH

Nothing better than bitter rivals (Dan Shaughnessy, 7/25/2003, Boston Globe)

It's the frequency that makes this different. Harvard and Yale joust on the gridiron only once a year. The Democrats and Republicans bite one anothers ankles hourly, but their defining moment comes on a Tuesday in November every fourth year.

What we have here is more of a Hatfields vs. McCoys feud. Blood-Crips, Sharks-Jets, and all that.

In the battle between Athens and Sparta, it is necessary always to recall that the Yankees are Sparta.

---

THOU SHALL NOT KILL, DEPENDING UPON THE SLOPE OF YOUR UTILITY FUNCTION

Prof's Murder Conviction Stuns Penn State (Dan Lewerenz, AP, 7/26/03)

Last month, Penn State University officials learned something about professor Paul Krueger that wasn't on his resume — he is on parole for a triple murder committed in Texas nearly 40 years ago. . . .

In 1965, when he was 18, Krueger and a 16-year-old friend, left San Clemente, Calif. The two passed through TeTexas and rented a motor boat hoping to travel to Venezuela, where they intended to become "soldiers of fortune," according to a 1979 story in the Austin American-Statesman.

Along the Intracoastal Waterway near Corpus Christi, they encountered a fishing boat with a crew of three, John Fox, 38; Noel Little, 50; and Van Carson, 40. As night fell on April 12, 1965, all five went to shore and put in for the night.

For reasons Krueger never made public, he shot the three fishermen that night, unloading 40 bullets into their bodies. Sam Jones, then the district attorney for Nueces County, later referred to the shooting as "the most heinous crime in the history of the Gulf Coast."

Krueger pleaded guilty in 1966 to three counts of murder and was sentenced to three life terms, to be served concurrently.

Corrections officials described Krueger as a model inmate. He earned his diploma and an associate's degree, volunteered with alcohol and drug rehabilitation programs and reported for the prison newspaper.

Two parole commissioners, in 1977, called Krueger, "probably the most exceptional inmate" in the entire state. "There is nothing further he can do to rehabilitate himself," they said. Two years later, he was paroled to West Covina, Calif., where he enrolled in graduate school.

Now here's a nice little hypothetical for looking at the death penalty. Does this show that we shouldn't put murderers to death, because of the chance that they might become business professors? Or does it show that we have to put murderers to death, because we're just not going keep even the most heinous murderers in jail if they show themselves to be no further threat? I say that there's nothing wrong with this story that a couple of amps of electricity couldn't have solved.

---

VIDEO SUGGESTION

Jean Shepherd: Radio's Noble Savage (Edward Grossman, January 1966, Harper's Magazine):

Shepherd in the flesh is not young, lean, and wisecracking, as his disembodied radio voice implies, but, middle-aged, stocky, with a Mephistophelean goatee that is starting to turn gray, and a surprisingly earnest and polite manner. He regularly telephones his mother, who is "real" and really lives in Hammond, Indiana, a place-name that has the same mythical importance for Shepherd as Hannibal had for Mark Twain. "I'd still be there," Shepherd reflects, "working in the steel mills and chewing Mail Pouch, if it hadn't of been for the second world war." The Signal Corps snatched him out of the mills at age seventeen and infected him with the radio bug. Several times he tried to shake it off, taking up Volkswagen dealership and sportscar racing, but without long-term success.

When he came to WOR ten years ago, fresh from running a hillbilly jamboree and interviewing wild animal acts for a Cincinatti station, Shepherd began by broadcasting records and random talk all night. His public then was mostly "night people"-- cabbies, students cramming on No-Doz, transatlantic pilots flying in on WOR's 50,000 watt signal. Now he has a larger (100,000 on a good night) and, to judge from his mail, more diversified audience. Hip adolescents are particularly sympatheic to him. A girl in a Quaker prep school based her valedictory speech on a Shepherd bit about false values created by advertising; a Scarsdale kid, quoting Kierkegaard, tried to explain to Shepherd why parents are mystified by his programs. Within the trade, too, Shepherd has achieved a measure of fame. "Official-type guys see me on an elevator," he says, "and they tell me I'm a great black humorist. Whatever that is."

But the devotion of his fans and recognition of fellow professionals has not been enough to make Shepherd as well known as a crowd of lesser performers. He remains essentially an "underground" phenomenon. The reason is no mystery: he is on radio, and he is himself. While national reputations are made on television, with help from the press agent's art, Shepherd works in a local medium, and his work is a rare kind that PR men wouldn't know what to do with.

Undoubtedly it is too bad that more people can't hear Shepherd. Outside the Northeast, which is covered by WOR, his only outlet until recently was a small listener-sponsored station in Seattle whose apt call-letters are KRAB. It remains to be seen whether he can win audiences in San Francisco and Boston as well. On the other hand, it is gratifying that he is heard at all, and that many of his programs have been taped. Very soon, when the genetic race has run its course and everyone is born with a portable T connected to his navel, archaeologists will find these tapes, and they will call Shepherd's flights of fact and fancy the final good moments of a lost form of communication.

Jean Shepherd (1925-1999) was born in Chicago, IL on July 26, 1925--the perfect excuse for Christmas in July

---

ENGAGED INDEPENDENCE

No quite so bad afterall (Victor Davis Hanson, July 25, 2003, townhall.com)

After the Cold War we may seem an imperial power of sorts. But it is a funny sort of hegemony that seeks foreign input, pays dearly for bases, extends aid, encourages the spread of often noisy and cranky democracies, and intervenes in distant places like Serbia to stop mass murder when others more proximate and calculating would not. The shrillness of South Korea, Jordan, Egypt or the Palestinians is explicable not because of their anger at our intrusiveness but due to worries that we may in fact either pull out troops, cut off aid or simply wash our hands of the whole mess.

And for our part in this brave new world? The real danger is not that the allies, neutrals and international organizations are tiring of us, but rather that we are tiring of many of them. In consequence, our troops will be redeployed in South Korea, removed from Germany and Saudi Arabia, and downsized in Turkey, as we seek alternatives: more carriers, arms depots and caches, and smaller bases with new Eastern European hosts. America, in fact, is fashioning a policy that neither undermines international accords, but is not captive to them either.

Call the new American rethinking "engaged independence" if you will, but we are neither withdrawing from the world nor going back to working in quite the same way under the old protocols that so often proved themselves both impotent and amoral.

That seems a useful phrase--"Engaged independence"--reflecting that America and the free world are best served by a United States that is engaged in the world's affairs but not bound too tightly by international institutions and laws that too frequently are designed to serve the unfree world.

---

NEW MODEL ARMY

The real American model: A dynamic free market? No. America's economy is about massive public subsidy of the middle class. The lesson for the world? Don't copy it. (James Galbraith, OpenDemocracy)

The "soft budget constraint" is an idea familiar to students of central and eastern Europe in the late years of communist rule. It described the condition of state-owned heavy industry under the communist regimes: entities that could not make profits, could not compete on international markets, and yet were so central to the social fabric of the system in which they were embedded, including its provision of social services, that they could not be allowed to fail. These entities became widely-deplored dependencies of the state budget and the state banks. Yet to millions, they provided the rudiments of a comfortable and secure life, the threads of which have not been picked up in the post-socialist orders that since emerged.

A brief examination of key American institutions shows that the concept goes very far toward explaining the structure and conduct of the US economy in the past twenty years, and particularly in the prosperous period of the late 1990s. But the institutions to which it is best applied in America are very different from those in eastern Europe. Indeed, the keys to the American model lie not in industry, but in those sectors providing social amenities to the middle class: health care, education, housing and pensions.

Health care, in the United States, consumes some 13% of GDP. A typical figure in Europe is 8-10%; in the UK the number is 7.3%. What few Europeans understand is that health expenditures within the direct US government budget consume 5.8% of GDP.

But whereas in (say) France a not-much-larger proportion of total output supplies medical services to the whole population, in the United States the direct public commitment is only to the elderly and disabled, the poor, and to veterans. For the rest of the covered population, medical care is paid out of private insurance, which enjoys tax advantages.

Overall, the tax-financed share is just under 60% of total health expenditure, or nearly 8% of GDP. The scandals of American health care do not lie in insufficiency of care (quite the reverse!), but rather in two notorious facts.

The first is that some 44 million persons lack either public or private insurance. This part includes many Latinos, who tend to avoid contact with the welfare system, as well as younger working people. Hence, deficient pre- and peri-natal care is an important problem.

The second is the rapacity of the private actors in the system - drug producers, doctors, nursing home operators, and insurance companies notably. Nevertheless, it is precisely the presence of those actors, and their political power, that has made the American health care system into the economic powerhouse that it is.

Higher education in the United States consumes about 2.25% of GDP. The figure for European countries is typically closer to 1%. Again the US spends more on public higher education as a share of GDP than do most Europeans: 1.07% as compared to 0.97% in Germany or 1.01% in France. But then in addition there is the private share, another 1.22% of GDP, centred on institutions whose multi-billion dollar endowments are highly motivated by the tax system. Many of these are to be found in the east, near traditional centres of capital wealth. Fully public institutions however dominate the scene in most of the country, including Texas and California.

The United States maintains two alternative public systems for keeping otherwise difficult-to-employ young people away from unemployment. These are the armed forces, with 1.4 million members, which consumes 4% of GDP and provides competent mechanical training to its members (including to virtually the whole of the population of commercial pilots, for example). And there is the prison system, whose much-expanded role in recent years is deplorable, but whose economic function also reduces unemployment. A major difference, of course, is that these three institutions provide very different levels of access to credit and other participatory mechanisms in later life.

Consumption of housing services accounts for about 9% of US GDP, while residential construction accounts for another 4%. The housing sector exists on its present scale thanks to a vast network of supporting financial institutions, subject to federal deposit insurance and to the secondary mortgage markets provided by quasi-public corporations (Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae, Freddie Mac).

Despite continuing problems of discrimination against black neighbourhoods particularly, known as redlining, the fact remains that most Americans grow up in their own homes, and for the present moment home equity remains the major collateral against which middle class Americans are able to borrow to support their consumption.

Finally, social security payments to the elderly and disabled together with public pensions account for 8% of US GDP, on the reasonable assumption that these transfers are substantially spent rather than saved by their recipients. Some of this has been counted already in expenditures for health care and housing - but arguably not all that much. The American elderly live in paid-off homes and pay only a fraction of their medical (as distinct from pharmaceutical) expenses out of pocket. And social security funds a great deal of their ordinary consumption.

To be precise, social security alone provides the major source of disposable income of 60% of American elderly; only the top 40% of that population group has substantial other sources of income, public or private. The typical social security payment for an elderly couple in moderate health can reach $18,000 per year, which when combined with Medicare is adequate for modest comfort in most of the country. Pockets of elderly poverty remain, but overall, poverty among the old in America has fallen dramatically since the early 1970s, and is now lower than among the general population. This is the accomplishment substantially of expanded public pensions.

The point to emphasise is not merely that the United States is full of hospitals, universities, housing and pensioners, but that in the US these sectors are funded by a bewildering variety of financial schemes, involving public support in myriad direct and indirect ways, including direct appropriations, loans, guarantees, and tax favours. Some of these are on budget, some are off-budget, some are "discretionary", some are "non-discretionary". But there exists a broad political constituency behind them, which gives them political staying power - despite continuing assaults on them and some erosion under a right-wing congress, president and court system. The control of the scale of these activities has, to some extent, slipped away from those who ostensibly control the public budget.

And this is the genius, if one may call it that, of the American Model. The soft budget constraint (which as recently as the 1960s was entirely the province of the military) has come to apply precisely where it can do the least harm. And that is in providing income and employment in sectors that provide universally demanded human services to the population. In other words, powerful political constituencies exist to keep these sectors at the forefront of American life, and it is very likely that they will remain there.

Though he's obviously approaching the issue from a different point on the political spectrum, this much of Mr. Galbraith's case is correct. Moreover, while Americans may not understand the Model in precisely such terms, they do seem to feel that they are getting a reasonably good deal from government. They know that Grandma and Grandpa get checks from the feds, that Junior got a government loan for college, that when Mom was laid off she got a check, and so on and so forth. This intuition is the likely reason that conservative anti-government rhetoric ends up scaring so many people.

Now there are plenty of folks on the Right who would have us believe that the basic unpopularity of simply slashing government spending makes it some kind of test of manhood--to be a "true conservative" they suggest you have to advocate for policies that are ideologically pure but politically ludicrous. This is a recipe for returning the GOP to its marginal status of the 1930s. Instead, the challenge before the Right and the Party--the Compassionate Conservative Challenge o the Bush Project or whatever one chooses to call it--is to undertake an ephocal--but perhaps subtle?--shift and use the power of the State to keep the checks flowing but alter the funding mechanisms so that folks are in effect writing those checks to themselves, via the kinds of reforms discussed earlier in the week..

The benefits of such a privatized system of welfare are many, but the particular genius is that it could save democracy from what conservatives have long identified as its main weakness: the predations of the majority. As Alexander Tytler famously put it:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury.

If conservatives could use their probably brief period of political dominance to restructure the institutions of the welfare state so that the largesse voters are getting comes instead from their own set of personal savings accounts--MSA, unemployment, & retirement--it would be only slightly less significant an achievement than the original Founding of the Republic.

---

I WANT MY, I WANT MY, I WANT MY HVT

For U.S., Raid on Hussein Sons Was Different Type of Victory (MICHAEL R. GORDON, July 25, 2003, NY Times)

Battle damage assessment in Iraq is no longer measured in terms of tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery. It is now measured more in terms of HVT's or "high value targets," the American military lingo for the men who used to run the Saddam Hussein regime.

This is a bitter and deadly contest. It is not a fight over terrain but a battle over Iraq's future and the Iraqis who will shape it. [...]

The insurgents have been trying to destroy the human capital that the United States needs to run the country. Recent targets have included the pro-American mayor of Hadithah, who was shot along with his son, and seven Iraqi police recruits who were killed by a bomb in Ramadi. They have also been trying to sabotage efforts to rebuild Iraq's electrical system, oil sector and other infrastructure. Coupled with the audiotapes from Mr. Hussein that have exhorted Iraqis to continue resistance, the attacks are designed to create the impression that the regime has not been destroyed but has survived to fight another day--against the Americans and any Iraqis who align themselves with them.

The American strategy for rebuffing this challenge does not depend on military force alone. It requires the restoration of electricity and other basic services, the establishment of an effective Iraqi police force and other steps to gain the support of the Iraqi people. The Iraqis have to be persuaded that they have a stake in the new order and can benefit from it.

"The Iraqi population has exceedingly high expectations, and the window for cooperation may close rapidly if they do not see progress on delivering security, basic services, opportunities for broad political involvement, and economic opportunity," noted a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that was commissioned by the Defense Department.

But military power is still key. The aim of the American military campaign is not only to break up the cells of guerrilla fighters who have been
ambushing American forces but also to deprive the insurgents of the former leaders who serve as a symbolically important rallying cry.

Hard to see the suicidal resistance lasting long beyond the day we produce a confirmed Saddam Hussein corpse. Hard to see it lasting many hours beyond when American-armed-and-trained Shi'ites start patrolling the streets.


MORE:
American soldiers really aren't spoilt, trigger-happy yokels (Jonathan Foreman, 25/07/2003, Daily Telegraph) (via ef brown)

Whether the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein were self-inflicted or not, the military operation to capture them was immaculate. There were no American deaths, 10 minutes of warnings were given over loudspeakers, and it was the Iraqis who opened fire. So sensitive was the American approach, they even rang the bell of the house before entering.

The neat operation fits squarely with the tenor of the whole American campaign, contrary to the popular negative depiction of its armed forces: that they are spoilt, well-equipped, steroid-pumped, crudely patriotic yokels who are trigger-happy yet cowardly in their application of overwhelming force.

---

HEAVYWEIGHT FIGHT

Clinton cautions Democrats (James G. Lakely, 7/24/03, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Former President Bill Clinton's advice that Democrats should quit harping on President Bush's disputed statement that Iraq had pursued nuclear material from Africa was well-received by many Democrats on Capitol Hill - but not his wife.

"Everybody makes mistakes when they are president," Mr. Clinton said Tuesday night on CNN's "Larry King Live," adding that "the thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do right now."

The comments were widely interpreted as a message to Democratic presidential candidates that their constant criticism of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy is pushing the party too far to the left and away from mainstream voters who still largely support the U.S.-led campaign that deposed Saddam Hussein. [...]

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat, ... didn't seem to be on the same page as her husband. She repeated her call yesterday for an investigation into the Iraq-Africa nuclear link.

"I think there should be an independent investigation," Mrs. Clinton said. "I've called for it. How credible are these claims? What else do we need to find out about other claims?"

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Ms Clinton's pending presidential candidacy is that because of the political dynamics in the Democratic Party--if not because of conviction--she's going to run against the New Democrat legacy of her husband.

---

HUDDLE UP

Kemp aides urging former vice presidential candidate to run in recall (RON FOURNIER,,
July 24, 2003, Associated Press)

Jack Kemp, the Republican vice presidential nominee in 1996, emerged Thursday as a possible candidate on the Oct. 7 ballot to recall California Democratic Gov. Gray Davis.

Several of his supporters called Kemp on Thursday urging him to put his name on the ballot, according to three GOP officials with ties to the former Housing and Urban Development secretary. After one of the
calls, Kemp chuckled and told an associate, "Oh, my God."

The associates said Kemp was flattered by the requests, but it was unclear how seriously he was considering the race. At least one senior Republican official close to Kemp began seeking advice from friends
in GOP circles in case Kemp decides to run.

Here's a slogan only supply-siders will love: The Golden State needs a Gold Bug.

---

PRICKLY SITUATION

Huge erection causes blushes on the eve of Royal visit (Ananova, 7/25/03)

A giant statue of a naked man with a two-foot erection has caused a row in Salzburg after it was unveiled on the eve of a visit by Prince Charles. [...]

Called Arc de Triomphe, the statue by artists Ali Janka, Wolfgang Gantner, Tobias Urban and Florian Reither shows a naked man bending over backwards with his hands on the ground and a two-foot erection thrusting into the sky.

The statue was described as a tribute to Viagra and was unveiled in front of the Rupertinum Modern Art Gallery, one day before Charles was due to fly in for a visit to the Salzburg Festival.

Big deal; the Prince is a bigger one.

---

THAT VEIN IS LONG SINCE TAPPED OUT

Foreign Currency: What Democrats can learn from Tony Blair's speech to Congress (Richard Just, 7/22/03, American Propect)

If the Democratic presidential candidates weren't paying attention last Thursday, they missed a powerful lesson in both the shortcomings of their own foreign policies and in how best to attack the Bush administration's handling of international affairs. To date, the national-security platforms of the top Democratic contenders have run the gamut from muddled critiques of Bush's hawkish conduct (John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman) to straightforward rejection of American power (Howard Dean). What these strategies fail to take into account is that Americans remain genuinely concerned about their country's safety. Voters intuitively understand that September 11 was a signal of our vulnerability; they want a president with a long-term plan for guaranteeing our country's security in the world. No Democrat has even hinted at a foreign-policy platform that would address this concern. Few Americans believed during the 1980s that Star Wars alone would keep us safe from the Soviet Union; how many voters in 2004 will really believe that beefing up homeland-security funding -- the current catch-all of Democratic anti-terrorism policy -- is a substitute for a real strategy of defeating terrorism before it reaches our shores?

Bush and his advisers are well aware that Americans continue to fear terrorism. But they have cynically used this fear only to beget more fear. Think about Bush's two primary justifications -- the Iraq-al-Qaeda link and the weapons of mass destruction claim -- for invading Iraq. One looked dubious from the start; the other is looking more so by the day. Both justifications for the war were designed to take the very rational, reasonable fears of average Americans and turn them into less rational, more unreasonable fears -- the kind that could justify war. Bush seems to have bet that the Democrats would have no answer for his strategy of fear. And so far, he is being proven right. While Bush is telling Americans to indulge and incubate their fears, the Democratic candidates -- in offering little strategic vision for combating terrorism -- are implicitly telling Americans that their fears are illegitimate, even silly. And no one wants to be told that.

Enter Tony Blair. In his address to Congress last week, Blair told Americans to take their very concrete fears and turn them to hope. He told them that their desire to secure their own country complements -- indeed demands -- an effort to remake the world in a more humane, more democratic mold. Blair's message was one of determined optimism: To defeat the threat of terrorism once and for all, he said, Americans must use both the strength of their military and the power of their ideas to build a better world. "The spread of freedom is the best security for the free," he said in the speech's most powerful line. "It is our last line of defense and our first line of attack." (The line raised the question of whether Blair, or his speechwriter, has been reading Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, which ends with the admonition that "freedom for others means safety for ourselves. Let us be for the freedom of others.")

Blair's brand of idealism stands in stark contrast to what can only be described as the growing surliness of Bush's approach to world affairs. Bush has flirted with foreign-policy idealism during the last two years, but since the start of the reconstruction of Iraq, he has seemed increasingly satisfied to settle, both in rhetoric and policy, for a cheap brand of realism rather than a broad commitment to midwifing democracy in the Middle East. Bush's most memorable pronouncement about postwar Iraq to date has been his goading of fedayeen to attack U.S. soldiers. Blair, by contrast, said on Thursday, "We promised Iraq democratic government; we will deliver it. We promised them the chance to use their oil wealth to build prosperity for all their citizens, not a corrupt elite, and we will do so. We will stay with these people so in need of our help until the job is done."

If a Democrat were smart enough to adopt the Blair formula as his own, he could create a number of advantages for himself in the presidential race.

What a deeply strange essay. Mr. Just isn't so much wrong as he is entirely beside the point. There is absolutely no basis in modern Democratic politics for his premise that there might be popular support in the party for the forcible imposition of freedom in foreign lands. In fact, his own magazine has demonstrated that there's not much support for the peaceful imposition of freedom, as witness this memorably misguided column from last summer, Mideast Misstep: Bush's dismal foray into peacemaking. (Adam B. Kushner, 6/27/02, American Prospect)

President Bush concluded his Rose Garden speech about the Middle East on Monday by calling the moment "a test to show who is serious about peace and who is not." Given how naive his plan is -- how astonishingly far it is from any foreseeable reality -- he may have failed his own test. It's not that Bush's goals aren't noble or correct, but real diplomacy takes more than wishful thinking.

Bush's fuzzy logic, to borrow a term, is weakest with regard to what he calls the "Palestinian leadership." By refusing even to name Yasir Arafat, the president showed that he's just not ready for an honest attempt at peacemaking.

It's not that Arafat is a stand-up guy, or even a credible negotiator. Revelations in recent months all but conclusively unmasked Arafat as a financial supporter of terrorism. It's quite possible the peace process would fare better in his absence. But there's no guarantee. And that's because there's not yet a viable replacement for him -- that we know of, at least. Presumably Bush wouldn't call for Arafat's removal without an idea of who he wants in Arafat's stead. The Bush team is not made up of amateurs, so it's unlikely it would create a power vacuum without some idea of how best to fill it.

But if Bush administration officials know who should lead the Palestinians, they should alert the public. Bush's candidate -- if indeed there is one -- should be scrutinized openly by the world community and the people he would presumably govern. And if there is no candidate, calling for Arafat's ouster is an even bigger mistake. With the radicalization of the Palestinian people since the onset of the second intifada, Arafat's replacement could be even worse than the decrepit guerilla himself. The next Palestinian head of state may not be so ambivalent in his desire to wipe out Israel.

Nor should Arafat be replaced without democratic elections, which are scheduled for January.

A Left that is so queasy about merely dictating the internal affairs of even an openly terrorist regime is just not going to rally behind a policy of changing like regimes via force, the policy Mr. Blair has just pursued in Iraq. It would be great if the Democratic Party still had a moralist/interventionist wing for a Blair-type candidate to lead, but the last such candidate was probably Scoop Jackson, and just about everyone who worked for him now resides in the neocon wing of the GOP. Mr. Just's proposed foreign policy is that of Mr. Bush.

---

WHY I KEEP LISTENING TO NPR

NPR : America's First Spaceman (NPR, 7/25/03)

NPR broadcast this biography of Iven Kincheloe, Korean war ace and rocket plane test pilot this morning. Although a little soppy, and not as technical as I would have wanted, it is probably the best thing I've ever heard on radio.

---

IS YOU IS, OR IS YOU AIN'T?

Total Recall--III: His advisers say Arnold Schwarzenegger will run for governor. (John Fund, July 25, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

Then there is the media. Mr. Schwarzenegger plots publicity blitzes with the zeal of a Clauzewitz. Sheri Annis, press secretary for his initiative last year, notes that "the entertainment media tends to coddle their subjects while political reporters are going to keep nudging him. How he handles that will really determine the outcome." Mr. Schwarzenegger may emulate Mr. Reagan by transcending the media and challenging Gov. Davis to one-on-one debates. A good showing might dispel doubts about his experience. If Mr. Davis ducked debates it would only reinforce his image as a weak leader.

Mr. Schwarzengger is being bombarded with advice. Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan told me his friend needs to make moderate women comfortable with him. Some urge him to talk Sen. McClintock, a budget expert, out of the race by making him a key adviser. Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform thinks he should campaign as the Tax Terminator and endorse sunsetting all new taxes after four years. Steve Moore of the Club for Growth wants him to favor a flat tax.

All this ideological tugging occurs because the actor hasn't spent a dozen years honing a crystal-clear message the way Mr. Reagan did before he first ran. Does the Terminator want to run primarily to scale another seemingly impossible career mountain or to transform California's dysfunctional government? The answer is probably both, but he must convince voters his primary motive involves them, not him.

Is GOP's Dream Action Hero Ducking a Political Battle? (Steve Lopez, July 25, 2003, LA Times)

Just when it looked like we might be in for the ride of our lives in California, Arnold Schwarzenegger appears to be getting cold feet.

I feel like a jilted bride. Please, Arnold. Say it ain't so.

Dan Schnur, the state's preeminent Republican strategist, admits that Arnold appears to be backpedaling, based on the sudden waffling of his political guru. If the Terminator chickens out and decides not to challenge Gov. Gray Davis in the Oct. 7 recall election, the GOP may find itself all dressed up with nowhere to go.

"When rumors started circulating on Tuesday that he wasn't running," says Schnur, "a lot of Republicans began to panic."

He's gotta run, just so we have all have something to talk about in August.

---

ACCIDENTAL?

The Accidental Radical (Jonathan Rauch, July 26, 2003, National Journal)

George W. Bush could end up realigning partisan loyalties and redefining what his party stands for. [...]

"If you can get fundamental reform," the administration official says, "he's willing to put up the dollars to get it." That about sums up the Bush
approach to domestic policy. [...]

"The Republican Party in 1994 tested a proposition," says a White House aide: "that people wanted government to be radically reduced. And they found out that people didn't want government to be radically reduced." Bush saw this, and he saw that the anti-government conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan had reached a dead end; and if there is a single characteristic that distinguishes Bush, it is his willingness to meet a dead end with a bulldozer. In 2002, "he really did set out to have the Republican Party stand for something different," says Michael Gerson, who signed on with Bush in 1999 and is now his chief speechwriter.

Bush's view, expressed in his book and in the 2000 campaign, is that government curtails freedom not by being large or active but by making choices that should be left to the people. Without freedom of choice, people feel no responsibility, and Bush insists again and again, as he put it in the book: "I want to usher in a responsibility era." [...]

The plan, therefore, has both tactical and strategic elements. In the short run, give people things they want; in the longer run, weaken the Democrats' base while creating, program by program, a new constituency of Republican loyalists who want the government to help them without bossing them around. Most important of all, however, is what might be thought of as the meta-strategy. [...]

Conservatives, for their part, believe that today they are the ones who stand for progressive change, in the face of "reactionary liberalism," but they have never been able to convince the public. That is what Bush seeks to do, both by rejecting the mantra of minimal government and by passing reform after reform. Never mind how you feel about any one of his initiatives; as a group, they seek to establish that it is Republicans who now "stand for the idea that the old ways will not work." If the Democrats dig in their heels and fall back on stale rants against greed, inequality, and privatization, so much the better. The voters will know whom to thank for the empowering choices that Republicans intend to give them. As for which is the "party of nostalgia," the voters will also remember who defended, until the last dog died, single-payer Medicare, one-size-fits-all Social Security, schools without accountability, bureaucratic government monopolies, static economics, and Mutually Assured Destruction. [...]

In the book, Bush returns again and again to his theory of political capital. Page 123: "I believe you have to spend political capital or it withers and dies. And I wanted to spend my capital on something profound." Page 218: "I had earned political capital... Now was the time to spend that capital on a bold agenda." His aversion to hoarding approval seems to flow as much from his personality as from his political experience. On page 2 he recounts hearing a sermon that "changed my life." It was, he writes, "a rousing call to make the most of every moment, discard reservations, throw caution to the wind, rise to the challenge." A few pages later: "I live in the moment, seize opportunities, and try to make the most of them."

Bush's mentality seems more like that of an entrepreneurial CEO than of a conventional politician: He tends to look for strategies that cut to the heart of the problem at hand, rather than strategies that minimize conflict. "He doesn't like 'small ball' -- that's his term," one of his aides says.

"My faith frees me," Bush writes, early in his book. "Frees me to make the decisions that others might not like. Frees me to try to do the right thing, even though it may not poll well. Frees me to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next." He clearly is not a man who fears failure.

The best essay on George W. Bush since Bill Keller's.

---

ABLE IS HE

Napoleon's His Name and He Has Conquest in Mind (ELAINE SCIOLINO, July 25, 2003, NY Times)

It is hard not to succeed in politics here when your name is Napoleon.

The sun-baked city of Ajaccio is the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte. It is also the place from where his great-great-grandnephew, Charles Napoleon, has decided to begin his political career.

Two years ago, Mr. Napoleon, a 52-year-old political economist, set out from Paris, where he was born, raised and educated, to run in Ajaccio's municipal elections, giving up a career in planning and finance that had taken him to Asia and Africa .

But Mr. Napoleon did not join the Parti Bonapartiste, the right-wing party dedicated to preserving the emperor's name and legacy that had controlled the city for a century and whose ideas had dominated the political landscape for 50 years before that.

Instead, Mr. Napoleon teamed up with a left-wing coalition that included Socialists and even Communists and ran on a platform of lowering taxes, improving public services and developing local projects.

The coalition won a stunning upset victory, and Mr. Napoleon now serves as second deputy mayor, a post that puts him in charge of the city's tourism industry. The position is a jumping-off point for his next political contest: running for the European Parliament next year.

"I wanted to build something by myself," he said, adding: "I am very free about my political views. I don't feel constrained to reproduce Napoleon in the 21st century."

Why can't our Left run on lowering taxes?

---

BUSHOCIALISM FILES

Failing Schools Need Courses in Readin', Writin' and Accountability (Ronald Brownstein, July 21, 2003, LA Times)

Joel I. Klein, the accomplished attorney who was Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's unconventional choice as schools chancellor last year, understands he can effectively educate the 1.1 million students in his care only if he shatters the cozy arrangements that have kept the New York City school system focused more on providing jobs for adults than on opportunities for kids. After 11 months on the job, Klein has the scars to prove his commitment to that cause.

But he also recognizes that decisions in Washington can tip the odds for or against success.

Mostly, Klein's a fan of the education reform bill that President Bush signed into law last year. The law provides a powerful tool for local reformers, like Klein, by requiring states to more precisely measure student performance and then intervene in schools that fail to improve it. That should pressure the entire system to demand results.

Hard to believe a stupid socialist like George W. Bush disguised this lever of reform--which leads directly to vouchers--so well that neither his critics on the Right nor the Left have figured out how monumental a change the Left Behind Act may effect on public education.

---

TRAMPS LIKE US...

Bodyguard Tells of Life on the Run (Times of London, July 25, 2003)

Uday Hussein's personal bodyguard broke a three-month silence yesterday to give the first authoritative account of how Saddam and his sons spent the war. [...]

During a three-hour interview in a house in a town an hour northwest of Baghdad, the bodyguard said that Saddam and his sons had remained in the capital throughout the war, convinced they could hold the city.

When the first bombs fell on a house in a southern suburb, where the Americans believed Saddam and his sons were meeting, he and Uday were on the other side of the city in one of dozens of safe houses belonging to trusted friends and relatives through which the three men were to pass in the weeks to come.

The bodyguard said the Americans’ next “decapitation” strike came a lot closer, and that Saddam survived only because several safe houses had come under attack and he suspected there was an informant within his camp.

Saddam asked the suspect, a captain, to prepare a safe house behind a restaurant in the Mansour district for a meeting. They arrived, and left again, almost immediately, by the back door. “Ten minutes after they went out of the door, it was bombed,” the bodyguard said.

Saddam had the captain summarily executed while the Pentagon was claiming that the strike had probably finished off Saddam and Uday. [...]

The bodyguard said that Saddam and his sons had remained in Baghdad in the genuine belief that they could hold the city. Only later, when they believed they had been betrayed by their commanders, did they consider an alternative. “The resistance was not factored in before the war,” he said. “There was a closed meeting five or six days after the war, and that is when they began to discuss the resistance.”

Luckily, the paranoia that let's them escape situations like that is coupled with the delusions that made them so easy to defeat in the first place.

---

IS PRESIDENT BUSH A SOCIALIST?

Judge for Yourself: Are Senate Democrats determined to keep believers off the bench? (KAY DALY, July 25, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

It cannot be mere coincidence that Mr. Holmes--as well as fellow disputed nominees like Mr. Pryor, Carolyn Kuhl (in the Ninth Circuit), Bob Conrad (eastern district of North Carolina) and three of the four stalled nominees from Michigan (Sixth Circuit)--is a practicing Catholic. For Catholics, Purgatory may very well be the judicial nominations process. Then again, Charles Pickering, a nominee for the Sixth Circuit who once served as president of the Mississippi Southern Baptist Convention, and Priscilla Owen, a filibustered Fifth Circuit nominee and Episcopalian Sunday school teacher, are also under attack.

What seems to have escaped the skittish senators is that, regardless of what these nominees believe personally, as constitutionalists and strict constructionists they recognize that their role as federal judges is to apply the Constitution and the law as they find it--no matter how contrary it may be to their personal belief system. It is judicial activism, whether on the left or the right, that is cause for concern, and the nominees under suspicion are opposed to it.

This should matter but doesn't seem to. Maybe the Senate should just print a sign that reads: "Believers Need Not Apply."

Here's what's really at stake while doctinaire conservatives fret about the steel tariffs and the agriculture bill. Stacking the judiciary with conservatives would do more to effect the kind of change the Right desires than any of the minor political measures they want to go to war over.

FOR EXAMPLE:
Sodomites owe Texas Republicans their thanks (DALE CARPENTER, July 23, 2003, Houston Chronicle)

[T]he best evidence of Texas GOP leaders' devotion to theocracy is their 22-page party platform, which is less a political document than a fundamentalist encyclical. It declares the United States "a Christian nation" founded "on the Holy Bible." It repudiates "the myth of separation of Church and State." It supports a "school prayer" amendment to the Constitution. It backs "a character education curriculum" in public schools "based upon biblical principles." On and on it goes in that fashion.

When it comes to gays, the state party platform lapses into obsessed rage. References to "homosexuals" or "homosexuality" (14) even outnumber invocations of "God" (10).

Needless to say, the platform opposes gay marriage and gays in the military. It goes further, opposing domestic partners benefits and allowing gays to adopt kids or even have custody of their own children. It urges stripping AIDS sufferers of any legal protection from discrimination.

Here is the Texas GOP on gay sex:

"The Party believes that the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God," blah, blah, blah.

Of course, Mr, Carpenter doesn't, nor could he, argue that any of that is inaccurate. Our deciding as a society to allow folks to degrade themselves and each other in private hasn't magically made such behavior mentally healthy nor made it physically healthy to have genital-anal and oral-anal intercourse. The premises by which sodomy has been forbidden for millennia have not changed, only certain attitudes toward the practitioners and the legal standards of a few folks on the Court, which are no longer based in the Constitution. Return to strict Constitutionalism and a Judeo-Christian concern for defending human dignity even in private and there'll be at least one Texas Republican the sodomites won't be so happy about.



MORE:
-Democrats do not cooperate (John A. Nowacki, 7/24/2003, USA Today)

---

LET THEM STAY

Feuding exiles could cause political pain for president (PETER WALLSTEN, Jul. 25, 2003, Miami Herald)

The Bush administration's decision this week to send 12 Cuban migrants back to the island has unleashed a wave of anger among exile leaders who, for the first time, are openly questioning their commitment to the Republican president.

The fury has created a public feud between top leaders of the influential Cuban American National Foundation, who say their loyalty to Bush in the 2000 election is proving worthless, and Miami-Dade County's three Republican Cuban-American members of Congress, who have aligned themselves closely with the president. [...]

The mounting tensions underscore the widening differences within the Miami exile community over how a changing but still-powerful voting bloc can influence decisions in Washington.

Typically, Florida's 400,000 Cuban-American voters align almost uniformly behind Republicans.

More than eight in 10 backed the president and his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, in 2000 and 2002 -- a bloc that many activists say is responsible for handing the president Florida's critical electoral votes three years ago and putting him into office.

It's a disgraceful policy, one Mr. Bush shouldn't be party to, and the Cuban-American community should turn up the pressure.

---

GOTCHA! JOURNALISM AT ITS VERY BEST

Rangel Slams Clinton for Hyping Iraq Nuke Threat (Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff, July 25, 2003)

Rep. Charlie Rangel slammed ex-President Bill Clinton yesterday for hyping the Iraqi nuclear threat five years ago - though when he leveled the criticism he was under the impression that Clinton's comments had actually been uttered by President Bush.

"There's no evidence to support what the president has said," Rangel told nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity, who had asked the Harlem Democrat to react to a series of quotes coming from a person he identified only as "the president." [...]

HANNITY: When the president said to the nation that the mission was to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons program; when the president said that Saddam must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons; when the president said we've got to act now and we can't allow Iraq to be free to retain and begin to rebuild its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs in months and not years - When the president said all that to the American people, was the president lying?

RANGEL: There's no evidence to support what the president has said. Now whether - lying means that you knew it wasn't true and you said it anyway. Clearly the president said that Saddam Hussein was involved in al Qaeda. The president said there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. The president said they had weapons of mass destruction. And the president said the United States of America was in imminent danger. There's no evidence supporting any of that.

HANNITY: All right, now. Charlie, I hate to do this to you because you're an old friend but I just set you up, Charlie. You know how I set you up? What I just read to you were Bill Clinton's words from 1998 when he addressed the nation the day that he bombed Iraq.

Totally unfair and very funny.

---

"IT CAN ONLY BE DESTROYED, AND THAT'S THE BUSINESS AT HAND"

Vice President's Remarks on War on Terror at AEI (WhiteHouse.gov, 7/24/03)

This worldwide campaign began after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, a watershed event in the history of our nation. We lost more people that morning than were lost at Pearl Harbor. And this was the merest glimpse of the violence terrorists are willing to inflict on this country. They desire to kill as many Americans as possible, with the most destructive weapons they can obtain. They target the innocent as a means of spreading chaos and fear, and to shake our national resolve. This enemy holds no territory, defends no population, is unconstrained by rules of warfare, and respects no law of morality. Such an enemy cannot be deterred, contained, appeased, or negotiated with. It can only be destroyed, and that's the business at hand.

For decades, terrorists have attacked Americans - and we remember every act of murder, including 17 Americans killed in 1983 by a truck bomb at our embassy in Beirut; and 241 servicemen murdered in their sleep in Beirut; an elderly man in a wheelchair, shot and thrown into the Mediterranean; a sailor executed in a hijacking; two of our soldiers slain in Berlin; a Marine lieutenant colonel kidnapped and murdered in Lebanon; 189 Americans killed on a PanAm flight over Scotland; six people killed at the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; 19 military personnel killed at the Khobar Towers; 12 Americans killed at our embassies in East Africa; 17 sailors murdered on the USS Cole; and an American diplomat shot dead in Jordan last year.

All of these were terrible acts that still cause terrible grief. Yet September 11th signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We suffered massive civilian casualties on our soil. We awakened to dangers even more lethal - the possibility that terrorists could gain weapons of mass destruction from outlaw regimes and inflict catastrophic harm. And something else is different about this new era: Our response to terrorism has changed, because George W. Bush is President of the United States. For decades, terrorists have waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America is waging war against them. [...]

Events leading to the fall of Saddam Hussein are fresh in memory, and do not need recounting at length. Every measure was taken to avoid a war. But it was Saddam Hussein himself who made war unavoidable. He had a lengthy history of reckless and sudden aggression. He bore a deep and bitter hatred for the United States. He cultivated ties to terrorist groups. He built, possessed, and used weapons of mass destruction. He refused all international demands to account for those weapons.

Twelve years of diplomacy, more than a dozen Security Council resolutions, hundreds of UN weapons inspectors, and even strikes against military targets in Iraq - all of these measures were tried to compel Saddam Hussein's compliance with the terms of the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire. All of these measures failed. Last October, the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Last November, the UN Security Council passed a unanimous resolution finding Iraq in material breach of its obligations, and vowing serious consequences in the event Saddam Hussein did not fully and immediately comply. When Saddam Hussein failed even to comply then, President Bush, on March 17th, gave him and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq. Saddam's decision to defy the world was among the last he made as the dictator of that country.

I have watched for more than a year now as President Bush kept the American people constantly informed of the dangers we face, and of his determination to confront those dangers. There was no need for anyone to speculate what the President was thinking; his words were clear, and straightforward, and understood by friend and enemy alike. When the moment arrived to make the tough call - when matters came to the point of choosing, and the safety of the American people was at stake - President Bush acted decisively, with resolve, and with courage.

Now the regime of Saddam Hussein is gone forever. And at a safe remove from the danger, some are now trying to cast doubt upon the decision to liberate Iraq. The ability to criticize is one of the great strengths of our democracy. But those who do so have an obligation to answer this question: How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat? [...]

Critics of the liberation of Iraq must also answer another question: what would that country look like today if we had failed to act? If we had not acted, Saddam Hussein and his sons would still be in power. If we had not acted, the torture chambers would still be in operation; the prison cells for children would still be filled; the mass graves would still be undiscovered; the terror network would still enjoy the support and protection of the regime; Iraq would still be making payments to the families of suicide bombers attacking Israel; and Saddam Hussein would still control vast wealth to spend on his chemical, biological, and nuclear ambitions.

All of these crimes and dangers were ended by decisive military action. Everyone, for many years, wished for these good outcomes. Finally, one man made the decision to achieve them: President George W. Bush. And the Iraqi people, the people of the Middle East, and the American people have a safer future because Saddam Hussein's regime is history. [...]

The United States of America has been called to hard tasks before. Earlier generations of Americans defeated fascism and won the long twilight struggle against communism. Our generation has been given the task of defeating the purveyors of terrorism, who are a direct threat to our liberty and our lives. We will use every element of our national power to destroy those who seek to do us harm. But, as in the past, we will do far more than merely defeat our enemies. In Afghanistan and Iraq and in other places where tyranny has been a fertile breading ground for terror, we will help those who seek to build free, more tolerant, and more prosperous societies.

America's commitment and generosity in rebuilding ravaged lands in Europe and Asia was a hallmark of our foreign policy in the 20th century. It was a good investment for America then -- it is just as wise now. We do this not only because it is right, but because it is essential to our own security, the security of our friends and allies, and to our eventual victory in the war against terrorism. Our soldiers serving so bravely in Iraq and Afghanistan today know they are ensuring a safer future for their own children and for all of us.

In the 22 months since that clear September morning when America was attacked, we have not lost focus, or been distracted, or wavered in the performance of our duties. We will not rest until we have overcome the threat of terror. We will not relent until we have assured the freedom and security of the American people.

The isolationist Right has legitimate worries about global overreach and the aggrandizement of power by the federal government, but one wonders how any patriot can quarrel with the basic notion of destroying anti-Western terrorist organizations and anti-Western terror regimes that aspire to WMD. And, though some have questioned whether a Clinton or a Gore would be pursuing these policies, it is hard to believe any president of the United States could sustain a 9-11 and not dedicate himself to using every means in his power to eradicate such menaces.

---

THIS REALLY ISN'T SELF-REFERENTIAL

The Hugh Hewitt Interview - Right Wing News (Conservative News and Views)

John Hawkins: What are some of the blogs you read regularly or semi-regularly?

Hugh Hewitt: All the ones that I goto at least weekly are at http://hughhewitt.com/. I think I start every day with Lileks, the guy is the new Mark Twain w/ bad spelling. I wrote a Weekly Standard piece about him because I want to make sure everyone knows about him. Of course, I do the big 4, Volokh, Glenn Reynolds, Virginia, Mickey Kaus, & a bunch of others. I read Right Wing News every day and I read Little Green Footballs every day because you guys have good breaking news and there are some esoteric ones like Joyful Christian or Brothers Judd that are right down my alley, that I found recently or have been going to for a while. Patrick Ruffini and then Rich Galen over at Mullings have some real good Republican stuff, excellent stuff.

"Esoteric"? I can live with esoteric.

---

PROTECTIONISM VS. PERSECUTIONISM

The `Free Trade' Fix Is In (NY Times, July 25, 2003)

The United States government has just added a final flourish of hypocrisy to its efforts to crush the Vietnamese catfish industry under a mountain of protectionism. The Vietnamese, after doing well enough to capture a fair share of the American market, have been declared trade violators deserving permanent, prohibitive tariffs by the United States International Trade Commission.

The case against the Vietnamese was brutally rigged by American fishing and political interests. It stands as an appalling demonstration to striving commercial nations that all the talk of globalization has not reined in the old power politics of marketeers in the United States, Europe and Japan. Their thumbs remain all over the scales of free trade.

No convincing evidence was presented that Vietnam is dumping its fish on the American market at prices below cost.

There should be no U.S. trade with them at all until Vietnam stops persecuting Christians.

Meanwhile, on the topic of free trade with free nations, comes this, House OKs Trade With Chile, Singapore (JIM ABRAMS, July 25, 2003, Associated Press)

The Bush administration's drive to open world markets to American goods and services gained momentum with House approval of free trade agreements with Singapore and Chile.

While the Senate is expected to give its quick endorsement, some lawmakers worried about the loss of jobs in the United States.

The deal would bring the first East Asian and South American nations into such trade accords with the United States. Singapore and Chile would join Canada and Mexico, participants in the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993, and Israel and Jordan as the only other free trade partners.

The new deal will "not only create American jobs and save American money, but also reaffirm our commitment to countries who value the free market," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. [...]

The House on Thursday passed both measures by unusually strong votes, reflecting the lack of resistance to deals with prosperous countries that have good labor and environmental records. The deal with Chile passed by 270-156 and Singapore's pact by 272-155.

Labor groups and their supporters in Congress said the labor standards in the two agreements, which leave it to Singapore and Chile to enforce their own laws, must not be used in future negotiations with less developed countries where protections are weaker. [...]

"The real gold ring here is to have a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas," said Bill Morley, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's vice president for legislative affairs. He said closer U.S.-Chile trade relations would soften the resistance of Brazil and others to a hemisphere-wide trade pact.

The Chile and Singapore deals are the first since Congress, after an eight-year lapse, last year granted the president authority to negotiate trade agreements that Congress can accept or reject but cannot change.

Seems more significant than communist catfishing, no?

MORE:
Bush Arm Twisting Squeezes Out Narrow House Fast Track Win (AFL-CIO, 7/28/2002)

---

THE RAIN IN SPAIN FALLS MAINLY ON HUSSEIN?

Debating Matters of Life and Death in a Baghdad Barbershop (NEIL MacFARQUHAR, July 25, 2003, NY Times)

As soon as the photographs of Uday and Qusay Hussein appeared on the television screen tonight, arguments erupted in the Zein Barbershop downtown. Half the men present exulted that their former oppressors were dead, while the others dismissed the images as forgeries because the dictator's sons were elsewhere when the attack occurred. In Spain, in fact. [...]

"In a few days they will show us another fat body with a beard and say it's Saddam," said Zohair Maty, a 30-year-old laborer. "Everyone says they are in Spain."

The conversation was interrupted by the rat-a-tat-tat of what seemed like celebratory gunfire. The sound was uncomfortably close, though, and several customers either retreated to the back of the store or dove to the floor.

"It's the first time I've ever seen people happy because somebody died," said the barber, Atheer Odeish, who continued his clipping.

The remarkable thing is that given the uselessness of our intelligence and his use of body doubles and what not, Saddam Hussein could have died ten years ago and we'd still not know.

---

MOORE-ON (via Southerner and Brian Boys)

Michael Moore, Humbug (Kay S. Hymowitz, Summer 2003, City Journal)

Recently a wealthy Chicago couple named Drobney announced their plan to bankroll a left-wing talk radio station. They needn't bother: the Left already has a multimedia star-and even without a radio station, he's bigger than Rush, has more fans than O'Reilly, and sells books faster than Coulter. Followers plead with this "folk hero for the American people" to run for president. Reviewers compare him to Twain, Voltaire, and Swift. Unlike Rush and company, the appeal of this blue-collar megastar extends far beyond the hoi polloi. Hollywood and Manhattan agents wave gazillion-dollar contracts in front of his face. He wins prestigious awards that will never grace the Limbaugh or O'Reilly dens-Oscars, Emmys, Writer's Guild Awards, and jury prizes at Cannes (where his latest movie received a record 13-minute standing ovation). People stop him on the streets of Berlin, Paris, and London-where, according to Andrew Collins of the Guardian, they consider him "the people's filmmaker."

He is, of course, Michael Moore [...]

In May, I went to see Moore give a talk to graduating seniors at a liberal arts college outside New York City, and it was easy to see why the kids went nuts. Moore recalled the Left as I remembered it in the "you-can-change-the-world" sixties-funny, confident, passionate, idealistic, full of possibility. As you might expect, he poked fun at conservatives, but also at liberals, those long-suffering targets of political satirists. "You must have a conservative in your family-an uncle or someone," he said confidingly. "That person never loses his car keys. He has every key marked: this SUV, that SUV. Our [the liberal] side goes [in a timid, whiny voice], `Do you know where my car keys are? . . . Where do you want to go to dinner?' `Gee, I don't know. Where do you want to go to dinner?' Right-wingers go [slamming the podium] `GET IN THE CAR! WE'RE GOING TO SIZZLER!' "

Isn't that just the gender difference between the parties?

---

IF TED KENNEDY DROVE ONE HE'DA BEEN PRESIDENT (via Buttercup)

Cubans Sure Truck-Boat Plan Was a Winner (AP, 7/24/03)

The Cubans who converted a 1951 Chevy pickup into a boat and got within 40 miles of Florida said Thursday they were sure that the audacity of their act would guarantee entry into the United States.

But a U.S. Customs plane spotted their unusual, bright-green craft in the Florida Straits and they were sent back to the island.

"We thought that they would let us in because it was so outrageous," Ariel Diego Marcel told Associated Press Television News.

The truck-raft was kept afloat by empty 55-gallon drums attached to the bottom as pontoons. A propeller attached to the drive shaft of the green vintage pickup was pushing it along at about 8 mph.

It's outrageous that we send any of them back, but these guys in particular should have gotten to stay just for the sake of their audacity and ingenuity. Or, as Buttercup said: "Too bad we didn't let them in the country. They already have the can-doism and moxie."

---

50 to DC

Rice, Rice, Baby!: My Big Fat Crush on Condoleezza (Ta-Nehisi Coates, 7/23/2003, Village Voice)

The Lexington Avenue Crunch isn't just a gym, it's a vat of eye candy. This is the joint that invented "Cardio Striptease." All the personal trainers are out-of-work models or actresses-this is Manhattan, after all-and even the members look like they got a discount for doling out a head shot. There are lots of pretty people here. I'm not one of them. But being in their company fools me into thinking I could be, and that's all the difference I need for that last set of squats.

Today, though, after six months of Crunch, I'm finding the normal scenery suddenly monotonous and unmoving. I'm sucking wind on the treadmill, needing some inspiration for that final stretch. Jane Sixpack hitting the pull-up bar usually suffices, but today I'm literally calling on a higher power. I look up (no, not that far) to a set of flashing monitors and spot a press conference on CNN. OK, so it's only another White House stiff ruminating on yellowcake, aluminum tubes, and bombs over Baghdad. But it's also my latest crush, and when I see her there I find everything that halters and spandex could never give. Suddenly those tortured laps are a stroll through mountain meadows, and I owe it all to my muse, my one, my Condoleezza Rice.

As always, Rice is sporting meticulous hair and makeup. As always, she's bulldogging through the press corps in a way that belies her dainty veneer. Not that I can make out a damn word she's saying (the volume's off), or follow the swiftly scrolling captions while finishing up. Still, I've seen this act play out so many times, I know how the script goes. My treadmill session ends before the press conference. But I'm left standing there, quite silent, quite smitten.

And smitten by what? No one confuses Rice with Beyonce Knowles, and she's a little thin for me anyway. Furthermore, she's Lex Luthor evil, man. How else to explain doing the bidding of a mental paralytic like George Bush? Or being the adopted daughter of the clan that brought us Willie Horton, "read my lips," and the slur "evildoers"? Meanwhile, I'm one part lefty, one part race-man. If you cut me I'd bleed green-then red and black, too. What could a Black Panther-sired, Malcolm X-worshiping, People's History of America-toting idealist see in a battle-ax like Condi Rice? Simply put, Rice, with her commanding presence and steely confidence, is the ultimate black woman.

When something conveys as much political advantage as putting her on the ticket would, it finds a way to happen.

---

GRUMPY OLD MEN

A Questionable Kind Of Conservatism (George F. Will, July 24, 2003, washingtonpost.com)

This is the summer of conservatives' discontent. Conservatism has been disoriented by events in the past several weeks. Cumulatively, foreign and domestic developments constitute an identity crisis of conservatism, which is being recast -- and perhaps rendered incoherent.

George W. Bush may be the most conservative person to serve as president since Calvin Coolidge. Yet his presidency is coinciding with, and is in some instances initiating or ratifying, developments disconcerting to four factions within conservatism.

The four groups, according to Mr. Will are: isolationists, angry about the war; supply-siders, worried about the failure to cut spending; strict constructionists, worried about the affirmative action ruling; and social conservatives, worried about the sodomy ruling. [There's also a fifth group, or maybe they're just part of the first, with a somewhat different concern: immigration.]

The first group doesn't much matter, because there are far more independents and even Democrats (especially white women) who favor a robust response to terror than there are conservatives/libertarians who are so disaffected from the State that they fear a president of their own party more than they fear the meltdown in the Islamic world. Mr. Bush would be well advised to give a major speech, at some point--setting reasonable limits on our global ambitions and outlining how we'll know when we've won this round of the war against the "-isms", but he can't win by playing to this contingent.

The second group has already shown a propensity to roll over, during the Reagan years. Give them their cuts and they'll ignore everything else. The President should make it a goal of his second administration to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, but no one ever lost more votes than he won by spending money.

The latter two groups are going to require, as Mr. Will suggests, just one thing: a known and trusted conservative appointee to the first Supreme Court opening. In fact, if such an opening were to occur next year, he'd do well to appoint a lightning rod--John Ashcroft, or Robert Bork for that matter--someone who would turn the Left rabid and force the Right to rally to the flag. Nor need the administration give up its desire to make an affirmative action pick--either Miguel Estrada or Janice Brown would likely satisfy conservatives as well as filling a politically desirable demographic profile. An intentionally combative nomination might ultimately fail, but, regardless, Mr. Bush would have proven his red meat conservative bona fides and shut up all the back-biters.

---

SWEET 16

Gephardt's 16 Words (William Kristol, July 24, 2003, washingtonpost.com )

"George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago."
--Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), July 22 [...]

I suppose it's technically possible that things could turn out worse for the Iraqi people, or for us, post-Hussein (though I'd be happy to take that bet, and I'm
sure the Bush campaign would too). But Gephardt has laid down an extraordinarily clear marker for judging the Bush administration: He claims we're less safe and less secure than we were four years ago.

Is this the case? Were we safer and more secure when Osama bin Laden was unimpeded in assembling his terror network in Afghanistan? When Pakistan was colluding with the Taliban, and Saudi Arabia with al Qaeda? When Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq? When demonstrations by an incipient democratic opposition in Iran had been crushed with nary a peep from the U.S. government? When we were unaware that North Korea, still receiving U.S. food aid, had covertly started a second nuclear program? When our defense budget and our intelligence services were continuing to drift downward in capacity in a post-Cold War world?

Are we not even a little safer now that the Taliban and Hussein are gone, many al Qaeda operatives have been captured or killed, governments such as Pakistan's and Saudi Arabia's are at least partly hampering al Qaeda's efforts instead of blithely colluding with them, the opposition in Iran is stronger, our defense and intelligence budgets are up and, for that matter, Milosevic is gone and the Balkans are at peace (to mention something for which the Clinton administration deserves credit but that had not happened by July 1999)?

When Mr. Gephardt was on the NHPR morning call-in show, the host, Laura Kinoy, asked him if there was anything that President Bush deserved credit for. He hemmed and hawed, was prompted again, and finally said that he comforted people right after 9-11. It's hard to see what political advantage such extremism could possibly convey. Just tick off a few things--education bill, signing CFR, war in Afghanistan--and say, "But we can do much better." You'll appear more reasonable, even generous.

---

TRADE WHAT?

Iraq's trade mission to Niger (Terence Jeffrey, July 23, 2003, townhall.com)

In their zeal to retroactively rebut the argument for the Iraq war, critics of President Bush have tried to discredit a British intelligence report -- cited by the president in his State of the Union address -- that concluded Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa.

The most important evidence against the British report is the undisputed conclusion by Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that documents purporting to show an Iraq-Niger uranium deal were forgeries.

What Bush's critics have ignored is that ElBaradei and the IAEA also presented evidence that tends to support the British report -- and that the IAEA may not have adequately investigated.

On March 7, ElBaradei appeared at the U.N. Security Council to report on the IAEA's investigation of Iraq's nuclear-related activities. It was here he revealed that the Iraq-Niger documents were "not authentic." But at the same time he also revealed -- in vague terms -- that Iraq had sent an official to Niger in 1999.

"For its part," said ElBaradei, "Iraq has provided the IAEA with a comprehensive explanation of its relations with Niger, and has described a visit by an Iraqi official to a number of African countries, including Niger, in February 1999, which Iraq thought might have given rise to the reports (of a uranium deal)."

Is there anything in your house, that isn't radioactive, that says "Made in Niger" on it?

---

IN SUMMER, NOBODY CAN HEAR DEMOCRATS SCREAM

Public's Attitudes Towards Iraq Little Changed Over Last Several Weeks: Majority still say situation in Iraq worth going to war over (Frank Newport, July 23, 2003, GALLUP NEWS SERVICE)

Much attention has been focused on President George W. Bush's problems relating to Iraq, including the controversy over the origins of the now famous statement included in Bush's State of the Union Address about Iraq's possession of uranium from Africa.

But recent Gallup polling data indicate that many Americans are not as concerned about this and other aspects of the Iraqi situation as media coverage might suggest. Gallup's latest assessment of the public's views of the most important problem facing the country, completed July 7-9, shows that concerns about the economy are much more prevalent than concerns about war or Iraq. Perhaps as a result, the polling finds that public views of the Iraqi situation and how Bush has handled it have remained relatively stable over the last few weeks, even in the face of the heightened news coverage.

---

)

Faith and Freedom (Karen Armstrong, May 8, 2003, The Guardian)

In 680, the Shias of Kufa in Iraq called for the rule of Ali's son, Husain. Even though the caliph, Yazid, quashed this uprising, Husain set out for Iraq with a small band of relatives, convinced that the spectacle of the Prophet's family, marching to confront the caliph, would remind the regime of its social responsibility. But Yazid dispatched his army, which slaughtered Husain and his followers on the plain of Kerbala. Husain was the last to die, holding his infant son in his arms.

For Shias the tragedy is a symbol of the chronic injustice that pervades human life. To this day, Shias can feel as spiritually violated by cruel or despotic rule as a Christian who hears the Bible insulted or sees the Eucharistic host profaned. This passion informed the Iranian revolution, which many experienced as a re-enactment of Kerbala--with the shah cast as a latter-day Yazid--as well as the Iraqi arba'in to Kerbala.

Shi'ism has always had revolutionary potential, but the Kerbala paradigm also inspired what one might call a religiously motivated secularism. Long before western philosophers called for the separation of church and state, Shias had privatised faith, convinced that it was impossible to integrate the religious imperative with the grim world of politics that seemed murderously antagonistic to it. This insight was borne out by the tragic fate of all the Shia imams, the descendants of Ali: every single one was imprisoned, exiled, or executed by the caliphs, who could not tolerate this principled challenge to their rule. By the eighth century, most Shias held aloof from politics, concentrated on the mystical interpretation of scripture, and regarded any government--even one that was avowedly Islamic--as illegitimate.

The separation of religion and politics remains deeply embedded in the Shia psyche.

This, and what follows in the essay, raises a series of questions though; here are two:

(1) The case of Iran seems to demonstrate the unworkability of an Islamic (even Shi'a) authoritarianism. But can this lesson be learned from the example, or must each predominantly Shi'ite nation experience the failure for itself, as almost the entire West had to try out some variant of socialism/communism/fascism and watch them fail?

(2) Will the Shi'a always feel that whatever government they have is oppressive, because it is not idyllic? The separation of Church and State that developed in Judeo-Christianity does not include such a belief, that government is uniquely corrupt--is the difference destined to be significant?

---

IT'S EASIER FOR A CAMEL TO FIT THROUGH A QUIDDITCH GOAL...

Harry Potter and the magic of Torah: Learning a Torah portion lesson from the boy wizard. (Rabbi David Zauderer, July 24, 2003, Jewsweek)

With all the hoopla and fascination surrounding the latest addition to the Harry Potter series, you would think that all this supernatural stuff about wizards, Hogwarts, and strange freaky things like The Letters From No One and Quidditch, were something new! Well, I have to tell you that I just picked up a book in which I found described some of the strangest, almost magical, supernatural things--just the type of stuff you'd expect to find in a Harry Potter adventure. In it, you'll read about a totally red cow whose ashes have the ability to purify those who have come in contact with the dead, a mysterious roving rock that provides water whenever you hit it or talk to it, a copper serpent on a flagpole that cures people who were bitten by a serpent merely by looking at it--only this book is well over 3000 years old!

That's right, it's the Torah. The best-selling book of all time (until Harry Potter came along!) [...]

So where am I going with all this? The great medieval commentaries explain that the entire purpose of the overt miracles that the Jewish people experienced in the desert, and that were subsequently recorded in the Torah for us to read about and study, was in order that we should realize that, ultimately, everything that happens in this world, including all of nature, is an expression of God's will, and that God is very much a part of our lives.

There's a very fine line in a sermon between making it topical and rendering it trivial--we'll let you judge this one.

---

BIAS?

A Mugging in Reuterville (James Taranto, 7/24/03, Best of the Web)

On Tuesday we noted that Reuters had published an anti-American screed about the Jessica Lynch story:

Jessica Lynch, the wounded Army private whose ordeal in Iraq was hyped into a media fiction of U.S. heroism, was set for an emotional homecoming on Tuesday in a rural West Virginia community bristling with flags, yellow ribbons and TV news trucks.

But when the 20-year-old supply clerk arrives by Blackhawk helicopter to the embrace of family and friends, media critics say the TV cameras will not show the return of an injured soldier so much as a reality-TV drama co-produced by U.S. government propaganda and credulous reporters.

It turns out even the byline was a lie. Reuters attributed the story to Deanna Wrenn, who we later learned is a reporter for the Daily Mail, an afternoon paper in Charleston, W.Va. Out of curiosity, we went to the Daily Mail's Web site and read Wrenn's account of Pfc. Lynch's homecoming. It reads nothing at all like the Reuters piece:

Jessica Lynch looked and sounded great, residents and visitors said after she rode through town on a Mustang convertible.

But many wanted to get a longer glimpse of the 20-year-old Army private they consider a hero.

"She looked absolutely beautiful," said Angie Kinder, who came from Huntington with her two girls, Grace, 4, and Caroline, 1. "I expected her to look worse."

The piece continues in this vein, without a hint of Reuterian anti-Americanism. In a column in today's Daily Mail, which the paper generously permitted us to reprint, Deanna Wrenn explains what happened.

It's our general policy not to link to stories in Best of the Web, Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, etc., on the understanding that no one starts their day here and nearly everyone will have visited all those bigger sites first. But this story really pisses me off. (Pardon my French, as two more rules get broken: self-reference and scatology.)

---

MCMAYFLOWER

Reliving Ireland's voyages of hope (Donovan Slack, 7/23/2003, Boston Globe)

Some say it's the way she cuts through high seas in gale-force winds, spilling nary a drop of tea. Others say it's the stubbornness of her supporters, who sank about $25 million into a ship some say is worth only $3 million. Either way, the Jeanie Johnston has captured hearts and minds across Ireland and in Boston, where the replica of a 19th-century Irish emigrant barque is due to arrive Thursday.

''It's kind of like the Big Dig in Boston -- that's the Jeanie Johnston in Ireland,'' said Victoria Breglio, a planner with Conventures, the Boston company arranging the ship's reception here. ''Everyone knows the ship.''

Between 1848 and 1855, the original Jeanie Johnston carried 2,500 emigrants during 16 voyages from Tralee in County Kerry, Ireland, to Quebec, Baltimore, and New York City. Many were fleeing the Great Famine at home.

Passengers were crammed four and five to a bunk, rations often consisted of rice cakes ridden with weevils, and fresh air was a rare commodity.

Still, the Jeanie Johnston never lost a life.

''It wasn't a typical vessel,'' said Boston College historian Thomas H. O'Connor.

Tomorrow at 11 a.m., cannons will sound, a Boston Fire Department boat will spray plumes in the harbor, and Irish dancers will high-step on Rowes Wharf as the barque reaches the harbor. Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran, and Irish Consul General Isolde Moylan all will be there to greet her.

That's nearly enough to get us to visit the nether state...nearly.

---

AFTER THE WORD "EARNEST" IN THE DICTIONARY

Task Force on Interpersonal Relations, Family Life, and Intimacy (Amitai Etzioni, Chair)

Preamble

From a wide variety of backgrounds, viewpoints, and experiences, we have come together to examine a complex set of issues that deeply affects our entire society: the rise of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and sexual exploitation, and the related moral, social, and psychological factors. Instructed by different religious and secular perspectives and by divergent political and social philosophical persuasions, drawn from academic and practical backgrounds, we join here to focus our examination on what is commonly referred to as 'sex education' in public schools, our task as part of a broader communitarian project on character education. Our purpose is not to review data for research purposes or to spell out specifics for classroom implementation. Rather, our goal is to chart a morally sound course and design a moral framework for programs that are too often constructed in the absence of such concern.

I try not to pick on the Communitarians, because if there have to be leftists, these are the kind of earnest, ineffectual leftists I prefer and because, other than a few dim jokes, I have nothing particularly new to say about them. This position paper on sex education, though, is such a perfect example of the policy wonk belief that serious and engaged means dry and humorless -- a belief shared by people on the left and right -- that I had to post it.

---

SUDDENLY, EVOLUTION LOOKS MORE ATTRACTIVE.

Zeus bug is ultimate male chauvinist (Reuters, 7/24/03)

As life goes, it doesn't get much better than for male Zeus bugs. The tiny water bugs that are common along Australia's east coast have an easy life. Their female partners provide free food, transport and unlimited sex whenever they want it.

'All the advantages in this relationship seem to fall to the male with no obvious advantage for the female, yet the female Zeus bug seems a willing partner in this one-sided affair,' Mark Elgar of the University of Melbourne in Australia said. . . .

The male Zeus bug is half the size of the female and hitches a piggy back ride on the female which also feeds him.
'The male can ride the female, feeding and mating for up to a week,' said Elgar, who reported his findings in the August 24 edition of the science journal Nature.

We've all known couples like this.

---

THE ANTI-ARAFAT

The Palestinian Prime Minister Is a Welcome Contrast to Yasir Arafat: Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has emerged as the No. 2 in the Palestinian political structure largely because he knows how to get things done behind the scenes. (ETHAN BRONNER, 7/24/03, NY Times)

Anyone who has sought an interview with Yasir Arafat learns the drill--agree with his lieutenants on a range of days, pick a nearby hotel and wait. At some point after midnight, you will be summoned. The old man, dressed in battle fatigues with his headdress folded in the diamond shape of mandatory Palestine, a pistol attached to his hip, will arrive in a hurricane of aides and hangers-on. He will grab your hand for emphasis but ignore many of your questions.

It is against such a background that one measures an appointment with the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen), who will hold his first White House meeting with President Bush on Friday. The hour for our interview last Saturday in his functional Ramallah office was set in advance--7 p.m. At two minutes past, dressed in a dull brown suit, he walked in accompanied by two aides. There is no bravado, no hand grabbing. When asked if the Palestinian Authority has the strength to take charge of West Bank cities that he wants the Israeli military to evacuate, the 67-year-old prime minister replies that it will be hard, but we will try to manage. Asked about Palestinian terror, he says there is no role for violence in the Palestinian national struggle.

Humility is not a trait associated with political leadership, and many of Mr. Abbas's supporters fear it is not serving him well among his people. Mr. Abbas is not a man of public charisma. He is a serious person of decency and integrity who has emerged as the No. 2 in the Palestinian political structure largely because he knows how to get things done behind the scenes.

The result is a kind of prime-minister-despite-himself, a reluctant leader who dislikes the spotlight.

One would hope that Mr. Abbas will not have to pay the ultimate price for America and Israel's past cultivation of Yassir Arafat as a legitimate leader of Palestine.

---

THE WAGES OF GITMOPHOBIA

Better Alive Than Dead: The killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein is
considered a victory in the eyes of Americans. But a better victory would have been if they were alive and brought to justice. (SANDRA MACKEY, 7/24/03, NY Times)

The killing of Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, is a tactical victory for the American occupation of Iraq. But it is not a strategic one. By not capturing these odious symbols of the old regime alive and putting them on display, the American occupation authority has denied itself the chance to give absolute proof of their demise to a society that rejects authority and thrives on conspiracy theory. It has also lost an opportunity to give Iraqis a chance to purge their bitterness, and satisfy a deep-seated need for revenge, by confronting their tormentors in court.

In the abstract Ms Mackey may have a point, but in the real world, where "civil libertarians" are fiercely fighting every attempt to administer justice to the extremists we've captured--like Zaccarias Moussaoui, John Walker Lindh, and the gangs at Guatanamo Bay--it has become dangerous to risk bringing such evil-doers into the formal justice system, where the process soon descends into farce. It's only too easy to imagine various Leftists groiups--and Democratic presidential candidates--insisting that the Saddam boys be allowed to call George Bush Sr., Donald Rumsfeld, and others to testify about trivia like American support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. Better just to end it with a bullet.

MORE:
Ashcroft's Folly: How the attorney general lost the Moussaoui trial before it began. (Dahlia Lithwick, July 24, 2003, Slate)

Moussaoui--intent on defending himself--undid the government by using transparency and due process to embarrass the prosecution and allegedly compromise national security. The man refused to go quietly, insisting on challenging the evidence against him and exercising his full range of rights as a criminal defendant. The prosecution--applying a broad new theory of conspiracy law--didn't help matters by filing an indictment shot through with circumstantial evidence and unsupported speculation. And so Moussaoui, considered nuttier than a Snickers bar when this trial began almost a year ago, suddenly looks like a Jeremiah. His ongoing contention--that the proceedings are nothing more than a "death show trial" jiggered to result in his execution--suddenly looks to be true.

---

CHANNELING THE DEMOCRATS

Tony, you're killing us (Dennis Prager, July 22, 2003, townhall.com)

Democrats may have applauded British Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech to the joint session of Congress. But in their hearts, they and the entire left must have loathed his speech.

To understand why, let us enter the minds of leftists and observe their thoughts on comments made by Mr. Blair.

"Thank you, Mr. President, for your leadership."

Leadership!? Tony, are you kidding? [...]

"In the end, it is not our power alone that will defeat this evil. Our ultimate weapon is not our guns, but our beliefs."

Enough with this talk about "evil" and "beliefs." You sound like Bush and all these other fanatics who talk about "Judeo-Christian values."

"Just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify it around an idea, and that idea is liberty."

Liberty? That proves you are not one of us, Tony. We believe in equality, not liberty.

Pretty funny. On Fresh Air the other day, Peter Stothard, author of Thirty Days: Tony Blair and the Test of History--a new book on Tony Blair in the run-up to the war--talked about how the PM wanted to end his address to the British people by saying: "God bless you" or something of the sort. He was forbidden by his advisors because it might offend people. Pretty sad.

---

BANKING CAPITAL

Dems under the spell of midsummer's dream (Zev Chafets, 7/23/03, Jewish World Review)

Summer is the Democratic season of hope.

Last year around this time, they launched a campaign against the impending war in Iraq. President Bush was in Crawford, Tex., playing cowboy when a front-page New York Times headline announced, "Top Republicans Break With Bush on Iraq Strategy."

According to The Times, Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser under Bush's father, thought the U.S. should be more unilateral. So did Henry Kissinger. House Majority Leader Dick Armey had voiced similar concerns. A mutiny was brewing.

It soon emerged that Kissinger was actually in favor of the war. The posse of critics never grew. Still, many Democrats convinced themselves in the summer of 2002 that Bush was in trouble.

For weeks, nobody could talk about anything else. Nobody that is, on the TV talk shows. The rest of the nation pursued its normal summer activities, which did not include an impassioned analysis of the opinions of Brent Scowcroft.

In September, Bush came back from Crawford, put on a business suit and went to the UN. In short order he gave the critics of the war what they said they wanted, a UN Security Council Resolution, and, in November, what they did not want - a thrashing in the congressional elections. Then, popularity soaring, the President took the country to war.

Now it's summer again...

One of the things that Karl Rove and George Bush talked about long before the latter won the office is the idea that a President has only a limited stock of political capital, which should only be expended on a limited set of truly important issues and which can be squandered if he is constantly before the American people. They well understand, as they demonstrated last summer, that no one is paying attention right now, no one deciding that the war was a mistake, so there's no need to trot Mr. Bush out to answer every attack. What's remarkable is that they've had the discipline to follow predetermined strategy, something few White Houses in memory have had.

---

FORCIBLE CONTRADICTIONS

Kashmir: A Shi'ite voice in the wilderness (Sudha Ramachandran, 7/25/03, Asia Times)

There is little political or sectarian unity in the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). While the broad regional divide - Kashmir Valley, Jammu and Ladakh - and the religious divide between Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists in J&K has been commented on, little attention has been paid to the sectarian divide. Analysts, and especially the media, have tended to view perceptions of each religious community as largely homogenous. As a result, the sharp differences that exist within each religious community have been ignored.

Muslims constitute 95 percent of the population in the Kashmir Valley, 30 percent of Jammu and 46 percent of Ladakh. However, they do not speak with one voice. The Shi'ite-Sunni divide, while not as deep and bloody as it is in neighboring Pakistan, exists. Tensions simmer beneath the surface. The fissures have erupted in the open on several occasions and have the potential of exploding seriously in the future.

Around 13 percent of the Muslim population in the Valley is Shi'ite. In J&K's summer capital, Srinagar, Shi'ites - as do other minority communities - prefer to live in clusters, resulting in almost exclusive Shi'ite neighborhoods in the city.

There is little love lost between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Several Sunnis, even those who otherwise seem liberal, refuse to eat food cooked in a Shi'ite home. The antagonism between the two seems, strangely, far more serious than the Muslim-Pandit enmity. The Shi'ites, otherwise more conservative, especially with regard to the treatment of their women, are opposed to attempts by Sunni militant groups to impose the burqa (a full veil) on women. Shi'ites complain that after Friday prayers in the mosque, Sunni boys throw stones at their houses. Shi'ite-Sunni trouble in Iraq reverberates in Srinagar.

In the end, if not sooner, it may be in the West's best interests to pit Sunni and Shiite against each other as a means of turning Islamic fury inwards instead of out. It is already in our best interest in Iraq to turn the Shi'a loose so that they can rout out the Sunni Ba'ath loyalists. One would like to think that Islam generally can reform itself before that kind of internecine warfare becomes our best option throughout the region, but we can't lose sight of the fact that the option exists.

---

HOWARD WHO? (via <~text text="The Corner">

Lieberman Leads New Democratic Poll (AP, 7/24/03)

Joe Lieberman had the most support from Democratic voters in a national poll released Thursday, followed closely by Dick Gephardt, John Kerry and Howard Dean. But if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is added to the field, she dominates, taking 48 percent to 11 percent for Lieberman, with others in single digits.

Lieberman, a Connecticut senator, was at 21 percent and Gephardt, a Missouri representative, was at 16 percent - just within the error margin of plus or minus 5 percentage points in the Quinnipiac University poll. Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, was at 13 percent and Dean, a former governor of Vermont was at 10 percent. . . .

When President Bush is matched head-to-head against top Democrats in the poll, he leads by margins ranging from 7 points over Clinton to 16 points over Dean. Bush's lead against Kerry, Gephardt and Lieberman was about 10 points.

I'm pretty skeptical of these results, and all polling this early (say, before Labor Day) is useless, but it does underscore how driven political reporters are to find a new, hot story and ride it into the ground.

---

THE ETHIC OF THE AGE

Shakespeare Sonnet-a-Day

LXII

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
'Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

---

THE END OF THE <~text text="EQUALITY-OF-HUMAN-LIFE ETHIC">

21st Century Eugenics (Jesse Reynolds, 6/26/03, TomPaine.com)

Talk of breeding humans may remind readers of the eugenic practices of the 20th century, which involved forcibly sterilizing thousands of Americans classed as mentally impaired or criminally inclined, in the service of "improving the gene pool." In recent years, three states have issued formal apologies to the victims of these programs. Of course, many people recall Nazi Germany's obsession with eugenics, and later in the century American foreign policy encouraged sterilizations of men and women in the Third World as the best means to deal with population and poverty problems. [...]

One new twist that's particularly disturbing is that advocates of this free-market eugenics are twisting the language of women's rights to push their agenda.

James Hughes, the chair of the Transvision conference planning committee, has argued in a scholarly article that "the right to a custom-made child is merely the natural extension of our current discourse of reproductive rights. I see no virtue in the role of chance in conception, and great virtue is expanding choice.... If women are allowed the 'reproductive right' or 'choice' to choose the father of their child, with his attendant characteristics, then they should be allowed the right to choose the characteristics from a catalog."

But clearly there's a huge difference between being pro-choice and pro-designer babies.

No, actually there isn't. Allowing abortion depends on just one tiny, but massive, shift in our morality: it requires only that we say that some lives are more equal than others. In the case of generic abortion, all we've said is that the mother's life is in all instances more valuable than the child's. That's it. That's all we have to do, just say life A is not equal to life B.

What is the justification for this shift? That the quality of the mother's life may be negatively affected by carrying the child to term, but can be
enhanced by killing the child. Mind you; the argument here is not even that the actual existence of the mother is at stake, only her happiness. And so we've instituted a moral regime where the happiness of one class of humans is more important than the lives of another class. Numerous reasons can be given for the classifications, but in the end they're quite arbitrary, based almost entirely on the political power of the one and political weakness of the other.

Now, Mr. Reynolds and others on the Left, like Bill McKibben, are suddenly waking up to the fact that this re-institution of the idea of inequality (though that's not how they would define their support for abortion) has myriad other ramifications, some of which make them quite uncomfortable. Unfortunately, having accepted that there's a scale of values of human lives in the first instance, there's no coherent basis for denying it later. All you are left with is your desire to have your chosen classifications succeed in the political arena. The question is no longer, "do we need to respect lives simply by virtue of their being human?" We've already answered that in the negative. Instead we are asking, "how are we going to rank the various classes on our scale of value?" And the answer will be a product of the same dynamic that produced the decision to allow abortion--lives will be valued in near-direct proportion to political power.

Eugenecists, bio-engineers, clonophiles, and others borrow the language of "women's rights" advocates because there's so little difference between them all. Each is based on the inequality of human life, the notion that some lives are more valuable than others.

---

BUSTIN' A MOVE II

Bustamante to set ballot date quickly, let court rule on succession process (Aurelio Rojas, July 23, 2003, Sacramento Bee)

Facing the biggest decision of his career, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante said Tuesday he will likely take no more than 24 hours from the day the choice is his to set the date for the recall election of Gov. Gray Davis.

But he said he will leave to an independent commission and the California Supreme Court a decision on whether he becomes governor himself -- without an election to determine a successor -- if Davis is recalled. [...]

Bustamante said he would not run to succeed the governor if a successor election is held. But sources say he has also been calling supporters and friends around the state seeking advice about whether he should enter the race.

Last month, Bustamante joined the state's other high-ranking Democrats in denouncing the recall effort and said he did not "intend" to put his name on the ballot.

Yet privately, some Democrats singled out Bustamante as the most likely member of the party to break ranks.

Bustamante is not a prolific fund-raiser, they said, pointing out that the recall's short campaign could be his best shot at becoming California's first Latino governor.

After ducking this decision in the way designed to benefit only himself, it seems safe to say he won't be getting a chapter in the next edition of Profiles in Courage.

---

PRESIDENT BUSH HAS YET TO USE THE VETO?

House Votes, 400-21, to Block Media Rule by the F.C.C. (AP, New York Times, 7/22/03)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House voted Wednesday to prevent federal regulators from letting individual broadcast companies own television stations serving nearly half the national TV market, ignoring the preferences of its own Republican leaders and a Bush administration veto threat.

By a 400-21 vote, lawmakers approved a spending bill with language blocking a Federal Communications Commission decision to let companies own TV stations serving up to 45 percent of the country's viewers. The current ceiling is 35 percent.

Despite GOP control of the White House, Congress and the FCC, the House vote set the stage for what may ultimately be an unraveling of a regulatory policy that the party strongly favors. The fight now moves to the Senate, where several lawmakers of both parties want to include a similar provision in their version of the bill.

Top Republicans are hoping that, with leverage from the threat of a first-ever veto by President Bush, the final House-Senate compromise bill later this year will drop the provision thwarting the FCC."

A perfect example of the Republicans standing up to the powerful multinationals -- acting entirely in their self-interest and against the public interest.

---

BEEBWATCH

The secret forces who ensured success of attack (Michael Smith, 24/07/2003, Daily Telegraph)

Task Force 20, the special forces team that has been hunting down Saddam Hussein and his supporters, played a key role in the raid that ended in the deaths of the former dictator's sons.

Allied special forces are organised into Joint Special Operations Task Forces wherever they operate. JSOTF 20 includes members of Delta Force, the American equivalent of the SAS, Devgru, the US navy special forces team previously known as Seals, the SAS and the SBS.

It is not yet clear whether British personnel were involved in the raid that killed Uday and Qusay Hussein.

NHPR switches to the BBC after 10pm, so driving home last night I heard their report on the killing of the Saddam sons: "This was the best day of the war for American forces in Iraq...well, besides the fall of Baghdad." Hard to decide which is stranger, that the British news network doesn't acknowledge their country is our partner in the war or that to them liberating the people of Iraq from such thugs is nearly an afterthought?

---

AND HERE I THOUGHT FDR WAS LYING ABOUT THE NAZI THREAT.

Fully armed Nazi bomber planes 'buried below East Berlin airport' (Allan Hall, The Scotsman, 7/22/03).

AN AIRPORT used by hundreds of thousands of tourists and business travellers each year could be sitting on top of thousands of live bombs.

Papers among thousands of files captured from the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany, claim tons of live Second World War munitions were buried in concrete bunkers beneath the runways of Schoenefeld airport in East Berlin. It is now the main destination for discount airlines, such as Ryanair, and numerous charter companies.

Not only did the commissars intern munitions beneath the runways, but also entire Nazi fighter planes, all fuelled and fully bombed-up, according to the Stasi.

The captured files of Interflug, the former East German government airline and the airport authority of the DDR, are now being examined to see if the Stasi claim is true."

This in no way excuses the administration's failure to find Iraq's WMD in four months.

---

GIT MO' BETTER RESULTS

As U.S. Lowered Sights, Information Poured In (Thomas E. Ricks, July 23, 2003, Washington Post)

After weeks of difficult searching for the top targets on the U.S. government's list of most-wanted Iraqi fugitives, U.S. military commanders two weeks ago switched the emphasis of their operations, focusing on capturing and gathering intelligence from low-level members of former president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party who had been attacking American forces, according to military officials.

That shift produced a flood of new information about the location of the Iraqi fugitives, which came just before today's attack in which Hussein's two sons were killed by U.S. forces in the northern city of Mosul, the officials said.

"We shifted our focus from very high-level personalities to the people that are causing us damage," Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander of the U.S. military in the Middle East, said in an interview last weekend. Later, he told reporters in Baghdad: "In the past two weeks, we have been getting the mid-level leadership in a way that is effective."

The captured Baathists provided much new detail about their organization and contacts, officials here said. Some gave information about their financing and their means of communication, they added. Others identified members of their networks. Some described the routes and contacts that fugitive leaders were using. Threats to ship the recalcitrant captives to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay on the eastern end of Cuba were especially helpful in encouraging them to talk, officials said.

It's like the Leftwing nitwits are playing bad cop for us, scaring folks into thinking Guantanamo is an especially nasty corner of Hades.

---

HEY! WE'RE ALL FASCISTS!

BRAVE NEW SCHOOLS: Berkeley study links Reagan, Hitler: Psychological research on conservatives finds them 'less complex' (WorldNetDaily.com, July 23, 2003)

In a study that ponders the similarities between former President Ronald Reagan, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Rush Limbaugh, four American university researchers say they now have a better understanding of what makes political conservatives tick.

Underlying psychological motivations that mark conservatives are "fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity; uncertainty avoidance; need for cognitive closure; and terror management," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.

"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," they wrote, according to a press release issued by the University of California at Berkeley.

The researchers also contend left-wing ideologues such as Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro "might be considered politically conservative in the context of the systems that they defended." [...]

The researchers said the "terror management" tendency of conservatism is exemplified in post-Sept. 11 America, where many people appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views.

Likewise, they said, concerns with fear and threat can be linked to another key dimension of conservatism, an endorsement of inequality.

That view is reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid and the conservative, segregationist politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, the researchers wrote.

A current example of conservatives' tendency to accept inequality, he said, can be seen in their policy positions toward "disadvantaged minorities" such as gays and lesbians.

A broad range of conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the researchers said, linking Reagan, Hitler, Mussolini and talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

Adolph Hitler was resistant to change?

---

DON'T DO THE CRIME IF YOU CAN'T DO ETERNITY

A Little Too Personal (PETER STEINFELS, July 19, 2003, NY Times)

Can you sue the person in the pulpit for preaching hellfire - at least if it gets personal?

That's only one of the questions raised by an unusual lawsuit filed last month against a priest in northern New Mexico and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the family of Ben Martinez, charged that at the funeral for Mr. Martinez, the parish priest declared that the deceased, an 80-year-old former town councilor in Chama, N.M., had been a lukewarm Catholic who had been living in sin and was going to hell.

Besides accusing the priest of other abusive statements and demeaning behavior, the suit detailed psychological pain, physical afflictions, anxiety, depression and humiliation allegedly suffered by Mr. Martinez's family in the months after the funeral, which occurred over a year ago and had been attended by more than 150 relatives and townspeople. [...]

This might be a simple dispute over defamation. Preaching at a religious service is not a license to say anything about anyone. But if hard words are a recognized part of a religious doctrine to which someone has voluntarily subscribed, the matter becomes more complicated.

It always seemed strange that Bob Dole cried at Richard Nixon's funeral, given that when Ronald Reagan sent Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon to Anwar Sadat's the Senator referred to them as: "See No Evil"; "Speak No Evil; and "Evil". Obviously mere men don't know where souls are going postmortem, but with some folks we've all got a hunch, don't we?

---

PAYING FOR YOUR CHOICES

Consider the Source: Planned Parenthood refuses to give up the dole without a fight (Mark Donald, 7/24/03, Dallas Observer)

The Texas Legislature has added a rider to its appropriations bill that denies public funding for family planning to any abortion provider, even if it performs abortions with private funds. And even though Corsicana Health Services does not perform abortions itself, the fact that it is an affiliate of Planned Parenthood of North Texas, which does provide abortions, will be enough to deny it family-planning funds.

Six of Planned Parenthood's regional affiliates, including North Texas, have taken this rider personally and filed a federal lawsuit claiming that this legislation amounts to the state levying an unlawful penalty on a woman's constitutionally protected right to choose. Because the state also is placing greater restrictions on the use of the federal government's money than the federal government is, Planned Parenthood alleges these restrictions (no family-planning funds if the organization performs abortions) are also unconstitutional. Its petition has received some favorable play from an Austin federal judge, who has granted a restraining order preventing the state from requiring Planned Parenthood affiliates to either sign a pledge to stop providing abortions or be disqualified from the state family-planning program. He will consider extending the injunction at a hearing scheduled for July 25.

The legislation is far too sweeping, argues Kathryn Allen, senior vice president for community relations for Planned Parenthood of North Texas, and "risks depriving 115,000 low-income women of their health-care needs at 33 clinics across the state." The $13 million in federal dollars helps fund family planning and reproductive health services, not abortions, which are offered at only seven clinics and account for only 2.3 percent of the medical visits to its 85 clinics in Texas.

The legislative sponsors of the rider--Senate Republicans Steve Ogden from Bryan and Tommy Williams from The Woodlands--say their legislation was not meant to target Planned Parenthood in particular or family planning in general. They just want government out of the business of subsidizing abortion providers, whether that means directly for the procedure itself or indirectly for the expenses--staff, rent, utilities--of its family-planning clinics or services.

At the risk of sounding paranoid, Planned Parenthood also believes that this rider is part of a "pernicious web of assault" that is bent on destroying its organization--as well as family planning. "Abortion is just the ideological tip of the iceberg," says Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "The hard right--which has found a spokesperson in President Bush--has long been opposed to reproductive health care and is making an orchestrated attack on family planning and sex education."

You know, the right to a free press doesn't obligate taxpayers to help you operate a newspaper either.

---

YOU COULD LOOK IT UP

Recall California!: Land of the Progressives' bad ideas (Glenn Ellmers, July 22, 2003, Claremont.org)

It is noteworthy that today's liberals, the ideological heirs of the Progressives, aren't always pleased with direct democracy in action. The most divisive and decisive ballot initiatives in California have been championed by conservatives: eliminating affirmative action, government largesse to illegal aliens, and bilingual education; preempting the recognition of same-sex marriage; and-granddaddy of them all, Proposition 13-capping property taxes, to change California politics ever since.

Given the overwhelming liberal majorities in Sacramento-no Republican holds statewide office, and Democrats control close to two-thirds of the legislature-it's easy to see why the recall has gained momentum. For many Californians, anything that unsettles the status quo must have some merit. Yet the constant recourse to direct democracy may undermine a healthy, representative constitutionalism. Conservative critics of the recall have pointed to the possibility of "blowback." Once the nuclear weapon of recall is used, it could become a regular tool of both parties.

The recall is one of the Progressives' sharpest instruments. By turning its edge against the liberal establishment at its most spendthrift, the present recall effort could have the paradoxical effect of prompting new debate about the purpose and limits of government. At the very least, it should remind voters that elections matter.

Surely this is the example that should appear in phrase books to go along with: "Hoist on your own petard".

---

NONE FINER

Wooden Reward: When legendary UCLA coach receives Medal of Freedom today, he can thank McCarter, who once challenged him (Bill Plaschke, July 23, 2003, LA Times)

He was the different one. He was the wild one.

Andre McCarter was that poor, misguided UCLA Bruin who loved behind-the-back passes and double-pump reverse layups and getting in your face.

During a time when his teammates thrived in the spotlight, he was the one Coach John Wooden would sit in the corner.

"You know how, if somebody has 10 children, there is always one of them who is a real pain in the butt?" McCarter said. "That kid was me."

He was publicly embarrassed. He was quietly benched. He was harangued and harnessed, his style abruptly changed, his attitude forcibly altered.

Since leaving UCLA after the 1976 season, Andre McCarter had been thinking of a way he could pay John Wooden back for all the trouble he caused.

Today, the country will see his answer.

Today, at the White House, Wooden will receive the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

This was not an idea from President Bush. This did not come from a California senator or representative. This was not about lobbying efforts from the NCAA or UCLA.

Wooden is receiving the medal only as a result of a secret three-year campaign by a former player who collected letters, twisted arms, made calls and pushed forward when
everyone thought he would pull back.

A guy named Andre McCarter.

It happens to be an especially worthy group that's getting the Medal this year. Here's an essay about the kind of man John Wooden is, Coach John Wooden: "A Paragon Rising above the Madness" (Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated)

On Tuesday the best man I know will do what he always does on the 21st of the month. He'll sit down and pen a love letter to his best girl. He'll say how much he misses her and loves her and can't wait to see her again. Then he'll fold it once, slide it in a little envelope and walk into his bedroom. He'll go to the stack of love letters sitting there on her pillow, untie the yellow ribbon, place the new one on top and tie the ribbon again.

The stack will be 180 letters high then, because Tuesday is 15 years to the day since Nellie, his beloved wife of 53 years, died. In her memory, he sleeps only on his half of the bed, only on his pillow, only on top of the sheets, never between, with just the old bedspread they shared to keep him warm.

There's never been a finer man in American sports than John Wooden, or a finer coach. [...]

One day, All-America center Bill Walton showed up with a full beard. "It's my right," he insisted. Wooden asked if he believed that strongly. Walton said he did. "That's good, Bill," Coach said. "I admire people who have strong beliefs and stick by them, I really do. We're going to miss you." Walton shaved it right then and there. Now Walton calls once a week to tell Coach he loves him.

---

THE DEMOCRATS VS. THE ELECTION LAWS, PART MMVII

FEC to Consider Lifting Ban On Soft Money for Conventions (Thomas B. Edsall, July 23, 2003, washingtonpost.com)

Committees organizing the 2004 Republican and Democratic national conventions would be able to continue raising and spending "soft money" -- much of it from businesses -- under a recommendation by the Federal Election Commission's staff. The full commission is scheduled to vote on the matter Thursday.

Officials of the host committee in Boston, where the Democratic convention will be held next July, have complained that fundraising was proceeding poorly because many prospective corporate and trade association donors feared the FEC would ban soft-money gifts. Soft money is the term for unlimited and largely unregulated donations that the national political parties were allowed to collect until
the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law took effect eight months ago. Politicians and lawyers have debated whether the ban applies to the committees that are host to the presidential nominating conventions.

The Boston Globe reported this week that the Democratic host committee had raised $1.7 million, $6.3 million less than it had expected to collect by now. Overall, the committee hopes to raise $28.5 million from private sources, $10 million in "in-kind" or non-cash gifts, and $11 million from various government sources.

Officials of the host committee in New York, where the Republican convention will be held in late August 2004, have reported no difficulty raising large sums. They say they have raised $61 million, just $4 million short of the overall $65 million goal.

Why even write these laws if the Democrats are never bound by them?

---

OUR ENEMY, ISLAMICISM

Is Bush Conservative Enough? (Sam Tanenhaus, July 22, 2003, LA Times)

What alarms these conservatives, young and old, is not so much the specific policies of the Bush administration as its appetite for an ever-enlarging, all-powerful government, a post- 9/11 version o