PRIORITIZING:

New glimpses of Bush worldview: Bush made major changes to his predecessor's list of foreign policy priorities, as all new administrations do. (Peter Grier and Faye Bowers, 4/01/04, CS Monitor)

[I]n the first months of the Bush administration US diplomacy changed directions, with new items such as withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and the multilateral Kyoto pact on atmospheric emissions moving up the priority list. Bush's first real foreign crisis - recovering a Navy spy plane and crew forced down near China - perhaps confirmed officials' beliefs that big-power politics would be their focus in the months ahead.

But it's probably wrong to portray the Bush team as just a bunch of unreconstructed Cold Warriors. Much of the US national security apparatus remains consistent, president to president, and as Richard Clarke's testimony demonstrates, worry about terrorism was widespread in Washington. The new Bush officials weren't deaf to their fears.

Both National Security Adviser Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, told the 9/11 Commission that they realized the Clinton administration had worked very hard on the Al Qaeda problem, according to a commission report. But they'd accomplished little, and their policies, in Hadley's words, were "out of gas."

So they determined to produce new ones. They asked counterterror chief Clarke for ideas. On March 7, 2001, Stephen Hadley convened an informal meeting of his counterparts from other agencies, to mull over such options as increasing aid to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance. They discussed a new presidential terrorism directive.

"The Bush administration was in the process of developing new approaches ... but it took time," says Robert Pfaltzgraff, an international security expert at Tufts University's Fletcher School.

On Sept. 4, 2001, a foreign-policy principals group chaired by Rice "apparently approved" a draft terrorism directive, according to a 9/11 commission report. Among other things, the directive envisioned an expanded covert action program against Al Qaeda.

It's not something we like to acknowledge with 3,000 fellow citizens dead and buried, but withdrawing from things like the Kyoto, ABM, & ICC treaties was and is more important than terrorism. Al Qaeda can't destroy our way of life; transnationalism can.

---

SAM'S CLUB:

No ‘Choice’: Wal-Mart prepares to bury the left under a mountain of money (Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, 3.31.04, In These Times)

Jim, John, Alice, Sam and Helen may carry the world’s most dangerous genetic markers. They are the Waltons, heirs to the global destructive force called Wal-Mart.

With more than $100 billion in personal assets among them, the five Waltons occupy positions six through 10 in the Forbes billionaires rankings, twice as rich as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the guy at the top. Collectively, they are antisocial malevolence with a last name. These spawn of Bentonville, Arkansas harbor an abiding hatred for the public sphere: business regulatory controls, nondiscrimination laws, wage and workplace safety standards, the social safety net—all of it—as expressed through the operations of their retail empire, which is both the largest employer in the United States and biggest importer of goods made in China. As the Democratic Socialists of America put it: “Wal-Mart is more than just a participant in the low-wage economy: It is the most important single beneficiary of that economy. It uses its economic and political power to extend the scope of the low-wage economy and threatens to extend its business model into other sectors of the economy, undermining the wages of still more workers.”

Such a vast project of political economy is far too complex for four middle-aged children of wealth and the 84-year-old matriarch, Helen. The family’s immediate personal ambitions are more modest: to destroy public education in the United States. To that end the Waltons, through their Walton Family Foundation and in close collaboration with Milwaukee’s Bradley Foundation, literally invented the national school “choice” network and its wedge issue-weapon, vouchers.

It is the existence of the school vouchers “movement” that allows the Bush administration to savage and massively disrupt the nation’s public schools while positing “alternative” forms of education, both vouchers and charter schools that often operate very much like public-funded private schools. “Choice” has become national policy under Bush’s Department of Education, which has doled out more than $75 million to organizations birthed by the Waltons, Bradley and their allies. (See “Funding a Movement” by People for the American Way, www.pfaw.org.)

Public education’s defenders, already outgunned by the combined resources of the right-wing political funding network plus the full weight of the Republican executive branch, now await the deluge: an infusion of $20 billion into the Walton’s private philanthropy, most of it earmarked for education “reform”—the euphemism for school privatization. At the usual rate of foundation disbursement, this would translate as $1 billion a year—a tidal wave of money, enough to reinvent the voucher “movement” many times over.

This would move them into the lofty ranks of Carnegie and Rockefeller in terms of a positive investment in education in America.

---

NONES ON THE RUN:

The God Wars: From here in the ‘None Zone,’ a feeling of helplessness as religious warriors relentlessly reshape the world. (Knute Berger, 3/24/04, Seattle Weekly)

In the Pacific Northwest, we’re the most irreligious folks in America. We have the largest percentage of adults in the nation who are unaffiliated with any church (63 percent) and the largest percentage who don’t identify with any religion (25 percent)—which is more than double the size of the largest religious group in the region (Catholics, 11 percent). The “state” religion in the Pacific Northwest is no religion, according to a new study, Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone (AltaMira Press). If you’re one of these so-called “Nones,” you’re in good company here.

That doesn’t mean we Nones aren’t deeply involved in religious conflict. From Israel and Palestine to the war on terror to the culture wars at home, they’re unavoidable, whether you’re religious or not. God, we are told, is setting the agenda.

In his Iraq anniversary speech last week, George W. Bush, whose statements since 9/11 have been filled with Biblical resonance and religious phrasings, showed that he’s honed his Manichean view of the world. We are engaged in a war of civilizations, good versus evil, he said again. But this time he was clearer than ever, provoked by the upstart Spanish electorate to assert that there is no room for dissent. “There is no neutral ground—no neutral ground—in the fight between civilization and terror, because there is no neutral ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery, and life and death.” He preached to representatives of 84 nations, and the essence was: Bush’s values constitute the dividing line between good and evil, and he represents good. Choose Bush, or you’re the enemy. [...]

[I]t appears that Bush’s side is winning—even here in heathen country. According to James Wellman, a professor of comparative religion at the University of Washington, evangelical churches are where the growth is. He described a veritable “revival” in Washington state. They seem to appeal to people who find the mainline protestant denominations too wishy-washy, secular, liberal, or old-school. Evangelical congregations are thriving because they’re dynamic, growth-oriented, and they offer moral clarity. He also notes that with Bush articulating so well the evangelical worldview of a titanic struggle between good and evil, people are drawn to the churches because they seem to reflect reality.

In this, Bush’s role is key right now. He believes he is called to rise to the challenges of his times. Others believe that he is interpreting events to suit his beliefs. Either way, he’s right that there is no longer a dividing line: His faith is shaping politics, and his politics are shaping America’s faith.

The effect of having such an evangelical President is obviously significant for America, but what's truly remarkable is the effect he's having in the Islamic world, where he's essentially forcing a Reformation.

---

WHY IT'S NOT THE CABLE PHILOSOPHY NETWORK:

The Mariane Pearl-Eason Jordan Link (Washington Post, 3/31/2004)

Eason Jordan, a CNN news exec who was deeply involved in the network's coverage of the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl, is now romantically involved with Pearl's widow, Mariane, people familiar with the relationship told us yesterday....

Married for 16 years, with two children, the Atlanta-based Jordan, 43, got to know Pearl, 36, who now lives in New York, after Islamic terrorists killed her husband in Pakistan two years ago....

Some CNNers mulled the ethical implications of the relationship.... "While she's a source, what kind of source is she?" one staffer wondered. "She's a source about her husband's death."

To see how ethical standards have fallen in 3000 years, imagine that Deuteronomy's evaluation of an adulterous relationship hinged on whether the woman is an important news source; or that Jesus had said, "Let he who lost the biggest story throw the first stone."

---

IF YOU'RE GOING TO GROVEL, AT LEAST GROVEL TO THE WORTHY:

'I'm fascinated by Hip-Hop," says Prez Candidate John Kerry (Rich Rock, Mar. 31, 2004, The Wire / Daily Hip-Hop News)

"I'm fascinated by Rap and Hip-Hop" said Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry during an MTV Choose or Loose forum. Offering up a heavy dose of street credibility, Kerry defended gangsta rap, freedom of speech and the realities of street life.

Kerry spoke with MTV's Gideon Yago and took questions from the audience last night in MTV's annual Choose or Loose forum. The youth voting movement this year endeavors to get 20 million new voters to the polls and impact what is projected to be a tight presidential race.

The Boston-born heir by marraige to the Heinz Ketchup fortune, offered his perspective on rap music as the voice of the streets. [...]

Calling rap a "reflection of life", Kerry empathized with the struggles reflected in the music.

"I'm still listening because I know that it's a reflection of the street and it's a reflection of life, and I understand all that. I'm not for the government censoring or stepping in. But I don't think it's inappropriate occasionally to talk about what you think is a standard or what you think is a value that is worth trying to live up to."

Today on NPR they were talking to some author who has a book out on the relationship between the presidents and Hollywood. He said, quite accurately, that George W. Bush seems the least interested in popular entertainment and noted that during the 2000 campaign had never even heard of the movie Titanic. He's certainly never listened to a single rap tune. Of course, neither has John Kerry. One of them though is honest.

---

THE PARTY OF DEATH:

Reclaiming pro-lifers (Nat Hentoff, 3/28/04, Washington Times)

Quiet as it's kept, the diminishing Democratic majority in Congress for the past quarter of a century equals the rate at which pro-life Democrats have been abandoning the party. This was the message given to Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), when he was visited on March 8 by members of Congress on the National Advisory Board of Democrats for Life of America. Among them were Reps. Bart Stupak of Michigan and James Oberstar of Minnesota.

These are the illuminating statistics — ignored by the media — that were presented to Mr. McAuliffe: In the 95th Congress (1977-78), Democrats had a 292-seat majority in the House of Representatives, which included 125 pro-life Democrats. Now, as a minority, Democrats are down to 204 seats, with 28 pro-life Democrats.

At the meeting, Mr. McAuliffe was told that in certain congressional districts, a pro-life Democrat would be able to win a Republican-leaning seat.

Add in the Roe effect and the Red Brown factor and you've got a party in demographic crisis and denial--not a good combination.

---

WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT BRITAIN NOT BEING AN UNHAPPY PLACE?:

In Britain, one in five pregnancies ends in abortion (Sarah Womack, 31/03/2004, Daily Telegraph)

More than one in five pregnancies in Britain ends in abortion while the number of childless women over 40 "increases substantially", according to new figures.

For the general population, parenthood has largely become a matter of choice as opposed to chance, says the Office for National Statistics.

Its report said 36 per cent of all pregnancies in women under 20 were terminated, a figure that has continued to rise despite the widespread availability of contraception and the "morning after" pill.

Among women of all ages, 23 per cent of pregnancies were terminated in 2000.

Sadly the loop feeds on itself, because who would bring a child into a self-loathing culture like Europe's. Islam can't take over fast enough.

---

THE FINE ART OF HEADLINE WRITING (via Christianity Today Weblog):

Statue of Jesus defaced by pro-choice vandal (NEIL SHEA, March 24, 2004, Providence Journal)

Outside Our Lady of Grace Church, black spray-paint streaked down the statue of Jesus, coating his face and throat. Near his feet, across a border of gray slate slabs, a vandal had scrawled: "Anti-choice Nazis."

---

300 AND DONE:

Readers Of The Last Aardvark: Dave Sim's postmodern comic-book epic, Cerebus, ends after 26 years and 6,000 pages (Grady Hendrix, March 30th, 2004, Village Voice)

One of the most ambitious literary projects of the last 25 years came to an end this March and you probably don't even know its name: Cerebus. It's a comic-book series about a talking aardvark, whose creator seems to have slowly gone insane somewhere over the course of its 6,000 pages. But it is also something of a masterpiece.

In 1979, Dave Sim (then just 23) made the improbable announcement that his black-and-white comic book, Cerebus, would run for 300 issues and that he would write, draw, and publish the books himself (although it was initially put out by his then wife, Deni Loubert). [...]

[O]ver the course of this story arc ("Mothers & Daughters")—both in the book itself and in the book's editorial pages—Sim made it clear that he believes we live in a feminist totalitarian state. Readers left in droves. The last 2,000 pages have been driven by their creator's deeply personal preoccupations ("Latter Days," the penultimate story line, devoted 144 pages to commentaries on the first 38 chapters of Genesis) and his religious faith (a homemade blend of fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, and Judaism).

Sim found his religion while writing Cerebus, and his uncompromising beliefs have become a whip driving his readers away and his fictional creations through increasingly convoluted antics intended to make theological points. Vexingly, the last 100 issues have also seen Sim and his collaborator (the mysterious Gerhard, who does the backgrounds) hone their visual technique to unparalleled expressive heights. With its dense layers of lettering, literary allusion, and internal logic, one page of Cerebus requires—and rewards—migraine-inducing concentration.

Cerebus's enormous contradictions have alienated it from the comic-book market. To Sim's readers, Cerebus was the satirical story of a talking aardvark in a realpolitik world. To Sim, Cerebus was a soapbox from which to proclaim his beliefs. And, like a true monomaniac, Sim painted himself into a corner, denouncing the Marxist-feminist axis to an increasingly hostile audience.

But despite Sim's anti-feminist crusade, Cerebus stands on its own as a ferocious critique of power. Sim believes that freedom is an absolute, and to this end he has self-published Cerebus, advocated for artists' rights, and bucked intellectual-property laws wherever possible (after his and Gerhard's deaths, Cerebus will become public domain). In an era when selling out is considered synonymous with success, Sim's resistance is bracing. But independence comes at a cost, and the price of Sim's is that his 26-year project, his life's work, is ending largely in silence. Tired of his grandstanding, most people long ago tuned him out. But for the scale of its ambition, the intricacy of its characters, the beauty of its artwork, and its commitment to mapping the at times objectionable mind of its creator without ever blinking or looking away, Cerebus remains a staggering declaration of independence.

Geez, I read it in high school, but had no idea it was still going and had become so much more interesting.

MORE:
-ESSAY: Requiem for an Earth-Pig (Brian Doherty, 3/23/2004, American Spectator)

One of our era's most enduring and complex epics of fantasy storytelling came to an end this month. It was 6,000 pages long, and chronicled one man's rise through a fascinatingly imagined world, on the cusp between medieval and early industrial ages. We witness the introduction of the printing press, cannons, and primitive airships as the tale progresses. The hero moves, often haplessly and buffeted by outside forces he barely understands, from a barbarian thief and adventurer to a prime minister to Pope of its Catholic-reminiscent church to renegade fighter against a matriarchal dictatorship to bartender to tyrannical head of his own brand new religion.
As with any 6,000-page epic, a one-paragraph prÈcis cannot do it justice. It can, I hope, hint at the riches to be found therein. A couple of complications are also worth noting. First, the protagonist is not strictly a man -- in two respects. "He" is a hermaphrodite, though he thinks of himself as male, and he's also an aardvark. A talking, hind-foot walking, sword-wielding, hard-drinking, scripture-parsing aardvark, mind you.
This 6,000-page epic, it should also be noted, is 6,000 pages of comic book, told and sold in 20 page chunks (mostly) monthly since 1977, published under the title Cerebus (the aardvark's name). It is a sad reflection of the regard with which the art of storytelling through the artful combination of words and pictures is held in our culture that knowing that Cerebus is a comic book is enough to make most intelligent readers not give it a second thought. The general level of regard for comics is low at best, usually plunging to "beneath notice" for the vast majority of literate Americans beyond an ever-shrinking cult of funny book devotees.
Most unusually for a comic book, which are generally produced in an assembly-line manner as work-for-hire for a corporate entity, this epic was mostly a one-man job, written and drawn by a Canadian named Dave Sim. Sim published it himself and retained full ownership of his characters and work. (With issue 65 of his 300 issue series, Sim hired another artist, the singly named Gerhard, to pen the backgrounds while Sim continued to draw the characters.)
The story started off as a broad parody of Conan the Barbarian comics. But it quickly latched on to greater ambitions. Throughout the series Sim continued his early practice of introducing parody characters based on figures from the world of comic books (both characters and creators), movie comedies (ditto), and authors (these latter less parody than attempts to grapple with the figure's meaning). These takeoffs are almost always hilarious, biting, and brilliantly observed.
Within the pages of Cerebus you'll find takes on Groucho and Chico Marx, Batman and the Sandman, the Three Stooges, and Norman Mailer, among many others, that in many cases capture and extend the essential aspects of those characters (it seems apt to refer to Norman Mailer as a "character") as well or greater than their original creators -- all the while fitting them in to Cerebus' fantasy world with perfect sense.
SIM STARTED OFF AS an energetic cartoonist, but 6,000 pages of practice turned him (and Gerhard) into, if not geniuses, highly skilled journeymen who through hard and continuous work discovered techniques and reached destinations not often matched in their discipline.
Cartoonists can achieve stylistic distinctions far more, well, distinct than a prose writer. A prose writer, after all -- unless he strives for Joycean unintelligibility -- uses the same words as everyone else. But within very wide limits, every ink line, and method of drawing a human figure, hand, furniture, a building, is unique. Sim and Gerhard, to abuse the language a bit myself, were even uniquer than most in the world of comics.
It might seem belittling to call Cerebus great "for a comic." But there is no other way for it to be great -- it is a comic book. This is not an insult to comic art, but the ultimate praise: it can strive for and reach storytelling effects that would be simply impossible for other storytelling forms. Sim's lettering is the most obvious example of this.
No one has yet discovered a way for a prose writer to make dialogue say as much about a speaker's intentions, inflections, thought processes and meanings (both hidden and surface) than Sim's brilliantly varied hand-lettering of it -- the most wild and innovative the form has ever known. Sim once made a bravura eight-page sequence of a broken-legged Cerebus trying to climb a huge staircase in complete darkness say surprisingly much, with nothing but panel after panel of differently-divided solid black ink with his lettering of Cerebus' thoughts and words, incredibly revealing of mania, panic, relief, comedy, and self-doubt.
The mastery of pacing through his choices in how to present images across panels and pages is another area where Sim approaches nonpareil, and similarly irreproducible by prose writers.
WITHIN THE WORLD OF comic books, Sim has achieved something unprecedented in length and focus: 6,000 pages all telling a single life story, all written and drawn by the same man. But he's not much loved for it. Somewhere along the line, Sim decided he had a mission with his story. Its theme became the evils and perfidy of feminism, in all its varieties, especially the notion that a man ought to cleave unto a woman and become one flesh.
Sim's methods of expressing this theme shifted as his own ideology did. The real tectonic shift came when he discovered religion and created his own portmanteau syncretist monotheism from aspects he admired from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Bloody fight scenes, long debates, quotes from fictional treatises, detailed representations of the depths men would sink to in a world dedicated tyrannically to motherhood at all costs, were all in the delightful mix as the story progressed. By the tale's end, Sim was theologizing feminist evils in the YHWH character in the Torah, who Sim insists is not the God who created the world.
I should give a spoiler warning here: One detail of the practice of the theocratic dictatorship that Cerebus sets up toward the work's end will give you a hint as to why, within the narrow community of comics fans, its creator is embattled and widely despised. Cerebus the religious leader arranged the public executions of women who didn't meet the approval of a gathered crowd of men.
Because of his very public animus toward feminism, which shades toward pure misogyny in the eyes of many readers, the comics community at best damn Sim with faint praise, raising the glass to his maniacal productivity and dedication -- a fully written and drawn page pretty much every weekday for 26 years without fail or falter. But they mostly just damn him, and Cerebus, for ideological reasons.
Sim's representation of himself as the embattled last defender of reason and masculinity against the Marxist-feminist axis that he thinks rules the world has marginalized him, to the point that he seriously seems to expect an angry mob of feminazis to lock him up for thoughtcrime. (Well, he is Canadian, so perhaps that's not so unrealistic a notion.)

-ESSAY: Cerebus: An Aardvark on the Edge: (A Brief History of Dave Sim and His Independent Comic Book) (Kelly Rothenberg, Spring 2003, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture)

Cerebus did appear at first to be a funny-man's comic book, taking everyone along for the ride for the first year and a half. The fact that Cerebus is an aardvark and everybody else is human, although never mentioned, is just one small thing (although Cerebus is described from time to time as anything from a short midget to a guy wearing a bunny's costume). The early stories were populated with parodies of famous fictional characters and figures from Marvel Comics. These lampoons of standard comic book clichés made Cerebus stand out in the early days from the rest of the pack; Sim was thumbing his nose at the corporate comic book machine.

There was Elrod of Melvinbone, a character who was based on Michael Moorcock's famous albino hero Elric, whose speech was patterned after the Warner Brothers cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn. There was Red Sophia, a parody of the Red Sonja character created by Robert E. Howard, and The Regency Elf, Sim's version of Tinkerbell. One of the best was Jaka's uncle, Lord Julius, the ruler of Palnu and an impersonation of Groucho Marx down to his speech, mannerisms and his first name (Groucho's real first name was Julius). Finally, but not least, there was Artemis, who morphed into parodies of Wolverine, Captain America, Spider-Man, Moon Knight, The Punisher, Sandman, and countless others over the years.

With all this parody going on, when did Cerebus get serious?

The seriousness started with Sim himself. He was always serious about doing comics, but it was around 1979—when he declared that Cerebus would run 300 issues—that the comic began to show more focus. Sim moved away from sword-and-sorcery tales and started dealing with the more adult themes of politics and society. The comics, collected in Book 2 as High Society, told one continuing story and were first published in comic form at around the same time as his announcement. Nobody noticed this connection, but the reader could see that Sim was more focused, as if he had something bigger in mind, and with each subsequent collection the stories and the artwork became more involved and, at times, more serious in tone. These collections, or Books, would eventually showcase the entire series. Sim also declared that the series would be in two overall parts, each with 150 comics. Cerebus, High Society, Church and State, Jaka's Story and Melmoth (Books One through Six) are the First Half of the series, and the Second Half (unfinished as of this writing) are Flight, Women, Reads, Minds, Guys, Rick's Story, Going Home and Form and Void (Books Seven through 14; the books got shorter as the years went along because Sim published fewer issues per book).

Two themes that developed as the comic evolved were Cerebus' campaigns to move up the ladder of power and his love/hate relationship with the dancer Jaka, who was introduced in Issue 6. Cerebus wanted Jaka, but only when he could not have her, and when he could have her he was too busy campaigning for power to notice. "You said you'd wait forever for Cerebus…" he says to Jaka at one point, referring to their first meeting when he was drugged against his will so he would not remember her. Jaka replies, "I said I'd wait forever for you to remember [me]. Well you did remember and you never came back" (Sim, Church and State I: 461-63). Cerebus does come back to her in Jaka's Story, but unfortunately she is married to Rick (who appears later in Rick's Story). Sim's take on the guy/girl romance angle haunts Cerebus through the entire run of the series. Cerebus is only truly happy with Jaka at the end of Rick's Story, and even that is short-lived. Throughout twenty-plus years of Cerebus, he has loved Jaka and driven her away, and when it seems that he has finally learned his lesson, he drives her off again at the end of Form and Void. The reader can only wonder if Jaka is to be heard from again.

Cerebus' campaign for power eventually wins him the title of Pope of the Eastern Church of Tarim, which in turn leads to a power struggle and eventually a radical power shift from men (Kelvinist) to women (Cirinist) being in control. While Cerebus' quest for power is at times very funny, it is also very serious. When all is said and done, Cerebus embodies the notion that "absolute power corrupts absolutely." The more powerful he becomes, the more insane he becomes until finally he is brought before The Judge—a being of intense power (though his greatest power is observation)—to prevent the destruction of the entire world through Cerebus' greed. Church and State ends with a prophetic warning from The Judge: "You live only a few more years. You die alone. Unmourned. And unloved" (Sim, Church and State II: 1212). This prophecy will haunt Cerebus, and the reader, for the remainder of the series.

Cerebus' drive to do things his way only mirrored Sim's. When Sim launched his series, there were only two comic companies around: Marvel and DC. Rather than sell his creation outright (the fight over creator-owned comics was still to come), Sim decided to self-publish his work. He had an advantage because he could do everything himself, from writing and drawing to stapling the issue together. However, he also had a disadvantage: he had to do everything himself, from writing and drawing to stapling the issue together…

With his girlfriend's help, he began planning out the comic. He wanted a character that was barbaric like all those Barry Windsor Smith comics he read (Smith had worked on Conan for many years before he was let go by Marvel, a move that angered Sim). He wanted a name, something mythological, and his girlfriend Deni suggested the three-headed dog of Greek mythology. Deni, however, spelled the name wrong; Ceberus became Cerebus, and a legend was born (Jones and Jacobs 229). Over time, as Cerebus started to attract a reading audience, Sim realized that there was an incredible amount of power in doing everything himself. He did not have to answer to anybody as far as his subject matter; if the readers did not like it, they would stop reading it. The readers' vote was what mattered most, and not the corporate idea of what a comic should look like or how much money it should make. As Marvel and DC were in a constant power struggle over which company was on top that week, Sim was left alone because, as far as the Big Two were concerned, Sim and his ilk did not matter. Little did they realize how wrong they were.

-DISCUSSION: Cerebus #300 (Craig Lemon, Silver Bullet Comics)
-REVIEW: of Cerebus (Grovel.org)
-Cerebus the Aardvark (Wikipedia)

---

LIKE "THE CAVEMAN" WITHOUT SONGS:

Kerry personally vulnerable (Tony Blankley, March 31, 2004, Jewish World Review)

[W]hat may become the enduring exemplar of the Kerry style was his spontaneous expletive on the ski slopes when his Secret Service guard bumped into him by accident (while guarding him): "I don't fall down. The S.O.B. knocked me over." To instinctively say that about the man who is sworn to put himself between Kerry and a bullet, paints a lasting and contemptible character portrait. Contrast that with what Ronald Reagan said shortly after he was shot: "Honey, I forgot to duck." It was at that moment that 60 percent of the American public fell permanently in love with the Gipper. As Ernest Hemmingway put it in another time, that is grace under pressure — and Kerry doesn't have it.

The second emerging liability is the matter of Senator Kerry's health and vigor. Few people commented adversely when Mr. Kerry had his cancer operation last year. Most otherwise healthy men go on to fully active lives after such a successful operation. But some people began to notice when he took a week off to relax and "re-charge his batteries" at his wife's ski lodge — just when the campaign was heating up and he had not yet recovered from his foolish foreign leaders claim. His staff had to explain that he gets verbally sloppy when he gets tired. (Of course, the presidency is a darned tiring job 365 days a year.)

Now comes the unrelated matter of an operation to repair a torn shoulder tendon, an injury that the Kerry campaign says he incurred while on a campaign bus in January. The post-operative period will again take him out of action for "three or four days." Of such episodes, impressions begin to form. [...]

The American public has a growing experience with incomplete, protective or misleading statements by the doctors of politicians and other celebrities. So long as Mr. Kerry refuses to permit the release of his military records relating to his war injuries and health, as well as his current and comprehensive medical records, a curious American public will have to judge the senator's physical fitness for the presidency by publicly available evidence, speculation and rumor. It's Kerry's own fault if false rumors affect his candidacy.

He is already on record as lying about his cancer condition last year — first denying the condition, then admitting it when the fact could not be avoided. Even The Washington Post yesterday reported that: "Kerry, 60, who appeared athletic and robust during his recent skiing holiday, has nonetheless faced medical issues in the past year that have raised questions about his overall health." When the Washington Post puts its corporate teeth into a candidate on a personal matter — that's not good news for the politician.

In 2000, everyone knew that George W. Bush had some skeletons in his closet that he preferred not come out--anyone who drinks to excess will inevitably have such. By not dealing with the embarrassment early--even if for understandable reasons--he left himself vulnerable, at the mercy of the media and his opponents, and when the old DUI charge came out so close to Election Day it cost him the popular vote and nearly the electoral.

The fundamentals of this race make it nearly unwinnable for Mr. Kerry--Northeastern liberal sitting senator vs. popular incumbent during economic boom--but if he doesn't get out in front of stories like this then Mr. Blankley is correct about his candidacy's potential for flophood.

---

SPEAKING OF REPEALING THE LAWS OF ECONOMICS:

The Jobs of the Future Are a Thing of the Past: Outsourcing and the sad little movement to stop it (Rick Perlstein, March 30th, 2004, Village Voice)

The outsourcing of white-collar jobs overseas began in earnest during the personnel shortage caused by the run-up to Y2K. In a sense, it grew directly from a parallel phenomenon, generally ignored. Call it "in-sourcing." Averting the catastrophe of a nation of computers suddenly partying one New Year's morning like it was 1899 gave Congress a reasonable excuse to raise the cap on the number of H-1B visas, which are issued to allow companies to sponsor specialized foreign workers in cases of a demonstrable labor shortage.

On the other side of the world, the Y2K panic catalyzed India, which was dismantling the protectionist components of its own quasi-socialist economy, to bid for all kinds of service work to be done there—thanks to its relatively large, educated, English-speaking middle class and a providential 10.5-hour time shift that lets Indian researchers crunch numbers on behalf of sleeping American financial analysts on the East Coast.

Importing labor, exporting jobs: These are the two sides of the coin. According to the regnant economic theories, the sides are inseparable: capital scouring the world to find labor at the cheapest price, supply meeting demand, each dollar being spent at its greatest point of efficiency. A fat lot of comfort that is if you're on the receiving end of the regnant economic theories. Capital does the scouring a lot more aggressively these days than it used to—even to the point of systematically abusing the law.

Some of the worst abuses are the "body shops," made possible by another kind of temporary work visa: the L-1. This permit is tailored even more narrowly; it was designed to allow companies to fill short-term vacancies with transfers only from their overseas branches. And since it was intended to be of such limited application, Congress didn't bother setting ceilings on their issuance. This proved a loophole big enough to fly a 747 through: Indian consulting companies set up U.S. branches, imported Indian computer programmers en masse, and rented them as cheap replacement parts to cost-conscious third-party companies in the U.S.

Such "intracompany transfers" made for one of the most dramatic stories of this fragile little movement. Siemens Information Communications Networks in Lake Mary, Florida, replaced its entire IT department with employees of the Indian consulting company Tata, who worked at about a third of the Americans' salary. For a severance bonus, the displaced workers received the privilege of training their replacements. The Dickensian maneuver turned one of them into a political animal. Mike Emmons, a 42-year-old father of two, awoke one morning with the sun and sent out thousands of e-mails to Siemens employees explaining the whole dirty deal—at 5:30 a.m., while possibly suspicious Siemens network administrators slept. Like a scene out of some post-industrial Erin Brockovich, some 1,000 workers settled down to their toil one January day in 2003, opened their inboxes, and, one by one, broke into a spontaneous cascade of applause in appreciation of the brave truth-teller no longer in their midst.

Now Emmons is running for Congress, as a Democrat. He makes some great points: "You know," he says, "I wouldn't mind if the relentless search for cheap, cheap, cheap included critical items Americans need. While I was training my Indian replacements, my HMO insurance was being increased 84 percent, to $18,000 a year—one-half the money Siemens pays my replacement!"

Mr. Emmons can be forgiven such obtuseness--it's practically a requirement for a Democratic congressman--but Mr. Perlstein is normally more sensible. The high cost of the health care Americans demand is one of the ways in which they've made their own labor more expensive that it's worth. Adopt HSA's and make these workers more affordable for corporations.

---

THE QUINTESSENTIALISTS:

Christian Quotation of the Day (March 31, 2004)

If there were a righteousness which a man could have of his
own, then we should have to concern ourselves with the question
of how it can be imparted to him. But there is not. The idea
of a righteousness of one's own is the quintessence of sin.
--Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998)

The central claim of secularism is precisely that we each have access to a righteousness of our own.

---

FIGHTING TO MAINTAIN THEIR RACKET:

Alternative teachers' training 'alarming': Group calls for reforms, oversight of programs that prepare new educators (Nancy Mitchell, 3/24/04, Rocky Mountain News)

Before they lead classrooms, alternative teachers in Colorado average only 18 hours of preparation. Some have none at all.

The Alliance for Quality Teaching labels that statistic "alarming" in its report, released this week, on the state's 44 alternative teacher preparation programs.

"That was a surprising and somewhat distressing discovery," said Gully Stanford, one of three people who lead the statewide Alliance, a nonpartisan group of educators, politicians and policymakers.

"It goes hand-in-glove with our first recommendation that there be more consistent oversight, even regulation, of alternative programs." [...]

Alternative programs, once considered a stop-gap measure to ease teaching shortages, are supplying greater numbers of the state's teachers.

The report found the typical alternative teacher is older, with an average age of 35, and better-educated, with nearly a fourth already holding a master's degree.

A system that would require people who are manifestly competent to go back and get the worthless "educational" training that most teachers get now would be totally pointless. It would actually be better to do away with every education department at every college in America and only hire people who've had some real world experience and been trained in other fields.

---

KERRY V. SMITH:

Bush Administration Shows More Support of Free Trade (EDMUND L. ANDREWS, 3/31/04, NY Times)

Top officials at the Federal Reserve, though independent of the Bush administration, have sided with the White House in defending free trade.

Ben S. Bernanke, one of the central bank's most visible and outspoken board members, said on Tuesday that foreign trade accounted for only a tiny fraction of the 2.2 million jobs that have been lost over the last three years.

Mr. Bernanke, citing estimates by outside economists that foreign trade may have led to the loss of as many as 167,000 jobs a year since 2001, said the numbers were small in comparison with the nation's overall pace of both job creation and job destruction. During the 1990's, Mr. Bernanke said, the United States lost about 15 million jobs a year but gained about 17 million jobs.

"Quantitatively, outsourcing abroad simply cannot account for much of the recent weakness in the U.S. labor market," he told an audience at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

Mr. Bernanke argued that the biggest reason for the weak job market was the rapid rise in domestic productivity, which has allowed companies to make more goods without hiring additional workers. American productivity has grown by about 5 percent a year for the last two years, twice its normal pace.

William Poole, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, told a college audience in Indiana that foreign trade and outsourcing would ultimately benefit the United States by reducing prices at home and expanding export markets.

"This process has been going on in the course of economic development for hundreds of years," Mr. Poole said. "So this is a fact of life. It's not something that we're going to reverse."

Unless the Democrats can repeal the basic laws of economics they're stuck with the fact that the Administration is right. So, the argument that John Kerry will stop the outsourcing is a de facto statement that he'll damage the efficient functioning of the economy.

---

BREAKING THE CIRCLE OF LIFE:

The Limits of Medicine (Philip Longman, Washington Post, 31/03/04)

Faith in medicine runs deep in America. We spend more per person on health care than any other nation. Most of us are confident that we will live longer, more active lives than our parents. Whether we eat too much or exercise too little, whether we're turning gray or feeling blue, we increasingly look to some pill or procedure to make us better. No one likes to hear official projections such as those that came out last week about Medicare, which show that the program will be running multitrillion-dollar annual deficits just when baby boomers need it. But a common response is: What's a more important priority for society's resources?

Good question, assuming that devoting ever more dollars to medicine will bring us longer, healthier lives. But there is mounting evidence that each new dollar we devote to the current health care system brings small and diminishing returns to public health. Today the United States spends more than $4,500 per person per year on health care. Costa Rica spends less than $300, and has half as many doctors per capita. Yet life expectancy at birth is nearly identical in both countries.

Despite the ballyhooed "longevity revolution," life expectancy among the elderly in the United States is hardly improving. Since 1990 Medicare expenditures per senior have more than doubled. Yet life expectancy among American women at age 65 was lower in 2003 than it was in 1991, according to estimates released by the Social Security Administration last week. Yes, we are an aging society, but primarily because of falling birthrates.

Younger Americans, meanwhile, are far more likely to be disabled than they were 20 years ago. Most affected are people in their thirties, whose disability rates increased by nearly 130 percent, due primarily to obesity. Americans of all ages are also increasingly likely to die from a host of infectious diseases and chronic conditions. Between 1980 and 2000, the age-adjusted death rate from diabetes increased by 39 percent, chronic lung disease by 49 percent, and kidney disease by 21 percent.

Why has our huge investment in health care left us so unhealthy? Partly it is because so many promised "miracle cures," from Interferon to gene therapies, have proven to be ineffective or even dangerous. Partly it's because health care dollars are so concentrated on the terminally ill and the very old that even when medical interventions "work," the gains to average life expectancy are small. And partly it is because of medical errors and adverse reaction to prescription drugs, which cause more deaths than motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer or AIDS. Each year roughly 200,000 seniors suffer fatal or life-threatening "adverse drug events" due to improper drug use or drug interaction. Will Medicare's new prescription drug benefit save more lives than it ends? The answer is not obvious.

There are some simple ways to improve the effectiveness of medicine. Each year 90,000 patients in the United States die from infections they contract in hospitals, and doctors and nurses who fail to wash their hands are the biggest vector. To cut down on medical errors, many hospitals are adopting sophisticated quality control measures similar to those used by manufacturers to reduce "defect rates." Today only 1 cent out of every dollar spent on the National Institutes of Health goes to establishing "best practices" in medicine. Redirecting more funds from basic research to studying the effectiveness of different treatments would go a long way toward preventing such lethal medical fads as high-dose chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants.

It is all well and good to encourage people to have more children to support the aged, but given the modern frantic determination to live as long as possible at whatever cost, what kind of slavery will they be born into?

---

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Dear Mr. Judd,

I just wanted to notify you and your readership about a call for submissions for the new journal of the Bull Moose Republicans:

"Defending the rule of law and promoting free trade are two of the foundational values of modern American conservatism. President Bush's immigration proposal has brought these two principles to the fore of public discussion within the GOP as faithful conservative loyalists debate the practical application of these two shared values as they apply to our country's present immigration situation.

Authors are invited to interpret these two values - rule of law and free trade - philosophically and/or historically, and apply them in defense of or opposition to the specific immigration policy proposal of the Bush administration.

For source material, read the President's immigration proposal."

More information is available at http://www.bullmooserepublicans.com/submissions/. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely yours,
William M. Fusz
Policy Director
Bull Moose Republicans
www.bullmooserepublicans.com

---

ANTI-MICROSOFT TSAR GETS NEW PORTFOLIO:

EU 'anti-terror Tsar' to fight al-Qa'eda (Telegraph, 3/26/2004)

European Union leaders agreed yesterday to rush forward a clutch of EU-wide surveillance measures and created an anti-terror "Tsar" in response to the Madrid bombings.

The list of counter-terrorism measures pushed by Britain, France and Spain at a Union summit in Brussels include plans to retain mobile telephone records, e-mail and internet data indicating the time and address of all websites visited.

Europhobe that I am, I still wouldn't have guessed that Europe's pre-eminent anti-terror measure would be monitoring of web-browsing. At least we'll know if the next Mohammed Atta was using Internet Explorer. Planned response to the next bombing: electronic ankle bracelets for everyone. Then we'll know if the third Mohammed Atta went bowling like the Columbine killers.

Campaign 2004 prediction: in September, Dick Clarke and John Kerry explain that the Europeans take terrorism much more seriously than the Bush administration.

---

AS GOES FRANCE, SO GO THE DEMOCRATS:

PAPER: GORE SET TO CLOSE DEAL ON CABLE TV CHANNEL (Drudge Report, 3/30/04)

The NEW YORK OBSERVER will report on Wednesday that former Vice President Al Gore will close the deal to buy his own cable TV channel this week!

Mr. Gore and his business partner, entreprenuer and Democratic fundraiser Joel Hyatt, will acquire Newsworld International for around $70 million from Vivendi. The Observer will also report that Mr. Gore approached French-owned Vivendi through French President Jacques Chirac in 2003, hoping to get a better deal from Vivendi CEO Jean-Rene Fourtou.

Who is running that Party that they think things like this help?

---

AN ASSOCIATION THEY DON'T RELISH:

Heinz Seeks to Disavow Kerry Connection (CHARLES SHEEHAN, 3/30/04, AP)

H.J. Heinz Co. has launched an election-year campaign of its own, this one to distance the ketchup maker from what is shaping up to be an acrimonious presidential race.

If you've waited this long, why not file online? Get a move on with E-filing tips and tax site comparisons.

The company has sent nearly 50 letters to radio and television talk shows nationwide to tamp down chatter on the airwaves and Internet suggesting revenue from ketchup sales will benefit the campaign of pending Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

My, they are in a pickle.

---

HIDDEN? IT WAS THE POINT OF THE LAW:

Medicare's Hidden Bonanza: After millions in campaign contributions, an insurance magnate's 10-year lobbying campaign finally pays off. (Michael Scherer, March/April 2004, Mother Jones)

For conservative leaders, the best part of the Medicare bill President Bush signed in December had absolutely nothing to do with Medicare. Rather, the provision that House Speaker Dennis Hastert calls "the most important piece in the bill" and former Speaker Newt Gingrich considers "the single most important change in health care policy in 60 years" is a little-noticed tax rebate set to cost the Treasury $6.4 billion over the next decade. The measure allows Americans to open tax-free "health savings accounts," which can be used to pay medical bills—in effect removing their owners from the shared risk that has been the core of the health-insurance system since World War II.

One problem with assuming your political opponents are always doing things that are merely expedient is that you blind yourself to their often obvious real intent. So, when Democrats, libertarians and the rest look at the Medicare law that the President ram-rodded through, they think he was just trying to buy the votes of seniors, when, in fact, he was buying them off. If the price of passing the significant social welfare reform that is embodied in HSA's was tossing the seniors their pharmaceutical bone, so be it--just as the price of school vouchers was a little extra federal money for education. Mr. Bush keeps building the infrastructuure of the Opportunity Society and laying the groundwork for permanent Republican control of the government cash spigot, yet the perceptive stories like this one are few and far between.

---

CAN WE SUBSTITUTE MEAT FOR THE OLIVES?

CRISP POTATO "PIZZA" (Lynne Rossetto Kasper, The Splendid Table)

Serves 3 to 4 as a side dish or antipasto

2 large cloves garlic
3 tightly packed tablespoons fresh Italian parsley leaves
1 1/2 pounds small red-skinned potatoes, sliced 1/16 to 1/8 inch thick
1 medium red onion, sliced into very thin rings
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/8 teaspoon hot red pepper flakes
Shredded zest of 2 large oranges
1/3 cup oil-cured black olives, pitted and coarsely chopped
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 heaping cup shredded Asiago or Fontinella cheese

1. Preheat the oven to 500°F. Oil a 14-inch pizza pan or a cookie sheet. Mince together the garlic and parsley. Place in a large bowl with the potatoes and onion. Fold in the olive oil, oregano, hot pepper, half the orange zest, and half the olives, along with generous sprinklings of salt and black pepper. Toss everything to coat the potato slices.

2. Spread the potatoes out in an even single layer on the pan. Bake 20 minutes, then sprinkle with the remaining orange zest and olives. Bake another 10 minutes, or until the potatoes are speckled with golden brown and the zest has darkened. To get the top to brown to a rich gold, it may be necessary to broil the pizza for 2 to 3 minutes. Sprinkle with the cheese, let it begin to melt, then take the pizza out of the oven. Slice into wedges (or squares) and lift off the pan with a spatula. Serve hot or warm.

---

THE BROWNS ARE RED:

The Red-Green Divide Over Human Enhancement (James Pethokoukis, 03/30/2004, Tech Central Station)

Having spoken with many enhancement advocates, it seems pretty clear to me that they, for the most part, think the cultural momentum is moving in their direction. Just look, they point out, how we are already enhancing themselves. College students are already using Ritalin to enhance their concentration for exams. Human growth hormone has been approved for healthy short kids. Demand for cosmetic plastic surgery continues to soar. In 2003, more than 6.9 million procedures were done -- 41 percent more than a year earlier, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Interest in plastic surgery has grown so much that it's now the subject of reality shows on ABC and MTV. And as soon as embryonic stem cells are shown to cure some disease or tinkering with the germline is shown to prevent some horrific malady from ever occurring, "the debate over them will be over," as UCLA's Gregory Stock, author of the book Our Inevitable Genetic Future, told me recently.

Except ... that Hispanics and blacks, who by 2050 will compose 39 percent of the population, both display strong culturally conservative values and -- along with evangelical whites -- may form formidable political obstacle to new biotechnologies. Take the issue of abortion, which serves as a handy stand-in for attitudes toward cutting-edge biotech since both touch on the issue of what it means to be human. A 2002 Pew Research survey found that more than 55% of both registered Latino and African-American voters believe that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases -- ten points higher than whites. When asked whether abortion is "unacceptable, 79 percent Hispanics who identified themselves as Roman Catholic -- about 70 percent of respondents -- agreed that it was vs. 53 percent of white Catholics. (Even 53 percent of self-described "secular" Hispanics found abortion "unacceptable" vs. 22 percent of secular whites.) And a 2001 Survey USA poll of attitudes of New Yorkers towards stem cell research found that only 38 percent of Hispanics and 44 percent of blacks thought such research ethical vs. 68 percent of whites.

Religious commitment, of course, plays a big part in that divergence. Another 2002 Pew Research poll of attitudes toward federal funding for stem cell research found that individuals with a high level of religious commitment (based on factors such as how often individuals pray and attend church services) opposed such funding in far greater numbers than low commitment individuals. Roughly 48 percent of black with a high religious commitment, for instance, opposed such stem cell funding vs. 22 percent of those blacks with a low commitment. For Hispanics, it was 44 percent vs. 32 percent.

Now unless we are about to enter a Star Trek world where religion seems to have disappeared, it appears likely that over the coming decades both demographic and technological trends will turn America's current red-blue divide into a red-green divide (like the colors in a traffic light) -- "red" for those religious Hispanic, blacks and evangelical whites who will want to stop human enhancement, and "green" for those more secular Hispanics, blacks and whites who will want to go forward with it.

This is the dynamic that George W. Bush comprehends but many others on the Rioght are oblivious to.

---

"CHOICE" VS. REALITY:

Face the Fetus: It's time for abortion rights advocates to stop denying reality. (William Saletan, March 29, 2004, Slate)

Once the embryo is defined as a child, and killing it is defined as killing a child, abortion at any stage of pregnancy becomes murder—immediately in theory, and eventually in law.

Is this what the Senate intended? Not really. Last year, 52 senators voted for an amendment declaring that Roe "secures an important constitutional right" and "should not be overturned." Fourteen of those 52 pro-choice senators voted Thursday for UVVA. Four of them voted against an amendment to UVVA, offered by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would have preserved UVVA's penalties for assaults on pregnant women while changing its language to avoid a collision with abortion rights. Feinstein's amendment was the sole alternative put forward by abortion rights supporters. It was the whole ball game, and those four senators held the balance of power. With their support, Feinstein's amendment would have been adopted, and abortion rights would be safe. Instead, the amendment failed, 50 to 49.

Why did the pro-choice side lose those four votes? The answer lies in the text of the Feinstein amendment. It says that anyone who commits one of the enumerated violent federal crimes and "thereby causes the termination of a pregnancy or the interruption of the normal course of pregnancy" will get a second punishment "the same as the punishment provided for that conduct under Federal law had that injury or death occurred to the pregnant woman."

One word is notably missing from the amendment. The word is "fetus." There is no fetus. There is only a "pregnancy."

This is not an accident. Each time pro-lifers have tried in recent years to treat the embryo or fetus as a person in one context or another, pro-choicers have responded by treating the fetus as a nonentity. When pro-lifers sought to ban human cloning, pro-choicers offered a counterproposal that would require the destruction of every cloned embryo—which they referred to only as "an unfertilized blastocyst" and "the product of nuclear transplantation"—within two weeks of its creation. When pro-lifers sought to make fetuses eligible for the State Children's Health Insurance Program, pro-choicers offered a counterproposal to expand the program's eligibility guidelines "as if any reference to targeted low-income children were a reference to targeted low-income pregnant women." The pro-choice alternative made no reference to the gestated entity until it was "born."

It's a strategy of denial. And this week, it ran into too much reality. [...]

"If a state can put someone in jail for life because they took the life of an unborn child, then we're clearly saying there is something very valuable there," Feinstein warned Thursday. She wasn't endorsing that conclusion. She was reading aloud, with disapproval and alarm, the words of a Nebraska state senator. Guess what: There is something very valuable there. And if you can't see it, we can't hear you.

The pro-life strategy of re-humanizing the fetus is truly brilliant.

---

AT LEAST IT GIVES HIM TIME TO RECONSIDER:

MAY DATE TARGET FOR DEM MATE (Brian Blomquist, March 30, 2004, NY Post)

John Kerry is looking to name a running mate early - by the end of May - to help raise money, build momentum and serve as an attack dog, sources said yesterday.

Kerry's advisers believe they can send out their No. 2 to hammer President Bush and quickly respond to Republican charges - in a fashion similar to Bush's use of Vice President Dick Cheney, who's been giving hard-hitting anti-Kerry speeches.

They can't be this stupid. They are not going to pick a veep four months before anyone is paying attention and then send this unknown out to be the attack dog, so that the first impression voters get of them is that they're a hatchet man/woman.

---

THE SPIRIT OF '76:

New Happiness Index shows British society peaked in 1976: Overall quality of life said to have dropped, despite technological advances and economic prosperity. (Mark Rice-Oxley, 3/31/04, CS Monitor)

Britain was in the grip of inflation, drought, and punk rock. The cold war was in remission, the IMF bailed out the economy, and the Muppets and Starsky and Hutch were on TV.

It hardly sounds like the halcyon days of a golden era. But according to new research from a London think tank, 1976 was the year when Britain peaked as a society. Since then, Britons may have become more prosperous and more technologically advanced, but at such a social and environmental cost as to weigh negatively on the overall quality of life.

The report by the New Economics Foundation (also dubbed the Gross National Happiness Index ) is the latest salvo in an ongoing global debate over how to measure progress. Some US cities have created their own quality of life or "sustainability" indexes that include crime, health, environmental, and cultural factors. Canadian, British, and Scandinavian governments have added a catalog of new social and environmental yardsticks, too.

Understanding that, however, hasn't stopped economists and social commentators here from balking at the idea that a period in British history often known for industrial unrest, bellbottoms, and terrorism can be considered the apogee of anything.

Some doubt that after a generation of economic growth and exponential technological change, British citizens are really worse off now than almost 30 years ago.

And yet the study insists that this is just the point: traditional measurements of progress, it says, heavily favor the economic over the social, and are becoming outmoded. Becoming bigger, faster, and richer is only part of the story.

Yet folk still believe in progress...

---

GOOD TO HAVE THE CAMEL IN THE TENT (via Kevin Whited)

Clarke's Progress: Guess who used to believe in the Iraq/al-Qaida connection? (Christopher Hitchens, March 29, 2004, Slate)

Opposition to the Bush policy since Sept. 11, 2001, has taken one of four forms. There are those who continue to believe that there must have been some administration collusion in the planning and timing of the attacks. (I notice that yet another book alleging this has attracted endorsements from about half of The Nation's editorial board.) There are those who feel that America has antagonized the Muslim world enough already, and that the use of force in Afghanistan and Iraq only makes the enemy more angry. There are those who think that Iraq is "a war too far" (to annex David Rieff's phrase) and a distraction from the hunt for al-Qaida as well as a dangerous exercise in pre-emption. And there are those who think that the Clinton administration would have done, indeed was doing, a superior job.

Of course this quartet of positions is not mutually exclusive, and elements of each are to be found in one another, but the third and fourth ones have emerged as the safest and most consensual with the reception accorded to Richard Clarke's book. Among those claiming to be vindicated by his testimony are Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, two senior counterterrorism figures from the Clinton National Security Council, whose not-bad book The Age of Sacred Terror, published in 2002, bears re-reading. Among other things, it contains (on Pages 230-233 and 336-338 of the paperback version) an interesting profile of Richard Clarke, who is depicted as an egotistical pain in the ass who had the merit of getting things right. This seems fair: He has been exposed as wildly wrong in saying that Condoleezza Rice had never even heard of al-Qaida—an allegation that almost amounts to the dread charge of "character assassination"—and his operatic bow to the families of the victims is fine unless you think (as don't we all?) that one shouldn't appear to exploit Sept. 11 for partisan purposes. However, when in office he worked to develop the Predator drone, pushed for aid to the Northern Alliance, and leant heavily on the CIA and FBI to stop their wicked practice of hiding information from each other, and one can picture his rage at learning that the hijackers had bought seats using their "terrorism watch list" names.

The Benjamin-Simon book contains a long account of the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and also a stern defense of Clinton's decision in August 1998 to hit the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan with cruise missiles. What is interesting is the strong Iraqi footprint that is to be found in both episodes. Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the makers of the bomb that exploded at the World Trade Center, was picked up by the FBI, questioned, and incredibly enough released pending further interrogation as a "cooperative witness." He went straight to Amman and thence to Baghdad, where he remained under Saddam Hussein's protection until last year. As Clarke told the Sept. 11 commission last week: "The Iraqi government didn't cooperate in turning him over and gave him sanctuary, as it did give sanctuary to other terrorists." That's putting it mildly, when you recall that Abu Nidal's organization was a wing of the Baath Party, and that the late Abu Abbas of Klinghoffer fame was traveling on an Iraqi diplomatic passport. But, hold on a moment—doesn't every smart person know that there's no connection between Saddam Hussein and the world of terror?

Ah, we meant to say no connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. Well, in that case, how do you explain the conviction, shared by Clarke and Benjamin and Simon, that Iraq was behind Bin Laden's deadly operation in Sudan?

You have to wonder if the reason that Mr. Clarke's testimony made so little dent is because he so forcefully argued that Bill Clinton had done different and better.

---

50-0:

Economists see 'booming economy' (Barbara Hagenbaugh and Barbara Hansen, 3/30/04, USA TODAY)

Employers soon will add jobs steadily as the economy continues to expand, say economists surveyed by USA TODAY.

In an optimistic outlook, the 56 economists also predict businesses and consumers will continue to spend more as the unemployment rate falls. Inflation will stay low, they say, letting the Federal Reserve keep interest rates at historic lows a bit longer. [...]

"Business looks really very, very good," Decision Economics President Allen Sinai says, noting that corporate profits are rising rapidly. That means firms can spend on new technology and other improvements.

They also may finally spend on hiring. In the survey conducted March 19-24, 31% of the economists said they expect hiring to begin in earnest in the second quarter. More than half expected considerable gains in the second half.

Economists say the economy is improving quickly enough that businesses will no longer be able to meet demand with their existing workforces.

It's 1984 with no MN.

---

LET'S GET IT ON:

Upsetting But Powerful Logic Behind Outbreak of War Over Taiwan (Tom Plate, 3/30/04, Korea Times)

It’s unimaginable that China would ever go to war against Taiwan, right? Until recently, that’s what I thought.

Why would the government of China alter strategic course, veer away from its sane game plan of prioritizing economic development for 1.3 billion people and launch some kind of military attack on Taiwan, a major investor on the mainland and the democratic darling of people in the West?

The international implications for Beijing would be staggering. It would shock an on-looking world every bit as much as last century’s horrific Cultural Revolution, not to mention Tiananmen Square. China again would become, for some years at least, a pariah on the international stage.

Die-hard anti-Communist Republicans in America would say “I told you so”; anti-free trade Democrats now blaming China for aggravating U.S. joblessness would say “There the Bad Guys go again.” Even the worshipful French would have to duck for political cover. Thus China, assuming the success of invasion, would gain Taiwan but lose the world.

And so I used to laugh when learned scholars such as UCLA’s Richard Baum would refuse to rule out the possibility of such military action. How could they be so oblivious to the primacy of economics over politics in our globalized world?

But now I have come to accept the Baum possibility: that significant forces inside China marching to a drumbeat different from that of rational economists may wind up calling the shots over Taiwan, where pro-independence party President Chen Shui-bian has apparently been reelected (subject to the recount) and unleash the first shot.

We should have settled their hash during Tiananmen, but it's never too late to get rid of the last three Communist regimes.

---

CLIMBING DOWN

March 30, 2004 Letter from Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, to Thomas A. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton. (From the Corner)

We continue to believe, as I advised you by letter dated March 25, 2004, that the principles underlying the Constitutional separation of powers counsel strongly against such public testimony, and that Dr. Rice's testimony before the Commission can occur only with recognition that the events of September 11, 2001 present the most extraordinary and unique circumstances, and with conditions and assurances designed to limit harm to the ability of future Presidents to receive candid advice.

Nevertheless, the President recognizes the truly unique and extraordinary circumstances underlying the Commission's responsibility to prepare a detailed report on the facts and, circumstances of the horrific attacks on September 11, 2001. Furthermore, we have now received assurances from the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate that, in their view, Dr. Rice's public testimony in connection with the extraordinary events of September 11, 2001 does not set, and should not be cited as, a precedent for future requests for a National Security Advisor or any other White House official to testify before a legislative body. In light of the unique nature of the Commission and these additional assurances, the President has determined that, although he retains the legal authority to decline to make Dr. Rice available to testify in public, he will agree, as a matter of comity and subject to the conditions set forth below, to the Commission's request for Dr. Rice to testify publicly regarding matters within the Commission's statutory mandate.

The necessary conditions are as follows. First, the Commission must agree in writing that Dr. Rice's testimony before the Commission does not set any precedent for future Commission requests, or requests in any other context, for testimony by a National Security Advisor or any other White House official. Second, the Commission must agree in writing that it will not request additional public testimony from any White House official, including Dr. Rice. The National Security Advisor is uniquely situated to provide the Commission with information necessary to fulfill its statutory mandate. Indeed, it is for this reason that Dr. Rice privately met with the Commission for more than four hours on February 7, fully answered every question posed to her, and offered additional private meetings as necessary. Despite the fact that the Commission will therefore have access to all information of which Dr. Rice is aware, the Commission has nevertheless urged that public confidence in the work of the Commission would be enhanced by Dr. Rice appearing publicly before the Commission. Other White House officials with information relevant to the Commission's inquiry do not come within the scope of the Commission's rationale for seeking public testimony from Dr. Rice. These officials will continue to provide the Commission with information through private meetings, briefings, and documents, consistent with our previous practice.

I greatly appreciate the strong support you expressed to me last night for an agreement to the conditions on which we are proposing this extraordinary accommodation and your commitment to strongly advocate for the full support of the Commission. If the Commission accepts the terms of this agreement, I hope that we can schedule a time as soon as possible for such a public appearance by Dr. Rice. I want to reiterate once again, however, that Dr. Rice would be made available to the Commission with due regard for the Constitutional separation of powers and reserving all legal authorities, privileges, and objections that may apply, including with respect to other governmental entities or private parties.

I would also like to take this occasion to offer an accommodation on another issue on which we have not yet reached an agreement - Commission access to the President and Vice President. I am authorized to advise you that the President and Vice President have agreed to one joint private session with all 10 Commissioners, with one Commission staff member present to take notes of the session.

This is a climb down, although politically necessary. It is one of the rare instances in which the administration, as Condi Rice was urged to do yesterday, chooses to rise above principle. The part about only doing this because Hastert and Frist agreed that it would not be a precedent is particularly silly, for being so transparent. I want to see Pelosi and Daschle agree. I expect that, far from agreeing, they, and the Democrats on the committee, will attack this agreement. The last thing they want is Dr. Rice's public testimony.

---

THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO ENDS (via Tom Morin):

Radio legend Cooke dies aged 95 (BBC, 3/30/04)

Veteran BBC broadcaster and writer Alistair Cooke has died at his home in New York.

For 58 years, Cooke presented his radio series Letter from America, the world's longest-running speech radio programme.

Earlier this month, he announced his retirement on health grounds following advice from his doctors. [...]

A special one-hour tribute, Remembering Alistair Cooke will be broadcast on BBC Radio Four at 2100 BST on Tuesday 30 March, 2004 and at 2000 BST on Saturday 3rd April, 2004.

A World Service tribute is being broadcast at 1030 GMT, 1430GMT (not Europe) and 2130 GMT (Europe) on Tuesday 30 March, 2004.

For more on the irreplaceable Mr. Cooke, see here.

MORE:
Alistair Cooke, Elegant Interpreter of America, Dies at 95: Alistair Cooke was the urbane and erudite British-born journalist who was a peerless observer of the American scene for almost 70 years. (FRANK J. PRIAL, 3/31/04, NY Times)
-TRIBUTE: Alistair Cooke: More than a charming TV personality, the elegant and erudite Englishman was, first and foremost, a top-notch journalist and social historian. (DOROTHY SAMUELS, 3/31/04, NY Times)
-TRIBUTE: The Bond Across the Pond: My friend Alistair Cooke was a literate and wise interpreter of life in the daughter country. (WILLIAM SAFIRE, 3/31/04, NY Times)

---

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME:

William Tell, Tax Rebel (Adam Young, March 30, 2004, Mises.org)

The legend of William Tell, the Swiss legendary hero who symbolizes the struggle for individual and political freedom, has its origins in medieval Switzerland, in the tax rebellions that launched the Everlasting League and the defeat of an empire., [...]

As the legend goes, the emperor dispatched his army of tax collectors to enforce his long unrecognized claims. One of them, Hermann Gessler, arrived in Altdorf, where he promptly acted to enforce imperial and feudal authority over the people. Raising a pole in the center square, and using his hat decorated with peacock feathers atop it as a symbol of imperial power, Gessler commanded all who passed to bow before it and show proper respect for the government.

William Tell and his young son Walter, peasants from the nearby countryside of Bürglen in Uri, perhaps having not heard of Gessler's command or maybe choosing not to obey it, walked past without bowing. Some versions say he laughed out loud at the silly symbol of the government and its claim to tax.

When Gessler heard of this, he became enraged, fearing that other men would also disobey him, and ordered William Tell's arrest. Hearing that this William Tell was a famous hunter, Gessler devised a cruel plan. He ordered Tell to shoot an apple atop the head of his young son, Walter.

Now, William Tell begged the tyrant not to have him do this. "What if my son should move? What if my hand should tremble? What if the arrow should not carry true? Will you make me kill my boy?" he asked. "Say no more," said Gessler. "You must hit the apple with your one arrow. If you fail, my soldiers shall kill the boy before your eyes."

Without another word, William Tell aimed and let the arrow loose. Walter, hands tied, stood firm and still. He wasn't afraid. The arrow struck the apple in the center, carrying it away from him.

Gessler was impressed and infuriated, but as Tell was turning away, a second arrow that he had hidden in his coat fell to the ground. Cried Gessler, "what mean you with this second arrow?" Tell proudly replied "Tyrant, this arrow was meant for your heart if I had hurt my son."

Not quite as central to the emergence of democracy as the longbow was, but it's surely significant that the Swiss national myth, like the Anglo-American, centers on tax rebellion and the leveling effect of lethal instrumentalities. If you've got kids, we particularly recommend the Newberry winner The Apple and the Arrow.

---

NEGOTIATING WITH YOURSELF:

US, Israel agree on disengagement terms (Herb Keinon, Mar. 30, 2004, Jerusalem Post)

[B]oth sides are presently 'mapping out the areas of understanding and agreement.' The discussions are taking so long, the official said, because they are tantamount to negotiations, with the US representing the interests of a number of other players - Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority.

The official also said he believes the final formula of support for the plan that the Bush administration will issue 'will be satisfactory for the Israeli domestic scene,' meaning that it will live up to the three conditions Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spelled out for his critical support of the plan.

Netanyahu, whose support is considered key in swaying some of the uncommitted Likud ministers, laid out three conditions for accepting Sharon's disengagement plan at last Sunday's meeting between Sharon and the Likud ministers.

These conditions are:

* All of the points of entry to the Gaza Strip - by land, air, and sea - must remain in Israeli hands. This condition was earlier by the Defense Ministry as well.

* A public and detailed US rejection of the Palestinian demand for the right of refugees to return to Israel. The US's rejection of the 'right of return' was strongly implied in comments by presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

* Completion of the security fence before withdrawal from Gaza begins, including building the fence around the Ariel, Gush Etzion, and Ma'aleh Adumim settlement blocs, as well as around Route 443 from Modi'in to Jerusalem. This will be the most difficult commitment to secure, since the US has objected to the route of the fence dipping deep into the West Bank. [...]

Sources close to Sharon said the disengagement plan placed Netanyahu in a political dilemma. While he has real problems with the plan, he understands the public sentiment in favor of withdrawal, and he is looking beyond the plan to the next election.

Remarkable how easy it is to solve the Palestinian problem if you just cut them out of the decision-making loop.

---

GOD'S IN HIS HEAVEN; ALL'S RIGHT WITH THE WORLD:

Rays tee off on Mussina in Tokyo (AP, 3/30/04)

On the other side of the world, these New York Yankees looked lost.

Jose Cruz Jr. hit a tying home run that sparked a comeback, Tino Martinez helped beat his former team with his 300th career homer and the lowly Tampa Bay Devil Rays roughed up Mike Mussina in defeating the Yankees 8-3 Tuesday night.

The team that dominates the AL East couldn't do much in the Far East, giving up 15 hits and playing sluggishly in the field.

---

STICK TO YOUR KNITTING:

NPR Stations Had Pushed for Change (LYNETTE CLEMETSON, 3/30/04, NY Times)

National Public Radio's decision to remove Bob Edwards as host of "Morning Edition" is part of a broader push by the network, at the urging of many of its local partners, to remain competitive in an increasingly demanding and crowded news marketplace, several public radio managers across the country say.

The announcement that Mr. Edwards would leave his anchor post, effective April 30, to take on a new assignment as a senior correspondent, and his statements that the move was not his idea, ignited widespread criticism. NPR, based in Washington, has received more than 17,000 calls and e-mail messages from angry listeners, its officials said. A Web site, savebobedwards.com, has generated close to 3,000 signatures. [...]

In recent years, however, several station managers confirmed, some member stations have voiced concerns to NPR management that Mr. Edwards, who has served as host of "Morning Edition" from its beginnings in 1979, often seemed less engaged on the air. More critically, some station officials said, the program's traditional anchor-dominated format, heard live from 5 to 7 a.m., Eastern time. and rebroadcast with updates throughout the morning, has left NPR ill positioned to respond instantly to breaking news.

"A host, when news is breaking, actually needs to be able to interact live with a reporter on the scene and do live interviews with analysts as a story is unfolding," said Jeff Hansen, program director for KUOW in Seattle, and an independent coordinator for news-focused radio statons that carry NPR programs. "We owe a lot to Bob Edwards for setting exactly the right tone for the first 25 years. But I think there is probably wide agreement in the public radio system that it is time for an evolutionary change."

Though it was a Saturday, so not on Mr. Edwards's watch, their coverage of the Columbia disaster was exemplary, helped greatly by their correspondent Pat Duggins, whose coverage of the space program is outstanding. Meanwhile, some of the best reportage early on 9-11 cvame from Imus in the Morning, when Warner Wolf heard the planes flying over his Manhattan apartment and was able immediately to say that the first hit was a jumbo jet, not a small plane as some first thought. Maybe there's more "luck" involved in such fast-breaking stories than they care to realize.

---

AXIS OF GOOD FILES

No More Clash of Civilizations: Greece and Turkey join hands to defeat al-Qaeda. (Stephen Schwartz, 3/30/04, FrontPage)

The victors in the Greek election--Kostas Karamanlis and his conservative New Democracy party--won on a classic free market platform. They preached lower taxes for citizens and corporations, leaner government, deregulation, privatization and denationalization of major industries, and reform of social security, health care, and education.

Their opponents, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), in power for 20 of the last 23 years, had long been known for virulent anti-American and anti-NATO rhetoric, and such provocative policies in foreign affairs as allowing Arab and other extremists free access to their country so long as they refrained from harming local interests. As a result, Greece had long been treated with near-universal disdain in European capitals, as well as in Washington.

At the same time, PASOK, for all its coziness with Arab militants, indulged in furious demagogy against Muslim Turkey. There was no contradiction in this--Arabs don't like Turkey, which has close links to Israel. But above all, Greeks still smart over their long humiliation at the hands of the Turks, symbolized by the fall of Constantinople in 1453. [...]

But all that is in the past. Now the Socialists--with George Papandreou as their leader--are in opposition, and Kostas Karamanlis, is prime minister of Greece, like his father before him. His government has approved a framework for direct Greek-Turkish negotiations regarding Cyprus. And on April 20, the Cypriots are scheduled to vote in a UN-sponsored referendum. Greek and Turkish Cypriots will be asked to approve a fairly predictable UN-style system for settlement of refugee claims, along with provisions for power-sharing between the two communities.

While UN-sponsored "conflict resolution" has failed in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Greeks and Turks, fortified by their thriving capitalist economies, seem bent on avoiding the path taken in the upper Balkans. For this, Athens and Ankara deserve congratulation and support. In the age of terrorism, a rapprochement between Greece, the cradle of democracy, and Turkey, the pioneer of Muslim secularism, is welcome news for the civilized world. It is of course anathema to al-Qaeda.

Fortunately wiser heads prevailed over the petulant, who wished to punish Turkey for its entirely justifiable worries about the ramifications of our liberating Iraqi Kurdistan. The ideal American response to the way the Europeans are mucking Turkey about as regards its entry into the EU would be to immediately cut a joint free trade and defense agreement with them and the Israelis and anyone else in the region who cares to join.

---

THE BULLETT THAT SAVED A PRESIDENCY:

Reagan Wounded In Chest By Gunman; Outlook 'Good' After 2-Hour Surgery; Aide And 2 Guards Shot; Suspect Held (Howell Raines, 3/30/1981, The New York Times)

At 4:14 P.M, Mr. Haig, in a voice shaking with emotion, told reporters that the Administration's ''crisis management'' plan was in effect, and citing provisions for Presidential succession, Mr. Haig asserted that he was in charge.

Mr. Reagan's wife, Nancy, and senior White House advisers rushed to the hospital and talked to Mr. Reagan before he entered surgery at about 3:24 P.M.. Despite his wound, the 70-year-old President walked into the hospital and seemed determined to assure his wife and colleagues that he would survive.

''Honey, I forgot to duck,'' Mr. Reagan was quoted as telling his wife. As he was wheeled down a corridor on a hospital cart, he told Senator Paul Laxalt, a political associate, ''Don't worry about me.'' According to Lyn Nofziger, the White House political director, Mr. Reagan winked at James A. Baker 3d, his chief of staff. Then, spying Edwin Meese 3d, the White House counselor, Mr. Reagan quipped, ''Who's minding the store?''

The operating room was said to be the scene of a bit of the partisan humor favored by the chief executive. Mr. Nofziger said that Mr. Reagan, eyeing the surgeons, said, ''Please tell me you're Republicans."

At this point, Mr. Reagan had apparently not been told of the grave wounds to the three men who went down in the spray of bullets aimed at him.
[...]

Mr. Reagan regained consciousness early tonight, according to a White House statement. It said: ''At 8:50 this evening, the President joked with his doctors in the recovery room and, despite the tubes in his mouth, he gave them a handwritten note that said, 'All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia.' ''

The President's game recounting of the show-business line, attributed to W.C. Fields as his choice of epitaph, struck a sharp contrast with the events of the day. [...]

Mr. Reagan was operated upon by Dr. Benjamin Aaron and Dr. Joseph Giordano of the university's staff. Asked if it was ''medically extraordinary'' for Mr. Reagan to have walked into the hospital, Dr. O'Leary said, ''Maybe not medically extraordinary, but just short of that.''

Dr. O'Leary said the surgeons made an incision about six inches long just underneath the left nipple. Mr. Reagan received two and a half quarts of blood through transfusions during what Dr. O'Leary called a ''relatively simple procedure.''

The bullet was removed intact, although its shape had been distorted by striking Mr. Reagan's rib. A .22-caliber bullet is relatively small, and although capable of killing, generally does less tissue damage than the larger calibers typically used by lawenforcement officers.

Mr. Reagan, who has been in office just over two months, is the eighth American President to become an assassin's target. Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy were killed by gunmen. Unsuccessful attempts were made on the lives of Andrew Jackson, Harry S. Truman and Gerald R. Ford. This is the third assassination attempt since President Kennedy's death in 1963. Two attempts were made on President Ford's life in September 1975.

Funny how that one incident indelibly shaped our images of both Ronald Reagan, positively, and Al Haig, negatively. Meanwhile, note Howell Raines's implication that the President's humor was inappropriate. Jackass.

---

WHAT WILL EVER BECOME OF THE VANQUISHED...:

Future of a ruined Germany (George Orwell, April 8, 1945, The Observer)

As the advance into Germany continues and more and more of the devastation wrought by the Allied bombing planes is laid bare, there are three comments that almost every observer finds himself making. The first is: 'The people at home have no conception of this.' The second is, 'It's a miracle that they've gone on fighting.' And the third is, 'Just think of the work of building this all up again!' [...]

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation. For one has to remember that it is not only Germany that has been blitzed. The same desolation extends, at any rate in considerable patches, all the way from Brussels to Stalingrad. And where there has been ground fighting, the destruction is even more thorough. In the 300 miles or so between the Marne and the Rhine there is not such a thing as a bridge or a viaduct that has not been blown up.

Even in England we are aware that we need three million houses, and that the chances of getting them within measurable time seem rather slender. But how many houses will Germany need, or Poland or the USSR, or Italy? When one thinks of the stupendous task of rebuilding hundreds of European cities, one realises that a long period must elapse before even the standards of living of 1939 can be re-established.

We do not yet know the full extent of the damage that has been done to Germany but judging from the areas that have been overrun hitherto, it is difficult to believe in the power of the Germans to pay any kind of reparations, either in goods or in labour. Simply to re-house the German people, to set the shattered factories working, and to keep German agriculture from collapsing after the foreign workers have been liberated, will use up all the labour that the Germans are likely to dispose of.

We always think the task we face is uniquely challenging, eh?

---

SHE WORKS FOR THE PRESIDENT:

Clarke Refused to Testify in 1999, Citing Same Reasons as Condi (NewsMax, March 29, 2004)

Former Clinton terrorism czar Richard Clarke refused to testify before the Senate Y2K Committee in 1999, citing the same rule invoked by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in recent days, with the Bush White House saying the regulation prevents her from testifying publicly before the 9/11 Commission.

In a transcript of a July 29, 1999, Senate hearing first unearthed by FreeRepublic.com, Committee Chairman Robert Bennett, R-Utah, explained that Clarke had canceled his appearance because, as a member of the National Security Council, he hadn't been confirmed by the Senate and as such was prohibited from testifying before Congress.

The Congressional Record confirms Clarke's decision not to appear by invoking the same rule cited by Dr. Rice.

One of the things the Bush team determined to do before they ever took office was to restore the prerogatives of the executive, many of which Bill Clinton had squandered. As with Vice President Cheney's Energy meetings they've pretty much stuck to their guns.

---

AMATEUR HOUR:

Kerry slams Cheney in Sacramento campaign stop (Associated Press, March 29, 2004)

Sen. John Kerry lashed out at Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday, accusing Cheney of distorting his Senate record on taxes as the Democrat sought to shift the debate to President Bush's stewardship of the economy. [...]

"They found Dick Cheney in an undisclosed location and brought him out to attack me," Kerry said at the start of a town hall meeting at the Charles A. Jones Skills & Business Education Center. "That seems to be his designated role, not to create jobs, but to attack John Kerry. [...]

Two weeks ago, Kerry and Cheney engaged in a cross-country, rhetorical fight over national security and the Democrat's credentials to be commander in chief. On Monday, they sparred over taxes and the economy.

Kerry is on a two-day campaign swing through four California cities, where he is raising money and talking to voters about the need for jobs. While Kerry blames Bush for rising unemployment, Bush's campaign portrays Kerry as a habitual tax-raiser.

Cheney said Kerry had voted for higher taxes some 350 times in his Senate career and was likely to seek huge tax increases to help pay for nearly $1 trillion in his spending proposals.

"That averages to one vote for higher taxes every three weeks for almost two decades. At least the folks from Massachusetts knew who was on the job," Cheney told a receptive audience at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

This is protoypical behavior for an undisciplined and unprepared candidate. He's stepping on the Richard Clarke story that was helping him. He's calling attention to Cheney's attack, which would otherwise have been buried behind the want-ads. And he's picking a fight with a flunky, one who won't even be on the ticket in the Fall.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, no one qualified to run for president entered the race and the campaign season was so mild that Mr. Kerry was never tested. Now they find they're stuck with a bad candidate who learned nothing.

---

COURTING THE COMMUNITY:

Jewish defections irk Dems (Alexander Bolton, 3/30/04, The Hill)

“On the GOP side they’ve been very aggressive in courting the community,” said Nathan Diament, director of public policy at the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. “The point person on the Senate side is Rick Santorum. Over the past two or three years they’ve been working the community and having a lot of meetings.”

Diament said Barbara Ledeen, the director of coalitions for the Senate Republican Conference, initiated the efforts.

Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who is Jewish, has also been active. He has traveled around the country “stumping in Jewish venues trying to convey a sense of why Republicans are more deserving of support,” said Diament.

On the House side, Cantor, the only Jewish Republican in the House, has led the GOP outreach effort.

“Democrats do not speak with a unified voice on Israel anymore,” said Cantor. “The Democrats want to re-inject the United States into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a neutral arbiter and neutral voice.”

If only they still believed in Judaism and Zionism they'd all be Republicans.

---

WHERE THE LANDSLIDE MATTERS:

A pitched battle for state legislatures: Chambers in 25 states could change majorities with a tip of three seats or less. (Daniel B. Wood, 3/30/04, CS Monitor)

The battle for party control over state legislatures, say experts, is more intense than at any point in recent political memory.

Of the more than 7,000 legislative seats in the US, the GOP holds a slim 60-seat advantage. And of the 50 states, 25 have legislative chambers that could switch party control with a shift of just three seats or less.

In Maine and Colorado, a switch of one seat could reverse longtime party dominance of both legislative and executive branches. While in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, a change in three seats could significantly reshape the poltical path of the South's fastest-growing states.

Several of the nation's key battleground states - Missouri, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington - could solidify political alliances for years to come.

"This is a far bigger election year for state legislatures than most," says Tim Story, election analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures. "Because there are so many close votes which could shift party control of legislative chambers, it will likely have an impact on every issue before state government from civil unions to transportation, education, and health care."

This fall's vote will indicate whether Republicans can continue to garner more power in state governments. The 2002 election gave the GOP control of a majority of US legislative seats for the first time in 50 years. (Republicans now control both chambers in 21 states, compared to 18 for Democrats.)

And George Soros isn't gonna pump money into keeping Indiana safe for gay marriage.

---

TIME TO, AS THEY SAY, "MOVE ON":

The Transition Has Begun: One by one, Iraqis regain control of their own government operations. (Robert Alt, 3/29/04, National Review)

Much debate has swirled from Washington to Baghdad over the June 30, 2004, Coalition-pullout deadline: Will it be too soon to formally transfer power over key governmental operations from Coalition authority to the Iraqi people? At least one agency has demonstrated that June 30 is not soon enough: In a formal ceremony on Sunday, Ambassador Paul Bremer, surrounded by Iraqi doctors, announced that authority over the Ministry of Health is now officially in the hands of the Iraqi people.

That the Ministry of Health should be the first of the 26 public ministries to return to Iraqi control is quite an accomplishment, especially when you consider its dilapidated status just one year ago. Years of neglect had taken their toll. Maintenance was unheard of under Saddam, leaving only 35 percent of the equipment in hospitals operable. Doctors and medical students were unable to view medical journals online because of government policies that made owning a satellite dish a crime punishable by the state. And to add insult to injury, when Jim Haveman, the senior Coalition adviser, and Dr. Kudair Abbas, the Iraqi minister of health, arrived last year, the ministry building itself was completely looted. It is therefore not surprising to learn that Iraqis had come to expect little in the way of medical care.

What a difference a year makes! Saddam only provided $16 million for health care in his 2002 budget, a wretchedly low sum that should again prompt questions about how the Oil-for-United-Nations-Cronies — I mean, Oil-for-Food — program was operated. In FY 2004, however, the health budget received an enormous 60-fold increase, providing $948 million for 26 million Iraqis. At the end of the war, Iraq possessed only 300 tons of pharmaceuticals on hand. Compare this to the 35,000 tons of drugs distributed this year alone, a total that notably includes 30 million doses of children's vaccinations.

---

60-40 NATION:

Mass. takes step toward gay marriage ban (AP, 3/29/04)

The Massachusetts Legislature adopted a new version of a state constitutional amendment Monday that would ban gay marriage and legalize civil unions, eliminating consideration of any other proposed changes.

The vote came at the opening of the third round of a constitutional convention on the contentious issue, as competing cries of "Jesus Christ" and "Equal Rights" shook the Statehouse outside the legislative chamber.

Lawmakers had voted earlier this month in favor of a similar amendment. The revised version adopted Monday would ask voters to simultaneously ban gay marriage and legalize civil unions — rather than taking those steps separately. It clarifies that civil unions would not grant federal benefits to gay couples.

That even MA can pass at least some kind of amendment is a sign of hope.

---

NOW THERE'S A RESUME:

Peter Ustinov, Oscar-Winning Actor, Dies at 82 (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 3/29/04)

Peter Ustinov, the hair-trigger wit with the avuncular charm whose 60-year-career amounted to a revovling series of star turns as actor, playwright, novelist, director and raconteur, died Sunday at a clinic near his home in Bursins, Switzerland. He was 82.

Mr. Ustinov had suffered for years from the effects of diabetes and, more recently, a weakened heart. His death was announced by Leon Davico, a friend and former spokesman for Unicef, for which Mr. Ustinov worked for many years.

Mr. Ustinov, a cosmopolitan, corpulent and full-bearded six-footer whose ancestors were prominent in czarist Russia, was a prodigy who began mimicking his parents' guests at the age of 2. He wrote his first play, "House of Regrets," in his teens; it opened in London to glowing reviews when he was 21.

As an actor, Mr. Ustinov won international stardom as a languid, quirky Nero in the 1951 sword-and-sandal epic Quo Vadis?, gained increasing stature by playing sly rogues, and became one of the few character actors to hold star status for decades, adjusting easily to movies, plays, broadcast roles and talk shows, which he enlivened with hilarious imitations and pungent one-liners.

The entertainer's many honors included two supporting-actor Academy Awards for portraying a shrewd slave dealer in Spartacus in 1960 and a clumsy jewel thief in Topkapi in 1964. He received three Emmys for television performances: in the title role of "The Life of Samuel Johnson" in 1958, as Socrates in "Barefoot in Athens" in 1966 and as a rural shopkeeper who gains compassion from a youngster in "A Storm in Summer" in 1970. He won a Grammy for narrating Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" in a concert conducted by Herbert von Karajan and also directed operas and his plays in half a dozen European cities.

---

SHHHHHHHH, WE'RE WINNING:

Listen to the Arab Reformers (Jackson Diehl, March 29, 2004, Washington Post)

The most underreported and encouraging story in the Middle East in the past year has been the emergence in public of homegrown civic movements demanding political change. Two years ago they were nonexistent or in jail. Now they are out in the open even in the most politically backward places in the region: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria. They are made up not only of intellectuals but of businessmen, women, students, teachers and journalists. Unlike their governments -- and the old school of U.S. and European Arabists -- they don't believe that change should be gradual, and they reject the dictators' claim that democracy would only empower Islamic extremists. It is the delay of change, they say, that is increasingly dangerous.

These people weren't created by George W. Bush. They are the homegrown answer to a decadent political order, and they ride a powerful historical current. But they will tell you frankly: The new U.S. democratization policy, far from being an unwanted imposition, has given them a voice, an audience and at least a partial shield against repression -- three things they didn't have one year ago.

"In the Middle East today, you talk about food, you talk about football -- and you talk about democracy," says Mohammed Kamal, a young political scientist from Egypt. "Some people condemn the Americans, others say, 'Look at the other side, these are universal values.' The point is that for the first time in many years, there is a serious debate going on in the Arab world about their own societies. The United States has triggered this debate, it keeps the debate going, and this is a very healthy development."

Kamal and another prominent Egyptian political scientist, Osama Ghazali Harb, were in Washington last week; both attended a groundbreaking meeting of civic organizations at Egypt's Alexandria Library earlier this month. The conference, unthinkable a year ago, produced a clarion call for democratic change -- one that was all but ignored by Western media.

So here is what the Alexandria statement said: "Reform is necessary and urgently needed." That means: an "elected legislative body, an independent judiciary, and a government that is subject to popular and constitutional oversight, in addition to political parties with their different ideologies." Also, "the freedom of all forms of expression, especially the freedom of the press . . . and the support of human rights in accordance with international charters, especially the rights of women, children and minorities."

The reason the stories are underreported is fairly obvious: they indicate George W. Bush is winning his world-historical gamble.

---

EQUAL JUSTICE:

Judge hands down a harsh sentence . . . on columnists (EJ Montini, Mar. 28, 2004, Arizona Republic)

Judge Stephen A. Gerst is a cruel and heartless jurist, bordering on evil. How a person like this could get appointed to the bench, then re-elected again and again by voters, is beyond comprehension.

Not because of what he did on Friday to convicted Bishop Thomas J. O'Brien. Not because of what he did to the family of victim Jim L. Reed. But because of what he did to . . . me.

He made me irrelevant. He made everybody who does a job like mine irrelevant. At least for a day.

Gerst spent over an hour explaining why he sentenced Bishop O'Brien to probation, community service and a deferred jail sentence. And he did so in a way that left people like me with nothing to gripe about. Not a thing.

Gerst detailed how he had read all 99 cases of those who, like the bishop, had been convicted of leaving the scene of a fatal accident. He showed a picture of himself with boxes and boxes and boxes of files. He announced in court that he had reviewed each file, using no clerks or other help, and then he described in meticulous detail exactly what the defendants in those cases received as sentences and what factors led to those decisions. [...]

If he were to treat the bishop differently, Gerst said, "It would establish a standard that treats people more leniently who do not hold religious position and treats people more harshly if they do. How people may personally wish to feel about this issue is their own business, but all people should be treated equally under the law."

That is what he did. He considered all of the evidence, all of the testimony, all of the mitigating and aggravating factors. Then he ignored the rants of self-righteous, marginally informed, overly emotional hacks like me and treated Bishop Thomas J. O'Brien equally under the law.

It was a good day for justice, a bad day for columnists.

Atticus Finch lives.

---

BE JUBILANT, MY FEET:

Americans fighting their own holy war (ALEX MASSIE, 3/27/04, The Scotsman)

[I]f there’s one essential truth about the United States these days, it is that the principal divide in the country is no longer between rich and poor, or even black and white, but between the devout and the unbelievers. Clearly, racial issues remain immensely important, but race is both an openly acknowledged problem and one that, although far from solved, is at least moving in the right direction. By contrast, the cultural war between religious and secular is only getting worse.

The case before the Supreme Court is the latest skirmish in this grinding cultural war. Mel Gibson’s The Passion drove another nail through the idea that the United States could comfortably reach any kind of consensus about religion. For the first time in living memory, religious conservatives had no problem with graphic violence on the big screen, while liberal atheists disparaged the pornographic brutalism of Gibson’s vision.

Last year, foreigners chuckled as devout Christians flocked to the state courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest against the (court-ordered) removal from the building of a slab depicting the Ten Commandments.

To some extent, the argument over gay marriage is but another front in this wider, deeper cultural struggle. The religious Right (and in this case many on the religious Left, too) sees no difference between the Church’s definition of marriage and the civil, secular, definition of the institution. "Activist" judges in Massachusetts and elsewhere disagree.

If further evidence were needed that a religious revival is under way, it came this week as Congress passed legislation making it a crime to hurt or damage unborn children. To godless Europe, this is an extreme measure; to many Americans, it is commonsense.

There is another point to be made too. The notion that the United States was and is a great and divine experiment is central, indeed crucial, to the idea of American exceptionalism. The US remains a profoundly evangelical country, even if the constitution explicitly rejects the idea of a State-sponsored established religion. [...]

The idea of manifest destiny, still deeply felt today, may trouble non-Americans more than any other aspect of contemporary American culture, be it secular or religious. But it is nothing new. Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt both believed themselves to be in the business of saving other countries from themselves. There was, in that respect at least, no contradiction in their minds between the interests of the divinity and the United States.

In other words, US religious fervour is inseparable from the political mission the United States has believed itself to be engaged in ever since its founding. In that respect, the modern-day US remains a deeply old-fashioned place, burdened with the sense of obligation (and righteousness) not seen in Europe since the 19th century. The spirit of noblesse oblige lives on and America is destined to be an inspiration for the rest of humanity. Some may see this as hubris, of course, but it is an essential element of American amour propre.

One as yet unrecognized problem for Democrats is that their Atlanticism places them at odds with this Americanism. It makes their choice of presidential candidates especially disastrous.

MORE:
Socialist Cousin Insists Kerry Isn't French (NewsMax, 3/29/04)

John Kerry's French cousin insists there's nothing gallingly Gallic about the Massachusetts Democrat.

"John Kerry is incredibly American," claimed cousin Brice Lalonde, mayor of Saint-Briac-Sur-Mer and environment minister under Socialist former president Francois Mitterrand. "He has absolutely nothing French about him."

The Associated Press reported today: "With the race for the White House turning nasty - and France-U.S. ties not quite mended from the Iraq war - Kerry's Gallic clan, when questioned, talks up his American-ness. Some are keeping a low profile, saying too much talk about France could be political arsenic."

Lalonde admitted, "I'm afraid to hurt him," but like other Frenchies has a Kerry bumper sticker pasted to his car.

---

THE STILL-HIGHER TRIBUNAL:

The leftist's Adam Smith (Joshua Glenn, 3/28/2004, Boston Globe)

ADAM SMITH IS often hailed as the original free-market guru. But according to Samuel Fleischacker, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and author of the new book On Adam Smith's `Wealth of Nations", the Scottish economist was also a deeply moral thinker who has some lessons to teach the left. "I came to Adam Smith with the notion that he must be a right-wing libertarian," says Fleischacker, who spoke with Ideas from his home in Evanston, Ill. "So it was eye-opening to discover that Smith didn't exalt `commercial society' because it allows people to amass goods, but because it can lead to good for human beings."

IDEAS: Before writing "Wealth of Nations" (1776), which is in part a tract against mercantilist restrictions on trade, Adam Smith published a much-acclaimed treatise on moral philosophy. Yet it's difficult to find any mention of morality in "Wealth of Nations."

FLEISCHACKER: It's true that in "Wealth," moral considerations are given oblique and cursory treatment. But remember, Smith was writing for politicians and merchants likely to ignore appeals to their better natures. Still, he argued for a liberal political economy largely because the broadening of free markets reduces the price of food and raises the standard of living for the poor. Also, he believed that political liberty has a crucial moral function: In a commercial society, individuals are able to develop virtues of self-reliance and self-government, essential to the development of good character.

IDEAS: But isn't Smith pessimistic about our selfish human nature? In a famous line, he writes, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

FLEISCHACKER: Read in context, Smith's point is that what distinguishes humans from animals isn't self-interest, but the fact that we understand that we can pursue our individual interests together. Instead of being a zero-sum game, economic exchange can serve a joint human effort to increase the wealth of everyone -- that's also the point of his "invisible hand" line. But it's important to note that Smith also believed that sometimes an individual's unconstrained pursuit of his interest will not benefit society, and he didn't rule out the possibility of benevolent actions.

The Leftist (or libertarian) who turns to Adam Smith will find cold comfort, Is Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy an Adequate Foundation for the Market Economy? (James Halteman, Fall 2003, Markets & Morality)

For Smith, the innate passions of humanity fall into three main categories: the social passions of generosity, compassion, and esteem that, when practiced, lead to benevolence and self-control. Unfortunately, these are rare and cannot be counted on to provide the glue of a social order. The unsocial passions of hate, envy, and revenge are never condoned as a social practice and they cannot be transformed into a social virtue. The third category of passions includes grief, joy, pain, pleasure, and self-preservation. These passions are the key to the formation of the social order, and when the downside of these passions is channeled for good, these passions become the virtues of prudence and justice.

The key to the transforming of passions into virtues is three screens or conditioners that function to make society viable. The first is sympathy, which helps people see themselves as others see them. The innate ability to see, hear, feel, and identify with another person’s situation and to experience the same fellow-feeling in return creates an interdependency that is socially constructive. The second screen is the impartial spectator, which acts to provide a totally unbiased perspective on how the passions are lived out. Finally, there is always the appeal “to a still higher tribunal, to that of the all-seeing Judge of the world, whose eye can never be deceived, and whose judgments can never be perverted.”

If this system of three checks on the passions is effectively supported by the proper institutional structures, then the social order can be viable and virtuous. In the area of economics, a market order will best fit this moral framework because of its compatibility with the rules of prudence and justice. The key is the effective control of the passions, and it is the moral order described above that must be present in order for the market system to succeed. What follows is a more detailed discussion of that moral system with special attention given to the question of whether that system is based on nature, custom, and habit alone or whether there is a moral force involved that is anchored in some sense of human telos or essence that defines human purpose. [...]

Smith does not root morality in our ability to attach self-command to sympathy or to our ability philosophically to discern right from wrong. Rather, he looks to the impartial spectator that comes to us from creation and is outside of ourselves—but people often do not have constancy in following the impartial spectator, so the moral battle is ever-present. In one example of a person in distress, Smith describes the battle that goes on between the selfish passions and the impartial spectator.

His own natural feelings of his own distress … presses hard upon him, and he cannot, without a very great effort, fix his attention upon that of the impartial spectator. Both views present themselves to him at the same time. His sense of honor, his regard to his own dignity, directs him to fix his whole attention upon the one view. His natural, his untaught and undisciplined feelings, are continually calling it off to the other. He does not, in this case, perfectly identify himself with the ideal man within the breast, he does not become himself the impartial spectator of his own conduct.

In other words, the inability to appropriate the ideal impartial spectator limits the ability of people to live a truly moral life. The language and context of this discussion points toward a view of the impartial spectator that approximates the conscience as it is used in modern discussion. There is a spiritual component to the conscience, but it can be easily abused by human weakness. In a similar manner, there are times when public pressure opposes the impartial spectator’s judgment for a person, and in those times the influence of the spectator will become weak and faltering, leaving the person with sympathy alone to guide action.

In such cases, this demigod within the breast appears like the demigods of the poets, though partly of immortal, yet partly, too, of mortal extraction. When his judgments are steadily and firmly directed by the sense of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, he seems to act suitably to his divine extraction: But when he suffers himself to be astonished and confounded by the judgments of ignorant and weak man, he discovers his connexion with mortality, and appears to act suitably, rather to the human, than to the divine, part of his origin.

The All-Seeing Judge of the World: The Still-Higher Tribunal

This divine and human extraction of the impartial spectator leaves the possibility of unsolved moral dilemmas where there is no reliable guidance left for a person involved in such a situation. Commenting on the mortal side of the impartial spectator, Smith concludes that there are times when the impartial spectator is no more dependable than the man without (sympathy of public) that accepts options that are not just or ethical.

In such cases, the only effectual consolation of humbled and afflicted man lies in an appeal to a still-higher tribunal, to that of the all-seeing Judge of the world, whose eye can never be deceived and whose judgments can never be perverted. A firm confidence in the unerring rectitude of this great tribunal, before which his innocence is in due time to be declared, and his virtue to be finally rewarded, can alone support him under the weakness and despondency of his own mind, under the perturbation and astonishment of the man within the breast, whom nature has set up as, in this life, the great guardian, not only of his innocence but of his tranquility. Our happiness in this life is, thus, upon many occasions, dependent upon the humble hope and expectation of a life to come: a hope and expectation deeply rooted in human nature, which can alone support its lofty ideas of its own dignity.

Smith believed that the idea of life beyond death where justice is fully realized is a valuable contributor to the willingness of people to transcend a weak man within and a faulty man without. Having this fully immortal backup to the impartial spectator, whether real or imagined, would be the final line of defense against antisocial behavior. Religious values could be very beneficial to a social order. In this sense, Smith, though espousing only a natural religion, did adopt a concept of telos that specified how people would behave if they live up to their essential purpose.
The Stoic tradition, which can be seen beneath the surface of Smith’s moral analysis, came through several phases from early Hellenistic philosophy through the Roman period up to the third century. Fundamental to Stoic thinking is the notion that the world is an ideally good organism that operates as a system with each part serving the whole. A divine logos, or primary moving force, ordained the system and acted as its guide, but direct access to the Creator rather than submission to the created order is an error of Christianity. Moral development, in the Stoic view, involved an ever-expanding sense of one’s self-interest until the good of the whole is foremost even to the point of sacrificing what would commonly be one’s personal interest, though later Stoicism developed a more pragmatic, ethical posture.

The notion of self-control in Stoicism gives clues as to how one progresses morally. Smith’s ability to connect the Stoic organismic view of the world with the mechanistic natural concepts of the Enlightenment provided a broad base on which Smith built his views. The notion of moral progress in Stoicism when blended with the Enlightenment ideas of moral precepts led Smith to his three-level approach to the moral socializing of behavior. The ability to exercise sympathy, appropriate to the impartial spectator and, if need be, the final judge of our conduct, can be seen as a marriage of Stoic moral development and the secular virtue concepts of David Hume. While there may be no teleology in Hume, one can see Stoic threads in Smith that make the teleological claims plausible.

The Role of Rules in Proper Conduct

Smith believed that if the proper institutional structures were established and new rules of the economic game could be established, then a new era of economic performance would result. The reason for established rules in a social order relates to the problem of appropriating the impartial spectator. Since all the circumstances and motivations must be known before the impartial spectator can authoritatively speak, and because humans rarely know those things in advance, it is necessary to set up general practices and rules that simplify the moral discernment process. “So partial are the views of mankind with regard to the propriety of their own conduct, both at the time of action and after it; and so difficult is it for them to view it in the light in which any indifferent spectator would consider it.”

Given this problem and the fact that individuals are easily self-deceived, Smith sees in nature a method that can standardize behavior effectively. We observe behavior that generates individual welfare and social harmony, and we see behavior that does not. “It is thus that general rules of morality are formed. They are ultimately founded upon experience of what, in particular instances, our moral faculties, our natural sense of merit and demerit, approve, or disapprove of.” Once the rules are established, it becomes the duty of everyone to follow the rules. Apparently, nature reinforces the opinion that the Deity is behind the rules and will subtly enforce them. “Those vice-regents of God within us, never fail to punish the violation of them, [rules] by the torments of inward shame and self-condemnation; and, on the contrary, always reward obedience with tranquility of mind, with contentment, and self-satisfaction.”

Conversely, for Smith, the rules are limited in their purpose. In discussing the operation of virtue development, Smith divides the process into efficient and final causes. The efficient cause of the heart, arteries and veins, or the digestive track in the body is to circulate blood and process food respectively. The efficient cause of the wheels of a clock is to spin with consistency. The final cause of the body is to make human life meaningful, and the final cause of the watch is to tell time. At this point Smith claims that we are trying to do too much if we focus on final causes.

But though, in accounting for the operations of bodies, we never fail to distinguish in this manner the efficient from the final cause, in accounting for those of the mind we are apt to confound these two different things with one another. When, by natural principles we are led to advance those ends, which a refined and enlightened reason would recommend to us, we are very apt to impute to that reason, as to their efficient cause, the sentiments and actions by which we advance those ends, and to imagine that to be the wisdom of man, which, in reality, is the wisdom of God.

This passage illustrates Smith’s concern that we confuse natural systems, which function as efficient causes, with the ends of social organization, which are the final causes. In short, the natural system is God’s design and the tendencies and forces that he programs into the system guide those concerned with morality to the virtues that God intends for us—but the guiding process is toward an end, which is more than simply a viable social order or an efficient economy. The goal is to achieve the perfection of human nature. “And hence it is, that to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety.” This surely represents a vision of the essential purpose of human creation and the role of the impartial spectator and the higher tribunal are not trivial in this process of perfecting human nature.

MacIntyre’s reading of Smith at this point sees Smith’s view of nature as a substitute for the Christian God. When applied to a setting such as economics, nature prescribes principles or rules that when submitted to properly, become a system of prudence. When a similar approach is taken in the moral realm, ethics and moral reflection become a prudential rule following enterprise. When Smith says, “The man who acts according to the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence, may be said to be perfectly virtuous,” MacIntyre sees Smith as having a moral system that simply follows rules given in a system based on human passions.

When Smith criticizes ancient moralists for ignoring the rules of justice, MacIntyre sees Smith as equating virtue with rule-following. No purpose beyond the rules of prudence is recognized. While I agree that the intellectual climate in which Smith wrote would support MacIntyre’s view, I believe that Smith could not easily discard the notion that there is a meaningful telos toward which, human activity should be directed. Smith’s references to the design of God, his vice-regents within us, the higher tribunal, and final causation, I argue, are attempts by Smith to hold onto a sense of telos.

In this day and age, only the Right accepts the need for such Christian moralism and rigid institutional structures as a prerequisite for the economic and social systems.

---

TALL TALES:

THE HEIGHT GAP: Why Europeans are getting taller and taller—and Americans aren’t. (BURKHARD BILGER, 2004-03-29, The New Yorker)

When Vincent van Gogh was thirty-one years old, in the fall of 1883, he travelled to the bleak moors of northern Holland and stayed at a tavern in the village of Stuifzand. The local countryside was hardly inhabited then—“Locus Deserta Atque ob Multos Paludes Invia,” an old map called it: “A deserted and impenetrable place of many swamps”—but a few farmers and former convicts had managed to carve a living from it. They dug peat, brewed illegal gin, and placed poles across the marshes to navigate by. Any squatter who could keep his chimney smoking for a full year earned title to the land he cleared.

There is little record of what happened to van Gogh in Stuifzand—whether he got lost in the marshes or traded sketches for shots at the bar. When I visited the village, the locals mentioned him merely to illustrate an even greater national obsession: height. At the old tavern, which is now a private home, I was shown the tiny alcove where the painter probably slept. “It looks like it would fit only a child,” J. W. Drukker, the current owner, told me. Then he and his wife, Joke (a common Dutch name, they explained, pronounced “Yoh-keh”), led me down the hall, to a sequence of pencil marks on a doorjamb. “My son, he is two metres,” Joke told me, pointing to the topmost mark, six and a half feet from the floor. “His feet”—she held her hands about eighteen inches apart—“for waterskiing.” Joke herself is six feet one, with blond tresses and shoulders like a Valkyrie. Drukker is six feet two.

The Netherlands, as any European can tell you, has become a land of giants. In a century’s time, the Dutch have gone from being among the smallest people in Europe to the largest in the world. The men now average six feet one—seven inches taller than in van Gogh’s day—and the women five feet eight. The national organization of tall people, Klub Lange Mensen, has considerable lobbying power. From Rotterdam to Eindhoven, ceilings have had to be lifted, furniture redesigned, lintels raised to keep foreheads from smacking them. Many hotels now offer twenty-centimetre bed extensions, and ambulances on occasion must keep their back doors open, to allow for patients’ legs. “We will not go through the ceiling,” the pediatrician Hans van Wieringen assured me, after summarizing national height surveys that he had coördinated. “But it is possible that we will grow another ten centimetres.”

Walking along the canals of Amsterdam and Delft, I had an odd sensation of drowning—not because the crowds were so thick but because I couldn’t lift my head above them. I’m five feet ten and a half—about an inch taller than the average in the United States—but, like most men I know, I tend to round the number up. Tall men, a series of studies has shown, benefit from a significant bias. They get married sooner, get promoted quicker, and earn higher wages. According to one recent study, the average six-foot worker earns a hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars more, over a thirty-year period, than his five-foot-five-inch counterpart—about eight hundred dollars more per inch per year. Short men are unlucky in politics (only five of forty-three Presidents have been shorter than average) and unluckier in love. A survey of some six thousand adolescents in the nineteen-sixties showed that the tallest boys were the first to get dates. The only ones more successful were those who got to choose their own clothes.

Like many biases, this one has a certain basis in fact. Over the past thirty years, a new breed of “anthropometric historians” has tracked how populations around the world have changed in stature. Height, they’ve concluded, is a kind of biological shorthand: a composite code for all the factors that make up a society’s well-being. Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives. That’s why the United Nations now uses height to monitor nutrition in developing countries. In our height lies the tale of our birth and upbringing, of our social class, daily diet, and health-care coverage. In our height lies our history. [...]

If you were to stretch a string from the head of the earliest soldier in that row to the head of the most recent recruit, you might expect it to trace an ascending line. Humans are an ever-improving species, the old evolution charts tell us; each generation is smarter, sleeker, and taller than the last. Yet in Northern Europe over the past twelve hundred years human stature has followed a U-shaped curve: from a high around 800 A.D., to a low sometime in the seventeenth century, and back up again. Charlemagne was well over six feet; the soldiers who stormed the Bastille a millennium later averaged five feet and weighed a hundred pounds. “They didn’t look like Errol Flynn and Alan Hale,” the economist Robert Fogel told me. “They looked like thirteen-year-old girls.”

Fogel, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993, is the man most responsible for Komlos’s interest in height. In the fall of 1982, when Komlos was working on a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago (he had earlier earned a Ph.D. in history there), Fogel gave a lecture on stature that Komlos attended. Most historians, if they thought about height at all, tended to assume that it was tied to income. The more people earn, the better they eat; the better they eat, the taller they grow. “Men grow taller and faster the wealthier their country,” the French hygienist and statistician Louis-René Villermé wrote in 1829. “In other words, misery . . . produces short people.”

Fogel knew it wasn’t that simple. In 1974, he and Stanley Engerman published an exhaustive study of slave economics entitled “Time on the Cross.” Historians had long insisted that slavery was not only inhuman; it was bad business—hungry, brutalized workers made the poorest of farmers. Fogel and Engerman found nearly the opposite to be true: Southern plantations were almost thirty-five per cent more efficient than Northern farms, their analysis showed. Slavery was a cruel and inhuman system, but more so psychologically than physically: to get the most work from their slaves, planters fed and housed them nearly as well as free Northern farmers could feed and house themselves.

“Time on the Cross” was greeted with uncommon fury in academia—one reviewer consigned it “to the outermost ring of the scholar’s hell.” Yet each point that critics blew apart left a scattering of uncomfortable facts behind it. The most dramatic example came from a graduate student of Fogel’s, Richard Steckel, who is now at Ohio State. Steckel decided to verify his mentor’s claims by looking at the slaves’ body measurements. He went through more than ten thousand slave manifests—shipboard records kept by traders in the colonies—until he had the heights of some fifty thousand slaves; then he averaged them out by age and sex. The results were startling: adult slaves, Steckel found, were nearly as tall as free whites, and three to five inches taller than the average Africans of the time.

The height study both redeemed and rebuked “Time on the Cross.” Although the adult slaves were clearly well fed, the children were extremely small and malnourished. (To eat, apparently, they had to be old enough to work.) But Fogel was more than willing to stand corrected. This wasn’t just another data set, he realized. Height records offered a new angle on history, and they were readily available. Measurements of French military conscripts date back to 1716, and anthropologists have collected much older skeletal measurements. “There are millions of these data lying around and nobody is looking at them,” Komlos remembers Fogel suggesting at the lecture. All that was needed was a few good graduate students to gather them up.

Which might explain why the French fight like 13-year old girls.

---

DEALING WITH THE DEVILS:

Who rules Iran? (AMIR TAHERI, Mar. 28, 2004, Jerusalem Post)

Since 1979, Iran has been ruled by an occult oligarchy with a strong theocratic component. That oligarchy sees itself as the embodiment of a messianic revolution in opposition to state structures that remain to be cleansed of millennia rule by "corrupt" kings, emirs and khans.

The oligarchy controls the real levers of power, sets policies, and imposes key decisions with little deference to the governmental fa ade. That fa ade is maintained as a first line of defense for the revolution which, so the oligarchs assert, is sill threatened by internal and external foes.

At the center of the oligarchy stands the "Office of the Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the "Supreme Guide." Under the Khomeinist Constitution, the "Supreme Guide" represents Allah's sovereignty on earth and has unlimited powers. The opening articles of the Khomeinist Constitution, approved in 1979, make it clear that the "Supreme Guide" is also the leader of all Muslims throughout the world, whether they like it or not. Thus, theoretically at least, the Khomeinist "Supreme Guide" can decide what Islam is and is not at any given time.

But that is not all.

In practical terms, the "Supreme Guide" controls the purse strings of the Iranian state, one of the richest in the Muslim world. (In the past quarter of a century the "Supreme Guide" has supervised the expenditure of almost half a trillion dollars in Iran's oil income.) He must approve the national budget and is the commander-in-chief of all armed and security forces. Every ministerial, gubernatorial and ambassadorial appointment must receive his assent. Also, each year he has a cool $1.5 billion, some eight percent of Iran's average annual oil income, to play with as he pleases.

This is no time to take the pressure off and legitimize the mullahs by cutting deals, as the Europeans wish too. As Reagan did with the Soviets, we should begin speaking of Iran as the revolution that failed on its own terms.

---

NOT THEIR FIGHT:

Europe, U.S. Diverge on How to Fight Terrorism (Glenn Frankel, March 28, 2004, Washington Post)

While President Bush was giving an address earlier this month describing the war on terrorism as "not a figure of speech" but "an inescapable calling of our generation," the official in charge of overseeing Europe's counterterrorism efforts was offering a far different assessment.

"Europe is not at war," Javier Solana, foreign policy chief for the European Union, told a German newspaper. "We have to energetically oppose terrorism, but we mustn't change the way we live."

Between those two declarations lies a gap that reflects the different modern histories, cultures and approaches to terrorism of the United States and Europe, according to politicians and analysts on the continent. [...]

Analysts trace some of the differences between the United States and Europe to the ways they view recent history. For Europeans, the seminal date is November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and Europe began the process of reunification with the former Soviet bloc. The end of the Cold War and European reunification has been the enduring narrative of the past 15 years, one that has promised peace and prosperity.

But for the United States, that narrative has been supplanted by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon and a new global campaign that some Americans liken to a new world war.

European leaders insist they are prepared to use force to combat terrorism. They point to their enthusiastic support for the U.S.-led military campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. And Bush and European leaders have all identified the lack of democracy, human rights safeguards and economic opportunity as root causes of popular support for Islamic extremists in the Muslim world.

"At the government level I don't see any huge differences in principle," said Gary Samore, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "Everyone accepts you need both hard power in the near term to deal with terrorist operatives and soft power to deal in the long term with root causes."

Europeans have had decades of bitter experience in dealing with domestic terrorism. Britain waged a 25-year campaign against the Irish Republican Army, while Spain has battled the Basque separatist group ETA. Germany defeated the Baader-Meinhof gang and Italy, the Red Brigades. France has engaged in a long struggle with Islamic extremists from Algeria.

"Their experience told them terrorism is a threat but not a war," said Mustafa Alani, a terrorism analyst at the Royal United Services Institute here. "If it's a war, you have to commit yourself fully -- all your resources, everything, and they found this has no appeal in public opinion."

Mr. Solana is right--it's not about changing how we live in the West. However, the Europeans are incapable of stepping up to the challenge of changing the way the people of the Islamic world live, which is what the war is actually about. Their populations would never let them divert resources to such an undertaking and they haven't the armed forces to be much help in deposing the regimes that will have to go and rounding up the concentrations of al Qaeda where we track them down. Moreover, they no longer believe in the principles around which we're restructing the Middle East, if they ever did. It's our war, not theirs.

---

TRANSPARENT MASQUERADE, NO?

A Misleading Fetal Violence Law (NY Times, 3/29/04)

The law that Congress passed last week making it a federal offense to harm a fetus, distinct from the crime of attacking the pregnant woman, is an attack on abortion rights masquerading as law enforcement.

There should be a keyboard function that stops you from typing when you've written something as silly as the thought that a law to protect fetuses is misleading because it could prevent them from being aborted.

---

YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE:

Summit's Collapse Leaves Arab Leaders in Disarray (NEIL MacFARQUHAR, 3/29/04, NY Times)

Arab governments were in disarray on Sunday after the Arab League summit meeting, set to grapple with vital regional issues like democratic reform, Arab-Israeli bloodshed and the American occupation of Iraq, was abruptly called off just before it was to open Monday.

The exact reason is a matter of some dispute, but all sides viewed the meeting's collapse — even as some heads of state were on their way — as an embarrassment. It was a stark public admission that the commitment to change voiced by Arab leaders risks becoming just more words.

The Arab League is infamous for its fractious gatherings, but even its most experienced bureaucrats described the cancellation as extraordinary. Some commentators thought the collapse inevitable from the start. The very idea of reform remains too divisive, and many nations' governments have yet to decide how to deal themselves with issues like elections.

With so many regimes reforming so quickly, instability has been introduced as a principle in Arab affairs--hard for leaders to act in concert when that's the case.

---

FUNNY THEY DIDN'T RUN THIS ON THE ANNIVERSARY:

Iraq economy shakes off the shackles of Saddam (Paul Wiseman, 3/28/04, USA TODAY)

Anything goes these days in Baghdad's teeming streets, crowded souks and back alleys. An exhilarating but virtually lawless economy has risen from the ashes of Saddam Hussein's government. Business opportunities are everywhere, but so are corruption and crime.

"The regime is gone," says Osama al-Quraishi, an Iraqi entrepreneur who returned to Baghdad to search for business opportunities after decades in exile in Europe and the Middle East. "There are no restrictions. There are no rules." He predicts Baghdad will soon replace Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, as the Middle East's commercial center.

Besides crushing human rights, Saddam smothered the Iraqi economy. The dictator, who invaded Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990, ran a war-based economy, diverting resources to the military and starving the rest of the country. Iraq's infrastructure deteriorated; the oil industry alone needs $10 billion to $40 billion of investment to catch up. Saddam and his cronies imposed stiff duties on imports, steered government contracts to loyalists and buried business in regulations. This encouraged a culture of kickbacks and corruption.

"It was a lawless economy governed by one principle: Saddam and the Baathist party took whatever they wanted," says Bill Block, an economist with the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

Under Saddam, the shops were silent, the goods available were obsolete or absurdly overpriced, and the cars were clunkers dating back 15 or 20 years. Now that Saddam is gone, signs of bounty are visible everywhere in Baghdad and to a lesser extent in smaller cities such as Mosul and Basra.

The World Bank says Iraq's economy shrank by nearly a third last year after several years of smaller declines. The World Bank projects a sharp rebound in 2004 — growth ranging anywhere from 30% to 70% — and an overall economy worth $17 billion to $22 billion. That would make the Iraqi economy about the size of North Dakota's or Vermont's, which have the smallest output among the 50 states.

Arab's throughout the region are wondering what they have to do to get us to attack them.

---

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

Riyadh To Close Charities Oversees: Some of targeted charities have been established by royal decrees  (Fawaz Mohammad, March 29, 2004, IslamOnline.net)

Saudi Arabia is set to close all charities and relief organizations outside the kingdom and place their funds and properties under the control of a newly established governmental body, well-places Saudi sources revealed Sunday, March 28.

Among the targeted organizations are the World Assembly of the Muslim Youth (WAMY), the Islamic Relief International, the Islamic Waqfs and the Saudi Joint Committee for the Relief of Kosovo and Chechnya (SJRC), the sources, speaking on condition not to be named, told IslamOnline.net.

The activities of the yet-to-be dismantled charities would be exclusively run by the state-run Saudi Civil Council for Relief and Charity Work Overseas, which was set up last month by a royal decree by King Fahd.

The sources said the Saudi move is expected to have a domino effect on some 100 charities worldwide. [...]

Analysts believe the kingdom has yielded to Washington, which has been laying huge pressures on Arab and Islamic countries, particularly Saudi Arabia to regulate charity operations, claiming that funds usually end up in the hands of “terrorists.”

---

WALTZING MEPHISTO:

Songs of Cuba, Silenced in America (JACKSON BROWNE, 3/22/04, NY Times)

Carlos Varela, the great Cuban singer-songwriter, applied for a visa to come to the United States to sing his powerful, amazing songs. He had concerts planned in Miami, New York and Los Angeles. Our government turned him down.

Visas have been denied to other Cuban artists because their visits are "detrimental to the interests" of our country. In essence, the government says that if Carlos Varela plays concerts in the United States, the money he makes would go to Fidel Castro. This is untrue. In Cuba, renowned artists keep much of what they earn, because the government does not want them to leave the country and live somewhere else. Yet, the Bush administration used the same reasoning to keep Ibrahim Ferrer, of the Buena Vista Social Club, and Manuel Galbán from attending the Grammy award ceremony in Los Angeles last month. (Both men won awards.)

So, is he really saying that the fact that those who collaborate with the regime get to keep this blood money is an argument in their favor? Was Leni Riefenstahl less objectionable because she got to keep the proceeds from her films?

---

AND HE SAW THAT HIS JAW WAS UNHINGED, SO HE TAUGHT HIMSELF TO HUNT...:

Jaw-dropping theory of human evolution: Did mankind trade chewing power for a bigger brain? (MICHAEL HOPKIN, 25 March 2004, Nature)

Researchers have proposed an answer to the vexing question of how the human brain grew so big. We may owe our superior intelligence to weak jaw muscles, they suggest.

A mutation 2.4 million years ago could have left us unable to produce one of the main proteins in primate jaw muscles, the team reports in this week's Nature. Lacking the constraints of a bulky chewing apparatus, the human skull may have been free to grow, the researchers say.

The timing of the mutation is consistent with rampant brain growth seen in human fossils from around 2 million years ago, says Nancy Minugh-Purvis of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who helped with the study. "Right at the point you lose power in these muscles, brain size evolution accelerates," she says.

One does so love these folks, who argue on the one hand that evolution proceeds by millions of tiny incremental changes, so small we can never observe them, but on the other that there was this one magic moment when, "presto change-o", everything is radically altered. Even setting aside the "just-so story" quality of the thesis and the obvious deus ex machina nature of it, you can't help but be amused by the way they speak of this mutation "freeing" the brain to grow--because, of course, as in all teleologies the end was foreordained and that end was a brain as big as ours (though strangely only for us--no other animal's brain, not even those most similar genetically, appears to have been rattling the bars of its cage).

---

POLICE ACTION OR REFORMATION:

Terrorists Don't Need States: The danger is less that a state will sponsor a terror group and more that a terror group will sponsor a state—as happened in Afghanistan (Fareed Zakaria, 4/05/04, Newsweek)

Around 1997, members of the intelligence community—and others, like Richard Clarke—began focusing on a Saudi man, Osama bin Laden, who they realized was the financier and leader of a new group, Al Qaeda. Few in government shared their concern. In 1997 Al Qaeda was not confirmed to have executed a single terrorist attack against Americans. "Employees in the government told us that they felt their zeal attracted ridicule from their peers," the commission's report on intelligence says.

In due course, some senior officials in the Clinton administration awakened to the threat: CIA Director George Tenet, national-security adviser Sandy Berger and Clinton himself. But they never proposed a full-fledged assault on it. Their one dramatic attack—bombing the Afghan terror camps and Sudanese factory in 1998—proved unsuccessful and led to domestic criticism, and they did not think they could do something more ambitious. The Pentagon, which comes off poorly in the commission reports, was stubbornly unwilling to provide aggressive and creative options. [...]

The Bush administration came to office with different concerns. During the 1990s conservative intellectuals and policy wonks sounded the alarm about China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Iraq, but not about terror. Real men dealt with states. [...]

Afghanistan housed Al Qaeda, and thus it was crucial to attack the country. But that was less a case of a state's sponsoring a terror group and more one of a terror group's sponsoring a state. Consider the situation today. Al Qaeda has lost its base in Afghanistan, two thirds of its leaders have been captured or killed, its funds are being frozen. And yet terror attacks mount from Indonesia to Casablanca to Spain. "These attacks are not being directed by Al Qaeda. They are being inspired by it," the official told me. "I'm not even sure it makes sense to speak of Al Qaeda because it conveys the image of a single, if decentralized, group. In fact, these are all different, local groups that have in common only ideology and enemies."

This is the new face of terror: dozens of local groups across the world connected by a global ideology.

It seems somewhat surprising that Mr. Zakaria essentially plunks his chips down on Kerry-ite police action against al Qaeda rather than the Bush revolution, the democratic transformation of Islam. Though, it's probably equally odd that it is the conservative Republican president who is now the leader of the root causes crowd.

---

STILL SHRUGGING (via Tom Morin):

The Holocaust Shrug: Why is there so much indifference to the liberation of Iraq? (David Gelernter, 04/05/2004, Weekly Standard)

[S]addam, like Hitler, murdered people sadistically and systematically for the crime of being born. Saddam, like Hitler, believed that mass murder should be efficient, with minimal fuss and bother; it is no accident that both were big believers in poison gas. Saddam's program, like Hitler's, attracted all sorts of sadists; many of Saddam's and Hitler's crimes were not quite as no-fuss, no-muss as the Big Boss preferred. Evidently Saddam, like Hitler, did not personally torture his prisoners, but Saddam (like Hitler) allowed and condoned torture that will stand as a black mark against mankind forever.

Hitler was in a profoundly, fundamentally different league. And yet the distinction is unlikely to have mattered much to a Kurd mother watching her child choke to death on poison gas, or a Shiite about to be diced to bloody pulp. The colossal scale and the routine, systematic nature of torture and murder under Saddam puts him in a special category too. Saddam was small compared with Hitler, yet he was like Hitler not only in what he wanted but in what he did. When we marched into Iraq, we halted a small-scale holocaust.

I could understand people disagreeing with this claim, arguing that Saddam was evil but not that kind of evil, not evil enough to deserve being discussed in those terms. But the opposition I hear doesn't dwell on the nature of Saddam's crimes. It dwells on the nature of America's--our mistakes, our malfeasance, our "lies." It sounds loonier and farther from reality all the time, more and more like the Holocaust Shrug.

Turning away is not evil; it is merely human. And that's bad enough. For years I myself found it easy to ignore or shrug off Saddam's reported crimes. I had no love for Iraq or Iraqis. Before and during the war I wrote pieces suggesting that Americans not romanticize Iraqis; that we understand postwar Iraq more in terms of occupied Germany than liberated France. But during and after the war it gradually became impossible to ignore the staggering enormity of what Saddam had committed against his own people. And when we saw those mass graveyards and torture chambers, heard more and more victims speak, watched those videotapes, the conclusion became inescapable: This war was screamingly, shriekingly necessary.

But instead of exulting in our victory, too many of us shrug and turn away and change the subject.

This is too easy though--patting ourselves on the back after we've gotten rid of Saddam--the question we face is : how can we justify to ourselves allowing the very same things to happen in North Korea?

---

AH, THE GLORY OF SECULAR EUROPE:

Wanted in Germany: a few good risk-takers: Germany now seeks to counter a culture that stymies innovation. (Andreas Tzortzis, 3/29/04, CS Monitor)

Last month, a group of companies headed by DaimlerChrysler and Deutsche Telekom conceded that they could not produce a high-tech toll-collection system in time to meet government deadlines. The government canceled the contract, sparking a national debate on the decline of the "Made in Germany" standard.

"Can't we do anything anymore in Germany?" read a headline in Bild, the country's widest-circulating tabloid.

Once Europe's economic powerhouse, Germany is facing an identity crisis as it reforms structures that steered its postwar economic miracle.

Analysts say Germany's welfare programs have made its workforce too costly, scaring away both foreign and German firms. The German economy, the largest in Europe, shrank by 0.1 percent last year. Researchers and academics quickly list two reasons Germany is falling behind in the global economy: Years of declining investment in research and development by both the government and private firms, and an overall aversion to risk.

"We're finding the interest in licensing new research comes from foreign companies ... even though we ask German companies first," says Ulrich Schmoch of the Fraunhofer Society, a think-tank network that develops new technology for companies and the government. "There's a whole culture that's behind it."

The Democrats want to make us more like them.

---

IT'S THE UNPRINCIPLE:

GOP Success: It's the Principles, Stupid: Liberals don't get the forces behind the right's rise (Matthew Dallek, March 28, 2004, LA Times)

The conservative edge of the Republican Party in the 1950s crafted a political philosophy, adapted it to the social turmoil of the '60s and deepened its popular appeal in the '70s by donning the mantle of political insurgency. When World War II ended, conservatives were isolationist in foreign affairs and adrift on domestic matters. Following Sen. Robert Taft's death and Sen. Joseph McCarthy's demise in the 1950s, they were what Sidney Blumenthal and others have called a "remnant." At the time, liberal commentators described conservatives as crackpots out of touch with modernity and progress.

Conservatives wore such epithets like medals of honor. The National Review, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in the magazine's 1955 premiere issue, "stands athwart history, yelling 'Stop,' at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." Conservatives logged long hours behind the scenes in pursuit of a political philosophy — not policies and electoral strategies. Far from monolithic in outlook, they relished ideological debates among themselves. Leading conservatives gave speeches to business organizations and exhorted fellow travelers at anti-communist rallies. They wrote books called "Witness" and "Up From Liberalism" and "None Dare Call It Treason." In addition to writing in the National Review, conservatives propounded ideas in Human Events and other magazines and pamphlets. "It is not the single conservative's responsibility or right to draft a concrete program — merely to suggest the principles that should frame it," Buckley noted.

Disdaining both Democrats and mainstream Republicans as big-government liberals, conservatives successfully adopted three bedrock beliefs: anti-statism, anti-communism and pro-moral authority. These beliefs formed the foundation of the movement's success over the next four decades. [...]

As the '60s progressed, however, right-wing jeremiads aimed at totalitarian ant heaps were replaced by a single-minded focus on public morality and law and order. Running against riots, crime, anti-Vietnam demonstrators and student dissent, conservatives appealed to whites — some racist — angry at Democratic support for civil rights. Conservatives shattered the liberal political order by ostracizing fringe figures like Welch and promising to restore traditional values to schools and streets. In 1966, Ronald Reagan complained that California's city streets resembled "jungle paths after dark." As governor, he had a sign near his office that read: "Observe the Rules or Get Out." In 1968, George Wallace, who had then abandoned the Democrats and was running for president as an independent, used the language of law and order and "values" to win votes in white, working-class communities. Conservatives soon appropriated Wallace's themes, denouncing "acid, abortion and amnesty," as Richard Nixon's running mate, Spiro Agnew, put it, which helped them further refine their populist message.

By the 1970s, conservatives were routinely using insurgent imagery and language to identify with middle- and working-class voters. In 1978, Howard Jarvis spearheaded his "tax revolt," Proposition 13, by attacking the liberal establishment for thwarting people's will and giving ordinary people's money to minorities and other so-called special interests.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, neoconservatives, calling Democrats weak on security, promised to win the Cold War by taking the struggle to communists, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua. Appealing to pride and patriotism, conservatives wrapped themselves in the flag. To this day, Democrats still wrestle with this foreign policy critique.

Today, conservatives are entrenched, politically dominant and often intransigent — exhibiting some of the proclivities that predated the liberals' crackup in the 1960s. Against this backdrop, the left's challenge is to stop obsessing over the right's organizing successes. Instead, it should articulate its bedrock beliefs, then unite and figure out which buttons to push to maximize its appeal in a country where "order" — the war on terror — remains a central concern. Liberals must drum out of their ranks figures like Ralph Nader who are now part of the fringe and seek a balance between philosophy and strategy, internal dissent and political cohesion. By taking these steps, they will finally be able to claim Buckley and Reagan's conservative counterrevolution legacy.

That's sound advice, except for one thing: Democrats, having abandoned religion, no longer believe in order. In fact, they no longer have any principles--they are simply a collection of special interests, which by its nature disagrees within its own ranks on most issues. To adopt a set of organizing principles would drive away several of the members of the coalition and make them even more of a minority party. It would be healthy as an intellectual exercise but suicidal as a political matter.

---

THE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE ENDORSEMENTS JUST KEEP COMING:

Did We Have It Coming? (Lee Harris, 03/23/2004, Tech Central Station)

"This is the culture in which we live… The world is ruled by force. The only way we can put a permanent end to terrorism is to stop participating in it… This is the first time the guns have been pointed the other way."

-- Noam Chomsky, discussing the events of 9/11/01.

Noam Chomsky has endorsed, however reluctantly, John Kerry.

This is an endorsement from the man who, on hearing about 9/11, attempted to put it in perspective for the American people by arguing that President Clinton had murdered many times more people in his response to the Al Qaeda bombing in Kenya than Al Qaeda had murdered on 9/11. The fact that Mr. Chomsky had not a shred of evidence for this blood libel did not kept him from making it. After all, he had something far better than evidence -- he had his own opinion; or what Jeremy Bentham called ipsedixitism: something is true because I myself have said it is true.

Yet Noam Chomsky was by no means alone in standing up in the days immediately following 9/11 and declaring that 9/11 was the expected and natural reaction of those who had been oppressed by American hegemony, and who, however immaturely, were fighting back in retaliation for what we had done to them. [...]

Now let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that these critics of America are right. Let us suppose that when the terrorists struck us we had done more than enough bad things to deserve such an attack. But now let me ask these apologists for terrorism a simple question:

If we had it coming then, don't we have it coming even worse right now?

At this rate the Democratic convention is going to resemble Hades.

---

IT'S CALLED GOVERNING:

GOP Pressing Cultural Issues (DAVID ESPO, 3/27/04, AP)

Passage [of the fetus protection bill] was not in doubt, only the size of the split within the Democratic ranks.

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who will be Bush's challenger this fall, opposed the bill, which passed on a vote of 61-38. But 13 Democrats voted for it, including Sen. Tom Daschle, the party leader seeking re-election in conservative South Dakota. [...]

The vote occurred two days after a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on a second contested social issue, a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages.

Bush has called for action on the measure. Republicans appear far short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage, and Daschle charges them with using the Constitution for partisan purposes.

"There are those who would like to politicize this issue and they'll use whatever means available to them to maximize whatever value they find politically," he said recently.

Republicans sense the potential for gain in the presidential race and in the battle for the Senate, where Democratic retirements have created open seats in five culturally conservative southern states.

A recent national CNN poll put opposition to gay marriage at 64 percent to 32 percent.

Why would anyone be surprised when the governing party enacts laws supported by 60%+ of the electorate?

---

FEET TIME:

Germans go on offensive to retain U.S. military bases (Melissa Eddy, 03/28/2004, Associated Press )

As host to 170,000 American soldiers and dependents, Germany has a lot to lose under Pentagon plans to shift forces out of western Europe, and officials in areas facing a pinch are lobbying heavily for them to stay.

Economic survival for their communities, more than security, is the concern for these supporters of a continued U.S. presence in their regions, where ties are deeply rooted despite Germans' current criticism of U.S. policy in Iraq.

Many of the communities depend on business and jobs generated by the bases, located mainly in economically weak regions of southern and western Germany.

"We realized that our installations are in grave danger," said Karl Peter Bruch, a state official in Rhineland-Palatinate who heads an effort to lobby U.S. officials. "And then came the question, what can we do to make us more attractive?"

Being beside us during the Iragi offensive might have helped, instead of behind us with long knives.

---

BOOKNOTES:

Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America by Michael Dobbs (C-SPAN, March 28, 2004, 8 & 11pm)

Shortly after America's entry into World War II, Adolf Hitler ordered an extensive sabotage campaign against the United States to disrupt the production of tanks and airplanes and blow up bridges and railroads. Eight German saboteurs were dispatched across the Atlantic by U-boat, one team landing in Amagansett, Long Island, the other near Jacksonville, Florida. They brought with them enough money and explosives for a two-year operation and traveled inland to explore potential targets.

The full story of this audacious endeavor is a remarkable account of a terrorist threat against America. Michael Dobbs describes the saboteurs' training in Nazi Germany, their claustrophobic three-week voyage in submarines, and their infiltration into American life. He explores the reasons each volunteered, and their links to a network of Nazi sympathizers in the United States. He paints a portrait of the group's leaders: George Dasch, a onetime waiter who dreamed of leaving his personal mark on history, and Edward Kerling, a fanatic Nazi caught between his love for his mistress and his love for his wife. And he shows how the FBI might never have captured the saboteurs had one of them not helped J. Edgar Hoover transform a hapless manhunt into one of his proudest accomplishments. A military tribunal, a historic Supreme Court session, and one of the largest mass executions in American history provide a stunning climax to a dangerous but failed mission.

MORE:
-BOOK SITE: Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America by Michael Dobbs (Knopf)
-ESSAY: A Familiar, Thorny Record Of Wartime Justice (Michael Dobbs, February 8, 2004, washingtonpost.com)
-ESSAY: Back in Political Forefront: Iran-Contra Figure Plays Key Role on Mideast (Michael Dobbs, May 27, 2003, Washington Post)
-REVIEW: of MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: A 20TH Century Odyssey By Michael Dobbs
(Michael Hirsh, Washington Monthly)

---

ANNALS OF DEGENERACY:

Virginity auction ends on net (BBC News, 2/9/2004)

A lesbian at the University of Bristol who is selling her virginity on the internet has closed the bidding. Rosie Reid, 18, a social policy first year student from Dulwich, south-east London, wants to avoid graduating with excessive debt.

According to her website, bidding closed at £8,400 on Sunday, with the winner to be contacted by 11 February....

Can Okar, President of the University's Student Union, previously said: "... It is a great stunt ..."

It appears that in England a one-night stand with a lesbian virgin is equal in price to a four-year college education.

This information will certainly come in handy to economists calculating English GDP. Very likely they've been under-estimating the value of teenage deflowerings.

UPDATE:
Internet virgin faces police probe (3/28/2004)

Avon and Somerset police are investigating if Reid is guilty of soliciting. A London man paid £8,400 by banker's draft to sleep with the lesbian student....

She told the News of the World the experience was "very uncomfortable but over quite quickly".

The man involved is a 44-year old divorced father of two. He is a BT engineer and lives in south east London, according to reports.

---

CLARKE V. CLARKE:

Transcript (NBC MEET THE PRESS, March 28, 2004)

MR. RUSSERT:  As you know, the White House has been rather aggressive trying to undercut your credibility.  They've released an e-mail which says it's Richard Clarke vs. Richard Clarke.  This is now last week on "60 Minutes." "...I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism.  He ignored it.  He ignored terrorism for months ...  I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."  And the White House then says then and they refer to a background briefing you gave reporters which has now been placed on the record.  "...the Bush administration decided then, you know, [in late] January, to do two things.  One, vigorously pursue the existing policy, including all the lethal covert action findings ...  The second thing the administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided.  ...[T]hat process which was initiated in the first in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after al Qaeda. [T]he principals met at the end of the summer [of 2001], approved them in their first meeting, changed the strategy by authorizing the increase in funding five-fold, changing the policy on Pakistan, changing the policy on Uzbekistan, changing the policy on the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.  And then changed strategy from one of rollback with al Qaeda over the court [of] five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al Qaeda."  There you are...

MR. CLARKE:  And it's not inconsistent.

---

CHOOSE:

A Test of Kerry's Faith: The candidate's policies are at odds with church canon. Will there be a price to pay? (KAREN TUMULTY AND PERRY BACON JR., Apr. 05, 2004, TIME)

Kerry and other Catholic politicians have long argued that their religious beliefs need not influence their actions as elected representatives. That position is what provoked New York's Archbishop John Cardinal O'Connor in 1984 to castigate New York Governor Mario Cuomo and Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, who are both pro-choice.

If anything, the church is getting tougher. The Vatican issued last year a "doctrinal note" warning Catholic lawmakers that they have a "grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that attacks human life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them." When Kerry campaigned in Missouri in February, St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke publicly warned him "not to present himself for Communion"—an ostracism that Canon Law 915 reserves for "those who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin." Kerry was scheduled to be in St. Louis last Sunday, and told TIME, "I certainly intend to take Communion and continue to go to Mass as a Catholic." [...]

Most Catholic officials expect that the church's response to Kerry's candidacy will vary from diocese to diocese. You may not see many Catholic bishops appearing at Kerry photo ops this campaign season, and there's a possibility of some uncomfortable moments on the trail. "All you need is a picture of Kerry going up to the Communion rail and being denied, and you've got a story that'll last for weeks," says Father Thomas Reese, editor of the Jesuit magazine America.

For now, theologians say, Kerry's conduct is principally a matter between the candidate and his own Archbishop. Boston Archbishop Sean O'Malley has given him Communion in the past; the Senator took the sacrament at O'Malley's installation last July. More recently, however, O'Malley has said that Catholic politicians who do not vote in line with church teachings "shouldn't dare come to Communion." But between the gay-marriage debate in Massachusetts and his efforts to repair the damage from the sexual-abuse scandal that began in his archdiocese, O'Malley already has a plateful of controversy. Kerry, for his part, is planning to avoid stirring any up. "I don't tell church officials what to do," he says, "and church officials shouldn't tell American politicians what to do in the context of our public life."

Senator Kerry's position, like that of all putatively Catholic politicians who are permissive on social issues, is patently absurd. The Church defines the morality of its members. If you can't accept that then you aren't a communicant.

---

CANADA IS NOW OFFICIALLY PARODY-PROOF (via Tom Morin):

Prison guards forbidden to wear protective gear (DOUG BEAZLEY, March 17, 2004, Calgary Sun)

Corrections Canada won't let guards at maximum security prisons wear stab-proof vests because it sends a confrontational "signal" to prisoners. "If you have that kind of presence symbolized by (a stab-proof vest), you're sending a signal to the prisoner that you consider him to be a dangerous person," said Tim Krause.

---

POOR, POOR, PITIFUL WE:

That Seldom Heard Encouraging Word (Christopher Farrell, 3/26/04, Business Week)

I think it's time for a reality check. What's everyone really complaining about? That India and China are joining the global trading system? That Russia and Taiwan just had democratic elections, however imperfect, for their Presidents? That the American productivity growth rate jumped to a 3% average annual rate from 1995 to 2003, about double the anemic pace of 1973 to 1995?

"We -- the globally collective we -- are getting rich so much faster than before that we ought to be in need of sedatives to subdue the wild laughter," says James Griffin, economist consultant at ING Investment Management.

Let's not lose sight of the bigger picture here. Even with the threat of terrorism, freer trade is invigorating global growth by providing entrepreneurs from all the world's major economies access to bigger markets.
The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek emphasized the role the markets play in creating and disseminating knowledge. In the Information Age, the cost of gathering and sharing information and knowledge has plummeted even as the size of the market has expanded exponentially.

"Capitalism, as Hayek conceived it, was fundamentally dynamic, and that dynamism was due to the discovery of new needs and new ways of fulfilling them by entrepreneurs possessed with 'resourcefulness,'" writes historian Jerry Muller in The Mind and the Market. These are the tantalizing glimmers of a payoff from globalization.

One is reminded most of the brief and rather painless period of slowed growth under the first President Bush, when the readjustment from a Cold War to a peacetime economy distracted attention from the protracted boom that was inevitably to follow. We are even more comfortable economically than we were then and the current difficulties--like outsourcing--are even more trivial, while the benefits to be reaped from increasing globalization are likely to be substantial.

If it weren't so disheartening, it would be hilarious to listen to Americans bitch and moan about how hard life is at a time when no one has ever had it so good--at least in material terms.

---

FROM FREEDOM BACK TO FRENCH?:

Foreign Policy for a Democratic President (Samuel R. Berger, May/June 2004, Foreign Affairs)

The foreign policy debate in this year's presidential election is as much about means as it is about ends. Most Democrats agree with President Bush that the fight against terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) must be top global priorities, that the war in Afghanistan was necessary and just, and that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed a threat that needed to be dealt with in one form or another. Over time, moreover, the Bush administration has, at least rhetorically, embraced the Democrats' argument that to win the war on terrorism the United States must do more than destroy something bad; it must also construct something good, supporting other peoples' aspirations to live in freedom and peace and to conquer poverty and disease.

But the manner in which the Bush administration has advanced these goals has been driven by a radical set of convictions about how the United States should act on the world stage. Key strategists inside the administration appear to believe that in a chaotic world, U.S. power -- particularly military power -- is the only real force for advancing U.S. interests, that as long as the United States is feared it does not matter much if we are admired. These same people believe it is best to recruit temporary "coalitions of the willing" to back our foreign actions, because permanent alliances require too many compromises. They believe the United States is perforce a benign power with good intentions and therefore does not need to seek legitimacy from the approval of others. And they believe that international institutions and international law are nothing more than a trap set by weaker nations to constrain us.

These are not new ideas. During the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, a hard-line faction of congressional Republicans, led by Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft, fought virtually every measure to build the postwar international order. They opposed NATO and the permanent deployment of U.S. troops in Europe, believing we should rely on the unilateral exercise of military power to defeat Soviet designs. They fought the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and turned against the un. And they disdained "one worlders" such as Eleanor Roosevelt for their support of international law. Taft Republicans were briefly dominant in the U.S. Congress (until the combined efforts of Democrats and internationalist Republicans such as Dwight Eisenhower relegated them to the sidelines). But their radical world-view never drove policy in the executive branch -- until today.

The real "clash of civilizations" is taking place within Washington. Considering the open differences between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, it is even playing out within the Bush administration itself. It is not really a clash over discrete policy issues -- the merits of the war in Iraq, the costs of the Kyoto Protocol, or the level of spending on foreign aid, for example -- but between diametrically opposed conceptions of America's role in the world. It is a battle fought between liberal internationalists in both parties who believe that our strength is usually greatest when we work in concert with allies in defense of shared values and interests, versus those who seem to believe that the United States should go it alone -- or not go it at all.

Bush administration hard-liners have not been bashful about defining and defending their vision. In an election year, Democrats must also be clear about what they believe and about what they would do to advance U.S. security, prosperity, and democratic ideals, to restore our influence, standing, and ability to lead. Democrats must outline a foreign policy that not only sets the right goals, but also rebuilds America's capacity to achieve them. [...]

A posture of strength and resolve and a willingness to define clear terms and to impose consequences are clearly the right approach for dealing with our adversaries. But where the Bush administration has gone badly wrong is in applying its "with us or against us" philosophy to friends as well as foes. Put simply, our natural allies are much more likely to be persuaded by the power of American arguments than by the argument of American power. Democratically elected leaders -- whether in Germany, the United Kingdom, Mexico, or South Korea -- must sustain popular support for joint endeavors with the United States. When we work to convince them that the United States is using its strength for the common good, we enable them to stand with us. But when we compel them to serve our ends, we make it politically necessary, even advantageous, for them to resist us. It would have been hard to imagine a decade ago that leaders of Germany and South Korea -- two nations that owe their existence to the sacrifice of American blood -- would win elections by appealing to anti-Americanism. [...]

A Democratic administration will need to reaffirm the United States' willingness to use military power -- alone if necessary -- in defense of its vital interests. But it will have no more urgent task than to restore America's global moral and political authority, so that when we decide to act we can persuade others to join us. Achieving this reversal will require forging a new strategic bargain with our closest allies, particularly in Europe. To this end, Washington should begin with a simple statement of policy: that the United States will act in concert with its allies in meeting global threats as a first, not last, resort. When we ask our allies to join us in military action, or in nation-building efforts in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, we should be ready to share not just the risks but also the decision-making. That is what we did when NATO went to war in Bosnia and Kosovo, and what the administration irresponsibly failed to do when NATO invoked its collective defense clause to offer aid to the United States in Afghanistan. The U.S. side of the bargain must also include a disciplined focus on our true global priorities, starting with the war on terrorism, undistracted by petty ideological disputes over issues such as Kyoto, the icc, and the biological weapons convention.

The Democratic approach to resolving disputes with Europe over treaties should be pragmatic, focused on improving flawed agreements rather than ripping them up. International law is not self-enforcing. It does not, by itself, solve anything. But when our goals are embodied in binding agreements, we can gain international support in enforcing them when they are violated. By the same token, nothing undermines U.S. authority more than the perception that the United States considers itself too powerful to be bound by the norms we preach to others.

What Mr. Berger seems oblivious to is that the internationalism he describes -- essentially a surrender of American sovereignty to transnational institutions and treaties -- is an end in itself, not just a means. And that end is to restrain American power and avoid conflict. The Europeans don't much care about fighting terrorism or bringing democracy to the Islamic world or depriving North Korea of nuclear weapons or any of a host of our goals, because all of these things are destabilizing, just as victory over Nazism and Communism destabilized the world.

Europeans are reasonably comfortable in their dotage and would like to be left alone to die in peace. What concern is it of theirs if the Muslim world is unfree, backwards, impoverished, and a breeding ground for radicalism? So long as totalitarian regimes have a reasonably firm grip on their populations, the worst that'll happen is a periodic bombing--hopefully aimed at the confrontational Americans, rather than the accommodationist Europeans.

That's all well and good for the Europeans--they aren't much use anymore anyway. But if we base our own foreign policy on keeping them happy then it seems obvious that we must act against our own interest and that of the people of the Middle East. You can't both satisfy Europe and transform Islam. So the difference between the foreign policy of George W. Bush and that of the Democrats is not a matter of means only but of ends.

MORE:
The Two World Orders (Jed Rubenfeld, Autumn 2003, Wilson Quarterly)

What’s the source of America’s growing unilateralism? The easy answer is self-interest: We act unilaterally to the extent that we see unilateralism as serving our interests. But the answer prompts a more searching question: Why do so many Americans view unilateralism this way, given the hostility it provokes, the costs it imposes, and the considerable risks it entails? Americans sometimes seem unilateralist almost by instinct, as if it were a matter of principle. Might it be?

It will not do to trace contemporary U.S. unilateralism to the 18th-century doctrine of isolationism, for unilateralism is a very different phenomenon. An isolationist country withdraws from the world, even when others call on it to become involved; a unilateralist country feels free to project itself—its power, its economy, its culture—throughout the world, even when others call on it to stop. Although there may still be a thread of isolationism in the United States today, unilateralism, the far more dominant trend, cannot usefully be derived from it.

The search for an explanation should begin instead at the end of World War II. In 1945, when victory was at hand and his own death only days away, Franklin Roosevelt wrote that the world’s task was to ensure “the end of the beginning of wars.” So Roosevelt called for a new system of international law and multilateral governance that would be designed to stop future wars before they began. Hence, the irony of America’s current position: More than any other country, the United States is responsible for the creation of the international law system it now resists.

The decisive period to understand, then, runs roughly from the end of the war to the present, years that witnessed the birth of a new international legal order, if not, as widely reported, the death of the Westphalian nation-state. America’s leadership in the new internationalism was, at the beginning, so strong that one might be tempted to see today’s U.S. unilateralism as a stunning about-face, an aberration even, which may yet subside before too much damage is done. But the hope that the United States will rediscover the multilateralism it once championed assumes that America and Europe were engaged in a common internationalist project after World War II. Was that in fact the case? [...]

At the risk of overgeneralization, we might say that for Europeans (that is, for those Europeans not joined to the Axis cause), World War II, in which almost 60 million people perished, exemplified the horrors of nationalism. Specifically and significantly, it exemplified the horrors of popular nationalism. Nazism and fascism were manifestations, however perverse, of popular sovereignty. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini rose to power initially through elections and democratic processes. Both claimed to speak for the people, not only before they assumed dictatorial powers but afterward, too, and both were broadly popular, as were their nationalism, militarism, repression, and, in Hitler’s case, genocidal objectives. From the postwar European point of view, the Allies’ victory was a victory against nationalism, against popular sovereignty, against demo-cratic excess.

The American experience of victory could not have differed more starkly. For Americans, winning the war was a victory for nationalism—that is to say, for our nation and our kind of nationalism. It was a victory for popular sovereignty (our popular sovereignty) and, most fundamentally, a victory for democracy (our democracy). Yes, the war held a lesson for Americans about the dangers of democracy, but the lesson was that the nations of continental Europe had proven themselves incapable of handling democracy when left to their own devices. If Europe was to develop democratically, it would need American tutelage. If Europe was to overcome its nationalist pathologies, it might have to become a United States of Europe. Certain European countries might even need to have democratic institutions imposed upon them, although it would be best if they adopted those institutions themselves, or at least persuaded themselves that they had done so.

These contrasting lessons shaped the divergent European and American experiences of the postwar boom in international political institutions and international law. For Europeans, the fundamental point of international law was to address the catastrophic problem of nationalism—to check national sovereignty, emphatically including national popular sovereignty. This remains the dominant European view today. The United Nations, the emerging European Union, and international law in general are expressly understood in Europe as constraints on nationalism and national sovereignty, the perils of which were made plain by the war. They are also understood, although more covertly, as restraints on democracy, at least in the sense that they place increasing power in the hands of international actors (bureaucrats, technocrats, diplomats, and judges) at a considerable remove from popular politics and popular will.

In America, the postwar internationalism had a very different meaning. Here, the point of international law could not ultimately be antidemocratic or antinationalist because the Allies’ victory had been a victory for democracy (American democracy) and for the nation (the American nation). America in the postwar period could not embrace an antinationalist, antidemocratic international order as Europe did. It needed a counterstory to tell itself about its role in promoting the new international order.

The counterstory was as follows: When founding the United Nations, writing the first conventions on international rights, creating constitutions for Germany and Japan, and promoting a United States of Europe, Americans were bestowing the gifts of American liberty, prosperity, and law, particularly American constitutional law, on the rest of the world. The “new” international human rights were to be nothing other than the fundamental guarantees made famous by the U.S. Constitution. Wasn’t America light-years ahead of continental Europe in the ways of democracy? International law would be, basically, American law made applicable to other nations, and the business of the new internationalism would be to transmit American principles to the rest of the world. So of course America could be the most enthusiastic supporter of the new international order. Why would it not support the project of making the world more American?

In the American imagination, then, the internationalism and multilateralism we promoted were for the rest of the world, not for us. What Europe would recognize as international law was law we already had. The notion that U.S. practices—such as capital punishment—held constitutional by our courts under our Bill of Rights might be said to violate international law was, from this point of view, not a conceptual possibility. Our willingness to promote and sign on to international law would be second to none—except when it came to any conventions that might require a change in U.S. domestic law or policy. The principal organs of U.S. foreign policy, including the State Department and, famously, the Senate, emphatically resisted the idea that international law could be a means of changing internal U.S. law. In the 1950s, the United States refused to join any of the major human-rights and antigenocide conventions. The rest of the world might need an American-modeled constitution, but we already had one.

What Mr. Berger and the Democrats seek is a world where we submit to Europe's vision rather than they to ours.

---

STUPID PUBLIC, STILL CRAVING BEAUTY...

SLOW BURN:
Norah Jones’s eternal afternoon. (SASHA FRERE-JONES, 2004-03-22, The New Yorker)

Norah Jones is apparently very boring. Recent reviews of her new album, “Feels Like Home,” use words like “tepid,” “blank,” and “dull” to describe her music. She has been referred to more than once as Snorah Jones. But there are at least twenty million people who have a different take. Her 2002 début album, “Come Away with Me,” which sold eight million copies in America and ten million overseas, and won a number of Grammys, is the flag waved by record executives every time another article about the end of the music business appears. Like many mega-platinum records, “Come Away” succeeded without the benefit of much critical support, and “Feels Like Home” has sold two million copies in the first month of its release. How her records do what they do is a topic that is annexing its own wing of journalism. Some credit marketing, but record companies regularly promote releases by sending out advance copies to critics, buying ads, licensing songs to Starbucks compilations, and the like. It’s what record companies know how to do. Yet the records they push rarely sell eight million copies. Eight million means there are no red states or blue states. Eight million means everyone voted for you.

There are sociological explanations. Critics point out, accurately, that young artists like Jones, who is twenty-five, and Josh Groban and Michael Bublé are selling soothing songs by the seashore to a much older audience. These artists’ faith in melody and acoustic instruments ostensibly provides evidence that not all musicians below the age of thirty are getting tattooed with runic symbols and sending viruses to each other on tiny, inscrutable batphones. Record companies have agreed to think that the older audience is their pot of gold. This is half science—the percentage of records being bought by listeners above the age of thirty is growing—and half hearsay. Older listeners are continually saddled with the calumny that they are too dumb or scared to download music for free.

There is the aesthetic explanation—Norah Jones and her foot soldiers are organic, grass-fed artists taking back the castle from the injection-molded, polyblend popbots who are accused of a number of crimes against music. (These crimes are often what drew people to pop in the first place, but what are a few false dichotomies when you’re mourning your youth?) Jones’s sound is distinctive enough to have created its own subgenre, and new singers like Katie Melua, possibly against their wishes, are being sold as post-Norah artists. Jones has managed to make music that is universally useful, like a paper clip, but personal enough that listeners think they discovered it for themselves.

There are two plausible explanations for all this smoke and fire: Norah Jones is actually pretty good. And she is selling the all-time No. 1 hit song—sex.

Who but the critics would be stumped by the popularity of melody?

---

THE WORLD HAS JUST ONE STORY:

How myth became the legend of Joseph Campbell: He’s half-Scottish and his work was the force behind star wars. So why haven’t we heard of him? (Allan Burnett, 3/28/04, Sunday Herald)

[The late anthropologist Joseph] Campbell was born 100 years ago this month, and it is testament to [George] Lucas’s acknowledgement that this once-obscure, half-Scottish, quiet academic is the subject of a glitzy, sell-out centenary celebration in the US hosted by the educational foundation set up in his name. A friend to the Steinbecks, his past admirers also include Jackie Kennedy Onassis and John Lennon – a nod to the fact Campbell was a cult figure even before Star Wars made him a worldwide celebrity.

The first child of a middle-class Catholic couple in New York, the young Campbell became consumed by myth when he was taken to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Upon seeing the figure of a naked American Indian, “his ear to the ground, a bow and arrow in his hand, and a look of special knowledge in his eyes”, he began a lifelong obsession with ancient cultures.

Already immersed in the rituals, icons and traditions of his parents’ Catholic heritage, he read all he could on Native Americans and even started his own pretend tribe. Fascinated with totem poles and masks, he was hooked by the direct experience “primal” people seemed to have of myths.

Campbell went on to study at Columbia, and in Paris and Munich, becoming an expert in Arthurian studies. It was during his time in Europe in the 1920s that he was exposed to the ideas of people such as Picasso and Freud, whose work was to have a profound influence on him. Returning to the US in 1929, and with the onset of the Depression giving him little hope of finding a teaching job, he decided to hit the road in an effort to discover “the soul of America” and in the process, hopefully, discover his own purpose in life. He eventually reconnected with the academic world and made his reputation in 1949 by publishing The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

That book posited that the concept of the heroic journey occupies the heart of all the world’s cultures. Moreover, the stages of this journey, or mythic cycle, are essentially the same in every culture – whether it be the creation myths of Native Americans or the Book of Genesis. So what makes one culture different from another is not an exclusive set of mythical principles, but a distinctive inflection on the universal “monomyth” that moves us all. The wrappings are different, he explained, but underneath it is the same diamond.

When Lucas reread the book in 1975, after he had first come across it while studying anthropology at college, it gave him the focus he needed to turn his sprawling fantasy universe into one coherent, powerful story. Above all, a story that felt real.

Campbell had argued that the travails of Odysseus or the legends of King Arthur were not meant to be taken literally – you wouldn’t go into a restaurant, he famously explained, see “steak” on the menu and then eat the menu. Rather, their truthfulness emerges when they are understood as metaphors for human action that work in terms of deep psychological principles.

Lucas realised that if his space-age fantasy could pull the same psychological triggers, audiences would respond to the trials and tribulations faced by Luke Skywalker during his quest to defeat Darth Vader in much the same way as bygone generations had to the journey of awakening undertaken by Christ, the Buddha or Telemachus. Lucas followed Campbell’s blueprint for the hero’s journey of initiation, departure and return exactly – and the result was a sensation.

The durability and continued pertinence of the monomyth is nowhere better demonstrated than in how closely the life of Charles Darwin adheres to it.

---

THE GOALIE SLEEPS:

A Long, Long Muddle (NY Times, 3/28/04)

The White House has been driving Congress — and the nation — in wildly contradictory ways that suggest a deeply muddled, or perhaps nonexistent, set of domestic goals.

Last year, for instance, the Republican House leaders desperately pummeled their more fiscally conservative members to get the Medicare drug program passed at the behest of the White House. Meanwhile, when the chief Medicare actuary tallied up the program's real cost, the administration did everything to keep him quiet but bury the man alive.

While Mr. Bush was pressing for this huge increased commitment in entitlements — along with big new spending on the military and homeland security — he was also drastically cutting taxes, depriving the government of the revenue it would need to pay for programs like a Medicare prescription drug plan. Last week, at the president's behest, the loyal House leaders waded into the fray once more, defeating attempts to block new tax cuts in next year's budget.

There are many people who believe in small government and low taxes. They often make the argument that tax cuts are needed to "starve the beast" and force the government to cut spending, particularly for mammoth entitlement programs. Others, including this page, believe the social safety net is vital, that the government has a responsibility to do things such as help the elderly pay their drug bills, and to collect enough revenue to make that possible.

But virtually no one believes it is a good idea to dramatically expand expensive Medicare entitlements while drastically cutting taxes.

Any estimates on how long it takes before the Times figures out that Health Savings Accounts, which effectively reprivatize health care and submit it to market forces, were the point of the bill?

---

ATLANTICISM IS ISLAMICISM:

The Moor's Last Laugh: Radical Islam finds a haven in Europe. (FOUAD AJAMI, March 28, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

In the legend of Moorish Spain, the last Muslim king of Granada, Boabdil, surrendered the keys to his city on Jan. 2, 1492, and on one of its hills, paused for a final glance at his lost dominion. The place would henceforth be known as El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro--"the Moor's Last Sigh." Boabdil's mother is said to have taunted him, and to have told him to "weep like a woman for the land he could not defend as a man." An Arab poet of our own era gave voice to a historical lament when he wrote that as he walked the streets of Granada, he searched his pockets for the keys to its houses. Al Andalus--Andalusia--would become a deep wound, a reminder of dominions gained by Islam and then squandered. No wonder Muslim chroniclers added "May Allah return it to Islam" as they told and retold Granada's fate.

The Balkans aside, modern Islam would develop as a religion of Afro-Asia. True, the Ottomans would contest the Eastern Mediterranean. But their challenge was turned back. Turkey succumbed to a European pretension but would never be European. Europe's victory over Islam appeared definitive. Even those Muslims in the Balkans touched by Ottoman culture became a marked community, left behind by the Ottoman retreat from Europe like "seaweed on dry land."

Yet Boabdil's revenge came. It stole upon Europe. Demography--the aging of Europe on the one hand and, on the other, a vast bloat of people in the Middle East and North Africa--did Boabdil's job for him. Spurred by economic growth in the '60s, which created the need for foreign laborers, a Muslim migration to Europe began. Today, 15 million Muslims make their home in the European Union. [...]

Europe's leaders know Europe's dilemmas. In ways both intended and subliminal, the escape into anti-Americanism is an attempt at false bonding with the peoples of Islam. Give the Arabs--and the Muslim communities implanted in Europe--anti-Americanism, give them an identification with the Palestinians, and you shall be spared their wrath. Beat the drums of opposition to America's war in Iraq, and the furies of this radical Islamism will pass you by. This is seen as a way around the troubles. But there is no exit that way. [...]

Whatever political architecture Europe seeks, it will have to be built in proximity to the Other World, just across the Straits of Gibraltar and in the grip of terminal crisis.

Those who would alter our policies to curry European favor are gripping onto that terminal crisis.

---

BLOOMS ETERNAL:

‘Bloom Building’ honors civilian news veteran at Fort Lee (Jamie L. Carson, March 26, 2004, Army News Service)

From the comfort of their homes, millions of Americans watched the war in Iraq through the eyes of David Bloom, veteran NBC news correspondent.

Traveling on top of his creation, the "Bloom Mobile," with the 3rd Infantry Division across the Iraqi desert toward Baghdad, the former White House Correspondent was exactly where he wanted to be, at the tip of the spear.

The 39-year-old husband and father of three daughters never made it to Baghdad. Bloom died from a pulmonary embolism April 6, 2003.

Fort Lee honored the news veteran for his commitment in a March 19 ceremony, dedicating its new Public Affairs Office building as the "Bloom Building."

A Soldier's journalist, Bloom stayed on the front lines of Operation Iraqi Freedom to accomplish his mission and broadcast the Soldier's story to the world.

"David risked his life to be with Soldiers, and he died among Soldiers, while telling the Soldier's story," said Maj. Gen. Terry E. Juskwoiak, U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command and Fort Lee commanding general.

It's not fair to the soldiers, of course, but for most of us the two deaths that brought the reality of the war home were Mr. Bloom's and Michael Kelly's.

---

YOU CAN TAKE THE CABANA BOY OUT OF FRANCE...:

Stop behaving as if you are a Frenchman if you want to win, says Kerry's (French) adviser (Julian Coman and Charles Laurence, 28/03/2004, Sunday Telegraph)

He has already attempted one reinvention: as outdoorsy Marlboro Man rather than buttoned-up Boston Brahmin. Yet John Kerry, the Democrats' challenger to George W Bush, has been warned by a French-born adviser that his style on the stump is still too "French" to win the presidential election.

Clotaire Rapaille, a psychologist and business consultant, has concluded that Mr Kerry, a noted francophile and fluent French speaker, would go down better in Paris than the Mid West because his style is too highbrow. In short, he needs a radical makeover.

"My expertise is in breaking the unconscious code in every culture, and you must do that to understand the presidency," he told the Telegraph last night. [...]

Mr Rapaille's devastating decoding of Mr Kerry will come as a blow for aides who sought help after the Republicans depicted their candidate - despite his Vietnam war service - as a woolly intellectual, given to over-analysing important issues.

"A French writer living in America," as one Democrat official described Mr Rapaille last week. "Who better to advise on the dangers of being seen as too intellectual?"

The ski trip didn't help.

---

GEEZ, NO ONE BELIEVES CLARKE (via John Resnick):

Kerry challenges Bush to prosecute Clarke if former anti-terrorism advisor lied (AFP, 3/26/04)

"My challenge to the Bush administration would be, if (Clarke) is not believable and they have reason to show it, then prosecute him for perjury because he is under oath, Kerry told CBS's MarketWatch.

"They have a perfect right to do that," said Kerry.

Sort of strange for a presidential candidate to use his post to call for the prosecution of a private citizen, but presumably if this is what the Senator believes he'll help declassify Mr. Clarke's prior testimony.

---

LOSING THE RACE:

The little horse that couldn't (The Japan Times, March 28, 2004)

Haruurara, the chestnut mare famous for having now lost 106 races in a row, must be a secret fan of Samuel Beckett, the acerbic Irish playwright who died in 1989. We are thinking in particular of Beckett's late play "Worstward Ho," a line from which is said to have become the mantra of a thousand struggling stand-up comics: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Haruurara's feats of ignominy at the racetrack -- the 8-year-old has never placed higher than second and has lifetime winnings of just 1 million yen -- have inspired pop philosophers from the prime minister down to the lowliest bettor to meditate on failure and its meaning, especially for slump-ridden Japan.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi praised the horse in the Diet as an example of fortitude in tough times. Conveniently ignoring the fact that the horse hardly has a choice in the matter, having stayed the course under whip and spur, the prime minister said the lesson of Haruurara's story was that "people shouldn't give up, even when they lose." Many ordinary people seem to have interpreted the saga of this Anna Kournikova of the equine world in the same way. (That's not a far-fetched comparison, by the way: Haruurara has earned millions in the horsy equivalent of endorsements and will soon go the winless tennis diva one better by having a movie made about her life).

Fans have told reporters that they identify the mare's losing streak with their own difficulties in a time of recession. "We feel that if we do our best for long enough we will win in the end," one man said last Monday after the little horse in the pink Hello Kitty hood posted a reliable 10th place out of 11 at Kochi Racecourse, despite the best efforts of a champion jockey.

Unfortunately, if Japan is comparable to a horse, that horse is a gelding.

---

ALWAYS ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY:

New Face Delivers Old Result in El Salvador: Candidate Seen as an Average Joe Retains Presidency for Pro-Business Party (Mary Beth Sheridan, March 23, 2004, Washington Post)

Tony Saca, the winner of El Salvador's presidential elections, had everything going for him. He was backed by the country's business barons, by a party in power for 15 years and by a national media tilted strongly toward his conservative party.

And yet, Saca's Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, was running scared as it geared up for Sunday's vote. Many Salvadorans have expressed concern about a lack of economic progress, and showed it in previous elections -- handing a victory in congressional elections last year to a party headed by former Marxist guerrillas. That raised the possibility of a dramatic change of leadership in El Salvador, one of the most pro-American governments in Latin America.

Arena fought off the challenge with its traditional advantages of money and media. But it also renovated its image, distancing the party from the 12-year civil war in which it had been linked to death squads.

The new president is a 39-year-old businessman who had no role in the conflict and no experience in political office. Saca became famous as a TV commentator narrating soccer games, and went on to purchase a string of radio stations. He projected a cheerful, Average Joe style in a party dominated by well-heeled businessmen.

"I represent that Salvadoran who wants to find . . . a pretext to vote for Arena," Saca said in an interview on the eve of the election.

But his overwhelming victory, with about 57 percent of the vote, also reflected the difficulties that El Salvador's former rebels have faced in adjusting to democratic competition since they signed peace accords in 1992, political analysts said. Their party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, ran a former guerrilla leader known for his hard-line views. The candidate, Schafik Handal, 73, failed to gain much support beyond his party's hard-core supporters. [...]

Saca, who takes office on June 1, has promised to continue Arena's free-market policies, which have included privatization of state-run industries, adopting the U.S. dollar as the nation's currency and negotiating a free-trade agreement between Central America and the United States. He said in the interview that he would "be ready to consider" any U.S. request to keep the Salvadoran troops in Iraq beyond their current commitment, which ends in June. And he has pledged to seek more programs for the poor, who make up about half the population, according to official statistics.

Senator Kerry, of course, did his level best to help the FMLN take over El Salvador in the '80s and even recently worked to stop the nomination of Otto Reich as revenge for his role in defeating Central America's Marxist movements.

---

MOVING AT THE SPEED OF GOVERNMENT:

Bush, Clinton Varied Little on Terrorism (Dana Milbank and Dan Eggen, March 27, 2004, Washington Post)

The Bush administration's approach, which was in draft form by Sept. 4, 2001, did not differ substantially from Clinton's policy. The commission staff, in the "key findings" it released this week, said: "The new administration began to develop new policies toward al Qaeda in 2001, but there is no evidence of new work on military capabilities or plans against this enemy before September 11" -- a point on which Armitage concurred.

The primary differences in the Bush proposal were calls for more direct financial and logistical support to the Northern Alliance and the anti-Taliban Pashtuns and, if that failed, to eventually seek the overthrow of the Taliban through proxies. The plan also called for drafting plans for possible U.S. military involvement, according to testimony and commission findings.

But those differences were largely theoretical; administration officials told the panel's investigators that the plan's overall timeline was at least three years, and it did not include firm deadlines, military plans or significant funding at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. [...]

But Clarke, who was counterterrorism director for both Clinton and Bush, has been much more critical of Bush. In testimony this week, he said al Qaeda and terrorism "were an extraordinarily high priority" and there was "certainly no higher a priority" under Clinton. On the other hand, he said, "the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue."

In fact, Clarke was constantly agitating for a more aggressive response to terrorism from the Clinton administration, including more significant bombing of al Qaeda and Taliban targets. The commission staff described him as "controversial" and "abrasive" and included an observation that several Clinton colleagues wanted him fired.

"He was despised under Clinton," said Ivo H. Daalder, who worked under Clarke in the Clinton National Security Council on issues other than terrorism. James M. Lindsay, who also worked under Clarke, concurred that people "thought he was exaggerating the threat" and said he "always wanted to do more" than higher-ups approved.

Even had we known for certain that al Qaeda planned hijackings, it seems unlikely we would have prevented 9-11, given that the anti-hijacking measures we had in place had worked so well for so long. And the idea that we'd ever have taken military action absent 9-11 is just delusional.

---

STARTING AT THE END (via Political Theory):

REVIEW: of Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? by Michael Ruse (Manuel Bremer, Mar 25th 2004, Metapsychology)

Michael Ruse's Darwin and Design is the third book in his trilogy on evolution, the first being Monad and Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology, the second being Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? All three books are written for a non-specialist audience and all three try to place evolutionary thought and the debate around evolution into the wider cultural climate of the times. In Darwin and Design Ruse takes on the relation between the theory of evolution and the argument from design as one of the classical ways to prove that there has to be a God. Aiming at the non-specialist the debate is not developed systematically or presented in formal clothing, but enfolds as Ruse leads us through the history of the argument from design and the unfolding of Darwinism and the theory of evolution. Ruse starts with the versions of the argument from design in Plato and Aristotle, distinguishes between a realistic reading of it (i.e. there really is design by God) and Kant's methodological reading of it (i.e. we have to see the world as if it was designed to formulate the laws of biology), and sees the argument from design in British natural theology employed as a justification of science: If the laws of nature are God's design, then it cannot be against faith to do science (as a means to understand God's ways).

The teleological language used in the argument from design is congenial to the language of functions in biology, it seems. The function/telos of the eye is to see, the function of the heart to circulate blood -- and so on. Darwin himself often writes in a teleological fashion. One of his favorite pictures of the process of evolution is the similarity to breeding, which obviously involves the farmer planning his breed. So the question is: What keeps Darwin's (and other evolutionist's) usage of functional or teleological expression distinct from the cosmological view of the argument from design?

Ruse is not very explicit about the formal structure of the argument from design, but introduces an important distinction between the two major steps in that argument. The first premise of the argument Ruse calls "the argument to (organized) complexity". This is a premise won by observation. We see around us highly complex living systems. Once we look into the details of the working of the human eye or the metamorphosis of a butterfly we see what immensely structured entities or processes we encounter. Given this complexity the decisive step, according to Ruse, is the "argument to design", namely that the observed complexity is design. Ruse takes the name "argument from design" a misnomer, since it is tautological that design requires somebody doing the designing. The crucial step, therefore, rather is that complexity is taken as design. This step involves two sub-steps, it seems. The first sub-step underlines that complexity is something to be explained. Complexity is not random. Explained such this sub-step trades on the definition of "complexity", and seems to be unproblematic. Scientists, naturalists, and religious people agree on the need to explain the occurrence of organized complexity in nature. The decisive second sub-step in the argument to design is the statement that nothing but design explains complexity. It is a negative claim arguing to design as the only/best explanation. It is here that Darwin and the theory of evolution enter, and it is here where the argument from design crumbles. What the theory of mutation ("inherited variation" in Darwin's first version of his theory) and selection provides is exactly some such explanation of complexity as adaptation to a (complex) environment. Since there is the interplay of (random) mutation and selection (of better adaptive traits), there is a mechanism -- even an "algorithm" the workings of which can be ascertained ex post -- to increase complexity, to get "design" out of chaos.

One can only assume this is a parody, particularly at the point where Mr. Bremer is arguing that the existence of algorithm leading to complexity is an argument against design, rather than in favor.

But as a general proposition, Darwinism can't help but be teleological because it is historical. It attempts to explain how we got to this precise point in the history of Evolution. As the great Darwinist Ernst Mayr puts it:

[D]arwin introduced historicity into science. Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science - the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.

Darwinism then, by definition, starts from the telos (the end) and then argues backwards to find a way it could have occurred randomly.

---

THE PRO-SOVIET PERSPECTIVE THAT IS:

Rethinking the United States — A European Perspective (Helmut Schmidt, March 23, 2004, The Globalist)

Some people in the United States believe that 9/11 changed the world. But that's not quite true, says former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Rather, it deeply changed the way in which Americans perceive the outside world. His analysis is all the more relevant one year after the start of the Iraq War.

On September 11, 2001, despite all of their power —and for the first time in many generations — Americans suffered from a violent attack on its own soil. This experience led the U.S. leadership to use their enormous military power to fight the so-called “war on terrorism.”

As a result, tendencies toward hegemonic behavior vis-à-vis other nations appear to have come to the forefront.

An imperialist element within the foreign policy of the United States has always co-existed with isolationism, and also with internationalist idealism (which is nowadays called “multilateralism”). Sometimes, one of these elements prevailed — and sometimes another.

Even for someone as historically hostile to the American mission as Mr. Schmidt, it's remarkable how quickly he strays into error. Note the assumption that multilateralism is the idealist position. In fact, American imperialism is more idealistic -- seeking to impose liberal democracy unilaterally -- where internationalism has historically allowed Europe to thwart our efforts. So, for instance, Mr. Schmidt was reluctant to site the new generation of missiles that helped win the Cold War and eager to help the USSR with the oil pipeline which would have supplied them with desperately needed hard currency and prolonged the War.

---

OCCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN IN THE PERFECT WORLD:

The Origins of Occidentalism (IAN BURUMA, February 6, 2004, Chronicle of Higher Education)

What...is the Occidentalist idea of the West?

That is the problem that vexed a group of prominent Japanese intellectuals who gathered for a conference in Kyoto in 1942. The attack on Pearl Harbor was not the ostensible reason for the conference, but the underlying idea was to find an ideological justification for Japan's mission to smash, and in effect replace, the Western empires in Asia. The topic of discussion was "how to overcome the modern." Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly with Western imperialism.

Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the Japanese spirit. The "modern thing," said another, was a "European thing." Others believed that "Americanism" was the enemy, and that Japan should make common cause with the Europeans to defend old civilizations against the New World (there would certainly have been takers in Europe). There was much talk about unhealthy specialization in knowledge, which had fragmented the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to blame. So were capitalism, the absorption into Japanese society of modern technology, and notions of individual freedom and democracy. These had to be "overcome."

All agreed that culture -- that is, traditional Japanese culture -- was spiritual and profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power. The West, particularly the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where people mixed to produce mongrel races. A holistic, traditional Orient united under divine Japanese imperial rule would restore the warm organic Asian community to spiritual health. As one of the participants put it, the struggle was between Japanese blood and Western intellect.

Precisely the same terms had been used by others, in other places, at other times. Blood, soil, and the spirit of the Volk were what German romantics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries invoked against the universalist claims of the French Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon's invading armies. This notion of national soul was taken over by the Slavophiles in 19th-century Russia, who used it to attack the "Westernizers," that is, Russian advocates of liberal reforms. It came up again and again, in the 1930s, when European fascists and National Socialists sought to smash "Americanism," Anglo-Saxon liberalism, and "rootless cosmopolitanism" (meaning Jews). Aurel Kolnai, the great Hungarian scholar, wrote a book in the 1930s about fascist ideology in Austria and Germany. He called it War Against the West. Communism, too, especially under Stalin, although a bastard child of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, was the sworn enemy of Western liberalism and "rootless cosmopolitanism." Many Islamic radicals borrowed their anti-Western concepts from Russia and Germany. The founders of the Ba'ath Party in Syria were keen readers of prewar German race theories. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an influential Iranian intellectual in the 1960s, coined the phrase "Westoxification" to describe the poisonous influence of Western civilization on other cultures. He, too, was an admirer of German ideas on blood and soil.
Clearly, the idea of the West as a malign force is not some Eastern or Middle Eastern idea, but has deep roots in European soil. Defining it in historical terms is not a simple matter. Occidentalism was part of the counter-Enlightenment, to be sure, but also of the reaction against industrialization. Some Marxists have been attracted to it, but so, of course, have their enemies on the far right. Occidentalism is a revolt against rationalism (the cold, mechanical West, the machine civilization) and secularism, but also against individualism. European colonialism provoked Occidentalism, and so does global capitalism today. But one can speak of Occidentalism only when the revolt against the West becomes a form of pure destruction, when the West is depicted as less than human, when rebellion means murder.

Wherever it occurs, Occidentalism is fed by a sense of humiliation, of defeat. Isaiah Berlin once described the German revolt against Napoleon as "the original exemplar of the reaction of many a backward, exploited, or at any rate patronized society, which, resentful of the apparent inferiority of its status, reacted by turning to real or imaginary triumphs and glories in its past, or enviable attributes of its own national or cultural character."
The same thing might be said about Japan in the 1930s, after almost a century of feeling snubbed and patronized by the West, whose achievements it so fervently tried to emulate. It has been true of the Russians, who have often slipped into the role of inferior upstarts, stuck in the outer reaches of Asia and Europe. But nothing matches the sense of failure and humiliation that afflicts the Arab world, a once glorious civilization left behind in every respect by the post-Enlightenment West. [...]

What, then, is new about the Islamist holy war against the West? Perhaps it is the totality of its vision. Islamism, as an antidote to Westoxification, is an odd mixture of the universal and the pure: universal because all people can, and in the eyes of the believers should, become orthodox Muslims; pure because those who refuse the call are not simply lost souls but savages who must be removed from this earth.

Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews, among others, but did not view the entire West with hostility. In fact, he wanted to forge an alliance with the British and other "Aryan" nations, and felt betrayed when they did not see things his way. Stalinists and Maoists murdered class enemies and were opposed to capitalism. But they never saw the Western world as less than human and thus to be physically eradicated. Japanese militarists went to war against Western empires but did not regard everything about Western civilization as barbarous. The Islamist contribution to the long history of Occidentalism is a religious vision of purity in which the idolatrous West simply has to be destroyed.

The worship of false gods is the worst religious sin in Islam as well as in ancient Judaism. The West, as conceived by Islamists, worships the false gods of money, sex, and other animal lusts. In this barbarous world the thoughts and laws and desires of Man have replaced the kingdom of God. The word for this state of affairs is jahiliyya, which can mean idolatry, religious ignorance, or barbarism. Applied to the pre-Islamic Arabs, it means ignorance: People worshiped other gods because they did not know better. But the new jahiliyya, in the sense of barbarism, is everywhere, from Las Vegas and Wall Street to the palaces of Riyadh. To an Islamist, anything that is not pure, that does not belong to the kingdom of God, is by definition barbarous and must be destroyed.

Just as the main enemies of Russian Slavophiles were Russian Westernizers, the most immediate targets of Islamists are the liberals, reformists, and secular rulers in their own societies. They are the savage stains that have to be cleansed with blood. But the source of the barbarism that has seduced Saudi princes and Algerian intellectuals as much as the whores and pimps of New York (and in a sense all infidels are whores and pimps) is the West. And that is why holy war has been declared against the West.

Since the target of the holy warriors is so large, figuring out how to defend it is not easy. But it is not immediately apparent that a war against Iraq was the most effective way to fight the Islamist jihad. Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath regime was a murderous dictatorship that deserved to come to an end, but it was not in line with the holy revolution.

However, if the war is between liberalism and totalitarianism, then is not the forced liberalization of Islamic regimes incredibly effective?

---

READY FROM DAY ONE (via Tom Morin):

Hamas linked to area housing (Jerry Seper, March 26, 2004, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

The terrorist organization Hamas invested millions of dollars during the past decade in real-estate projects nationwide, including in suburban Maryland, as part of a scheme to raise cash to fund acts of terrorism, records show.

The investments -- involving the construction of hundreds of new homes, including many in Oxon Hill -- were handled through BMI Inc., a defunct Secaucus, N.J., investment firm founded by Soliman S. Biheiri, an Egyptian and Hamas supporter, according to a newly released sentencing declaration by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

They already demonstrate a better understanding of market economics than the PA ever did.

---

APPORTIONING BLAME:

The Lonely Historian: Benny Morris discusses the new version of his famously controversial book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which has left him alienated from both the left and the right (Elizabeth Wasserman, March 25, 2004, Atlantic Unbound)

I want to ask you about the recent change in your politics, from a highly critical to a more pro-Israel view. How do you explain that?

Let me just say something up front: I don't really regard my views as having changed much.

I still believe that a territorial compromise is necessary, that a two-state solution is the only equitable solution here, and that Israel must withdraw from the territories. What has changed in my views is my perception of the Palestinian side during the past decade. Whereas in the 1990s I was fairly optimistic that the Palestinians had accepted in their hearts the need for a compromise and for a two-state solution, now I'm very doubtful. I don't think the Palestinians really want to agree to a two-state solution. They want a one-state solution, which means Israel's destruction and the turning of all of Palestine into one Arab majority state. That's what has changed in my thinking.

How has this influenced your thinking on the subject of transfer?

From my realization about the Palestinians stems a number of conclusions. If it is true that the Palestinians—historically, monolithically, continuously and probably forever—are disagreeable to a two-state solution, to the acceptance of Israel's existence, then one has to think afresh about the problem of demography and territory. And what this has led me to conclude is that in 1948, it would probably have been better for everybody to have had all the Palestinians cross the Jordan River rather than having many of them stay on the Israeli side at the end of the war. In other words, if Israel had been established on all the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River and the Palestinians had crossed the river and turned Transjordan into a state of their own, both peoples would have probably been happier, and the Middle East would certainly have been a pleasanter place over the next fifty years.

Do you have an idea of how and when this should have come about?

Well, there were expulsions and there was mass movement of population in '48 in the course of the war, and had this transfer occurred completely rather than partially, that would have been the right moment for it to occur, historically speaking—the only possible moment it probably could have occurred. Later it was already too late. The Palestinians were not going to move of their own volition; Israel was not going to kick anybody else out; and the opportunity for a complete separation between the two peoples, and the establishment of two states—one on each side of the Jordan—was lost.

In conducting research for Revisited you found a lot more evidence that the Arab leaders were partially responsible for promoting the evacuation. What is the significance of this? Should this information affect the Palestinian cause internationally?

It should translate in some way. Look, there is a connection between current policy on the Arab side—the demand for the right of return of the refugees to their homes and lands in Palestine—and the question of who is to blame for what happened in '48. There's sort of a formula here that essentially asserts that if the Israelis were by and large to blame for the displacement of the Palestinians, therefore they are guilty and must agree to a full-scale return of the refugees. On the other hand, if the Palestinians have more blame in the flight or the displacement of the Palestinians, their argument for a return of the refugees is diminished. So there is a political significance to the apportioning of blame

You have referred to Arab intellectuals' approach to the history of the Arab-Jewish conflict in the Middle East as hypocritical. Can you elaborate on this?

A lot of Arab critics have become hot and bothered about the so-called ethnic cleansing of Arabs in 1948. But they neglect to mention that ethnic cleansing is a sport long and consistently practiced by the Arabs, from Muhammad, who ethnically cleansed Arabia of its Jewish tribes back in the seventh century, down to the Arab world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which systematically cleansed their communities of Jews. Almost no Jews live in the Arab world today—in Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, etcetera. And, for that matter, there are very few Christian communities in the Arab world. The Arabs between the seventh and the twentieth centuries took care to expel them, massacre them, or forcibly convert them to Islam. An ethnic cleansing of giant proportions is currently under way in the Sudan, and has been for decades. No Arab historian I know of has ever studied or written about these events.

How has the change in your politics affected your relations with your leftist colleagues?

My relations have suffered as a result. Before the recent, as we think of it, change of heart, they were at least courteous. They were suspicious of my basic feeling because they always knew that I wasn't on the Arab side—I was never pro-Palestinian or pro-Arab, but at least I was producing a history that they enjoyed and made use of. But since I have made these statements blaming the Palestinians for much of what is going on, especially since the year 2000, they've been extremely hostile in print and I find that even my colleagues at the university don't say hello in the corridors. I'm talking about extreme leftists. So in some ways there is a beginning of an embargo or ostracism in the works. It isn't pleasant, but I think it's instinctive.

If you're a university professor and your colleagues are talking to you, it's time to worry.

MORE:
BEATING A PLOUGHSHARE INTO A SWORD (1/11/04)
POST-POST-ZIONISM (1/26/04)

---

WHAT'S ABOVE THE SUBTEXT? (via Mike Daley):

The Virtues of C-SPAN (Harvey Mansfield, September/October 1997, The American Enterprise)

With a healthy, unexciting breakfast, you need a zesty appetizer to start the day. I receive mine from C-SPAN, where the morning talk show, "Washington Journal," gets my partisan juices flowing. A liberal and a conservative politician pick articles from the morning paper and usually get into an argument. They spin, they bicker, they exchange barbs. I love it.

C-SPAN, two [now three and a radio station] educational channels funded by the cable television industry, is known for providing "unfiltered" news-including live coverage of floor debates in the U.S. House and Senate, unabridged taping of campaign stump speeches, and similar political jousting. Yet the same network famous for providing the most partisan news is also considered the most objective. Why? Because C-SPAN lets politics appear as it is, with all its partisan slants. Sometimes the slant is obvious, as when a Democrat or Republican states his party's position, and sometimes it is concealed behind the desire to appear "nonpolitical" (or "bipartisan"). C-SPAN tolerates both: It doesn't dismiss people's opinions merely because they are partisan, and it doesn't dismiss the aspiration to rise above partisanship merely because the effort often fails or is insincere.

Brian Lamb, the head moderator, and his able assistants do something almost never done on the major networks. They listen and they question; or rather, they listen so that they can question. Lamb's purpose is to enable the talker to make his point, not to embarrass him. But to do that, he asks for evidence, for a source, for an example, for consistency, or-when it's a wanderer-for the point. Sometimes the result is to embarrass an ill-informed caller or a biased guest, but that is not the intent. The intent-though Lamb doesn't boast of it-is to educate.

On C-SPAN talk-show programs the moderators do not simply sit by silently while others talk; they maintain an active neutrality that helps all sides. They want to improve our respect for democratic debate; so they do their best to make the debate worthy of respect. You never hear a voice-over or a sound-bite on C-SPAN. In a voice-over, the network reporter gives the gist
of a speaker's statement in his own words, and then often illustrates his interpretation with a punchy phrase actually taken from the speaker. The emphasis is the reporter's, and the speaker, who may well be the President of the United States, becomes a character in the reporter's story-and thus a witness to the reporter's moral or intellectual superiority.

The ruling vice of American journalists is not that too many are Democrats but that they show such disrespect for democracy. Their error is mostly unconscious but nonetheless grave: They despise the surface of things and look too much, too quickly, for the inside story. The surface of things in democratic politics is the partisan dispute of the moment, but journalists allow themselves to get bored with that. They don't listen partly because they have heard it before and mostly because they are convinced beforehand that it doesn't mean anything. The only important events, they believe, are the ones that go on behind the scenes, and the only important words are those spoken in private: what we don't see determines what we do see, and the job of the journalist is to unearth secrets, not to report what is obvious.

C-SPAN, by contrast, is not afraid of the obvious.

If you're headed to the videostore today and your spouse is as much a policy wonk as you, see if they have Alexandra Pelosi's documentary, Journeys with George. It's an entertaining look at the boys on the bus, covering George W. Bush in 2000. The portrayal of Mr. Bush is rather generous, including the key scene in the film, where he comes to Ms Pelosi's rescue after she's pulled a boner. Moreover, there's a very sly plotline in which the most cynical and partisan reporter in the film ends up playing a key role in another controversy, and in retrospect we can see that Ms Pelosi has essentially been working to destroy his credibility.

But the film does have a significant weakness, one pointed up by Mr. Mansfield above: even as the media complains constantly that the campaign is devoid of substance, Ms Pelosi avoids the substance almost entirely. We see that George Bush is at Bob Jones University or at a debate or giving his nomination acceptance speech, but get none of the words. His candidacy becomes almost inexplicable except to the extent that he charms the journalists covering him. It's almost as if the election were about whether they ended up liking him or not. That they do is a credit to one fact of his political skills, but it does make the election seem as if it was devoid of ideas--a notion which his presidency has laid to rest.

MORE:
THE WALLFLOWER KNOWS: C-SPAN has downsized Washington, revealing it to be a city of mere people, not giants. (William Powers, March 24, 2004, The Atlantic)

---

FROM YELLOW TO RED (via Mike Daley):

The Myth of the Racist Republicans (Gerard Alexander, March 20, 2004, Claremont Review of Books)

[B]ias is evident...in how differently they treat the long Democratic dominance of the South. Carter and the Black brothers suggest that the accommodation of white racism penetrates to the very soul of modern conservatism. But earlier generations of openly segregationist Southerners voted overwhelmingly for Woodrow Wilson's and Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic Party, which relaxed its civil rights stances accordingly. This coalition passed much of the New Deal legislation that remains the basis of modern liberalism. So what does the segregationist presence imply for the character of liberalism at its electoral and legislative apogee? These scholars sidestep the question by simply not discussing it. This silence implies that racism and liberalism were simply strange political bedfellows, without any common values.

But the commonality, the philosophical link, is swiftly identified once the Democrats leave the stage. In study after study, authors say that "racial and economic conservatism" married white Southerners to the GOP after 1964. So whereas historically accidental events must have led racists to vote for good men like FDR, after 1964 racists voted their conscience. How convenient. And how easy it would be for, say, a libertarian conservative like Walter Williams to generate a counter-narrative that exposes statism as the philosophical link between segregation and liberalism's economic populism.

Yet liberal commentators commit a further, even more obvious, analytic error. They assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up voting Republican in the 1970s and beyond, it had to be because Republicans went to the segregationist mountain, rather than the mountain coming to them. There are two reasons to question this assumption. The first is the logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually have little choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at best the lesser of two evils, one that offers them little of what they truly desire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968, when Wallace won less than 9% of the electoral
college and Nixon became president anyway, without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limited national bargaining power. In the end, not the Deep South but the GOP was the mountain.

Second, this was borne out in how little the GOP had to "offer," so to speak, segregationists for their support after 1968, even according to the myth's own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP, they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason these policies aren't plausible codes for real racism is that they aren't the equivalents of discrimination, much less of segregation.

Why did segregationists settle for these policies rather than continue to vote Democratic? The GOP's appeal was mightily aided by none other than the Democratic Party itself, which was lurching leftward in the 1970s, becoming, as the contemporary phrase had it, the party of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." Among other things, the Democrats absorbed a civil rights movement that was itself expanding, and thus diluting, its agenda to include economic redistributionism, opposition to the Vietnam War, and Black Power. The many enthusiasms of the new Democratic Party drove away suburban middle-class voters almost everywhere in the country, not least the South.

One of the tragedies of American politics is that white Southerners supported the Democrats for so long, simply because of racial issues. Had the voted their conservative consciences much of the damage done by FDR and Truman might have been avoided.

---

YOU DON'T SAY...:

Democrats' Ads in Tandem Provoke G.O.P.: An analysis of advertising data shows a striking synchronicity between the advertising campaigns of Senator
John Kerry, Moveon.org and the Media Fund. (JIM RUTENBERG, 3/27/04, NY Times)

Senator John Kerry's advertising campaign is so closely complemented by those of two major liberal groups running commercials against President Bush that Republicans are accusing the Democrats of trying to evade campaign finance laws.

An analysis of advertising data provided by Republicans, Democrats and an independent group shows a striking synchronicity between the advertising campaigns of Mr. Kerry and Moveon.org and the Media Fund, which flatly deny any illegal consultations. They have been advertising in the same 17 swing states, in most of the same markets while almost uniformly ignoring others.

In mid-March, while Mr. Kerry advertised slightly more in the morning, the groups advertised slightly more at night. At other times of day, the two groups and the Kerry campaign together matched Mr. Bush's advertising nearly spot for spot, in a couple of cases exceeding it. That level of correlation has delighted Democrats, who acknowledge that the groups have gone a long way in helping Mr. Kerry to meet the advertising onslaught of Mr. Bush, whose campaign has raised far more money.

Officials of the two groups say that they do not need to speak to the Kerry campaign to join it in answering the Bush campaign. But such help is becoming a focal point in what is widely expected to be a legal battle with Republicans and some advocates of election reform over what legitimate role the groups, which are called 527 committees for the section of the tax code that created them, should be allowed to play.

The 527 groups' significance has grown exponentially this election cycle because they are able to collect millions in unregulated, unlimited contributions from unions, corporations and wealthy individuals. The parties and candidates are now prohibited from that type of fund-raising under the new campaign finance law.

While the law does not affect the fund-raising practices of these groups, it prohibited them from coordinating their efforts with federal parties or candidates.

---

WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE WAR ENDED?:

Palestinian officials call on militants to lay down arms (Ha'aretz, 3/26/04)

Over 60 prominent Palestinian officials and intellectuals Thursday urged the public to refrain from retaliation for Israel's assassination of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, saying it would ignite a new round of bloodshed that would only hurt Palestinian aspirations for independence.

A half-page advertisement in the PLO's Al-Ayyam newspaper called on Palestinians to lay down their arms and turn to peaceful means of protest to end Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The ad reflected apparently growing sentiment among many Palestinian leaders and intellectuals that military struggle is not helping the Palestinian cause. [...]

The intellectuals who signed Thursday's ad - including lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi, Nablus Governor Mahmoud Aloul, Geneva Accord co-author and PLO Executive Committee member Yasser Abed Rabbo and Abbas Zaki, a leading member of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement - said such revenge attacks would lead to a strong Israeli retaliation and further hurt the Palestinian cause.

The group called on the public to "rise again in a peaceful, wise intifada." While saying the 37-year occupation must be brought down, they asked the public to reconsider the benefits of a violent struggle.

The conflict is over. They have their state. The Israelis are leaving. Time to stop dehumanizing themselves.

---

LOOK UP IN AWE:

5 planets offer stargazers rare show visible at dusk (MARCIA DUNN, 3/24/04, Associated Press)

For the next two weeks, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn -- the five closest planets -- should be easily visible at dusk, along with the moon.

"It's semi-unique," said Myles Standish, an astronomer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "They're all on the same side of the sun and stretched across the sky and that's what is kind of pretty."

---

JUST 8 MORE MONTHS OF LISTENING TO THIS:

When Kerry's Words Obscure His Message: Deviations From Script Don't Always Resonate (John F. Harris, March 26, 2004, Washington Post)

For a national security speech earlier this month, Sen. John F. Kerry's speechwriters produced a draft that included the story of a woman who was suddenly evicted from military housing. Because her husband was killed in Iraq, authorities brusquely told her, she no longer qualified as a military family.

Kerry's prepared speech had the words to crisply convey his outrage. "How can this happen in the United States of America?" the prepared text read. "Who among us could move on short notice when you don't even know where your paycheck will come from?"

But when the Massachusetts Democrat delivered the speech, those crisp words went a bit limp. "Now how can this happen in the United States of America in the way that it happens? . . . Who among us thinks it's right to say so quickly, on short notice, before you even know where your next paycheck's going to come from; before you know, if you haven't been working, what skill you can apply to be able to earn a paycheck; before you've been able to adjust to the loss and begin to be able to get back into life?" [...]

The fear among some Kerry backers is that muddy language from Kerry -- at a time when he is still not well known among most voters -- will also cloud the policy distinctions he needs to unseat Bush, and make it easier for Republicans to promote their less flattering definition of what the Democrat represents.

The obfuscation is the message.

---

CLARKE V. CLARKE:

Republicans seek to declassify Clarke testimony (DAVID ESPO, March 26, 2004, AP)

Key Republicans in Congress sought Friday to declassify two-year-old testimony by former White House aide Richard Clarke, suggesting he may have lied this week when he faulted President Bush's handling of the war on terror.

"Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said in a speech on the Senate floor.

The Tennessee Republican said he hopes Clarke's testimony in July 2002 before the House and Senate intelligence committees can be declassified. Then, he said, it can be compared with the account the former aide provided in his nationally televised appearance Wednesday before the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. [...]

One Republican aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the initial request for declassification was made by House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Rep. Porter Goss, the chairman of the House intelligence committee.

Frist, without elaborating, said Clarke's testimony in 2002 was "effusive in his praise for the actions of the Bush administration."

Frist also noted that Clarke, appearing as an anonymous official, had praised the administration's actions in an appearance before White House reporters in 2002.

Clarke on Wednesday dismissed that appearance as the fulfillment of the type of request that presidential appointees frequently receive.

But, Frist said, "Loyalty to any administration will be no defense if it is found that he has lied to Congress."

Who ya gonna believe: me or me?

---

RUNNING TO THE GOOD COP:

Syria seeks our help to woo US (John Kerin, 27Mar04, news.com.au)

SYRIA has appealed to Australia to use its close ties with Washington to help the Arab nation shake off its reputation as a terrorist haven and repair its relations with the US.

Secret talks between the two nations have been under way for months but have become more urgent as rogue nations reconsider their role in allowing terrorists to thrive, in light of the US determination to take pre-emptive military action.

A Syrian embassy will be opened in Canberra in weeks and Australia is considering reopening its mission in Damascus.

Australia's close relationship with Washington, and its much higher profile in the Middle East, have prompted Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq al-Shara'a and parliamentary speaker Mahmoud Al-Ibrache to appeal to Canberra to help bring their country back in from a US-imposed diplomatic freeze.

"You're his partner, can't you talk to him? We'll do anything he wants!"

---

THE STAKES:

Abortion on the line in election (Joan Ryan, March 26, 2004, San Francisco Chronicle)

The message scrolled across Kate Michelman's cell phone as she sat in the Westin St. Francis Hotel ballroom Thursday afternoon. Around her, the room buzzed with the conversation and clicking flatware of 975 people, the largest turnout in the nine years San Francisco has hosted the NARAL Pro- Choice America lunch. Michelman, the longtime president of NARAL, read the message and let out a soft groan. [...]

If you looked across the enormous ballroom at the hundreds and hundreds of smart, accomplished, committed women, you might shake your head at the Bush administration's folly. How can it think it will succeed in making abortion illegal again? We won already. The Supreme Court said so 31 years ago. It's a done deal. Living in an America that forces women to back-alley butchers to end unwanted pregnancies seems as preposterous, in the year 2004, as living in an America that makes women wear burqas.

But the assumption of keeping this fundamental liberty could be the agent of its demise. [...]

"The situation is perilous,'' Michelman said. "It's very scary. There's a lot going on in the world, and this (unborn victims' act) might get missed. But this is a very, very serious setback. Pro-choice advocates have been too complacent that the right to an abortion can never be lost. Too many believe it cannot and will not happen. But the Supreme Court is not immune to social currents. This highlights how important it is to elect a pro-choice president."

San Francisco businessman and philanthropist Richard Goldman, a lifelong Republican, drove the point home. He walked to the lectern and announced publicly he was supporting Democratic candidate John Kerry for president.

"This is the most important election of my lifetime,'' said Goldman, a man not given to hyperbole. "There is no choice.''

Amen.

---

ANTONYMIANISM, NOT ANTINOMIANISM:

The Faith-Based Presidency: You can question Bush's veracity, his grip on reality, and the rationality of his policies, but not his faith. (Jack Beatty, March 25, 2004, Atlantic Monthly)

George W. Bush has made rationality an antonym of Republican. His is the first faith-based presidency. Above the entrance to the Bush West Wing should be St. Paul's definition of faith—"the evidence of things unseen." [...]

You can question Bush's veracity, his grip on reality, and the rationality of his policies, but not his faith. Turning to Jesus to escape from drinking was the turning point in his life. Sincerity, unreservedly giving your heart to Jesus, is the fulcrum of life-altering faith, say people who have experienced it. Reason, skepticism, critical thought, irony, argument—all threaten this sustaining emotional purity. You owe your life to a miracle, and it will go away if doubt creeps in.

All lives have the kind of soul-trying trouble that nearly cost George W. Bush his marriage. Some people see psychiatrists; others take medication; many turn to faith. And for many of this last group, I suspect, Bush's sins against reason, his privileging of his heart over his head, make up no small part of his appeal. Religiosity—intensity of faith and frequency of church attendance—now vies with race as a partisan predictor. Just as 9 in 10 African-Americans voted for Al Gore in 2000, so nearly 9 in 10 "high-commitment evangelicals" voted for George W. Bush. Altogether, evangelicals and white Protestant fundamentalists constituted 40 percent of Bush's vote. When Pat Robertson resigned as president of the Christian Coalition, in late 2001, Gary Bauer, a spokesman for social conservatism, said he knew why: "I think he stepped down because the position has already been filled..." President Bush "is that leader right now."

He's contemptuous of that faith and completely fails to understand how it translates into policy, but Mr. Beatty is right that this is the central fact about Mr. Bush and the partisan political divide in America.

You can't arrive at a belief in human dignity, inalienable rights, the necessity of freedom, and a basis for democracy without Judeo-Christianity. So George W. Bush can't use Reason to explain why the Iraqi people should be free. He's "reduced" to fundamentalist religious formulations, like this one:

Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.

just as the Founders--supposed Rationalists--could do no better than this:

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness...

Of course, Mr. Beatty can't use Reason to arrive at these things either. So, the choice is between faith, and American values, or Reason, and no values.

---

ARE ANGLICANS JUST NOTICING THIS?:

Islamic world is violent, says Carey (Sam Jones, March 26, 2004, The Guardian)

The Islamic world is a violent, authoritarian and undemocratic place, according to Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.

In a speech in Rome yesterday, Dr Carey denounced moderate Muslims for refusing to condemn the "evil" of suicide bombers, urged Islamic theologians to take a more critical approach to the Koran, and lamented that "no great invention has come for many hundred years from Muslim countries".

"Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, we find authoritarian regimes with deeply entrenched leadership, some of which rose to power at the point of a gun and are retained in power by massive security forces," he said.

Turning his attention to suicide bombers, he said: "Sadly, apart from a few courageous examples, very few Muslim leaders condemn clearly and unconditionally the evil of the suicide bombers ... We need to hear outright condemnation of theologies that state that suicide bombers are martyrs and enter a martyr's reward."

Dr Carey's words, reported in the Daily Telegraph, come as the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, leads a seminar of Muslim and Christian scholars in New York today.

His call for Islamic theologians to be as rigorous in their studies as their Jewish and Christian counterparts is unlikely to please his successor.

Is the Reverend Williams not aware of this?

---

GIVING THE MINORITY A WEDGIE:

'Culture wars' shaping election (Bill Sammon, March 25, 2004, Washington Times)

"He sort of wins on a lot of these issues without even firing a shot," said Democrat Manfred Wolf, an English professor at San Francisco State University. "It's just a feeling that a lot of people have that the country is growing soft, and they don't like it.

"The Republicans tend to cash in on this," he added. "I would hate to see the Democratic Party get caught in this, because the Democratic Party will lose on these cultural issues."

The Bush campaign agreed.

"The Democrats' position on almost all of these issues is anti-majoritarian," said a senior campaign official. "Their position is: Because we don't trust the majorities in defining marriage, or in establishing appropriate laws in their states on things like abortion or on so many other fronts, we need to step in and have an elite group of people who share our values tell the majority what to do."

For example, he said, the left warned that Mel Gibson's "The Passion," which graphically depicts Jesus' crucifixion, would incite anti-Semitism.

"Think about what they're saying: You can't be trusted to go see this movie. You can't be trusted, or your passions will rise up," said the Bush campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Is Mr. Wolf saying he'd rather see the culture destroyed?

---

A CABANA BOY'S PREROGATIVE:

Tax flip-flop? (The Tipsheet, March 26, 2004, The Hill)

Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), the Democrats‚ presumptive presidential nominee, withdrew his co-sponsorship of the Senate‚s corporate tax bill last fall, citing concerns that the bill‚s international provisions could spur the outsourcing of jobs overseas. The move came shortly after he joined other Democrats in voting the bill out of committee. A spokesman for Kerry said that he had wanted to move the bill forward in an attempt to avert trade sanctions, but later had concerns about the international provisions.

---

THE THIRD BEARD TRIMMED:

Whatever happened to evolutionary theory?: INTELLIGENT DESIGN: Intelligent design has now (in 2025) become a thriving scientific research program and replaced materialistic accounts of biological evolution (in particular, Darwinism). ID theory led to new understanding of embryo development and the importance of "junk DNA" (Jonathan Wells, 4/03/04, World)

[D]arwinian evolution is little more than a historical footnote in biology textbooks. Just as students learn that scientists used to believe that the Sun moves around the Earth and maggots are spontaneously generated in rotting meat, so students also learn that scientists used to believe that human beings evolved through random mutations and natural selection. How could a belief that was so influential in 2000 become so obsolete by 2025? Whatever happened to evolutionary theory?

Surprising though it may seem, Darwinism did not collapse because it was disproved by new evidence. (As we shall see, the evidence never really fit it anyway.) Instead, evolutionary theory was knocked off its pedestal by three developments in the first decade of this century-developments centered in the United States, but worldwide in scope. Those developments were: (1) the widespread adoption of a "teach the controversy" approach in education, (2) a growing public awareness of the scientific weaknesses of evolutionary theory, and (3) the rise of the more fruitful "theory of intelligent design." [...]

In the second major development, students who were free to examine the evidence for and against evolution quickly realized that the former was surprisingly thin. Although Darwinists had long boasted about having "overwhelming evidence" for their view, it turned out that they had no good evidence for the theory's principal claim: that species originate through random mutation and natural selection. Bacteria were the best place to look for such evidence, because they reproduce quickly, their DNA can be easily mutated, and they can be subjected to strong selection in the laboratory. Yet bacteria had been intensively studied throughout the 20th century, and bacteriologists had never observed the formation of a new species.

If there was no good evidence that a Darwinian mechanism could produce new species, still less was there any evidence that a Darwinian mechanism could produce complex organs or new anatomical features. Darwinists discounted the problem by arguing that evolution was too slow to observe, but this didn't change the fact that they lacked empirical confirmation for their theory.

Of course, there was plenty of evidence for minor changes in existing species-but nobody had ever doubted that existing species can change over time. Domestic breeders had been observing such changes-and even producing them-for centuries. Unfortunately, this was not the sort of evidence that evolution needed. After all, the main point of evolutionary theory was not how selection and mutation could change existing species, but how that mechanism could produce new species-indeed, all species after the first-as well as new organs and new body plans. That's why Darwin titled his magnum opus The Origin of Species, not How Existing Species Change over Time.

A growing number of people realized that the "overwhelming evidence" for evolutionary theory was a myth. It didn't help the Darwinists when it became public knowledge that they had faked some of their most widely advertised evidence. For example, they had distorted drawings of early embryos to make them look more similar than they really are (in order to convince students that they had descended from a common ancestor), and they had staged photos showing peppered moths on tree trunks where they don't normally rest (in order to persuade students of the power of natural selection).

In the first few years of this century, the cultural dominance of Darwinism was so strong, especially in academia, that critics were slow to speak up. By 2009, however, when Darwin's followers had hoped to stage a triumphal celebration of their leader's 200th birthday, millions of people were laughing at the emperor with no clothes. [...]

More and more people saw through the lies, however, and within a few short years Darwinism had lost its scientific credibility and public funding. By 2015 it was well on its way to joining its intellectual cousins, Marxism and Freudianism, in the dustbin of discarded ideologies. By 2020, Darwinism was effectively dead.

To his credit, Darwin's replacement for Judeo-Christianity did last longer than that of his rivals.

---

THE STAKES:

Guess What’s Hot? Politics! (Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, Beth Lester, Clothilde Ewing and Sean Sharifi, 3/26/04, CBS News)

The latest poll from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press indicates that Americans feel the stakes of the 2004 presidential campaign are high. About 63 percent of those surveyed said it really matters who wins the election. This is up from the last presidential election when a June 2000 Pew poll showed that only 45 percent said it really mattered who won the presidency.

Given that in most American presidential elections the candidates have been either rather similar (TR/Wilson, Hoover/FDR, Dewey/Truman, JFK/Nixon, Nixon/Humphrey, Ford/Carter, Carter/Reagan, Bush/Dukakis, Bush/Clinton, Clinton/Dole) or one candidate has been so different as to have no shot (William Jennings Bryant, Barry Goldwater, George McGovern, Walter Mondale), this is likely the most important election of the past century and a half, if not in all of American history. George Bush's liberal democratic interventionism and free marketeering contrasts sharply with Kerry's isolationism and protectionism. His opportunity society will radically reform the New Deal/Great Society welfare state that Kerry is defending. His shift of taxation to consumption instead of income marks a sea change. And his Christian conservatism on social issues is the polar opposite of Kerry's libertinism. No two candidates with reasonable chances of winning have ever had such different visions of the future.

---

BRING DA' FUNK:

Democrats Trounce Bush in Negative Ads (Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, Beth Lester, Clothilde Ewing and Sean Sharifi, 3/26/04, CBS News)

The Bush-Cheney campaign has defended its ads attacking John Kerry by saying that Kerry ran 16 negative ads against Bush before Bush-Cheney even got into the game. And a study out today by the Wisconsin Ad Project documents that Democrats have been clobbering President Bush in TV ads for months.

"The Democrats spent $51.3 million in the top 100 media markets during the Democratic presidential primaries … Although only a handful of ads attacked fellow Democrats in the field, half of all the ads aired by the Democratic presidential candidates had at least one negative mention of President Bush and his administration. Of the $10.6 million that now-Democratic nominee Kerry spent on advertising in his bid for his party’s nomination, 78 percent of his ads had at least one criticism of President Bush."

The study also says that "of all of the Democratic presidential primary candidates, Kerry ran the most negative television advertising campaign, with less than a quarter of his spots being purely positive. Kerry’s criticisms were entirely aimed at Bush, while other candidates, most notably Richard Gephardt and Howard Dean, also used spots to directly attack their Democratic primary opponents. Edwards and Clark were the most positive of the Democratic candidates."

The study says that by and large the Bush ads so far have been mainly positive and a Pew Poll released yesterday indicated that Americans may be aware of that fact. Forty-seven percent say that John Kerry has been too critical of George Bush, while only 33 percent feel Bush has been too critical of Kerry.

Which gives Bush and Rove a free hand to "respond".

---

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS ALWAYS WRONG:

NEWS ANALYSIS: Sharon's Gaza Strategy: Good for Hamas, or Israel? (JAMES BENNET, March 26, 2004, NY Times)

Hamas sees a unilateral Israeli withdrawal as a political opportunity. In the weeks before he was killed in an Israeli missile strike on Monday, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, was in talks with other Palestinian factions over how to govern Gaza if the Israelis depart, according to officials of Hamas and Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction.

That is a landmark change for Hamas. A fundamentalist group that officially seeks Israel's destruction and rejects any negotiated end to the conflict, Hamas always refused a role within the governing Palestinian Authority, regarding it as a creature of the Oslo peace framework. Since Mr. Sharon is planning to leave Gaza without an agreement, Hamas now feels free to step in, its leaders said.

How much of a role the group wants to play in running Gaza in the near term is unclear. Dr. Mahmoud Zahar, one of its leaders in Gaza, said, "We are going to contest municipal elections."

For now, the killing of Sheik Yassin has given Hamas a lift among Gaza's Palestinians. "Sheik Yassin's death will give more momentum and more power to Hamas," said one Palestinian Authority official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Palestinian Authority in Gaza is already struggling. It is straining to meet payrolls and keep the lights turned on in ministry buildings. Its popularity has faded as Palestinians have come to view it as incompetent and corrupt. By contrast, Hamas has built a network of schools and low-cost health clinics. Its leaders live modestly and have reputations as incorruptible. [...]

Under Olso, Israel was supposed to yield civil or security control of some Gaza and West Bank land to the Palestinian Authority, which in turn was supposed to safeguard Israelis from attack by Hamas and other militant groups.

Mr. Sharon says the Palestinian Authority did not live up to its end of the deal. Now he wants to act without any agreement, withdrawing from Gaza and part of the West Bank because, he says, Israel needs to draw more defensible boundaries.

He also says he fears that if Israel does not act on its own, an internationally imposed plan may eventually deprive it of far more of the territory it captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

It's always amusing when they run a think piece like this which is devoid of any thought. What Mr. Bennett has done is draw a false dichotomy, ignoring what his own story makes clear, that what's good for Hamas is good for Israel and vice versa. Israel wants to get out and leave a state behind. Hamas wants Israel out and is better prepared to run a state than the PA. Who loses...other than Yassir Arafat?

---

ALL HUMOR IS CONSERVATIVE FILES:

Bush criticized for gags about weapons search (Frank James, March 26, 2004, Chicago Tribune)

The jokes came at Wednesday night's annual Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner. In a 10-minute, mostly puckish, self-deprecating speech, the president presented a slide show he called "an election year, White House photo album."

In several photos, he appeared to be searching the Oval Office. A photo of Bush looking under a piece of furniture was flashed on the large projection screens in the ballroom.

"Those weapons of mass destruction got to be here somewhere," Bush said in his narration, drawing laughter from the audience of journalists, politicians, government workers and other guests.

Another photo showed him looking through a window. "Nope, no weapons over there," the president said.

"I'm appalled," said Larry Syverson of Richmond, Va., who has a son serving with the Army in Iraq and another who recently returned after serving in the Tikrit area. Syverson read news accounts of the event.

"I think it's in extremely poor taste," he said. "I think he owes an apology to those families who have lost loved ones there and those of us that are going through the dread every day having a son or daughter in Iraq."

Syverson recalled the displeasure many military families felt with Bush after he appeared last year to be daring Iraqi insurgents to attack U.S. troops by saying "Bring it on."

"Now he pokes fun at the reason that he told us [soldiers] went over there. I think it's extremely callous."

First of all, get over yourself you humorless git. Second, that's not why he said we went.

---

PEARLS AFTER PORK:

Change in South Carolina (George Will, March 26, 2004, Jewish World Review)

With the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, [Rep. Jim DeMint] has developed an ``index of dependency.''

America is in, he says, ``an eleventh-hour crisis'' of democracy because it recently reached a point where a majority are ``dependent on the federal government for their health care, education, income or retirement.'' Tax reforms, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, have removed many Americans from the income tax rolls: ``Today, the majority of Americans can vote themselves more generous government benefits at little or no cost to themselves.'' DeMint asks: ``How can any free nation survive when a majority of its citizens, now dependent on government services, no longer have the incentive to restrain the growth of government?''

DeMint's fear, that dependency produces ``learned helplessness,'' echoes Tocqueville's warning about government keeping people ``fixed irrevocably in childhood,'' rendering ``the employment of free will less useful and more rare.'' It is, Tocqueville said, ``difficult to conceive how men who have entirely renounced the habit of directing themselves could succeed at choosing well those who will lead them.''

In the context of a welfare state devoted to assuaging the insecurities and augmenting the competencies of its citizens, conservatism's challenge is to use government — collective action — to promote individualism. DeMint believes dependency can be countered by policies that foster attitudes and aptitudes requisite for independence. He favors applying to public policy the axiom that ``no one washes a rental car.'' Which means: Ownership encourages rational maintenance of resources. Consider the pertinence of this to health care.

DeMint was one of 25 doughty House Republicans who, resisting intense White House pressure, voted against the Medicare prescription drug entitlement, partly because of its cost. And this was before the administration's ``$130 billion `oops!'" — the projection of a 10-year cost that much higher than previously anticipated.

But DeMint says the Medicare bill's provision for individual health savings accounts is ``the grain of sand in the oyster,'' from which a pearl of progress may emerge.

The oyster is the cost required for the pearl--Ameriucans are going to have to be tricked into giving up dependency, as Ted Kennedy was on NCLB;'s vouchers and as everyone was on the HSA's in the Medicare bill.

---

DEATH OF A HERO:

Why are we still annoying Americans with metrics? (Dean P. Johnson, 3/26/04, Jewish World Review)

Last week saw the passing of an international hero. Steve Thoburn, 39, died in Sunderland, England from an apparent heart attack, reports said.

While most people probably never heard of Thoburn, his stand against a system forced upon millions of people in both the UK and here in America echoes many people's beliefs.

In 2001, Thoburn was prosecuted for selling fruits and vegetables in pounds and ounces when the European Union requires produce to be sold in metric units.

Fortunately, Thoburn's spirit of aversion to the metric system carries on. [...]

It is time for the world to realize that our system of measurement is indefatigable because it is quintessentially American. It's no accident that the United States is one of the only countries in the world not totally committed to adopting the metric system. Rugged defiance of global influence and shrewd isolationism are representative of the American spirit. What else than good ol' American determination can fathom (6 feet) measurements like the rod (16.5 feet) or the pole (5.5 yards) or the peck (2 gallons) or the pace (2.5 feet) or the gill (half a cup) or the hogshead (63 gallons)?

America will keep her measures just as she pleases. She will not bend to the torrents of international pressures. Her scales of justice will tip left and right with ounces and pounds; her quantities of milk and honey will flow in pints, quarts and gallons; her rulers will hold its inches to a foot. And remember what Thomas Jefferson said: People get the rulers they deserve.

Just one of the many things that makes us the exceptional nation.

---

PAGING FOX NEWS:

Bye, bye Banfield (Lloyd Grove, March 26, 2004, Jewish World Review)

Onetime cable television star Ashleigh Banfield — a publicity-magnet even before she achieved celebrity in the aftermath of 9/11 — is out at NBC News. [...]

The native Canadian was a controversial figure at NBC, where detractors spread rumors of diva-like behavior and sniped at her supposed journalistic deficiencies.

Banfield didn't try to butter up colleagues and supervisors, and instead cast herself as an enemy of the Establishment. She once showed up for anchor duties at MSNBC's Secaucus, N.J., studios sporting a T-shirt that shouted, in garish glitter: "Starf — — r." But on camera, the message was discreetly concealed by a conservative jacket.

On Sept. 11, 2001, her dramatic reports from Ground Zero won her star status and her own nightly live show from Afghanistan and Pakistan, "A Region in Conflict" (for which she wore a burqa and dyed her hair) and, later, "Ashleigh Banfield: On Location."

Of course, her main "journalistic deficiency" was that she wasn't exactly like every other bubblehead on the air; she was actually interesting.

---

SPEAKING IN TONGUES:

Do thoughts count?: Intent, action and responsibility (Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, March 25, 2004, Jewish World Review)

Do thoughts count? Of course they do, one might be tempted to say, especially after forgetting an important birthday, then remembering it two weeks later. If the person you forgot is gracious, he or she will say, "It's the thought that counts." Meaning: What really counts is the action, but I'll forgive you since you meant well.

Which counts most, then, thoughts or acts? It's a complicated topic in Judaism. Saul of Tarsas, propagator of Christianity, thought that Judaism regarded actions above all else. Judaism doesn't care what you think or feel, only what you do, he said. Judaism values the "law." To Saul, this was a biting criticism.

Some 1,700 years later, this was a high compliment, according to Moses Mendelsohn, the founder of the Jewish enlightenment in Western Europe.

Mendelsohn argued that Judaism required only action — and that this was a strength. Mendelsohn wished to adopt European ways of thought and felt he could do so and still remain a good Jew, provided only that he performed Jewish acts — the mitzvos, or commandments. Judaism, he said, was strictly a matter of "legislation." Any Jew was free to think whatever he wanted about G-d and philosophy, just so he observed the laws of the Torah.

Here is a contemporary version of the same approach, heard in certain Orthodox Jewish circles: Homosexuality is wrong, but only to the extent that it expresses itself in an act. The act is wrong, but the thought or "orientation" is not proscribed. Judaism values the "law" only. The circle comes back on itself, from Saul of Tarsas to Mendelsohn to some Orthodox rabbis. Strange bedfellows indeed.

The point is this: Yes, Judaism values acts; yes, Judaism is a religion of acts, of mitzvos; but no, acts do not exhaust Judaism. Far from it. Just as Saul was wrong about Judaism, ignoring the importance that Judaism places on love and other emotions and intentions, so, too, every Jewish thinker who tries to reduce Judaism to deeds alone ignores a pivotal quality of the religion.

This is brought home in this week's Torah portion by the olah sacrifice. It was offered on many occasions, one being this: Having sinful thoughts that are not carried out. Do thoughts count? Indeed they do. The very first sacrifice in Leviticus — the olah — was brought for imagining sin, for thinking unworthy thoughts. One dreamt of sin, nothing more. For this one was obligated to go to the trouble and expense of offering an olah sacrifice in the Temple.

We have no more Temple, but we do have sinful thoughts, and we do have a clear value statement about them in this week's Torah portion. Thoughts count.

Almost thirty years ago, then candidate Jimmy Carter confessed in a Playboy interview:

I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I'm going to do it anyhow, because I'm human and I'm tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, 'I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.'

I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do--and I have done it--and God forgives me for it.

He was widely derided in the mainstream media, but this sort of talk gave him the narrow margin by which he was elected, quite possibly the last time the Democratic standard bearer will ever carry the religious vote.

---

WHERE EAGLES DARE:

Eagles dare nest in city first time in a century (GARY WISBY, March 26, 2004. Chicago Sun-Times)

Chicago is home to a pair of nesting bald eagles for the first time in more than a century, bird experts said Thursday.

State officials and birders are trying to keep the eagles' location secret, lest people spook them into leaving town.

Suffice it to say they are nesting next to the Little Calumet River, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said. The Little Calumet marks part of Chicago's southern border.

"This is a historic event," said Walter Marcisz, a longtime birder in the Calumet area. "The last eagle nesting in the Chicago area was in 1897, in the Indiana Dunes. So this is a big deal."

---

THE SUBMERGING DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY:

America's Disappearing 'Black Vote' (Todd Boyd, March 26, 2004, LA Times)

[C]onsider this question: What happened to "the black vote"? Once a hot topic of discussion during presidential campaigns, it has been noticeably absent in recent years. Instead, it is the Latino swing vote that appears to be "in play" right now, with both parties vying for this group's attention in the presidential race.

It's not all that hard to figure out why. Over the years, Democrats have come to take the black vote for granted. And why shouldn't they, as long as blacks vote overwhelmingly and unwaveringly Democratic?

Republicans feel the converse: No matter what they do — even with prominent African American figures like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in high places — they now realize that their appeal to black voters in large numbers remains limited. So, why address this constituency? Latinos, by contrast, are up for grabs.

A cursory glance across the political landscape reveals another fact: There are no African American politicians with a substantial presence on the national stage who demand any real respect.

Whahappen? Are Powell and Rice (and Rodney Paige) not respected or not counted because they are Republican?

---

MARKING HIS TERRITORY (via AWW):

In your face: Bush gives Kerry a Boston beaning (Andrew Miga, March 26, 2004, Boston Herald)

Red-meat rhetoric topped the menu last night as President Bush took aim at Sen. John F. Kerry at a Boston fund-raising reception, needling his rival as a big-spending Democrat eager to boost taxes.

Spicing his attacks with a dash of humor as he invaded Kerry's home turf, Bush seized on the senator's 1993 vote that would have boosted the federal gasoline tax by 50 cents per gallon.

"He wanted you to pay the extra money at the pump - and he wouldn't even throw in a free car wash,'' Bush said to a crowd of about 1,000 well-heeled supporters who paid upwards of $2,000 apiece to attend his reception at the Boston Park Plaza ballroom.

Bush ticked off a laundry list of tax cuts, ranging from the marriage penalty to the child care tax credit and the death tax, that he accused Kerry of opposing.

"My opponent is one of the main opponents of tax relief in the United States Congress,'' Bush said. ``Over the years, he voted over 350 times for higher taxes on the American people, including the biggest tax increase in American history.'' [...]

Bush shared the stage with Gov. Mitt Romney and his Bay State fund-raising chief, former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Richard J. Egan, founder of Hopkinton-based EMC Corp. Former Gov. William F. Weld was among the crowd.

A playful Bush tweaked Romney's national political ambitions, noting he telephoned Sunday's traditional St. Patrick's Day political roast in South Boston.

"When I called in, I had the feeling they were going to ask me about a Massachusetts politician who had his eye on the White House,'' Bush recalled. ``So I addressed the issue as directly as possible: I told Mitt the job was filled until 2008."

Geez, you half expect to read that he whizzed on a fire hydrant in front of Kerry's townhouse or rubbed his rump on a tree in the Commons.

---

NO COLD WAR, NO PROBLEMS:

rish Lessons (Anne Applebaum, March 24, 2004, Washington Post)

Read the British or the Irish press and you'll see references to the "battered" peace process or the "flagging" peace process, stories of Irish Republican Army beatings and kneecappings, tales of hopelessly complex machinations among Belfast politicians. But Trimble agrees that there have nevertheless been some fundamental changes over the past decade. Some IRA members, while still claiming they are fighting a war for Irish independence, in fact spend much of their time smuggling cigarettes and dealing drugs. Others have morphed into democratic politicians, and now compete in Northern Irish elections. It's unsavory for someone like Trimble to deal with them, and cigarette smuggling and drug dealing don't contribute much to the greater social good either. Still, this is preferable to the frequent bloody attacks on innocent people that once characterized the IRA's "war" on Britain.

Nor is the IRA unique: Moving to another part of the world, the same phenomenon was on display last weekend in El Salvador. There, two parties that represented in effect the two sides of that country's old civil war clashed in a bitter, unfriendly but ultimately nonviolent election. The loser, a former FMLN Marxist guerrilla leader who recently congratulated Fidel Castro for imprisoning dissidents, was ungracious, refusing to congratulate the winner of his own country's election. Nevertheless, he didn't take to the forests, go underground or set off bombs. That, too, is progress.

These conflicts, as well as South Africa and Israel-Palestine--which seemed intractable for fifty years but have been quickly settled in recent years--were largely functions of our failure to reckon with the Soviets in the 40s, as we should have. It has obviously helped that the respective militant movements have lost their main source of funding and armaments, but even more important--if subtler--is the fact that if we still had a significant geostrategic rival we would not have allowed the replacement (or potential replacement) of allied regimes at these navigational chokepoints, nor in South Africa's case ceded control over its natural resources.

---

SERVANT OF SPECIAL INTERESTS:

Kerry to Offer Cut in Corporate Taxes (Jim VandeHei, March 26, 2004, Washington Post)

John F. Kerry today will propose cutting the corporate tax rate as part of an economic plan designed to create 10 million jobs by 2009 and discourage companies from sheltering taxable income overseas, his economic advisers said yesterday.

How about doing something sensible like not taxing corporations at all?

---

AT THE MOVIES:

Police: 'Passion' movie prompts man to admit murder (Associated Press, March 25, 2004)

The hanging death of Ashley Nicole Wilson in January was closed as a suicide and might have remained so if longtime friend Dan R. Leach hadn't seen "The Passion of the Christ."

Leach's experience viewing Mel Gibson's cinematic depiction of the last hours of Jesus Christ, coupled with a discussion with a religious adviser, caused him to walk into the Fort Bend County sheriff's department earlier this month and confess to killing Wilson, Detective Mike Kubricht said Thursday.

Leach otherwise had successfully tricked authorities and the Harris County Medical Examiner into ruling suicide, Kubricht said.

"He was very, very meticulous," Kubricht said. "It was very well-planned and well executed."

Wilson's body was discovered Jan. 19 in her apartment near Richmond, just beyond the southwest suburbs of Houston. All physical evidence pointed to suicide, Kubricht said, and Wilson had gone off several anti-depressant medications because she was pregnant.

The pregnancy apparently was the motive, Kubricht said, because Leach believed the baby was his and did not want to raise the child.

Should have gone to Dawn of the Dead instead.

---

LEGIT O.G. LIT:

Credentials for Pulp Fiction: Pimp and Drug Addict: The novels of Donald Goines, who died in 1974, are experiencing a resurgence in popularity, fueled by prison
literacy programs, hip-hop music and now a new movie. (LOLA OGUNNAIKE, 3/25/04, NY Times)

Born to a middle-class family in Detroit, [Donald] Goines was expected to go into the family's laundry business. Instead, at 15 he falsified his age and joined the Air Force, for which he served from the early to mid 1950's. While enlisted Goines developed a heroin habit that plagued him until he died. For nearly 15 years after leaving the military, he pimped, robbed and gambled to support his addiction, spending several years in and out of prison. During his last stint behind bars Goines began his literary career. A fan of cowboy flicks, he first tried to write westerns. After reading Iceberg Slim's autobiography, "Pimp: The Story of My Life," Goines moved from the Wild, Wild West, to the wilds of America's urban jungles.

"Dopefiend," which follows the descent of a middle-class woman into drug abuse, was almost too graphic to be published, Mr. Morriss said. In it Terry, a prostitute, happens on the corpse of a pregnant addict who has just hanged herself and discovers "what looked to be a child's head protruding from" between the woman's naked legs, Goines writes.

When working on "Never Die Alone," Mr. Dickerson said, he shied away from many of the more graphic passages. "Some of it was too much."

While Goines's novels, like many rap songs, tend to glorify the gangsta lifestyle — pimp's wardrobes, cars and diamond jewelry are often described in loving detail — his words are also quick to condemn. Comeuppance is the guiding theme for much of his work.

Dr. Brenda Greene, director of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, prefers to view Goines's books as cautionary tales. "You can tell someone not to do drugs," she said, "or you can give them a copy of `Dopefiend.' "

Driven by a need to support his drug habit, Goines wrote at a feverish pace, sometimes finishing books in less than month, Mr. Morriss said. His novels at times have the hurried feel of a first draft. "He was a junkie, but you'd never know it," said Mr. Morriss, who remembered Goines as introspective and low-key, standing just over 5 foot 6. "His eyes were always sharp, and he always wore long sleeves."

Though Goines wrote when blaxploitation films were beginning to flourish, bringing larger-than-life characters like Shaft, Superfly and Foxy Brown to the big screen, there are few heroes and even fewer positive role models to be found in most of his earlier works. Toward the end of his career Goines introduced Kenyatta, a character named after Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of independent Kenya. This protagonist heads a Black Panther-like organization intent on ridding the ghetto of its ills.

Whether Goines intended to move in a more political direction can never be known. In October 1974, while sitting at his typewriter at home in Highland Park, Mich., Goines was fatally shot. His common-law wife was also killed. Their murders remain unsolved.

Be prepared for a funny look from the cashier at Borders when you purchase Whoreson and Dopefiend.

---

TAXING INNOVATION:

Paring Away at Microsoft (STEVE LOHR, 3/25/04, NY Times)

On its own, the European ruling might be seen largely as a nuisance to Microsoft. Yet it comes as other forces are also weakening Microsoft's grip on desktop computers.

Beyond the moves to open the Windows desktop to rivals, Microsoft faces growing competition from Linux, an operating system that is distributed free. Even more important, Microsoft's dominance is threatened by a shift in computing from the personal computer to technologies like Internet-connected cellphones and Internet-based services offered by Google and similar companies.

"The significance of Europe is not the decision itself, but it adds to the other pressures on Microsoft," said David Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School.

Those pressures may be having some effect. There are signs that Microsoft has altered its practices since the settlement with the Bush administration — and the European ruling could provide a further prod.

Industry analysts note that work on the company's next generation of Windows, expected in 2006 or 2007, emphasizes programming code as building blocks, or modules, that can be removed and snapped into the larger program.

This approach may be paving the way for the day when Microsoft shifts away from its bundling approach. Skeptics, however, say that Microsoft may be adopting this approach simply because it needs to be able to locate and combat security flaws in Windows more easily.

Other analysts say that the Microsoft division responsible for MSN Web sites — and not the Windows division — is working to develop a Web search service to compete with Google. To be sure, Microsoft could eventually decide to fold its search software into Windows, as it has with other products in the past.

Critics and competitors contend that the company, having long used the bundling strategy to protect and extend its Windows monopoly into other software products, will not significantly change its approach.

"How do you really deter Microsoft from pursuing this bundling strategy when they have bet the company on it?" asked Andrew I. Gavil, an antitrust expert at the Howard University law school in Washington.

Timothy F. Bresnahan, a professor at Stanford University who was chief economist for the Justice Department's antitrust division during the Clinton administration, said, "Microsoft sees a new product and says, `We were about to invent that, too,' comes up with its version and bundles the software into Windows." The result, he added, is that "the early leader in some promising new technology is bundled out of the market."

"It's an innovation tax that is a problem for society," Mr. Bresnahan said.

The fine is a joke--it's Mrs. Gates's pin money. Meanwhile, as Mr. Bresnahan notes, Microsoft uses predatory practices to stifle innovation and destroy people who come up with new ideas.

---

WE LOVE YOU MICHAEL!!!!:

Atheist Presents Case for Taking God From Pledge (LINDA GREENHOUSE, 3/24/04, NY Times)

Michael A. Newdow stood before the justices of the Supreme Court on Wednesday, pointed to one of the courtroom's two American flags and declared: "I am an atheist. I don't believe in God."

With passion and precision, he then proceeded to argue his own case for why the daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in his daughter's public school classroom violates the Constitution as long as the pledge contains the words "under God."

Dr. Newdow, a nonpracticing lawyer who makes his living as an emergency room doctor, may not win his case. In fact, justices across the ideological spectrum appeared to be searching for reasons he should lose, either on jurisdictional grounds or on the merits. But no one who managed to get a seat in the courtroom is likely ever to forget his spell-binding performance.

That includes the justices, whom Dr. Newdow engaged in repartee that, while never disrespectful, bore a closer resemblance to dinner-table one-upmanship than to formal courtroom discourse. For example, when Dr. Newdow described "under God" as a divisive addition to the pledge, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist asked him what the vote in Congress had been 50 years ago when the phrase was inserted.

The vote was unanimous, Dr. Newdow said.

"Well, that doesn't sound divisive," the chief justice observed.

Dr. Newdow shot back, "That's only because no atheist can get elected to public office."

The courtroom audience broke into applause, an exceedingly rare event that left the chief justice temporarily nonplussed. He appeared to collect himself for a moment, and then sternly warned the audience that the courtroom would be cleared "if there's any more clapping."

Wow, this is more like a mash note than journalism. Particularly odd is that she thinks Dr. Newdow one-upped the Chief by proving Mr. Rehnquist's point. The universal opposition to his view in a country of so many different faiths amply demonstrates that there's no establishment involved in the Pledge.

---

INTRINSICITY:

Friend Jim Siegel wrote the following:

The Consequences of Mel Gibson’s Fifth Gospel (Jim Siegel, March 2004)

1966 was the first time I read the Four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I was a high school freshman in a Boston suburb at St. John’s Prep taking the required Catholic religion course. As a fourteen year old Jewish kid, I asked our teacher Brother Linus, “Why are there four versions of the story?”

Because the film medium has so much power, today Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ” is a fifth version. He thinks his Gospel is the right one and that anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong.

From what Gibson has said in recent interviews, he does not appear to be interested in having a conversation about this with anyone who has a different point of view.

Yet one good thing about the film is that it has sparked a lot of constructive conversations among Christians and among Christians and Jews. This is a consequence that I doubt Gibson intended. We’re learning more about each other. We’re learning more about ourselves. A couple of years ago Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in- chief of the interreligious journal “First Things” said, Salvation Is from the Jews (First Things, November 2001) :

The percentage of Christians involved in any form of Jewish-Christian dialogue is minuscule. Not much larger, it may be noted, is the percentage of Jews involved. …Only in America are there enough Jews and Christians in a relationship of mutual security to make possible a dialogue that is unprecedented in two thousand years of history…. Providential purpose in history is a troubled subject, and the idea of America’s providential purpose is even more troubled, but I suggest that we would not be wrong to believe that this dialogue, so closely linked to the American experience, is an essential part of the unfolding of the story of the world.

So far I’ve had conversations with eight friends I would describe as religious Christians who have seen the movie. Most say that its portrayal of how much Jesus suffered for them has strengthened their faith.

For them, that is good.

My friends who mentioned the portrayal of the Jews in the movie describe it as not positive. But they do not blame the Jews as responsible for the death of Jesus. Instead they say God in His love for humanity sacrificed His only son to redeem the sins of all mankind.

From what they said, I think they do believe that. I don’t think they were pulling punches for the Jewish guy.

In his unprecedented visit to the Synagogue in Rome eight years ago, Pope John Paul II denounced anti-semitism and the blaming of Jews for "what happened in Christ's passion" and proclaimed the bond between Christianity and Judaism:

Through myself, the Church, in the words of the (of the Second Vatican Council’s) well-known Declaration Nostra Aetate (Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions), "deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and by anyone;" I repeat: "by anyone."

The Jewish religion is not "extrinsic" to us, but in a certain way is "intrinsic" to our own religion. With Judaism therefore we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers and, in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.

No ancestral or collective blame can be imputed to the Jews as a people for "what happened in Christ's passion". Not indiscriminately to the Jews of that time, nor to those who came afterwards, nor to those of today. So any alleged theological justification for discriminatory measures or, worse still, for acts of persecution is unfounded. The Lord will judge each one "according to his own works," Jews and Christians alike (cf. Rom 2:6)

It is not lawful to say that the Jews are "repudiated or cursed," as if this were taught or could be deduced from the Sacred Scriptures of the Old or the New Testament. …(Refer to) Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans (11:28-29), that the Jews are beloved of God, who has called them with an irrevocable calling.

Nonetheless Jews today fear that Gibson’s film will fuel overt anti-semitism. This is not paranoia. Reactions in the past to passion plays have led to dreadful acts. There is a horrible history of Jews tortured, murdered and persecuted -- from the Crusades to forced conversion or burning at the stake in Spain and Portugal to the pogroms of Eastern Europe to the Six Million exterminated in the Holocaust.

Not What Jesus Would Do.

Jesus would condemn as well the covert, “polite” American anti-semitism that caused grandparents and parents of the Baby Boom Generation to anglicize their last names in order to deflect bigotry and get jobs.

A Jewish friend of mine recalls:

I grew up in a virulently anti-Semitic neighborhood in the Midwest. The police had to surround our house every Halloween to protect us from loving Christian children. Going to school every day was pure and violent hell. To this day I recall a kid sitting on my chest in kindergarten his fingers around my throat screaming, “You f-ing Jews killed Jesus." At the time I had never heard about Jesus and really hadn't thought much about what I was or wasn't.

There will always be a tiny percentage of Americans who dislike or hate people simply because they are Jewish. But I'm not worried about the United States. This is the best and most free country in the world to be a Jew or a Christian, or a Moslem or to choose another religion or none at all. For a Jew the United States is better than Israel in terms of economic opportunity, physical safety (while Israel can be a dangerous place the media highlight not the peace but the terrorist attacks) and the freedom to practice Judaism that is not Orthodox of the strictest kind. Religious freedom lies at the heart of our country’s founding, and the Constitution protects it. Religious freedom is enmeshed in American values.

However, Europe and the Arab world are another story. I greatly fear the film's effect where anti-Semitism is more prevalent and more public.

In recent interviews Mel Gibson supports his father, someone who has denied Hitler’s Holocaust. Gibson is not accountable for what his father says or does. Yet Gibson does not seem to recognize that the movie will encourage people who hate the Jews. This is not a Christian act. This is irresponsible. God teaches us that we must take responsibility for our actions.

I am dismayed that Gibson presents Pilate in the movie as a sympathetic man, when all other accounts describe him as cruel and ruthless.

I am troubled that many scenes are based not on the Gospels but on the graphic, bloody and imagined visions of an early19th Century nun Anne Catherine Emmerich. One of my friends noted the scene in the movie where an earthquake cracks the Temple structure when Jesus dies. He asked, “Was it factual or made up?” Emmerich made it up. So too the movie’s prominent role of Satan.

Why should the Gospels carry more weight than Emmerich’s visions? Two thousand years’ acceptance by hundreds of millions far outweigh a 200 year old tract that only a small number of traditionalist Catholics have embraced.

Based on Emmerich’s visions and Gibson’s concept, the film portrays the Romans’ torture of Jesus with far greater gore and violence than do the Gospels. Father Bob Robbins of the Church of the Holy Family in Manhattan spoke at a packed-house, interfaith gathering of neighborhood clergy and congregants at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue on March 15. On this point, he said:

Traditionally, Christ fell three times on the way to the Cross. I stopped counting at seven! The whipping that Christ receives at first from the Romans is so severe that no human being could have lived through it. He has the Lord turned over for a second beating. He has the Romans use a cat o nines tail and there is a close-up of the flesh being torn from Jesus' body. There isn't as much blood in the human body as he has gush from every imaginable body part. The Romans are portrayed as whipping Jesus all the way on the road to Calvary – a sheer physical impossibility.

Gibson has said that he intentionally focused on the death of Jesus. So the film barely touches upon life -- how Jesus taught that we should act with compassion and virtue.

An essay on Jesus from the Jewish perspective would be incomplete without explaining the Jewish concept of the Messiah. Monsignor Tom Hartman and Rabbi Marc Gellman (“The God Squad”) explain it in their wonderfully clear way:

The Hebrew Bible doesn’t really include the idea of a personal Messiah who will end evil and usher in a time of peace. Instead, there is the idea of a ‘Day of God’ – a kind of messianic age that would bring peace to the earth. Later, in the chaos that followed the Roman destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem (around the year 70 Common Era), when rabbinic Judaism gradually arose to replace the priestly sacrificial offerings, the idea of a personal Messiah developed. This idea became a part of both rabbinic Judaism and, obviously, Christianity…The rabbinic idea was that there would be two Messiahs:

* A Messiah, the son of Joseph, who would die in the great battle of the end of days, fighting the forces of evil.

*A Messiah, the son of David, who would come and defeat evil, gather the scattered exiles of the Jewish people into the land of Israel, bring world peace, resurrect the dead to eternal life, and usher in the end of suffering, death and strife.”
(Source: Rabbi Marc Gellman & Monsignor Thomas Hartman, Religion for Dummies®, 2002)

I respect Christians who believe that Jesus is the Messiah and who pursue their lives with the tenets of ethical monotheism -- that there is one God, and that His primary demand is that we treat each other decently. What matters is how we choose to act, and that we recognize that each person is created equal in the eyes of God.

Judaism does not believe that Jesus is the Messiah. Nor do Jews believe that the Messiah would be an incarnated god whose death would erase original sin and save mankind. The idea of original sin and its punishment are not at the core of Judaism. For my sins against other people, only they can forgive me. For my sins against God, only He can forgive me.

A fundamental principle of Judaism is that each of us is born with an inclination to do good and an inclination to do evil. Our struggle in life is to choose to act as God wants – to be His partner on earth in unfinished and ever-unfolding creation and to make the world a better place one act at a time.

We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Linking our purpose in life with Gibson’s “Passion” in particular, Central Synagogue Senior Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein said in a recent sermon:

All of us need to take responsibility for our actions and that is what we can learn from the events that surround the release of this movie. All of us would do well to think about the effects, intended or not, of what we do and what we engender. We all would do much better expanding the scope of our responsibility rather than claiming that we are powerless over others or the events of their lives or what they think.

At the start I said that the dialogue that Gibson’s movie has generated is a good thing. This is no small matter, as Father Neuhaus says:

We can and must say that there are great goods to be sought in dialogue apart from conversion; we can and must say that we reject proselytizing, which is best defined as evangelizing in a way that demeans the other; we can and must say that Jews and Christians need one another in many public tasks imposed upon us by a culture that is, in large part, in manifest rebellion against the God of Israel; we can and must say that there are theological, philosophical, and moral questions to be explored together, despite our differences regarding Messianic promise; we can and must say that friendship between Jew and Christian can be secured in shared love for the God of Israel; we can and must say that the historical forms we call Judaism and Christianity will be transcended, but not superseded, by the fulfillment of eschatological* promise. But along the way to that final fulfillment we are locked in argument. It is an argument by which—for both Jew and Christian—conscience is formed, witness is honed, and friendship is deepened. This is our destiny, and this is our duty, as members of the one people of God—a people of God for which there is no plural.

Let’s keep the conversations going.

And if Mel Gibson wants to chat, all he has to do is give me a call.

(* -- Eschatology is the branch of theology dealing with death, resurrection, judgment, immortality. I had to look that one up. )

(Endnote: For those who wish to explore this topic more deeply, Beliefnet.com has created a terrific, comprehensive e-book called The Passion Papers)

MORE (via Rod):
One Small Problem With 'The Passion' (Jeffrey K. Mann, March 9, 2004, AScribe)

Claims that the film is anti-Semitic are ludicrous, and we need to recognize them as such. Even the argument that it could inflame anti-Semitism is rather weak. And since when do we condemn a work of art because it may be misunderstood? Could one see the film and conclude that the Jews are Christ-killers? Of course. However, I suspect even more people will see the film and conclude that the savior of the world is a Jew.

We live in an age when our racial sensitivities are on such high alert that we condemn not only racism, but anything that could potentially lead to racism. The Anti-Defamation League condemns the "objectionable elements that would promote anti-Semitism" in the film. This movie, according to these folks, is problematic not because it is anti-Semitic, but because it might be misused to convey anti-Semitism.

Now, in a society that constantly rewards those who claim discrimination, we can hardly be surprised by such objections. We have moved from condemning actual racism to behavior that could conceivably evoke racism. To do so is absurd and can never be applied equitably. We would have to censure "Schindler's List" for potential anti-Germanism, "The Killing Fields" for its anti-Cambodianism, "Austin Powers" for its potential anti-dwarfism, and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" for its ... wait, we've already done that.

---

60-40 NATION:

Without the Consent of the Governed: Without a Federal Marriage Amendment, the gay marriage movement is threatening to overturn one of our bedrock legal principles: that all laws stem from the consent of the governed. (Hugh Hewitt, 03/25/2004, Weekly Standard)

Had the proponents of gay marriage taken their cause to state legislatures, they would have been rebuffed, at least today and in the foreseeable future. Across the country, even in the liberal precincts of California, supermajorities continue to believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, and presented with the question on ballots, have continually affirmed the millennia-old standard. And off course the Congress has already passed, by supermajorities in both houses, the Defense of Marriage Act.

FACED WITH THIS WALL OF RESISTANCE, proponents of a radical new view of marriage wish to bypass the consent of the governed and impose their vision. Andrew Sullivan has taken to branding opponents of gay marriage as "theocrats," but of course those seeking to impose their own vision of society--without even a single instance of elected officials acting in legislative bodies to endorse their view--are acting in the tradition currently on display in Iran, where the reigning mullahs do everything in their power to prevent majorities from electing legislatures to represent their own desires and views. The theocrats of the gay marriage movement have set their goals above the consent of the governed.

THE MARRIAGE AMENDMENT is a necessary, indeed urgently required antidote to such a radical assault on the bedrock of the American experience. If imposition of new norms can be accomplished without even one law anywhere ever having being passed, then it can happen again and again whenever willful minorities can persuade robed elites to act without conscience against the idea that all law proceeds from the people.

Mr. Sullivan is right, those who believe in morality are theocrats.

MORE:
Senate Passes Bill On Harm To Fetuses: Critics Say Measure Defines Start of Life (Helen Dewar, March 26, 2004, Washington Post)

The Senate gave final approval yesterday to legislation that would make it a crime to injure or kill a fetus during the commission of a federal crime of violence, overriding critics' claims that the bill defines the start of human life in a way that could undermine abortion rights.

The 61 to 38 vote to approve the measure came after a vote of 50 to 49 to reject an alternative favored by abortion rights advocates that would have imposed the same penalties without reference to the legal status of a fetus.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act, given new impetus by the killing of Laci Peterson and her unborn son in California more than a year ago, was passed by the House last month and now goes to President Bush, who strongly supported its passage.

It was the second narrowly focused initiative by antiabortion forces to pass in the past two years, fulfilling a strategy aimed at incremental gains in the absence of a congressional majority to ban abortion outright. It follows approval last year of legislation to ban a specific procedure, called partial-birth abortion by its critics.

---

WHAT PART OF "SHALL" DON'T THEY UNDERSTAND (From John Resnik)

Rice Accuses Clarke of Conflicting Stories (Steve Holland, Reuters, 3/24/04)

Rice is not testifying before the 9/11 commission based on a White House principle that a presidential adviser who has not been confirmed by the U.S. Senate should not give public testimony. Commissioners are calling on her to testify.

About that call, she said: "I would like to be very clear that this is not a matter of preference. I would like nothing better than to be able to go up and do this, but I have a responsibility to maintain what is a long-standing constitutional separation between the executive and the legislative branch."

In February she spent four hours privately with the commission and said she would be available to answer more questions. "I'm prepared to spend longer with them, any where they want, any time they want, answer as many questions as they have," she said.

Here's another bizarre thing I believe: when the Constitution says, in Article II, clause 1, "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America", it means that the executive power is vested in the President.

There are lots of clauses in the Constitution to which we pay less attention than we should, but this might be the one clause most ignored. For my part, I think that it means that the so-called "independent agencies" are unconstitutional and that there is no executive action within the scope of the power of the United States that the president himself can't take, unless the Constitution specifically provides a limitation. If the president chooses to delegate power to Dr. Rice, an officer of the Executive Branch not subject to Senate confirmation, then when she acts, it is the Presidency acting through her. In other words, I'm all for this claim of executive privilege.

But this hit on Dr. Rice is the cheapest of cheap shots. An oath makes no difference here at all. As Martha Stewart found, we make false statements to the government at our peril:

Section 1001. Statements or entries generally

(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully -

(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both. . . .

(c) With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to - . . .

(2) any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate.

18 USC Sec. 1001. If Condi lies, whether she was under oath is the least of her problems.

---

SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO ADMIRAL YAMAMOTO:

'Al-Qaeda has got it wrong' (Ritt Goldstein, 4/25/04, Asia Times)

A recently released Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) provided document affords some remarkably critical and militant Islamic perspectives on the "war on terror". Highlighting the unique nature of the document's perspective, it addresses an analysis of al-Qaeda's efforts by al-Jama'ah al-Islamiyah, a faction which is designated by the US State Department as a terrorist organization. The fact of the document's release by the CIA speaks volumes about its interest.

Providing an equally surprising parallel, in December the US Defense Department's Strategic Studies Institute released a report describing the objectives of the Bush administration's war efforts as "politically, fiscally and militarily unsustainable". Al-Jama'ah observed essentially the same of al-Qaeda. And according to the CIA translation, al-Jama'ah argues that al-Qaeda "entangled the Muslim nation in a conflict that was beyond its power to wage". [...]

The authors blame anti-US violence (including the Trade Center bombing) for casting Islam as "the green peril". They portray a shift in US perception as transpiring during the period when America was attempting to define its "new enemy" following the Cold War.

Particularly singled out as evidence of this American development are the works of Francis Fukuyama The End of History and Samuel Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations). However, the authors pointed out that even during this period, the US sought an accommodation with the Taliban, demonstrating "the supremacy of the US self-serving logic on US strategy". But concurrently the authors saw an al-Qaeda policy of confrontation lead to the foregoing of unique opportunities that may never recur.

According to the text, because of US geostrategic (oil and gas) interests, the Taliban were offered "US$3 billion as a free grant and $300 million annually in return for leasing the pipeline transporting natural gas from the Caspian" to Pakistan. This was in reference to the trans-Afghan pipeline the US had long desired.

Al-Jama'ah cites Islamic history to make the point that mutually advantageous accommodation is not sacrilegious.

The authors note that instead of the assets and stability the proposed pipeline revenue held for both Afghanistan and Pakistan, there have instead been substantive setbacks for the global Islamic community. The siege al-Qaeda is under, as well as the increased pressures on those who are fighting traditional struggles of liberation, were seen as but one part of a much broader fallout. Particular note is given to the extreme nature of September 11, and the West's reaction to it.

Let's assume no one in al Qaeda has ever heard of the Tonkin Gulf, Pearl Harbor, the Lusitania, the Maine, Fort Sumter, or the Stamp Act.

---

THE ENEMY (via Robert Duquette):

L’Année de la Chine: Will Europe arm Red China? (John J. Tkacik Jr., 3/25/04, National Review)

A bitter dispute over election results is bad enough. But Taiwan's troubles — and ours — may be just beginning.

The reason: Our European allies might well approve plans to sell China advanced weaponry at the March 25-26 European Union summit that begins today.

The repercussions would be disastrous. Not only could China use new weapons from Europe against Taiwan, but Chinese generals have said they're prepared to confront U.S. forces in the Pacific if America tries to help Taiwan.

Why would NATO allies put the United States in this position? Money is one reason. But European commentators suspect that France and China want to build a multipolar alliance to counter American "hegemony."

Instead of holding hearings on why we didn't move against al Qaeda in the past, how about hearing on why we aren't attacking France now?

---

HAVE MORE KIDS, WE'LL MAKE MORE FOOD:

The Man Who Defused the "Bomb" (Steven Martinovich, 03/25/2004, Tech Central Station)

In the long history of the global popularity contest known as the Nobel Prizes it's beyond debate that more than a few of them were undeserved. What should also be beyond debate, however, was the merit in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. Norman Borlaug in 1970. Despite the fact that Borlaug -- who celebrates his 90th birthday on March 25 -- isn't a household name, he is owed a debt by the world that is simply beyond calculation.

Borlaug's contribution to the world is what we know today as high-yield farming. During the Depression Borlaug, who had already made a name for himself researching the rust fungus, noted that areas that employed high-yield farming saw less soil lost to wind than those that employed traditional practices. Borlaug decided that his life's mission would be to spread the word about the benefits of high-yield farming.

Borlaug took that mission to Mexico in the 1940s when he became director of a wheat program. There he developed crops that were able to grow in a wide variety of climates and more quickly. Combined with fertilizer and irrigation, Borlaug's new wheat was the answer to a problem that not many people were thinking about in the years after the Second World War. The world's population was growing quickly and many third world nations faced the prospect of perpetual famine.

In 1965, India and Pakistan were two of those nations. The famines were so extreme that the institutional resistance to Borlaug's technology disappeared. The results spoke for themselves. Just three years later Pakistan became self-sufficient in wheat product. Despite a prediction by Paul Ehrlich in 1968's "The Population Bomb" that it was a "fantasy" that India would ever do the same, it managed the feat for all cereals by 1974. In 1967, the average Indian consumed 1,875 calories a day. That same average Indian consumed 2,466 calories a day in 1998 even while the population of India doubled during that period.

What Borlaug was able to do, as Gregg Easterbrook illustrated in a 1997 Atlantic Monthly essay, was grow more grain, for more people on only marginally more land. [...]

[H]e continues to add to his legacy as the man, as Easterbrook wrote, who "has already saved more lives than any other person who ever lived."

Here's a bit of free advice: if a Malthusian offers you a bet, take it.

---

THE PROTESTANTS OF ISLAM:

Sahara refugees form a progressive society: Literacy and democracy are thriving in an unlikely place. (John Thorne, 3/26/04, CS Monitor)

A dozen women recline on the steps of the main girls' school in the Saharawi refugee camps, their pastel robes like blots of water-color on the whitewashed cement. When the door opens and the headmistress emerges, the women suddenly leap up and crowd around her, clamoring. They are mothers seeking places for their daughters in the already-crowded school.

The Saharawi women are among the most liberated of the Muslim world, and their status is characteristic of the well- organized, egalitarian society that has developed in the refugee camps over the past three decades. For all their bleakness, the Saharawi camps boast a representative government, a 95 percent literacy rate, and a constitution that enshrines religious tolerance and gender equality.

The Saharawis are the Arab nomads of Western Sahara, bound together by their Yemeni ancestry and their dialect, Hassaniya, which remains close to classical Arabic. For centuries, they roamed the territory with their camels and goats, sometimes trading with Spanish colonizers, and became known as "blue men" for the indigo robes they wear.

When Spain abandoned Western Sahara in 1975, Morocco invaded and drove the Saharawis into neighboring Algeria. Trading their camels for Land Rovers, they fought a guerrilla war under the leadership of the Polisario Front, an independence movement, until the UN brokered a cease-fire in 1991. Since then, the promised vote on independence has been stalled by disagreement over who should be allowed to participate. [...]

It has also begotten an individualistic approach to Islam. While most Muslims tend to stress the importance of the Islamic community, "the Saharawis believe that religion is a very personal issue," says Mouloud Said, the Polisario's representative in the United States. "It's a personal relationship between the human being and his Creator. This is the mentality of the nomadic society."

Mosques are conspicuously absent from the camps, in large part because the Saharawis "don't believe that to speak to God, you need a fancy place," explains Mr. Said.

Saharawis seldom pray in groups save on important Muslim holidays, and view even these ceremonies as purely optional. For some, this is a welcome escape-hatch from the religion's bloodier rituals.

"Each person has his own Islam," says Zorgan Laroussi, a translator in the camps who chose not to attend the mass slaughter of camels for the feast of al-Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan. His brother-in-law Salek did go, and relishes explaining the ritual's finer points while the two men and their families share a dish of grilled hindquarters.

Saharawis are equally welcoming of other religions. "There is an almost continuous presence of church groups from all over the world - in particular the US - in the camps," says Said. "Every year for the last four years, there has been a joint prayer at Easter."

"Tolerance is not something new, but it's something [Saharawi leaders] encourage," he says. "In a tolerant society, the center prevails, not the extremes. That means respect for others, whether for the faith or their ideas."

Move them here.

---

THEY MADE THE BED, THEN WOKE IN IT:

Different hearings - and times: 9/11 hearings expose Washington's culture of caution. (Gail Russell Chaddock, 3/26/04, CS Monitor)

While the news media fixed on the firefight between the Bush White House and former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, there's a deeper theme in this week's 9/11 commission hearings: Call it un-Church imperative.

Sen. Frank Church's scorching 1973-76 investigations of US intelligence operations changed the thinking of a generation. Starting with the CIA role in the downfall of Chile's Salvador Allende, the hearings targeted international "dirty tricks." Today, instead of asking why an assassination was attempted (against Fidel Castro), panels are asking why one didn't succeed (against Osama bin Laden). The difference stems partly from the 9/11 attacks themselves, which galvanized Americans against terrorists - and in favor of using stronger means of stopping them. But it also reflects a slower evolution of national opinion.

In the mid-'70s, packed hearing rooms heard of botched attempts on the life of Cuba's Castro that ranged from exploding cigars to acid in his shoes. In the wake of the just-completed Watergate hearings, the cautions stuck. At the end, assassination was no longer viewed as a legitimate tool of foreign policy, and the CIA was no longer considered a top career path for the "best and brightest."

Asked why US officials seemed cautious "to a fault" in going after bin Laden, 9/11 Commission chairman Thomas Kean recalled his days as a student at Princeton University: "The CIA was not a very good thing to go into for a while. When I was in college, I think the guy who recruited for the CIA was the dean of the college. It was a very prestigious organization to go into. Some years later, the CIA was kicked off campus and most good campuses didn't even allow them to recruit on campus because of the kind of reputation they got after some of those [Church] hearings."

Critics at the time dubbed the Church Committee hearings "potentially dangerous" to the nation's security. "The repercussions of the Church Committee's misguided zeal are still being felt today," wrote former Sen. John Tower (R) of Texas in his 1991 memoir.

That legacy was everywhere in evidence in this week's 9/11 hearings.

Excellent point which requires one follow-up: perhaps the most successful foreign policy initiative of the past several decades was Reagan's covert aid to the Contras, in contravention of congressional desires. It is a model for how aggressive we need to be against our enemies, including those here at home who opposed it, like John Kerry.

---

GOOD TO BE THE BOGEYMAN:

Who's behind the LTTE split? (Sudha Ramachandran, 3/25/04, Asia Times)

Speculation is rife in Sri Lanka over who might have engineered the recent split in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). While some are pointing to a foreign hand - India and/or the United States - others are insisting that Colombo might have had a part in fomenting the rebellion. [...]

Some have suggested that it might be the Americans. After all, there is little love lost between the US and the LTTE. Washington has declared the LTTE a terrorist organization and has refused to remove this tag despite the Tigers engaging in negotiations with the Sri Lankan government. The US has in fact openly backed the government and has warned the LTTE of dire consequences if it walks out of the peace process. Less than a week before the rebellion, the US State Department issued a stern warning to the LTTE, blaming it for the assassination of Sinnathamby Sunderapillai, the United National Party's Batticaloa candidate, and the killing of P Yogeswaran, a member of the Eelam People's Democratic Party.

When it expelled Karuna, the LTTE blamed "malicious elements" for instigating Karuna's "traitorous act". It did not elaborate on the identity of these "malicious elements". In a subsequent interview to the Associated Press, Thamilselvan, the LTTE's leader of the political wing, accused "external forces" for the crisis. Although he did not identify the external force, he elaborated that it was one that "did not accept the LTTE's position of being the sole representative of the Tamil people and was jealous of the high regard and acceptance it was enjoying in the international community".

One of the very beneficial effects of the global hysteria over George W. Bush being an anti-terror fanatic is that every time something bad happens amongst these groups where bad things are rather routine will only serve to burnish his legend. We saw the same dynamic at work in Palestine this week, where it was simply assumed that he must have been in on the assassination of Sheik Yassin.

---

SEND MORE:

Laid-Off Jac-Pac Workers Search for Work (Raquel Maria Dillon, 2004-03-25, NHPR)

It's been seven weeks since the Jac-Pac plant in Manchester closed and left 550 workers unemployed. The state Employment Security Department could not absorb this vulnerable population of mostly immigrant workers. So state officials got a federal emergency grant worth 2.4 million dollars to boost their unemployment services. In a matter of weeks, a new job training and placement center opened downtown. It will stay open for the next two years, or as long as workers need it. As New Hampshire Public Radio's Raquel Maria Dillon reports, the former Jac-Pac workers who gather there are desperate to start working again soon.

Job hunting is never easy. You need a good resume, networking contacts, and someone to cheer you on when you get discouraged. The former Jac-Pac employees also need English-as-a-Second-Language classes, translation services, and training -- but at least they have the new Worker Assistance Center in downtown Manchester. [...]

Earlier this week, one of the center's new job placement counselors, Rafael Calderon was helping a job-seeker compose a resume. Like some of his clients, Calderon emigrated from the Dominican Republic, and struggled to learn English far from home. He knows finding a job will be isn't easy for new immigrants with few skills. But he's full of confidence and encouragement. He tells them that self-esteem and a firm handshake is just as important as speaking English. [...]

Calderon tries to put them at ease -- He recommends taking the language pill that will teach them English automatically [...]

If only there were...a miracle pill for Felix Soto. He stopped by the Worker Assistance Center with a handful of unpaid bills. He was injured on the job in January, less than a month before Tyson Foods closed down the Manchester plant. He hasn't received any of the workers' comp benefits he expected. But his first priority is finding a new job.

SOTO: yo estoy preparado para hacer cualquier tipo de trabajo – supervisor, produccion (son los ultimos trabajos que yo he tenido). Lo unico que quisa es por el ingles, porque el ingles mio es bien limitado.

VOICEOVER I'm prepared to do whatever kind of job: supervisory work, manufacturing -- that's what my last few jobs have beenâ€| The only thing is English, my English is very limited.

Soto moved from New York City to Manchester about a year ago. Rents are cheaper here, and he says he was lonely in Brooklyn, life is easier here. He lives with his parents and sends money home to his grandparents in the Dominican Republic and to his wife and son in Puerto Rico.

SOTO: vine con la ilusion de progresar y encontrar un futuro para los mio alla en mi pais, y estoy luchando para eso. Tengo muchas illusions metas, espero conseguir un buen trabajo y ahora estoy fuera de trabajo.

VOICEOVER I came with the hope of finding a better future for my family in my home country. That's what I'm fighting for. I have a lot of hopes and goals -- I want to find a good job and now I'm out of work. [...]

About a quarter of the Jac-Pac workers don't speak English. 40% say Spanish is their first language. The rest speak Arabic, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Bosnian and a handful of other languages. At first, workers were reluctant to come to the job center. Calderon says there was some mistrust, and lots of rumors. [...]

About 100 former Jac-Pac employees have found new jobs. Now the center is focusing in on the harder cases -- the workers with fewer skills, no English, no drivers license or transportation. Job Counselor Emily LaBlonte speaks French (with a Canadian accent) and translates for her clients from Togo (who speak French with West African accents). [...]

LaBLONTE: In NH it's so white and so European. For someone like myself, a NH native, it's very striking to see that these people do exist here. Yes, they are a minority, but they're a hidden population. You can live your life in city of Manchester and never run into these people, but they're here and they're working and contributing.

And they're heading back to work -- one by one. Lablonte says that about every day, someone comes in with good news about a new job. Earlier this week it was Michael Kuda, a refugee from Sudan. He says the new job came just in time.

KUDA: I was in a difficult of money. My wife get a new baby, I don't know how to help myself, employment security didn't pay me until today. They say they're going to send check this week. Every day I open my mailbox 2-3 times looking for check, nothing, I don't know what's going on. it's better I will find job and help myself.

Kuda says he'll be working the second shift at a fan factory in Bow. That way he can take classes in the morning, get his G-E-D, and move on to a better job.

KUDA: I'm looking on internet, job sites. All need to have high school diploma, or EGD, if you don't have that they cannot qualify your application to get the job.

LaBlonte says Kuda was one of the easier workers to place, he speaks English, he has a car, and his wife takes care of their five children. Kuda says he'll continue looking for a better job. He earned 9-25 an hour at Jac-Pac, but his new job only pays 8 dollars an hour.

The Jac-Pac tale is emblematic--a Tyson food packing plant whose entire workforce was pretty much immigrants. NHPR has done an excellent job covering the closing, including maybe the only favorable story ever broadcast about Tyson and how they handled the closing and the equanimity with which employees took the news, determined to find new jobs instead of bitching and moaning the way natives most likely would have.

MORE:
Jac Pac workers find welcome at support center (DALE VINCENT, 3/22/04, Manchester Union Leader )

The Tyson plant was a magnet for immigrants and refugees, many of them recent arrivals. One asset is a strong work ethic. Another is they look out for one another. "There's a strong community spirit," said LaBonte.

---

COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM JUST KEEPS RACKING UP WINS:

Crimes against fetuses bill nears Senate passage (JIM ABRAMS, March 25, 2004, Associated Press)

Congress stood ready Thursday to send President Bush legislation making it a separate offense to harm a fetus during a violent federal crime, an issue that has become tangled with the battle over abortion.

The Senate cleared the way for passing the Unborn Victims of Violence Act by defeating an amendment, backed by abortion rights lawmakers, that would have increased penalties but maintained that an attack on a pregnant victim was a single-victim crime.

The House approved the legislation last month.

The vote is being closely watched by anti-abortion and other conservative groups, who have made passage of the measure one of their top goals this year. Abortion rights groups say the bill is an effort to undermine a woman's right to end her pregnancy.

Perhaps this presidency is so radical that folks just can't process what's happening around them.

---

NOT GEORGE BUSH:

Kerry's Task Now Is to Win Enthusiasm of Democrats: Fresh from an Idaho vacation, the likely presidential nominee needs to turn his party's anti-Bush fervor into passion for him. (Mark Z. Barabak and Matea Gold, March 25, 2004, LA Times)

[E]ven as he sets his sights on the fall contest against President Bush, Kerry faces a challenge within his own party, rallying Democrats who seem more passionate at this point about beating the Republican incumbent than backing the party's apparent nominee-to-be.

"The early Kerry people are certainly enthusiastic about their guy," said David Rosen, a Democratic fundraiser in Chicago. "But the rest of the folks, the folks coming over and jumping on the bandwagon, I don't think they have this great enthusiasm yet for Kerry."

Rosen is convinced that will change as the senator becomes better known. But for now, Rosen and others say Kerry is still a mystery to many fellow Democrats, who know little beyond the fact that he once served in Vietnam and won a succession of primaries to clinch the party's nomination in record time.

And while Democratic leaders praised Kerry as both a candidate and potential president, notwithstanding the rough patch his campaign hit before vacation, they tacitly acknowledged that he has yet to forge a personal connection with many of the party faithful

"I think people in the Democratic Party like, admire and love him because he's a Democrat," said Mark Brewer, the state party chairman in Michigan.

Does anyone who knows him like him?

---

WHAT CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION LIMITS?:

Richard Clarke KOs the Bushies: The ex-terrorism official dazzles at the 9/11 commission hearings. (Fred Kaplan, 3/25/04, Slate)

Among the many feckless or snarky statements that Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and White House spokesman Scott McClellan have issued about Clarke the past few days, the observation they've recited with particular gusto is that this disgruntled ex-official was in charge of counterterrorism policy during the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the attacks on the U.S.S. Cole, and the bombing of our East African embassies. Their implication was: How can this guy, who allowed so much bloodshed on his watch, be blaming us?

And so now here's Clarke, in an official, nationally broadcast forum, announcing: I failed, I'm sorry, please forgive me. Which, as one member of the panel noted, is more than any official in the Bush administration has said to any victims of the far more devastating 9/11 attacks.

I am not suggesting that Clarke's apology was cynical or purely tactical.

Odd that Slate doesn't run a disclaimer that Mr. Kaplan is assisting the Kerry campaign, perhaps illegaly, no?

---

SON RISE:

Blair meets Gadhafi, sees 'common cause' (MSNBC News Services, March 25, 2004)

In a state visit that marks Britain's willingness to welcome Libya back into the international community, British Prime Minister Tony Blair met with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi on Thursday, saying that the two shared a common goal in defeating the al-Qaida terrorist network.

After historic talks with the Libyan leader, Blair said Gaddafi recognized “a common cause with us in the fight against al-Qaida, extremism and terrorism, which threatens not just the Western world but the Arab world also.”

“We are showing by our engagement with Libya today that it is possible for countries in the Arab world to work with the United States and the U.K. to defeat the common enemy of extremist fanatical terrorism driven by al-Qaida", Blair said, "and to ensure we have a more secure world because of the absence of weapons of mass destruction.”

“I think it is a very, very important signal for the whole of the Arab world,” Blair added.

Ghaddafi's son: Arab leaders should embrace US reform proposals (Khaled Abu Toameh, Mar. 25, 2004, Jerusalem Post)

The son of Libyan leader Muammar Ghaddafi, Saif al-Islam, said on Wednesday that his country would be prepared to compensate Jews who had lost their property in Libya. He also welcomed Libyan Jews to return to Libya and receive Libyan citizenship.

"In the future, we will open the file of compensation for Jews who lost their property and money," Saif al-Islam Ghaddafi said in an interview with al-Jazeera. "These people are Libyans, and therefore they will be compensated. We should call on the 30,000 Jews of Libyan origin who are living in Israel to return to Libya as citizens. This is their land and the land of their ancestors. That way, they will leave the country they took away from the Palestinians."

Ghaddafi's son said his country no longer viewed Israel as an enemy. "Until recently, Israel was an enemy," he said. "But things have changed, and the Palestinians, whom we supported with weapons, are saying that they don't want these weapons. In addition, neither Jordan nor Egypt wants a confrontation [with Israel]. We are not negotiating with Israel because it's not occupying our land; it's not a country with which we are in conflict, and we have no problems with it."

However, he stressed that Libya has no intention of recognizing Israel in the near future.

Saif al-Islam lashed out at the Arab states for failing to endorse democracy and reforms. He called on Arab leaders to agree to US demands to introduce democracy to their countries. "Instead of shouting and criticizing the American initiative, you have to bring democracy to your countries, and then there will be no need to fear America or your people," he said, addressing Arab rulers.

"The Arabs should either change or change will be imposed on them from outside," he said.

He denied reports that he is a candidate to succeed his father. "Many Arab countries are now following the policy of inherited leadership, but there are hundreds of Libyans who are better [suited] than I," Saif al-Islam said.

He even praised Israel, saying that unlike Arab countries, sons do not tend to succeed their fathers in power there.

"We don't place the appropriate person in the right place, but Israel is a democratic country," he added.

Saif al-Islam joins King Mohammed of Morocco and the sons of the Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini as a hopeful sign that there are leaders in this generation who see comprehend the End of History.

---

BUT TODAY IS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF JAPANESE IMMIGRATION TO HAWAII (Gareth Jones, 1935)

Since the arrival of the first ship-load of “government contract labour in February 1885, until the 26th Immigrant boat “Miike Maru” in the early part of 1894, some 29,032 Japanese poured into Hawaii. During the next three years from 1896 private immigration companies looked after the immigrants, and brought here 40,208 Japanese. In July 1898, Hawaii was annexed to the United Slates. The contract labour was forbidden, and over-night, Japanese labourers in Hawaii became free labourers. Children, born in the islands, were granted the right of American citizenship.

For a time being, the Japanese government restricted the immigration to Hawaii, but the bar was lifted in the latter part of 1901, and a limited number of Japanese was allowed to leave Japan. Within the short period of five or six years more than 40,000 Japanese came. The majority of these Japanese made Hawaii their stepping-stone and deluged the Pacific coast states. In 1907 the ‘Gentleman’s Agreement” was drawn up, and the immigrants from Japan were stopped. With the passage of the Immigration Act in 1924, Japanese were ex­cluded from the United States. Not a single Japanese Immigrant can now come into Hawaii.

Looking back at the past half a century, the Japanese have gone through many striking changes. They have built up slowly, the foundation of today, but industrially they have not accomplished anything very strik­ing. Only in population, have the Japanese beaten other nationalities. Out of some 15.000 Japanese only a third are first genera­tion Japanese. Death has removed many of them; others have gone back to Japan. But the second and third generation Japanese are increasing steadily. Over 10,000 are now ex­ercising their right as voters, and many engaged in hopeful occupations. These facts are most encouraging, and they strengthen our hope of the future.

However today, the Japanese both of the first and second generation are being put to a test. They are, in the words of the streets, “being put on the spot.” They are seriously been questioned:

a. Have the Japanese during the past fifty years made an honest effort toward assimilation?

b. Are the Japanese born in Hawaii truly loyal American citizens, or can they become absolutely loyal to America?

c. Are the Japan­ese bringing up their children into good and loyal American citizens?

The future of the Japanese in Hawaii, and the relations between the two countries depend on the solution of these two problems. Japanese have been excluded from Canada. Australia, America and Brazil. The chief reason is that “Japanese do not assimilate,” for example, let us quote some of the out­standing arguments.

1. Mr. McClatchy. Editor of ” Sacra­mento Bee,” holds that the Japanese as a race cannot assimilate. He gives three reasons:

a. “Japanese racial characteristics, hered­ity and religion prevent social assimilation,

b. “Japanese government claims all Ja­panese, no matter where born, as its citizens, thus preventing political assimilation.

c. “Individually and in mass with op­portunity offered and even when born under the American flag, they have shown pro­nounced antagonism to assimilation.”

2. After his extensive tour of Hawaii in July, 1923 the late Congressman Charles F. Curry of California stated:

“I do not think there is any possibility of Americanising the Hawaiian Japanese who were born in Japan. While a majority of them may not wish to return to Japan, they are nevertheless loyal to the Mikado ant their government, and Japan is first in their thoughts at all times. This is only natural in as much as they speak an alien language and live among the alien people.

“In so far as the native-born Japanese are concerned; that portion of them who are sent back to Japan for their education and return to the United States just before the time when they would be required for army service are also alien in thought and sympathy. Same result must be expected of those who are educated even in Hawaii under the alien influences. Public Schools in Hawaii should exert their utmost endeavour to correct these evils. Y.M.C.A. and Sunday Schools are called upon to pay particular attention to them.

“I am convinced more than ever that aliens ineligible to citizenship should be ex­cluded in the future, and that an immediate stop should be placed upon the bringing of ‘picture brides’. All Oriental influences must be stamped out.

3. In this argument against the injunction proceeding instituted by the language schools against the Act 36, ex-Governor W. F. Frear said:

“The most important problem of this territory is the character of the children who are to become our future citizens. Whether Hawaii will have a commission form of government, or whether she will be granted statehood will be largely determined by the character of our future citizens. Will these citizens of Oriental descent act as the United States citizens or as the subject of Japan, or as citizens half-American and half-Japan­ese is a most Important problem?”

Today the questions of commission form of government and the statehood are being widely discussed. Naturally the qualifications and loyalty of our second-generation are seriously questioned. We can easily surmise that President Roosevelt came here primarily to make a personal check on the problems of our second generation.

“To the eyes of those who came here to give us an once-over, do the Japanese in Hawaii seem to be making honest efforts assimilate, and are they actually assimilating? Or as Mr Frear feared, does it look as though the Japanese are trying their outmost to become subjects of Japan or citizens half-American? Are we able to pass these tests?

“When a person is living in a room of a large family, he must follow the rules of that home. Otherwise he can never get along harmoniously with the others living in the home. We are living today in a corner of American territory under the protection of America and are enjoying many privileges. We have an obligation to perform. That is we must try to assimilate and bring our children up into good and loyal American citizens. In a sense our boys and girls are adopted children of America, and we must see to it that they become simon-pure American citizens. If we perform this task sincerely we would be rendering a great service to both America and Japan.”

On the eve of his departure from Seattle, Viscount Kikujiro Ishii said:

“The Americanisation campaign which is now going on in the United States is a nation-wide movement. As long as you are residents of America you must make your status clear. If you desire to assimilate, you must make up your mind to live here permanently. If you can not assimilate, you ought to return to Japan.”

Today Japanese in Hawaii are displaying Japanese spirit in full colour. This may be the reaction of the rise of nationalism in Japan. Many of the Japanese schools have become Japanised. Imperial rescript is boldly read and taught in some of the schools. Some teachers have openly declared that they are teaching Japanese spirit through the medium of the Japanese language. This audacity may he the result of their mistaken idea of victory in the legal battle. If the Japanese go on in the present conditions, they will fail miserably in the test. Politically and socially America may oppress the Japanese. The doors of Canada, Australia and South American countries may be closed more and more tightly. We must think more of the future and remove every obstacle that hinders our real progress.

All sorts of suggestions on the ways and means of celebrating the Fiftieth anniversary of the first landing of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii have commenced to appear in the various newspapers. It is a splendid thing to observe this memorable day. As a fitting celebration can the Japanese throughout the territory get together and work for the radical change our community? As Ishii has said: “Let’s remove every trace of alien influence and attitude” and expatriate all our children from their allegiance to Japan. Then we will be declaring to the world that the “Japanese can truly assimilate” and that “our children can become loyal citizens.” This will be more suitable work than having a noisy festival.

That this article is wrong is self-evident. There was no reason to think that the Japanese would not be able to assimilate into a majority white, majority Christian, English speaking culture. Mexicans, on the other hand . . .

---

OFFER HIM $25 BUCKS AND PRE-MORTEM SEX TO KILL ARAFAT:

Teenager promised sex with virgins if he blew himself up near soldiers (Ellis Shuman, March 25, 2004, Israeli Insider)

"I wanted to get to the Garden of Eden, to have sex there with 72 virgins," said 14-year-old Hussam Abdu, who approached an army roadblock near Nablus yesterday with 8 kilograms (14 pounds) of explosives wrapped around his waist. Alert IDF Paratroopers suspected the teen bomber, and helped him cut off the belt. It was the second time in ten days that Nablus terrorists have sent a young boy on a bomb mission.

"They told me that this was the only way (to get to Heaven), and they promised that my mother would get one hundred shekels ($22) if I did this," Hussam told the soldiers after the belt was removed. Hussam said that after being bullied in school, he wanted "to be a hero."

Hussam's path to the Garden of Eden was planned to pass through the Huwara roadblock, south of Nablus, where ten days ago an alert Border Policewoman spotted an innocent-looking 12-year-old carrying a heavy bag with wires protruding from it.

Okay, we know that it is no longer justifiable for us to judge the sexual tastes of others, no matter how deviant, but necrophilia is one thing--at least there it's only your partners who are dead--killing yourself before sex is quite another.

---

"STUPID, STUPID PEOPLE" POPULISM (via Jeff Guinn):

Howard Zinn's History Lessons (Michael Kazin, Winter 2004, Dissent)

From the 1960s onward, scholars, most of whom lean leftward, have patiently and empathetically illuminated such topics-and explained how progressive movements succeeded as well as why they fell short of their goals. But Zinn cares only about winners and losers in a class conflict most Americans didn't even know they were fighting. Like most propagandists, he measures individuals according to his own rigid standard of how they should have thought and acted. Thus, he depicts John Brown as an unblemished martyr but sees Lincoln as nothing more than a cautious politician who left slavery alone as long as possible. To explain why the latter's election in 1860 convinced most slaveowners to back secession, Zinn falls back on the old saw, beloved by economic determinists, that the Civil War was "not a clash of peoples…but of elites," Southern planters vs. Northern industrialists. Pity the slaves and their abolitionist allies; in their ignorance, they viewed it as a war of liberation and wept when Lincoln was murdered.

To borrow a phrase from the British historian John Saville, Zinn expects the past to do its duty. He has been active on the left since his youth in the 1930s. During the 1960s, he fought for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam and wrote fine books that sprang directly from those experiences. But to make sense of a nation's entire history, an author has to explain the weight and meaning of worldviews that are not his own and that, as an engaged citizen, he does not favor. Zinn has no taste for such disagreeable tasks.

The fact that his text barely mentions either conservatism or Christianity is telling. The former is nothing but an excuse to grind the poor ("conservatism" itself doesn't even appear in the index), while religion gets a brief mention during Anne Hutchinson's rebellion against the Puritan fathers and then vanishes from the next 370 years of history.

Given his approach to history, Zinn's angry pages about the global reach of U.S. power are about as surprising as his support for Ralph Nader in 2000. Of course, President William McKinley decided to go to war with Spain at "the urging of the business community." Zinn ignores the scholarly verdict that most Americans from all classes and races backed the cause of "Cuba Libre"-but not the later decisions to vassalize the Caribbean island and colonize the Philippines. Of course, as an imperial bully, the United States had no right, in World War II, "to step forward as a defender of helpless countries." Zinn thins the meaning of the biggest war in history down to its meanest components: profits for military industries, racism toward the Japanese, and the senseless destruction of enemy cities-from Dresden to Hiroshima. His chapter on that conflict does ring with a special passion; Zinn served as a bombardier in the European theater and the experience made him a lifelong pacifist. But the idea that Franklin Roosevelt and his aides were motivated both by realpolitik and by an abhorrence of fascism seems not to occur to him.

The latest edition of the book includes a few paragraphs about the attacks of September 11, and they demonstrate how poorly Zinn's view of the past equips him to analyze the present. "It was an unprecedented assault against enormous symbols of American wealth and power," he writes. The nineteen hijackers "were willing to die in order to deliver a deadly blow against what they clearly saw as their enemy, a superpower that had thought itself invulnerable." Zinn then quickly moves on to condemn the United States for killing innocent people in Afghanistan.

Is this an example of how to express the "commonality" of the great majority of U.S. citizens, who believed that the gruesome strike against America's evil empire was aimed at them? Zinn's flat, dualistic view of how U.S. power has been used throughout history omits what is obvious to the most casual observer: al-Qaeda's religious fanaticism and the potential danger it poses to anyone that Osama bin Laden and his disciples deem an enemy of Islam. Surely one can hate imperialism without ignoring the odiousness of killers who mouth the same sentiment.

Funny how once you acknowledge the Christianity and conservatism of the American people it sudedenly appears that they are generally winners rather than losers in the Manichean struggle.

---

SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY:

Kerry spoke of meeting negotiators on Vietnam (Michael Kranish and Patrick Healy, 3/25/2004, Boston Globe)

In a question-and-answer session before a Senate committee in 1971, John F. Kerry, who was a leading antiwar activist at the time, asserted that 200,000 Vietnamese per year were being "murdered by the United States of America" and said he had gone to Paris and "talked with both delegations at the peace talks" and met with communist representatives.

Kerry, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, yesterday confirmed through a spokesman that he did go to Paris and talked privately with a leading communist representative. But the spokesman played down the extent of Kerry's role and said Kerry did not engage in negotiations.

Asked about the appropriateness of Kerry's saying that the United States had "murdered" 200,000 Vietnamese annually when the United States was at war, Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan said "Senator Kerry used a word he deems inappropriate."

Meehan said Kerry "never suggested or believed and absolutely rejects the idea that the word applied to service of the American soldiers in Vietnam." Meehan then declined to say to whom Kerry was referring when he said that the United States had murdered the Vietnamese; Kerry declined to be interviewed about the matter. [...]

When Kerry was asked by committee chairman Senator J. William Fulbright how he proposed to end the war, the former Navy lieutenant said it should be ended immediately and mentioned his involvement in peace talks in Paris.

"I have been to Paris," Kerry said. "I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government and of all eight of Madam Binh's points . . . ."

The latter was a reference to a communist group based in South Vietnam. Historian Stanley Karnow, author of "Vietnam: A History," described the Provisional Revolutionary Government as "an arm of the North Vietnamese government." Madam Nguyen Thi Binh was a leader of the group and had a list of peace-talk points, including the suggestion that US prisoners of war would be released when American forces withdrew.

Hard to know whether he was a dupe or a traitor.

---

MEN ARE ISLANDS?:

An Unlikely Immigration Champion (Tamar Jacoby, March 23, 2004, LA Times)

[E]ven if no bill is passed in the foreseeable future, the Bush initiative still marks a critical step forward in the effort to make our immigration code rational, bringing it more into line with the realities of the global labor market.

For one thing, popular or not, the proposal has already energized a national conversation about immigration — a conversation that would never have taken place otherwise. Despite the glaring failure of current law — a failure acknowledged both by those who want higher immigration ceilings and those who are determined to lower them — no one on either side of the argument had made any headway with the public since 9/11. The Bush initiative changed that overnight.

Second, the Bush proposal has put a floor under the immigration debate: a point beyond which we as a nation can no longer retreat. The analogy is civil unions for gay couples. Just a few months ago, that seemed like a radical idea. Now, in the light of the debate about gay marriage, civil unions are the least-generous option and a plausible fallback position even in some conservative states. So too now with a guest worker program and more realistic immigration ceilings.

Finally, by making clear that the critical question about an immigration overhaul is not if but when, the president's speech created space for advocates to get busy working out the details of a reform package. The Bush proposal is only the roughest outline of the change that's needed. The most glaring gap has to do with enforcement. Congress' last best idea for enforcing the nation's existing immigration code — the employer sanctions at the heart of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act — has proved a total failure, and nobody has come up with a better notion.

For more than a hundred years now, Americans have tolerated — and worse, all but deliberately maintained — a vast underclass of disenfranchised and exploitable foreign laborers. In California, they included Chinese, then Filipinos and then mostly, since the 1920s, Mexicans. Wherever they came from, they've done our dirtiest work, mainly though not only in the fields. But because they came as temporary workers or without papers — though often with a wink from ineffective immigration authorities — they were easily taken advantage of and could be deported at will. They are the last century's dirtiest secret. Yet now, led by, of all people, a conservative Republican president, the nation is moving toward abolishing this shameful institution.

One tries to give the anti-immigrationists the benefit of the doubt, and crediot their disclaimers that they don't just hate Mexicans but value our current culture. Then you get an essay like Steve Sailer's latest, Japanese Substitute Inventiveness for Immigration; NYT Shocked (Steve Sailer, 3/21/04, V-Dare)

Sofia Coppola, who owns a fashion business in Japan, recently captured the best original screenplay Academy Award for the movie Lost in Translation—making her the fourth Oscar-winning member of the Coppola dynasty, after her father Francis, grandfather Carmine, and first cousin Nicolas Cage. Bill Murray stars as a morose and mordant American action movie star who finds himself washed up in a Tokyo Hyatt.

The hotel seems dispiritingly like every other downtown luxury hotel in the world. But its Japanese idiosyncrasies make it subtly disconcerting.

Japan refuses to import millions of Third Worlders, so the Japanese have robotized many service jobs. This takes Murray some getting used to. His drapes fling themselves open in the morning. In a hotel gym devoid of personal trainers, he finds himself in the clutches of an unstoppable and hyperactive exercise machine shouting indecipherable and no doubt deranged commands.

But, of course, it's the puzzling uniqueness of Japanese life that helps make Lost in Translation so entertaining. You leave the theatre thinking that a trip to the Orient would be disappointing if it wasn’t a little disorienting. Isn't travel more fun when other countries are different from your own?

In a lot of small ways, Japan is indeed very different. Consider professional nail care. [...]

The Japanese voters think their islands are crowded enough already without importing human nail polishers. And the Japanese government is mysteriously inclined to enforce the will of its people.

So the Japanese have done something that by our standards is weird, even comical. They've invented yet another kind of vending machine, this one for doing your nails. You stick your finger in, and it gives it back (you hope) with the nail painted to your specifications using inkjet printer technology.

The idea that a complete lack of human contact is preferable to living people who are somewhat different than you is not just anti-immigrant but anti-human. It does though raise a question that few will have any trouble answering: can you have a healthy society in which life is reduced to the completely atomized one led by Bill Murray's character in the film?

---

THE BLIND MAN DESCRIBES THE ELEPHANT:

Bush's Meandering Moral Compass (Peter Singer, March 25, 2004, LA Times)

Do Bush's statements and actions reflect a coherent, defensible ethic?

First, what does Bush think about the proper reach of the federal government? In his preelection memoir, "A Charge to Keep," he was eloquent about his support for states' rights, individual freedom and small government. He contrasted that with "a philosophy that seeks solutions from distant bureaucracies" and added, "I am a conservative because I believe government closest to the people governs best."

Again and again during the campaign he hammered that theme. On the "Larry King Show," in response to a question about a hypothetical state vote on gay marriage, he replied: "The states can do what they want to do. Don't try to trap me in this states' issue."

Yet in office, Bush has done just the opposite of what he said he would do. The Patriot Act has given the federal government unprecedented powers over American citizens. Arguably, that legislation may be justified by the need to combat terrorism. But no such justification exists for Bush's support for a constitutional amendment to rule out gay marriage. Here, his stated reason for this proposal is to curb "judicial activism." And what about attempts by his attorney general to overturn Oregon's law permitting physician-assisted suicide and to fight against state decisions allowing the use of marijuana for medical purposes? These changes were brought in at the ballot box, by the state's voters.

Next, take Bush's stance on taxes. Leading up to the 2000 election, he argued for a tax cut on the basis that the government was running a huge surplus, and the money should be given back to the taxpayers. Instead of government spending the money, he said, his preferred option was "to let the American people spend their own money to meet their own needs."

When the surplus evaporated and turned into a huge deficit, however, Bush did not reverse his arguments. Instead, he simply switched ground, defending a further tax cut on a completely new basis: that it would benefit the economy. But now a tax cut was not letting the American people spend their own money; it was letting this generation of Americans spend the money of future generations.

Finally, there is Bush's policy on the sanctity of human life. In August 2001, he announced that his administration would not allow federal funds to be used for research on stem cells if that funding could encourage the destruction of human embryos — even though there are more than 400,000 surplus embryos in laboratories across the country and the chances of most of them ever becoming children are close to zero.

In defending this policy, the president says he worries about "a culture that devalues life" and believes that, as president, he has "an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world." Yet under his command, the U.S. military has, by the most conservative estimates, caused the deaths of at least 4,000 civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq — the real number could easily be three times as high — and injured thousands more. Sometimes a target as insignificant as a single Taliban truck has brought American bombs down on a village, killing people sleeping in their homes.

Pretty shocking ignorance from the premier moral philosopher of the age. Except for single white males who sit in a computer cubicles surrounded by cheesecake photos of Ayn Rand, everyone accepts that the first purpose of government is to provide for the physical security of those who give up some measure of personal freedom in subjecting themselves to the state. The Patriot Act conforms precisely to this near universally accepted role of the federal government.

Second, if you believe that people can generally spend their own money more effectively than the government can spend it for them, then what does it matter if there's a deficit? Does the government's insatiable need for more money demonstrate that it is more efficient than the citizenry? Or does it not demonstrate the truth of the initial proposition?

Finally, it is innocent life that is to be protected, not that which is morally compromised. This why it is appropriate to put to death criminals and to make war on totalitarian regimes. Indeed, as the Declaration of Independ3ence says, the people of Afghanistan and Iraq had a moral duty to depose their rulers. They failing to do so, we did it for them.

---

WALKING THE DOGMA:

Only Fools Bark at Dogma (Patrick O'Hannigan, 03/22/04, Catholic Exchange)

Many freedom-loving Americans are frustrated by Christianity. They stumble over dogma, not because anything in it is provably wrong, but because dogma is the public face of authority, and they do not comprehend the nature and purpose of authoritative teaching — particularly as expressed by the Catholic Church.

Where pious people part company with thoughtful agnostics is not in thinking that truth and virtue sustain each other, but in articulating the implications that flow from that premise. As Thomas Aquinas wrote in answer to the first question of his Summa Theologica, "The entire salvation of man depends upon the knowledge of the truth."

Note the lack of equivocation: this Doctor of the Church has confidence in our ability to comprehend enough of what is true to preserve both sanity and hope.

The Christian understanding of freedom has an equally impressive pedigree. It dates back to Judaism, and the prominent role that free will plays in the Garden of Eden. As Fr. James V. Schall writes: "No faith is worth anything at all if it is not rooted in freedom, freedom not for its own sake — as if there was nothing further than making our own choices — but freedom to seek and live by what is true and what is right."

One of the great tragedies of modernity is that secularists, libertarians, and the rest have become terribly confused and believe freedom to be an end, rather than a means.

---

$5 SAYS WHIMPER:

Did 311 = 911?: Spain’s Surrender, and the Destiny of Europe (Nicholas Stix, March 21, 2004, Men's News Daily)

By the early 20th century, Europeans tended to speak synonymously of “Europe,” “Christianity,” and “the West.” But Christianity was born in the same place as Judaism – the Middle East. Christianity may have achieved its greatest political power in Europe, but its greatest religious passion had peaked long before it arrived on the Continent. By the mid-19th century, at the height of European power, Christianity was a decadent, empty shell. And the ideas associated with “the West” were already moving … west.

Until the past generation, the notion of being a “European,” as opposed to the national of a particular country, was an oddity. There were no “Europeans,” there were only Frenchmen, Germans, etc. Today, since “Europeans” refuse to identify themselves in opposition to Asia and Africa (and South America isn’t a part of their consciousness), the only reason I can see for their identification with the Continent, is in unified opposition to America. (No, not “North America”; Europeans are indifferent to Mexico and Canada. The term “North America” functions merely as a petty insult to Americans.)

The official story today, is that nationalism destroyed Europe. As is so often the case, the official story is nonsense. Nineteenth century European history is largely split between wars pitting nation-states and alliances against each other, and the rise of revolutionary, transnational movements (communism, pan-Germanism). Those two trajectories converged and exploded, in the first half of the 20th century. In each case, a transnational movement (communism, national socialism) bonded with a national base and nationalistic passion (Russia, Germany, Austria). The irony, is that one of the reasons that Europe failed to stop Nazism, was due to the interwar influence of a bureaucratic, pacifist humanitarianism. After the war, that pacifist humanitarianism was left standing, unchallenged, in Western Europe, where it still saps the Continent’s strength. Today, corrupt, supranational bureaucracies (the UN, EU) are manipulated by nationalist interests (France, Germany, Russia) in the name of “internationalism.”

And as Europeans permit their nations to be swamped with their Muslim enemies, one wonders if the nations of the Old World will go down with a bang or a whimper.

By the time the Europeans decide to ship the Muslims to the East they'll be too old to herd them on the cattle cars.

---

THE PRINCE DISSES A KING:

Al Green on Gay Marriage and Prince (Peter Scholtes, March 19, 2004, Complicated Fun)

Have you ever met Prince?
 
Yes, I got some Minneapolis memories. And I got to see Prince once. But I really never got a chance to get close enough to him to shake his hand. And that's what we wanted to do, was go meet him. He was at the Grammys once, maybe two or three years ago. He sung and he played his guitar, and vroom, they went off the stage, and nobody got a chance to meet anybody or say hello or anything like that.
 
But he's a tremendous, dynamic personality and a wonderful performer, and I know you guys up there know that. I mean he's awesome in his own right. And everybody got their way of doing things, you see. That may be his way of keeping himself where he's clear at, you know? So if he don't want to talk with the Letterman or Leno people, or whatever that is, everybody got their own way. I don't condemn a man for having his own way. If that's the way he is, then that's what he's got to do, to keep his head together. If he don't want to talk to people about what he's doing and what his thing is, then that's his prerogative to have that, and people should respect that, you know?
 
I mean, I don't want to jump in the man's business. My idea was, it would be exciting for me to meet him.

It is a disgrace that an artist as gifted as Prince is going into the Rock Hall of Fame with the flock of riff-raff that got voted in with him, but ya gotta make time for Al Green.

---

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE SOCKS (via Rick Turley):

Germany axes Lederhosen subsidies (Reuters, 23 March, 2004)

Germany can no longer afford state aid to help its yodellers buy Lederhosen, the Bavarian government says, in a sign of how drastically public finances have deteriorated in Europe's largest economy.

"We no longer want to sponsor the Lederhosen with subsidies," Bavarian Premier Edmund Stoiber said, ignoring outcries from traditional folk groups, some of whom have threatened to boycott the opening parade of the Munich Oktoberfest, the world's biggest beer festival.

The Alpine state had previously provided the 300,000 members of its folklore groups with half a million euros in state funds to help buy traditional Bavarian attire such as the leather shorts -- amounting, one newspaper said, to a subsidy of 13 percent per garment.

This is a sign that they're getting serious?

---

THE NECESSARY AUTHORITARIAN INTERLUDE:

Putin on the Writs (Marta Glazier, 03/17/2004, Tech Central Station)

In the midst of so many tumultuous changes (Presidential Administration turnover not one of them), the Yeltsin-era Mikhail Kasyanov was booted for Mikhail Fradkov, who the pundits claim is a complete "unknown" and has been chosen to execute Putin's wishes. Now, just for kicks, let's say that is true. Yes, Putin has replaced a Soprano-type family member with a man with little political clout, but with experience in essentially two areas: tax collection/corruption control and relations with the European Union.

Maybe, just maybe, Putin (and I share this view) thinks that corruption and tax evasion, are intermingled and potentially the most destructive problems in post-Soviet Russia. And let's say that Putin recognizes how important foreign relations are in this quickly shrinking world, and in particular, Russia's relationship with the EU, as well as the effect these relationships could have on his ambitious plans for Russia's economy. And maybe, like any CEO or good manager, Putin wants someone working for him who is smart and fresh, responsive and even malleable, depending on the position - someone untouched by ugly political entanglements and tainted experiences. In a nutshell, appointing Fradkov as Prime Minister could mean that Putin's priorities are to fight corruption and improve relations with the EU, while simultaneously looking out for Russia's best interests. [...]

It seems to me that Putin has one thing on his mind: growing Russia's economy. And that includes its trade interests in the surrounding countries (the actual trade effects of the EU expansion remain unclear. Russia and the EU disagree in terms of their predictions). Over the past eight years, living standards have improved dramatically and the creation of a middle class has been initiated. By contrast, most of Western Europe is middle class, most Europeans live in a clean and safe environment where venturing out on a sidewalk in January is not the equivalent of signing up for an arm cast of plaster. Russia's government does not have the luxury of planning 20 years down the road whether for future trade or environmental benefits.

Europe doesn't have that luxury either, but that's a different meme.

---

GREED, MEET MONEY:

The EU's Fine State Of Affairs (Forbes, 3/23/2004)

A few weeks ago, a man in Finland was fined 170,000 euros, or $208,847, for speeding, which was said to be a record. In Finland, it appears that speeding tickets are assessed according to income and the man in question, heir to his family's sausage business, earned nearly 7 million euros, or $8.6 million, per year.

For the record, the Finnish fine amounted to about a week's pay....

Brussels is not far from Finland, which is where Microsoft ... is reportedly facing a fine from the European Union of 487 million euros or $613 million relating to antitrust violations ...

The amount is far less than the theoretical maximum 10% of the company's annual revenue of $32.2 billion ...

"We believe it's unprecedented and inappropriate for the Commission to impose a fine on a company's U.S. operations when those operations are already regulated by the U.S. government," Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's lead lawyer in Europe, told the Associated Press. "The conduct at issue has been permitted by both the U.S. Department of Justice and a U.S. court."...

One would think that fine levelers would seek to pay attention to the seriousness of the offense as well as the ability to pay. No one suggests that Microsoft earned more than a pittance of its overall profit--in Europe or anywhere else--from either servers or its Media Player software. But Mario Monti, antitrust chief of the European Union, thinks the issue goes beyond the specific violations ...

So, where does the EU get $613 million? Perhaps from Finland. The fine, as it happens, works out to about one week's worth of Microsoft's annual worldwide revenue.

The common link between European support for Saddam (and his oil-for-palaces-and-bribes program) and its massive fines for trivial Microsoft offenses is Europe's grasping spirit. It's becoming difficult to do business abroad without diplomatic protection, backed by a credible military threat. The Wall Street Journal today had an article about how Wal-mart has found it impossible to operate abroad without support from the U.S. government, and thus has built up a Washington lobbying organization. It appears, however, that the Bush administration has not made any credible threats of a European invasion, and so the EU is less accommodating toward us than Lybia or Pakistan.

Sometimes on the Brothers Judd we argue that the Judeo-Christian ethic of kindness and love is better for the economy than the sheer self-interest, however enlightened, of homo economicus. Europe's ongoing decline will continue to provide support for that thesis.

---

SIGNS OF HOPE FROM THE TORIES (via Robert Duquette):

Jihadists keen to repeat Spanish effect (The Australian, 24 March 2004)

The legacy from Spain is that political parties, in government or opposition, must decide whether to lead or merely to follow public opinion as the war on terrorism penetrates the political culture of Western democracies.

One of the first responses has come from Britain's Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, who chose defiance.

Howard's message is that terrorists cannot manipulate Britain to repeat the "Spanish effect", whereby an opposition won by seeking to separate itself from the US – in effect, to procure a better deal from the terrorists.

"If the terrorists hope they can gain their ends by perpetrating in Britain a similar outrage to that in Spain, their wickedness will be in vain," Howard told a News Corporation conference in Mexico. His comments reflect an unspoken reality – that toppling Tony Blair via a massive strike on Britain would be the prize for the jihadists.

"Whatever my disagreements with Tony Blair, any government that I lead will not flinch in its determination to win the war against terror where it has to be fought," Howard said. "It would be a terrible thing indeed if last week's murders in Madrid led the terrorists to conclude that attacking America results in retribution but attacking Europe results in victory. We cannot buy ourselves immunity by changing our foreign policy."

Howard confronted the issue at the heart of Europe's agony – that the war on terror has to be won side by side with the US. There is no other way. A separate peace would never work and it is folly to think that it would (as many Europeans do). Appeasement would usher in a new dark age.

If we had an effective intelligence service, they could blow up the Eiffel Tower and pin it on al Qaeda, making it look like appeasement doesn't work.

---

WHY DOES JOHN KERRY HATE INDIANS?:

(via John Resnick):
Gee, look who's 'outsaucing'! (CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA, MARCH 20, 2004, Times of India)

John Kerry's financial fortunes may be linked to a ketchup empire, but in his political notebook, what's sauce for the goose isn't sauce for the gander. The Democratic Presidential nominee, who has been railing against outsourcing, is walking on a sticky wicket on the issue. There are outsourcing footprints all over Kerry's pristine all-American turf.
 
H J Heinz & Co, the family business of Kerry and his wife Teresa, has spread its ketchup operations across the world. Of the 79 factories that the food processor owns, 57 are overseas. Heinz makes ketchup, pizza crust, baby cereal and other edibles in such countries as Poland , Venezuela , Botswana , Thailand , and most of all, China and India .
 
That's not all. Campaign finance reports reviewed by the Congressional publication, The Hill, reveal that executives at 25 companies identified by CNN's Lou Dobbs as prime outsourcers have contributed more than $370,000 to Kerry's presidential campaign. Among them are executives of Citigroup (who contributed $68,250 to Kerry), Morgan Stanley (gave $38,000) and Goldman Sachs (gave $50,300).
 
Direct investments and trusts controlled by Kerry list assets of $124,026 to $636,000 in companies that outsource jobs, according to his financial disclosures. Trusts held by Teresa Heinz Kerry hold at least $8.5 million in outsourcing companies. Among them are General Electric, IBM and AIG which have big operations in India and China .
 
All this has led analysts to believe that Kerry's anti-outsourcing stand is just election season posturing.

They needed analysts to figure that out?

---

60-40 FILES:

The Arnold Effect: Senate race tests his coattails: Incumbent Boxer faces a strong Republican in a race that may revive California's GOP. (Daniel B. Wood, 3/25/04, CS Monitor)

The fact that Senator Boxer faces a challenge amplifies the question of whether the GOP can stage a Schwarzenegger-led comeback. From now through November's presidential election, analysts say, that's the story to watch: whether the governor's coattails will be as broad as his smile and whether Republicans - whose fortunes have long sagged here - and President Bush himself can ride Schwarzenegger's honeymoon train. Is the movie star's popularity strictly personal, they ask, or a harbinger of further expansion among Republicans promoting his formula for social tolerance and fiscal conservatism?

"There is no question California is enjoying a new era of enthusiasm and possibility because of its historic recall election," says Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. "The question is, is this a new era of Republican possibilities or does it go no further than [Schwarzenegger's] popularity?"

To be sure, Boxer has a loyal following, and with over 1 million more registered Democrats than Republicans, she has a clear advantage - though Republicans say they'll register half a million new voters by November. Though more liberal than most senators, she's a national figure and is considered a formidable campaigner.

For his part, Jones is an eight-year assemblyman and eight-year secretary of state, author of the controversial "three strikes, you're out" law that became a national model. The former rancher and businessman won a second term as secretary of state in 1998 with the endorsement of nearly every major state newspaper. He's considered a specialist in agriculture, trade, and water issues and has received national attention for tightening voting laws.

"The attempt by conservative Bill Jones to unseat liberal Barbara Boxer will be the first big test in California of whether Arnold Schwarzenegger's rise to victory was an anomaly or [if] Republicans are making a comeback here," says Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. "If Jones even comes close, then it's a sign that the Democratic swing of California in recent years may have crested and is headed in the other direction."

This should be the GOP battleground. Importantly, President Bush will be helped nationally by campaigning with guys like Schwarzenegger and McCain, both because news coverage will be massive and because of their popularity with moderates.

---

JUST LIKE US:

Hard-liners take hard hit in Malaysia: Secular wins in national elections emphasize narrow appeal of strict Islamist politics. (Simon Montlake, 3/25/04, CS Monitor)

The sweeping victory of Malaysia's secular rulers in last Sunday's national elections emphasizes the narrow appeal of Muslim hard-liners in Southeast Asia, where strict religion-based politics run up against multiethnic realities.

Muslim voters dealt a potentially knock-out blow to the conservative Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS), which slid to third place in parliament.

This message may resonate in neighboring Indonesia when it holds national elections on Apr. 5. Although several Muslim-oriented parties are expected to do well, their platforms mostly eschew calls for strict Islamic law in favor of vague appeals to Muslim brotherhood.

"[PAS's] loss will be felt across the Muslim world. They were seen as a future model for political Islam in a democratic context," says Karim Raslan, a political analyst and author. PAS has forged close ties in recent years with like-minded parties in Indonesia, Egypt, and other Muslim-dominated countries, he says.

For Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, a former Muslim scholar who took office last October and campaigned on a platform of rural development and anticorruption, the election was a personal triumph. His ruling coalition won 90 percent of seats in parliament and regained majority in one of two state legislatures formerly dominated by PAS. Adding to its humiliation, PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang lost his seat by only 163 votes.

Noordin Sopiee, who chairs Malaysia's Institute of Strategic and International Studies, a political think tank, says this shows Islamic challengers to secular politics can be curbed at the ballot box. "There's a lesson here. You can democratically win over conservative, fundamental Muslim candidates if you have the right mixture of leaders and policies, and if you appeal to people with respect and humility," he says.

Poll-watchers in Malaysia give Abdullah credit for reaching out to rural Malays who deserted the ruling party at the last election in 1999. They say his soft-spoken manner, Islamic piety, and refusal to rise to the bait of his conservative foes played well among Malay voters, particularly first-time voters attracted to his reformist rhetoric.

The real blow it to the anti-religious and their claims that Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy.

---

WERE THEY EVER GOING TO TELL US IT WAS URGENT?:

Clarke contrasts Bush, Clinton terror priorities (HOPE YEN, March 24, 2004, Associated Press)

The government's former top counterterrorism adviser testified Wednesday that the Clinton administration had "no higher priority" than combatting terrorists while the Bush administration made it "an important issue but not an urgent issue."

Richard Clarke told a bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that "although I continued to say it (terrorism) was an urgent problem I don't think it was ever treated that way" by the current administration in advance of the strikes two and a half years ago.

Does anyone else find it odd that in his entire run for president, Al Gore never mentioned the most urgent foreign policy issue of the administration he was helping to lead?

---

AN AWKWARD POSITION--DEFENDING KERRY AND THE TRUTH:

Kerry Still Backpedaling on Presence at 1971 Anti-War Meetings (Marc Morano, March 24, 2004, CNSNews.com)

Early last week, Kerry's presidential campaign spokesman David Wade told the New York Sun, "Kerry was not at the Kansas City meeting." Wade added that Kerry had resigned from the VVAW "sometime in the summer of 1971."

But following the March 18 publication of the CNSNews.com report, in which the FBI files were used to corroborate Kerry's attendance at the meeting, Wade reversed himself.

"If there are valid FBI surveillance reports from credible sources that place some of those disagreements in Kansas City, we accept that historical footnote in the account of his work to end the difficult and divisive war," Wade said in a statement late last week.

Kerry also retreated from an earlier comment he made in response to a CNSNews.com question about former VVAW executive director Al Hubbard. Kerry and Hubbard appeared together on an April 18, 1971 broadcast of the news show Meet the Press to discuss their anti-war efforts.

But Hubbard, who had passed himself off as a decorated Air Force captain, was later shown to have lied about his military record. An investigation in 1971 by a CBS News reporter revealed that there were no military records showing that Hubbard had either served in Vietnam or was injured there.

When asked about his relationship with Hubbard at a televised press conference two weeks ago, Kerry said, "I haven't talked to Al Hubbard since that week" of the April 1971 Meet the Press appearance.

But after CNSNews.com reported that FBI files and eyewitness accounts from former VVAW members had placed Kerry and Hubbard in the same place on several occasions after the Meet the Press appearance, the Kerry campaign conceded that the senator was also incorrect on that point. [...]

Gerald Nicosia, author of the book Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement and a Kerry supporter, told CNSNews.com last week that Kerry was being less than truthful about his anti-war activities.

"I am having some problems with the things he is saying right now, which are not matching up with accuracy," Nicosia said.

"I am in kind of an awkward position here. I am a Kerry supporter and I certainly don't want to do anything that hurts him. On the other hand, my number one allegiance is to truth. So I am going to go with where the facts are, and John is going to have to deal with that," Nicosia said.

Kerry hosted a reception in Nicosia's honor in 2001 when the book was released and praised it as an "important new book [that] ties together the many threads of a difficult period in our history every American should take the time to understand in its totality."

More recently, Nicosia offered some advice for Kerry: "The chickens are coming home to roost, and unfortunately he is starting to backtrack and I personally don't think backtracking is going to work because people are going to go at him and find the discrepancies," Nicosia said.

Nice the way they work "chickens coming home to roost" into an assassination story--Brother Malcolm would be tickled pink..

---

ISN'T LIFE THE FIRST LIBERTY? (via John Resnick):

Judge Permits Testimony About Fetus Pain (LARRY NEUMEISTER, 3/23/04, Associated Press)

A pediatrician who says a fetus can feel pain during an abortion will be allowed to testify in a legal challenge to a new law banning a type of late-term abortion, a judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Richard Casey ruled Friday that Dr. Kanwaljeet S. Anand can testify as a government witness at a trial scheduled for later this month.

The judge rejected arguments from the National Abortion Federation that the testimony would be irrelevant and unreliable. [...]

The judge said the doctor's testimony will help him assess Congress' findings that the procedure is "brutal and inhumane" and that "the child will fully experience the pain associated with piercing his or her skull and sucking out his or her brain."

Anand has conducted research on pain in fetuses and newborns and concluded that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks of gestation.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the National Abortion Federation, argued that Anand's testimony is insufficient because he will say it is likely but not definite that a fetus experiences pain during late-term abortions.

Irrelevant?

---

WOODY ALLEN, PROPHET

Hot Cocoa Tops Red Wine And Tea In Antioxidants; May Be Healthier Choice (Science Daily, 11/06/03)

There's sweet news about hot cocoa: Researchers at Cornell University have shown that the popular winter beverage contains more antioxidants per cup than a similar serving of red wine or tea and may be a healthier choice.

The study adds to growing evidence of the health benefits of cocoa and points to a tasty alternative in the quest to maintain a diet rich in healthy antioxidants, chemicals that have been shown to fight cancer, heart disease and aging, the researchers say.

Just so I've got this straight: I should be eating eggs, meat, cheese and cream and washing it down with hot chocolate?

---

BEERS GOGGLES:

(via Andrew Withers):
Transcript: Clarke Praises Bush Team in '02 (FoxNews, March 24, 2004)

The following transcript documents a background briefing in early August 2002 by President Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke to a handful of reporters, including Fox News' Jim Angle. In the conversation, cleared by the White House on Wednesday for distribution, Clarke describes the handover of intelligence from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration and the latter's decision to revise the U.S. approach to Al Qaeda. Clarke was named special adviser to the president for cyberspace security in October 2001. He resigned from his post in January 2003.

RICHARD CLARKE: Actually, I've got about seven points, let me just go through them quickly. Um, the first point, I think the overall point is, there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.

Second point is that the Clinton administration had a strategy in place, effectively dating from 1998. And there were a number of issues on the table since 1998. And they remained on the table when that administration went out of office — issues like aiding the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, changing our Pakistan policy -- uh, changing our policy toward Uzbekistan. And in January 2001, the incoming Bush administration was briefed on the existing strategy. They were also briefed on these series of issues that had not been decided on in a couple of years.

And the third point is the Bush administration decided then, you know, mid-January, to do two things. One, vigorously pursue the existing policy, including all of the lethal covert action findings, which we've now made public to some extent.

And the point is, while this big review was going on, there were still in effect, the lethal findings were still in effect. The second thing the administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided.

So, point five, that process which was initiated in the first week in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda.

The sixth point, the newly-appointed deputies — and you had to remember, the deputies didn't get into office until late March, early April. The deputies then tasked the development of the implementation details, uh, of these new decisions that they were endorsing, and sending out to the principals.

Over the course of the summer — last point — they developed implementation details, the principals met at the end of the summer, approved them in their first meeting, changed the strategy by authorizing the increase in funding five-fold, changing the policy on Pakistan, changing the policy on Uzbekistan, changing the policy on the Northern Alliance assistance.

And then changed the strategy from one of rollback with Al Qaeda over the course [of] five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al Qaeda. That is in fact the timeline.

QUESTION: When was that presented to the president?

CLARKE: Well, the president was briefed throughout this process.

QUESTION: But when was the final September 4 document? (interrupted) Was that presented to the president?

CLARKE: The document went to the president on September 10, I think.

QUESTION: What is your response to the suggestion in the [Aug. 12, 2002] Time [magazine] article that the Bush administration was unwilling to take on board the suggestions made in the Clinton administration because of animus against the — general animus against the foreign policy?

CLARKE: I think if there was a general animus that clouded their vision, they might not have kept the same guy dealing with terrorism issue. This is the one issue where the National Security Council leadership decided continuity was important and kept the same guy around, the same team in place. That doesn't sound like animus against uh the previous team to me.

JIM ANGLE: You're saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct?

CLARKE: All of that's correct.

Man, this guy must be hanging around Kerry, he's on both sides of all these issues too.

---

POST-CIVILIZATION EUROPE (Via the Corner)

Man Who Killed Armed Intruder Jailed Eight Years (Will Batchelor, PA News, 3/23/04)

A man who stabbed to death an armed intruder at his home was jailed for eight years today. . . .

When the gang tried to rob him he grabbed a samurai sword and stabbed one of them, 37-year-old Stephen Swindells, four times. . . .

After the case, Detective Chief Inspector Sam Haworth said: “Four men, including the victim, had set out purposefully to rob Carl Lindsay and this intent ultimately led to Stephen Swindells’ death.

“I believe the sentences passed today reflect the severity of the circumstances.”

I've read the quote over and over, and I can't for the life of me figure out what Detective Chief Inspector Haworth is saying. For our foreign visitors, in the US it would be more likely that the other robbers would be tried and convicted for Swindells' death than that the victim would. Oh, and in the US the "victim" would be the stabber, not the stabbee.

ETA: This must be misreporting, mustn't it?

---

POST-CHRISTIAN AND PAST CARING:

The End of Europe? (Niall Ferguson, March 4, 2004, AEI Bradley Lecture)

When we look closely at the way in which the European Union is evolving and try to set its evolution in some kind of historical perspective, I believe it becomes apparent that, far from approaching a kind of parity with the United States, whether in economic and cultural and political or in international terms, in reality the European Union is an entity on the brink of decline and perhaps ultimately even of dissolution.

Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying that the European Union will disappear as an institution in our lifetimes. Institutions, in Europe particularly, tend not to disappear. They just decline in their power. Like, for example, today's Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development--once the prototype of a far larger post-Marshall Aid European union, today a harmless agency for gathering data and producing economic reports. And ladies and gentlemen, Europe is littered with such agencies, which once embodied grandiose plans--think, for example, of the Bank for International Settlements or the International Labor Organization. There's scarcely a European capital without the relic of some past plan for great greater European integration.

My suggestion is not that the European Union will vanish, but simply that its institutions are in danger of atrophying and that it, too, may one day be no more than a humble data-gathering agency with expensive but impotent offices in the city of Brussels and elsewhere.

Let me try to illustrate to you why I think this is. There are really three parts to my argument, one of which is quite obvious and I will deal with as swiftly as possible. And that is, essentially, to point out why so many of these signs of rapid integration and of approaching parity with the United States are false signs.

The second and more interesting part of the argument has to do with a fundamental historical insight into the way that the European Union or, to be precise, the process of European integration, has always functioned from its very inception until the present. I want to draw on the work of recent scholars, not all of which will be known to you, to suggest that there is a key to understanding the process of European integration, and that key can be summed up in a single phrase: German gravy.

Finally, having bored you near to unconsciousness with economics, I will soar away from such dry matter and offer a third cultural argument to the effect that Europe may not only experience a kind of institutional decline, but that its very culture is in itself authentically, and in the true sense of the word, decadent. So my conclusion will be as much cultural as economic.

First, the economics. In every year of the last decade but one--that was 2001--the economy of the United States has grown in real terms faster than that of the European Union. In every year but two out of the last nine years, productivity has grown faster in the United States than in Europe. If you look at the average of unemployment--and these are the standardized measures of unemployment that the OECD uses--you can see that on average over the last decade unemployment in the European Union has been double what it has been in the United States.

Why is this? I think there are two ways of explaining European economic under-performance in the past decade. One of them is that the labor market and indeed markets generally are less flexible than those of the United States. The other is simply that the monetary policy of the European Central Bank has been somewhat inept, or at least somewhat unbalanced, in the way that it has treated the different members of the euro zone.

The key point about economic under-performance in Europe is that it is principally, or at least predominantly, a German story. It is richly ironic that only 20 years ago scholars were warning that Germany--along, of course, with Japan--was going to surpass the United States among the world’s biggest economies. In truth, those of us who were living in Germany in the 1980s could see an impending economic crisis in that country, a crisis that German reunification temporarily postponed in an orgy of deficit finance and subsidized consumption.

Now we see the reality. There is a profound problem in the German economy that would be there whether the Bundesbank was still in charge of monetary policy in that country or not. The problem is worsened by the fact that, under the ECB, interest rates in Germany are probably around 100 basis points higher than they should be. And given that the German economy is roughly a third of the economy of the euro zone, an unhealthy Germany is an unhealthy European economy.

I want to add a little footnote to this story. If you look closely at man-hour statistics-comparing the productivity of, say, a Frenchman in a single hour with that of his American counterpart--there is in fact nothing to choose between them. As a worker, a Frenchman is just as efficient as an American. It's less true in the case of a German worker, but the difference is not huge. One of the biggest differences in economic terms between Western Europe and the United States has been an astonishing divergence in working hours. In the past decade or so, Americans have steadily worked more hours per year. In fact, according to figures from the OECD, the average American in employment works nearly 2,000 hours a year--and hours a year are a good measure of just how much work people are doing. The average German, ladies and gentlemen, works fully 22 percent less of the year.

Between 1979 and the present, the length of the working year grew in the United States. Or, if you want to put it in more conventional terms, the vacation shrank. Precisely the opposite happened in Europe. In Europe, working hours diminished, vacations grew. Labor participation also diminished. Fewer and fewer of the population actually entered the labor market altogether. And that in many ways explains that differential in GDP growth rates as well as anything I could suggest to you. It's a little hint of what I'm going to say in a minute, that this, I think, is more than just an economic phenomenon. In some ways it is a symptom of that cultural malaise in Europe that I want to see as a critical part of the end of Europe.

To put it very crudely, it is the work ethic itself that has declined and fallen. And it is, I think, noteworthy that the decline in working hours is most pronounced in what were once distinctly Protestant countries of northwestern Europe. Once. [...]

There's been some very good work on the history of European integration done recently. It hasn't been, I think, widely enough understood or received. Perhaps the most interesting work has been produced by the venerable British economic historian Alan Milward, but it's also been complemented by the young Harvard historian Andrew Moravcsik. Between them, working independently, they've arrived at a new interpretation--and I think it deserves to be called a new interpretation--of why European integration happened at all after the Second World War.

Instead of the conventional view that a few saintly figures, like Jean Monnet, realized a vision of European integration to prevent the recurrence of war in Europe and generally make everybody happier and better off, they argue that, beginning with the negotiations that produced the European Coal and Steel Community, the nation states of Western Europe made very limited concessions of sovereignty in the pursuit of the national economic interest---or, to be quite specific, in pursuit of the interests of well represented economic groups within their societies, principally heavy industry and small agriculture.

If one understands the process of European integration in these terms--essentially an economically driven set of deals between still largely sovereign nation states--one thing becomes abundantly clear. And that is, ladies and gentlemen, that from the very outset this process relied on what I rather crudely called a moment ago "German gravy." It was the Germans who, from the very word go, were prepared to subsidize the other parties in the process of European integration.

To give you just one example: The fundamental bottom line of the coal and steel community was that German taxpayers would prop up the inefficient coal mines of Belgium at the cost of hundreds of thousands of marks. In the same way, it was German taxpayers who paid the development aid to the French colonial empire, aid that was an integral part of the Treaty of Rome.

It's often forgotten that where the British saw a choice between empire and Europe, and dithered and hesitated about that choice, the French did what I always do whenever I see a choice. They said, "We'll have both, please." Not only did the French seek to retain their African empire and what was left of their Asian empire within the structures of the emerging European community, but, with a brilliant stroke of diplomacy, they insisted that the other five members that signed the Treaty of Rome should subsidize their colonies. And so it was that, in an extraordinary deal, Konrad Adenauer agreed to payments to French colonies that came very largely from German taxpayers. Likewise, the Common Agricultural Policy, which became the single largest item in the budget of the European community, was from its very inception underwritten by net contributions from German taxpayers. That was how it worked.

If you add up all the--to use the technical term--unrequited transfers that Germany has paid through the European budget since its inception, one of the most striking facts that I can offer you is that the total exceeds the amount that Germany was asked to pay in reparations after the First World War. It is more than 132 billion marks, the sum that the Germans in the 1920s insisted would bankrupt them if they paid it. Well, they finally did pay it. They paid it not as reparations, but as net contributions to the European budget. [...]

But ladies and gentlemen, I didn't come here this evening to make a purely economic argument. What I've said I think is in fact a sufficient argument to explain the end of the process of European integration as we have known it up until this point. But I have one last argument to make that is not, in the end, an economic argument at all.

The fundamental problem that Europe faces, more serious than anything I've mentioned so far, is senescence. It's a problem that we all face as individuals to varying degrees, but from society to society the problem of senescence, of growing old, varies hugely. In the year 2050, which is less remote than it may at first sound, current projections by the United Nations suggest that the median age of the European Union countries, the EU 15, will rise from 38 to 49. The median age will rise in the United States, too, though less sharply. (I wish I had time to tell you about the problems that you are going to face, because then it would stop you feeling the complacency that you may have begun to feel this evening.)

The situation in the United States is not great at all in this respect, but it is--and I believe this is the most one can say--better than the situation of the European Union. The German population is projected to decline absolutely from 82 to 67 million between now and 2050. Falling populations will be a characteristic feature of the once globally dominant societies of Western Europe. An increase in retirement ages would help only slightly, but it is not an adequate answer to the problems that already beset the social security systems of Western Europe. The implicit liabilities of the German social security system at the moment are currently around about 270 percent of German GDP. There are problems with the social security and Medicare systems in this country--very serious problems indeed. But the problems in Europe are much worse, and they will bite politically much sooner.

There is only one way out for this continent, and that is immigration. There is an obvious source of youthful workers who aspire to a better standard of living. All around Europe there are countries whose birth rate is more than twice the European average, indeed, significantly more than twice. The trouble is that nearly all these countries are predominantly Muslim. Not only that, but there is, right next door to the European Union, in fact between the European Union and Iraq, a country that now has a very plausible claim to European Union membership. And that country is Turkey.

Turkey's per capita income is in fact, by some measures, higher than that of Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania, all of which are about to enter the European Union--certainly higher than those Balkan economies that hope to be in the next, or next but one, wave. The arguments against Turkish membership--and the Turks have been pressing for some form of membership since the 1980s--are getting weaker and weaker. And you know the only one that is left? It's one most often heard among German conservatives, but occasionally it slips out of a French mouth, too. That argument is a cultural argument. It is the argument that Europe is fundamentally a Christian entity; that the European Union is a kind of latter day secular version of Christendom.

Ladies and gentlemen, I only wish that were true. The reality is--and it is perhaps the most striking cultural phenomenon of our times--that Western and Eastern Europe are no longer in any meaningful sense Christian societies. They are quite clearly post-Christian--indeed, in many respects, post-religious--societies. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, less than 1 in 10 of the population attends church even once a month. A clear majority do not attend church at all. There are now more Muslims in England than Anglican communicants. More Muslims attend mosque on a weekly basis than Anglicans attend church. In the recent Gallup Millennium Survey of Religious Attitudes conducted just a couple of years ago, more than half of all Scandinavians said that God did not matter to them at all. This, it seems to me, makes the claim to a fundamental Christian inheritance not only implausible but also downright bogus in Europe. The reality is that Europeans inhabit a post-Christian society that is economically, demographically, but, in my view, above all culturally a decadent society.

They cannot, though they will try, resist forever the migration that must inevitably occur from south and from east. They will try. Indeed, they try even now to resist the migration that really ought legally to be permissible from the new member states to the old member states after May the 1st. Even that has become contentious. Increasingly, European politics is dominated by a kind of dance of death as politicians and voters try desperately and vainly to prop up the moribund welfare states of the post-Second World War era, but above all to prop up what little remains of their traditional cultures.

Here's something to consider: John Kerry may very well be the last Atlanticist candidate of the major parties. Europe simply doesn't matter anymore except to the bicoastal intellectuals.

---

BUGGER ALL:

A Dance to the (Disco) Music of Time: A review of Homosexuality and Civilization, by Louis Crompton (John Derbyshire, March 16, 2004, Claremont Review of Books)

We are, as everyone knows, living in the, or a, "gay moment." One of the consequences is that we have to put up with a great deal of homosexualist propaganda. (I favor the usage "homosexualist" for people who are activist about their sexual orientation, versus "homosexual" for people who are merely, and privately, homosexual. I admit, though, that my attempts to promote this—it seems to me, useful and non-insulting—usage have fallen mostly on stony ground.) Among homosexualists there are many whose devotion to what Christopher Isherwood famously called "my kind" is as intense as anything that can be shown by the followers of any religion or political ideology.

One aspect of this devotion is the urge to recruit long-dead historical names to the Cause—to comb through history seeking out gayness. Since history is, much more often than not, a very ambiguous affair, an explorer of this inclination can return with many trophies, which he will then display triumphantly to us dull-witted, unimaginative breeders, revealing to us that the human race is, contrary to our narrow brutish prejudices, a very ocean of gayness. Julius Caesar? Gay! Jesus of Nazareth? Gay! Leonardo? Gay! Frederick the Great? Gay! All of them-gay, gay, gay! I do not recall having seen it argued that George Washington was gay, but I have not the slightest doubt that the argument has been made by somebody, somewhere.

Louis Crompton's Homosexuality and Civilization belongs to this genre of homo-prop. It has, I should say here up front, many virtues. Crompton has done prodigies of literary and historical research across a wide range. His sources are for the most part secondary, but they could hardly be otherwise in a book of this scope. Nobody has real expertise on both ancient Greece and feudal Japan. He writes well for an academic (Crompton is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Nebraska), and the book is beautifully produced, with a high standard of copy editing and many fine plates to please the eye.

Certainly Crompton has a bill of goods to sell, but there we come to matters of personal taste in reading. You either like didactic history, or you don't. I myself like it very much, to the degree that I even like it when an author writes contrary to my own prejudices. We—the readers of this fine periodical, I mean—are not gaping rubes, to be lured from the straight and narrow by a silver-tongued swindler. We have powers of judgment, which we can apply to an author's reasoning, and we have knowledge, which we can compare with the facts he presents. Crompton left me unconvinced on his main point, but he proved thoughtful, and entertained me along the way. As propaganda goes, this is a superior specimen.

Don't know about General Washington, but ole Abe was outed a few years back.

---

THE 2008 PRIMARY:

Romney's national profile rises (Frank Phillips, 3/24/2004, Boston Globe)

Governor Mitt Romney's national profile has risen significantly over the last year, as he created a broad fund-raising machine, developed closer ties to President Bush, and became the chief GOP leader in a state that is home to both the likely Democratic presidential nominee and that party's convention.

A perfect storm of events -- including the convention, gay marriage, and John F. Kerry's presidential candidacy -- has created a swirl of national media attention for Romney, a marked contrast to his lower profile when he took office in January 2003.

Romney's new image will be on display tomorrow when he hosts a Boston fund-raiser for Bush that is expected to raise $1 million and further foster his links to the president, who had hosted Romney at the White House for two nights shortly before the president endorsed a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

By every indication, Romney and his staff are relishing his emerging role, even while insisting that the events are not of his making. They said the governor's increasing national role is being thrust on him because of the events rooted in Boston. [...]

The national attention has forced Romney to try to quash speculation about his future. He fended off a leading question Monday night from WBZ radio personality David Brudnoy about replacing vice president Dick Cheney, and laughed along with Bush when the president joked to a St. Patrick's Day breakfast that Romney would have to wait until 2008 to run for the White House.

Though the GOP does not have the same tradition of MA politicians routinely winning the NH presidential primary, Governor Romney's proximity would have to make him an early favorite to succeed President Bush--though Jeb Bush, Vice President Rice, John McCain and others will make for perhaps the most formidable field in U.S. history.

---

MIRROR IMAGE

U.S. OK’d plan to topple Taliban a day before 9/11, Panel report faults intelligence, lack of will (MSNBC, 3/23/04)

After years of delay caused by inadequate intelligence, the U.S. government decided just one day before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that it would try to overthrow the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan if a diplomatic push to expel