RECALL FREEFALL:

Recall, Schwarzenegger ahead in new LA Times poll (ERICA WERNER, September 30, 2003, Associated Press)

Voters favored recalling Gov. Gray Davis by a large margin in a Los Angeles Times poll released Tuesday and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger was ahead of Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, a Democrat.

It was the second recent statewide survey to show Davis badly behind and Schwarzenegger in the lead. There is a week to go until the Oct. 7 election.

Likely voters interviewed by the Times supported the recall by a 56 percent to 42 percent margin. That was a dramatic shift from the last Times poll, released Sept. 12, that showed support for the recall apparently stalling, with 50 percent of voters supporting it and 47 percent in opposition.

Schwarzenegger had support from 40 percent of likely voters in Tuesday's poll, Bustamante had 32 percent and Republican state Sen. Tom McClintock had 15 percent.

In the Sept. 12 survey Schwarzenegger was slightly behind Bustamante -- Bustamante had 30 percent, Schwarzenegger had 25 percent and McClintock had 18 percent.

Uglier and uglier...

MORE:
"They are against food" (California Insider: A Weblog by Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub, September 30, 2003)

Cruz has played the race card -- in an interview in Spanish on the Univision Television Network. The network has translated the interview and sent a transcript to reporters covering the campaign:

"No one is asking me how much money I get from the Latino community, or from African-Americans, or from people in the Jewish community, or any other group," said Bustamante. "No one else, just the indigenous tribal governments. Why is that?" When asked if he saw this as racial discrimination, Bustamante responded: "Well, that's how it is, I think, sometimes. And I believe we need leaders who can unite, not divide, people."

The lieutenant governor had strong words for his Republican opponents in the recall race. "People who are on the ballot - people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom McClintock - want Proposition 187 once again. They don't want driver's licenses for immigrants. They are against food. They are against access to colleges and access to schools. They are against the opportunity to organize labor unions. They are against so many of the values we have in our community. I think it's important to see who the enemy is... It's the Republican legislators, candidates, and officials who say that they don't want to solve our community's problems. That they don't want children to go to school. That they don't want driver's licenses. All of those are Republicans, they're not Democrats."

We get the secret-coded VRWC newsletter and, as God is my witness, I've never seen anything in there about opposing food.

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JOE WILSON, THE MAN WHO TOOK DOWN A PRESIDENT...:

Man Behind the Furor: Wilson: Envoy With an Independent Streak (Richard Leiby, October 1, 2003, Washington Post)

Former diplomat Joseph Wilson used to tell reporters he felt certain how his obituary would read. It went: "Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was the last American diplomat to meet with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, died . . . "

But "it seems to change," Wilson said yesterday, smiling across his desk in his Washington office. He has kept mentally revising the obituary to keep up with the political maelstrom over Iraq policy and White House leaks that is swirling around him.

A recent version began: "Joseph C. Wilson IV, the Bush I administration political appointee who did the most damage to the Bush II administration . . . "

The current version goes: "Joseph C. Wilson IV, the husband of the spy the White House outed, . . . "

Wilson, 53, is also now known as the man the CIA sent to Niger in February 2002 to investigate rumors that Hussein was trying to buy uranium there -- and who came back with denials from Niger officials. As President Bush repeated the allegation -- most prominently in the so-called 16 words in the State of the Union address Jan. 28 -- Wilson said, he grew increasingly perplexed. And by July, he was annoyed enough to say publicly that U.S. officials had exaggerated the public case for invading Iraq.

At the time, he said he feared that the White House would retaliate. It allegedly did when administration officials called reporters to identify Wilson's wife as a clandestine CIA operative.

As the world now knows, Wilson is married to Valerie Wilson, nee Plame. She is his third wife. She is 40, slim, blonde and the mother of their 3-year-old twins. In the photos in his office, she has the looks of a film star.

"She is really quite amazing," Wilson said. "We were just discussing today who would play her in the movie," he cracked.

Wilson himself seems to have a theatrical streak. [...]

Even though the White House has said Rove wasn't involved, Wilson made clear yesterday that he has no intention of backing off from his assertion that Rove at least condoned someone's making telephone calls to reporters about his wife. He said he took a call from a reporter who quoted Rove as saying: "Joe Wilson's wife is fair game."

Wilson said he and his wife have attended the same Episcopal church as Rove. Wilson quoted Valerie as saying, "Perhaps the next time we are taking communion I should introduce myself so he can see that I have a face and a name other than 'fair game.' "

He seems to alternate between delusions of grandeur and self-pity.

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THE CONCRETE QUAGMIRE:

U.S. mission remains on track in Iraq (MICHAEL O'HANLON, 10/01/03, The Japan Times)

[M]ost indicators are now favorable in Iraq. Consider first the security environment. We face three main challenges -- from criminals, Ba'athists and jihadists. On the first matter, while crime rates are too high, they have generally stabilized at levels statistically no higher than in many Western cities. As Iraqi police are increasingly recruited and trained, rates should decline -- though Iraq clearly also needs a judicial system as soon as possible to deal with those detained.

As for Ba'athist remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime, they are diminishing with time as coalition forces detain and arrest them. For example, in the region north of Baghdad now run by Gen. Ray Odierno's 4th infantry division, some 600 fighters have been killed and 2,500 arrested over recent months. Not all of these are Ba'athists, to be sure, but with those kinds of attrition rates, a group of fighters that probably numbered 10,000 to 20,000 at peak strength will decline over time, especially because it has no appealing ideology with which to attract more members.

Terrorist "jihadists" are a greater worry because it cannot yet be confidently asserted that their numbers in Iraq have begun to decline or even plateau. In an overdue move, coalition forces have been strengthening border patrols to check the influx of foreign terrorists. They can hardly be expected to seal off all entry points into Iraq (though a few thousand more coalition troops might help, at least until more Iraqi border police can be trained, but even that would not solve it). But they can probably contain the problem. But their numbers do not appear enormous, and local intelligence networks that enable us to find and attack them are improving with time. [...]

Of course, economic issues are critical in any counterinsurgency as well. [...]

The problems are well known -- high unemployment, low electricity levels, worries about availability of gas supplies for the coming winter, even insufficient food in some places. But there is room for hope. Oil production is up. Coalition authorities are refurbishing power plants and building redundant electricity lines so that when main lines are sabotaged occasionally in the future, as they surely will be, power still flows. They are hiring Iraqis to man security forces, repair public infrastructure, beautify parks and buildings, and fix factories. If Congress does the right thing and approves President George W. Bush's full $87 billion supplemental request for next year, positive trends should accelerate.

Now what do the Democrats have left to talk about?

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YEN DUMP:

Japan dumps another 4.5 trillion yen (Japan Times, 10/01/03)

Japan spent 4.46 trillion yen between Aug. 28 and Sept. 26 intervening in the currency market to weaken the yen, the Finance Ministry said Tuesday.

The government has now tossed a record 13.48 trillion yen into yen-weakening operations since the beginning of the year.

The ministry has been conducting the effort to fight the yen's ascent, which makes exporting less profitable.

Currency interventions prove to be both fruitless and costly (CHRISTOPHER LINGLE, 10/01/03, The Japan Times)

The weakening of the U.S. dollar accelerated after finance ministers from the Group of Seven issued a communique calling for market-oriented international exchange rates. Soon afterward, the Japanese yen set a two-year high against the American currency.

Of course, Japanese exporters complain that the rising value of the yen will erode their profits. This has brought considerable political pressure to support government intervention in forex markets to avoid further advances in the value of the yen. [...]

While a stronger currency may adversely affect some exports, this impact is mitigated through diversification of domestic production. Intervening in currency markets discourages producers from making decisions that will be in their long-term interest.

It turns out that these interventions cannot alter the inevitable gains in the yen against the dollar because of the inherent weakness in the U.S. currency. Most market analysts and dealers expect the dollar to continue its downward path.

This is perhaps the most ruinous outcome of the irresponsible monetary policy pursued by the Federal Reserve under Chairman Alan Greenspan. By forcing interest rates down artificially, it has caused such a massive flood of dollars into the system that no amount of intervention will be able to stem its decline on global currency markets.

While forex intervention is likely to be fruitless, it involves high costs and is a distraction from implementing other policies that could promote long-term growth. Indeed, currency intervention goes against the most basic notion of financial prudence. Basically, buying dollars that are certain to be less valuable with yen that are becoming more valuable is equivalent to a "buy high, sell low" activity.

While the net impact of market-induced changes in currency valuations is uncertain, there is also no way to know what the proper market rate of exchange is. And so, forex intervention is a highly speculative and Quixotic adventure that should be avoided.

Except that American interest rates are artificially high and with Iraq winding down, a strengthening economy and Europe headed into recession the dollar will inevitably rise.

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THE WHITE SHADOW:

The White Man: Can David Jennings please inner-city minorities and neo-con legislators? (Britt Robson, 10/01/03, City Pages)

Before becoming the [Minneapolis] school system's chief operating officer two years ago, [David] Jennings, who lives in Burnsville, had been a corporate executive at Schwan's, president of the Greater Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, and a Republican Speaker of the House in the Minnesota Legislature. In short, he doesn't exactly fit the traditional mold of an MPS superintendent.

Despite this conservative track record, school board members were unanimously enthusiastic about their decision, and former board members Catherine Shreves and Albert Gallmon (the latter the head of the local NAACP), along with the Star Tribune editorial board, all heartily endorsed the appointment.

So what gives?

Those aboard the Jennings bandwagon believe his corporate and legislative experience make him a formidable opponent of so-called "reformers" who are laying siege to public education at the state and federal levels. It's not far-fetched to regard the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" as an agenda for discrediting and ultimately dismantling public school systems nationwide. Because of this, board members like Audrey Johnson and Dennis Schapiro happily explain the political motives behind their support for the new superintendent. "I think David Jennings has the guts enough to stand up and say this is not right," Johnson says, expressing dismay with new state education standards.

Hey, wait a second, didn't Ted Kennedy take George W. Bush to the cleaners on No Child Left Behind? Wasn't it one of W's key failures?

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HARD TO PICK THE BIGGEST LOSER:

Dan Walters: With one week left: Schwarzenegger rising, Davis falling (Dan Walters, September 30, 2003, Sacramento Bee)

This is the situation, as best one can determine:

* Arnold Schwarzenegger's competent, if not inspiring, performance at last week's debate has solidified Republican voters' support and enthusiasm to turn out and vote both for the recall of Davis and Schwarzenegger as his successor. He has now become the prohibitive favorite to win the successor race, should Davis be recalled, as now looks likely.

* Schwarzenegger's rise has contributed to a reversal of fortunes for Davis, who had appeared to be closing the gap on the recall, at least somewhat, prior to the debate. Pundits who thought Davis was the real winner of the debate were dead wrong. Fence-sitting moderates, both Democrats and independents, who disliked Davis but worried about having an acceptable successor, have moved toward voting for the recall, reopening a strong double-digit gap, and for Schwarzenegger. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, published over the weekend, shows the pro-recall side and Schwarzenegger winning, although the poll's methodology may overstate both. Davis' campaign has indirectly acknowledged that its own polls show the recall and Schwarzenegger gaining, and is now going on the attack on several fronts. Davis knows now that his best chance of surviving is to denigrate Schwarzenegger -- a lesser-of-two-evils strategy that has been a Davis hallmark in the past.

* Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante has faded badly in the last 14 days because of his almost inexplicable entanglement in an ongoing political and legal flap over his acceptance of millions of dollars in campaign funds from casino-owning Indian tribes. What had seemed to be a Bustamante-Schwarzenegger duel, when the two were tied and Davis appeared doomed, now has morphed into a Davis-Schwarzenegger contest. The sheer size of the tribal involvement, coupled with the Indians' obvious interest in having a governor of their choosing, has become a negative with voters, and it's hurting not only Bustamante but the other major Republican candidate, conservative Sen. Tom McClintock, who also embraced tribal money.

* McClintock had been under great pressure from GOP leaders to drop out, but the latest round of polling indicates that with Schwarzenegger's surge, McClintock is becoming almost a non-factor in this race. And his stubborn insistence on remaining in the race even though it's evident that he cannot win, and his involvement with the casino tribes, may have damaged his political future. His Senate district has been expanded into Santa Barbara County, which is not friendly territory for a conservative Republican, and there is serious local speculation that he may face a moderate GOP challenger in the primary next March.

Why didn't McClintock agree to bail out a week ago in exchange for Schwarzenegger's help in the Senate primary to face the entirely beatable Barbara Boxer? In fact, he could have done it right after the debate: "Tonight proved to me that Arnold has what it takes..."

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REFRESHING PERSONAL HONESTY

Huffington Quits California Recall Race (Beth Fouhy, AP, 9/30/03)

Independent candidate Arianna Huffington dropped out of the California recall race on Tuesday, saying it was her best hope of preventing Arnold Schwarzenegger from becoming governor.

"I'm puling out and I'm going to concentrate all my time and energy in the next week working to defeat the recall becasue I realize that's the only way to defeat Arnold Schwarzenegger," Huffington said as she made the announcement on CNN's "Larry King Live."

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"HORROR AND DISGUST":

Publius vs. Demos (Christopher Hull, 09/30/2003, Tech Central Station)

As any political science 101 student can tell you, the United States is not in fact a "democracy," at least not as the term is understood technically. In a democracy, power to govern is lodged with the demos, that is, the mass of individual citizens. In America's federal republic, the power is allocated to local, state and national representatives by the vote, delegating decision-making authority to them.

This is not an accident. Our Nation's Founding Fathers were sharply opposed to too much democracy -- too much decision-making ability placed at the disposal of individual citizens. They deliberately turned instead to a system in which those citizens selected statesmen according to their merit and judgment.

The greatest voice of our Constitutional constructors is the tri-partite character "Publius," the pseudonym of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, writing around 1787 in defense of the soon-to-be-approved Federal Constitution. These thinkers, though later to be divided by politics, were united in thinking that the Constitutional Convention had gotten it right, and that rejecting the framework for the United States would prove disastrous.

In these "Federalist Papers," as the collected writings are generally called, Publius argues consistently against direct democracy, and for a representative republic. Hamilton and Madison especially were rebutting the Anti-Federalists who had an eye for California-style distribution of power to the states and the masses. They felt "sensations of horror and disgust" over early stabs at self-government in Greece and Italy, for instance, because of their "perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy." That said, they felt that a republic vitiated these concerns. Unless the country adopted a strong, central representative republic, Publius held,

we shall be driven in the alternative either of taking refuge at once in the arms of monarchy, or of splitting ourselves into an infinity of little, jealous, clashing, tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord and the miserable objects of universal pity and contempt. (Federalist 9)

More than just calling for a central authority with representatives from the people, Publius directly assaulted direct democracy itself, charging that where citizens had too much direct power, special interests -- or "factions" -- would rule the day entirely. "A pure democracy," he wrote, "by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction."

And Publius warns that direct democracies themselves

have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. (Federalist 10)

Welcome to the Hotel California.

The most remarkable thing about the Founding is that the opposition was even more opposed to centralized power.

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PAGING MR. SMOOT?:

Who Killed Free Trade? (Irwin Stelzer, September 21, 2003, London’s Sunday Times)

Supachai Panitchpadki, director-general of the WTO, claims that “the losers will be the poor and weaker nations,” and that renewed efforts to hammer out an agreement are crucial to world economic prosperity. No surprise: the head of a large bureaucracy that is in the process of being marginalized cannot be expected to think that such a development is a good idea. Indeed, with this defeat the WTO joins the United Nations and, after Sweden’s robust rejection, the euro, among the international concoctions that just ain’t what they used to be.

Then there are the economists who believe that free trade, by permitting the international specialization of labor, increases efficiency and the material well-being of all the participants in trade. Economists at the World Bank estimate that a global deal would raise worldwide incomes by $520 billion by 2015 and lift 144 million people out of poverty. They may be right, but George Bush can hardly be expected to follow the lead of Senator Henry Clay, who in 1839 grandly announced, “I would rather be right than be president.”

The dirty little secret is that the collapse of the Cancun meeting is rather good news for the White House. Of course, the U.S. delegation could hardly join the developing countries in popping the champagne corks when the conference collapsed. Those countries made no secret of their pleasure at the fact that they had finally united to make it clear that there would be no more worldwide agreements until their legitimate demands for freer trade in agricultural products are met.

But the White House is hardly mourning the death at Cancun. With a presidential election now right around the corner, as politicians reckon these things, free trade is hardly the rallying cry that Bush’s advisers will select as his campaign theme. America has lost millions of manufacturing jobs since the Bushes moved into the White House, most of them in states the president must win if he is to avoid his father’s fate. Voters tend to forget the cheap sneakers, cars, T-shirts, and other products that are made for them in Asia, and remember the factories, call centers, and other job-giving enterprises that have pulled stakes and moved to China, India, Mexico, and other low-wage countries. The last thing the administration needs is some agreement that can be made to seem to increase pressure on the U.S. manufacturing sector.

And farmers, who voted for Bush in overwhelming numbers in 2000, would hardly have rewarded the president a second time with their votes had he opened them to competition from African, Caribbean, South American, and other growers, even if the concession had been made in return for an agreement by the poorer countries to open their markets to American manufacturers and providers of financial and other services.

So any tears shed by the White House at the Cancun funeral are of the crocodile variety. Zoellick, although probably more annoyed at the conference’s failure than the White House politicos, can take solace from the fact that he can still pursue his alternative strategy of negotiating bilateral trade agreements with countries who find it to their advantage to do so.

Trade is a near perfect example of the kind of sensible reform that democracy makes almost impossible.

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GO, SPEED RACER! (via brian boys):

Clark Campaigns at Light Speed (Brian McWilliams, Sep. 30, 2003, Wired)

Wesley Clark: Rhodes scholar, four-star general, NATO commander, futurist?

During a whirlwind campaign swing Saturday through New Hampshire, Clark, the newest Democratic presidential candidate, gave supporters one of the first glimpses into his views on technology.

"We need a vision of how we're going to move humanity ahead, and then we need to harness science to do it," Clark told a group of about 50 people in Newcastle attending a house party -- a tradition in New Hampshire presidential politics that enables well-connected voters to get an up-close look at candidates.

Then, the 58-year-old Arkansas native, who retired from the military three years ago, dropped something of a bombshell on the gathering.

"I still believe in e=mc², but I can't believe that in all of human history, we'll never ever be able to go beyond the speed of light to reach where we want to go," said Clark. "I happen to believe that mankind can do it."

"I've argued with physicists about it, I've argued with best friends about it. I just have to believe it. It's my only faith-based initiative." Clark's comment prompted laughter and applause from the gathering.

Gary Melnick, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said Clark's faith in the possibility of faster-than-light (FTL) travel was "probably based more on his imagination than on physics."

While Clark's belief may stem from his knowledge of sophisticated military projects, there's no evidence to suggest that humans can exceed the speed of light, said Melnick. In fact, considerable evidence posits that FTL travel is impossible, he said.

"Even if Clark becomes president, I doubt it would be within his powers to repeal the powers of physics," said Melnick, whose research has focused on interstellar clouds and the formation of stars and planets.

Geez, and the Left has coniptions because Reagan based his idea of an anti-missile shield on a movie.

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IF YOU'RE EVER STUCK THERE...:

Air Force One Lands At The Reagan Library (Edward B. Driscoll, Jr., 09/30/2003, Tech Central Station)

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum in Simi Valley California hosts a 3.5 by ten foot segment of the Berlin Wall. If all goes according to schedule, in mid-2004 it will open a pavilion that houses the Air Force One that flew President Reagan into Berlin, where he gave his legendary "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech. The aircraft, sporting tail number 27000, was Reagan's primary Air Force One, in which he logged 631,640 miles and 1,288 hours of flying time. It also flew Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter to Cairo in 1981, to represent the US at the funeral of Anwar Sadat. In 1986, #27000 was used to take Reagan to Reykjavik for his summit meeting with Gorbachev, in which Reagan refused to bargain away SDI, and in so doing, began the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Friend Driscoll somehow managed to hornswoggle a trip to the Reagan Library and get a paying gig out of it.

N.B. The last Time Zone Rule violation by the Brothers was structured around a visit to the Simi Valley shrine, but, sadly, the plane wasn't there and we ain't ever goin' back.

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AGENT 99:

Novak: Wilson's Wife Not a Covert CIA Agent (NewsMax, Sept. 29, 2003)

The wife of Bush-bashing former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Joe Wilson is apparently not a covert CIA operative or an undercover agent, though she's been described that way repeatedly since the CIA asked for an investigation on how her identity was made public.

According to columnist Robert Novak, who revealed Mrs. Wilson's name in his July 14 column, sources at the CIA expressly told him she was not a spy.

"According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative, and not in charge of undercover operatives," Novak told his audience on CNN's "Crossfire."

It could be a different Joseph Wilson, but someone of that name in DC is a Kerry contributor

Yup, it's him..

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IT'S ALL ABOUT GRAY:

Recall race turns into head-to-head brawl (Martin Kasindorf, 9/30/2003 , USA TODAY)

Gov. Gray Davis and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger are slamming away at each other as if no other candidates exist in the final seven days of California's recall election.

Schwarzenegger, 56, the front-running Republican to replace the Democratic incumbent if voters recall him next Tuesday, fires up crowds with calls to "terminate" Davis. The Hollywood star no longer mentions state Sen. Tom McClintock, his Republican rival.

For Davis, 60, it's also mano a mano combat. He had strongly hinted that he would endorse Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, 50, by this past Saturday as a fallback choice for Democrats if he is ousted. But now, Davis is ignoring the fading Bustamante and saying the only options for Democrats are himself or a Republican takeover.

In targeting each other, Davis and Schwarzenegger are ending the offbeat campaign with yet one more oddity. Technically, they aren't opponents on the ballot next Tuesday. Davis is alone on the ballot's first question, which is whether he should stay or go. He needs 50%, plus one vote, to stay in office. Schwarzenegger is one of 135 candidates listed on the second question. If Davis loses, the replacement candidate with the most votes becomes governor.

This is too clever by half on the part of the Governor. The key to the race for him was to disappear from view and hope voters forgot why they hated him, then turn out the party base with organization and money. Turning into Gray Davis vs. Arnold is a disaster.

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THE 1ST ANNUAL BROTHERS JUDD CALIFORNIA RECALL PROGNOSTATHON:

Only one week left; here's the deal:

You pick the %'s of the "Yes" and "No" votes; the % of the vote that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Cruz Bustamante will each get; and, as a tie breaker, the % of eligible voters who will turn out on October 7th.

We'll award whoever comes closest a copy of the magnificent new Illustrated version of James M. McPherson's Pulitzer-winning Battle Cry of Freedom and the runner-up a hot--off-the-presses paperback copy of Rick Atkinson's Pulitzer-winning Army at Dawn (both courtesy of our friends at FSB Associates).

Please go to this page to enter your picks.

MORE:
-Here are he results so far
-Here's the latest poll in pdf form.

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ARE ARAB-AMERICANS PART OF THE SOLUTION OR PART OF THE PROBLEM?:

Powell Tells Arab-Americans of Hopes to Develop Mideast (JOSEPH B. TREASTER, 9/30/03, NY Times)

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell came here tonight, to the American city with the biggest concentration of Arab-Americans, and said the United States was dedicated to building a prosperous and peaceful Middle East.

Mr. Powell, speaking at an economic conference of leaders from the Middle East and hundreds of American and Arab-American executives, said millions of people in the Middle East were frustrated by joblessness and poverty. "With so much frustration," he said, "no wonder so many people are angry."

"I come to help you build a new Middle East," Mr. Powell said.

Echoing the Administration's call for help from other nations in Iraq, Mr. Powell said the United States "was committed to supporting Arab efforts at reform and development." But he added: "We cannot do it alone. We need partners in the region and in the international community."

He spoke of the administration's effort to develop a huge free trade zone in an area that is now hobbled with more trade barriers than any other part of the world, and he spoke of United States programs like those that finance small-business start-ups for women and send Arab students to intern at American companies.

Summarizing developments in the region, Mr. Powell said the United States was making "remarkable progress" in Iraq, but he said the Middle East peace plan for the Israelis and the Palestinians was stalled because of continuing violence.

To move forward in Israel, he said, the Palestinians must be fully committed to fighting violence. He drew his first ripple of applause when he said that "Israel, too, has obligations," and that "settlement activity" in the West Bank "must end."

That "first ripple of applause" bit is ominous, because if these guys aren't enthused about reforming the Middle East, only about focusing on Israel, then they're useless.

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SOMEONE PASS KRUGMAN HIS SMELLING SALTS:

Economy growth beats expectations: A hot housing market and spending for the war in Iraq gave a boost. (Martin Crutsinger, Associated Press)

The U.S. economy, powered by a red-hot housing market and a huge dose of spending for the war in Iraq, grew at a surprisingly strong 3.3 percent clip last quarter and raised hopes for an even better performance the rest of the year.

The increase announced yesterday in the gross domestic product for the April-June period represented an upward revision from a 3.1 percent estimate a month ago.

Analysts said growth in the July-September quarter would be at a significantly higher rate, fueled by President Bush's newest round of tax cuts, which took effect in July, and continued low interest rates from the Federal Reserve, a combination that has helped to push auto and home sales to record levels.

"The economy is firing on all cylinders," said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo in Minneapolis. "The strong economic growth we are predicting in the future should create some new jobs."

So continues 20+ years of uninterrupted economic growth.

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IT'S ALWAYS THE GAI-JIN:

Japan's streets grow meaner (The Japan Times, Sept. 30, 2003)

Japanese criminal organizations are increasingly penetrating a variety of economic fields and strengthening their links with foreign organized-crime groups, posing a threat to the nation's public order. The National Police Agency's 2003 white paper highlights "The Fight Against Organized Crime," focusing on how a growing behind-the-scenes presence of Japanese gangs in crime, an increase in foreign involvement in crime and juvenile crime are contributing to the worsening state of public order.

Criminal investigations are not solely a police matter; nonetheless, there can be no more dillydallying on the implementation of measures to restore public order. Stronger steps must be taken to eliminate the gangs that are worming their way into the daily lives of citizens.

Crimes committed by foreigners are often lumped together in reports. In actuality, however, the offenses are diverse, ranging from house burglaries and car theft to armed robbery and the illegal trafficking of guns and drugs. Last year foreigners in Japan accounted for about 35,000 criminal cases and about 16,000 arrests. These figures are the highest on record, exceeding last year's statistics by about 4,000 cases and roughly 1,600 arrests. [...]

Last year there were more than 2.85 million recognized criminal cases, setting a postwar record for the seventh consecutive year. The arrest rate, meanwhile, plunged to a new low. Clearly, the state of public security is declining.

Focusing on the 35,000 out of the 2.85 million seems the mark of a society that can't face its own pathologies, no?

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JUST SAY "NO":

The secret lives of middle schoolers (Seth Stern, 9/30/03, The Christian Science Monitor)

Writing a book about Maryland middle schoolers forced journalist Linda Perlstein to live like an adolscent again.

She attended swim practices and bat mitzvahs. She watched her subjects instant-message each other from their bedrooms, and even sat through their classes - though she could walk through the halls without a pass.

The result, "not much just chillin','' is a preteenager's view of the world, drawn from what Perlstein likens to a three-year-long game of dodge ball. [...]

[Q:] You suggest sixth-graders quickly change from innocents to snobby and catty?

It's not particularly gradual. It happens every year. The kids who have been pretty sweet all year - it tends to be when they come back from spring break - tend to come back as full-on middle schoolers. Teachers dread it if they remember it. Some forget but come March, they remember. [...]

[Q:] Why do you emphasize how sexualized middle schoolers have become?

I was overwhelmed by it and pretty saddened too. You shouldn't have to be thinking about this kind of stuff at 12. It's not that the kids were going to go off and have sex in the alley, but I wonder what their relationships and sexual relationships would be like later in life. The patterns were so unintimate and objectified. [...]

What should parents do?

The main thing is to be involved and ignore the "get out." These kids still want you around; they just may want you around in a slightly different way.

It's important not to underestimate the amount of power you still have over your child. A lot of parents throw up their hands and think they can't make a difference and throw their children to the peer gods, and that's wrong. Say 'no' and mean it - so the child hits middle school and is used to hearing it.

When our daughter is 12 we're sending her to the Magdalenes.

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5% GIANT:

Would a weaker dollar create new US jobs?: American factory workers compete against China, where labor costs are only 5 percent of those in US. (Ron Scherer, 9/30/03, The Christian Science Monitor)

"This administration never said it was for a weak dollar, but they are clearly concerned about the lack of employment growth," says Paul Kasriel, an economist at Northern Trust Company in Chicago. "There is a lot of pressure from the manufacturing sector and labor."

That pressure is particularly strong with the Chinese currency, the yuan, which is pegged to the US dollar.

Many American companies are moving their manufacturing to China where the labor costs are only about 5 percent of the cost of labor in the US. As a result of this stampede, the US trade deficit with China is now running at $130 billion a year - a record for any country. [...]

Another reason the Chinese are reluctant to revalue, says Mr. Kasriel, is that their overall trade surplus with the rest of the world is narrowing. China has now become a major importer of raw materials and parts to assemble for goods shipped to the largest consuming nation - the US.

"This means countries like Chile - which are exporting copper to China - are starting to benefit from the Asian economies," says Kasriel. "And, the Chileans may want to buy something from the US which will help our exports." [...]

In fact, many economists don't see the dollar as having long-term problems. The European economy is in worse shape than the US. And, it's still not clear if the Japanese recovery will last. "Fundamentally, dollar investments are not as good as they used to be, but they are still better than most others" says Wyss. Adds Mr. Vitner, "I think people are too bearish on the US economy."

Three tidbits:

(1) If their labor costs are 5% of ours why is there any reason to believe we'll have any manufacturing jobs in a few years?

(2) They buy raw materials elsewhere, follow plans we think up, and put pieces together. All they are is assemblers and they'll only be that until their own labor force starts pushing wages up. Then the jobs go elsewhere and they're nothing.

(3) [Q:] If you were going to invest your life savings in one economy until you retire, whose is safest?

[A:] Ours.

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MORE HEAT THAN LIGHT:

Poor nations keep heat on trade: After WTO talks, the 'G-22' group of developing nations focuses on more-open agricultural markets (Patrick Smith, 9/30/03, The Christian Science Monitor)

Global trade negotiations may well proceed more slowly in the aftermath of the World Trade Organization's collapsed talks in Cancún, Mexico, earlier this month. But they are also likely to proceed more equitably.

As the WTO's 148 members brace for their next session, now scheduled for December, it is already clear that the sudden emergence of a coalition of 22 developing nations has turned the negotiating landscape between rich and poor countries into one that more closely resembles a level playing field.

For now, the Group of 22 intends to remain focused on the opening of global markets for farm products - the issue that divided rich and poor at Cancún and prompted the group to walk out on Sept. 14. Viewed more broadly, however, the "G-22" reflects the increasing assertiveness of developing nations - not only in the WTO but in other multilateral organizations, including the UN.

"It's too early to tell what the G-22's larger agenda will be, or even if we will have one," says Rubens Barbosa, Brazil's ambassador to Washington and a prime mover behind the group's formation. "But the political, economic, and trade circumstances are different now. There's a new balance of power, and the US and the European Union are finally going to have to face us."

Why? Or what?

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WANNA TAKE THE LEAK STORY OFF THE FRONT PAGE?:

As reform falters, Syrian elite tighten grip: Confidence in President Bashar al-Assad has dropped as familiar players amass more power (Nicholas Blanford, 9/30/03, The Christian Science Monitor)

When Mohammed Naji al-Otari was sentenced to several months in prison for corruption in the mid-1980s, most residents of this city in northern Syria assumed that his political career was over.

They were wrong. Last week, Mr. Otari was appointed prime minister of a new government in Damascus, pledging to stamp out the rampant corruption that continues to stifle economic growth and hamper much sought-after political reforms.

Otari's appointment and the composition of his 31-member cabinet - which proportionately contains more members of the ruling Baath Party than the previous government - has come as a blow to reformers and Syrian human rights activists as well as ordinary Syrians. There is a palpable sense of disillusionment here as hopes of tangible political and economic reform fail to materialize. Faith in Bashar al-Assad, Syria's youthful president, is being replaced by a sullen resentment at his apparent inability to curb the excesses of the powerful and super-rich clique of regime leaders.

Although there is little prospect of significant domestic instability in the near future, cracks in the 40-year-old Baathist edifice are beginning to appear. And analysts, economists, and diplomats believe that unless a concerted effort is made to usher in a genuine and effective reform program, the country could be heading for serious trouble in the long run.

Now would be an excellent time to challenge Baby Assad so forcefully over Syria's role in Lebanon and supporting terror that he either has to back down and be so humiliated as to be quite possibly fatally weakened or else respond and provide us with a pretext for regime change.

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DEMOCRATS CHOOSE A TARGET:

Bush '04 Readying for One Democrat, Not 10 (RICHARD W. STEVENSON and ADAM NAGOURNEY, 9/29/03)

President Bush's political advisers have set in motion an aggressive re-election machine, building a national network of get-out-the-vote workers and amassing a pile of cash for a blanket advertising campaign expected to begin around the time Democrats settle on their candidate early next year, party officials said.

Mr. Bush's senior advisers, in interviews last week, repeatedly described the Democratic field as unusually weak and divided, providing an important if temporary cushion for Mr. Bush. [...]

The decision to delay the start of advertising until about the time the Democrats settle on a nominee is a rejection of what had been a central element of President Bill Clinton's re-election campaign. Mr. Clinton began advertising 16 months before Election Day, in an effort to define the election before the Republicans chose an opponent.

Republicans said that would be a waste of money, given the battle taking place among the Democrats. Instead, aides to Mr. Bush said, their campaign would begin spending when a Democratic nominee starts to emerge from the primary battle, probably battered and very likely almost broke.

The biggest difference between the positions of Mr. Bush now and Mr. Clinton then is that, especially in light of the 1994 midterm, the latter could barely be certain of holding together as much of his Democratic coalition as had voted for him in '96, whereas no one who voted for George W. Bush in '00 is going anywhere. He can fight the re-election out on the Democrats' turf.

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NOW THIS SHOULD BE PAY-PER-VIEW (THE BIG BANG IN PYONGYANG?):

NORTH KOREA: ON THE BORDERLINE: Part 1: Soldiers head for the frontier (Alan Fung. 9/30/03, Asia Times)

Recently, reports have been surfacing about extraordinary movements along the border between China and North Korea. On September 14, Hong Kong's Sing Tao Daily carried a report that up to 150,000 People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops had been deployed on the border, replacing local armed police. On September 15 Kong Quan, spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, released a statement that the PLA troops were taking on responsibility for defense of the border as a normal adjustment that was part of China's efforts to unify border control. At the same time, Ta Kung Pao newspaper, the mainland's mouthpiece in Hong Kong, carried a series of reports that there was no large-scale deployment along the border. Its journalists had paid visits to various towns along border and found no illicit crossings of the border. Everything, it reported, seemed to be normal along the border. What is really happening along the Sino-North Korean border? Asia Times Online has dispatched correspondents to the scene to dig out the truth, and this is the first of a series of their reports.

Remember that old saying: when totalitarian dictatorships have a fall out we all win.

Funny, isn't it, how W's stupid approch to N. Korea has now been adopted by all the other players, No more pandering to Pyongyang (Stephen Blank, 9/30/03, Asia Times)

Japan's decision to bring North Korea's nuclear proliferation to the United Nations for debate and resolution marks another significant development in the saga of Pyongyang's nuclearization. Not only does it signify Japan's final loss of patience with North Korea's brinkmanship and nuclear threats, it also represents in more prosaic terms a Japanese effort, no doubt supported by at least some of the other states involved, to call North Korea's bluff.

This, frankly, is unprecedented in the record of crises stemming from North Korean nuclearization. Normally it is North Korea that has pushed its interlocutors to the brink, not the other way around.

One can only wish that the Clnton admiitration had stood up to N. Korea ten years ago.

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WHY SHOULD THE BRITS HAVE ALL THE FUN?:

U.S. probes leak of CIA agent's identity (Barbara Slavin, 9/28/2003, USA TODAY)

The Justice Department is investigating a CIA complaint that White House officials leaked the name of a CIA officer in an apparent effort to punish her husband and stifle criticism of the U.S. case for war in Iraq.

Joseph Wilson, the husband of the officer, is a former ambassador to Iraq who angered the Bush administration in July by asserting that the White House knew when Bush made statements about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in Africa that the evidence was dubious.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice confirmed that the Justice Department was looking into a complaint from CIA Director George Tenet that White House officials had leaked the name and occupation of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. [...]

The Washington Post quoted an administration official Sunday as saying two White House officials phoned at least six journalists and disclosed the name and occupation of Wilson's wife. Novak printed the name July 14 and said Wilson, a critic of Bush policy on Iraq, had been sent by the CIA to Africa after his wife suggested it.

Eight days earlier, Wilson, writing in The New York Times, revealed that he had traveled to Niger in February 2002 to investigate reports that Saddam's regime had sought to purchase yellowcake, a form of uranium that can be enriched to produce nuclear weapons. Wilson, who was the top Africa expert on President Clinton's National Security Council, concluded that the reports were based on false information.

Whoever leaked the name is going to have to resign, but given the recent history of administrations leaking about their enemies, no prosecution seems likely. Meanwhile, revenge would appear to be a dubious motive here; more likely is that Ambassador Wilson was seen as a tool of CIA, which was opposed to the war, and folks in the White House thought his at least marital ties to the Agency were the key to understanding his report. He tried to play hardball and had it played back, it would appear inappropriately.

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THE DEMOCRATS' SEASON OF DREAD BEGINS:

Poll: Calif. set to oust Davis (John Ritter, 9/29/03, USA TODAY)

California voters are ready to fire Gov. Gray Davis and replace him with actor and political novice Arnold Schwarzenegger, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll finds.

A week before the vote on recalling the two-term Democrat, 63% of probable voters say they will vote to remove him from office. Three-quarters are unhappy with his job performan

Schwarzenegger, a Republican who is making his first run for elective office, captures 40% of the vote in the poll. His closest pursuer, Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, receives 25%.

In a normal election you'd expect the supporters of the subsidiary candidates to come home to the two main parties on election day--in the same way Ralph Nader's support collapsed on Election Day 2000--but this is California and a Recall election, so it's anything but normal. Still, it does not seem possible that in such a heavily Democratic state the annointed candidate could possibly poll under about 40-45% in the actual election.

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- - - :

Cultural movement kindles interest of secular Jews (Cathy Lynn Grossman, 9/29/03, USA TODAY)

Nearly 200 secular humanistic Jews here will gather this week to honor the culture and values of their people.

Minus God.

Like Jews worldwide, they are marking the High Holy Days. Saturday was Rosh Hashana, and Oct. 6 is Yom Kippur.

But they will not pray.

"We don't talk about God. Judaism is more than a religion," says Judi Gladstone, founder of the Secular Jewish Circle of Puget Sound.

The group is part of the national Society for Secular Humanistic Judaism, founded by Rabbi Sherwin Wine in 1963 with the creation of its first synagogue, the Birmingham (Mich.) Temple near Detroit.

Wine, now retired, cites research showing nearly half of all U.S. Jews call themselves secular. About 40,000 are affiliated with congregations linked to Wine's group or the parallel Congress for Secular Jewish Organizations.

Wine believes they are the future of the Jewish people. "Our focus is on how we, as Jewish human beings, can live an ethical life of courage with greater strength and compassion."

Like Caffeine-Free Diet Coke, it raises the question: why bother? If you're trying to reconnect with Jewish culture and live more ethical lives you won't achieve either end without God.

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HE BROUGHT THE LIGHT OF SCRUTINY:

Elia Kazan, Influential Director, Dies at 94 (MERVYN ROTHSTEIN, 9/28/03, NY Times)

Elia Kazan, the immigrant child of a Greek rug merchant who became one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 94.

Mr. Kazan's achievements in theater and cinema helped define the American experience for more than a generation. For Broadway, his legendary productions included "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Death of a Salesman." His movie classics included "On the Waterfront" and "East of Eden."

To many critics, he was the best director of American actors in stage and screen history, discovering Marlon Brando, James Dean and Warren Beatty and redefining the craft of film acting. In 1953 the critic Eric Bentley wrote that "the work of Elia Kazan means more to the American theater than that of any current writer."

Mr. Kazan was a founder and longtime co-director of the Actors Studio; a founder with Robert Whitehead of the first repertory theater at Lincoln Center; a member of the fabled Group Theater in the 1930's; the favorite director of a generation of new American playwrights, including the two most important, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller; and in his later years a best-selling novelist.

He received best-director Tony Awards for his work on two of Mr. Miller's plays, "All My Sons" (1947) and "Death of a Salesman" (1949), as well as for Archibald MacLeish's "J. B." (1959).

In Hollywood, seven of Mr. Kazan's films won a total of 20 Academy Awards. He won best-director Oscars for "Gentleman's Agreement," a 1947 indictment of anti-Semitism, and "On the Waterfront" in 1954. "On the Waterfront," a searing depiction of venality and corruption on the New Jersey docks, won eight Oscars.

Mr. Kazan also received an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1999. The lifetime achievement award was controversial because in 1952 Mr. Kazan angered many of his friends and colleagues when he acknowledged before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of the Communist Party from 1934 to 1936 and gave the committee the names of eight other party members. He had previously refused to do so, and his naming of names prompted many people in the arts, including those who had never been Communists, to excoriate him for decades.

Asked why he had identified others, he cited a "specious reasoning which has silenced many liberals" that ran like this: "You may hate the Communists, but you must not attack them or expose them, because if you do you are attacking the right to hold unpopular opinions."

"I'd had every good reason to believe the party should be driven out of its many hiding places and into the light of scrutiny, but I'd never said anything because it would be called `red-baiting,' " he wrote years later. "The `horrible, immoral thing' that I did I did out of my own true self."

Completely fitting for a great artist, Mr. Kazan had the last word in the naming names dustup with his magnificent film, On the Waterfront, an artwork so powerful that even those who were on the side of the murderers and goons in real life had to acknowledge its core truth: that the exposure of evil is more important than "loyalty" to one's fellows in a ciminal enterprise. Long after the names of all the blacklisted and those who testified and those named in things like the Venona transcripts are forgotten, two testaments to the time will endure: Whittaker Chambers's Witness and Mr. Kazan's Waterfront.

MORE:
-Elia Kazan (kirjasto)
-Elia Kazan (Wikipedia)
-Elia Kazan (PBS: American Masters)
-Elia Kazan (Spartacus School)

-Elia Kazan: Postage Paid (Modern Times)
-ARTICLE: Hollywood protest at Kazan's Oscar (Tom Brook, February 22, 1999, BBC)
-Washington Post: Academy Awards 1999
-ESSAY: The Legacy of the Anti-Communist Liberal Intellectuals (Ronald Radosh, Partisan Review)
-ESSAY: Elia Kazan's Towering Presence (Larry P. Arnn, Claremont Precepts)
-ESSAY: Elia Kazan: Moral Hero: Kazan should be applauded for defending individual rights by testifying against Hollywood’s communists. (Robert W. Tracinski, Ad Hoc Committee for Naming Names)
-ESSAY: Justice for Elia Kazan (Glenn Woiceshyn, March 1, 1999, Capitalism Magazine)
-ESSAY: Naming Names (Thomas Sowell, 3/19/99, Jewish World Review)
-ESSAY: A Different Waterfront (Paul Greenburg, 3/9/99, Jewish World Review)
-ESSAY: Kazan's Oscar: Not Too Late (L. Brent Bozell III, January 25, 1999)
-ESSAY: Kazan and Miller: Long, Bitter Debate From the '50's: Views of Kazan and His Critics (Richard Bernstein, May 3, 1988, NY Times)
-ESSAY: Why Elia should get his Oscar: moral and political judgments of Elia Kazan should not overshadow his art at this month's Academy Awards (Arthur Miller, March 6, 1999, The Guardian)
-ESSAY: The Forgotten Oscar (Victor Navasky, March 18, 1999, The Nation)
-ESSAY: Blacklist and Backstory: Hollywood's unexpected embrace of Elia Kazan (Jacob Weisberg, January 31, 1999, Slate)
-ESSAY: Why Elia Kazan should not receive an Oscar: By bestowing a special honor on the director, who already has won two Oscars, the academy is glossing over history. (Steve Erickson, March 1999, Salon)
-ESSAY: Hollywood honors Elia Kazan. Filmmaker and informer. (David Walsh, 20 February 1999, World Socialist Web Site)
-ESSAY: And the Winner Is -- HUAC: Elia Kazan will have the statue, but the victory belongs to the blacklist (Christopher Trumbo , 3/19/99, LA Weekly)
-ARCHIVES: READINGS IN THE AMERICAN 1950S
-REVIEW ESSAY: Seeing Red: Reviews of Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left by Ronald Radosh, A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left, by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, and Red Scared!: The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture by Michael Barson and Steven Heller.(Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, Claremont Review of Books)

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THE GENERAL DEBATES HIMSELF:

Looks like Clark should go back to basic training (Clarence Page, September 28, 2003, Chicago Tribune)

Will the real Wesley Clark please stand up and throw his helmet in the ring?

Such is the question I hear welling up from the masses as the retired general and fledgling Democratic presidential candidate politically evolves right in front of our eyes. As he figures out what he believes in, Gen. Clark sounds at times like Gen. Chameleon, recoloring himself to suit his surroundings.

In his first debate last week in New York with the nine other Democratic candidates, for example, Clark was asked to explain why he had been a speaker at the May 11, 2001, Lincoln Day fundraising dinner of the Arkansas Republican Party, where Clark gave glowing praise to Ronald Reagan and President Bush.

Clark acknowledged his politics had changed, then he backed that up by criticizing Bush as a man who had "recklessly cut taxes ... recklessly took us into Iraq" and practices "neither conservatism nor compassion."

Then with the warm and confident smile of a man who had just come home, he declared to the audience, "I am pro-choice, I am pro-affirmative action, I'm pro-environment, pro-health [care]. That's why I'm proud to be a Democrat."

Clark handled the question far more smoothly than his flip-flop a week earlier. The New York Times reported that he called out "Mary, help!" for his press aide Mary Jacoby when reporters peppered him with questions about how he would have voted on the congressional resolution to authorize invading Iraq.

Clark's reply, "On balance, I probably would have voted for it," startled and angered anti-war Democrats, forcing Clark to do a U-turn the next day: "I would never have voted for war." Ah, well, even a Rhodes Scholar who graduated first in his class at West Point can find himself sent right back to basic training when he runs for president.

Looks like the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party may not roll over for the General, which will afford us the great pleasure of watching the Democrats destroy a military man (even if a lousy one), while trying to convince the American people that they can be trusted with our military defense.

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SAME AS IT EVER WAS:

ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT: BROADCAST FROM THE OVAL ROOM OF THE WHITE HOUSE,
NATIONALLY, AND OVER A WORLD-WIDE HOOKUP (DECEMBER 9, 1941 -- 10:00 P.M.)

MY FELLOW AMERICANS:

The sudden criminal attacks perpetrated by the Japanese in the Pacific provide the climax of a decade of international immorality.

Powerful and resourceful gangsters have banded together to make war upon the whole human race. Their challenge has now been flung at the United States of America. [...]

The course that Japan has followed for the past ten years in Asia has paralleled the course of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and in Africa. Today, it has become far more than a parallel. It is actual collaboration so well calculated that all the continents of the world, and all the oceans, are now considered by the Axis strategists as one gigantic battlefield. [...]

I repeat that the United States can accept no result save victory, final and complete. Not only must the shame of Japanese treachery be wiped out, but the sources of international brutality, wherever they exist, must be absolutely and finally broken.

In my Message to the Congress yesterday I said that we "will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again." In order to achieve that certainty, we must begin the great task that is before us by abandoning once and for all the illusion that we can ever again isolate ourselves from the rest of humanity.

In these past few years -- and, most violently, in the past three days -- we have learned a terrible lesson.

It is our obligation to our dead -- it is our sacred obligation to their children and to our children -- that we must never forget what we have learned.

And what we have learned is this:

There is no such thing as security for any nation -- or any individual -- in a world ruled by the principles of gangsterism. There is no such thing as impregnable defense against powerful aggressors who sneak up in the dark and strike without warning.

We have learned that our ocean-girt hemisphere is not immune from severe attack -- that we cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on any map any more.

We may acknowledge that our enemies have performed a brilliant feat of deception, perfectly timed and executed with great skill. It was a thoroughly dishonorable deed, but we must face the fact that modern warfare as conducted in the Nazi manner is a dirty business. We don't like it -- we didn't want to get in it -- but we are in it and we're going to fight it with everything we've got.

I do not think any American has any doubt of our ability to administer proper punishment to the perpetrators of these crimes. Your Government knows that for weeks Germany has been telling Japan that if Japan did not attack the United States, Japan would not share in dividing the spoils with Germany when peace came. She was promised by Germany that if she came in she would receive the complete and perpetual control of the whole of the Pacific area -- and that means not only the Ear East, but also all of the Islands in the Pacific, and also a stranglehold on the west coast of North, Central and South America. We know also that Germany and Japan are conducting their military and naval operations in accordance with a joint plan. That plan considers all peoples and nations which are not helping the Axis powers as common enemies of each and every one of the Axis powers.

That is their simple and obvious grand strategy. And that is why the American people must realize that it can be matched only with similar grand strategy. We must realize for example that Japanese successes against the United States in the Pacific are helpful to German operations in Libya; that any German success against the Caucasus is inevitably an assistance to Japan in her operations against the Dutch East Indies; that a German attack against Algiers or Morocco opens the way to a German attack against South America and the Canal.

On the other side of the picture, we must learn also to know that guerilla warfare against the Germans in, let us say Serbia or Norway, helps us; that a successful Russian offensive against the Germans helps us; and that British successes on land or sea in any part of the world strengthen our hands.

Remember always that Germany and Italy, regardless of any formal declaration of war, consider themselves at war with the United States at this moment just as much as they consider themselves at war with Britain or Russia. And Germany puts all the other Republics of the Americas into the same category of enemies. The people of our sister Republics of this Hemisphere can be honored by that fact.

The true goal we seek is far above and beyond the ugly field of battle. When we resort to force, as now we must, we are determined that this force shall be directed toward ultimate good as well as against immediate evil. We Americans are not destroyers -- we are builders.

We are now in the midst of a war, not for conquest, not for vengeance, but for a world in which this nation, and all that this nation represents, will be safe for our children. We expect to eliminate the danger from Japan, but it would serve us ill if we accomplished that and found that the rest of the world was dominated by Hitler and Mussolini.

So we are going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that follows.

And in the difficult hours of this day -- through dark days that may be yet to come -- we will know that the vast majority of the members of the human race are on our side. Many of them are fighting with us. All of them are praying for us. But, in representing our cause, we represent theirs as well -- our hope and their hope for liberty under God.

Three things leap out about this speech:

(1) If you're education was anything like mine--at utterly conventional public schools and a liberal arts college--you'll have heard innumerable times that Hitler's declaration of war on the United States was a totally unnecessary, almost deranged, blunder, that came out of the blue. In fact, it followed this address by FDR, which all but officially declared war on Germany.

(2) Given that there was practically no coordination between Japan and Germany and that we well knew that to be the case, we might consider this FDR's own Iraq speech, overstating the case against an obvious enemy of freedom in order to drag a reluctant, even dubious, into war with his chosen target, rather than theirs.

(3) We can probably go out on a limb and say that no one ran editorials the next day complaining about his references to evil or about his closing line being too religious.

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THE FINAL BATTLE WITH THE TALIBAN AND AL QAEDA WILL OCCUR IN PAKISTAN:

Inside the Islamic Mafia: Bernard-Henri Lévy exposes Daniel Pearl's killers. (Christopher Hitchens, September 25, 2003, Slate)

I remember laughing out loud, in what was admittedly a mirthless fashion, when Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, one of Osama Bin Laden's most heavy-duty deputies, was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Straining to think of an apt comparison, I fail badly. But what if, say, the Unabomber had been found hiding out in the environs of West Point or Fort Bragg? Rawalpindi is to the Pakistani military elite what Sandhurst is to the British, or St Cyr used to be to the French. It's not some boiling slum: It's the manicured and well-patrolled suburb of the officer class, very handy for the capital city of Islamabad if you want to mount a coup, and the site of Flashman's Hotel if you are one of those who enjoys the incomparable imperial adventure-stories of George MacDonald Fraser. Who, seeking to evade capture, would find a safe house in such a citadel?

Yet, in the general relief at the arrest of this outstanding thug, that aspect of the matter drew insufficient attention. Many words of praise were uttered, in official American circles, for the exemplary cooperation displayed by our gallant Pakistani allies. But what else do these allies have to trade, except al-Qaida and Taliban suspects, in return for the enormous stipend they receive from the U.S. treasury? Could it be that, every now and then, a small trade is made in order to keep the larger trade going?

One hesitates to utter thoughts like these, but they recur continually as one reads Bernard-Henri Lévy's latest book: Who Killed Daniel Pearl? Everybody remembers—don't they?—the ghastly video put out on the Web by Pearl's kidnappers and torturers. It's the only live-action footage we possess of the ritual slaughter of a Jew, preceded for effect by his coerced confession of his Jewishness. Pearl was lured into a trap by the promise of a meeting with a senior religious demagogue, who might or might not have shed light on the life of the notorious "shoe-bomber," because of whom millions of us must take off our footwear at American airports every day, as if performing the pieties required for entering a mosque.

What a sick joke all this is, if you study Lévy's book with care. If you ever suspected that the Pakistani ISI (or Interservices Intelligence) was in a shady relationship with the Taliban and al-Qaida forces, this book materializes the suspicion and makes the very strong suggestion that Pearl was murdered because he was doing his job too well, not because he was a naive idealist who got into the wrong car at the wrong time. His inquiries had at least the potential for exposing the Pakistani collusion and double-dealing with jihad forces, in much the same pattern the Saudi Arabian authorities have been shown to follow—by keeping two sets of books, in other words, and by exhibiting only one set to Americans.

In case you've ever wondered why the India-Israel-America axis is the most important and under-reported story in the world today.

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COST/BENEFIT, NO ANALYSIS:

Review of Environment Rules Finds Benefits Outweigh Costs (JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr., 9/28/03, NY Times)

The White House office in charge of reviewing federal regulations has reported that the benefits of some major environmental rules appear to exceed the costs by several times and that the net benefits may be even larger than previously acknowledged. [...]

The report included only a handful of the 4,135 final rules published in the Federal Register during the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, 2002. Its principal focus was on three rules issued by the Energy Department, the Transportation Department and the E.P.A. They imposed estimated annual costs of $1.6 billion to $2 billion, but produced estimated annual benefits of $2.4 billion to $6.5 billion.

If they save that much money we might be inclined to keep them, but this story is a tad cryptic, no?

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THE 1ST ANNUAL BROTHERS JUDD CALIFORNIA RECALL PROGNOSTATHON:

Here's the deal:

You pick the %'s of the "Yes" and "No" votes; the % of the vote that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Cruz Bustamante will each get; and, as a tie breaker, the % of eligible voters who will turn out on October 7th.

We'll award whoever comes closest a copy of the magnificent new Illustrated version of James M. McPherson's Pulitzer-winning Battle Cry of Freedom and the runner-up a hot--off-the-presses paperback copy of Rick Atkinson's Pulitzer-winning Army at Dawn (both courtesy of our friends at FSB Associates).

Please go to this page to enter your picks.

MORE:
-Here are he results so far
-Here's the latest poll in pdf form.

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LESS PEOPLE THAN YOU'D FIND AT A PEACE MARCH:

Few catch glimpse of Bustamante (VICTORIA MANLEY, 9/28/03, Monterey Sun)

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante didn't have time for small talk when he dropped into Salinas on his campaign trail Saturday. Not that there were many who seemed to care.

Bustamante, who has mostly run on a "no on recall, yes on Bustamante" campaign for California governor, visited with a small group at a private fund-raiser in a home south of Salinas.

Apparently, anyone not willing to pay to speak with Bustamante was out of luck. The politician arrived in a private jet at Salinas Municipal Airport at 4 p.m., and within minutes of landing was whisked into a black sedan.

He arrived around 4:40 p.m. at the Alisal Road home of Jose L. Alcala, owner of Shorty's Portable Toilets. The chauffeured car was driven to the rear of a roped-off driveway, where Bustamante was escorted to the back door of the house and greeted by paid guests.

The visit to Salinas was the first, and likely the last, for Bustamante while on the recall campaign trail.

Despite assurances that he would address the public and talk to the press, Bustamante was swiftly escorted to rear entrances. Not once did he greet onlookers to answer their questions.

Then again, onlookers were few. Aside from mostly local reporters and a half-dozen Arnold Schwarzenegger supporters, no one seemed to notice or care that Bustamante was in town.

If he weren't a Democrat in CA, you'd have to stick a fork in him.

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OBLIGATORY FASCIST REFERENCE OF THE DAY:

No wonder America has so many enemies (ERIC MARGOLIS, 9/28/03, Toronto Sun)

President Bill Clinton was impeached by a Republican-controlled Congress for lying about sex. President George W. Bush and aides lied the United States into a stupid, unnecessary colonial war that has so far killed more than 305 Americans and seriously wounded more than 1,400. It has also cost many thousands of Iraqi dead, and $1 billion US weekly.

Lying about sex is an impeachable offence; lying the nation into war apparently is not.

I was no Clinton fan, but give me his iffy morals any day over Bush's Mussolini-like strutting.

Harold Meyerson calls it a Jefferson Davis strut.

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BOOKNOTES:

Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson (C-SPAN, September 28, 2003 , 8 & 11 pm)

Two themes dominate most of what has been written about Mexicans in California, and I have tried to avoid both. On the one extreme, we hear scary statistics that "prove" California will become part of Mexico by the sheer fact of immigration. On the other, we are told that either nothing much is changing, or that what alterations are occurring in the fabric of our social life are all positive. The truth, as always, is in between: California is passing through tumultuous times, but there is no reason to anticipate that it must become a de facto colony of Mexico. More importantly, I do not believe all that much in historical determinism—the idea that broad social, cultural and economic factors make the future course of events inevitable and render what individuals do in the here and now more or less irrelevant.

My main argument instead is that the future of the state—and the nation too, as regards the matter of immigration—is entirely in the hands of its current residents. California will become exactly what its people in the present generation choose to make it. So it is high time for honest discussion, without fear of recrimination and intimidation. How else are we ever going to sort out the various choices that will decide our collective fate—especially at a perilous time when we find ourselves at war with those who kill us as Americans regardless of accent, skin color or origin? That many in the business community will consider what follows naïve or dub me a protectionist/isolationist worries me as little as the critical voices I am sure to hear from an academic elite whose capital remains largely separatist identities and self-interest. Both parties, after all, did their part to get us into this predicament and have so far escaped accountability for the harm they have done.

We have extensive links to more by and about Mr. Hanson and his writings following our review of his earlier title, The Soul of Battle.

MORE:
-BOOK SITE: Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson (Encounter Books)
-ESSAY: Do We Want Mexifornia? (Victor Davis Hanson, Spring 2002, City Journal)
-INTERVIEW: Such a Lovely Place: Talking with Victor Davis Hanson about the future of California — and the United States. (A Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez, 6/11/03, National Review)
-ESSAY:Hanson on “Mexifornia”: Good – But Not Good Enough (Sam Francis, June 19, 2003, V-Dare)
-REVIEW: of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson (Ken Masugi, Claremont Review of Books)
-REVIEW: of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson (Emily Cochran, Townhall.com)
-REVIEW: of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson (Paul A. Garcia, Fresno Bee)
-REVIEW: of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson (John Fonte, Hudson Institute)

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WHY WE FIGHT?:

Now Is the Time to Teach Democracy: How can we defend our democratic way of life if we don't even understand it? (Diane Ravitch, Winter 2002, Hoover Digest)

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting at my kitchen table, enjoying a second cup of coffee and reading the morning paper. A friend called to tell me that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. I live about three blocks from the waterfront in Brooklyn, directly across the river from Lower Manhattan, so I ran to the harbor. Just as I arrived, the second plane crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center. Along with about six others, I stood there wordless as we watched huge balls of flame and smoke erupting from the two buildings. On that bright blue, cloudless morning, the air in the harbor was filled as far as the eye could see with tiny bits of paper, like confetti in a ticker-tape parade, the paper blown off the
desks of people who worked in the upper floors of the burning buildings. All that day, ashes and soot rained down on my neighborhood. Cars were coated with the airborne ash, and a distinctive sickening smell, something akin to burning plastic, permeated the air. Thousands were killed in the conflagration. They were people of all races, religions, ethnicities, and social origins. Most were Americans, some were not. The hundreds of rescuers who died when the buildings collapsed were trying to save human lives, without distinction to anyone's color, beliefs, or national origin. By day's end, New Yorkers were lining up at emergency centers to give blood or to offer supplies or to volunteer in any way that seemed useful. The outpouring of volunteers was so large that many were turned away. So much for those who have decried the decline of civic participation in the United States. Since the mass murders, educators have been opining about how we must change what we teach our children. We must teach tolerance, they say, as if our children were somehow responsible for what happened because their teachers had failed to teach them tolerance. Of course, we must teach tolerance and we do teach tolerance, but we must not teach children to tolerate those who hijack commercial jetliners and kill innocent victims. We must not teach children to tolerate fanaticism, be it political or religious. Perhaps we could engage in civic dialogues with educators in the countries that the terrorists came from, to share what we know about teaching tolerance. Other educators have said that the events of September 11 demonstrate the necessity for a multicultural curriculum. Again, the implication is that this unprecedented atrocity was caused by a failure in the schools' curriculum, rather than by heartless, inhumane terrorists. [...]

I suggest that what our schools must do is to teach young people the virtues and blessings of our democratic system of government. Our ability to defend what we hold dear depends on our knowledge and understanding of it. If we value a free society, we must know about its
origins and its evolution. If we value our rights and freedoms, we must understand how we got them and what it would mean to live in a society that did not have them. To be sure, our democratic practices are not universal, even though almost all of them were clearly articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was endorsed by the United Nations in 1948. It is true that there are many societies that treat women as beasts of burden, many societies that do not choose their leaders, and many societies where the government and religious authorities decide who is allowed to speak and write. There are societies where free public education does not exist, where homosexuals are rounded up and imprisoned, and where our Western legal concepts of due process are unknown.

Some of these societies hate us because they hate our way of life. They think it is decadent. They think we are decadent because we protect freedom of speech, allowing people to read, say, and write whatever they want; because we protect freedom of religion, allowing "truth" and
"untruth" to be taught without any regulation; because we grant equal rights to men and women, allowing women to be educated to the same extent as men and to advance in the same professions. Certainly other generations of Americans understood that these rights and freedoms were part of the American way of life. The members of the "greatest generation," which saved the world from fascism and Nazism, knew that they were defending these rights and freedoms. The Cold War generation that helped to bring down Soviet totalitarianism understood the importance of these rights and freedoms. We do not know what sacrifices will be required of us in the months and years ahead. What we should know is the importance of teaching our children about democracy, freedom, human rights, the principle that every person is equal before the law, and the value of the individual. These are ideas with a long history. Our children need to know them.

It's inherently important for citizens to comprehend the Founding and the ideas that undergird America, but it's also important not to turn history into fantasy. Americans generally had no idea why we were fighting the Germans in WWII and wanted no part of it. Killing the Japanese was popular at home, but really only for racial reasons. When Ike toured Buchenwald, the first concentration camp to be liberated, he snarled at a G.I.: "Still having trouble hating them?" Tolerance and freedom and the like are lovely ideals, but folks aren't big on going to war for them.

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AT NPR, IT'S ALWAYS 1984:

Advertising Freedom (NPR: On the Media, 9/28/03)

According to a recent poll by the AdCouncil, an overwhelming majority of Americans think that fellow citizens take their freedoms for granted. And so the people who brought you Smokey Bear and the crash test dummies have taken up the cause with their latest series of TV, radio, and print PSAs. The latest installment in the "Campaign for Freedom" features immigrants who have fled from repressive regimes. AdCouncil President & CEO Peggy Conlon speaks with Bob about the campaign.

So host Bob Garfield asks about one ad in particular where in a dystopic America a man tries checking a book out of a library but is carried off by federal agents, "which is ironic because under the Patriot Act the same exact thing is happening right now in the real America." Mind you, this is a program devoted to keeping track of the uses and abuses of the media.

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WORD TO YOUR MOTHER:

Mother Angelica’s Empire of the Airwaves: Kathryn Jean Lopez tracks the 20-year growth of Catholic broadcast giant (Crisis, July/Aug 2001)

Hanceville, Alabama, is in the heart of the Bible Belt, in a state with a population that is less than 3 percent Catholic. Turn onto Old Country Road in this northern Alabama town, and you'll likely see more than a few Southern Baptist churches as you drive along. But
soon the religious landscape changes: For a mile or so, just about every house displays a statue of the Virgin Mary in the front yard. Or a sign indicating that the dwelling is named after a saint and is a guest house for visiting pilgrims. Or a "For Sale" placard naming an astronomical price for the privilege of residing in an area that lives and breathes Catholicism.

Finally, you drive along a seemingly endless white picket fence framing fertile, farmable land, and you see what looks incongruously like a 13th-century abbey, surmounted by an enormous Italian Romanesque church with a red-brick campanile. Its name: the Our Lady of the Angels
Monastery, housing the Poor Clare Nuns of Perpetual Adoration, members of a 147-year-old order of cloistered Franciscan sisters in traditional black-and-white garb. The church has its own name: the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, where the nuns spend their days in the presence of the Eucharist, displayed in an eight-foot monstrance.

You're in the land of Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation, P.C.P.A., the 78-year-old nun who brought the Poor Clares to Alabama as their abbess (in 1962), built the Hanceville monastery (it opened in 1999; see "Mother's Magnificent Temple" in the September 2000 issue of Crisis), and helped turn this pocket of Alabama into a veritable Catholic theme park. Mother Angelica is best known as the founder of the Eternal World Television Network (EWTN)--with just under 300 employees, an annual budget of about $29 million, and an audience of about 66 million households in 43 countries, the largest Catholic cable network in the nation.

On August 15, EWTN will celebrate its 20th birthday--two decades of skyrocketing growth since Mother Angelica started it in 1981 with just $200 as a single television station operating out of the garage of her previous monastery in Irondale, Alabama, a Birmingham suburb some 50 miles from Hanceville. Irondale is still the home of EWTN's headquarters, and although Mother Angelica retired as chairman of its board last year, she still makes the drive there twice a week to tape her popular Mother Angelica Live television show in front of a studio audience.

Many Catholics idolize Mother Angelica as a media mogul of faith, an up-to-date version of the video-savvy Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen of the 1950s who did Sheen one better by building her own broadcasting empire. They refer to her reverently as "Mother," and some have moved to Hanceville just to be near her, as the front-yard statues around the monastery indicate.

Perhaps just as many other Catholics can't stand her, finding her needlessly truculent and all too ready to pick quarrels with those who strike her as less than orthodox in their beliefs. Whatever the reactions, Mother Angelica may well be, as Time magazine once described her, "the most influential Roman Catholic woman in America."

The tv remote control offers no more jarring experience than to stumble upon Mother Angelica in the midst of music videos, cartoons, and sports shows. They do a nice program on G.K. Chesterton.

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DOES ANYONE EDIT SLATE?:

Republicans for Hillary, Part 2: Why conservatives want her to run. (Timothy Noah, September 23, 2003, Slate)

Yesterday, Chatterbox demonstrated that the "Draft Hillary" movement consists almost entirely of conservative Republicans. Liberals are largely indifferent to the idea of Hillary running, and a few oppose it.

Never Say Never: Why the Hillary buzz won’t go away (Eleanor Clift, Sept. 26, 2003, Newsweek)

However many times Hillary Clinton denies she is running in 2004, the buzz continues about her possible candidacy. We always love the candidate who is outside the process. The entry last week of Gen. Wesley Clark into the race only fed the rumors that the Clintons are orchestrating the primaries behind the scenes with an eye to reserving a place for Hillary and extending Bill’s legacy.

The confluence of circumstances is almost too delicious. Clark is the vice president Clinton never had. He’s from Arkansas, a Rhodes scholar and he performed heroic service in Vietnam and won a war in Kosovo. With Clark in the White House, the Clinton era returns. If Clark doesn’t live up to his potential on the campaign trail, then Hillary jumps in to save the party.

It’s a tantalizing scenario, and former president Clinton drops enough hints to keep it alive.

We'd like to be the first to welcome Eleanor Clift and Bill Clinton to the ranks of the VRWC, the exclusive domain of the Hillary for President meme according to Mr. Noah.

MORE:
Time for Hillary to fish or cut bait (Bill Press, September 26, 2003)
Hillary Faces Test - Is She a Clinton Who Keeps Pledges? (Mort Kondracke, September 23, 2003)

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DO WE REALLY WANT THEM TO IMITATE CALIFORNIA?:

Candidate Plans 'Democracy Tour' of Afghanistan (LA Times, September 27, 2003)

Badi Badiozamani, one of the 135 people running for governor, has invited four of his fellow candidates to accompany him on a mission to Afghanistan, where they hope to share the lessons from the campaign trail with a country struggling to create democratic institutions.

"I would like to tell them about the democracy we have, that ordinary people can run for any position," said Badiozamani, a nonpartisan candidate from San Diego who moved to America from Iran in the early 1980s.

He said the trip was being planned under the auspices of the Center for East-West Understanding, which he runs.

Dick Lane, a Democrat from Sunnyvale; Frank Macaluso, a Democrat from Visalia; Lawrence Strauss, a Democrat from Sherman Oaks; and Jon Zellhoefer, a Republican from San Jose, have volunteered for the trip.

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FIGHTING THE ENEMY WITH ONE WING TIED BEHIND OUR BACK (via Mike Daley):

The Terror War Needs Liberal Democrats, Too (Richard Brookhiser, NY Observer)

Why should liberal Democrats interest themselves in the Terror War? One reason I would think is national liberation. Over two decades of political gladiatorship, I have often found liberals taking that side of controversial issues. They wanted the black majority of South Africa to have equal rights. They lost no love on pro-American strong men like Pinochet, Marcos or the Shah. And whatever they felt about the Cold War, they didn’t seem sad when Communism lost. Leonard Bernstein conducted a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Terror War has already burst open jails, real and metaphorical, in two countries. Men in Afghanistan can shave their beards, women who wish to can show their faces. Iraqi soccer players are no longer tortured for missing goals, Kurdish children are no longer stuffed into mass graves.

Indifference to the fate of dusky peoples used to be the property of the right, especially its satirists. The classic expressions of such sentiments are the African farces of Evelyn Waugh, Scoop and Black Mischief, filled with comic savages and their jabbering intelligentsia. (Waugh’s white people don’t come off any better, but it his depiction of the Other that stings.) The Tory view of the world acknowledged that people and cultures are different, and that they cannot be homogenized by mere decrees. But in its extreme form it treated different races as different species, and consigned some to eternal darkness. Liberals should not want to be in that role.

Liberal Democrats’ chief interest in the Terror War, however, should be what it means for us. Ordinary Americans, including ordinary liberal Americans, are precisely what the terrorists and their patrons hate most in the world. The Islamist utopia has no room for minorities, deviants, independent women, religious freedom or intellectual expression. Islamists enforce their tastes with murder on their ascent to power, and with capital punishment once they have achieved it. Secular terrorists in the Muslim world may drop a few clauses of this agenda. Iraqi women could wear skirts; they just couldn’t speak, vote or read.

Paint John Ashcroft as black as you please, and stick demon horns on his head. He will not murder his enemies. If his party loses, he will go home. That is why the proper arena for liberal Democrats who quarrel with him is the ballot box.

Imagine for a moment that Scoop Jackson had to listen to a Democratic Presidential debate. He'd be physically ill.

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QUAGWHAT?:

US army turns over border control to Iraqis (Ireland On Line, 27/09/2003)

The US Army turned over a large stretch of the border separating Iraq from Iran to an American-trained border police force today, for the first time relinquishing control of a sensitive frontier area to the provisional government.

The 210-mile length of frontier running from the edges of Kurdish-controlled territory in the north to a point just southeast of Baghdad is part of a broader effort to give Iraqis more control over their affairs and relieve the US military of the burden of guarding the border.

“They are now controlling the border, we are in oversight mode,” said Lt Col Reggie Allen, commanding officer of the 4th Infantry Division’s 1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry.

Anybody got a dictionary? Quagmire appears not to mean what the Left says it does.

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DAMNED IF THEY DO...:

DEMOCRATIC CONFUSION ON VOUCHERS (Matthew Miller, 9/24/03, Tribune Media Services)

Democrats are prepared to filibuster a Republican plan to spend $13 million to give up to 2000 children in Washington, D.C., a $7,500 school voucher. But Democrats are not planning to filibuster President Bush's plan to spend a fresh $87 biillion in Iraq without rescinding some tax cuts for the wealthy to pay for it.

There is something wrong with this picture.

To say that Democrats have a voucher problem is to understate matters. But because passions run so high on this issue, let me throw in the obligatory caveats. Even though the Democratic mayor of Washington, Anthony Williams, rightly wants this plan passed, it is not a serious test of the voucher concept. A serious test would offer more generous vouchers to most of Washington's 70,000 children, not only a tiny fraction.

Let me also stipulate that Republicans are often evil, and their claim to champion poor children is largely a hoax.

Thank goodness for the qualifiers: "often" and "largely".

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THAT'LL SHOW HIM:

Man guilty of damaging churches (DAN ROZEK, 9/27/03, Chicago Sun-Times)

A Joliet man who authorities said targeted churches because of his hostility to religion pleaded guilty Friday to robbing and vandalizing nine DuPage County churches and religious schools.

During one break-in, 41-year-old Jamie Pytell beheaded and desecrated a statue of Jesus Christ, prosecutors said. He also set small fires during at least two of the burglaries, authorities said. [...]

Pytell confessed during interviews with police to committing the break-ins, telling them that several happened during fits of rage at religious institutions. A law enforcement source said after Pytell was arrested last year that the attacks took place because Pytell "hates religion." [...]

While Jacobs had raised concerns about Pytell's mental state, Pytell was found mentally fit to stand trial in August, although he remains on psychotropic medication while being held in the DuPage County Jail.

Pytell vandalized and burglarized churches of different denominations, including Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist and Christian Fellowship.

One of the most ridiculous, yet widely accepted, stories of recent years concerned the supposedly racially-motivated epidemic of black church burnings. It turns out that there are a series of perfectly logical reasons why churches--predominantly white, predominantly black, and everything in between--are victims of fire. First, the buildings are often old and susceptible to fire of the accidental sort. Second, they're unoccupied and don't have much security so they're inviting targets for vandals. Third, as above, they tend to be the target of mentally-ill people. Many of the unbalanced seem to enjoy expressing their rage at God by lighting his buildings on fire. If such arsons are hate crimes they are not primarily fueled by racial but by religious animus.

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WHAT ABOUT ME?:

Army Chaplain's Arrest Puts Chinese Americans on Edge: : The unanswered questions and media frenzy around the arrest of Capt. James Yee remind Chinese Americans of the charges -- almost all of which were later dropped -- against Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, which they say ruined an innocent man's career. (Andrew Lam, Sep 26, 2003 , Pacific News Service)

Many Chinese Americans are feeling dread in the wake of the arrest of Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain stationed at Fort Lewis Army Base, Wash. The case brings back memories of the prosecution -- some would say persecution -- of Dr. Wen Ho Lee.

Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, was arrested by the FBI in 1999 on espionage charges and found not guilty after months in solitary confinement. President Clinton later apologized to him, though Dr. Lee's career as a scientist was already ruined.

Yee's arrest is as troubling as Dr. Lee's, says Ling Chi Wang, a professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Though not prepared to pass judgment on the case, Wang says that "based on what has been leaked to the media, I smell a rat." The public knows next to nothing about the Yee case other than what the FBI and the military have revealed to the press, he says, much of which "we can safely regard as propaganda and half-truths." [...]

The effect of the arrests of Dr. Lee and other Chinese scientists due to racial profiling, Chan adds, "is that now, few Asians want to join government institutions. How many Chinese will want to go to West Point if they see what's happening to Capt. Yee?"

Phil Ting, director of Asian Law Caucus, is also watching the case with concern. "The New York Times article about Yee insinuates certain amount of guilt already," he says. Ting adds that in some ways, Captain Yee's situation is worse than Dr. Lee's because after 9/11, government power over civilian and military personnel increased. "If it's a closed military tribunal, I wonder if Yee will be getting due process."

Asian Americans are more vulnerable after 9/11, says Zia. "At times of heightened government scrutiny, the clergy are among the first to be rounded up. Faith communities should be especially concerned. Unfortunately for Chaplain Yee, he's facing a double whammy, being Chinese and Muslim." But everyone has a right to a fair and open trial, she says, "to be treated as innocent until proven guilty."

Whether Wen Ho Lee was an actual spy or not, butv what is indisputable is that he engaged in criminal activity and endangered national security. He admits as much. Maybe these folks could find another "martyr".

Meanwhile, that they are mainly worried about themselves in the face of revelations of a potentially disastrous security problem at Guantanamo hardly speaks well of their patriotism.

Potomac Watch: Case shows U.S. vulnerability in Arabic shortage (STEWART M. POWELL, 9/27/03, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER)

The spying charge against an Air Force translator at the terrorist detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, underscores the U.S. government's shortage of Arabic language specialists at a time when the war on terrorism demands their skills.</