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NEW THEORY SUGGESTS PEOPLE ARE ATTRACTED TO RELIGION FOR 16 REASONS (Jeff Grabmeier, OSU Research News)

People are not drawn to religion just because of a fear of death or any other single reason, according to a new comprehensive, psychological theory of religion.

There are actually 16 basic human psychological needs that motivate people to seek meaning through religion, said Steven Reiss, author of the new theory and professor of psychology and psychiatry at Ohio State University.
“Because this theory can be tested scientifically, we can learn its strengths and weaknesses, and gradually improve it,” Reiss said. “Eventually, we may understand better the psychological basis of religion.”

These basic human needs – which include honor, idealism, curiosity and acceptance – can explain why certain people are attracted to religion, why God images express psychologically opposite qualities, and the relationship between personality and religious experiences.

Previous psychologists tried to explain religion in terms of just one or two overarching psychological needs. The most common reason they cite is that people embrace religion because of a fear of death, as expressed in the saying ‘there are no atheists in foxholes,” Reiss said.

“But religion is multi-faceted – it can’t be reduced to just one or two desires.”

Reiss described his new theory – which he said may be the most comprehensive psychological theory of religion since Freud’s work more than a century ago -- in the June issue of Zygon, a journal devoted to issues of science and religion.

“I don’t think there has been a comprehensive theory of religion that was scientifically testable,” he said.

The theory is based on his overall theory of human motivation, which he calls sensitivity theory. Sensitivity theory is explained in his 2000 book Who Am I? The 16 Basic Desires that Motivate Our Action and Define Our Personalities (Tarcher Putnam).

Reiss said that each of the 16 basic desires outlined in the book influence the psychological appeal of religious behavior. The desires are power, independence, curiosity, acceptance, order, saving, honor, idealism, social contact, family, status, vengeance, romance, eating, physical exercise, and tranquility.

In fact, Reiss has already done some initial research that suggests the desire for independence is a key psychological desire that separates religious and non-religious people. In a study published in 2000, Reiss found that religious people (the study included mostly Christians) expressed a strong desire for interdependence with others. Those who were not religious, however, showed a stronger need to be self-reliant and independent.

The study also showed that religious people valued honor more than non-religious people, which Reiss said suggests many people embrace religion to show loyalty to parents and ancestors.

WHO THAT DOESN'T RESPECT US IS WORTH HAVING THE RESPECT OF?:

America's battle to regain respect (Lawrence Freedman, May 30 2004, Financial Times)

We have reached a turning-point in international politics as well as in Iraq. President George W. Bush is widely seen to have gambled on Iraq and lost. The impact of that loss goes well beyond Iraq. The US has not been defeated in battle and is unlikely to be so but it can no longer impose its will on Iraq because it lacks the moral authority to do so.
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The "resistance" in any of its many guises is too divided to win and half- decent outcomes may yet emerge. The point is only that the future of Iraq increasingly depends on the variable quality of local leaders in the country, their ability to understand the consequences of allowing violence to become the first arbiter of their differences, the role that the United Nations chooses to play in helping to secure a transition from coalition occupation - and the readiness of the Americans to accept that they have lost the initiative. If he is to have any chance of success, Ayad Allawi, would-be prime minister, will need to demonstrate his distance from the coalition.

This was not inevitable.

(1) The attempt to make Iraq a democracy didn't inevitably have to end with Iraqis choosing their own leaders.

(2) The attempt didn't inevitably have to lead to resistance by Ba'athists and al Qaeda.

(3) The attempt didn't inevitably have to lead to opposition from Europe and the American Left.

(4) The attempt didn't inevitably have to lead to greater hatred of Israel.

(5) North Korea and Iran would not have eventually had to be dealt with.

NOT ONE OF US:

Bush likability not to be underrated: Ike, JFK, Reagan, and Clinton all had it - Kerry may need it to beat Bush. (Godfrey Sperling, 6/01/04, CS Monitor)

Yes, Senator Kerry has caught up with Bush in the polls. But the average of several polls I've seen would show that Kerry is only a percentage point or two ahead. So the question persists: Why, with Bush so far behind in public approval, isn't Kerry substantially ahead in the polls?

I find the answer on the wall above my typewriter where I have the picture of my favorite president, Abraham Lincoln. I see in his face his warmth and friendliness. Polls show that voters find these qualities more in Bush than in Kerry. Indeed, this is what is keeping the contest in the polls close when Bush is so bogged down with problems.

A Zogby poll showed that voters found Kerry cold, aloof, and remote. Biographical material about Kerry describes him as a man who is really quite warm in personal relationships, but simply finds it difficult to show this friendliness when in a group. I recall Kerry coming into a Monitor breakfast back in his earlier years in the Senate. I remember how very reserved he was and commented on it at the time.

Now, as I watch Kerry on TV, I see him making an effort to be open and warm - and who knows, maybe he'll become likable and cuddly before the race is over.

Likability of a candidate certainly doesn't trump how he stands on the issues; but it is very important.

Add to that: the candidate perceived as obviously less intelligent won every race (not involving an incumbent--and many of those races too) in the 20th Century except for Hoover in '28. And look how that worked out...

65% WINS IN A DEMOCRACY:

US-named Iraqi council pushes back: Negotiations resume after weekend talks stalled between the Governing Council, CPA, and UN envoy Brahimi. (Nicholas Blanford and Orly Halpern, 6/01/04, CS Monitor)

The 24-member council, a mix of seasoned politicians, exiles, academics, and tribal leaders, appeared doomed to irrelevancy when Brahimi said last month that none of them would appear in the post-June 30 administration. Brahimi, charged with helping to form a transitional government, favored a team of technocrats who could hold Iraq together until national elections, scheduled to be held by the end of January.

But on Friday, the council surprised everyone by announcing that it had endorsed Alawi as prime minister. Now the council has locked horns with the UN envoy and the CPA chief over the choice of president. The council members favor Ghazi al-Yawar, a US-educated Sunni engineer and leader of the prominent Shammar tribe who has expressed criticism of the occupation and US military actions. Mr. Bremer and Brahimi are said to prefer Adnan Pachachi, an 81-year-old veteran Sunni Iraqi politician who is regarded as generally pro-US.

Raja Habib Khuzai, a Shiite member of the council says, "The Americans want Pachachi, but they won't tell us why. If they continue to insist on Pachachi it will create very big problems because all the Iraqis want Sheikh al-Yawar, not just the Governing Council."

Despite his biting criticism of past coalition actions, Sheikh al-Yawar is a vocal opponent of the mainly Sunni-driven insurgency. His influence with Iraq's tribes could help reduce the level of violence, reassuring nervous Sunnis that they will not be marginalized in the new Iraq.

But CPA officials privately concede that Pachachi has the backing of the Americans because he is seen as the one person who will stand by the Transitional Administrative Law during ing the interim period. The law, of which Pachachi was a key architect, was drawn up earlier this year to serve as a temporary constitution until a permanent one is established no later than December 2005. "Everyone else will just ignore it like any piece of paper," says one CPA official.

The law sparked opposition among Shiites, who represent 65 percent of the population. They resented a clause that potentially allowed Kurds and Sunnis to veto a future constitution.

MORE:
'Sovereignty' at issue in final push for Iraq transition plan: Members of UN Security Council are pressing the US to ensure that caretaker Iraqi government has full control. (Howard LaFranchi, 6/01/04, CS Monitor)

Sovereignty is taking on such importance because of deepening concern over whether the Iraqi people will embrace the interim government as legitimate in the crucial months before elections planned to be held by January 2005. "There are going to be problems with any government, especially where the security situation won't allow an electoral process to deliver it," says James Dobbins, a former White House envoy to Afghanistan and Bosnia. "But what is needed is a government that as many people buy into as possible."

The interim government that began to emerge over the weekend is a reflection of a tougher tug of war than anticipated between the US-named Governing Council and UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, entrusted by the White House with coming up with a caretaker government. Charged with forging a leadership made up of a prime minister, a largely ceremonial president and two vice presidents, as well as 26 ministers, Mr. Brahimi sought to deliver something more representative to average Iraqis than the Governing council, which has never enjoyed much public support.

But the council, made up largely of former exiles representing established political parties, balked at Brahimi's first choice for prime minister, nuclear scientist Hussain Sharistrani, a Shiite and senior adviser to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. After imposing one of their own, Mr. Allawi, in that post on Friday, council members also stonewalled candidates that were known to be the preference of Brahimi and the US for other top jobs.

But at the same time Brahimi was believed to have secured three of the six most coveted ministerial positions for two Kurd leaders and one Sunni - the other six going to representatives of the majority Shiites. While some of the top picks of the new government still being drawn up Monday were not Brahimi's first choices, the overall makeup is reflective of the careful balance among Iraq's predominant religious and ethnic populations that the UN envoy sought from the beginning. "Brahimi really has been very clever. He knows that if there is no buy-in from the main communities, the government won't have legitimacy and it can't be successful," says Laith Kubba, an Iraqi expert at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington.

From the beginning, the Governing Council was uneasy with what Brahimi said was his preference for a caretaker government of technocrats who would swear off any role in elections. People close to Brahimi say his talk of technocrats was never a hard and fast rule, but rather a way to discuss the new government's formation. "Brahimi doesn't go in with a vision, he goes in with an open mind and a plan for moving consultations in a desirable direction," says Mr. Dobbins, who worked with Brahimi in Afghanistan.

Now an international security expert at the RAND Corp., Dobbins says any government Brahimi accepts will be one he believes can move Iraq ahead.

ORTEGA IS A LOCK...:

Why Not Palestinian Elections? (Jackson Diehl, May 24, 2004, Washington Post)

Last week an Arab government publicly embraced the idea of democratic elections and asked the United States for its help in holding them -- and the Bush administration, which says Middle Eastern democracy is its top priority, ducked. That's because the idea came from the Palestinian Authority, where a free vote would probably demonstrate that another tenet of Bush policy, the "irrelevance" of Yasser Arafat, is a fiction.

Loath to acknowledge the reality of Arafat's continuing authority, or offend Israel's Ariel Sharon, the White House brushes off the appeals of Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia for new elections for a Palestinian parliament and president. In doing so it misses an important opportunity -- one that may offer the only real hope of achieving American aims on the Israeli-Palestinian front.

Like it or not (and no reasonable non-Palestinian does), Arafat remains in charge, as he has demonstrated repeatedly during the past year. Qureia and other Palestinian moderates are too weak to move against him or to meet U.S. and Israeli demands that control over security forces be taken away from him. That leaves Bush's "road map" for Israeli-Palestinian peace stalemated -- a status that is convenient for Sharon but disastrous for Bush's attempts to regain his footing in Iraq and the broader Middle East.

What would happen if the United States were to endorse and facilitate Palestinian elections? To begin with, Bush would get considerable credit around the region for acting to back up his democracy sloganeering and for taking an initiative in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict beyond his indiscriminate backing of Sharon. Both the president's democracy initiative for the "greater" Middle East, due to be unveiled next month, and the cause of elections in Iraq would get a boost.

More important, the stalemate in Ramallah would finally end. Most likely Arafat would be reelected president -- after all, his most formidable rival, Marwan Barghouti, is inside an Israeli prison. But Palestinian voters would almost certainly vote out of office the corrupt and feckless band of Arafat cronies and yes men now serving in the Palestinian parliament. In their place would come a new generation of Palestinian leaders, from both nationalist and religious parties, who mostly oppose their 75-year-old president and would be eager to curb his power. Some would be cronies of Barghouti, who, unlike Arafat, is liable to support a negotiated settlement with Israel. Some would be representatives of Hamas, which would be drawn into the realm of democratic politics and government -- as opposed to insurgency and terrorism -- for the first time.

MORE:
Egypt tells Arafat: Reform or be removed - report (JOSEPH NASR, 5/31/04, Jerusalem Post)

Egyptian Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman has reportedly warned Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to relax his grip on the reins of Palestinian power or face the possibility that Egypt and the US will cease to block Prime Minister Ariel Sharon from carrying out his threat to "remove" the chairman.

According to a report Monday in the pan-Arab Al-Quds-al-Arabi, Suleiman handed Arafat three demands:

First, to unite all the Palestinian security forces under one command authority, and into three components. These include the police, the Preventative Security Service (equivalent of Israel's General Security Service), and the Palestinian foreign security service (equivalent of Israel's Mossad).

Secondly, give PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei complete authority to conduct negotiations with Israel over Ariel Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan.

Thirdly, stand aside and accept a symbolic position and let others lead the Palestinian Authority.

THE BIGGER THE BETTER:

Warning of massive Saudi attack (Michael Theodoulou and Daniel McGrory, June 1, 2004. news.com.au)

INTELLIGENCE agencies believe the Islamic terrorists behind the weekend kidnapping and murder of foreigners in Saudi Arabia are close to staging "a spectacular attack" that will cause devastating loss of life.

The British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sherard Cowper-Coles, confirmed yesterday that "further attacks may be in the final stages of preparation".

It is feared the attack could be on a key oil installation or the causeway linking Saudi Arabia to Bahrain.

Three suspected al-Qaeda militants escaped after slitting the throats of up to nine foreigners among at least 22 killed in a 24-hour rampage in a housing compound in the eastern oil city of Khobar.

The trio seized one car then another in their flight, and appeared yesterday to have escaped.

Going by the timing offered by the owner of the second hijacked car, they may even have slipped away from the Oasis housing compound before Saudi commandos descended in a helicopter to rescue what hostages they could.

A fourth militant, the alleged leader, was wounded and captured. He was identified only as one of the kingdom's "most wanted".

OH, SO THAT'S WHAT "RAM" MEANS

GOP looks to limit class-action suits (Jesse J. Holland, AP, 5/31/04)

After trying to curb class-action suits for years, Republicans finally have enough support to ram legislation through the Senate to limit what they call an overabundance of frivolous cases against American businesses. . . .

GOP senators fell one vote short of achieving a filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority in October. But now several Democrats, including Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Charles Schumer of New York, have agreed to support the legislation.

WHERE'S THE BLACKLIST WHEN YOU NEED IT...:

Hollywood as a Tool of German Foreign Policy? (Stephan Richter | Friday, May 28, 2004, The Globalist)

Roland Emmerich, ["Day After Tomorrow"]’s director, comes with impeccable cinematographic credentials, including “The Patriot” and “Independence Day.” Both these movies revolve around core American ideals — such as overcoming adversity, fighting for one’s way of life and the ultimate belief that good will conquer evil. [...]

Hollywood has long been used as a tool to project "soft" American power around the world.

In that sense, this activist director must feel like he has achieved a perfect circle — aligning the commercial interests of the movie industry with his own agenda, which in this case is pro-environment.

So far, so good. What is completely overlooked in this tale is the fact that Mr. Emmerich hails from Germany, is an avid supporter of the pro-environment German Green Party — and is known to hang out on trendy Berlin cafes with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the leading figure of the Green Party.

EVEN LE PEN IS ON THE RIGHT SIDE ONCE IN AWHILE (via Tom Corcoran)

Remembering the Vendée (Sophie Masson, LewRockwell.com)

In 1789, the French Revolution began, a revolution that at first was full of optimism, of the genuine wish for reform; a revolution that was not even opposed by King Louis XVI himself. This was the Enlightenment. Humanity was to be trusted to behave well. Liberty, equality, fraternity. Who could argue with that? Very few did, least of all the peasants of western France, who welcomed many of the changes – the abolition of compulsory labour, the gradual abolition of privilege. The revolutionaries produced a passionate and idealistic document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Some of those rights were the right to freedom of religion; the right to live peacefully, without tyranny or arbitrary rule; the right to discuss. Alas! While Desmoulins and Danton debated and wrote passionately, Robespierre bided his time. That time came all too soon.

In 1790, the first cracks began to appear. Provincial assemblies were abolished, stripping people of their local governments. The clergy was to be stripped of its property and would be appointed by lay people, not the church. In practice, this meant that the bourgeois of the cities now had the right of imposing chosen priests on peasant communities. Vendée and Brittany and Normandy began to stir at this; they were greatly attached to their own priests and resisted the imposition of others. A year later, the King was arrested. Riots erupted in Brittany. In 1792, the extremist Jacobins under the leadership of Robespierre took power and formed the now infamous Convention. And then the horrors began in earnest.

Madame Guillotine was fed many times, soon taking Danton and Desmoulins and many of the earlier revolutionaries, who, too late, had seen the monster they had unleashed. But it was not till 1793 that two events happened which precipitated France into a terrible civil war; the consequences of which are still very much felt today.

Those events were the execution of Louis XVI, the subsequent pre-emptive declaration of war by France on the rest of Europe, and, as a consequence, the forced conscription of 300,000 men – the revolutionaries wanted the peasants of France to pay for their murderous folly! There was immediate revolt in Vendée, in Brittany, in Normandy, but the centre of the revolt was Vendée itself. This was a completely popular uprising; it was the peasants themselves who took the initiative and who only later persuaded some of their native nobles, who had been army officers, to lead some of their armies.

The new, the First Republic reacted immediately. This would be a fight to the death, for it was a tussle for the very spirit of revolution. The fact that the Vendée revolt was a popular one called into question the very nature of the Revolution, with its middle-class and aristocratic leaders. More than that, it dared to oppose the "despotism of liberty." Republican armies led, more often than not, by ci-devant ex-nobles and princes were sent into the rebellious province. But the Vendéens proved difficult nuts to crack. To the contemptuous surprise of the Paris grandees, the armies of the Chouans, as they became known (because of their rallying call, which imitated the call of the screech owl, or chat-huant in French), were well-disciplined and highly effective, and unusual in that the men had an input into decisions, not just the leaders (some of course later saw that as a weakness). They fought with a combination of regular and guerilla tactics and had a number of brilliant leaders – Cathelineau, La Rochejacquelein, Charrette, d'Elbée, Stofflet, Lescure. The Bretons, under Cadoudal, Jean Jan, Jean Cottereau and others, joined them at several points.

In the first year, they were remarkably successful, and their armies swelled to more than 150,000 men, none of whom had been coerced or conscripted. They captured towns and villages, made tentative links with the English, who were horrified by the fate of the King, and with the émigré nobles who had escaped to England already. It seemed that not only the liberation of western France, but also of the whole of France from the tyranny and terror of the Convention was at hand. Alas . . .

Division began to appear in Chouan ranks, as leaders with strong egos fought with each other, the English and the French émigrés (many of whom scorned this "peasant army") proved to be of no help whatsoever, and the Republic spared no expense of finance or soldiers' lives to crush the rebels. The crushing defeat of the Chouan armies at the end of 1793 in Vendée did not predispose the Republic to mercy. In early 1794, the Convention decided to exterminate the Vendéens, to the last man, woman and child. And they found plenty who were happy to carry out these orders.

"Not one is to be left alive." "Women are reproductive furrows who must be ploughed under." "Only wolves must be left to roam that land." "Fire, blood, death are needed to preserve liberty." "Their instruments of fanaticism and superstition must be smashed." These were some of the words the Convention used in speaking of Vendée. Their tame scientists dreamed up all kinds of new ideas – the poisoning of flour and alcohol and water supplies, the setting up of a tannery in Angers which would specialise in the treatment of human skins; the investigation of methods of burning large numbers of people in large ovens, so their fat could be rendered down efficiently. One of the Republican generals, Carrier, was scornful of such research: these "modern" methods would take too long. Better to use more time-honoured methods of massacre: the mass drownings of naked men, women, and children, often tied together in what he called "republican marriages," off specially constructed boats towed out to the middle of the Loire and then sunk; the mass bayoneting of men, women and children; the smashing of babies' heads against walls; the slaughter of prisoners using cannons; the most grisly and disgusting tortures; the burning and pillaging of villages, towns and churches.

The ci-devant aristocrat Turreau de la Linières took command of what are known in Vendée as the douze colonnes infernales (the twelve columns of hell), which had specific orders both from his superiors and from himself to kill everyone and everything they saw. "Even if there should be patriots [that is, Republicans] in Vendée," Turreau himself said, "they must not spared. We can make no distinction. The entire province must be a cemetery." And so it was. In the streets of Cholet, emblematic Vendéen city, by the end of 1793, wolves were about the only living things left, roaming freely and feeding on the piles of decomposing corpses.

People in Vendée still tell the stories of the colonnes infernales and the unspeakable things they did. There was not even any pretence of discriminating between fighters and civilians; documents of the time, still kept in army records in Vincennes, tell their hideous, chilling story, a story which has tolled repeatedly in our own terrible century. The generals speak coolly of objectives achieved, exterminations nicely done, "ethnic cleansing" carefully carried out, of genocide systematically and rigorously conducted. There were those, too few, alas, who refused to take part; but they were summarily dealt with.

But the Vendéens were not completely beaten. Full of hate now, they fought back, sporadically but ferociously. Their "chouan" rallying cry became a source of terror for republican stragglers in the deep remote country of the marshes and forests of Vendée. And the Bretons fought, attempting to come to the aid of their brothers, but it was difficult to maintain resistance in the face of such full-scale assault. One by one, the charismatic leaders were killed or hunted down like wild beasts. Within two years, Chouan resistance in Vendée was all but dead, though Brittany, under the leadership of the remarkable Georges Cadoudal, continued to fight for many years to come. [...]

Right wing, left wing, centre in France have never been able to deal with the legacy of Vendée. The left wing has problems with the impugning of the Revolution; the right wing because civil war put France in peril of foreign armies; the centre because, hey, it's not exactly pretty stuff. Thirty or so years ago a then-unknown but now infamous Jean-Marie le Pen championed the cause of Vendée and Brittany, applauding regionalism and independence, and produced a recording of Chouan songs; now, as the leader of the extreme right Front National, he studiously ignores it all, speaking grandly and opportunistically of the marvellous republic and the great destiny of a centralised France – for Vendée costs votes. Vendée is embarrassing, for it shows what the French are capable of doing to the French without any help from immigrant bogeys. The extreme left, the communists, of course never had any warm feelings for "priest-ridden peasants." Besides, they understood Robespierre's "despotism of liberty" only too well.

Many people in Vendée who keep the memory in their hearts refuse to vote at all in general elections, considering that the soul of the republic itself is soiled and flawed. They find it bitter indeed that the 1989 bicentenary ignored them completely. There are some who would sanctify all the Chouans, would make of them impossibly perfect heroes. For them, the "Bleus," the republicans, were devils without any redeeming features. But it is remarkable how many in Vendée do not hate. They only wish to remember.

ARE THEY LIES IF YOU MAKE YOUR OWN POSITIONS MURKY ENOUGH?:

From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity: Scholars Say Campaign Is Making History With Often-Misleading Attacks (Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei, May 31, 2004, Washington Post)

It was a typical week in the life of the Bush reelection machine.

Last Monday in Little Rock, Vice President Cheney said Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry "has questioned whether the war on terror is really a war at all" and said the senator from Massachusetts "promised to repeal most of the Bush tax cuts within his first 100 days in office."

On Tuesday, President Bush's campaign began airing an ad saying Kerry would scrap wiretaps that are needed to hunt terrorists.

The same day, the Bush campaign charged in a memo sent to reporters and through surrogates that Kerry wants to raise the gasoline tax by 50 cents.

On Wednesday and Thursday, as Kerry campaigned in Seattle, he was greeted by another Bush ad alleging that Kerry now opposes education changes that he supported in 2001.

The charges were all tough, serious -- and wrong, or at least highly misleading.

VP RICE IT IS:

Cheney office denies role in Halliburton deal: E-mail cited by Time implies veep helped ex-employer get Iraq contract (Suzanne Malveaux, May 31, 2004, CNN)

Vice President Dick Cheney's office denied Sunday that he was involved in a coordinated effort to secure a multibillion dollar Iraq oil deal for Halliburton, his former employer.

A reference to such an arrangement was made in an internal Pentagon e-mail from an Army Corps of Engineers official to another Pentagon employee, Time magazine reports in its June 7 edition, which is due on newsstands Monday.

The existence of the e-mail was confirmed to CNN by a senior administration official familiar with it.

The e-mail -- dated March 5, 2003 -- says Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, approved the arrangement to award the contract to the oil-services company, the administration official said.

According to an e-mail excerpt in Time, the contract was "contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w[ith] VP's office."

The Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton the contract three days later without seeking other bids, Time reports.

Time says it found the e-mail "among documents provided by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group."

The senior official told CNN the e-mail was a typical "heads-up" memo from one government agency to another that "a decision has been made, we're about to announce this contract, and as a courtesy we are alerting the White House of a public announcement. This is a standard practice."

The "coordinated action" referred to, the senior administration official said, was "that of publicly announcing the contract decision that has already been made."

CARTHAGE WASN'T DESTROYED IN A DAY:

Pro-life lobby touts fetal-pain bill (Amy Fagan, 5/20/04, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

The next big rallying point for the pro-life movement on Capitol Hill appears to be legislation introduced yesterday that would require doctors to inform women seeking abortions that the procedure will cause pain to their unborn children.

"Unborn children can and do feel pain," said the bill's Senate sponsor, Sen. Sam Brownback, Kansas Republican. "Women should not be kept in the dark."

"We're going full-court press," said Rep. Christopher H. Smith, a New Jersey Republican who is sponsoring the measure in the House.

Mr. Smith has asked for hearings on the legislation and is hoping for a floor vote this year. Mr. Brownback is talking with Senate Republican leaders about attaching the proposal to a larger bill that comes before the Senate.

MEANING?:

Double standard: Israel escapes sanctions imposed on other nations (Bill Kaufmann, 5/31/04, Calgary Sun)

In Washington state, a mother still struggles over the meaning of her daughter's sacrifice.

In March, 2003, Rachel Corrie, 23, was crushed to death in Rafah, Gaza, beneath an Israeli bulldozer in an incident photos and witnesses suggest was a cold-blooded killing.

50-0 FILES:

In Minnesota, Kerry holds narrow lead (BILL SALISBURY, 5/31/04, St. Paul Pioneer Press)

Democrat John Kerry holds a slim 3-percentage point lead in Minnesota over President Bush, according to a new statewide poll.

The poll shows 44 percent of Minnesota voters would vote for Kerry, while 41 percent favor Bush. Two percent support independent candidate Ralph Nader, while 13 percent are undecided.

Kerry's 3-point lead puts the race within the poll's 4-point margin of error.

HOW?

The Real Story of Fallujah: Why isn't the administration getting it out? (ROBERT D. KAPLAN, May 31, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

If Al-Karmah is reclaimed, if Fallujah itself remains relatively calm, if the Marines can patrol there at some point, and if mortar attacks abate measurably--all distinct possibilities--the decision not to launch an all-out assault on Fallujah could look like the right one.

But none of the above matters if it is not competently explained to the American public--for the home front is more critical in a counterinsurgency than in any other kind of war. Yet the meticulous planning process undertaken by the Marines at the tactical level for assaulting Fallujah was not augmented with a similarly meticulous process by the Bush administration at the strategic level for counteracting the easily foreseen media fallout from fighting in civilian areas near Muslim religious sites. The public was never made to feel just how much of a military threat the mosques in Fallujah represented, just how far Marines went to avoid damage to them and to civilians, and just how much those same Marine battalions accomplished after departing Fallujah. [...]

[I]...found that there are many different Iraqs and different levels of reality to each of them. Presently, the administration lacks the public relations talent and the organizational structure for conveying even the positive elements of the Iraqi panorama in all their drama and texture.

Because the battles in a counterinsurgency are small scale and often clandestine, the story line is rarely obvious. It becomes a matter of perceptions, and victory is awarded to those who weave the most compelling narrative. Truly, in the world of postmodern, 21st century conflict, civilian and military public-affairs officers must become war fighters by another name. They must control and anticipate a whole new storm system represented by a global media, which too often exposes embarrassing facts out of historical or philosophical context.

Without a communications strategy that gives the public the same sense of mission that a company captain imparts to his noncommissioned officers, victory in warfare nowadays is impossible. Looking beyond Iraq, the American military needs battlefield doctrine for influencing the public in the same way that the Army and the Marines already have doctrine for individual infantry tasks and squad-level operations (the Ranger Handbook, the Fleet Marine Force Manual, etc.).

The centerpiece of that doctrine must be the flattening out of bureaucratic hierarchies within the Defense Department, so that spokesmen can tap directly into the experiences of company and battalion commanders and entwine their smell-of-the-ground experiences into daily briefings. Nothing is more destructive for the public-relations side of warfare than field reports that have to make their way up antiquated, Industrial Age layers of command, diluting riveting stories of useful content in the process. Journalists with little knowledge of military history or tactics and with various agendas to peddle can go directly to lieutenants and sergeants, yet the very spokesmen of these soldiers and Marines themselves--even through their aides--seem unable to do so.

WHAT WOULD SHE KNOW ABOUT IT?:

SCUD MISSIVES: a review of Letters of Ayn Rand, edited by Michael S. Berliner (Florence King, May 28, 2004, National Review)

If anyone needs a makeover it's Ayn Rand. After her death in 1982, her one-time proteges, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, both published biographies portraying her as an abusive monster who held facts instead of opinions, drove her husband to drink, and held purge trials in her living room whenever one of her acolytes got philosophically out of line.

The centerpiece of both books is Miss Rand's affair with Nathaniel, begun when she was 50 and he 24, and continuing until they were 63 and 37. The story goes that she gathered the Brandens together with her husband, Frank O'Connor, announced that she and Nathaniel wanted to have an affair, and then opened the floor to discussion, which she dominated, analyzing the proposed adultery to prove that it was rational according to the principles of Objectivism, her home-cooked contribution to Western thought.

When the inevitable explosion came, Miss Rand publicly repudiated and denounced the Brandens, who soon divorced. Her think tank, largely their work, fell apart, as did many of her emotionally dependent acolytes, some of whom discussed whether it was rational to assassinate Nathaniel.

No hint of any of this appears in Letters of Ayn Rand, a labor of love by Leonard Peikoff, her leading loyalist (and sole heir under her will, according to Barbara Branden), and Michael S. Berliner, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, newly restored to promote Objectivism. They give us a new, improved Ayn Rand. [...]

Writing to Barry Goldwater about his book, The Conscience of a Conservative, she upbraids him for saying that conservatism rests on faith instead of on reason.

HOWL OF THE BITTER

Resistance (Ignacio Ramonet, Le Monde Diplomatique, May, 2004)

Resistance means saying no. No to contempt, arrogance and economic bullying. No to the new masters of the world: high finance, the countries of the G8, the Washington consensus, the dictatorship of the market and unchecked free trade. No to the quartet of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. No to hyper-production. To genetically modified crops. To permanent privatisations. To the relentless spread of the private sector. No to exclusion. No to sexism. No to social regression, poverty, inequality and the dismantling of the welfare state.

No to the abandonment of the South. No to the daily deaths of 30,000 poor children. No to the destruction of the environment. No to the military hegemony of a sole superpower. No to "preventive" war, to invasion, to terrorism and to attacks on civilians. No to racism, anti-semitism and islamophobia. No to draconian security measures. No to a police state mentality. No to dumbing-down. To censorship. To media lies. To manipulative media.

Resistance also means saying yes. Yes to solidarity between the six billion inhabitants of this planet. Yes to the rights of women. Yes to a renewed United Nations. Yes to a new Marshall plan to help Africa. Yes to the total elimination of illiteracy. Yes to an international campaign against a technology gap. Yes to an international moratorium that will preserve drinking water.

Yes also to generic medicines for all. To decisive action against Aids. To the preservation of minority cultures. And to the rights of indigenous peoples.

Yes to social and economic justice. And a less market-dominated Europe. Yes to the Porto Alegre Consensus. Yes to a Tobin tax that will benefit citizens. Yes to taxing arms sales. Yes to writing off the debt of the poor nations. Yes to banning tax havens.

To resist is to dream that another world is possible. And to help build it.

Who says the Left and Right can’t find common ground? We’re completely on board with that bit about dumbing down.

THE ONLY AMERICAN POSITION:

What Europe Doesn't Understand: Neoconservatism is neither neo nor conservative. It's just American. (ZACHARY SELDEN, May 26, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

It is difficult to define neoconservative foreign policy or to spell out what distinguishes it from other strains of political thought. Originally the label was applied to former leftists who became anticommunist after World War II and to Democrats who found themselves more in the Republican camp in the post-Vietnam era. But many of the individuals identified as neocons today are too young to have been part of the original group or were never associated with the Democratic Party.

Some turn to a more arcane definition of "the neoconservatives" as the students of the University of Chicago political philosophy professor Leo Strauss. Others note the Jewish surnames of many of the president's foreign affairs and defense advisors and hint darkly that the U.S. government is being manipulated for the benefit of Israel. Once again, these definitions fail to satisfy. Strauss may have been an influence on some, but it is difficult to believe that a relatively obscure philosophy professor dead for 30 years could now suddenly wield such influence over the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. By the same token, many of President Bush's advisors may indeed have Jewish roots, but many do not; it is, moreover, truly bizarre to believe that individuals can work their way to the top of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus by advocating the interests of another state to the detriment of the United States.

More often than not, the label is now employed as a pejorative to mean "hawkish on foreign policy." But this description applies to much of the American public since September 11. What has happened is that some commentators and defense intellectuals associated with the neocon label have been successful after 9/11 in articulating ideas that resonate with the general public and deep-seated beliefs that have historically guided the conduct of American foreign policy.

As much as some may have wanted to push the U.S. toward intervention in Iraq and take a firmer line with state supporters of terrorism, it simply was not politically possible until the clear and present danger presented itself. The arguments of Paul Wolfowitz and others were originally made in the early 1990s. They pressed for a more interventionist policy based on the threat to U.S. national security posed by inaction in the Greater Middle East, particularly in Iraq. One does not have to look any further than the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992 (co-authored by Mr. Wolfowitz), which in part advises removing the Saddam Hussein regime, to see the pattern. Others have long been advocating increased U.S. pressure on other regimes in the region, such as Iran and Syria. But it was not until September 11 that such a policy could have resonance in American public opinion.

There is also a strong misperception in Europe that the ideas ascribed to the neocons represent a small, extreme faction of the Republican Party. Although the so-called neocons may in general be Republicans, their ideas have a fair degree of approval within the ranks of the Democratic Party as well. In my own recollection, the first two individuals to promote the idea of military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power were both Democratic Party figures--one a retired congressman and the other a former Clinton administration official. It also bears repeating that 81 Democrats in the House voted in favor of authorizing the president to use military force in Iraq. Clearly there is more involved here than a handful of Rasputin-like ideologues whispering in the president's ear.

In truth, much of what has been identified as the neoconservative agenda has little to do with Republican versus Democrat; it is more a contest between realists and idealists--with the neocons firmly in the idealist camp. Realists are generally conservative in the true sense of the word. They do not seek to take risks to extend liberal democratic ideals. On the contrary, they seek to maintain American primacy and would not risk diluting finite resources to take on an enormous and protracted mission such as remaking the Middle East.

The realist school of thought contrasts sharply with the neoconservative camp, whose agenda would not be unfamiliar to Woodrow Wilson. He too sought to remake the international system from a position of relative strength, to spread democracy and the rule of law. It is true that today's crusaders are not about to place their trust in international institutions to do the job, but the basic ideals are similar in that they seek to use American power to reshape the global environment in the name of a set of liberal democratic ideals. It is their belief that this will make the United States more secure by reducing the seemingly intractable problems of the Middle East, thus getting at some of the root causes of terrorism. In taking up this banner, the neocons play into a very deep and old aspect of American political thought. This is why President Bush could speak for a large majority of the country when he set forth such an ambitious agenda based on their proposals.

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, JOE DiMAGGIO?:

A's blow another lead, lose to Indians: Rhodes melts in 2nd straight game as Cleveland sweeps (Josh Suchon, May 31, 2004, )

Pitcher Arthur Rhodes thought it was the third sign. Catcher Adam Melhuse thought it was the second sign. Rhodes threw a hard slider. Melhuse expected a cut fastball.

By the time Melhuse realized a different pitch was coming, it was too late. The ball was past him at the backstop, the winning run sliding home, and the Oakland Athletics found another painful way to lose a game.

In a game of bullpen meltdowns, the A's were handed two runs in their half of the ninth, then Rhodes gave two back as the Cleveland Indians completed a weekend sweep in their final at-bat to win 4-3 on Sunday before 24,005 fans at Jacobs Field. [...]

Rhodes' history with Vizquel may have played a role in his emotions. Three years ago, Vizquel asked Rhodes, then with Seattle, to remove his earring because the glare made it tough to see.

During a heated argument, Rhodes called Vizquel "a little midget" and was ejected. Rhodes later told reporters, "I'm not going to let a guy weighing 125 pounds tell me that I have to take off my earring."

HIGH, BUT INTENTIONALLY SO:

If you really want to reduce gas prices, here's how (BEN LIEBERMAN, 5/31/04, Chicago Sun-Times)

The nearly $10 per barrel rise in oil prices since the start of the year explains much of the nation's 2004 jump at the pump, from just over $1.50 to over $2 per gallon, but it does not explain all of it. That's because we can't put crude oil into our fuel tanks. First it must be refined into gasoline and diesel.

And it is at this step that costly regulations have pushed gas prices higher than necessary.

Under the Clean Air Act, refiners must adhere to strict requirements affecting the composition of motor fuels, and at the same time comply with tough provisions restricting refinery pollution. Both types of regulations have become more stringent in recent years. And several state-specific requirements have also complicated matters.

America has at least 15 different gasoline blends in use, in order to meet the hodgepodge of regulations. The fuel specifications get even tougher during the summer months, when several smog-fighting provisions kick in.

One of the most difficult summer blends to produce is the one required in Chicago. According to AAA, a gallon of regular gasoline currently averages $2.18 in Chicago, and $2.05 nationally.

At the same time that refiners struggle to produce gasoline that meets these requirements, they must also comply with a long and growing list of facility emissions controls. Due in part to this multi-billion dollar regulatory burden, no new domestic refinery has been built since 1976, and expansions of existing refineries has barely kept pace with growing demand. The Department of Energy predicts that gasoline demand will set a record this summer, but notes that "refinery capacity has not expanded significantly since last summer."

Few are inclined to shed tears over the plight of "big oil," but oil companies' high production costs and capacity restraints are hurting all of us, boosting the retail price of gas above and beyond the impact of crude oil costs.

BRACE FOR BLOWBACK:

Dem dispute may give GOP budget say (DAVE MCKINNEY, CHRIS FUSCO AND LESLIE GRIFFY, May 31, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

With their leaders going separate ways, Democrats fumed Sunday at the growing possibility of budget gridlock driving them into legislative overtime -- a prospect that could lift Republicans off state government's doormat.

Seemingly oblivious to the gravity all around her, Gov. Blagojevich's 8-year-old daughter Amy played volleyball with a staffer in a Capitol hall while her father was entangled in a behind-the-scenes political wrestling match with House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago).

As hope of a budget deal appeared to crash, sending the General Assembly out the door early during a rare Sunday session, an adjournment deadline looms today in a poisoned atmosphere where Democrats hold all the power but can't get along.

Senate President Emil Jones (D-Chicago) left the Capitol at 10 p.m. and summed up the situation in particularly bleak terms: "It's going to be a long, long year."

BIRTH OF A NATION:

Progress in Iraq: Consider the possibility, for a change, that on our Memorial Day, we have cause for cautious optimism. (WILLIAM SAFIRE, 5/31/04, NY Times)

Iyad Alawi is the Acceptable Arab. At the Ambrosetti conference in Italy last year, he and Adnan Pachachi — a Sunni in his 80's close to the Saudi royals — were the only Iraqis present. They spent most of their time in close consultation with Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League. Pachachi, whose exile ended with our overthrow of Saddam, was overtly ungrateful to the Americans.

Alawi, however, was noncommittal, so I plonked myself next to him at lunch and asked who was going to run Iraq after the U.S. left. He said only "I have a real political organization in Iraq." Mebbeso; at any rate, this tough-minded escapee from Saddam's assassins knows how to dicker with disparate colleagues and knew precisely when to make his move.

Present and former C.I.A. types, fresh from exacting their vengeance on their hated critic, Ahmad Chalabi, are telling media outlets that Alawi has always been their asset. This boasting by our leakiest intelligence agents is harmful to the presumptive prime minister because Alawi cannot let himself appear to be any outsider's puppet. But apparently some of our spooks feel that settling scores and falsely claiming credit takes precedence over U.S. and Iraqi interests.

Now the fast-fading three B's — Brahimi, Blackwill and Bremer — are joining with Alawi to put across Pachachi as figurehead president to appeal to the Arab League's Moussa. The Kurds, who have so far been outmaneuvered by Iraqi Arabs and, as usual, abandoned by our State department, prefer the younger Ghazi al-Yawar, sheik of the powerful Shamar Arab tribe and a businessman educated in the U.S.

The purpose of all this jockeying is to form an organization capable of holding an election in a country beset by Saddam loyalists and terrorists determined to block that election. This will take Iraqi politicians courageous enough to risk their lives, sensible enough to work closely with coalition generals to protect the voters from the killers, and persuasive enough to enlist many more Iraqis to join the fight for freedom.

By contrast, Congress authorized WWII in December 1941. American troops first landed in France in June 1944. The Federal Republic of Germany was created in 1949. That republic did not include East Germany, which we failed to liberate.

Guess which is called the Good War?

PRODUCTIVE MALAISE?:

What Studs Terkel's 'Working' Says About Worker Malaise Today: It is hard to read "Working," Studs Terkel's oral history of working life published 30 years ago, without thinking about what has gone wrong in the workplace. (ADAM COHEN, 5/31/04, NY Times)

There have been substantial productivity gains. But those gains have not found their way to paychecks. In a recent two-and-a-half-year period, corporate profits surged 87 percent, while wages rose just 4.5 percent. Not surprisingly, a study last fall by the Conference Board found that less than 49 percent of workers were satisfied with their jobs, down from 59 percent in 1995.

When "Working" was written, these trends were just visible on the horizon. A neighborhood druggist laments "the corner drugstore, that's kinda fadin' now," because little shops like his can't compete. "Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit," an editor says. "Jobs are not big enough for people."

When America begins to pay attention to its unhappy work force — and eventually, it must — "Working" will still provide important insights, with its path-breaking exploration of what Mr. Terkel described as "the extraordinary dreams of ordinary people."

LEARN THE LEFT:

Office Politics Give Liberal Radio a Rocky Start: Even by the chaotic standards of a new media company, Air America Radio's first two months of broadcasting have been convulsive. (JACQUES STEINBERG, 5/31/04, NY Times)

The fledgling talk-radio network has replaced five top executives, been taken off the air in two of its top three markets and lost several crucial producers. By late April, current and former executives said last week, the company was perilously close to running out of money. It has since received an infusion of cash, though it has not disclosed how much or from whom. [...]

Despite the intrigue concerning its management - and the abrupt pulling of its programming last month from stations in Chicago and Los Angeles, in a contract dispute - there are early indications that, where it can be heard, Air America is actually drawing listeners. WLIB-AM in New York City, one of 13 stations that carry at least part of Air America's 16 hours of original programming each day, even appears to be holding its own with WABC-AM, the New York City station and talk radio powerhouse that is Mr. Limbaugh's flagship.

For example, among listeners from 25 and 54, whom advertisers covet, the network estimates it drew an average listener share (roughly a percentage of listeners) of 3.4 on WLIB in April, from 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays, according to the company's extrapolation of figures provided by Arbitron for the three months ended in April. (Arbitron, which does not provide ratings in monthly increments, said the network's methodology appeared sound, although such figures were too raw to translate to numbers of listeners.)

By contrast, according to Air America's figures, WABC-AM drew an average share of 3.2 during the same period in April for the same age group. That time period includes the three hours in which Mr. Limbaugh was pitted head to head against Mr. Franken.

Phil Boyce, the program director of WABC , cautioned against drawing conclusions from preliminary data. "If they end up doing that well when the final number is out, which is two more months, I'll give them a congratulations," Mr. Boyce said.

While the network is awaiting the release of similar figures from Arbitron for other cities, KPOJ-AM, the Clear Channel station that carries its programming in Portland, Ore., informed Air America executives by an e-mail message in late April that its ratings appeared to have tripled last month, according to the station's informal survey. (A station executive, Mary Lou Gunn, did not return a telephone message left at her office on Friday.)

The network, which is also carried on the satellite radio providers XM and Sirius, has found an audience on the Internet. In its first week, listeners clicked on the audio programming on the Air America Web site more than two million times, according to RealNetworks, the digital media provider.

"It's clear the audience is there," Mr. Franken said.

EXCEPTION NATION:

The Challenge Of Secularism: It is no accident that the introduction of universal compulsory state education has coincided in time and place with the secularization of modern culture. (CHRISTOPHER DAWSON, 1956, Catholic World)

Where the whole educational system has been dominated by a consciously anti-religious ideology, as in the Communist countries, the plight of Christianity is desperate, and even if there were no persecution of religion on the ecclesiastical level, there would be little hope of its survival after two or three generations of universal Communist education. Here however the totalitarian state is only completing the work that the liberal state began, for already in the nineteenth century the secularization of education and the exclusion of positive Christian teaching from the school formed an essential part of the program of almost all the progressive, liberal and socialist parties everywhere.

Unfortunately, while universal secular education is an infallible instrument for the secularization of culture, the existence of a free system of religious primary education is not sufficient to produce a Christian culture. We know only too well how little effect the Catholic school has on modern secular culture and how easily the latter can assimilate and absorb the products of our educational system. The modern Leviathan is such a formidable monster that he can swallow religious schools whole without suffering from indigestion.

But this is not the case with higher education. The only part of Leviathan that is vulnerable is his brain, which is small in comparison with his vast and armored bulk. If we could develop Christian higher education to a point at which it meets the attention of the average educated man in every field of thought and life, the situation would be radically changed.

In the literary world something of this kind has already happened. During my lifetime Catholicism has come back into English literature, so that the literary critic can no longer afford to ignore it. But the literary world is a very small one and it does not reflect public opinion to anything like the degree that it did in Victorian times. The trouble is that our modern secular culture is sub-literary as well as sub-religious. The forces that affect it are in the West the great commercialized amusement industries and in the East the forces of political propaganda. And I do not think that Christianity can ever compete with these forms of mass culture on their own ground. If it does so, it runs the danger of becoming commercialized and politicized and thus of sacrificing its own distinctive values. I believe that Christians stand to gain more in the long run by accepting their minority position and looking for quality rather than quantity.

This does not mean that Catholicism should become an esoteric religion for the learned and the privileged. The minority is a religious minority and it is to be found in every class and at every intellectual level. So it was in the days of primitive Christianity and so it has been ever since.

The difference is that today the intellectual factor has become more vital than it ever was in the past. The great obstacle to the conversion of the modern world is the belief that religion has no intellectual significance; that it may be good for morals and satisfying to man's emotional needs, but that there is no such thing as religious knowledge. The only true knowledge is concerned with material things and with the concrete realities of social and economic life.

This is a pre-theological difficulty, for it is impossible to teach men even the simplest theological truths, if they believe that the creeds and the catechism are nothing but words and that religious knowledge is not really knowledge at all. On the other hand, I do not believe that it is possible to clear the difficulty away by straight philosophical argument, since the general public is philosophically illiterate and modern philosophy is becoming an esoteric specialism.

The only remedy is religious education in the widest sense of the word. That is to say a general introduction to the world of religious truth and the higher forms of spiritual reality. By losing sight of this world, modern secular culture has become more grievously impoverished than even the non-Christian cultures, for those cultures agreed in recognizing the existence of a higher supernatural or divine world on which human life was dependent.

Now the Christian world of the past was exceptionally well provided with ways of access to spiritual realities. Christian culture was essentially a sacramental culture which embodied religious truth in visible and palpable forms: art and architecture; music and poetry and drama, philosophy and history were all used as channels for the communication of religious truth. Today all these channels have been closed by unbelief or choked by ignorance, so that Christianity has been deprived of its natural means of outward expression and communication.

It is the task of Christian education to recover these lost contacts and to restore contact between religion and modern society — between the world of spiritual reality and the world of social experience.

THE DROPOUTS:

The real problem with Europe (Martin Walker, 5/31/2004, UPI)

Whatever happened to the European economies? Since 1990, the big three continental economies of Germany, France and Italy have grown at an average rate of less than 1.7 percent a year. By contrast, the United States grew almost twice as fast over the same period.

One result of this became strikingly clear last week when the German edition of the Financial Times published a league table of the world's 100 "most valuable" companies (which means ranked by market capitalization). Were it not for the British, whose refusal to join the euro currency renders them semi-detached, the Europeans would be dropping out of contention. [...]

No wonder that Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, in his appearance before the European Union's Economic and Social Committee last week lamented that Europe needed "a radical change."

Prodi was testifying on something called the Lisbon strategy, a highly ambitious plan drawn up at the EU summit in Lisbon in 2000 that was supposed to deliver the "most competitive economy in the world by 2010." The strategy called for liberalization of labor markets, intensified competition, Europe-wide coordination of education and skills training, and reform of corporation taxes and incentives for research. The "social partners," as the EU dubs the representatives of the EU's federations of labor unions and of employers, were to be brought into the process. And this was all to be combined with a budget and investment strategy that was supposed to unleash the talents of Europe and catch up -- and even overtake -- the great spurt the American economy had displayed in the 1990s.

Instead, the Lisbon strategy has become something of a joke.

NOT REALISTIK:

Freedom is taking root in Russia (Aleksander Lebedev, May 31, 2004, The Boston Globe)

THE CHANGES in Russia during the past 15 years have been brought about by the desire of the Russian people to have a better life. Although laced with imperfection, democratic changes have taken root in Russia, and we now have an elected parliament and a popularly elected president.We also have a multi-party system and claim to be tolerant of a pluralism of views and attitudes.

The economy is based on market values and private ownership. Russia voluntarily withdrew its troops from Eastern and Central Europe, and our nuclear weapons are no longer aimed at theWest.We have been assisting the United States in the war on terrorism, and few can downplay the significance of Russian-American cooperation in Afghanistan.

Domestically, Russia will soon undergo rapid economic growth. After the 1998 default the economy is growing at a steady rate. In 2003, economic growth was more than 7 percent of the GDP. The first quarter results of 2004 support these positive trends: GDP grew by 8 percent, and investment grew by 13 percent, while inflation was the lowest ever at 3.5 percent. Real income grew by 13.9 percent while net capital outflow was as low as $200 million.

It would be a mistake to try to attribute this growth only to higher prices on oil and other natural resources in the international markets. Yet to accelerate this growth we have to solve many problems. Most important is that we clear a path to development of private entrepreneurship. If we succeed in this, Russia will have a real chance to complete the historic economic reforms of the 1990s.

ONE WAY, MANY MEANS:

A Worn Road for U.N. Aide (DEXTER FILKINS, 5/31/04, NY Times)

When Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy, arrived earlier this month, he declared that he would crisscross Iraq to give the people a new government, one that he suggested would be more independent of America's heavy-handed ways.

Now, as Mr. Brahimi nears the end of his work, Iraqis are discovering that his task was not so simple.

With his slate of appointees expected to be announced in the next day or two, the appointments leaked so far suggest that what Mr. Brahimi ultimately accomplishes may turn out to be less a revolution than a rearrangement, less a new cast of characters than a reworked version of the same old faces.

The reason, Iraqis are beginning to say, has been the unexpected assertiveness of American officials and their allies on the Iraqi Governing Council, coupled with Mr. Brahimi's surprising passivity, after he was expected to have a free hand.

WE LET THE SERVANTS WORRY ABOUT BABIES

Careers curtailing children
(Anne Marie Owens, National Post, May 31st, 2004)

Canadian professional women are choosing not to have children, or severely limiting their number of offspring, because they do not believe they can have children and successful careers, according to new research that has significant implications for Canada's future labour market and economic consumption patterns.

Almost a third of female professionals and managers had no children at all and almost as many had just one child, with the majority of those surveyed indicating they made a conscious decision on how many children to have and stating their career was a major factor in that decision.

The number of women surveyed who had more than two children was extremely low: None of the women under the age of 31 had more than two children, and only 17 of the nearly 100 under the age of 38 had more than two children.

The study, which is to be released today by researchers at Carleton University's Sprott School of Business, provides one of the first insights into the behaviour and decision-making that is driving the international trend of declining fertility.

"This is a revolution in fertility," says Linda Duxbury, one of Canada's leading workplace experts and one of the authors of the study. "These professional women are making a conscious decision to limit family size because they know that organizations and government haven't responded.... They used to have the kids and worry about the career later. Now, they're worrying about the work first."

The researchers say their findings have significant societal implications because they show the impending labour-force shortage stemming from this declining fertility is largely a result of a conscious rejection by working women of workplace practices and government policies that have made the top professional careers incompatible with family life.

Debates about demographics often reflect an assumption that we are speaking of broad socio-economic forces or evolutionary imperatives cutting a wide swath through society. The tone of these debates leaves the impression that people largely make their choices unconsciously or in response to general forces over which they have little control, and that some sort of counter trends or equilibrium will set in as these change. They do not consider that demographic change can be a product of individual intelligent design that has little to do with the objective state of the world around them.

The article makes a half-hearted and predictable attempt to blame government and corporations for the lack of child-friendly policies. But the problem is a spiritual one that is reflected in the word “career”. People can have jobs, which are generally mundane, practical means to acquire the material needs that support what is really important to them. They can have vocations, which imply service and duty within certain defined and traditional parameters. But folks with careers believe the worth their lives is measured by their personal status, which requires a continuous, discernable advancement in power, wealth and prestige. Emotionally, they live for themselves and nothing–certainly not the messy, demanding life of family–can be allowed to stand in their way.

It is fine to point fingers at women, but, as with so many popular feminist causes, they are simply following trends set by men and are but a generation or two behind.

UN-ISLAMIC:

CLERICS CONDEMN KHOBAR CARNAGE (Ahmad Wahaj Al-Siddiqui, 5/31/04, The Saudi Gazette)

ISLAMIC scholars and high authorities condemned the deadly terrorist attacks at the Arabian Petroleum Investment Corp. residential compound in Al-Khobar.

It is most abhorring to kill innocent people who came to Saudi Arabia on its invitation to help build the country and who are under a covenant to get protection under Islamic order, the clerics said.

These criminal acts only strengthen the Zionists in their aggression against the Palestinians, they said.

Dr. Abdullah Abdul Mohsin Al-Turki, the Secretary General of the Muslim World League and member of the Supreme Council of Islamic clerics at Makkah, explained why terrorist acts have no place in Islam.

Islam came at a time when the world was a lawless state, he said. It is Islam that laid down the constitution to govern and brought peace and made every one including the ruler subservient to peace. This caused Islam to spread quickly. But now these terrorists are indulging in un-Islamic and inhuman acts of barbarism which no religion ever allows.

He appealed the people to cooperate with the authorities in achieving and maintaining peace in the Kingdom.

YOU BETTER THINK:

U.S.: China rethinking military strategy ROBERT BURNS, 5/30/04, AP)

The speed with which U.S. ground forces captured Baghdad and the prominent role played in Iraq by U.S. commandos, have led China to rethink how it could counteract the American military in the event of a confrontation over Taiwan, the Pentagon says.

The Chinese also believe, partly from its assessment of the Bush administration's declared war on terrorism, that the United States is increasingly likely to intervene in a conflict over Taiwan or other Chinese interests, according to the Pentagon analysis.

"Authoritative commentary and speeches by senior officials suggest that U.S. actions over the past decade ... have reinforced fears within the Chinese leadership that the United States would appeal to human rights and humanitarian concerns to intervene, either overtly or covertly," said the Pentagon.

WHAT ABOUT THE STEEL TARIFFS?:

Central America Free Trade Agreement (Cynthia Kirk, May 29, 2004, VOA)

The United States has signed a trade agreement with five Central American countries. The five are Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Trade ministers from the six countries signed the agreement in a ceremony Friday at the Washington headquarters of the Organization of American States. The new treaty is known as the Central America Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA.

The Dominican Republic is expected to join CAFTA at a later date. All seven countries will be included in the agreement when it is presented to the United States Congress for approval.

President Bush first announced his plan to negotiate a free trade agreement with Central American countries in two-thousand-two. The negotiations were completed at the end of last year.

WHERE THE WAR ENDS:

Senior Pro-Taliban Cleric Killed in Pakistani Port City (Reuters, May 30, 2004)

A senior pro-Taliban cleric in Pakistan was gunned down by unknown assailants outside his mosque in the port city of Karachi on Sunday and later died of his wounds, police and hospital sources said.

Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, who called for a holy war against the United States after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, was wounded along with three of his sons outside his mosque, police official Fayyaz Qureshi said.

MAKE TUBBY WALK

Actually, we eat less (Daily Telegraph, May 30th, 2004)

In fact, Britons are eating less than they used to. According to a study by the Royal College of General Practitioners, the food intake of the average Briton has declined by 750 calories a day over the past 30 years. The reason we are getting fatter is that we are doing less manual work and taking less exercise: we are burning off 800 fewer calories a day than we were in the early 1970s. For the decline in physical activity, especially among children, the Government has to take some of the blame. It has continued to allow school playing fields to be sold to developers and has introduced health and safety legislation which makes it more difficult for outdoor adventure courses to operate.

To accuse the food industry of promoting child obesity is to distract attention from these issues. But there is also a cultural reason why the manufacturers of crisps, chocolate bars and fizzy drinks get blamed for promoting obesity: they represent everything which the Left dislikes about globalisation. The main difference between the British diet now and that of 30 years ago is not that we eat more sugar and fat, as a visit to an old-fashioned greasy spoon will remind anyone; it is that we eat more branded foods. Wotsits are damned not just because, when eaten in excess, they make people fat but because they are produced by a multinational company and are marketed around the world in standardised form.

While the availability of many forms of junk food has certainly increased over the past generation, so too have the opportunities to eat well. Whereas the greengrocer of 30 years ago offered a limited range of yellowing cauliflower and frozen peas, today's supermarket brims with fresh fruit and vegetables from all over the world. Thanks to the globalised food industry, it is possible now to buy leaner meat than 30 years ago, to buy olive oil as well as butter, skimmed milk as well as full cream. Moreover, food manufacturers now offer hugely detailed nutritional information, including calorie counts, on their packets: something which they never used to do.

Clearly, not all Britons are making wise decisions about what they eat, but to lay the charge of promoting obesity at the door of the food industry is the easy way out. Those who get fat have themselves to blame above anyone else.

Or their parents. If children were compelled to walk to and from school, to play outside all day on weekends and to pay for their own treats out of a modest allowance, there would presumably be a sharp decline in childhood obesity. Yet somehow many modern parents have let themselves be convinced that the first is dangerous, the second oppressive and the third mean. More and more they see exercise as a scheduled event to be undertaken only on consent. Having lost control over the matter, they find it much easier to direct their wrath at an imagined corporate conspiracy and teach their children to be neurotic about food.

Scientists and lawyers know a good deal when they see one and are persuading millions that we all ate a diet based upon fruits and vegetables and unrefined grains in the good old days. Those of us who can remember the typical huge breakfasts, rich desserts, school lunches, fatty meats and gravies, creamy milks, syrupy canned fruits, sugar-laden juices and soft drinks and ubiquitous cakes and pies of the 50's and 60's may wonder how we possibly managed to avoid the very real tragedy afflicting so many of our children.

STOCK UP ON YOUR SUMMER READING:

Conservative Classics Outlet (ISI)

and FROM THE ARCHIVES:
Brothers Judd Recommended Summer Reading

WHERE MY PEEPS AT?:

Christian Cool and the New Generation Gap (JOHN LELAND, 5/16/04, NY Times)

FOR evidence of generational upheaval these days, you might skip over the usual suspects - sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll - and consider instead the church.

Two decades after baby boomers invented the suburban megachurch, which removed intimidating crosses or stained-glass images of Jesus in favor of neutral environments, their children are now wearing "Jesus Is My Homeboy" T-shirts.

As mainline churches scramble to retain young people, these worshipers have gained attention by creating alternative churches in coffee bars and warehouses and publishing new magazines and Bibles that come on as anything but church.

But does a T-shirt really serve the faith? And if religion is our link to the timeless, what does it mean that young Christians replace their parents' practices?

The movement "has a noble side," said Michael Novak, the conservative theologian at the American Enterprise Institute. He himself remembers how much he enjoyed the Christian comic books of his youth. He compared the alt-evangelicals to missionaries, who "feel they've learned something valuable from their faith and want to share it" using the native language.

"But in boiling it down, trying to make it relevant, you leave out the hard edges and the complicated points," he said. "You make the faith less than it is."

Yet for many in this generation, the worship of their parents feels impersonal - not bigger than their daily, media-intensified lives, but smaller. Their search is for unfiltered religious experience.

"My generation is discontent[ed] with dead religion," said Cameron Strang, 28, founder of Relevant Media, which produces Christian books, a Web site and Relevant magazine, a stylish 70,000-circulation bimonthly that addresses topics like body piercing, celibacy, extreme prayer, punk rock and God.

"We don't want to show up on Sunday, sing two hymns, hear a sermon and go home," Mr. Strang said. "The Bible says we're supposed to die for this thing. If I'm going to do that, this has to be worth something. Our generation wants a tangible experience of God who is there."

NOT LEBANON:

Deadlock Seen on Presidency in Iraqi Talks (DEXTER FILKINS and STEVEN R. WEISMAN, 5/30/04, NY Times)

American, Iraqi and United Nations officials deadlocked Saturday over the selection of an Iraqi president, even as they appeared to strike a deal over the most important cabinet ministers for the new government that is to take over on July 1.

On one side of the deadlock are the United Nations envoy, Lakdar Brahimi, and the chief American administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, who are backing the former foreign minister, Adnan Pachachi. Leaders of the Iraqi Governing Council support a rival, Sheik Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar. Both men are Sunnis.

Some Iraqi officials said Saturday that Mr. Brahimi had reached agreements with Mr. Bremer and Iraqi leaders on six important cabinet positions. Two people close to the Iraqi Governing Council said Mr. Brahimi had reached agreements to name three Shiites, two Kurds and one Sunni to high-level jobs in the cabinet. That mix reflects the ethnic and religious balancing act under way.

According to these sources, the two Kurds were Barham Salih, who would become the foreign minister, and Hoshyar Zebari, who would be named the defense minister. The Kurds, deprived of the top jobs of prime minister and president, would get these two important cabinet posts. Three members of the majority Shiite population would be in line for the cabinet: Adel Abdul Mahdi as the finance minister, Thamir Ghadbhan as the oil minister, and Dr. Raja Khuzaie as the health minister.

In addition to the president being a Sunni Arab, the last of the six cabinet officials mentioned would also be Sunni: Samir Sumaidy, who stands to become the interior minister.

The stage appears set for a showdown on the presidency on Sunday.

American officials say they are backing Mr. Pachachi in large part because they believe he would adhere to the interim constitution that was hammered out earlier this year and is meant to guide the new government until elections are held.

FORCING THE SAUDIS INTO THE WoT:

Hostages Released After Standoff in Saudi Arabia (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 5/30/04)

Saudi forces freed dozens of American and other foreign hostages Sunday after a shooting rampage turned into a daylong standoff with Islamic militants at an expatriate resort. A Saudi security official said the lead attacker was in custody and two other suspects were being arrested.

Saudi officials would not comment on the condition of the hostages. However, a diplomat in Khobar said officials told him there were deaths among the hostages and attackers. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said he did not know how many hostages were dead, but was informed that two gunmen were killed.

At least 10 others -- including an American -- died in the attack claimed by an al-Qaida-linked group that began Saturday morning when gunmen in military-style dress opened fire on security forces at two oil industry compounds in Khobar, 250 miles northeast of Riyadh.

The assailants -- believed to number up to seven -- then fled up the street, taking some 45-60 hostages in a high-rise housing mainly foreigners.

THE HIGH FEELING LOW:

The Literary Divide (Anne Applebaum, April 7, 2004, Washington Post)

At the National Book Awards ceremony last fall, a special lifetime achievement award was given to the horror writer -- and mass-market success -- Stephen King. He returned the favor with a slap in the face. In an extraordinary acceptance speech, he claimed that he had been snubbed all of his life by snooty critics; that wonderful writers such as John Grisham were regularly ignored by snobbish prize committees; and that never, ever in his entire life had he written a word for money.

But most people do write for money. How else would we survive? As long ago as the 18th century, Samuel Johnson declared that it would be idiotic to imagine otherwise: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Only people like Stephen King, whose best-selling novels are regularly made into popular movies, don't need to think about money: He employs an accountant to do that. It's hardly surprising that he's resented, even snubbed, by authors like the anonymous, self-described "critically acclaimed mid-list writer" who wrote a long, painful description of her career ups and downs -- four published books, good reviews, middling sales, waves of rejections thanks to middling sales and, finally, a decision to take another job -- in Salon last month, causing a minor sensation.

There are, it is true, still a few "crossover" writers, mostly writers of excellent popular books about American history, and one or two novelists. But my sense is that their numbers are shrinking, that there's almost no more middle ground. Popular culture now hates high culture so much that it campaigns aggressively against it. High culture now fears popular culture so much that it insulates itself deliberately from it. As for the rest of us -- we're inundated with the former, often alienated from the latter. And if we write books, we skulk about checking our Amazon rankings, wondering whether CNN might possibly have put our names in tiny print at the bottom of the screen, and feeling dazed -- and extremely grateful -- when we win prizes.

OUTSIDE THE BOX:

Where to Get a Good Idea: Steal It Outside Your Group (MICHAEL ERARD, 5/22/04, NY Times)

Got a good idea? Now think for a moment where you got it. A sudden spark of inspiration? A memory? A dream?

Most likely, says Ronald S. Burt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, it came from someone else who hadn't realized how to use it.

"The usual image of creativity is that it's some sort of genetic gift, some heroic act," Mr. Burt said. "But creativity is an import-export game. It's not a creation game."

Mr. Burt has spent most of his career studying how creative, competitive people relate to the rest of the world, and how ideas move from place to place. Often the value of a good idea, he has found, is not in its origin but in its delivery. His observation will undoubtedly resonate with overlooked novelists, garage inventors and forgotten geniuses who pride themselves on their new ideas but aren't successful in getting them noticed. "Tracing the origin of an idea is an interesting academic exercise, but it's largely irrelevant," Mr. Burt said. "The trick is, can you get an idea which is mundane and well known in one place to another place where people would get value out of it."

Mr. Burt, whose latest findings will appear in the American Journal of Sociology this fall, studied managers in the supply chain of Raytheon, the large electronics company and military contractor based in Waltham, Mass., where he worked until last year. Mr. Burt asked managers to write down their best ideas about how to improve business operations and then had two executives at the company rate their quality. It turned out that the highest-ranked ideas came from managers who had contacts outside their immediate work group. The reason, Mr. Burt said, is that their contacts span what he calls "structural holes," the gaps between discrete groups of people.

"People who live in the intersection of social worlds," Mr. Burt writes, "are at higher risk of having good ideas."

People with cohesive social networks, whether offices, cliques or industries, tend to think and act the same, he explains. In the long run, this homogeneity deadens creativity. As Mr. Burt's research has repeatedly shown, people who reach outside their social network not only are often the first to learn about new and useful information, but they are also able to see how different kinds of groups solve similar problems.

NO, NOT THAT PEOPLES’ CHOICE!

British-educated surgeon is new Iraqi prime minister (Luke Harding, Michael Howard and Julian Borger, The Guardian, May 29, 2004)

A British-educated neurosurgeon who spent 30 years in exile in Britain, and who has close links with both the CIA and MI6, was named as Iraq's new interim prime minister last night.

Ayad Allawi, 58, the head of the Iraqi National Accord (INA), emerged as Iraq's surprise new leader after weeks of speculation and intrigue.

Earlier this year the INA said it had provided "in good faith" the raw intelligence from a single source that was used to support the claim that Saddam Hussein was able to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of the order.

The INA said later it had presumed that MI6 would verify the claim. [...]

Other observers were also enthusiastic. Laith Kubba, a veteran Iraqi liberal who is now at the US-based National Endowment for Democracy, said Dr Allawi would be a unifying choice. "He has reached out to Sunni and Shia as well as Kurds."

However, Dr Allawi's close links to US and British intelligence agencies will not make him a popular choice for many ordinary Iraqis. [...]

The Iraqi resistance is likely to dismiss Dr Allawi as an American stooge and try to kill him.

So, Ba'athists and terrorists are now the "Iraqi resistance". It isn't very hard to figure out what the Left's worst nightmare is.

WINNING THE WoT:

Bush Points the Way: President Bush scored a humanitarian victory in Sudan this
week, but unfortunately it is not far-reaching enough. (NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, 5/29/04, NY Times)

I doff my hat, briefly, to President Bush.

Sudanese peasants will be naming their sons "George Bush" because he scored a humanitarian victory this week that could be a momentous event around the globe — although almost nobody noticed. It was Bush administration diplomacy that led to an accord to end a 20-year civil war between Sudan's north and south after two million deaths.

If the peace holds, hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved, millions of refugees will return home, and a region of Africa may be revived.

But there's a larger lesson here as well: messy African wars are not insoluble, and Western pressure can help save the day. So it's all the more shameful that the world is failing to exert pressure on Sudan to halt genocide in its Darfur region. Darfur is unaffected by the new peace accords. [...]

Yet while Mr. Bush has done far too little, he has at least issued a written statement, sent aides to speak forcefully at the U.N. and raised the matter with Sudan's leaders. That's more than the Europeans or the U.N. has done. Where are Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac? Where are African leaders, like Nelson Mandela? Why isn't John Kerry speaking out forcefully? And why are ordinary Americans silent?

Islamic leaders abroad have been particularly shameful in standing with the Sudanese government oppressors rather than with the Muslim victims in Darfur. Do they care about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?

FLYOVER TERRITORY:

Calling All Ids: Freudians at War (D. D GUTTENPLAN, May 29, 2004, NY Times)

Who owns psychoanalysis? That question is at the center of the most recent battle here in the Freud Wars, the epic (or as the man himself might say, interminable) struggle over the legacy of Sigmund Freud, pioneer psychotherapist, cartographer of the unconscious and former resident of Hampstead, the leafy corner of Northwest London where the concentration of therapeutic couches per square mile may be even higher than on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Late last year a new group calling itself the College of Psychoanalysts sent out a letter inviting British therapists who met certain qualifications to list themselves on the organization's "register of practitioners." The British Psychoanalytical Society, headquarters of classical Freudian analysis, responded with a statement accusing college members of "misleading the public about their training and qualifications." And then the fireworks really started. One founder of the college — which is a professional organization rather than a training institution — countered with a letter describing the society's action as "a phobic response to growth as symbolized in the Oedipal myth." An opponent of the college, on the other hand, described the new group as "an association of wannabes and poseurs."

More recently, the society's Web site included a disclaimer describing the college as a device for allowing therapists "to pass themselves off to the public as though they were trained psychoanalysts." In British law, "passing off" is a form of fraud; this was a declaration of war.

Susie Orbach, a therapist, an active member of the college and the author of the best-selling "Fat Is a Feminist Issue" and other books, says the dispute has already had "a chilling effect" on British intellectual life. To her, the society's argument that the title psychoanalyst "refers not to what the practitioner does, but what they have been trained to do" is nonsensical, a spurious restraint on trade.

"I do the work," she said. "My contributions are contributions to psychoanalysis, its theory and clinical practice, not to some other field."

On the surface, this is a parochial argument about labels and credentials, a tempest in a Viennese teacup — or at most, a professional turf war. But you don't have to probe the protagonists too deeply to discover that this is also a battle over the nature of therapy itself — what it is, what it does, how it works. And it quickly becomes apparent that alongside the intellectual controversy is a bare knuckles fight over money, power and prestige. These people, after all, are professionals of the ego.

WHEN ARABISTS ATTACK:

Conservative Allies Take Chalabi Case to the White House (ELISABETH BUMILLER, 5/29/04, NY Times)

Influential outside advisers to the Bush administration who support the Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi are pressing the White House to stop what one has called a "smear campaign" against Mr. Chalabi, whose Baghdad home and offices were ransacked last week in an American-supported raid.

Last Saturday, several of these Chalabi supporters said, a small delegation of them marched into the West Wing office of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to complain about the administration's abrupt change of heart about Mr. Chalabi and to register their concerns about the course of the war in Iraq. The group included Richard N. Perle, the former chairman of a Pentagon advisory group, and R. James Woolsey, director of central intelligence under President Bill Clinton.

Members of the group, who had requested the meeting, told Ms. Rice that they were incensed at what they view as the vilification of Mr. Chalabi, a favorite of conservatives who is now central to an F.B.I. investigation into who in the American government might have given him highly classified information that he is suspected of turning over to Iran.

Mr. Chalabi has denied that he provided Iran with any classified information.

The session with Ms. Rice was one sign of the turmoil that Mr. Chalabi's travails have produced within an influential corner of Washington, where Mr. Chalabi is still seen as a potential leader of Iraq.

"There is a smear campaign under way, and it is being perpetrated by the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. and a gaggle of former intelligence officers who have succeeded in planting these stories, which are accepted with hardly any scrutiny," Mr. Perle, a leading conservative, said in an interview.

Mr. Perle, referring to both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the campaign against Mr. Chalabi was "an outrageous abuse of power" by United States government officials in Washington and Baghdad.

GREED HAS NO POLITICS:

US and the EU: an economic love affair (Richard Carter, 5/28/04, EUObserver)

Despite political tensions and periodic trade disputes, the economic ties between the EU and the US are closer and deeper than ever, argues a new report presented today (28 May) at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. [...]

The report says: "even though US-German relations ebbed to one of their lowest levels since World War II, American firms sank $7 billion in Germany in 2003, a sharp reversal from 2002, when US firms pulled some $5 billion out of Germany".

US investment flows to France also jumped by ten percent last year despite a general decline in Franco-US relations.

And there was more French investment into the state of Texas than the combined total of US investment into China and Asia.

SOCIAL SCIENCE ADVANCES:

"Money, Sex, and Happiness: An Empirical Study" (David G. Blanchflower, Dartmouth College Dept of Economics, and Andrew J. Oswald, University of Warwick Dept. of Economics)

The happiness-maximizing number of sexual partners in the previous year is calculated to be 1.

BACK TO BASICS:

The rule of law: a new prime minister in Baghdad, and an old role model (The Daily Star, May 29, 2004)

Iraq has a prime minister in waiting. On Friday, the Iraqi Governing Council unanimously endorsed Iyad Allawi, a British-educated neurologist, in the post, which will take effect on June 30 when US rule through the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) ends.

This represents the beginning of a new era for Iraq, and a heavy burden will rest on the shoulders of the new prime minister. It will be in his job description to be a symbol of renewal, and there will be those, as we have seen, who will do their utmost to make his task as difficult as possible.

The immediate challenge is to muster momentum among Iraqis to push the United States, the United Nations and all other influential players in the unfolding Iraq drama to work toward developing and then implementing a comprehensive legal system for Iraq. [...]

At this juncture it should be remembered that Iraq, in its ancient Mesopotamian incarnation, was the land that gave the world the first written code of laws in human history - the code of Hammurabi, c.1700 BC. Hammurabi was the sixth king of the Amorite Dynasty of Old Babylon.

Allawi has much work to do, and he must begin now. If Hammurabi can be a source of inspiration, then all the better. If Iraq succeeds in the enormous task that lies ahead - and a tragedy for the world it will be if it does not - then instituting the rule of law will be a foundation stone of that success. And, in so doing, Iraq will set an example for the other states of the Middle East that still have much to learn about the rule of law.

EBONY & IVORY:

The Connection: The collaboration of Iraq and al Qaeda. (Stephen F. Hayes, 06/07/2004, Weekly Standard)

In late February 2004, Christopher Carney made an astonishing discovery. Carney, a political science professor from Pennsylvania on leave to work at the Pentagon, was poring over a list of officers in Saddam Hussein's much-feared security force, the Fedayeen Saddam. One name stood out: Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. The name was not spelled exactly as Carney had seen it before, but such discrepancies are common. Having studied the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda for 18 months, he immediately recognized the potential significance of his find. According to a report last week in the Wall Street Journal, Shakir appears on three different lists of Fedayeen officers.

An Iraqi of that name, Carney knew, had been present at an al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on January 5-8, 2000. U.S. intelligence officials believe this was a chief planning meeting for the September 11 attacks. Shakir had been nominally employed as a "greeter" by Malaysian Airlines, a job he told associates he had gotten through a contact at the Iraqi embassy. More curious, Shakir's Iraqi embassy contact controlled his schedule, telling him when to show up for work and when to take a day off.

A greeter typically meets VIPs upon arrival and accompanies them through the sometimes onerous procedures of foreign travel. Shakir was instructed to work on January 5, 2000, and on that day, he escorted one Khalid al Mihdhar from his plane to a waiting car. Rather than bid his guest farewell at that point, as a greeter typically would have, Shakir climbed into the car with al Mihdhar and accompanied him to the Kuala Lumpur condominium of Yazid Sufaat, the American-born al Qaeda terrorist who hosted the planning meeting.

The meeting lasted for three days. Khalid al Mihdhar departed Kuala Lumpur for Bangkok and eventually Los Angeles. Twenty months later, he was aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it plunged into the Pentagon at 9:38 A.M. on September 11. So were Nawaf al Hazmi and his younger brother, Salem, both of whom were also present at the Kuala Lumpur meeting.

Six days after September 11, Shakir was captured in Doha, Qatar. He had in his possession contact information for several senior al Qaeda terrorists: Zahid Sheikh Mohammed, brother of September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi who helped mix the chemicals for the first World Trade Center attack and was given safe haven upon his return to Baghdad; and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, otherwise known as Abu Hajer al Iraqi, described by one top al Qaeda detainee as Osama bin Laden's "best friend."

Despite all of this, Shakir was released. On October 21, 2001, he boarded a plane for Baghdad, via Amman, Jordan. He never made the connection. Shakir was detained by Jordanian intelligence. Immediately following his capture, according to U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence on Shakir, the Iraqi government began exerting pressure on the Jordanians to release him. Some U.S. intelligence officials--primarily at the CIA--believed that Iraq's demand for Shakir's release was pro forma, no different from the requests governments regularly make on behalf of citizens detained by foreign nationals. But others, pointing to the flurry of phone calls and personal appeals from the Iraqi government to the Jordanians, disagreed. This panicked reaction, they say, reflected an interest in Shakir at the highest levels of Saddam Hussein's regime.

CIA officials who interviewed Shakir in Jordan reported that he was generally uncooperative. But even in refusing to talk, he provided some important information: The interrogators concluded that his evasive answers reflected counterinterrogation techniques so sophisticated that he had probably learned them from a government intelligence service. Shakir's nationality, his contacts with the Iraqi embassy in Malaysia, the keen interest of Baghdad in his case, and now the appearance of his name on the rolls of Fedayeen officers--all this makes the Iraqi intelligence service the most likely source of his training.

The Jordanians, convinced that Shakir worked for Iraqi intelligence, went to the CIA with a bold proposal: Let's flip him. That is, the Jordanians would allow Shakir to return to Iraq on the condition that he agree to report back on the activities of Iraqi intelligence. And, in one of the most egregious mistakes by the U.S. intelligence community after September 11, the CIA agreed to Shakir's release. He posted a modest bail and returned to Iraq.

He hasn't been heard from since.

WHO ARE THEY TO PICK THEIR OWN LEADERS...:

U.S., U.N. Blindsided on Iraq PM Announcement (Caren Bohan, 5/28/04, Reuters)

When word surfaced in Baghdad on Friday that Iyad Allawi would lead Iraq's interim government, confusion reigned both in Washington and at the United Nations, despite President Bush's assurances of an orderly handover.

For weeks, the Bush administration has described the selection of the interim government as a process that was being spearheaded by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi in consultation with the United States and Iraqis.

Bush, in a major address on Monday, laid out a step by step plan that he said would lead to Iraqi sovereignty on June 30.

But it was the U.S. appointed-Iraqi Governing Council and an aide to Allawi who first disclosed his selection to the top job in the transitional Iraqi government.

Nearly three hours later Brahimi gave his endorsement to Allawi through a spokesman. It took a full three additional hours for a senior administration official in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity, to confirm that Allawi would be interim prime minister.

"He will be the prime minister when the interim government is set up in the next two or three days," the official told reporters in a conference telephone call. "We thought he would be an excellent prime minister. ... I think that this is going to work."

MORE:
Surprising Choice for Premier of Iraq Reflects U.S. Influence: In the choice of Iyad Alawi for prime minister of Iraq, the United Nations found itself appearing shoved aside by the U.S. (WARREN HOGE and STEVEN R. WEISMAN, 5/29/04, NY Times)

Statements from the United Nations seemingly confirmed the idea that Mr. Brahimi was merely bowing to the wishes of the others.

"Mr. Brahimi respects the decision and says he can work with this person," Fred Eckhard, the spokesman for Secretary General Kofi Annan, said in response to a barrage of skeptical questioning. Asked what Mr. Annan's view was, Mr. Eckhard said: "The secretary general respects the decision, as I said Mr. Brahimi does. `Respect' is a very carefully chosen word."

Some time later, perhaps because of the skepticism that comment engendered, a less circumspect statement was issued in the name of Ahmad Fawzi, Mr. Brahimi's press spokesman, saying: "Let there be no misunderstanding. Mr. Brahimi is perfectly comfortable with how the process is proceeding thus far."

In a telephone interview from Baghdad, Mr. Brahimi refused to discuss the selection of Dr. Alawi. "I don't want to go back saying who is good and who is bad," he said.

But in a hint that the selection process had not gone exactly as planned, Mr. Brahimi added, "You know, sometimes people think I am a free agent out here, that I have a free hand to do whatever I want." He noted that he had been asked to take on the job in a letter to Mr. Annan from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and the Iraqi Governing Council.

SOCIALLY PURPOSELESS PLEASURES

On American Morals (G.K. Chesterton)

Incidentally, I must say I can bear witness to this queer taboo about tobacco. Of course numberless Americans smoke numberless cigars; a great many others eat cigars, which seems to me a more occult pleasure. But there does exist an extraordinary idea that ethics are involved in some way; and many who smoke really disapprove of smoking. I remember once receiving two American interviewers on the same afternoon; there was a box of cigars in front of me and I offered one to each in turn. Their reaction (as they would probably call it) was very curious to watch. The first journalist stiffened suddenly and silently and declined in a very cold voice. He could not have conveyed more plainly that I had attempted to corrupt an honorable man with a foul and infamous indulgence; as if I were the Old Man of the Mountain offering him hashish that would turn him into an assassin. The second reaction was even more remarkable. The second journalist first looked doubtful; then looked sly; then seemed to glance about him nervously, as if wondering whether we were alone, and then said with a sort of crestfallen and covert smile: `Well, Mr. Chesterton, I'm afraid I have the habit.'

As I also have the habit, and have never been able to imagine how it could be connected with morality or immorality, I confess that I plunged with him deeply into an immoral life. In the course of our conversation, I found he was otherwise perfectly sane. He was quite intelligent about economics or architecture; but his moral sense seemed to have entirely disappeared. He really thought it rather wicked to smoke. He had no `standard of abstract right or wrong'; in him it was not merely moribund; it was apparently dead. But anyhow, that is the point and that is the test. Nobody who has an abstract standard of right and wrong can possibly think it wrong to smoke a cigar. But he had a concrete standard of particular cut and dried customs of a particular tribe. Those who say Americans are largely descended from the American Indians might certainly make a case out of the suggestion that this mystical horror of material things is largely a barbaric sentiment. The Red Indian is said to have tried and condemned a tomahawk for committing a murder. In this case he was certainly the prototype of the white man who curses a bottle because too much of it goes into a man. Prohibition is sometimes praised for its simplicity; on these lines it may be equally condemned for its savagery. But I myself do not say anything so absurd as that Americans are savages; nor do I think it would matter much if they were descended from savages. It is culture that counts and not ethnology; and the culture that is concerned here derives indirectly rather from New England than from Old America. Whatever it derives from, however, this is the thing to be noted about it: that it really does not seem to understand what is meant by a standard of right and wrong. It is a vague sentimental notion that certain habits were not suitable to the old log cabin or the old hometown. It has a vague utilitarian notion that certain habits are not directly useful in the new amalgamated stores or the new financial gambling-hell. If his aged mother or his economic master dislikes to see a young man hanging about with a pipe in his mouth, the action becomes a sin; or the nearest that such a moral philosophy can come to the idea of a sin. A man does not chop wood for the log hut by smoking; and a man does not make dividends for the Big Boss by smoking; and therefore smoking has a smell as of something sinful. Of what the great theologians and moral philosophers have meant by a sin, these people have no more idea than a child drinking milk has of a great toxicologist analyzing poisons. It may be a credit of their virtue to be thus vague about vice. The man who is silly enough to say, when offered a cigarette, `I have no vices,' may not always deserve the rapier-thrust of the reply given by the Italian Cardinal, `It is not a vice, or doubtless you would have it.' But at least the Cardinal knows it is not a vice; which assists the clarity of his mind. But the lack of clear standards among those who vaguely think of it as a vice may yet be the beginning of much peril and oppression. My two American journalists, between them, may yet succeed in adding the sinfulness of cigars to the other curious things now part of the American Constitution.

THE ONLY QUESTION IS HOW MANY OF THEM HAVE TO DIE:

Cold feet and cold beers (Zev Chafets, 5/28/04, Jewish World Review)

Many of the politicians and commentators who beat the drums for invading Iraq have begun beating their breasts instead. They didn't bargain for the pictures from Abu Ghraib or reports of the accidental slaughter of innocent villagers.

They didn't think about how unpopular war would make them with the friends of their enemies or how unpleasant it would be to watch the evening news. They no longer want to be associated with war's terrible inevitabilities.

Their sudden scrupulousness is not a badge of moral superiority. On the contrary, it is a mark of cowardice and a sign of bad character. Every grownup who supported sending troops to Iraq (and Afghanistan) knew that they would wind up unintentionally killing or injuring some civilians and abusing the rights of others. The question was, and remains: Is the war worthwhile despite what it entails?

The answer, at least in my opinion, is yes. The worldwide fight against Islamic fascism — whose hottest theaters are presently Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza — is a good cause in the same way that World War II was a good cause.

It is not about payback for 9/11 or other acts of terrorism. Rather, it is a wholly necessary struggle against a debased, xenophobic and aggressive ideology.

This war can be won, but only with patience and self-confidence and the willingness to inflict as much punishment as necessary. In other words, in cold blood.

GONE NATIVE:

The same old song: As war news turns sour, critics point their fingers at who else — the Jews (Jonathan Tobin, May 28, 2004, Jewish World Review)

[Marine Gen. Anthony C.] Zinni rose briefly to fame in 2002 during a brief stint as Washington's envoy to the Middle East, an experience that gave new meaning to the word fiasco. The man was so ineffective that the post itself was obsolescent. The general who'd helped inflame Arab expectations that the U.S. would pressure Israel to appease Palestinian terrorists dropped from the public eye.

But there's no keeping a publicity-hungry ex-military man down. Zinni used the commencement of the war in Iraq to begin to try and even the score with his political foes inside the Pentagon. This campaign of self-aggrandizement via anti-war rhetoric has now reached its climax with the publication of a book (co-authored by techno-thriller maven Tom Clancy), coupled with the "60 Minutes" interview.

Correspondent Steve Croft played right into Zinni's hands as he described the Iraq invasion planners as "a group of policymakers within the administration known as 'the neoconservatives,' who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel.

They include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; Former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle; National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter" Libby.'

Following in the footsteps of other media outlets, including Business Week, that have played the same tune, Croft managed to list only those members of the administration who are Jewish. That's a neat trick when you remember that neither Bush, Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld nor any member of the Cabinet is Jewish. Nor did he mention the fact that a broad cross-section of the defense and intelligence establishment viewed Iraq and Saddam Hussein as threats to U.S. security and to the security of "moderate" Arab states.

Responding to previous criticisms of his singling out Jews, Zinni stretched his thin supply of credibility to the breaking point: "Because I mentioned the neoconservatives … I was called anti-Semitic. I certainly didn't criticize who they were. I certainly don't know what their ethnic religious backgrounds are. And I'm not interested."

Given the confrontational culture of the "60 Minutes" genre, you would have expected Croft to nail Zinni for uttering such disingenuous tripe. At the very least, you would expect a follow-up question. But just because he plays "journalist" on television — like the rest of "60 Minutes" on-screen celebrities — doesn't mean he actually practices the craft of journalism. Zinni was allowed to get away with not only spreading a whopper of a lie, he wasn't even challenged to defend it.

Zinni's screed is, of course, just the tip of a growing anti-Semitic iceberg that stands ready to sink public discourse on the war into a morass of hate.

WHO'LL CUT THE CONGRESSMAN'S LAWN?:

Immigrants Drain $30 Billion in Cash Annually (Joseph A. D'Agostino, May 28, 2004, Human Events)

"Technological advances in communication and data transfer--and a surge in labor mobility--have fueled enormous growth in remittances," Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Samuel Bodman said at a May 17 conference at which a new study on remittances was released. "Since 1995, annual remittances from the United States have nearly doubled. . . . In recognition of the importance of remittances around the world, the G7 is committed to facilitating remittance transfers and increasing options available to recipients to help them improve their own economic livelihood. This is a top priority issue for this year's G8 Summit to be held in Sea Island, Georgia, next month."

The study, based on a survey of 3,800 Latin American immigrants living in the United States conducted by Bendixen & Associates, found that legal and illegal immigrants send a combined $30 billion annually to their home countries. Mexico alone receives $13.3 billion a year. [...]

"It's money flowing out of some of the poorest communities of the United States," said Steve Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies. Camarota said that statistics on remittances are hard to generate accurately due to the large number of illegal immigrants in the United States and to the "informal banking arrangements" that often serve as conduits for money sent home. He said there was no reliable way of estimating how much of the $30 billion was taxed by the United States and how much went under the radar screen. "It's certainly not being taxed in the way money spent here would be in sales taxes, etc," he said. "Roughly half of what illegals make is on the books and half off."

Asked if remittances were helping poor Latin American countries stay afloat, Camarota replied, "Does it stymie development in the home country? Everyone sees their economic future dependent on immigration to the United States."

"It encourages governments in other countries to push harder and harder for open borders," said Rep. Tom Tancredo (R.-Colo.), chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus. "They want those funds to keep flowing."

In fact, Georgetown Prof. Manuel Orozco reported in a presentation to the Inter-American Development Bank on Sep. 17, 2002, that Haiti depends on remittances for 24.5% of its GDP, El Salvador for 17%, Nicaragua for 22%, Jamaica for 15%, the Dominican Republic for 10%, and Mexico for 1.7%. Since $30 billion out of Latin America's total remittance receipts of $38 billion come from the United States, these countries are heavily dependent on immigrants to America.

(via Robert Schwartz):

Calm Down. That Wolf at the Door Has Been Here Before. (BEN STEIN, 5/23/04, NY Times)

One of the best antidotes to fear is to consult with reality. Another is to consult with experience. On both counts, there is a certain amount of cause for optimism.

For one thing, we are in the middle of a powerful recovery from the slowdown that began in 2000 or 2001. Corporate profits have reached historical highs. The stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones industrials and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, is at a more sensible level, compared with earnings, than it has been in more than five years, and possibly longer. In other words, stocks are priced more sensibly by historical measurements than at any levels since the bubble. The stock "market" is a market for buying future earnings, and, at least for the Dow, these are priced more reasonably than they have been since before Bill Clinton's second term.

Housing is phenomenally strong. A record share - more than two of three - of Americans own their own homes. A high rate of home ownership is usually considered a sign of economic strength; it is also a prime cause of the increase in household indebtedness, as people acquire mortgages. Even with rising mortgage rates, there is little sign of a construction slowdown.

The "jobless recovery" is over. New jobs are running at close to 300,000 a month, well above the average of 115,000 added each month in the era since World War II. There is even rapid growth in manufacturing employment.

The economy now has a good kind of inertia on its side. Recoveries in the postwar era have tended to last about 50 months, on average, and they have generally grown longer as time has passed since V-J Day. If the current recovery started near the beginning of 2002, it still has at least two years to go - and probably more, if it is in line with the average.

What about the inflation and the oil and the commodities and the rising interest rates? Well, as Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say on "Saturday Night Live," "It's always something." But oil prices tend to fluctuate greatly when there is terrorism near oil-producing areas. So far - and this is a fascinating fact in and of itself - there has never been a long-lasting interruption in supply because of terrorism. Sharp price increases in oil tend to be followed by price declines.

(I hasten to add, however, that this is no excuse for not having a national program of conservation, turning coal into oil and doing anything else that will reasonably reduce our energy dependence on people who hate us. This kind of Project Independence, first proposed by my former boss, Richard M. Nixon, is long, long overdue.)

If oil reverts to historical patterns, this period of increases will be followed by a correction. Even if it is not, the economy has dealt with oil price gains before, and lived to tell the tale. And commodities are on a long-term downward, not upward, trend - and upticks are often temporary. When they are not, many substitutions are possible.

>11,000=50 (via Robert Schwartz):

At Least the Contrarians Are Smiling (MARK HULBERT, May 23, 2004, NY Times)

To be sure, contrarian analysis strikes some investors as odd, even mysterious. But it rests on nothing more contentious than the widespread tendency of most people to become more bullish and optimistic as the market climbs and to be progressively more bearish as it falls. It follows that the most extreme levels of bullishness will be registered at market tops, and that the most gloom and doom will be found at market bottoms.

Contrarians often focus on newsletter editors because the editors' consensus opinion of the market is a very sensitive barometer of investor moods. The editors can be quick to change their minds about the market - raising or lowering by big margins their recommended portfolio exposure to stocks. In contrast, large Wall Street institutions are relatively sluggish in changing their recommended market exposure. And when they do so, they typically suggest only small adjustments.

The three dozen newsletters monitored by The Hulbert Financial Digest that try to time the market's short-term swings have turned remarkably bearish in recent months. They now have a recommended equity exposure, on average, of minus 13.5 percent. That means that the average market timer in this group is not only recommending that subscribers avoid stocks, but that they allocate about one-eighth of their portfolios to going short the stock market - a bet that the market will decline.

That would be reason enough to expect a market rally, according to contrarians. But they also point to a second reason: the speed of the market timers' turn from stocks. Typically, that doesn't happen at market tops. As recently as Jan. 8, the average equity exposure among this group of timers was as high as 47.5 percent, according to The Hulbert Financial Digest. That means that, even though the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is only about 3 percent lower now than it was then, this group has reduced its average equity exposure by more than 61 percentage points.

UNNAIL THE COFFINS:

U.S. Lengthens the List of Diseases Linked to Smoking: According to the latest surgeon general's report, smoking can cause cancers of the cervix, kidney, pancreas and stomach, as well as several other illnesses. (ELIZABETH OLSON, 5/28/04, NY Times)

The report, Dr. Carmona said at a news briefing, "documents that smoking causes disease in nearly every organ in the body at every stage of life."

Among the other disorders listed since the first report, in 1964, are cancers of the esophagus, throat and bladder; chronic lung disease; and chronic heart and cardiovascular diseases.

Government figures show that 440,000 Americans a year are now dying of smoking-related illnesses, and Dr. Carmona said more than 12 million had died since the first report. Smokers typically die 13 to 14 years earlier than nonsmokers, he said.

Treating those diseases costs about $75 billion a year, according to government figures, and an even greater amount is sacrificed in lost productivity.

For the first time, however, the number of Americans who have quit smoking edges out the number who still smoke, the surgeon general said. An estimated 46 million Americans "have managed to beat the habit and quit,'' he said, "while 45.8 million continue to smoke." Of the entire adult population, people 18 or older, smokers now account for only 22 percent.

Still, Dr. Carmona conceded that at the current rate of decline, the federal government would not meet its goal of cutting the number of smokers to 12 percent of adults by 2010.

IT'S A WESTERN IMPORT:

Bush Calls for 'Culture Change': In interview, President says new era of responsibility should replace 'feel-good.' (Sheryl Henderson Blunt, 05/28/2004, Christianity Today)

Explain your comment "I don't do nuance" in the context of the war.

Well, my job is to speak clearly and when you say something, mean it. And when you're trying to lead the world in a war that I view as really between the forces of good and the forces of evil, you got to speak clearly. There can't be any doubt. And when you say you're going to do something, you've got to do it. Otherwise, particularly given the position of the United States in the world today, there will be confusion. And it is incumbent upon this powerful, rich nation to lead—not only lead in taking on the enemies of freedom, but lead in taking on those elements of life that prevent free people from emerging, like disease and hunger. And we are. We feed the world more than any other country. We're providing more money for HIV/AIDS in the world. We are a compassionate country.

What about your description of the war as a battle between good and evil and statements you made on Egyptian television following the prisoner abuse scandal, which some later called a mistake for appearing to be apologizing in a way that reinforces Pan-Arabism?

No question, that's why I said I am sorry for those people who were humiliated. That's all I said. I also said, "The great thing about our country is that people will now see that we'll deal with this in a transparent way based upon rule of law. And it will serve as a great contrast." But I never apologized to the Arab world.

Do you believe there is anything inherently evil in the way some practice Islam that stands in the way of the pursuit of democracy and freedom?

I think what we're dealing with are people—extreme, radical people—who've got a deep desire to spread an ideology that is anti-women, anti-free thought, anti- art and science, you know, that couch their language in religious terms. But that doesn't make them religious people. I think they conveniently use religion to kill. The religion I know is not one that encourages killing. I think that they want to drive us out of parts of the world so they're better able to have a base from which to operate. I think it's very much more like an … "ism" than a group with territorial ambition.

More like a what?

An "ism" like Communism that knows no boundaries, as opposed to a power that takes land for gold or land for oil or whatever it might be. I don't see their ambition as territorial. I see their ambition as seeking safe haven. And I know they want to create power vacuums into which they are able to flow.

To what final end? The expansion of Islam?

No, I think the expansion of their view of Islam, which would be I guess a fanatical version that—you know, you're trying to lure me down a road [where] … I'm incapable of winning the debate. But I'm smart enough to understand when I'm about to get nuanced out. No, I think they have a perverted view of what religion should be, and it is not based upon peace and love and compassion—quite the opposite. These are people that will kill at the drop of a hat, and they will kill anybody, which means there are no rules. And that is not, at least, my view of religion. And I don't think it's the view of any other scholar's view of religion either.

A POWER WE AREN'T COMPETENT TO WIELD:

'Drowned' toddler returns to life (Associated Press, May 28, 2004)

A hospital worker preparing a drowned toddler for a funeral home noticed the boy was breathing - more than an hour after he had been pronounced dead.

Logan Pinto, who is 22 months old, apparently wandered away from his baby sitter Thursday and fell into a canal near his home in Rexburg, about 275 miles east of Boise. He was submerged for nearly 30 minutes before police found him a half-mile downstream, said Rexburg police Capt. Randy Lewis.

Though an officer gave him CPR and emergency workers did everything they could to revive him, Lewis said, the boy was pronounced dead when it appeared the effort had failed. After giving the boy's mother and stepfather - Debra and Joe Gould - some time to say goodbye, Madison Memorial Hospital nurse Mary Zollinger began to prepare Logan's body for the funeral home.

But when she looked at the boy, she noticed his chest was slightly moving and realized that Logan was alive.

IF IT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE CZECHS...(via Paul Cella):

Santa Klaus: John Laughland talks to the Czech President, Václav Klaus — Thatcherite, Eurosceptic and much loved by the people (John Laughland, 5/29/04, The Spectator)

The man who has dominated Czech politics for more than a decade is not usually associated with symbolic, still less mystical gestures. A neo-liberal former professor of economics in the Hayekian tradition, and a one-time president of the Mont Pelerin society, [Vaclav] Klaus’s name evokes money supply more than mediaeval mythology. And yet it is precisely his skills at statecraft, and in particular his deep belief in the political value of nationhood, which form the real bedrock of his political identity. [...]

Unlike his British Tory friends, however, Klaus has enough sense not to fall into the equal and opposite sin of thinking that America is the universal panacea. The man who was ousted as prime minister of the Czech Republic in 1997 because he started to talk about national interest rather than frenetic privatisation is no slavish follower of the latest faddish dictates from Washington. This is in stark contrast, for instance, to the President of neighbouring Poland, who seems to spend more time in the White House than in Warsaw. Before becoming President, Klaus published articles questioning both the Kosovo and Iraq wars — ‘And I was right in both cases,’ he tells me proudly — and as President, he struck a Gaullist note when he said that he did not want US military bases on Czech soil, because Czechs had had enough experience of foreign soldiers on their territory in the past.

‘The Americans on the one hand,’ Klaus explains, ‘play visibly a card of national defence. They speak about the nation. We do not, because it is politically incorrect. At the same time, they speak about exporting ideas. So for me there is a contradiction in their position. They export more ideas than national defence. That’s a problem for me. We know something in this country about the export of ideas and ideology. I have recently engaged in a debate on the difference between human rights and citizens’ rights: I always advocate citizens’ rights, because mankind is not an entity which could potentially guarantee your rights, whereas the nation is an entity where it is possible.’ It takes guts to say you are against human rights, and indeed Klaus insists to me that he opposes the idea of using military force to promote ideas rather than to defend territory. ‘The military defence of human rights is a political agenda and an ideological standpoint.’ It is also precisely that for which Nato now stands, to which the Czech Republic has belonged since 1999.

As if the field were not already strewn with slaughtered sacred cows, Klaus also likes to puncture the hubris of those ‘dissidents’, his predecessor in the first place, who present themselves as heroes for having defeated communism. He is convinced that, instead, communism collapsed of its own accord. It is, paradoxically, his left-wing enemies whom he denounces for their professional anti-communism today. He caused a stir last week when he told a meeting of former political prisoners under communism that there are plenty of new isms to be afraid of today, ‘such as Europeanism and internationalism’, and yet these are of course precisely the new conformisms that have supplanted the old left-wing orthodoxies to which so many subscribed before, especially the so-called dissidents themselves. In other words, if there is one true dissident in today’s Euro-American internationalist morass, it is none other than Václav Klaus himself.

ITS FIFTEEN MINUTES ARE NEARLY OVER:

e Builders of Iraq (Charles Rousseaux, 05/28/2004, Tech Central Station)

Several structures of self-government have been established. Control of thirteen separate government ministries has been transferred to Iraqis, the most recent of which was the Ministry of Transportation. Other ministries under direct Iraqi control include the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education.
 
Notwithstanding an awful start last year, when Coalition commanders cancelled elections shortly after announcing them, Iraqis have gained experience in self-government. President Bush noted that, "many of Iraq's cities and towns have elected town councils or city governments." Under the oversight of Paul Bremer, a group of local government representatives, including members of the Baghdad City Council, elected engineer Mahmood al Tamimi as city mayor last month.
 
The Baghdad City Council, largely a mix of previously apolitical technocrats, ranging from sheiks to secularists and from lawyers to engineers, has become a power in its own right. Council members were selected by their neighbors almost a year ago, and after first focusing on their neighborhoods, have since started to speak out on national issues. A February Washington Post profile of the group said, "They are the closest thing Iraq has to a democratically elected representative body with real clout." For instance, council member Ali Hadary pushed hard for the reassembly of classrooms, and received almost $500,000 to repair 20 schools in his area.
 
The entire Iraqi educational establishment is being rebuilt. Mr. Bush said, "Under the direction of Dr. Ala'din al-Alwan, the Ministry [of Education] has trained more than 30,000 teachers and supervisors for the schools of a new Iraq." According to the White House, over a third of the 15,000 teachers fired by Saddam have been rehired and more than 5.5 million Iraqi students are back at school. Earlier this month, the World Bank issued a $40 million grant to the Ministry of Education.
 
Schools aren't the only things going up. Spending on reconstruction is finally surging, according to retired admiral David Nash, who is overseeing construction. Earlier this week he said at a briefing, "Things are going very well." $75 million in new construction being set up each week. Over the last two months, $4 billion has been put towards specific projects. That is twice the amount two months ago, and the pace is still increasing.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Muslims for the Coalition (Stephen Schwartz, 5/28/04, Weekly Standard)

American Shia Muslims claim two million adherents in the United States and Canada, mainly drawn from India, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq, with a sprinkling from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, East Africa, and the Balkans. Iraqi Shias are concentrated in Dearborn, Michigan, and Los Angeles and are expected to be well-represented at the gathering this weekend.

The first such convention, held in the nation's capital last year with 3,000 delegates, featured a surprising banquet speaker: deputy Defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz. While this year's banquet program had not been fixed by Thursday afternoon, UMAA media representative Agha Shawkat Jafri said the delegates have received hundreds of calls from Iraqi Shias expressing hope that the convention can draw the attention of the Pentagon to their concerns, which are centered on the need for forcible action against rebel Shia leader Moktada al-Sadr.

"Our people view Moktada al-Sadr as a dangerous renegade and adventurer, who threatens the safety of every Shia Muslim in Iraq," Jafri said. "We do not want the Coalition forces to inflict harm on the holy sites in Najaf or Karbala, but we want al-Sadr firmly defeated. The best action would be to support the Iraqi Shias in combating him. Give them the power and they will get rid of the problem."

Jafri said that Shias were disturbed and hurt by the scandal of prison abuses at Abu Ghraib but understand the difference between the Coalition forces and the former regime. "In the Coalition forces, these cruel acts represented the prejudice and indiscipline of a tiny, exceptional minority, and they will be punished. In Saddam's army, it was required of them and they were rewarded for it."

Jafri said Iraqi Shias are "terrified that if the U.S. in Iraq leaves, the Wahhabis concentrated in Falluja and Tikrit will begin a wholesale genocide of Shias, repeating the earlier actions of the Saddam regime."

WELL, THINGS ARE WORSE IF YOU IGNORE COMMUNISM'S CRIMES:

Human rights at a 50-year nadir: Amnesty report says US war on terror encourages global abuses (Ewen MacAskill, May 27, 2004, The Guardian)

Human rights last year came under the most sustained attack for 50 years, according to the annual report of Amnesty International published yesterday.

Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty, blamed a combination of groups such as al-Qaida and the response of US and other governments as part of the war on terror. "The global security agenda promoted by the US administration is bankrupt of vision and bereft of principle," she said.

"Violating rights at home, turning a blind eye to abuses abroad, and using pre-emptive military force where and when it chooses has damaged justice and freedom, and made the world a more dangerous place."

A host of countries, following the lead of the US, had introduced legislation after September 11 that seriously undermined human rights, especially the right to a fair trial. Others had used the war on terror as an excuse to crack down on legitimate political and religious dissent.

Challenged at a press conference in London over the claim that human rights abuses were running at the highest level for 50 years, an Amnesty spokeswoman said that while there might no longer be abuses in a single country on the scale of Cambodia under Pol Pot, the abuses were more spread out.

TO BE DEMONSTRABLY SELF-MADE:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BOLLOCKS: Francis Wheen talks to Brendan O'Neill about creationism, McDonald's and the new anti-Enlightenment. (Brendan O'Neill, May 2004, spiked)

Wheen reckons we're living through a counter-revolution against the Enlightenment, that revolution in human affairs when reason was elevated over tradition and superstition to become, in the words of one author, 'the arbiter of truth and the foundation of objective knowledge'. 'The Enlightenment brought us out of the dark', says Wheen. 'Now we seem to be heading back in.' In his book he celebrates the Enlightenment's gains - how it led to the 'waning of absolutism and superstition, the rise of secular democracy, the transformation of historical and scientific study'. The Enlightenment put us centre stage, says Wheen, as the makers of history and destiny. 'Yet now, 200 years later, there are people who believe their Tuesday mornings are determined by the alignment of the planets'.

As a good God-fearin' atheist and some time contributor to the New Humanist magazine, Wheen is especially aghast at the apparent rise of the creationist movement. 'Those people', he says, as a full sentence, to indicate that he doesn't much care for the likes of the Christian fundamentalists who in 2002 took control of a state-funded school in north-east England intending to 'show the superiority' of creationist beliefs in their classes. 'Why don't we have schools that teach children there is a tooth fairy or put Santa Claus Studies on the national curriculum, and be done with it?'

Wheen was most struck by prime minister Tony Blair's response to revelations
of a creationist takeover of a state-run school. When Lib Dem Jenny Tonge asked Blair if he was 'happy to allow the teaching of creationism alongside Darwin's theory of evolution in state schools', the prime minister said: 'In the end, a more diverse school system will deliver better results for our children.' 'A simple "no" to Tonge's query would have sufficed', says Wheen, 'and perhaps shown that the prime minister of the United Kingdom believes in reason. This is a man whose mantra is "education, education, education". He ought to know

OK, MAYBE I AM INSANE, BUT THAT’S BUSH’S FAULT TOO

Just like Stalingrad (Bret Stephens, Jerusalem Post, May 28th, 2004)

According to Sidney Blumenthal, a one-time adviser to president Bill Clinton who now writes a column for Britain's Guardian newspaper, President George W. Bush today runs "what is in effect a gulag," stretching "from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantanamo to secret CIA prisons around the world." Blumenthal says "there has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union."

In another column, Blumenthal compares the April death toll for American soldiers in Iraq to the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Bush's "splendid little war," he writes, "has entered a Stalingrad-like phase of urban siege and house-to-house combat." [...]

Blumenthal is not alone. Former vice president Al Gore this week accused Bush of creating "more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation." Every single column written by the New York Times's Paul Krugman is an anti-Bush screed; apparently, there isn't anything else worth writing about. A bumper sticker I saw the other day in Manhattan reads: "If you aren't outraged, you're not paying attention."

There are two explanations for all this. One is that Bush really is as bad as Sid, Al and Paul say: the dumbest, most feckless, most fanatical, most incompetent and most calamitous president the nation has ever known. A second is that Sid, Al and Paul are insane. [...]

This is an easier case to make. Blumenthal, for instance, is the man who described Clinton's as the most consequential, the most inspiring and the most moral American presidency of the 20th century, only possibly excepting FDR's. Krugman spent his first couple of years as a columnist writing tirades about how the US economy was on the point of Argentina-style collapse.

What makes these arguments insane – I use the word advisedly – isn't that they don't contain some possible germ of truth. One can argue that Clinton was a reasonably good president. And one can argue that Bush economic policy has not been a success. But you have to be insane to argue that Clinton was FDR incarnate, and you have to be insane to argue Bush has brought the US to its lowest economic point since 1932. This style of hyperbole is a symptom of madness, because it displays such palpable disconnect from observable reality.

If you have to go looking for outrage, the outrage probably isn't there. That which is truly outrageous tends to have the quality of obviousness.

Never mind the elusive search for the outspoken, moderate Muslim. Why are there so few voices from the decent, moderate middle condemning these slanders and verbal outrages?

NOT STARSHIP TROOPERS:

Getting All Veterans to the Voting Booths (Charles Slaughter, May 27, 2004, AlterNet)

On Memorial Day this year we will dedicate a new national memorial to Americans who served in World War II. The decision to join America's armed forces isn't something most of us make lightly. As an Army veteran of the Vietnam era, Memorial Day reminds me of the tremendous sacrifice of my brave friends and colleagues. I am blessed to still be here as a community activist and father to my four daughters.

Another celebration this month -- the 50th Anniversary of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision and its extraordinary impact on American society -- reminds us that many World War II vets returned from fighting for freedom abroad to a society that not only tolerated but enforced segregation, racial discrimination, and denial of voting rights.

The Brown decision galvanized a national commitment to making progress on all those fronts, yet 50 years later there are still more than 4 million Americans, including 500,000 veterans, who are denied the right to vote by state laws that keep felons and former felons out of the voting booth. It is especially troubling that the most fundamental right of citizenship - the right to participate in the democratic process -- is denied to those who risked their lives to achieve the goals set forth by the authors of our Constitution: "... to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

IT'S A TV SHOW:

24's Subversive Message (Matthew Hisrich, May 28, 2004, Mises.org)

What, other than ratings, is the show's underlying premise for why disaster is always imminent? Like any good soap opera, there are a lot of twists and turns along the way, but as the seasons pile up, the evidence points to one man: President David Palmer.

As first Senator, then President, David Palmer stands for integrity in the face of adversity. Though this season has seen him get his hands a bit dirty, the show places the moral structure of each dilemma in him. While it could be argued that both he and Bauer are what you might call moral
utilitarians, Palmer clearly suffers from the weight of his decisions, whereas Bauer seems to shrug most things off as all in a day's work.

It is interesting, then, to reflect on the rationale for each season's crisis. Seasons 1 and 3 are both linked to a covert operation in Bosnia authorized by Palmer. Season 2, which appears unrelated (though there are plenty of theories), is instead a crisis resulting from tensions with the
Islamic world.

In each case, though, the focus is on the repercussions of an interventionist U.S. foreign policy. Sometimes called "blowback," or what might otherwise be identified by Misesians as the unanticipated consequences of government action, the lesson is the same whether dealing with foreign or domestic policy. Government policy presumes a static and unchanging world
and cannot predict or account for the human response to its policies. Even its "dynamic" models are static because they cannot account for every variation.

In foreign policy, the problem is arguably worse than in domestic policy, because the government deals with political systems its supposed experts cannot understand, cultures that are unfamiliar, and unleashes forces and responses that it never expected. The result is always some "crisis," which means nothing more than a dangerous development that had not been part of
the plan.

"24's" preoccupation with this theme seems indicative of an underlying message for viewers. Season after season, we are confronted with the reality that meddling in the affairs of other countries brings deadly consequences home to American soil.

SHUT THE BOX:

REVIEW: of Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater (Farhad Manjoo, Salon.com)

Early in Lauren Slater's engaging new book, Opening Skinner's Box, the author reports an amusing conversation she has with Jerome Kagan, a psychologist at Harvard who insists that humans beings possess "free will." Kagan is having a hard time convincing Slater
of his view; in the middle of the last century, the psychologist B.F. Skinner showed, through a series of ingenious experiments with animals, that we are all far more mechanistic than we believe. We do what we do because we are conditioned to do it, because we are, all of us, acutely sensitive to rewards and reinforcements in the environment.

Slater, who is herself a psychologist, agrees with Skinner. She tells Kagan, "I don't absolutely rule out the possibility that we are always either controlled or controlling, that our free will is really just a response to some cues that --" And just then, to prove that people really do whatever they want to do, "Kagan dives under his desk," Slater writes. "I mean that literally. He springs from his seat and goes head forward into nether regions beneath his desk so I cannot see him anymore."

Kagan shouts to Slater, "I'm under my desk. I've never gotten under my desk before. Is this not an act of free will?"

Opening Skinner's Box, in which Slater guides us through 10 landmark psychological experiments, brims with moments like this one -- unbelievable little scenes in which Slater or one of the many people she encounters does or says something so unexpected that you'll wonder, for just a split second, whether you're reading fiction. There's Kagan diving under his desk. There's the dour psychologist Robert Spitzer, who, when told that an old foe of his is laid up with a terminal disease that doctors can't diagnose, responds with perverse glee. There's Elizabeth Loftus, a famous memory researcher who "blurts out odd comments" and has "targets from a rifle practice affixed to her office wall." She volunteers her bra size to Slater. In the middle of a telephone interview, Loftus slams down the phone for no reason, then "calls back sheepishly," offering no explanation for her behavior.

And finally there's Slater herself, a writer so personally invested in her subject that she seems willing to risk just about anything for a good story.

THE GOOD OLD '70s:

Kerry outlines foreign policy (Brian Knowlton, May 28, 2004, International Herald Tribune)

Senator John Kerry, seeking to more clearly define his national security differences with President George W. Bush, said Thursday that members of the administration had "bullied when they should have persuaded" and "looked to force before exhausting diplomacy."

Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, called for an energetic new pursuit of diplomacy and foreign alliances, as in the years after World War II.

"There was a time, not so long ago," he said, "when the might of our alliances was a driving force in the survival and success of freedom."

"At stake is a vision of an America truly stronger and truly respected in the world," he said in Seattle.

WHAT WEAPONS?:

In the Scrapyards of Jordan, Signs of a Looted Iraq: There is increasing evidence that parts of sensitive military equipment, billed as Iraqi scrap metal, are streaming into Jordan. (JAMES GLANZ, 5/28/04, NY Times)

As the United States spends billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq's civil and military infrastructure, there is increasing evidence that parts of sensitive military equipment, seemingly brand-new components for oil rigs and water plants and whole complexes of older buildings are leaving the country on the backs of flatbed trucks.

By some estimates, at least 100 semitrailers loaded with what is billed as Iraqi scrap metal are streaming each day into Jordan, just one of six countries that share a border with Iraq.

American officials say sensitive equipment is, in fact, closely monitored and much of the rest that is leaving is legitimate removal and sale from a shattered country. But many experts say that much of what is going on amounts to a vast looting operation.

In the past several months, the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna, has been closely monitoring satellite photographs of hundreds of military-industrial sites in Iraq. Initial results from that analysis are jarring, said Jacques Baute, director of the agency's Iraq nuclear verification office: entire buildings and complexes of as many as a dozen buildings have been vanishing from the photographs.

"We see sites that have totally been cleaned out," Mr. Baute said.

SAPPED:

Founders' Quote Daily (The Federalist Patriot)

The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing
our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone."
-Thomas Jefferson

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

IRAQ'S NEXT GOVERNMENT (AMIR TAHERI, May 27, 2004, NY Post)

The method under which elections will be held is the subject of heated behind-the-scenes debates among various Iraqi parties and the Coalition authority led by Paul Bremer.

Most of the Shiite parties want a first-past-the-post British-style electoral system based on single- or multiple-member constituencies. Such a system could give the Shiites up to 75 percent of seats in any future parliament, far beyond their 60 percent or so of the total population.

The system could also benefit the two main Kurdish parties. They could end up with almost a quarter of the seats, although the population of the areas they control is no more than 15 percent of the total.

On the other hand, if proportional representation is the method of election, the Kurds could end up as big losers. This is because the regions where they are the majority also include large non-Kurdish minorities, notably Turcomans, Assyrians and Yazidis.

Shiite leaders reject any analysis based on sectarian differences. "We are all Iraqis," says Muhammad Bahr al-Olum, a leading Shiite political and religious figure. "We must have an electoral system that reflects the reality of our country, and create a government that all Iraqis will see as their own." [...]

Iraq today is in a position that few other nations have found themselves in history.

All the pillars of the various despotic regimes that have ruled Iraq since its creation have disappeared. There is no army, no security apparatus worth mentioning. The ruling party is gone, along with the idea of the "strongman." The dominant political, economic and cultural elites have been blown away, along with methods of government established over decades. By one estimate more than two-thirds of all laws will have to be repealed or amended.

"We must build a new state from the very foundations," says Zebari. "The first bricks we pose will determine the shape of the whole structure."

BUT THEY'RE DIFFERENT...:

Not yet nyet to democracy: After the chaotic 1990s, Russians put a premium on stability. (Scott Peterson, 5/28/04, The Christian Science Monitor)

Deep in the heart of their national psyche, do Russians really yearn for democracy?

Several surveys appear to show that Russians prefer authoritarian order to democracy. One poll found that 53 percent of Russians opposed democracy, while 22 percent favored it.

But the story behind those numbers, as well as other poll results, complicate that view. While Russians want stability - a condition that President Vladimir Putin is widely credited with restoring - Russians are also attached to democratic values.

"There's a battle of data, and everybody cites their favorite poll," says Michael McFaul, a Russia expert at Stanford University, who began canvassing Russian opinions more than a decade ago.

"The big picture is, if you ask Russians about the actual practice of democracy - Should there be a separation of powers? Should people vote for their leaders? Should there be independent media? - a two-thirds majority say yes," says Mr. McFaul. "But when you ask about their experience with democracy, it's been very negative, because folks that called themselves democrats are perceived as having failed in the 1990s."

HALF EMPTY:

'Tomorrow's' forecast: bad science on the big screen: Natural-disaster film risks trivializing a real problem as far-out science fiction. (Peter N. Spotts, 5/28/04, CS Monitor)

[E]ven if the movie gets passing marks for entertainment and is stirring the political caldron, it flunks Climate 101. And in the process, it runs the risk of trivializing as mere entertainment a problem that many researchers say is quite serious.

Global warming "is a real problem and people need to be educated about it," says Peter Stone, a professor of atmospheric dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who attended an advanced screening of the film in Boston. But the film's errors and exaggerations "make it an easy target to shoot at," he adds, and could leave an impression that the issue as a whole is an exaggeration.

OPPOSITE:

Kerry pitches his global view: In the first of a series of speeches, Kerry seeks to sharpen foreign-policy differences with Bush. (Liz Marlantes, 5/28/04, CS Monitor)

[K]erry and Bush share some key similarities when it comes to their overall approach to foreign policy. Both have clearly asserted that the US does not need a green light from other nations to use force. And while Bush has moved toward Kerry's call for internationalizing the effort in Iraq, Kerry has moved closer to Bush's original wariness of the United Nations, proposing a "high commissioner" to Iraq who could bypass UN bureaucracy.

Still, many analysts argue that the overall approach and tone Kerry would bring to US foreign policy would represent a striking contrast with Bush - and could lead to some substantially different results.

"Bush is part of the realist, realpolitik school of foreign policy, that first and foremost showcases America's force," says historian Douglas Brinkley. "Kerry is part of what they used to call the moralist or multilateral school of foreign affairs."

Often, realpolitik is the best approach, Mr. Brinkley adds: During the cold war, for example, both Kennedy and Reagan took tougher stands against the Soviet Union, that ultimately proved successful. "But it is not the best approach when you are trying to get countries to spend billions of dollars in building up a new democratic society."

Kerry's multilateral worldview can be traced to his background: The son of a diplomat, he went to boarding school in Switzerland, and spent time in cities like Paris and Bonn. In the US, his familiarity with European culture has been seen almost as a disadvantage - Republicans have joked that he "looks French," and mocked him in an Austin Powers-style spoof as an "international man of mystery."

But as the US burden in Iraq grows, Americans may increasingly see an advantage in a president who is comfortable negotiating with - and might have more of an opening among - foreign leaders.

MORE:
Understanding Evil: As liberals try to sabotage the War on Terror, President Bush, like Reagan before him, boldly faces an unappeasable evil. (Peter Huessy, 5/26/04, FrontPage)

The Bush administration's foreign and national security policy has generated serious opposition here at home and overseas. This is not unlike the reaction to President Reagan's plan to deploy intermediate range missiles in Europe and to modernize our land, sea and air-based nuclear deterrent systems.

The demonstrations of the early 1980's throughout Europe, coupled with the push for a nuclear freeze here in America, made it appear as if President Reagan was intent on blowing up the world. Former Carter administration officials were sought on a daily basis to appear on morning, evening and weekend talk shows, warning of impending doom, the collapse of arms control, possible conflict with the Soviet Union, and the deterioration of NATO.
For the intellectual Left in America, Reagan's bold foreign and defense policies were seen as fundamentally representative of a narrow, U.S. interest, reflecting the selfish concerns of the military industrial complex, war planners and DOD officials. In particular, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the evening television news shows were unanimous that the US President, an uninformed actor, naive in the ways of the world, could not be trusted with US security policy.

The Left hoped that cooler heads in the State Department would convince Reagan, the former California governor, to seek coexistence, not confrontation, with the leaders in Moscow. Critical to this strategy, we were told, was to get the two leaders from the US and the Soviet Union together at a "summit" to freeze our respective nuclear arsenals.

Fast forward twenty years later. In early 2001, the earliest manifestations of the new Bush administration security policy were a speech at the National Defense University where the President outlined the need for missile defenses, an overall counter terrorism strategy, and stronger controls over the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as a strong, robust but reduced and more balanced deterrent force of nuclear weapons.
 
The reaction mirrored that of 1981. The same media outlets, the same articles, same television commentators, wringing their hands in worry, despairing of a "cowboy" governor from Texas, way over his head in the nuanced, fuzzy liberal world of his opponents.

Bush's assertion of US interests, such as defending ourselves from ballistic missiles, or foregoing signing-off on a foolish energy consumption commitment such as called for by the Kyoto Treaty, was universally derided as wrong headed, "unilateral," representative of a "go it alone" policy.

CRANK UP THE "BUYERS' REMORSE" STORIES:

Kerry puts Edwards
through veep paces: N.C. senator gets the closest look (Howard Fineman, May 26, 2004, Newsweek)

If Sen. John Kerry isn’t going to pick Sen. John Edwards to be his running mate, he’s sure putting him through his paces. At the Kerry campaign’s request, the North Carolinian is doing four major events in June, three in battleground states. The headliner is the mid-month Jefferson-Jackson Weekend in Florida. If Edwards is a hit there, he could be on his way to the vice presidential nomination in Boston in July.

THE AMERICAN DREAM AT WORK:

In a Reverse Migration, Blacks Head to New South: California, other regions lose African Americans feeling the pull of 'home' and a slower pace.
(Mark Arax, May 24, 2004, LA Times)

In what demographers are calling a "full scale reversal" of the Great Migration in the early part of the 20th century, blacks are leaving California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey and retracing steps to a place their families once fled — the South.

This population shift of hundreds of thousands of blacks is nowhere near the millions who left the South from 1910 to 1970. But the flow is sustained and large enough, according to a study released today by the Brookings Institution, that a new map of black America must be drawn.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Detroit — cities blacks once considered the promised land — have been seeing more blacks moving out than moving in. As part of this shift, the overall black population in Los Angeles County and the Bay Area dropped for the first time in 70 years.

The new migratory pattern reflects the ascendancy of Latinos and Asians and provides another sign that the high-water days of black community power — when Los Angeles boasted a black mayor for two decades — may be over.

"We came out to California to find gold, and many of us found it," said Noella Buchanan, a pastor at the Community African Methodist Episcopal Church in Corona. "But when it's time to retire, there's this desire to go back home. Even the children who grew up in California are feeling the pull. They're heading off to black colleges in Atlanta and North Carolina and staying there.

"Let's face it. Everything is crazy here. The traffic is crazy, the housing prices are crazy. They're finding a slower pace of life in the South. Out here, we're the forgotten minority. Back there, we're the chosen minority." [...]

"My wife and I live in a house with 3,000 square feet, a nice yard, nice patio, nice pool, nice neighborhood, right next door to a Mormon bishop," said Martin Bauchman, a 75-year-old Las Vegas newcomer.

His migration tells the story of black America in the post-World War II years. He left his native Oklahoma in 1950, moved to South-Central Los Angeles and spent the next 50 years working his way up from prison guard to assistant manager in the state Department of Education. Two years ago, he pulled up stakes and moved to the boomtown in the desert.

"My backyard is even big enough that I got some tomatoes and peppers and a few carrots," he said, chuckling. "I just saw Gladys Knight perform at the Flamingo down the street. It's a pretty good life."

MUMBO-JUMBO

Human rights climate 'worst in 50 years' (Simon Jeffery and Mark Oliver, The Guardian, May 26th, 2004)

Amnesty International today claimed that governments and armed groups such as al-Qaida were putting human rights and international humanitarian law under the greatest pressure for more than 50 years. [...]

The 2004 annual report documents human rights abuses in 155 countries including execution, detention without judicial process, hostage taking and "disappearances" by state agents.

It condemns attacks by al-Qaida and others as "sometimes amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity" but says principles of international law that could prevent such attacks were being undermined and marginalised by powerful countries such as the US.

"Governments are losing their moral compass, sacrificing the global values of human rights in a blind pursuit of security. This failure of leadership is a dangerous concession to armed groups," said Irene Khan, the secretary general of Amnesty International.

"The global security agenda promoted by the US administration is bankrupt of vision and bereft of principle. Violating human rights at home, turning a blind eye to abuses abroad and using pre-emptive military force where and when it chooses has damaged justice and freedom, and made the world a more dangerous place."

The attacks of 9/11 forced us to confront the power, hatred and popularity of the Islamic movement. Since then, perhaps an even greater shock has been to see just how many in the West have had their critical faculties so badly warped by abstract, soft-leftist drivel. That these statements from Amnesty International don’t even make sense does not mean they won’t resonate with millions.

We tend to imagine that appeasement in the 1930's was an expression of collective fear whereby people cowered in their homes and, somewhat guiltily, refused to concern themselves with Hitler’s threats or his victims. In fact, it was an aggressivly idealistic force that was marked by a gradual demonizing of those victims, a preoccupation with the “underlying causes” of totalitarianism, a scorning of moral distinctions, utopian dreams and a constant blaming of all things Western and democratic for– well, just about everything. For many, it was an inspiring, cutting edge cause that filled young and not-so-young hearts with a sense of noble purpose and the conviction they were fighting for a just and peaceful world.

LEST WE THINK THE ANTI-ZIONIST LEFT ANYTHING NEW (via Rick Perlstein):

A Child of the Century (Ben Hecht)

The Reader's Digest Magazine broke the American silence attending the massacre of the Jews in February 1943. It printed my article called "Remember Us," based on Dr. Greenberg's data.

Reading it in the magazine, I thought of a larger idea and set out to test its practicality. Thirty famous writers (and one composer) were assembled at George Kaufman's house by my friend, his wife Beatrice. All had written hit plays or successful novels. Put their names together and you had the box-office flower of American culture. In addition to success, wit and influence, they had in common the fact that they were all Jews.

I had said to Bea that thirty New York dinner guests might save the surviving four million Jews in Europe. The first massacre scores had come in: dead Jews --two million; anti-Germany butchery protests--none.

I looked eagerly at the thirty celebrities in Bea's drawing room. Some were friends, some enemies. Some wrote like artists (almost), some like clodhoppers. Some were insufferably fatheaded, some psychotically shy. But such variation was unimportant. Bold, shy, Shakespeare or Boom McNutt--they had a great common virtue. They could command the press of the world.

What would happen if these brilliant Jews cried out with passion against the German butchers? If these socially and artistically celebrated Jews spoke up in rage at the murder of their people? How they could dramatize the German crime! How loudly they could represent the nightmare to America and the world!

When we sat with coffee cups, Bea said to me, "Why not talk to them now, before they start playing games or something?"

I recited all the facts I knew about the Jewish killings. I said I felt certain that if we banded together and let loose our talents and our moral passion against the Germans we might halt the massacre. The Germans now believed that the civilized world looked with indifference on their extermination of Europe's Jews. How could they think anything else? Had anybody (but the biased kinsmen of the victims) protested? Had England's great humanitarian, Churchill, spoken? Or our great keeper of the rights of man--Roosevelt? No, nary a word out of either of these politically haloed gentlemen. And out of that third champion of all underdogs--Stalin--no more hint of Jews than if they had all bowed out with Moses.

Consider (this was part of my speech to the thirty Jewish geniuses of New York City), consider what would happen to the Germans if they were to hear that their crime was sickening the world! If a roar of horror swept the civilized earth and echoed into the land that was once Goethe's and Beethoven's! Imagine the effect on the descendants of Schiller, Wagner, Kant, Hegel, etc., etc., were they to hear a universal shout go up! "You are not heroes. You are monsters."

And to back up my theory I wheeled out my sole exhibit--the King of little Denmark. Peter Freuchen, the writer and explorer, had told me the story. He had been in Copenhagen at the time the Germans announced they were going to "clean" Denmark of Jews. The King of Denmark, with the German heel on his neck, had answered that the Danes would never stand for this crime against humanity. He had put the yellow armband identifying Jews on his own sleeve and requested his people to do the same. They did. The Jews of Denmark went on living, protected by the moral passion of an otherwise powerless king.

I concluded with another argument. I said that an outcry against the massacre would have an important effect on the British. The British were not a bloodthirsty, murderous people. If they heard that millions of Jews had already been murdered, and that the Germans planned to kill the four million still left breathing in Europe, and that most of these still-breathing Jews could be saved if the ports of Palestine were opened, the British, fine, decent people that they were, would certainly not continue to collaborate with the Germans on the extermination of the four million surviving Jews.

There was no applause when I stopped talking. Not that I expected any. The authors of hit plays and novels are more interested in receiving applause than in giving it. But the nature of the silence was revealed to me when a half-dozen of the guests stood up and without saying "Boo" walked out of the room.

"It looks like I struck out," I said to my hostess as the silence kept up.
Edna Ferber's voice rose sharply. "Who is paying you to do this wretched propaganda," she demanded, "Mister Hitler? Or is it Mister Goebbels?" Her query started irritated and angry talk. The anger and irritation were against me.

In the vestibule, Beatrice said to me, "I'm sorry it turned out like this. But I didn't expect anything much different. You asked them to throw away the most valuable thing they own--the fact that they are Americans."

How argue with Beatrice, a fine woman with as bright a mind and as soft a heart as anyone I knew? How convince any of her high-faluting guests that they had not behaved like Americans but like scared Jews? And what in God's name were they frightened of? Of people realizing they were Jews? But people knew that already. Of people hearing that they had Jewish hearts? What kind of hearts did they imagine people thought Jews had, non-Jewish hearts? Or did they think they would be mistaken for "real" Americans if they proved they had no hearts at all? Two of the thirty guests came into the vestibule to say good night to me.

"I thought I'd tell you that if I can do anything definite in the way of Jewish propaganda call on me," said Moss Hart.

Kurt Weill, the lone composer present, looked at me with misty eyes. A radiance was in his strong face.

"Please count on me for everything," Kurt said. (Hecht, Moss and Weill would cooperate in creating the pageant "We Shall Never Die" which was staged in Madison Square Garden. The three were joined by showman Billy Rose of whom Hecht writes "A third Jew soon joined us--Billy Rose. He needed no briefing. He came under his own steam, which was considerable.")

I am likely to sound rather immodest in this chapter, but truth is truth, and a man should not be afraid to speak it even if it embarrasses him. My activities quickly produced a new Jewish battle cry. And not only in New York but in Chicago, Boston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco and even in London. This new Jewish battle cry was "Down with Ben Hecht." It came roaring from synagogue pulpits (reformed ones). It filled the Jewish press and the Jewish magazines. I can still see the headlines in the American Jewish Congress Monthly and other such periodicals. They identified me as the American Goebbels, as Hitler's Hired Stooge, as the Broadway Racketeer Growing Rich on Jewish Misery, and this and that.

The first Jewish outbursts against me remained, actually, unknown to me. I was too busy getting the pageant ready....

I first became aware that there was annoyance with me among the Jews when Rabbi Stephen Wise, head of the Jews of New York, head of the Zionists and, as I knew from reading the papers, head of almost everything noble in American Jewry, telephoned me at the Algonquin Hotel where I had pitched my Hebrew tent.

Rabbi Wise said he would like to see me immediately in his rectory. His voice, which was sonorous and impressive, irritated me. I had never known a man with a sonorous and impressive voice who wasn't either a con man or a bad actor. I explained I was very busy and unable to step out of my hotel.

"Then I shall tell you now, over the telephone, what I had hoped to tell you in my study," said Rabbi Wise. "I have read your pageant script and I disapprove of it. I must ask you to cancel this pageant and discontinue all your further activities in behalf of the Jews. If you wish hereafter to work for the Jewish Cause, you will please consult me and let me advise you."

At this point I hung up. When I informed Bergson of Rabbi Wise's fatheadedness, he answered moodily, "We'll have to get the spies out of our organization. There are obviously people among us carrying information and documents to the enemy."

I was confused by the word enemy. I had up to that moment been thinking only of an enemy with a swastika.

MORE:
-The Return of Ben Hecht--40 Years After His Passing (Dr. Rafael Medoff, April 2004, Wyman Institute)

As a young man, Hecht had shown no real interest in his Jewish heritage. But the rise of Nazism and the persecution of Europe's Jews transformed him. First he joined the Fight for Freedom Committee, which advocated pre-emptive U.S. military action to oust Hitler. He wrote a fundraising pageant for the group, called "Fun to Be Free," which drew more than 17,000 people to Madison Square Garden in 1941.

Hecht's evolution from assimilation to activism is explored in an essay by Prof. Gil Troy, "The Transformation of Ben Hecht from Literary Gadfly to Political Activist,"which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the scholarly journal American Jewish History.

My own recent book, Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, reveals previously-classified documents showing that the FBI spied on the Bergson Group, the militant Jewish activists headed by Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), with whom Hecht was associated. Memoranda authored by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover erroneously characterized Hecht as a "fellow traveler" and a "Communist Zionist."

Hecht's first project with the Bergson Group was "We Will Never Die," a dramatic 1943 pageant to raise American public awareness of the Nazi genocide. Starring Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni, it was staged at Madison Square Garden before audiences totaling more than 40,000, before traveling to Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, the Hollywood Bowl, and Washington D.C., where the audience included First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, six Supreme Court justices and several hundred Members of Congress.

During the 1940s, the Bergson Group sponsored numerous full-page newspaper ads calling for U.S. action to rescue Jews from Hitler. The ads, many of them authored by Hecht, featured eye-catching headlines such as "Time Races Death: What Are We Waiting For?" and "How Well Are You Sleeping? Is There Something You Could Have Done to Save Millions of Innocent People--Men, Women, and Children--from Torture and Death?" "Our mission in the United States would not have attained the scope and intensity it did if not for Hecht's gifted pen," senior Bergson group activist Yitshaq Ben-Ami later wrote. "He had a compassionate heart, covered up by a short temper, a brutal frankness and an acid tongue."

THE 'F' IS FOR FASHION:

THINK SIMPLE FOR SUMMER STYLE (Brooke Showell, Long Island Press)

The flip-flop is one of this summer's biggest trends, having made its way into the season's most fashionable footwear. Rubber thongs are casual, comfortable, practical and inexpensive. Once strictly a beach statement, this laid-back look now appeals to all ages for all occasions. New Yorkers wear flip-flops with a bikini on the Montauk shore, or with a sundress on Madison Avenue. Even Sarah Michelle Gellar showed off white flip-flops with her Vera Wang wedding gown. Right now, there are no limitations when it comes to summer sandals.

Flip-flops range from high-end Helmut Lang rubber thongs and kitten-heeled Sigerson Morrison sandals to everyday options by J.Crew, Old Navy and Target. Adidas' high-tech flip-flops and the surf-friendly Reef Smoothy Sandals offer sportier selections for guys. But like all trends, the flip-flop has taken a trendy turn.

Who'd have thought Sen. Kerry's spectacular nuancing would spark a fashion revival? Doesn't hold a candle to Al Gore inventing the Internet though.

SINKING STAR:

House deals Blagojevich budget defeat (DAVE MCKINNEY AND LESLIE GRIFFY, May 27, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

The Illinois House on Wednesday overwhelmingly defeated a $304 million plan to end several corporate tax breaks, dealing Gov. Blagojevich a sobering setback and putting a budget deal before a Monday deadline deeper in doubt.

The bid to close so-called business loopholes, a cornerstone of the governor's revenue package, drew only 23 "yes" votes and 81 "no" votes after the state Senate narrowly backed the proposal earlier.

"That was a significant message to the governor that maybe some of your revenue is in trouble," Senate Minority Leader Frank Watson (R-Greenville) said of the House vote, which drew universal praise from business groups.

While House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) voted for the plan Wednesday, he allowed the measure to be unceremoniously voted down at the same time Blagojevich had scheduled a new round of budget talks with the legislative leaders -- a summit Madigan chose to skip.

If the vote's timing was merely a coincidence, the speaker's absence from budget negotiations for a second straight day was not. Denying that any messages were being sent, a top aide said Madigan's schedule was too busy to permit any time to attend talks on a budget compromise, producing smirks from some Statehouse observers.

"I don't think we're obstructing anything that I can see," Madigan spokesman Steve Brown said.

The test of wills between Blagojevich and Madigan has brought business at the Capitol to a virtual standstill, increasing the likelihood the Democratic-controlled Legislature will miss a Monday adjournment deadline, go into overtime and empower Republicans to dictate terms of a new state budget.

NOT JUST POSSIBLE BUT IMMINENT (via Derek Copold):

ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY: THE IMPOSSIBLE UNION: Iranian Muslim Amir Taheri says his faith cannot embrace western liberalism because our notions of equality are antithetical to the basis of Islam (Amir Taheri, May 23, 2004, The Sunday Times)

In recent weeks there has been much soul-searching, in the Islamic world and among the wider Muslim diaspora about whether Islam is compatible with democracy. This sparked a debate hosted by Intelligence2, a forum I took part in last week. As an Iranian now living in a liberal democracy, I would like to explain why Islam and democracy are essentially incompatible.

To understand a civilisation it is important to comprehend the language that shapes it. There was no word in any of the Muslim languages for democracy until the 1890s. Even then the Greek word entered Muslim vocabulary with little change: democrasi in Persian, dimokraytiyah in Arabic, demokratio in Turkish.

Democracy is based on one fundamental principle: equality. [...]

The idea of equality is unacceptable to Islam. For the non-believer cannot be the equal of the believer. Even among the believers only those who subscribe to the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, known as the "people of the book" (Ahl el-Kitab), are regarded as fully human. Here, too, there is a hierarchy, with Muslims at the top.

Non-Muslims can, and have often been, treated with decency, but never as equals. There is a hierarchy even for animals and plants. Seven animals and seven plants will assuredly go to heaven while seven others of each will end up in hell.

Democracy means the rule of the demos, the common people, or what is now known as popular or national sovereignty. In Islam, however, power belongs only to God: al-hukm l'illah. The man who exercises that power on Earth is known as Khalifat al-Allah, the regent of God. Even then the Khalifah, or Caliph, cannot act as legislator. The law has already been spelt out and fixed forever by God.

The only task that remains is its discovery, interpretation and application. That, of course, allows for a substantial space in which different styles of rule could develop.

YES, BUT THE NEIGHBORS ARE HAPPY YOU PUT AWAY THE BULLHORN:

For Some, the Blogging Never Stops (KATIE HAFNER, 5/27/04, NY Times)

TO celebrate four years of marriage, Richard Wiggins and his wife, Judy Matthews, recently spent a week in Key West, Fla. Early on the morning of their anniversary, Ms. Matthews heard her husband get up and go into the bathroom. He stayed there for a long time.

"I didn't hear any water running, so I wondered what was going on," Ms. Matthews said. When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with his laptop balanced on his knees, typing into his Web log, a collection of observations about the technical world, over a wireless link.

Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession. Such bloggers often feel compelled to write several times daily and feel anxious if they don't keep up. As they spend more time hunkered over their computers, they neglect family, friends and jobs. They blog at home, at work and on the road. They blog openly or sometimes, like Mr. Wiggins, quietly so as not to call attention to their habit. [...]

The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites like blogger.com, which makes it easy to set up a blog. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs.

Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades.

Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs.

Indeed, if a blog is likened to a conversation between a writer and readers, bloggers like Mr. Wiggins are having conversations largely with themselves.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES (via GG):

US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war (Julian Borger, May 25, 2004, The Guardian)

An urgent investigation has been launched in Washington into whether Iran played a role in manipulating the US into the Iraq war by passing on bogus intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, it emerged yesterday.

Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq.

According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions.

The CIA has asked the FBI to investigate Mr Chalabi's contacts in the Pentagon to discover how the INC acquired sensitive information that ended up in Iranian hands.

The implications are far-reaching. Mr Chalabi and Mr Habib were the channels for much of the intelligence on Iraqi weapons on which Washington built its case for war.

"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi."

DON'T CRY FOR ME, AYNRANDISTAS:

Cry No Tears for Martha Stewart: The privilege the law sometimes extends to the well-to-do explains why Martha Stewart was not convicted of more. (SCOTT TUROW, 5/27/04, NY Times)

As you would expect of someone who has been a criminal defense lawyer for many years, I was disgusted to learn that the government has charged its own expert witness with committing perjury in the Martha Stewart trial. Yet the development is unlikely to overturn Ms. Stewart's criminal conviction. Its most lasting effect, rather, will probably be louder bleating from those who have insisted from the start that Ms. Stewart got a raw deal. And more's the pity, because that's hardly the case.

A PHENOMENON SO HUGE YOU BARELY NOTICE IT:

Touching, teaching: Could the surprising election result in India push the decline of the most racist system in the world? (Marvin Olasky, 5/29/04, World)

Defeat of the Hindu nationalist party in India's elections means that national anti-evangelism legislation is unlikely, and that some of the state laws may be rolled back. The other tidbit is from Turkey, where a criminal court in southeastern Turkey dropped all charges against a Protestant pastor accused of opening an "illegal" church. [...]

But India has a deeper problem that will take more than an election to fix: More than 200 million Dalits ("untouchables") still face discrimination at least as great as that faced by black Americans 50 years ago.

Although officials legally abolished the caste system in 1949, culture almost always trumps law, so castes remain a significant force throughout India. (Generally, the lighter-skinned Indians belong to a higher caste, the darker-skinned ones to a lower.) As in the United States up to the 1960s, those near the bottom can lord it over those at the bottom. Sudras (members of the peasant class) can feel superior when they refuse to drink from the same glass as a Dalit.

Some Indians joke sadly about a prominent Dalit politician who returns to his small village to open a hospital and is welcomed by those who once looked down on him. After a fancy lunch he is preparing to leave when another Dalit comes into the room through a back door. The politician says, "You don't have to come in by the back way now. I was once like you, and see what I have made of myself." The other replies, "I just came to get my plates. They borrowed them to serve you your lunch."

Why does such bigotry remain in India at a time when it is largely gone from the United States? One reason may be difference between the biblical sense of equality and a common Hindu theology of inequality. The biblical understanding is that all of us are sinners (Psalm 14:3: "there is none who does good, not even one"). We owe anything good in us and our living circumstances to God's grace. We know that God offers that grace to people of all races. Kids convey more truth than they realize when they warble, "Red and yellow, black and white/ They are precious in His sight/ Jesus loves the little children of the world."

Hinduism, however, pushes Dalits into believing that their karma for this life is already determined, and that submissiveness can make their next birth better. Although Social Darwinism—the idea that helping the poor obstructs societal evolution—is a 19th century western invention, Hindu racists a millennium before developed strong rationales for malign neglect of those in need: the poor are suffering in accordance with their karma and their qualities.

For many Indian secularists karma is now a faded rose from days gone by, but it still has influence. So does pride: Indian leaders have long criticized others while letting themselves off easy. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said on in 1953, "India will not go with the doctrine of racial inequality. Wherever there is racial discrimination we shall do everything in our power, short of war, to oppose it." Good words, but he pointed to Africa and the United States as problem areas and left out the biggest one, his own country. Today, India is clearly the largest purveyor of racism in the world.

Could that be changing?

THE UNKNOWN CANDIDATE:

Marquis de Bush? (MAUREEN DOWD, 5/27/04, NY Times)

John Kerry's advisers were surprised and annoyed to hear that Mr. Gore hollered so much, he made Howard Dean look like George Pataki. They don't want voters to be reminded of the wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party.

They would like Mr. Gore, who brought bad karma to Mr. Dean with his primary endorsement, to zip it and go away. But more and more Democrats think it is Mr. Kerry who should zip it and go away.

Mr. Kerry has made a huge $25 million ad buy in recent weeks, believing that the better voters know him, the more they'll like him. But many Democrats fear he's one of those supercilious/smarmy candidates (like Al Gore) for whom the opposite is true: the more you know him, the less you want to see him.

They wonder whether Mr. Kerry should just let the campaign be Bush vs. Bush. As the president's old running buddy, Lee Atwater, used to say, don't get in the way when your rival's busy shooting himself.

Couldn't the Democratic standard-bearer use a William McKinley front-porch strategy, talking only to those who bother to show up at his front porch? After all, Mr. Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, have five front porches, stretching from Sun Valley to Nantucket and Georgetown.

IT'S A MOVIE:

A Film That Could Warm Up the Debate on Global Warming: Whatever its flaws, "The Day After Tomorrow"' could do more to elevate the issue of global warming than any number of Congressional hearings or high-minded tracts. (ROBERT B. SEMPLE. Jr., 5/27/04, NY Times)

It could be similar to how the summer-blockbuster Armageddon led even the Left to support the deployment of a space-based defense against asteroids.

RECOGNIZE THE DISEASE (via Tom Corcoran):

Treat the Disease: Campaign spending will keep increasing as long as government does. (Patrick Basham , 5/25/04, National Review)

[T]he most important factor driving campaign finance upward is "more government." Simply stated, the growth of government spending fosters the growth in campaign spending. Taxes and regulations on society have increased the ambit of government at all levels. Increasing government activity leads to more efforts to influence political decisions, including spending on campaigns, a relationship confirmed by scholarly studies.

As government does and spends more, individuals try to influence government, both to advance their causes and to protect themselves from abuse. And government has grown enormously. In 2000, the federal government taxed Americans to the tune of $2.03 trillion, a 250-percent real increase since 1970. On the expenditure side, federal-government spending reached $1.79 trillion in 2000, a 915 percent nominal increase over the previous 30 years.

Government has assumed the additional power to regulate all kinds of private conduct, especially regarding economic life. Economist Thomas Hopkins estimates that the cost of complying with these federal regulations exceeds $700 billion. The desire to gain benefits or avoid costs from regulation also pushes campaign contributions upward.

These levels of taxation and regulation indicate that government has vast power over many aspects of American life — from wealth redistribution, to the nature of housing, agriculture, education, and health care, to trade, energy, and telecommunications, to gun ownership, to the consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. Almost 70,000 government bodies are authorized to impose taxes on Americans.

Is it any wonder, then, that several billion dollars are spent lobbying politicians during each election cycle?

WHO'S IT HELP?:

The Chalabi Fiasco: He's a pawn in a much larger strategic game. (Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2004)

The more we dig into last week's Baghdad raid against Ahmed Chalabi, the more curious it seems. Clearly there's much more going on here than a fight over one man's credibility.

If nothing else, this has to be the strangest "spy" case in U.S. history. On the day of last week's raid, a spokesman for U.S. regent L. Paul Bremer denied that Mr. Chalabi was even the target. But the papers and TV shows have since been filled with accusations that Mr. Chalabi provided classified information to Iran. None of his accusers is ever on the record, and no one has explained how Mr. Chalabi would have access to such U.S. secrets. But someone in the U.S. government clearly wants to damage him. [...]

The charge of spying for Iran is serious enough that Mr. Chalabi, Iraqis and the U.S. have a substantial stake in getting to the truth. As Mr. Chalabi suggests, ideally that would be in public, before Congress.

Mr. Chalabi has long maintained good relations with Iran, in particular to gain access to northern Iraq during Saddam's rule. But this is hardly news to U.S. officials, who financed the INC's Tehran office. In any event, the last thing Iran's mullahs want is the emergence of a secular, stable, Shiite-led free government of the kind Mr. Chalabi has long favored.

So what's really going on here? We think Mr. Chalabi is a pawn in a much larger battle that is strategic, ideological and personal. [...]

The ideological battle concerns Iraq's future governance. As a secular Shiite, Mr. Chalabi has sought to make an alliance with Grand Ayatollah Sistani and other moderate Shiite leaders. This puts him at odds with Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special envoy to Iraq, as well as with the neighboring Arab leaders who are wary of control by the Shiite majority.

Jordan's King Abdullah, a longtime Chalabi enemy who is close to Mr. Brahimi, has already called for another Sunni strongman to run Iraq. Mr. Bremer and the Bush Administration have handed control over the June 30 transition to Iraqi sovereignty to Mr. Brahimi, and one of his demands is that Mr. Chalabi be frozen out.

As for the personal, Mr. Chalabi is a blunt man who can seem arrogant even to his friends. Unlike some others on the Iraqi Governing Council, he has frequently been critical of Mr. Bremer and has fought him over many issues, especially elections and the probe into the U.N. Oil for Food scandal.

All of this is to suggest that there are many people, in the U.N. and U.S. government, who were only too happy to see Mr. Chalabi humiliated in that raid and then trashed afterward.

"KEEP IT UNDER YOUR HAT!" THEY SHOUTED:

2006 Cuts In Domestic Spending On Table (Jonathan Weisman, May 27, 2004, Washington Post)

The White House put government agencies on notice this month that if President Bush is reelected, his budget for 2006 may include spending cuts for virtually all agencies in charge of domestic programs, including education, homeland security and others that the president backed in this campaign year.

Administration officials had dismissed the significance of the proposed cuts when they surfaced in February as part of an internal White House budget office computer printout. At the time, officials said the cuts were based on a formula and did not accurately reflect administration policy. But a May 19 White House budget memorandum obtained by The Washington Post said that agencies should assume the spending levels in that printout when they prepare their fiscal 2006 budgets this summer.

"Assume accounts are funded at the 2006 level specified in the 2005 Budget database," the memo informs federal program associate directors and their deputies. "If you propose to increase funding above that level for any account, it must be offset within your agency by proposing to decrease funding below that level in other accounts."

J.T. Young, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the memo, titled "Planning Guidance for the FY 2006 Budget," is a routine "process document" to help agency officials begin establishing budget procedures for 2006. In no way should it be interpreted as a final policy decision, or even a planning document, he said.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH BEING A SMOKIN' HOT, CLASSICAL, CONSERVATIVE BABE?:

The Curse of Beauty for Serious Musicians: Classical music still seems to have trouble dealing with strong women. If you're attractive, it seems, you must also be cheesy and commercial. (ANNE MIDGETTE, 5/27/04, NY Times)

When the violinist Lara St. John gave a recital in Toronto in February, she gave a lot of thought to what she was going to wear.

Ms. St. John, 32, is well aware of the power of image. For one thing she is a striking six-foot blonde. And while this week saw the release of "Re: Bach," her first album for Sony Classical, the CD she will probably always be best known for is "Bach Works for Violin Solo" from 1996. That is the one on which she appeared naked on the cover, holding her violin across her breasts.

The picture was more artistic than shocking. Showing Ms. St. John from the waist up with the violin completely hiding her chest, it revealed nothing inappropriate for a family paper. But from the reaction, you would have thought she had posed for Penthouse. There were accusations of sexploitation and child pornography. (Ms. St. John was 24 and looked younger.) There were also phenomenal album sales: more than 30,000 copies, big stuff for a classical music recording.

The cover has remained a mixed blessing. Because of it many in the field have pigeonholed Ms. St. John in the booming genre of classical crossover, lumping her with other musicians of far less artistic substance, like Linda Brava (a Finnish violinist who has indeed posed for Playboy) or Vanessa-Mae (a violinist remembered for her wet T-shirt poses and electric violin arrangements).

But this is patently foolish. Ms. St. John is a substantial musician, and she has never strayed from the classical repertory. "Re: Bach" is her first crossover album. In person she is also less a bimbo than a bird of paradise, striking and unconventional. And while she clearly enjoys vamping for photos, she's very serious about the music.

"I'm actually pretty conservative when it comes to performance," she said.

LETTING GO:

Iraqis Need to Bear the Burden (Melana Zyla Vickers, 05/26/2004, Tech Central Station)

"Can (Iraqi forces) opt out of an operation if they don't want to or something of that nature? And the answer has to be yes," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 18. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz added: "I agree exactly."

If ever there was an illustration of what's wrong with the administration's perception of the U.S. role in Iraq, this is it: Current Iraq policy puts the U.S. military far too much in the front and center in that country, and relies far too little on transferring the burden of fighting armed insurgents, nation-building and policework to the Iraqis. The reasoning ranges from the Iraqis being unready and untrained, to them being unwilling, to them being unable to take the lead role in their own security and defense.

Yet sidelining the Iraqis with exceptions and concessions such as the opt-out clause is damaging to both Iraq and the United States. It puts off the day when a new Iraq is militarily master of its own house. And it shoves the U.S. -- which was never supposed to be the bull's eye of insurgents and antagonists in Iraq, only the liberator of the Iraqi people -- more deeply into the burdensome, dangerous, and increasingly unpopular position of military occupier.

AT LEAST THE MILLENARIANS ARE ZIONISTS IN THE MEANTIME:

Israel and the Question of the National State (Ran Halévi, April 2004, Policy Review)

The idea of a binational state has repeatedly reared its head throughout the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was already circulating, in various guises, during the 1920s and 30s among the Brit Shalom (“The Alliance for Peace”) group, led by Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, before falling victim to military confrontation. It surfaced in the wake of the Six-Day War, this time under the auspices of the plo, which demanded the dissolution of the “Zionist entity” for the sake of what the official euphemism called “a secular and democratic Palestinian state” where there would be no place for Jews who arrived in Israel after 1948. It was also embraced by some figures of the American literary left. With the signing of the Oslo Accords, it seemed to have vanished for good. But the second Intifada infused it with new life: The resurrection of the binational project is one of the many consequences of the dramatic fiasco at the Camp David negotiations during the summer of 2000.

Today, however, it is not within the Palestinian camp that the idea is most audible, but in the margins of the political debate in Israel and . . . in the writing of Tony Judt (see Israel: The Alternative, New York Review of Books, October 22, 2003), who adorns it with the attire of novelty and the noble allure of the “unthinkable.” It is odd to see this epithet attached to an idea that is almost a hundred years old and which has never ceased to be “thought,” despite never having been applied. Here it is back on the agenda. [...]

Several months before his article appeared, in August 2003, the readers of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz had the binational project explained to them by two respected figures of the Israeli left. One of them, Meron Benvenisti, once deputy mayor of Jerusalem responsible for relations with the local Arab population, is one of the men who has toiled most to bring about a reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. An engaging, passionate personality with deep family roots in the Zionist movement, it isn’t as if Benvenisti, at the age of 70, had turned into a furious ideologue who favored the disintegration of Israel.

His reflection proceeded from three fundamental observations. The first is that the development of settlements in the West Bank has created an irreversible trend that precludes a return to the situation before 1967. Mr. Benvenisti has been predicting this since the 1980s. At that time, however, the settlements amounted to barely 20,000 persons; today the estimate is 230,000. And that which to him seemed impossible 20 years ago is all the more so today.

From this observation flows a second one: The irreversible situation produced by the extension of the settlements has already created a binational reality which any political solution should take into account. All the more so, given a third observation: that the debacle at Camp David and the bloody confrontations that almost immediately followed have tragically brought Israelis and Palestinians back to their attitudes of 50 years ago, thus consuming all avenues of compromise which they believed they were so close to achieving: “Both sides have in fact given up their mutual recognition, when we have begun again to consider the Palestinians as a terrorist entity, and they to look at us as aliens.” In this respect, Mr. Benvenisti shows himself almost as hard on the Israeli left as on the right: “This whole problem of the Arabs annoys the people on the left, is too complicated for them, exposes them to a moral dilemma and a cultural embarrassment: this is why they want this horrible wall . . . which is a violation of this land, why they flee Jerusalem, why they flee the countryside and the landscape to crowd together in Tel Aviv.”

In this disenchanting picture, the dominant, decisive fact that prescribes, so to speak, the future is the demographic element: The entanglement of Jewish and Arab populations on the territory that extends from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean renders literally inapplicable the creation of two distinct national states, says Mr. Benvenisti. “Since Zionism excluded the idea of eliminating the Arabs, its dream has become unrealizable. For this land cannot accommodate two sovereignties within it, and will never be able to do so.”

In other words, a binational reality prescribes a binational solution. Between the 3.5 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza, the 1.2 million Israeli Arabs, and the some 5 million Jewish Israelis, it is thus necessary to imagine a new framework of cohabitation. Mr. Benvenisti envisages a structure that is both federal and cantonal — he speaks of “ethnic cantons” — where each people could lead an autonomous existence. The plan, he admits, is still embryonic and nebulous, but the general direction seems clear. “What I propose doesn’t make me rejoice. . . . I cling to the fragile hope that, perhaps, a common purpose may emerge . . .; that we will learn perhaps to live together; that we will understand perhaps that the other is not the devil.”[...]

Besides being “bad for the Jews,” Mr. Judt explains, Israel represents an historical anachronism, founded, what is more, on an original injustice. Several nation-states rose from the ashes of the old empires on the eve of World War i, and their very first action was “to set about privileging their national, ‘ethnic’ majority . . . at the expense of inconvenient local minorities, who were consigned to second-class status.” The creation of the state of Israel not only reproduced this offense, but posed the additional difficulty of having arrived “too late” in a world where borders are open, democracies are pluralist, and there are multiple “elective identities.” This late-blooming nation-state thus embodies the double sin, according to Tony Judt, of both injustice and anachronism.

The legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise was, we know, contested from the outset. But when it comes to legitimacy, it is not ideological posturing but history that is the final judge. The history of Israel’s creation, which is still being written, has not yet produced its moral balance sheet — and thus is incommensurate with the experience of nation-states whose security has been established for centuries. Tony Judt does not contest the legitimacy of the French nation on account of the Frankish invasions, or that of England by stigmatizing the armed expedition of William the Conqueror. But he haggles over Israel’s legitimacy for its supposedly anachronistic character. As Mark Lilla recently noted, as if replying to Judt in anticipation, “all political foundings, without exception, are morally ambiguous enterprises, and Israel has not escaped these ambiguities. Two kinds of fools or bigots refuse to see this: those who deny or explain away the Palestinian suffering caused by Israel’s founding, and those who treat that suffering as the unprecedented consequence of a uniquely sinister ideology.” [...]

[H]ere are two living examples, America and Israel, where democracy, the nation, and the sovereign state are closely linked. And if so many Europeans today have a hard time acknowledging this “incongruity,” and a harder time still putting up with it, this is because they tend increasingly to detach democracy from the nation and to persuade themselves, against all the evidence, that democracy does not need either the nation or the state in order to flourish.

The wars of the twentieth century have fatally brought the nation into disrepute, and this process has only grown further with European integration. We do not cherish the nation anymore, but we are unable to abandon it because we do not know how and with what to adequately replace it. Political philosophy does not provide us with any practical alternative: neither the tribe, nor the empire, nor the city. Even Europe disconcerts us: It has taken only one plenary session of the Council, enlarged to 25 states — only one! — to make us discover, belatedly, that the European machine cannot offer an adequate substitute for our disaffection with the nation. But this disaffection remains so deeply rooted that many Europeans are less and less inclined to understand those nation-states which are not afflicted by our doubts, and still less to tolerate the use these states make of their monopoly on legitimate force. The detestation of George W. Bush or of Ariel Sharon does not confine itself to what in their policies could be seen as reprehensible — and God knows they may be, in certain respects. Rather it is combined with a sentiment of alienation and frustration in the presence of such fully assumed expressions of national sovereignty — this still-vital constellation of the nation-state and democracy, which so many of us are inclined to disconnect and even to oppose.

Israel offers a mirror, an exemplary case in which we can contemplate and realize vicariously our schizophrenic relationship towards the national question. It is no accident that the more virulent critics, who often happen to be those of the United States as well, are to be found in the ranks of the antiglobalization movement. The type of postnational nihilism they inscribed on their banner contributed to the depoliticization of their approach to politics in general and the Middle East in particular: Israel, in other words, is that nation-state which most immediately vexes their planetary humanism.

MORE:
-The End of Zionism?: The ideology that built the State of Israel has given way to a Post-Zionism that sanctifies Jewish disempowerment. (Yoram Hazony, Summer 1996, Azure)

CHOOSING NO INFLUENCE:

Japanese divided on whether foreigners are good influence (AP, May 27, 2004)

The Japanese are evenly split over whether foreigners are a good influence on their society, according to an Associated Press poll on immigration attitudes.

Forty-four percent of respondents said immigrants are a good influence on their country -- but the exact same percentage called immigrants a bad influence, researchers said. [...]

There are 2 million foreigners living in Japan -- a minuscule number in a country with 127 million people. The largest group are Koreans, many of them descendants of laborers taken there during Japan's 1910-1945 colonization of the Korean Peninsula. [...]

Foreigners, particularly those from other countries in Asia or developing countries, face discrimination in employment and housing, and there have been incidents in which they have been barred from certain shops, bathhouses or bars.

Authorities and media reports suggest illegal aliens are behind a recent crime surge, but statistics show foreigners commit crimes at about the same rate as Japanese.

WRONG SAUDI DUPE:

Clarke claims responsibility: Ex-counterterrorism czar approved post-9-11 flights for bin Laden family (Alexander Bolton, 5/26/04, The Hill)

Richard Clarke, who served as President Bush’s chief of counterterrorism, has claimed sole responsibility for approving flights of Saudi Arabian citizens, including members of Osama bin Laden’s family, from the United States immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In an interview with The Hill yesterday, Clarke said, “I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again.”

Most of the 26 passengers aboard one flight, which departed from the United States on Sept. 20, 2001, were relatives of Osama bin Laden, whom intelligence officials blamed for the attacks almost immediately after they happened.

Clarke’s claim of responsibility is likely to put an end to a brewing political controversy on Capitol Hill over who approved the controversial flights of members of the Saudi elite at a time when the administration was preparing to detain dozens of Muslim-Americans and people with Muslim backgrounds as material witnesses to the attacks.

Several Democrats say that at a closed-door meeting May 6, they pressed members of the commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11 to find out who approved the flights.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH STABLE REFORM?:

Putin: Russia's 'Mr. Stability': In state-of-the-nation speech, Russian president pledged to stay the course with modest reforms. (Scott Peterson, 5/27/04, CS Monitor)

Tax reform. Better healthcare and education. And a promise from Russian President Vladimir Putin that, after a decade of post-Soviet chaos and four years of his benevolent rule, Russia has now crossed a threshold to a stability that will double the economy and incomes by 2010.

With little emotion, Mr. Putin Wednesday used his first state-of-the-nation speech since a March landslide reelection victory to announce new long-term aims. But among Putin's modest pledges for affordable housing and new oil pipelines, analysts expressed concern about what Putin did not say.

"I did not hear anything significant about political reforms, the media, regional problems, or building a professional army - as if everything was OK in those fields," says Maxim Glikin, political editor of Moscow's Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily newspaper. "The message is: I'm victorious, and everything is under my control."

Widely popular among Russians tired of the uncertainties of the 1990s, Putin is beginning his second term on the wave of a 7.3 percent economic growth last year, and backed by a pro-Kremlin parliament elected last December.

PSYCHOBABBLER (via Uncle Neil)

Remarks by Al Gore (May 26, 2004)

One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one's soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised, especially if the helpless come to be treated as animals, and degraded. We also know - and not just from De Sade and Freud - the psychological proximity between sexual depravity and other people's pain. It has been especially shocking and awful to see these paired evils perpetrated so crudely and cruelly in the name of America.

RAGTIME:

Doctorow Booed After Anti-Bush Speech (Associated Press, May 26, 2004)

Author E.L. Doctorow, who penned "Ragtime" and "City of God," was stunned when his commencement address at Hofstra University was booed by some students angry at his criticism of President Bush.

"I thought we were all supposed to speak out," he told The Washington Post in Tuesday's editions. "Isn't that what this country is about?"

In a 20-minute address to graduates at the Long Island school on Sunday, the novelist criticized Bush's tax cuts, anti-terrorism policies and the Patriot Act, but focused mainly on what he called Bush's "untrue" stories about the war in Iraq.

"One story he told was that the country of Iraq had nuclear and biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction and was intending shortly to use them on us ... but it was not true," Doctorow said.

"Another story was that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was in league with the terrorists of al-Qaida, and that turned out not to be true. But anyway we went off to war on the basis of those stories."

That led to a torrent of boos and catcalls that forced Doctorow to stop talking.

MORE:
Doctorow's Malpractice: Hofstra students use boos responsibly. (PEGGY NOONAN, May 25, 2004, Wall Street Journal)
Newsday said many parents and relatives of the more than 1,300 undergraduates were "livid" over the address. Frank Mallafre, who had traveled from Miami for his granddaughter's graduation, said, "If this would have happened in Florida, we would have taken him out" of the stadium. Bill Schmidt, 51, of North Bellmore, N.Y., shared the outrage. "To ruin my daughter's graduation with politics is pathetic," the retired New York police captain told the paper.

On Sunday night a Hofstra official said that while Mr. Doctorow had the right to his views, he violated the unwritten code that college commencement speeches should inspire and unite a student body. But a Hofstra faculty member came to the fore, defending Mr. Doctorow. "I thought this was a totally appropriate place to talk about politics because that's the world our students are entering," sociology professor Cynthia Bogard told Newsday. "I only wish their parents had provided them a better role model."

Wow. Think of what a role model Prof. Bogard is. What a fool. What a snob.

I want to explain to Ed Doctorow why he was booed. It was not, as he no doubt creamily recounted in a storytelling session over drinks that night in Sag Harbor, that those barbarians in Long Island's lesser ZIP codes don't want to hear the truth. It is not that they oppose free speech. It is not that the poor boobs of Long Island have an unaccountable affection for George W. Bush.

It is that they have class.

The poor stupid people of Long Island are courteous, and have respect for the views and feelings of others, and would not dream of imposing their particular views on a captive audience that has gathered to celebrate--to be happy about, to officially mark with their presence--the rather remarkable fact that one of their family studied and worked for four years, completed his courses, met all demands, and became a graduate of an American university.

This indeed is something to be proud of.
The Heckler Heckled (George Neumayr, 5/26/2004, American Spectator)

When E.L. Doctorow urged graduates at Hofstra University to question authority, he didn't expect them to question his. The fiction writer accused George Bush of launching a fictitious war in Iraq and was heckled into silence. In a moment the liberal elite must regard as an alarming illustration of the Red-Blue divisions of America now even bleeding into academia, students and parents booed Doctorow while the liberal faculty stood to cheer at the end of his speech. Booing a speaker into silence wasn't the vigorous free speech and activism Doctorow had in mind when he extolled agitation earlier in his speech. How dare the mob turn on its visionaries. Notice the suggestion (in the Newsday story about Doctorow's speech) that peasants were responsible for the heckling -- the booing "came mainly from the crowd in the stands." This is reminiscent of self-appointed populist Michael Moore blaming boos at the Oscars two years ago on lowly stage hands and hooligans in the cheap seats.

The distinction between civility and incivility in the liberal mind is very fine indeed: If a liberal commencement speaker calls the president of the United States a liar, that's civility; if the crowd boos the speaker calling their president a liar, that's incivility.

FOSBURY ON THE CHARLES:

Kerry decides to have conventional convention (Ron Fournier, 5/26/2004, Associated Press)

Bowing to pressure, John Kerry decided Wednesday to accept the nomination at the Democratic presidential convention in July, scuttling a plan to delay the formality so he could narrow President Bush's public money advantage.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Al-Sadr Offers to Remove Militia From Najaf (Fox News, May 26, 2004)

[I]raq's national security adviser said al-Sadr had offered to remove his fighters from Najaf — except for those who live there.

WERE ANY OF HIS WAR WOUNDS SELF-INFLICTED?

Kerry to Accept Nomination at Convention (Ron Fournier, AP, 5/26/04)

Bowing to pressure, John Kerry decided Wednesday to accept the nomination at the Democratic presidential convention in July, scuttling a plan to delay the formality so he could narrow President Bush's public money advantage.

"Boston is the place where America's freedom began, and it's where I want the journey to the Democratic nomination to be completed," Kerry said in a statement released by his campaign. "On Thursday, July 29, with great pride, I will accept my party's nomination for president in the city of Boston. From there we will begin our journey to a new America."

WHAT'S FRENCH FOR BARBECUE?:

Kerry inches up as Bush approval drops (Quinnipiac University, May 26, 2004)

By a 50 – 39 percent margin, voters would rather have a backyard barbecue with Bush

"OUT OF CONTROL!," HE FOAMED:

Gore calls for Rice, Rumsfeld, Tenet to resign (MSNBC, 5/26/04)

Al Gore issued a fiery denunciation Wednesday of Bush administration policy in Iraq and demanded the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Raising his voice to a yell in a speech at New York University, Gore said: “How dare they subject us to such dishonor and disgrace! How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein’s torture prison!”

NEVERMIND:

Gay vows in S.F. appear doomed: JUSTICES CAST DOUBT OVER LEGALITY OF 4,000 WEDDINGS (Howard Mintz, May 26, 2004, San Jose Mercury News)

San Francisco's bold decision to issue marriage licenses to thousands of gay couples in February and March appears doomed to fail in the California Supreme Court.

In two hours of rapid-fire arguments, the majority of Supreme Court justices on Tuesday sent strong signals that San Francisco had no legal authority to defy California law and wed more than 4,000 same-sex couples.

And while the justices made clear they won't decide the constitutionality of California's ban on gay marriage for now, their questions left little doubt that same-sex weddings will not resume any time soon in San Francisco or other cities across the state.

RECTIFIABLE:

U.S. war policy 'grave error': Ex-Rumsfeld aide admits occupation of Iraq a failure (SANDRO CONTENTA, May 26, 2004, Toronto Star)

Richard Perle, until recently a powerful adviser to U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, described U.S. policy in post-war Iraq as a failure.

"I would be the first to acknowledge we allowed the liberation (of Iraq) to subside into an occupation. And I think that was a grave error, and in some ways a continuing error," said Perle, former chair of the influential Defence Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon.

With violent resistance to the U.S.-led occupation showing no signs of ending, Perle said the biggest mistake in post-war policy "was the failure to turn Iraq back to the Iraqis more or less immediately.

"We didn't have to find ourselves in the role of occupier. We could have made the transition that is going to be made at the end of June more or less immediately," he told BBC radio, referring to the U.S. and British plan to transfer political authority in Iraq to an interim government on June 30.

THE DRUMBEAT:

Inside Syria's Gulag (Nir Boms, May 26, 2004, FrontPageMagazine.com)

[T]he story of Aktham Na’eesah—a lawyer, activist, and the recent laureate of the prestigious “Ludovic Trarieux” award for his distinct human rights work—provides a glimpse into the Syria’s “democratic” reality.

Two weeks ago, Na’eesah nearly died as a result of a stroke suffered inside the unforgiving walls of the Sadniah prison in Damascus, a facility notorious for the brutal “rehabilitation” programs it offers its political prisoners.

Luckily, though, Syrian guards summoned a doctor, who was able to save Na’eesah’s life—at least for the moment.

A longtime critic of Syria’s totalitarian Ba’athist regime, Na’eesah was first imprisoned in 1982 for his written calls for the protection and respect of human rights in Syria. In 1989, after years of harassment by Syria’s security apparatus, he and a group of fellow Syrian pro-democracy activists created the Committee for the Defense of Freedom and Human Rights (CDF).

In 1991, Na’eesah was arrested yet again for taking part in activities intended to regain the independence of the Syrian Bar Association. For his actions, he was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison.

Following his release in 1998, Na’eesah and other CDF members continued their activism despite being subjected by Syrian authorities to routine surveillance, phone tapping, confiscation of mail and the harassment of their families.

That is, until April 13, when Na’eesah was arrested and thrown into Sadniah prison, accused of “spreading false information and establishing a secret organization with an international influence.”

Shortly before his arrest, Na’eesah had presented a petition to the government signed by 7,000 Syrian intellectuals seeking the abolition of Syria’s emergency laws, which have been in place since the Ba’ath party came to power in 1963.

He also issued a report that accused Syrian authorities of illegally arresting more than 1,000 Kurds and called for an end to the state's “terrorist and illegal practices” against the Kurdish minority in Syria (last month, close to a 100 Kurds were killed and more than 500 wounded in anti-government riots and around the Syrian city of Quamoshli).

YOU'D BE OPTIMISTIC TOO IF YOU WERE AN IRAQI:

HANDS OF FRIENDSHIP (DEBORAH ORIN, May 26, 2004, New York Post)

Seven Iraqi men whose right hands were chopped off on Saddam Hussein's orders at Abu Ghraib prison yesterday went to see President Bush - to thank America for freeing their country and getting them prosthetic limbs.

"You have to thank everybody who participated in the decision-making of going to war against Saddam, because without this, nobody can live in peace ever in the United States, Iraq or in Europe," said Basim Al Fadhly, 43.

All seven had their right hands amputated by a doctor at Abu Ghraib on Saddam's orders, on charges of foreign currency trafficking - and each had an "X" tattooed in the middle of his forehead to mark him as a criminal. [...]

The men spoke at a press conference several hours after going to the Oval Office, where Bush said, "I'm honored to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein. They are examples of the brutality of the tyrant."

But the men - who today plan to thank some of the U.S. troops who helped free Iraq - also spoke with surprising optimism and lack of bitterness about the future, talking about the need for forgiveness, as well as punishment, so Iraq can build anew.

DOES ANY DEMOCRAT LIKE HIM?:

Daley says Kerry went too far with joke about president's fall (Chicago Sun-Times, May 26, 2004)

Mayor Daley scolded Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry Tuesday for making a wisecrack about the bicycle accident that scraped the face, hands and knees of President Bush.

According to the Drudge Report, Kerry was having a conversation with reporters that he apparently believed was off the record when he reportedly asked, "Did the training wheels fall off?"

Daley, who ripped the skin off his kneecap during a bicycle accident a few years ago, said the joke was disrespectful. "When someone falls . . . you should not wish ill upon anyone. It's not right. . . . You just don't do that. Let's have some respect for one another."

THINKS HIMSELF HORACE GREELEY:

The Washington Post`s New Leftist: Harold Meyerson`s qualifications: a fringe leftwing journalist for the L.A. Weekly, an ideologue at The American Prospect, an unreconstructed socialist. His job: regular columnist for the Washington Post. (Shawn Macomber, 5/26/04, FrontPage)

Meyerson also has an activist career as Vice-Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and refers to George W. Bush “The Most Dangerous President Ever,” frequently describes America as “belligerent” and “xenophobic,” and openly yearns for a European superstate to “prevail” in blocking American interests and power. “We need Europe to save us from ourselves,” Meyerson recently wrote.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), by its own admission, is “the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.” Meyerson is so well respected by the DSA that he was the honored guest at their annual 1995 dinner and is a featured speaker at the Socialist Scholars Conference, an event which annually gathers intellectuals of the hard left including indicted terrorist, Lynne Stewart. [...]

As the war on terror moved on, he was soon was begging Europe to rescue humanity from the Great Satan. “Americans must hope that, in this era of global integration, we are not at the brink of the American century. If anything, the Europeans should take some time out from perfecting Europe to project their values more forcefully on the wider world.” Clearly Europe is political home for Meyerson. “At the outset of the 21st century, the battle between Europe and America for the power to shape the century, and on behalf of different models of social organization, is already joined,” Meyerson lectures. “And may I gently suggest that the best possible outcome for the American democratic republic – for the America of Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt – would be an American (or more precisely, Bushian) defeat.”

WIN-WIN:

U.S. troops capture key lieutenant of radical cleric (ROBERT H. REID, May 26, 2004, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

U.S. troops captured a key lieutenant of radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr during overnight clashes in Najaf that killed 24 people and wounded nearly 50, hospital and militia officials said.

Riyadh al-Nouri, al-Sadr's brother-in-law, offered no resistance when American troops raided his home during a series of clashes in this Shiite holy city, according to Azhar al-Kinani, a staffer in al-Sadr's office in Najaf.

The capture of al-Nouri would be a major blow to al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army, which has been battling coalition forces since early April. Al-Sadr launched his uprising in response to a crackdown by coalition authorities who announced an arrest warrant against him in the April 2003 assassination of a moderate cleric in Najaf.

In Baghdad, diplomatic sources confirmed reports published Wednesday that Dr. Hussain al-Shahristani, a science adviser to the Iraqi government who spent years in Abu Ghraib prison, was among several people under consideration for the job of prime minister of an interim government to take power June 30. The sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, emphasized that no decision had been made and other candidates were under consideration.

Before the Iraq war, al-Shahristani was among the Iraqi exiles who had insisted that Saddam maintained weapons of mass destruction. In February 2003, he told CBS' "60 Minutes" that such weapons may have been hidden in tunnels for a Baghdad subway that never opened.

HOW EASILY HE'D RECOGNIZE THE TYPE WHO OPPOSE THIS WAR:

Melvin J. Lasky, Cultural Cold Warrior, Dies at 84 (RICHARD BERNSTEIN, May 22, 2004, NY Times)

Melvin J. Lasky, the editor of two major intellectual journals and a man at the vortex of the debates and controversies thrown up by the cold war, died Wednesday at his home in Berlin. He was 84. [...]

Probably no person was more associated than Mr. Lasky with the term cultural cold warrior. In a career that spanned several decades, during which he lived in London, Paris and Berlin, he edited the monthly magazine Encounter, which was not only one of Europe's leading literary and political journals but also a major force in articulating the point of view best summed up by the phrase liberal anti-Communism. [...]

Mr. Lasky was seen as a hero by his friends and intellectual allies for his fierce and uncompromising opposition to totalitarianism. In what was a kind of personal credo, he once wrote about the intellectual's responsibility to mount an unwavering defense of individual rights, or else, as he put it, "manuscripts will be banned, books will be burned, and writers and readers will once again be sitting in concentration camps for having thought dangerous ideas or uttered forbidden words."

He was himself uncompromising in his disdain for anyone who, in his view, had muddled, morally confused thoughts about the irredeemable viciousness of Soviet totalitarianism, or who committed, in his eyes, the incomprehensible error of seeing the flaws of the democratic West as somehow comparable to those of the Communist East. [...]

In 1966, The New York Times disclosed that the magazine had been secretly financed by the C.I.A., which channeled funds through an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which Mr. Lasky had helped to create to wage the intellectual battle against Communism. [...]

Melvin Jonah Lasky was born in New York on Jan. 15, 1920. He went to the City College of New York, a hotbed of left-wing "isms," where among his classmates were the men later to be known in New York intellectual life as "the two Irvings," Irving Howe and Irving Kristol.

During World War II, Mr. Lasky served as a combat historian in France and Germany, and no sooner had the war ended, than he showed what became his feisty and prickly approach to political controversy, taking part in a literary debate organized as a propaganda exercise in the Soviet occupied part of Berlin.

While most participants duly lambasted the "imperialistic" United States, Mr. Lasky, who with his goatee looked a bit like Lenin, compared the Communist system to Nazism.

MORE:
-OBIT: Obituary: Melvin J. Lasky, Editor of Encounter (The Daily Telegraph, May 21, 2004)
-OBIT: Obituary: Melvin Lasky: Cold warrior who edited the CIA-funded Encounter magazine (Andrew Roth, May 22, 2004, The Guardian)
-OBIT: Melvin J. Lasky: Cold Warrior editor of the controversially funded 'Encounter' (Albert H. Friedlander , 21 May 2004, Independent uk)
-melvin-lasky.de
-ESSAY: Babel: The return of the J-word in Germany and whether "Hey Jude" is anti-Semitic (Melvin J Lasky, April 1997, Prospect)
-Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals (pbs.org)
-PROFILE: A Brief Encounter: Melvin Lasky is a legend. Better yet, he dislikes Maureen Dowd. (TUNKU VARADARAJAN, April 6, 2001, Wall Street Journal)
-REVIEW ESSAY: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited (James Petras, November 1999, Monthly Review)
-REVIEW: of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
by Frances Stonor Saunders (MICHAEL P. ROGIN, The Nation)
-ESSAY: A Cause In Need of A Lasky (Anne Applebaum, June 9, 2004, Washington Post)

AT LEAST HE CARRIED MA:

McGovern: Kerry Shouldn't Delay Nomination (LOLITA C. BALDOR, 5/25/04, AP)

Democrat George McGovern, who ran for president in 1972, warned Tuesday that John Kerry should not delay the party's nomination schedule out of concern over money.

The liberal South Dakotan told The Associated Press that Kerry's proposal to delay accepting the Democratic nomination would show that "money is king and everything else takes a back seat." And while McGovern said he wished he'd had more funds in his unsuccessful campaign against Republican Richard Nixon, he said money isn't everything. [...]

"It's the worst idea I've heard on timing since I gave my (acceptance) address at 2 a.m. in the morning," said McGovern, whose middle-of-the night speech accepting the Democratic nomination missed most television viewers. "I don't believe in monkeying around with things like that."

WHO EVER TOOK IT SERIOUSLY?:

Prodi: 'radical change' needed for EU to catch US (Richard Carter, 25.05.2004, EUOBSERVER)

Commission President Romano Prodi on Tuesday (25 May) called for a "radical change" in EU economic policy if it is to succeed in its ambitious goal to overhaul the US and become the "most competitive economy in the world by 2010" - its so-called Lisbon strategy.

Speaking at a meeting of the European Economic and Social Committee, Mr Prodi said that the process is undergoing "great difficulties" and declared, "if we want the Lisbon strategy to be a success, we need to radically change European economic policy".

Echoing his sentiments, competition commissioner Mario Monti asked, "how can we seriously try to become the most competitive economy in the world if we do not put our money where our mouths are"?

ALL THE ROOM IS TO THE LEFT:

Candidates' Iraq Policies Share Many Similarities: When it comes to Iraq, it is getting harder every day to distinguish between President Bush's prescription and that of Senator John Kerry. (ADAM NAGOURNEY and RICHARD W. STEVENSON, 5/26/04, NY times)

They both support the June 30 deadline for the beginning of the transition to civilian power. They both say they would support an increase in United States troop strength, if necessary. Neither has supported a deadline for removing United States troops.

Mr. Bush's gradual shift away from what many Democrats have long denounced as a go-it-alone stance is an adjustment to the surge in violence in Iraq, as well as the deterioration of domestic support for the occupation in the wake of the prison abuse scandal.

But there also is clearly a political component at play here, as the White House seeks, while managing its own problems, to create a predicament for Mr. Bush's Democratic opponent. Mr. Kerry this week is beginning a series of speeches in which he will lay out some of his most detailed foreign policy pronouncements.

The fact that Mr. Bush has moved close to Mr. Kerry on some of these questions makes it much more difficult for Mr. Kerry to take advantage of what Democrats and Republicans view as the biggest political crisis of Mr. Bush's presidency, by emphasizing differences between them. Mr. Kerry is left to argue that while both men have similar ideas about what to do, he has more credibility to do it, given the breakdown in relations between Mr. Bush and many world leaders over Iraq.

Mr. Kerry has negotiated the shifting sands of Iraq for more than a year now. Some Democrats said that their candidate would just as soon stand back and not engage Mr. Bush on the war, allowing the president to struggle with setbacks, while avoiding making himself a target should Mr. Bush attempt to suggest that he is not supporting the troops.

But as Mr. Kerry is well aware, there is a growing antiwar segment of the American electorate. And there is likely to be an antiwar candidate on the ballot, in the person of Ralph Nader, the independent candidate who has called for an withdrawal of American forces.

In another sign of the complication Mr. Kerry faces, Al Gore, one of the party's severest critics of the war, is to deliver a speech in New York on Wednesday that is expected to call for the dismissal of top administration officials and assert that Americans have been put at risk at home and abroad by Mr. Bush's foreign policy.

"He's caught between what would be politically advantageous, declaring a timetable for getting out, and what he knows is the reality on the ground, which is that we need more troops," said one adviser who Mr. Kerry relies on heavily.

MORE:
The Bush and Kerry Tilt: On one issue, John Kerry is no alternative to George Bush:
Both of them embrace Ariel Sharon. (NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, 5/26/04, NY Times)

As for Mr. Kerry, he has generally been sensible on the Middle East. But in recent months he has zigged and zagged away from his record (he used to oppose the Middle East fence, for example) to plant his own wet kisses on Mr. Sharon. It's too bad he doesn't have the leadership to acknowledge what 50 former U.S. diplomats wrote in an open letter to President Bush last month:

"You have proved that the United States is not an evenhanded peace partner. . . . Your unqualified support of Sharon's extrajudicial assassinations, Israel's Berlin Wall-like barrier, its harsh military measures in occupied territories, and now your endorsement of Sharon's unilateral plan are costing our country its credibility, prestige and friends. This endorsement is not even in the best interests of Israel."

Four weeks ago, at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo.,, Kerry laid out three basic options: (1) "continue to do this largely by ourselves" (would never work); (2) "pull out and hope against hope that the worst won't happen" (worst would happen); or (3) "get the Iraqi people and the world's major powers invested with us in building Iraq's future" (that's it!).

In his address the other night, President Bush agreed with Kerry's unassailable Option 3 by recounting his own five-step plan:

(1) Turn over sovereignty as promised in a month, the date O.K.'d by Kerry; (2) help establish security (like Kerry, Bush is ready to send over more troops if our generals ask, and they'd better not ask); (3) "rebuilding that nation's infrastructure," echoing Kerry's call for "tangible benefits of reconstruction in the form of jobs, infrastructure and services"; (4) "Next month at the NATO summit in Istanbul," Bush promised to "discuss NATO's role in helping Iraq build and secure its democracy." As Kerry said last month: "He must also convince NATO as an organization that Iraq should be a NATO mission."

Only on the fifth step can we find daylight between the two men's positions. The neomultilateral Bush boasted that "a United Nations team headed by Karina Pirelli is now in Iraq helping form an independent election commission that will oversee an orderly, accurate national election."

But Kerry prefers a "high commissioner . . . charged with overseeing elections . . . highly regarded by the international community." Sorry, Pirelli; step aside, Brahimi; we need a celebrated heavy hitter like Nelson Mandela or Jimmy Carter to order those so-called sovereign Iraqis around. (Who'd a-thunk it: Bush caving in to the U.N., while Kerry gives Kofi Annan's envoys the back of his hand.)

Aside from this minor divergence of views — which could be rectified the moment Bob Shrum reads this — the speeches of the two candidates show that they see eye to eye not only about staying the course, but about what course to pursue. "If the president will take the needed steps to share the burden," said Kerry, ". . . then I will support him on this issue." And the Bush five-step plan takes those steps.

The Bush campaign yesterday launched a new TV attack ad blasting John Kerry for voting for the anti-terror Patriot Act and then speaking out against it.

"John Kerry? He voted for the Patriot Act, but pressured by fellow liberals, he's changed his position," the narrator of the ad says.

"While wiretaps, subpoena powers and surveillances are routinely used against drug dealers and organized crime, Kerry would now repeal the Patriot Act's use of these tools against terrorists."

"John Kerry: playing politics with national security," the commercial concludes. [...]

The Kerry campaign called the ad "completely false," saying Kerry himself used wiretaps when he was a prosecutor in the Boston.

SELLING THE 40% POSITION:

Building the Countermovement (Laurie Spivak, May 25, 2004 , AlterNet)

In order to stem the conservative tide and to win the hearts and minds of Americans, progressives need to go on the offensive and develop a commonsense countermovement with a quick ramp-up, long-term resolve, and sufficient resources reaching far beyond the 2004 election.

To accomplish this goal, progressives should look to the architecture of the conservative movement, which according to the founder of the Heritage Foundation, Paul Weyrich, was built on "the four M's: mission, money, management and marketing." While each of these factors has played a critical role in the ascendancy of the conservative movement, perhaps the most important is marketing.

To understand the role of marketing, think of policies as the products in "a marketplace of ideas" and public opinion polls as indicators of consumer preference. Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans are more closely aligned with the Democratic Party on the issues than they are with the Republican Party. Yet today twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservatives than as progressives. [...]

A progressive movement should be built on the four M's, plus one more M, mobilization. Progressives need to think strategically and long-term, like conservatives, while drawing upon their unique, competitive advantages and untapped resources.

In terms of competitive advantages, Americans not only prefer the positions and policies of the Democratic Party, but according to Ruy Texeira and John Judis, coming demographic shifts will also favor Democrats. [...]

The ultimate counter to the conservative movement is a progressive movement. Why progressive and not liberal? The word "progressive" frames the conservative movement for what it truly is: a regressive, backward movement. As its antithesis, it contrasts conservatives, who are stuck in the past and seek to resist change, with innovative, forward-looking progressives.

Consider the implications of the progressive frame on the war on terror. Conservatives missed the 9-11 threat because they were "preserved in amber," as Richard Clark put it, obsessed with Cold War thinking. The terrorist threat that America faces post-9-11 requires a modern foreign policy paradigm. The solution to a network of global terrorists that reaches across international borders lies in transnational networks and cooperation, not in regional Cold War models, alienating allies, and inflaming antagonisms.

Similarly, the progressive frame exposes conservative domestic policies for what they truly are: a rollback of the gains and progress that America has made over the past century.

In looking at the voting records of members of Congress since the 1790s, sociologist G. William Domhoff found that by and large, conservatives have generally opposed all of the progressive changes in American history, such as voter rights, worker protections and civil rights. These significant progressive achievements, gains in equality, and an expansion of the basic rights that most of us consider central to American values, are today taken for granted by the right and the left alike. It is these very strides that today's conservatives seek to undo. [...]

Progressives share a common set of values. According to cognitive linguist George Lakoff, these values center on our children's future: their health, their prosperity, their education, and the environment, as well as the global situation that they inherit. From the pilgrims on the Mayflower to our newest waves of immigrants, for more than 300 years, people have come to America to give their children a chance at a better life.

Securing that future through forward-looking policies, bold vision and political reform is the mission that unites progressives. To this end, progressive issues include everything from quality public education, to global warming, to a healthy and poison-free environment, to energy independence, to healthcare and wellbeing, to economic opportunities, to safety and security, to federal deficits.

(1) The UN and other transnational institutions (except, presumably, for the WTO and NATO).

(2) The Kyoto Treaty--which failed 95-0 in a sense of the Senate resolution.

(3) Affirmative Action

(4) Gay rights

(5) Abortion--though that's deuced hard to reconcile with "our children's future."

(6) Immigration

(7) Taxes

Of course, the most successful Democratic leader of the second half of the 20th Century (the only one to be elected president twice since FDR) ran against all of those things.

INTO THE WILD, PART II:

Tracing a Civilian's Odd Path to His Gruesome Fate in Iraq (JAMES DAO, 5/26/04, NY Times)

[T]he many unexplained details of Mr. Berg's final days, combined with the uncommon details of his unconventional life, have also prompted furious speculation on the Internet and talk radio about Mr. Berg himself. Some have argued that he was a spy for Israel or the C.I.A., or that the video of his murder was staged by pro-American forces to arouse anger toward Iraqi insurgents. Some have asserted that he had ties to the very Qaeda militants who are believed to be responsible for his death.

He was, after all, traveling alone, without a translator or a bodyguard, in a lawless land whose language he barely understood. He carried books about Iran and kept a detailed inventory of Iraqi communications towers. He was shown in the beheading video wearing orange clothing, which, to some, looked like the jumpsuits worn by prisoners held by the American military.

Adding to the mystery, both the Iraqi police and the American military deny responsibility for Mr. Berg's detention. The Iraqi police contend they promptly turned Mr. Berg over to the American military, an assertion Mr. Berg later confirmed in e-mail home. But American officials assert he remained in the custody of Iraqi police for the entire 13 days.

American law enforcement and intelligence officials have strenuously rejected the conspiracy theories. Mr. Berg was detained because his activities seemed suspicious, and once those suspicions were dispelled, he was released, they said. They are convinced, they said, that Mr. Berg was just a freelancing businessman with a high tolerance for risk, whose naïveté and idealism blinded him to Iraq's treacherous corners.

"He was in the wrong place at the wrong time," an F.B.I. official said.

To Mr. Berg's friends and family, there was nothing odd or mysterious about his wanderings in Iraq. He was just being Nick: a bright, fearless, iconoclastic man who saw himself as a modern-day Prometheus, bringing progress to a downtrodden nation. And like Prometheus, his friends say, he was punished for his good deeds.

"I'm sure that throughout the entire ordeal, he felt no fear," a close friend, Luke Lorenz, said of Mr. Berg's final hours. "I doubt that he thought they would hurt him. He really believed in the goodness of people. That if they took the time, they'd like him."

"When I see him sitting there in the video, it doesn't seem any different than when I'd see him anywhere else," Mr. Lorenz, 28, said. "Taking it all in." [...]

In Oklahoma, Mr. Berg's e-mail password was obtained by an associate of Zacarias Moussaoui. Mr. Moussaoui, who is awaiting trial on charges of assisting the Sept. 11 plot, attended flight school in Norman in 2001, but it is not clear that he ever met Mr. Berg.

F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Berg in 2002 and came away convinced that he had either shared the password with someone who passed it on to Mr. Moussaoui or that the password had been stolen from him. The F.B.I. cleared Mr. Berg of having links to terrorist groups, officials said.

UNWISE:

Founders' Quote Daily (The Federalist Patriot, 5/26/04)

It is a wise rule and should be fundamental in a government disposed to cherish its credit, and at the same time to restrain the use of it within the limits of its faculties, 'never to borrow a dollar without laying a tax in the same instant for paying the interest annually, and the principal within a given term; and to consider that tax as pledged to the creditors on the public faith.'
-Thomas Jefferson

IRAQ WAR WINDFALL:

In Libya, chance for new start (Charles A. Radin, May 26, 2004, Boston Globe)

A quarter-century of being identified as a leading enemy of the United States and listed as a state sponsor of terrorism, combined with economic policies based on Khadafy's personal leadership and philosophy, have stagnated the economy despite the country's substantial oil revenues.

Many government buildings and community centers are shabby, in need of plaster and paint. Public works and public services have deteriorated. Roadsides and forests near cities are full of trash; highway maintenance is spotty. Large, government-owned hotels and other public facilities are strongly evocative of China and the Soviet Union before the demise of socialism in those countries.

US-based oil companies, which have major interests in Libya, have not operated here since 1986, when President Ronald Reagan -- who also launched US airstikes against the country and broke diplomatic relations in response to alleged Libyan involvement in terrorism -- ordered the companies out and stopped all energy-related Libyan trade with the United States.

When suspicions arose that Libyan officials were linked to the Lockerbie bombing, most other developed nations joined the US sanctions regime, and the Libyan economy nosedived. Without tourists or business travelers, internal air routes withered in the Alaska-sized country, most of whose 5.5 million people live near the coast. Ferries to Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, and Malta also came to a halt.

The lifting of sanctions by other countries in 1999, when Libya acknowledged responsibility for the airliner bombing and surrendered two suspects for trial, did not do enough to modernize the oil industry and reinvigorate the economy. There are stiil very few foreigners on the streets of Tripoli and in major tourist destinations.

Posted Green Book slogans say things like "there is no freedom for the people when food comes from overseas," but a huge selection of food products, such as yogurt, cheese, pistachio nuts, and breakfast cereals, are imported. Neither the material failings nor the limitations on political speech have engendered the tough political opposition that has arisen in defiance of repression in other Arab countries, such as Syria and Tunisia. A middle-aged history teacher explained with a Libyan saying: "A satisfied stomach has no ears."

Khadafy may not have succeeded in keeping up with modernity or developing the economy, but he apparently did not engage in the gross corruption of many other Arab regimes, and he used Libya's oil resources to subsidize the population's basic needs.

"Oil was everything," said a professional tour guide, with a hint of resentment. "That's why tourism is only just beginning. Quite frankly, until now we did not need it."

BETWEEN EXTREMES:

In fits and starts, free press rises: Journalist Sirikit Syah set up Indonesia's first media-watch organization. By Susan llewelyn Leach, 5/26/04, CS Monitor)

In the five years since, [journalist Sirikit] Syah has watched the freewheeling Indonesian press and broadcast media run through some wild swings before settling down to relearn its trade. It was "chaotic," she says. "It was like another extreme" - the media thought they could write anything, broadcast anything. After decades of repression, Indonesia's newspapers and magazines often published stories that were provocative, misleading, and biased, she says. But her media-watch organization also realized that the press wasn't just putting out misinformation; it was inflaming conflicts around the country. In response, LKM Media Consumers Board stepped in and starting running workshops on "peace journalism" and conferring awards for good reporting.

In the past two years, Indonesia's media have largely found their equilibrium, she says. They recognize that being free means being responsible and accurate.

The biggest challenge now is educating the audience, she says. In the past, if an individual or organization wasn't happy with a news story, the media outlet would learn about it when its computers were vandalized or its journalists attacked. Now disapproval comes in a slew of lawsuits, many unjustified. Everyone is suing, Syah says - conglomerates, politicians, celebrities - and the amount of money awarded is threatening the existence of some publications. She calls it a "war" between the press and the public.

But it's a healthier war than that under General Suharto. Syah remembers, as a journalist, getting calls from the military about a clash between religious or ethnic groups and being told not to report on it. "They were very direct, very clear about what could not be published. We just followed to survive."

Despite major strides, the Indonesian media still have "noticeable problems," according to Reporters Without Borders, an international organization that lobbies for press freedom.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

U.N. Closes In on Choice To Lead Iraq: U.S. Differs With France, Britain on Power Sharing (Robin Wright and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, May 26, 2004, Washington Post)

The United Nations is closing in on a slate for the new Iraqi government, with a Shiite nuclear scientist who spent years in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison emerging as the leading candidate for prime minister, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials.

U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and Robert D. Blackwill, the U.S. presidential envoy to Iraq, are still working out the "complicated geometry" of dividing power among Iraq's disparate ethnic and religious factions, a senior administration official in Baghdad said yesterday. But Brahimi has met several times this month with Hussain Shahristani, who said in an interview yesterday that if asked, he would reluctantly accept the post of prime minister in Iraq's first post-Saddam Hussein government.

"If they consider my participation essential, I'll try to convince them otherwise," said Shahristani, who was educated in London and Toronto. "But if they're not convinced and they ask me to take a role . . . I cannot refuse. I must serve my people." [...]

The interest by U.N. and U.S. envoys in the 62-year-old nuclear scientist reflects their goal of crafting a government with broad legitimacy both at home and with the international community and reaching beyond the 25 men and women appointed to the Governing Council last year, who have failed to win widespread support among Iraqis.

Shahristani, who has a doctorate in nuclear chemistry from the University of Toronto, served as chief scientific adviser to Iraq's atomic energy commission until 1979, when Hussein became president. When he refused to shift from nuclear energy to nuclear weaponry, he was jailed. For most of a decade, he was in Abu Ghraib prison, much of it in solitary confinement. He escaped in 1991 and fled with his wife and three children to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and, eventually, Iran, where he worked with Iraqi refugees. He later moved to Britain, where he was a visiting university professor.

But unlike other exiles, Shahristani was not active in opposition parties, choosing instead to focus on humanitarian aid projects. He does, however, have a critical connection: He is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite cleric, whose support is essential for the viability of an interim government.

Shahristani, who has described himself as an adviser to Sistani, said he has met with the ayatollah several times since the fall of Hussein's government. Shahristani said Sistani has played a "very, very constructive" role in Iraq over the past year. Iraqi officials familiar with Brahimi's mission said Shahristani's lack of political affiliation could be an asset, allowing him to serve as a bridge between various factions. [...]

Iraqi officials familiar with Brahimi's mission said it was an op-ed piece Shahristani wrote for the April 29 Wall Street Journal that piqued Brahimi's attention. Headlined "Election Fever," the piece criticized the U.S. occupation authority for failing to prepare for elections sooner and for promulgating an interim constitution that was drawn up behind closed doors. He called for the government taking power on June 30 to have limited powers aimed at preparing the country for elections -- a position advocated by Sistani.

Iraqis are told by the CPA that the reasons for delaying elections are the absence of voter registration lists and the security situation. However, in mid-2003 the Iraqi Central Bureau of Statistics, the body responsible for preparing voter lists, issued a report concluding that it could prepare lists and arrange for elections before the end of 2003. The CPA and the Transitional Governing Council chose to ignore this report, and together signed an agreement that would allow them to handpick transitional assembly members through a complex caucus process. The Nov. 15 agreement gave no role to the U.N., and set a timetable for a handover of sovereignty to these handpicked Iraqis by June 30, 2004.

Having recognized that this process violates the fundamental principle of a fair election--one person, one vote--Ayatollah Al-Sistani issued an edict, "[T]he mechanism in place to choose members of the Transitional Legislative Assembly does not guarantee true representation of the Iraqi people. Therefore this mechanism must be replaced with one that guarantees the aforesaid, which is elections."

On the Ayatollah's insistence, the U.N. was invited to send a mission to study how it can help prepare for such elections and to assist in the transition of sovereignty to a legitimate Iraqi authority. This is an extremely important opportunity for the U.N. to exercise its mandate to maintain peace and security in this volatile part of the world, and to uphold the right of nations to self-determination.

The current impasse is far more than a showdown between Iraq's most influential leader and the CPA. It raises the disturbing question of whether Washington truly understands the Iraqi reality. National identity and self-determination are strong forces in Iraq. Instead of dismissing them, the U.S. ought to work with the U.N. to start preparation for a national election under U.N. auspices.

CPA head L. Paul Bremer might be right that there is not enough time now to organize elections by June 2004; but surely preparations could have been made over the last nine months--if, indeed, an election was ever a U.S. priority. He also points out that security conditions are not conducive to elections; yet clearly, impeding the legitimate demand for direct and fair elections would further aggravate ethnic and sectarian tensions.

The U.S. administration should not force its agenda onto the Iraqi people, based on a U.S. election timetable. The aim should be the creation of a new Iraqi government that has legitimacy in the eyes of its own citizens, so that in the years ahead, a stable, democratic and peaceful Iraq will emerge as a responsible member of the world community. If America is genuinely committed to democracy in the Middle East, then it should avoid handpicking rulers for Iraq. Only a very short-sighted policy would orchestrate a process that leaves behind a government that may be friendly, but will not endure. Without a constitutional process, Iraqis cannot be assured that their basic human and political rights are respected. Failing to engage the people in the political process will further destabilize the country and provide fertile grounds for the remnants of Saddam Hussain's security apparatus to recruit zealots to carry out terrorist acts.

(1) How many of the folks who think the wog uninterested in democracy would have the physical courage to take this job?

(2) The Administration's understanding that some distance from the U.S. will be helpful to a new leadership and likewise a closeness to Ayatollah Sistani.

MORE:
-Profile of Dr. Hussain Shahristani (Eric Goldstein, Mafqud.org)
-INTERVIEW: Interview with Hussain Al-Shahristani (CNN, 4/08/03)

AND THEY ENRICH US ALL TOO

Quebec minister sparks outrage over aboriginal comments (Globe and Mail, May 26th, 2004)

A Mohawk chief and opposition politicians expressed outrage Tuesday after a provincial minister said aboriginals were more violent than the rest of Canadian society.

Public Security Minister Jacques Chagnon made the comments in the legislature during remarks about the embattled Mohawk community of Kanesatake, west of Montreal, which is embroiled in a tense policing dispute.

"I don't think it's a secret to anyone that in aboriginal societies and in Kanesatake society, there is a level of violence that is not found elsewhere," the minister said during Question Period.[...]

Grand Chief James Gabriel, who was forced out of the settlement in January when his house was torched by dissidents, said he was insulted by the minister's comments.

Forget the fact that the young and armed dissidents in this community call themselves the Warriors. Everyone knows the Mohawk culture is a culture of peace. Like Islam.

FOR J.H.

THE JEWISH CEMETERY AT NEWPORT (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, July, 1854)

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!

The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath,
While underneath these leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down
And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.

The very names recorded here are strange,
Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera interchange
With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

"Blessed be God! for he created Death!"
The mourners said, "and Death is rest and peace;"
Then added, in the certainty of faith,
"And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease."

Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,
No Psalms of David now the silence break,
No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue
In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.

Gone are the living, but the dead remain,
And not neglected; for a hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,
Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.

How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o'er the sea -- that desert desolate --
These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;
Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of fire.

All their lives long, with the unleavened bread
And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,
The wasting famine of the heart they fed,
And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.

Anathema maranatha! was the cry
That rang from town to town, from street to street;
At every gate the accursed Mordecai
Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.

Pride and humiliation hand in hand
Walked with them through the world where'er they went;
Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.

For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.

And thus forever with reverted look
The mystic volume of the world they read,
Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a Legend of the Dead.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again.

IN THE JEWISH SYNAGOGUE AT NEWPORT (Emma Lazarus, July, 1867)

HERE, where the noises of the busy town,
The ocean's plunge and roar can enter not,
We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,
And muse upon the consecrated spot.

No signs of life are here: the very prayers
Inscribed around are in a language dead;
The light of the "perpetual lamp" is spent
That an undying radiance was to shed.

What prayers were in this temple offered up,
Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,
By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!

How as we gaze, in this new world of light,
Upon this relic of the days of old,
The present vanishes, and tropic bloom
And Eastern towns and temples we behold.

Again we see the patriarch with his flocks,
The purple seas, the hot blue sky o'erhead,

The slaves of Egypt,--omens, mysteries,--
Dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led.

A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount,
A man who reads Jehovah's written law,
'Midst blinding glory and effulgence rare,
Unto a people prone with reverent awe.

The pride of luxury's barbaric pomp,
In the rich court of royal Solomon--
Alas! we wake: One scene alone remains,--
The exiles by the streams of Babylon.

Our softened voices send us back again
But mournful echoes through the empty hall:
Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound,
And with unwonted gentleness they fall.

The weary ones, the sad, the suffering,
All found their comfort in the holy place,
And children's gladness and men's gratitude
'Took voice and mingled in the chant of praise.

The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!
We know not which is sadder to recall;
For youth and happiness have followed age,
And green grass lieth gently over all.

Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,
With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.
Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,
Before the mystery of death and God.

BAD DREAMS

Berkeley Intifada (Anneli Rufus, East Bay Express, May 19th, 2004)

On the day after September 11, Micki Weinberg walked to the UC Berkeley campus still in shock. At the entrance to campus, facing Telegraph Avenue, huge sheets of blank paper were spread out as an impromptu memorial on which students, faculty, and other passersby were invited to write comments. Glad to have found such a forum, Weinberg scanned the inscriptions. Then he saw one, large and clear, that stopped him dead in his tracks:

"It's the Jews, stupid."

The slender Weinberg, a year younger than most freshmen, had only just arrived at Cal from Beverly Hills, where he had been president of his high school's Shalom Club. As a young teenager, he had savored heady stories of how Mario Savio and his comrades in the Free Speech Movement danced the hora and sang "Hava Nagila" at sit-ins and peace rallies forty years ago. The son of left-wing, Jewish intellectuals, Weinberg viewed himself as one too, having spent the summer before his senior year of high school in Myanmar, cataloguing the archives of Rangoon's disintegrating and depopulated Jewish synagogue. "That's why I came to Berkeley -- because of its strong romantic aura of the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio," he recalls. "Then I got here and discovered that that light seems to have been extinguished. You have this vitriol. You feel it everywhere. Berkeley is now the epicenter of real hatred."

Almost three years later, Weinberg graduates this month as a student whose days at Cal were marked by what he calls "pinnacles of horror," in the pinched tone of a man betrayed. He remembers pro-Palestinian protesters insisting that Israeli border crossings are as bad as Nazi death camps. He remembers the glass front door of Berkeley's Hillel building -- where he attends Friday night services -- shattered by a cinderblock, with the message FUCK JEWS scrawled nearby. He remembers the spray-painted swastikas discovered one Monday morning last September on the walls of four lecture rooms in LeConte Hall accompanied by the chilling bilingual message, "Die, Juden. "

In recent years the international press has documented the resurgence of anti-Semitism around the world. Jewish schoolkids have been attacked by epithet-shouting gangs in Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, France, and Brazil. Synagogues have been destroyed in Marseille and Istanbul; a Jewish school was firebombed this spring in Montreal; "Death to the Jews" was shouted through bullhorns outside a temple in South Africa. AP ran photos last month of a Jewish graveyard in eastern France where a hundred tombstones had been spray-painted with blood-red swastikas and the Nazi slogan Juden Raus: "Jews out." The Chicago Sun-Times and the British Guardian report that a ubiquitous chant at European soccer matches -- leveled at London and Rotterdam teams perceived as having Jewish roots -- is "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas."

So, what is to be done?

PAPERIZING PAUPER PROPERTY:

Kenyans buy into slum plan: It's the latest example of what experts say is becoming a model for slum improvement around the world. (Meera Selva, 5/26/04, CS Monitor)

Susan Wanjiru used to be a seamstress. For 12 hours a day in her cardboard shack, she would hunch over her sewing, earning just 200 shillings, or $2.50, to feed her four children. Her back always ached and the tips of her fingers were constantly scratched and bleeding. But since she changed jobs, training to be a stone mason in the Nairobi slums, things have improved.

"Ah, my body feel so much better now," she says, flexing her biceps proudly. "I work in the fresh air, get paid 300 shillings [$3.75] a day, and sleep soundly at night. It is a much better life."

Ms. Wanjiru makes an unlikely builder, even with her newly formed muscles. But mixing cement is part of a new kind of renovation program, one that gives slum residents some control over their lives. Last year, a group of Nairobi slum dwellers banded together and asked the city council to give them the land that they had been squatting on illegally. In return, they promised to build proper houses, schools, and community centers without any government money.

"We went to the council and said: 'We know this land belongs to you, but we have lived here for 30 years and if you help us, we will make it a clean environment with good security," says Peter Chege, secretary of the housing association. "In the end, they agreed to draw up title deeds to the land in our name." [...]

The idea comes from Slum Dwellers International, an Indian pressure group that encourages people living in slums to find their own solutions to housing problems. In the 1990s, it helped slum residents in Bombay to claim the land they were squatting on and turn it into a proper residential estate with running water and electricity. The group has programs in Africa, Asia, and South America.

BEING REAL:

Positive signs for GOP in Democratic-leaning California (BETH FOUHY, May 25, 2004, AP)

[R]epublicans see a wealth of opportunities on the horizon, due in large part to shifting population growth and the broad popularity of their new governor - Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"I have always maintained that California is far more competitive than pundits believe," said former Gov. Gray Davis, the Democrat who was recalled by voters and replaced by Schwarzenegger last year. "Democrats can't win this state on the cheap. Kerry has to spend money here, and I believe he knows that."

Political strategists largely credit excitement about Schwarzenegger with helping to increase Republican voter registration in the state, cutting the advantage for the Democrats from more than 10 percent in 2000 to about 8 percent.

Organizers of the Republican National Convention and Schwarzenegger aides are trying to reach an agreement on how to showcase him in New York in late August. The Schwarzenegger camp is pressing for a prominent role - perhaps a prime-time convention speech - that organizers have not yet offered. [...]

Republicans point to the state's changing population patterns. While Democratic strongholds such as the San Francisco Bay area have been bleeding population, growth has exploded in traditionally Republican areas such as northern San Diego County and the so-called Inland Empire east of Los Angeles, where cheaper housing and new roads have lured thousands of families.

Said Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie: "There is no downside to us competing in California, and having it be real."

FALLING OUT OF LOVE WITH A DREAMER:

A Dangerous Dreamer: Spurned by the U.S., Chalabi emerges as a Shiite firebrand (Andrew Cockburn, May 21, 2004, LA Times)

U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has made it known that Chalabi, who currently sits on the Iraqi Governing Council, will not figure in the Iraqi administration he is assembling for a June 30 transfer of power. And just this week the Pentagon revealed that it is at last suspending Chalabi's $340,000 monthly subsidy.

That's not all. The discrediting of Chalabi's prewar "intelligence" on Saddam Hussein's WMD and terror links has wrecked his once-warm relations with the U.S. media. And his senior aides are under investigation for robbery and kidnapping, the official reason for Thursday's raid. The raid was not insignificant; it was an indication of just how seriously the U.S. occupation authorities consider Chalabi a threat to their plans for the future of Iraq.

In recent months he has been adopting an increasingly strident tone in denouncing both the U.S. occupation and the U.N. role in Iraq. He has recently compared American officials bringing former Iraqi generals to Fallouja to "putting the Nazis back in power" and has derided Brahimi as "an Algerian with an Arab nationalist agenda."

Less publicly, he has been putting together a sectarian Shiite bloc with the aim of immediately destabilizing whatever arrangement Brahimi unveils in 10 days' time. Many fear Chalabi could, for example, champion a move for a separate Shiite state, or indeed, foment anti-Sunni demonstrations. This is indeed a far cry from the days when Chalabi posed as the champion of liberal Iraqi democracy for U.S. supporters, though Iraqis who know him are less surprised at the cynical turnabout.

As one Iraqi who has known and worked with Chalabi in the past observes: "His dream has always been to be a sectarian Shia leader. Not in the religious sense, but as a political leader." Leading fellow sectarians in opposition to the U.S. and U.N. plans would be a vital step in realizing this dangerous dream.

WOULD YOU TAKE ONE IF OFFERED IT FREE?:

Saturn SL is most-stolen vehicle in U.S. (John Porretto, May 25, 2004, Associated Press)

The 1995 Saturn SL was the nation's most-stolen vehicle last year based on thefts versus the number of models registered...

"IS IT A DONKEY?":

Survey Finds Angst-Strained Wretches in the Fourth Estate (Howard Kurtz, May 24, 2004, Washington Post)

A joint project by the Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism reveals a darkly pessimistic view of the profession among its own members, often echoing the criticisms of the public at large.

The 55 percent of national journalists, and 37 percent of local ones, who see the media as soft on Bush may well be reflecting their own views of the president. At national outlets, 34 percent describe themselves as liberal, 54 percent as moderate and 7 percent as conservative. (The local split was 23-61-12.) Nearly 7 in 10 of the liberal national journalists criticized the Bush coverage.

"You'd expect the minority who say they have a liberal point of view to be more critical of the press when it comes to Bush," says Pew Director Andrew Kohut, whose organization interviewed 547 journalists. But he noted that 44 percent of the self-described moderates also hold that view.

Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director, says the growing proportion of self-identified liberals in the national media -- and the fact that "conservatives are not very well represented" -- is having an impact. "This is something journalists should worry about," he says. "Maybe diversity in the newsroom needs to mean more than ethnic and gender diversity."

The survey confirmed that national journalists are to the left of the public on social issues. Nine in 10 say it is not necessary to believe in God to be moral (40 percent of the public thinks this way). As might have been inferred from the upbeat coverage of gay marriage in Massachusetts, 88 percent of national journalists say society should accept homosexuality; only about half the public agrees.

In a related finding, 31 percent of national journalists now have a great deal of confidence in the public's election choices, compared with 52 percent at the end of the Clinton administration. The clear implication is that many media people feel superior to their customers.

HE WATCHES THE WATCHERS:

Kevin Whited, of Reductio ad Absurdum fame, has a worthy new project: Chronically Biased.

MUMBO-JUMBO NATION:

When Reason Sleeps, Mumbo-Jumbo Frolics: Often, it seems as though the Enlightenment never happened. (Francis Wheen, May 24, 2004, LA Times)

In 1922, just after his second term as president, Woodrow Wilson was asked for his thoughts on Darwinian theory.

"Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education, I do believe in organic evolution," he replied. "It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised."

Now imagine Wilson's downright astonishment had he been informed that in 2004, more than eight decades later, the state schools superintendent in Georgia would propose excising the word "evolution" from the biology curriculum.

There are few backers these days for the argument that we have reached "the end of history." However, a glance at some of the dominant ideas of the last couple of decades raises an even more startling possibility: that history, far from halting, has gone into reverse gear.

BAD AD WATCH:

Lady Liberty hooded in political ad (Mark Memmott, 5/21/04, USA TODAY)

A hooded Statue of Liberty, meant to remind viewers of Iraqis abused by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, dominates a TV ad that an anti-Bush organization will begin airing nationally next week.

MoveOn.org, a national grassroots organization, and the new ad's makers defend the imagery they used.

"There's nothing inappropriate about making sure Americans know about the scandal," said Peter Schurman, MoveOn.org's executive director.

WE PREFER "THE PURITANICAL WING":

Daschle Hypocrisy on Johnson Calling Republicans Members of the Taliban (Daschle v. Thune, 5/24/04)

To the left is a picture of Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota, with Senator Daschle and Stephanie Herseth behind him, railing against the "Taliban wing of the Republican Party" at a Herseth rally yesterday in McKennan Park in Sioux Falls. His statement has generated a firestorm--see here, here, and here--and calls for Johnson, Daschle, and Herseth to apologize for the remarks. The immediate context is the House special election next week that Herseth is competing in against Larry Deidrich (Stephanie memo to Tim: we're running a "postive" campaign and trying to tar our opponent for launching "negative attacks," remember?)(see this for Stuart Rothenberg's comments about Herseth "crying wolf" on "negative" ads). The broader context is the major speech Senator Daschle gave earlier this month decrying the "startling meanness" in American politics and denouncing the tactic of "demonizing those with whom we disagree." (see this USA Today story about Daschle's speech). Instead of intervening after Johnson's remarks, however, Daschle stood by and clapped.

THE MISSILES OF OCTOBER:

Iraqi weapons pipeline probed (Bill Gertz, 5/25/04, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

The Pentagon is investigating reports that Iraqi weapons are being sent covertly to Syria and that they are fueling anti-U.S. insurgents training there, The Washington Times has learned.

The shipments include weapons and explosives sent by vehicles that were detected during the past several months going to several training camps inside Syria, which has become a key backer of anticoalition forces in Iraq, according to defense officials familiar with reports of the shipments.

WAIT ALONG:

Nader Makes Waves (Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, Beth Lester and Clothilde Ewing, 5/25/04, CBS News)

Ralph Nader, referred to President Bush as a "messianic militarist" who should be impeached for pushing the nation into a war in Iraq "based on false pretenses," reports The New York Times.

In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in Manhattan, Nader said, "The founding fathers did not want the declaration of war put in the hands of one man," referring to his belief that U.S. foreign policy goals are being compromised because the president tends to "talk like an out-of-control West Texas sheriff."

The Times says, "Mr. Nader also accused President Bush of exaggerating the threat of terrorism in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. 'To say that President Bush has exaggerated the threat of Al Qaeda is to trip into a political hornets' nest,' he said. But he said it was time to raise 'the impertinent question' about whether the threat had been 'exaggerated for a purpose.' Mr. Nader said he believed such a deception had taken place, and had been intended in part to draw popular support for more militaristic policies and to generate military contracts for companies with close ties to the Bush administration."

BRAVEHEART DIDN'T END TOO WELL EITHER, FOLKS:

Vigil held for slain lion: ORGANIZER HOPES FOR `HEALING' AFTER SHOOTING THAT SHOOK COMMUNITY (Julie Patel, 5/25/04, San Jose Mercury News)

Monday night there was a vigil for the mountain lion that wandered into Palo Alto last week and was shot by police.

"What it evoked in the community was a feeling of sadness,'' said Larissa Keet, a psychotherapist who was a teacher in the Palo Alto Unified School District for 20 years and who organized the vigil. ``I felt a vigil was something that could help with all of those range of sentiments that get aroused and that we could somehow channel those feelings to provide healing for all of us.''

Six people formed a circle around a photo of a mountain lion and two American Indian Zuni fetishes -- miniature animal-shape sculptures believed to embody the spiritual force of a soul -- in a grove of redwood trees at Rinconada Park.

BETTER OUT OF FOCUS:

Kerry needs to focus, state party chiefs say (Donald Lambro, May 23, 2004, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Undecided voters are still trying to "figure out" presidential candidate John Kerry's message, especially on Iraq, which remains unclear and confusing to much of the electorate, according to Democratic state chairmen from key battleground states.

"I think he is going to have to sharpen the message on Iraq. He has to present some clear alternative to what we have now," said Ron Oliver, chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party.

Acknowledging that virtually all the head-to-head polls show the Massachusetts liberal has not benefited much from President Bush's decline in job-approval surveys, Democrats such as Mr. Oliver say that Mr. Kerry probably will not see any new movement toward his candidacy until he becomes better known and offers voters a more vivid contrast to the president's policies in Iraq.

SUBURBAN HELICOPTER ASSAULT:

Maple seed problems are spiraling (DAN ROZEK, May 25, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

Rain isn't the only thing coming down more heavily than usual. The Chicago area also is being inundated by an unusual bumper crop of maple seeds that have been helicoptering down, clogging gutters, making a mess of patios and porches -- and delighting children.

"It is a banner year for seeds,'' said Peter Bristol, curator of woody plants at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe. "They're big and falling all over the place.''

The familiar pods -- a seed connected to a 1- to 2-inch curved wing that causes it to whirl to the ground in a distinctive way -- begin twisting down out of maples every May.

But some years, for reasons scientists say aren't entirely understood, the trees spawn more of the seeds than usual.

That's what's happening now, apparently triggered in part by a dry and warm April, the time when many trees begin flowering. That breezy, dry weather helped spread pollen more readily -- and widely -- between maples.

The pollen fertilized the flowering maples, producing an abundance of seeds, which then twirl out of the tree looking to put down roots and grow into a new tree.

"I think all the conditions are right for seed production this year,'' Bristol said.

The helicopter assault is particularly heavy in long-established suburbs on the North Shore, where maple trees are especially common.

AND MA MAKES 50:

Chance of Delayed Nomination Vexes Boston (JENNIFER PETER, May 24, 2004, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

The possibility that John Kerry may delay accepting the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention here is compounding the upset of city officials and business owners, who already are unhappily looking ahead to traffic tie-ups expected during the four-day gathering.

"It's one thing to hold the neighborhood hostage because of a political convention," said Robert Torabgar, manager of Hilton's Tent City, a sporting goods store in the shadow of the FleetCenter, the convention site in the densely built downtown. "But to have the neighborhood closed just because of a political rally is a little harder to take."

Kerry said Monday that no decision had been made about whether he will accept the nomination at the July 26-29 convention or wait a few weeks to even the financial playing field with President Bush.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

BUSH BETS THE HOUSE (John Podhoretz, May 25, 2004, NY Post)

GEORGE W. Bush is a high-stakes player, a political gambler. And last night he took a fantastically bold gamble: In the teeth of bad polls, an atmosphere of panic in his own party and the barely concealed glee of his rivals . . . he has decided to stand pat. [...]

Bush's decision to stay on course may not simply be an example of stubbornness. The fact is that the news from the battlefield in Iraq these past five or six days has been remarkably good. The forces commanded and directed by the thug-cleric Muqtada al-Sadr are on the run or nearly destroyed in three different cities.

Sadr's uprising two months ago was the moment at which even passionate supporters of the war and proponents of the success in achieving civil order began to grow terrified that somehow the United States might actually lose in Iraq. So shouldn't the fact that we're routing him be grounds for some optimism?

It's very meaningful that other Shiite clerics in the city of Najaf now feel safe enough to issue what must be judged an astounding denunciation of Sadr in the past few days.

As reported on the brilliant Healing Iraq blog, Najaf clerics laid the blame for the entry of U.S. forces into that holy city: "It is the movement of Sayyid Muqtada [Sadr] that has encouraged the occupiers to cross the red lines," the senior clerics in Najaf wrote. "And it is clear that the organization of Sayyid Muqtada - and whoever follows the Sadrist movement - were the first to violate the sanctity of" the city's holiest shrine.

COOLER STILL:

New Testament as Easy to Read as ... Cosmo?: Glossy 'biblezines,' complete with top 10 lists, mix the secular with Scripture in an attempt to get teens to pick up the Good Book. (Joy Buchanan, May 15, 2004, LA Times)

In some local bookstores, teen boys can find a glossy publication filled with music reviews, top 10 lists and advice about dating. Its photos show pretty girls, skateboarders, guys with cornrows and teens cruising in convertibles.

But it's not a magazine. It's a Bible. Or actually, what its publisher has dubbed a "biblezine."

Titled Refuel, it was recently released by Thomas Nelson, one of the nation's largest Bible publishers. Refuel has the complete New Testament written in the company's colloquial New Century translation. But the Scriptures are printed in columns like a magazine story and are surrounded by, among other things, pop-up bubbles containing suggestions on how a fly teenager can also be a good Christian.

This ain't your grandfather's Bible. Smack in the middle of 1 Corinthians is a list of the coolest things God has made, including dogs, pterodactyls, facial hair and ocean waves — with girls at the top of the list. Refuel also reports the results of a survey asking girls what they look for in a boyfriend: guys who show them respect, open doors for them, spend time with their parents and worship God freely.

Youth pastors say they welcome anything that will get teens to read the Bible. Publishers like Thomas Nelson say they are providing teens with Bibles that address issues specific to them, much like adult devotional Bibles, with short lessons on applying Scripture to modern life.

MAGGIE'S GET:

One slam fits all (Debra Saunders, May 25, 2004, TownnHall)

He isn't very bright. He's a religious fanatic who sees the world in black and white. He engaged in an "elaborate campaign of disinformation" designed to "mislead his own people" about the war. He's not really running the government; he's a puppet manipulated by a subordinate. And his name is -- Tony Blair.

So says author Geoffrey Wheatcroft in June's "The Atlantic Monthly" in a profile of the prime minister of Great Britain. It demonstrates how the left demeans its opposition so uniformly that Wheatcroft managed to hurl the exact same insults at Blair that U.S. lefties have hurled at President Bush for years. One slam fits all.

Wheatcroft sadly writes that Blair "is in no real sense an intellectual." Then: "Clearly, Blair is a smart operator, but how intelligent is he?" The answer comes from an American woman who dined with Blair and concluded "he wasn't that bright." The American denies making that statement. But who cares? Not Wheatcroft, who dispels the disclaimer by noting that novelist Doris Lessing said Blair is "not very bright in some ways."

The proof of Blair's low wattage apparently comes, not from his actions or history but from what intellectuals have to say about him. If Lessing said it, case closed; it must be true.

In fact, while critics here slam Bush for not reading newspapers, the word across the pond -- voiced by Lessing -- is that Blair doesn't read books.

When she originally announced Blair's lack of brainpower last year, Lessing also linked the PM's dubious intelligence with his religious beliefs -- in the bigoted way that leftists dismiss the devout. Wheatcroft followed suit. He quoted Roy Jenkins, co-founder of Social Democrats, who said Blair is "a little too Manichean for my perhaps now jaded taste, seeing matters in stark terms of good and evil, black and white."

Every Tory leader since Sir Robert Peel had implicitly agreed with his opponents that the future belonged with their side; that at best a rearguard action could be fought; that conservatism's role was to make concessions as slowly, and with as good grace, as possible. That is, until Margaret Thatcher. She was the first Tory leader who did not share this belief.

And Blair agrees with her. He is the first of the Tories' political opponents ever to concede that they have largely won the argument. An anthology of Blair's recent reflections speaks for itself.

"I believe Margaret Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right."

"A strong society should not be confused with a strong state."

"Duty is the cornerstone of a decent society."

"Britain needs more successful people who can become rich by success through the money they earn."

"People don't want an overbearing state."

Any of these could have been uttered by a Tory, or by a none-too-liberal Democrat or, indeed, by a none-too-liberal Republican. Come to think of it, Patrick Buchanan's main disagreement with the Labour leader would be over Blair's uncritical admiration for "wealth creators" and free trade. It has been a breathtaking achievement--but a paradoxical one. Political parties have changed character before now, and have sometimes been taken over from the outside. This is a unique and much stranger case: a party has been captured from the inside, and by a man who in his heart despises most of that party's traditions and cherished beliefs. [...]

Someone who knows him says, "You have to remember that the great passion in Tony's life is his hatred of the Labour Party."

You also have to remember our old friend English irony as you read that, but it is not just a joke. Tony Blair's career has been a freak of political nature. When he was chosen leader, two years ago, the Labour Party was punch-drunk, demoralized by its miserable run of lost elections, desperate for any chance of returning to office. The puritanical "culture of defeat" might have permeated sections of the movement, but the brighter and more ambitious in the party had not gone into politics to spend a lifetime in opposition. They wanted their ministerial red boxes and secretaries; they were fed up with waiting in line for cabs and craved black limos. That meant that they wanted a leader who could win, and in the process they struck a Faustian bargain.

Except that Faust knew what he was doing. Labour had not truly reckoned with Blair. The party did not realize just how deep was his contempt for its traditions, and certainly didn't guess that its first Prime Minister in a generation will be further to the right not only than any previous Labour premier but than several postwar Tory premiers. It is an extraordinary performance, and a political triumph of sorts--but for whom? The life, times, and government of Tony Blair may yet be seen as Margaret Thatcher's greatest victory.

A DECLARATION OF ENERGY INDEPENDENCE:

The 50¢-a-Gallon Solution (GREGG EASTERBROOK, 5/25/04, NY Times)

[T]he country would indeed be better off if gasoline taxes had been raised by 50 cents a gallon when Mr. Kerry favored the idea. And the United States would still be wise today, if it increased gasoline taxes by the same amount now.

The federal gasoline tax is 18.4 cents per gallon, while state gasoline taxes average 24.6 cents per gallon. Had federal gas taxes gone up 50 cents a gallon 10 years ago, several things might not have happened or would have had far less impact.

The S.U.V. and pickup-truck crazes would not have occurred, or at least these vehicles would be much less popular; highway deaths would have been fewer; and gasoline demands would be lower as would oil imports. To continue, the world price of oil would have been lower, since petroleum demand in the United States is the first factor in oil markets; greenhouse-gas emissions in this country would be lower; Persian Gulf oil states would have less influence on the global economy and less significance to American foreign policy; fewer dollars would have flowed to the oil sheiks; and the trade deficit balance for the United States would be smaller.

Don't all those things sound pretty good? And if higher gasoline taxes had moderated the ever-growing national thirst for oil, fuel at the pump still would have become more expensive — but Americans would be sending the extra money to Washington rather than Riyadh.

AT THE (OUT)SOURCE:

At the center of a culture shift: A pioneer says outsourcing will ultimately benefit US, India. Others are less sanguine. (Robert Weisman, May 25, 2004, Boston Globe)

It doesn't look much different from the other three-family, gambrel-roofed homes lining the blocks behind Central Square. But for students of the Indian outsourcing movement, the olive gray house at 10 St. Paul St. could qualify as a historic landmark.

It was here, in the fall of 1972, where one of the earliest ''offshore" business models was conceived and tested by Indian-born MIT graduate Narendra K. Patni and his bride, Poonam. Their experiment has mushroomed into a business empire, and a global phenomenon that is fueling productivity -- along with controversy.

The newlyweds launched a pilot project in their third-floor apartment, designating the living room as the ''United States" and the bedroom as ''India."

In one room, they wrote instructions for the conversion of data from paper documents to computers. In the other room, a small team of MIT students typed the data into a Flexowriter machine that spat out paper tape -- the first and most labor-intensive task in what then was a multiple-step, data-conversion process.

A key ground rule was that there would be no oral communication -- only written notes -- between people in the two rooms. That was because phone connections between the United States and India were still spotty in the 1970s. Written instructions would have to suffice.

''That was the first major attempt to outsource services," said Narendra Patni, 62, who shuttles between his US office in Kendall Square and his headquarters in Bombay as chief executive of Patni Computer Systems Ltd., a $250 million-a-year technology services firm that recently went public in India. ''I felt from the beginning there was economic significance to it."

His wife has a different, less grandiose memory. ''It wasn't easy hauling the Flexowriter up all those stairs," she recalled. [...]

Even among Patni's admirers, not everyone is so sanguine about the impact of outsourcing, especially as the practice spreads to higher-wage job categories such as software programming.

Jay Forrester, a retired professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and a pioneer in the field of systems dynamics, hired Patni to help him run his consulting and publishing company (no relation to Forrester Research) in the late 1960s. ''He was a very high-caliber person," Forrester said, ''and he's been very successful."

When Patni told him a few years later that he was shipping documents to India for data conversion, Forrester said, ''I was surprised because this was entirely new to me."

Today, more than 30 years later, the 85-year-old Forrester casts a skeptical eye on the burgeoning outsourcing movement.

''I think it's going to produce a tremendous political backlash, and will be significantly curtailed in a few years," he warned. ''I think it will drive the standard of living of the United States down to the level of the countries that we're outsourcing to."

Patni, for his part, believes the genie is out of the bottle.

LEGALITY? HE SMIRKED:

Kerry justifies idea of nomination delay: But critics say legality an issue (Glen Justice and Michael Kranish, May 25, 2004, Boston Globe)

[T]wo prominent campaign finance watchdogs questioned whether it would be legal for the host committee to spend $15 million in federal funds to stage the Democratic National Convention if the event does not produce Kerry's nomination.

"I think there is a very strong case here that it would be illegal," said Fred Wertheimer, who runs a campaign finance organization called Democracy 21. "They received the money to conduct a nominating convention, and a nominating convention tends to include the concept of a nominee. At a minimum, they face real legal questions."

Representative Martin T. Meehan of Lowell, a fellow Democrat and coauthor of the country's new campaign finance law, agreed that the $15 million is at risk. "The question is whether it could be made up in private contributions," the congressman said. [...]

The Kerry campaign is studying alternatives, including the use of a lesser-publicized option that would enable individuals to give as much as $57,500 to national and state parties for advertising that would independently boost Kerry's candidacy. While individuals are allowed to give no more than $2,000 to Kerry for the primary campaign, Wertheimer said they can give an additional $25,000 to the national party and $10,000 to state parties, with an overall two-year limit of $57,500.

IRAC:

The Lobotomized Weasel School of Writing (Crispin Sartwell, May 20, 2004, LA Times)

Today's educational establishment is making actual illiteracy look good, like an act of humanity and rebellion. Writing, which ought to nurture and give shape to thought, is instead being used to pound it into a powder and then reconstitute it into gruel.

The thoroughly modern grade-A public-school prose style is not creative or interesting enough even to be wrong. The people who create and enforce the templates are, not to put too fine a point on it, people without understanding or imagination, lobotomized weasels for whom any effort of thought exceeds their strength. I recently read one of the many boilerplate descriptions of how students should write their essays. "The penultimate sentence," it said, "should restate your basic thesis of the essay." Well, who says? And why?

LET ME REITERATE AGAIN:

Remarks by the President on Iraq and the War on Terror (United States Army War College Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 5/24/04)

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all. Thank you and good evening. I'm honored to visit the Army War College. Generations of officers have come here to study the strategies and history of warfare. I've come here tonight to report to all Americans, and to the Iraqi people, on the strategy our nation is pursuing in Iraq, and the specific steps were taking to achieve our goals.

The actions of our enemies over the last few weeks have been brutal, calculating, and instructive. We've seen a car bombing take the life of a 61-year-old Iraqi named Izzedin Saleem, who was serving as President of the Governing Council. This crime shows our enemy's intention to prevent Iraqi self-government, even if that means killing a lifelong Iraqi patriot and a faithful Muslim. Mr. Saleem was assassinated by terrorists seeking the return of tyranny and the death of democracy.

We've also seen images of a young American facing decapitation. This vile display shows a contempt for all the rules of warfare, and all the bounds of civilized behavior. It reveals a fanaticism that was not caused by any action of ours, and would not be appeased by any concession. We suspect that the man with the knife was an al Qaeda associate named Zarqawi. He and other terrorists know that Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror. And we must understand that, as well. The return of tyranny to Iraq would be an unprecedented terrorist victory, and a cause for killers to rejoice. It would also embolden the terrorists, leading to more bombings, more beheadings, and more murders of the innocent around the world.

The rise of a free and self-governing Iraq will deny terrorists a base of operation, discredit their narrow ideology, and give momentum to reformers across the region. This will be a decisive blow to terrorism at the heart of its power, and a victory for the security of America and the civilized world.

Our work in Iraq has been hard. Our coalition has faced changing conditions of war, and that has required perseverance, sacrifice, and an ability to adapt. The swift removal of Saddam Hussein's regime last spring had an unintended effect: Instead of being killed or captured on the battlefield, some of Saddam's elite guards shed their uniforms and melted into the civilian population. These elements of Saddam's repressive regime and secret police have reorganized, rearmed, and adopted sophisticated terrorist tactics. They've linked up with foreign fighters and terrorists. In a few cities, extremists have tried to sow chaos and seize regional power for themselves. These groups and individuals have conflicting ambitions, but they share a goal: They hope to wear out the patience of Americans, our coalition, and Iraqis before the arrival of effective self-government, and before Iraqis have the capability to defend their freedom.

Iraq now faces a critical moment. As the Iraqi people move closer to governing themselves, the terrorists are likely to become more active and more brutal. There are difficult days ahead, and the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic. Yet our coalition is strong, our efforts are focused and unrelenting, and no power of the enemy will stop Iraq's progress. (Applause.)

Helping construct a stable democracy after decades of dictatorship is a massive undertaking. Yet we have a great advantage. Whenever people are given a choice in the matter, they prefer lives of freedom to lives of fear. Our enemies in Iraq are good at filling hospitals, but they do not build any. They can incite men to murder and suicide, but they cannot inspire men to live, and hope, and add to the progress of their country. The terrorists' only influence is violence, and their only agenda is death.

Our agenda, in contrast, is freedom and independence, security and prosperity for the Iraqi people. And by removing a source of terrorist violence and instability in the Middle East, we also make our own country more secure.

Our coalition has a clear goal, understood by all -- to see the Iraqi people in charge of Iraq for the first time in generations. America's task in Iraq is not only to defeat an enemy, it is to give strength to a friend - a free, representative government that serves its people and fights on their behalf. And the sooner this goal is achieved, the sooner our job will be done.

There are five steps in our plan to help Iraq achieve democracy and freedom. We will hand over authority to a sovereign Iraqi government, help establish security, continue rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, encourage more international support, and move toward a national election that will bring forward new leaders empowered by the Iraqi people.

The first of these steps will occur next month, when our coalition will transfer full sovereignty to a government of Iraqi citizens who will prepare the way for national elections. On June 30th, the Coalition Provisional Authority will cease to exist, and will not be replaced. The occupation will end, and Iraqis will govern their own affairs. America's ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, will present his credentials to the new president of Iraq. Our embassy in Baghdad will have the same purpose as any other American embassy, to assure good relations with a sovereign nation. America and other countries will continue to provide technical experts to help Iraq's ministries of government, but these ministries will report to Iraq's new prime minister.

The United Nations Special Envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, is now consulting with a broad spectrum of Iraqis to determine the composition of this interim government. The special envoy intends to put forward the names of interim government officials this week. In addition to a president, two vice presidents, and a prime minister, 26 Iraqi ministers will oversee government departments, from health to justice to defense. This new government will be advised by a national council, which will be chosen in July by Iraqis representing their country's diversity. This interim government will exercise full sovereignty until national elections are held. America fully supports Mr. Brahimi's efforts, and I have instructed the Coalition Provisional Authority to assist him in every way possible.

In preparation for sovereignty, many functions of government have already been transferred. Twelve government ministries are currently under the direct control of Iraqis. The Ministry of Education, for example, is out of the propaganda business, and is now concerned with educating Iraqi children. Under the direction of Dr. Ala'din al-Alwan, the Ministry has trained more than 30,000 teachers and supervisors for the schools of a new Iraq.

All along, some have questioned whether the Iraqi people are ready for self-government, or even want it. And all along, the Iraqi people have given their answer. In settings where Iraqis have met to discuss their country's future, they have endorsed representative government. And they are practicing representative government. Many of Iraq's cities and towns now have elected town councils or city governments - and beyond the violence, a civil society is emerging.

The June 30th transfer of sovereignty is an essential commitment of our strategy. Iraqis are proud people who resent foreign control of their affairs, just as we would. After decades under the tyrant, they are also reluctant to trust authority. By keeping our promise on June 30th, the coalition will demonstrate that we have no interest in occupation. And full sovereignty will give Iraqis a direct interest in the success of their own government. Iraqis will know that when they build a school or repair a bridge, they're not working for the Coalition Provisional Authority, they are working for themselves. And when they patrol the streets of Baghdad, or engage radical militias, they will be fighting for their own country.

The second step in the plan for Iraqi democracy is to help establish the stability and security that democracy requires. Coalition forces and the Iraqi people have the same enemies -- the terrorists, illegal militia, and Saddam loyalists who stand between the Iraqi people and their future as a free nation. Working as allies, we will defend Iraq and defeat these enemies.

America will provide forces and support necessary for achieving these goals. Our commanders had estimated that a troop level below 115,000 would be sufficient at this point in the conflict. Given the recent increase in violence, we'll maintain our troop level at the current 138,000 as long as necessary. This has required extended duty for the 1st Armored Division and the 2nd Light Cavalry Regiment -- 20,000 men and women who were scheduled to leave Iraq in April. Our nation appreciates their hard work and sacrifice, and they can know that they will be heading home soon. General Abizaid and other commanders in Iraq are constantly assessing the level of troops they need to fulfill the mission. If they need more troops, I will send them. The mission of our forces in Iraq is demanding and dangerous. Our troops are showing exceptional skill and courage. I thank them for their sacrifices and their duty. (Applause.)

In the city of Fallujah, there's been considerable violence by Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters, including the murder of four American contractors. American soldiers and Marines could have used overwhelming force. Our commanders, however, consulted with Iraq's Governing Council and local officials, and determined that massive strikes against the enemy would alienate the local population, and increase support for the insurgency. So we have pursued a different approach. We're making security a shared responsibility in Fallujah. Coalition commanders have worked with local leaders to create an all-Iraqi security force, which is now patrolling the city. Our soldiers and Marines will continue to disrupt enemy attacks on our supply routes, conduct joint patrols with Iraqis to destroy bomb factories and safe houses, and kill or capture any enemy.

We want Iraqi forces to gain experience and confidence in dealing with their country's enemies. We want the Iraqi people to know that we trust their growing capabilities, even as we help build them. At the same time, Fallujah must cease to be a sanctuary for the enemy, and those responsible for terrorism will be held to account.

In the cities of Najaf and Karbala and Kufa, most of the violence has been incited by a young, radical cleric who commands an illegal militia. These enemies have been hiding behind an innocent civilian population, storing arms and ammunition in mosques, and launching attacks from holy shrines. Our soldiers have treated religious sites with respect, while systematically dismantling the illegal militia. We're also seeing Iraqis, themselves, take more responsibility for restoring order. In recent weeks, Iraqi forces have ejected elements of this militia from the governor's office in Najaf. Yesterday, an elite Iraqi unit cleared out a weapons cache from a large mosque in Kufa. Respected Shia leaders have called on the militia to withdraw from these towns. Ordinary Iraqis have marched in protest against the militants.

As challenges arise in Fallujah, Najaf, and elsewhere, the tactics of our military will be flexible. Commanders on the ground will pay close attention to local conditions. And we will do all that is necessary -- by measured force or overwhelming force -- to achieve a stable Iraq.

Iraq's military, police, and border forces have begun to take on broader responsibilities. Eventually, they must be the primary defenders of Iraqi security, as American and coalition forces are withdrawn. And we're helping them to prepare for this role. In some cases, the early performance of Iraqi forces fell short. Some refused orders to engage the enemy. We've learned from these failures, and we've taken steps to correct them. Successful fighting units need a sense of cohesion, so we've lengthened and intensified their training. Successful units need to know they are fighting for the future of their own country, not for any occupying power, so we are ensuring that Iraqi forces serve under an Iraqi chain of command. Successful fighting units need the best possible leadership, so we improved the vetting and training of Iraqi officers and senior enlisted men.

At my direction, and with the support of Iraqi authorities, we are accelerating our program to help train Iraqis to defend their country. A new team of senior military officers is now assessing every unit in Iraq's security forces. I've asked this team to oversee the training of a force of 260,000 Iraqi soldiers, police, and other security personnel. Five Iraqi army battalions are in the field now, with another eight battalions to join them by July the 1st. The eventual goal is an Iraqi army of 35,000 soldiers in 27 battalions, fully prepared to defend their country.

After June 30th, American and other forces will still have important duties. American military forces in Iraq will operate under American command as a part of a multinational force authorized by the United Nations. Iraq's new sovereign government will still face enormous security challenges, and our forces will be there to help.

The third step in the plan for Iraqi democracy is to continue rebuilding that nation's infrastructure, so that a free Iraq can quickly gain economic independence and a better quality of life. Our coalition has already helped Iraqis to rebuild schools and refurbish hospitals and health clinics, repair bridges, upgrade the electrical grid, and modernize the communications system. And now a growing private economy is taking shape. A new currency has been introduced. Iraq's Governing Council approved a new law that opens the country to foreign investment for the first time in decades. Iraq has liberalized its trade policy, and today an Iraqi observer attends meetings of the World Trade Organization. Iraqi oil production has reached more than two million barrels per day, bringing revenues of nearly $6 billion so far this year, which is being used to help the people of Iraq. And thanks in part to our efforts -- to the efforts of former Secretary of State James Baker, many of Iraq's largest creditors have pledged to forgive or substantially reduce Iraqi debt incurred by the former regime.

We're making progress. Yet there still is much work to do. Over the decades of Saddam's rule, Iraq's infrastructure was allowed to crumble, while money was diverted to palaces, and to wars, and to weapons programs. We're urging other nations to contribute to Iraqi reconstruction -- and 37 countries and the IMF and the World Bank have so far pledged $13.5 billion in aid. America has dedicated more than $20 billion to reconstruction and development projects in Iraq. To ensure our money is spent wisely and effectively, our new embassy in Iraq will have regional offices in several key cities. These offices will work closely with Iraqis at all levels of government to help make sure projects are completed on time and on budget.

A new Iraq will also need a humane, well-supervised prison system. Under the dictator, prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values. America will fund the construction of a modern, maximum security prison. When that prison is completed, detainees at Abu Ghraib will be relocated. Then, with the approval of the Iraqi government, we will demolish the Abu Ghraib prison, as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning. (Applause.)

The fourth step in our plan is to enlist additional international support for Iraq's transition. At every stage, the United States has gone to the United Nations -- to confront Saddam Hussein, to promise serious consequences for his actions, and to begin Iraqi reconstruction. Today, the United States and Great Britain presented a new resolution in the Security Council to help move Iraq toward self-government. I've directed Secretary Powell to work with fellow members of the Council to endorse the timetable the Iraqis have adopted, to express international support for Iraq's interim government, to reaffirm the world's security commitment to the Iraqi people, and to encourage other U.N. members to join in the effort. Despite past disagreements, most nations have indicated strong support for the success of a free Iraq. And I'm confident they will share in the responsibility of assuring that success.

Next month, at the NATO summit in Istanbul, I will thank our 15 NATO allies who together have more than 17,000 troops on the ground in Iraq. Great Britain and Poland are each leading a multinational division that is securing important parts of the country. And NATO, itself, is giving helpful intelligence, communications, and logistical support to the Polish-led division. At the summit, we will discuss NATO's role in helping Iraq build and secure its democracy.

The fifth and most important step is free, national elections, to be held no later than next January. A United Nations team, headed by Carina Perelli, is now in Iraq, helping form an independent election commission that will oversee an orderly, accurate national election. In that election, the Iraqi people will choose a transitional national assembly, the first freely-elected, truly representative national governing body in Iraq's history. This assembly will serve as Iraq's legislature, and it will choose a transitional government with executive powers. The transitional national assembly will also draft a new constitution, which will be presented to the Iraqi people in a referendum scheduled for the fall of 2005. Under this new constitution, Iraq will elect a permanent government by the end of next year.

In this time of war and liberation and rebuilding, American soldiers and civilians on the ground have come to know and respect the citizens of Iraq. They're a proud people who hold strong and diverse opinions. Yet Iraqis are united in a broad and deep conviction: They're determined never again to live at the mercy of a dictator. And they believe that a national election will put that dark time behind them. A representative government that protects basic rights, elected by Iraqis, is the best defense against the return of tyranny -- and that election is coming. (Applause.)

Completing the five steps to Iraqi elected self-government will not be easy. There's likely to be more violence before the transfer of sovereignty, and after the transfer of sovereignty. The terrorists and Saddam loyalists would rather see many Iraqis die than have any live in freedom. But terrorists will not determine the future of Iraq. (Applause.)

That nation is moving every week toward free elections and a permanent place among free nations. Like every nation that has made the journey to democracy, Iraqis will raise up a government that reflects their own culture and values. I sent American troops to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power. I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history, and find their own way. As they do, Iraqis can be certain, a free Iraq will always have a friend in the United States of America. (Applause.)

In the last 32 months, history has placed great demands on our country, and events have come quickly. Americans have seen the flames of September the 11th, followed battles in the mountains of Afghanistan, and learned new terms like "orange alert" and "ricin" and "dirty bomb." We've seen killers at work on trains in Madrid, in a bank in Istanbul, at a synagogue in Tunis, and at a nightclub in Bali. And now the families of our soldiers and civilian workers pray for their sons and daughters in Mosul and Karbala and Baghdad.

We did not seek this war on terror, but this is the world as we find it. We must keep our focus. We must do our duty. History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy. Our terrorist enemies have a vision that guides and explains all their varied acts of murder. They seek to impose Taliban-like rule, country by country, across the greater Middle East. They seek the total control of every person, and mind, and soul, a harsh society in which women are voiceless and brutalized. They seek bases of operation to train more killers and export more violence. They commit dramatic acts of murder to shock, frighten and demoralize civilized nations, hoping we will retreat from the world and give them free rein. They seek weapons of mass destruction, to impose their will through blackmail and catastrophic attacks. None of this is the expression of a religion. It is a totalitarian political ideology, pursued with consuming zeal, and without conscience.

Our actions, too, are guided by a vision. We believe that freedom can advance and change lives in the greater Middle East, as it has advanced and changed lives in Asia, and Latin America, and Eastern Europe, and Africa. We believe it is a tragedy of history that in the Middle East -- which gave the world great gifts of law and science and faith -- so many have been held back by lawless tyranny and fanaticism. We believe that when all Middle Eastern peoples are finally allowed to live and think and work and worship as free men and women, they will reclaim the greatness of their own heritage. And when that day comes, the bitterness and burning hatreds that feed terrorism will fade and die away. America and all the world will be safer when hope has returned to the Middle East.

These two visions -- one of tyranny and murder, the other of liberty and life -- clashed in Afghanistan. And thanks to brave U.S. and coalition forces and to Afghan patriots, the nightmare of the Taliban is over, and that nation is coming to life again. These two visions have now met in Iraq, and are contending for the future of that country. The failure of freedom would only mark the beginning of peril and violence. But, my fellow Americans, we will not fail. We will persevere, and defeat this enemy, and hold this hard-won ground for the realm of liberty.

May God bless our country.

MORE:
Allies offer the UN draft plan on Iraq (Brian Knowlton, May 25, 2004, International Herald Tribune)

WASHINGTON The United States and Britain presented a draft UN resolution Monday that calls for a full transfer of sovereignty to Iraq and an initial one-year mandate for the U.S.-led multinational military force, subject to the consent of the transitional government.

"The interim Iraqi government will assume total responsibility for its own sovereignty," the British ambassador, Sir Emyr Jones Parry, said before a closed-door Security Council session called to review the proposal. That government is to take office by June 30. The text drew mostly positive comments among ambassadors in the corridors outside the conference room, and was expected to lead fairly quickly to the passage of a resolution. But the timetable from now to June 30, when the United States has promised to hand over additional powers to Iraqis, remains tight, troubled and uncertain. "We are definitely running out of time," said Ambassador Abdallah Baali of Algeria, a council member. "There is no room for error. Not anymore." [...]

Even Ambassador Gunter Pleuger of Germany, whose country ardently opposed the Iraq war, called the draft text "a good basis for discussions" toward a resolution that will "make clear that we have a new start in Iraq."

BEATING AK-47s INTO BUTTERFLY BALLOTS:

US closes in on deal with Iraqi cleric: Officials say talks are under way to turn Moqtada al-Sadr's army into a political group. (Orly Halpern, 5/25/04, CS Monitor)

As fighting between Shiite militiamen and US-led coalition forces continued Monday, the outline of a Fallujah-like solution began to emerge.

The death toll rose in Baghdad and Kufa as the Mahdi Army of militant Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr battled US troops. But behind the scenes, direct negotiations were under way to transform Sadr's militia into a political entity and end a violent rebellion.

The coalition has declared repeatedly that it will not negotiate with "militias and criminals." Nonetheless, a deal may be forthcoming with Sadr, said an official close to the talks. The coalition has previously said it wanted the cleric killed or captured.

If the deal pans out, it could bring to an end the seven-week conflict. The hope is that by engaging Sadr politically, the coalition can neutralize him militarily. His militia might also eventually be integrated into the Iraqi national security forces.

Such an accord would reverse previously held coalition strategies - much as happened in Fallujah. In that Iraqi city, the scene of intense fighting in April, militia including many of the same insurgents who were fighting the Marines are now in charge of keeping the peace.

MORE:
U.S. Seems Ready to Allow Iraqi Militias to Keep Arms (DEXTER FILKINS, 5/25/04, NY Times)

The danger is that on June 30 the Americans will hand over power to an Iraqi administration that will not have a monopoly on the use of armed force, in an environment that many fear could set the stage for sectarian and ethnic warfare as the country moves toward what are intended to be democratic elections.

As that date approaches, the Americans are quietly allowing some of these armed groups to flourish and, in some cases, have even helped recreate them.

In Falluja, the scene of deadly fighting last month, American commanders agreed to set up an Iraqi security force composed almost entirely of former members of Mr. Hussein's Republican Guard and anti-American guerrillas.

In Baghdad and southern Iraq, the Americans have allowed the two largest Shiite militias, the Badr Corps and the Dawa army, to remain intact, largely on the promise by their leaders that the fighters will stay off the streets.

In northern Iraq, as part of the effort to disband the 60,000-man Kurdish militia, entire military units simply donned police uniforms of the new Iraqi state but otherwise stayed in the same place with the same commanders.

Even fighters in the Mahdi Army of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whom American soldiers have been killing in large numbers in recent weeks, may be given a chance for legitimacy. In a recent news conference, the general commanding American forces in Najaf and Karbala said he would be willing to consider taking Mahdi Army militiamen into a new Iraqi security force being set up to help secure southern Iraq. [...]

In some cases, the Americans have allowed militias that it considers friendly simply to change their names. The Badr Corps, for instance, has changed its name to the Badr Reconstruction Organization, and its leaders claim that it is now involved only in cultural activities. The head of the group, Abu Hassan al-Ameri, remains in his same offices, and his men still carry Kalashnikov rifles. "All of our guns have been licensed by the Americans," Mr. Ameri said.

As with most other militias, the Badr organization is made up almost entirely of a single religious or ethnic group. So strong is the Shiite identification of the Badr Corps that in the 1980's, during the Iran-Iraq war, some of its members fought for Iran, another majority-Shiite country, against the Sunni-led forces of Iraq.

From the beginning, the task of disarming the militias has been a difficult one. Every Iraqi family is permitted to own one high-powered assault rifle, and virtually all of them do. Like the American minutemen of yore, the militias are composed mostly of civilians, who assemble — or disappear — on short notice.

While the United States has tried a hands-off approach with armed groups it regards as friendly, it has tried to co-opt ones that have demonstrated hostility. After the heavy fighting in Falluja last month, American commanders accepted an offer from a former general in the Republican Guards to set up a security force of his former troops.

One result is that Falluja has been mostly peaceful since the deal was reached a month ago. But the peace has come at considerable cost: It has enraged mainstream Shiites, who were stunned to learn that the Americans had resurrected the very soldiers they deposed a year before. Shiite leaders worry that the short-term peace in Falluja will give way to disaster in the future.

"Today, they are in Falluja; tomorrow they will be in Baghdad," said Mr. Mehdi, the Shiite leader.

These days in Falluja, the line separating an insurgent and a member of the "security forces" is sometimes invisible.

"All the people in Falluja are fighters," said Naji Obeid, a 35-year-old member of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, an American-sponsored force.

When the Marines tried to enter Falluja last month, Mr. Obeid joined the fight against them. When the peace deal was struck, he put his Iraqi civil defense uniform back on and returned to work.

"The people, they were fighting against the Americans, and they were fighting to protect their city," he said. "And now they are in the new Iraqi Army, protecting their city."

THE WORSE:

George Bush never looked into Nick's eyes: Even more than the murderers who took my son's life, I condemn those who make policies to end lives (Michael Berg, May 21, 2004, The Guardian)

People ask me why I focus on putting the blame for my son's tragic and atrocious end on the Bush administration. They ask: "Don't you blame the five men who killed him?" I have answered that I blame them no more or less than the Bush administration, but I am wrong: I am sure, knowing my son, that somewhere during their association with him these men became aware of what an extraordinary man my son was. I take comfort that when they did the awful thing they did, they weren't quite as in to it as they might have been. I am sure that they came to admire him.

I am sure that the one who wielded the knife felt Nick's breath on his hand and knew that he had a real human being there. I am sure that the others looked into my son's eyes and got at least a glimmer of what the rest of the world sees. And I am sure that these murderers, for just a brief moment, did not like what they were doing.

George Bush never looked into my son's eyes. George Bush doesn't know my son, and he is the worse for it.

NEO-CON MAN?:

Billion-dollar timebomb puts Chalabi at risk (Robin Gedye, 21/05/2004, Daily Telegraph)

Ahmad Chalabi is in possession of "miles" of documents with the potential to expose politicians, corporations and the United Nations as having connived in a system of kickbacks and false pricing worth billions of pounds.

That may have been enough to provoke yesterday's American raid. So explosive are the contents of the files that their publication would cause serious problems for US allies and friendly states around the globe.

Late last year and several months before Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority became involved, Mr Chalabi had amassed enough information concerning corruption in the oil-for-food scandal to realise that he was sitting on explosive material.

"GOOD NEWS IS ALSO NEWS":

Speaking to the nation (Michael Barone, May 24, 2004, TownHall)

To the criticism that they report and overemphasize bad news, reporters say, correctly, that bad news is news. But in a country like Iraq, ruled by a vicious dictator for the last 35 years, good news is also news. Reporters readily fan out to find bad news. But they seldom seek the good news -- readily available in Iraqi and military weblogs and confirmed in polls of Iraqis -- that incomes, electricity, schools, water quality, medical care, religious freedom and security are improving in Iraq. Some reporters, as the Daily Telegraph's Toby Harnden reports from Iraq, deliberately avoid good news because they think it might help George W. Bush win re-election.

When Bush speaks to the public, he might follow the example of one considerably below him in the chain of command, Marine Corps Maj. Ben Connable, who wrote is USA Today: "This is my third deployment with the 1st Marine Division to the Middle East. This is the third time I've heard the quavering cries of the talking heads predicting failure and calling for withdrawal. This is the third time I find myself shaking my head in disbelief. ... Just weeks ago, I read that the supply lines were cut, ammunition and food were dwindling, the ‘Sunni Triangle' was exploding, cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was leading a widespread Shiite revolt and the country was nearing civil war. As I write this, the supply lines are open, there's plenty of ammunition and food, the Sunni Triangle is back to status quo and Sadr is marginalized in Najaf. Once again, dire predictions of failure and disaster have been dismissed by American willpower and military professionalism."

The president needs to put things in perspective. Iraq is not Vietnam. My Lai was a massacre; Abu Ghraib was abuse. Hundreds of thousands of enemy attacked in the Tet offensive; a few thousand fought for Moqtada al-Sadr, and they are being rejected by his fellow Shiites.

MUST FLEE TV:

Mayor Tom to Kerry: Just do it!: Nomination flap heats up in Hub (David R. Guarino, May 23, 2004, Boston Herald)

A frustrated Mayor Thomas M. Menino yesterday urged Sen. John F. Kerry to make good on plans to accept the Democratic presidential nomination in the Hub, bluntly telling Kerry to ``just do it.''

Menino, peeved that Kerry didn't clue him in on planning that could render the Boston convention irrelevant, said it's too late for ideas like Kerry's.

``My advice? Do what everybody else has done in the past,'' Menino told reporters.

``Just do it. Just get it done.''

The mayor led what could become a rising tide of opposition to the Kerry trial balloon suggesting the nomination be delayed to improve the campaign's finances.

PIG-LIPSTICKING:

Sharon tweaks withdrawal plan: Israel's leader is expected to seek cabinet approval Sunday for a Gaza plan that some say has changed little. (Ilene Prusher, 5/25/04, CS Monitor)

"It's basically a watered-down version to persuade some of the naysayers that, even if they couldn't go along with the last one, they will go along with the next one," says Mark Heller, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University. "Most of those who opposed did so on ideological grounds, being opposed to the concept of unilateral withdrawal, and not the specifics."

On the one hand, many Israelis view the military drive into Gaza Strip as justifiable, given the recent shooting deaths in Gaza of an Israeli mother and her four daughters and the deaths of 13 Israeli soldiers during attacks by Palestinian militant groups. But the stated goals of the operation have been inconsistent - from what the military says is a need to destroy tunnels to plans to widen the corridor between the Strip and Egypt.

In the hawkish view, Israel wanted to show Palestinians how Israel will respond to any attempt to use a Gaza Strip withdrawal to launch fresh attacks on Israel. Or, as Ze'ev Schiff, a military analyst with the Ha'aretz newspaper, puts it: "Rafah will be a reminder to them what will happen if they go on with the terror war after the withdrawal."

Israel may also have gone on the offensive to preempt Hamas claims that the army is leaving Gaza "under fire," as Hizbollah claimed in Lebanon.

The shifting and varied reasons to justify the Rafah operation have left many here baffled, and the new and improved disengagement plan according to an editorial in Ha'aretz, "arouses both concern and puzzlement."

Says Mr. Heller: "We always proceed on the assumption that someone up there in the leadership has a clear idea of what they're doing, and we just need to figure it out. But in this case, i'm not sure if they had a clear idea.

"It's the government's job to provide a clear explanation of things, a rationale, and in that they failed - so everyone's confused and we're reduced to guessing," he says.

What is clear is that Sharon's essential thinking remains unchanged, namely that Israel has no partner within the Palestinian leadership and should therefore withdraw from some 20 Jewish settlements in Gaza and certain parts of the West Bank.

THE STABLE BUSH (via Kevin Whited):

Bush Sr. clarifies 'Chicken Kiev' speech (Natalia A. Feduschak, May 24, 2004, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Former President George Bush, the latest in a string of prominent American visitors to Ukraine, said last week that what became known as his "Chicken Kiev" speech in 1991 was misunderstood by his critics.

In that speech, delivered in Kiev months before a referendum in which Ukrainians voted to withdraw from the Soviet Union, Mr. Bush cautioned against "suicidal nationalism."

The remarks subsequently were derided as lacking sufficient resolve against communism and, in any case, had little impact on the referendum, which passed overwhelmingly.

Back in Kiev last week during a European tour to raise support for his son's re-election campaign, Mr. Bush insisted that both Ukrainians and the Western press had missed his point.

The message he had wanted to send was that Ukrainians should not do "something stupid," he said. "If your leaders hadn't acted smartly, there would have been a crackdown" from Moscow.

Mr. Bush told an audience of students and other invited guests that Washington had felt a "sense of relief" when 90 percent of Ukrainians voted for independence. "What transpired 13 years ago marked a new, hopeful chapter for mankind," he said.

The state of dis-Arabia (Claude Salhani, 5/24/2004, UPI) -- If Arab leaders gathered in a summit meeting in Tunis this past weekend were to qualify for a report card, most would score low marks for lack of progress, absence of political freedom, deficit of democracy and human rights abuses.

While the developed world has progressed over the last decade, the Arab world has largely stagnated, lamented Turki al-Hammad, a Jordanian-born political scientist.

"The whole world has changed but the Middle East has not," said al-Hammad, adding the reason the area remained in conflict was "because the Middle East is going backward instead of forward." [...]

While the Middle East regressed politically, Europe, meanwhile, particularly the "New Europe," has been the most successful Cinderella story of the planet. The former Eastern Bloc has shed the chains of communism, and in light years leaps and bounds joined the 21st century, leaving the Middle East behind in its dust.

Despite its richness in natural resources, the Middle East continues to lag behind the rest of the developed world in bringing about democratic reforms. The proliferation of the Internet, cellular telephones and satellite television has allowed many Arabs greater access to information than ever before, yet, as Secretary of State Colin Powell pointed out, the entire Arab world of 260 million people has a smaller combined gross domestic product than Spain with 40 million. [...]

Given the immense richness of the area -- from oil, to natural gas and its multitude of minerals, given Middle Easterners' natural flair for business and their success at it -- there is little excuse for the socio-political retardation in the area. "We must identify the past and not repeat its mistakes," said a participant at last week's Kuwait conference.

"Here are the facts, whether we like them or not. A number of countries have no respect for human rights," said al Hammad, the political scientist. The need for change in the Arab world was echoed by his Syrian colleague, Sami al-Khaymi, who said, "There is dire need to change the Arab mind." No one will argue that point.

But still, there is room for optimism. A few countries are beginning to introduce reform, albeit at their own pace, such as Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Tunisia and Algeria, the latter of which has seen a mushrooming of independent newspapers. Others are under mounting pressure from the Bush administration to change.

The other country offering a glint of hopefulness in the region is Iran -- not an Arab country -- and which is most likely to head towards greater democratic changes within the next decade. "It is not right to represent Iran with its ruling mullahs, who are (going to be) seriously in trouble when young Iranians enter society," commented Amir Naghshineh-Pour, director of the San Diego-based Iran Alliance Public Relations.

FELLOW-TRAVELING (via ef brown):

Kerry's Stalinist Slogan (Insight Magazine, May 24, 2004)

Insiders say John Kerry has settled on "Let America Be America Again" as the motto and theme of his presidential campaign. The line comes from a Langston Hughes poem Kerry quoted at an NAACP event in Kansas. Apparently the pedantic St. Paul's and Yale graduate didn't bother to note that it was written for an International Workers Order (IWO) pamphlet called A New Song. The IWO was an officially cited affiliate of the Communist Party, and Hughes was so committed a Stalinist that he formally endorsed the Bolshevik purges.

THE THEORY'S SOUND:

'Gas roots' protest over pump prices: Many consumers, blaming big oil, boycott stations. (Ron Scherer, 5.//25/04, CS monitor)

It sounds like a late-night joke: Did you hear the one about the Texan who drives a pickup truck and wants to boycott gasoline stations?

Leno and Letterman, meet Stephanie Cain, a resident of Houston, who has been avoiding the pumps at her favorite gas station. "The oil companies have no regard for the consumer," says Ms. Cain, the owner of a "gas hog" Dodge Ram pickup. "They are just lining their pockets."

She's far from alone in wanting to punish the pumps. Websites are springing up (www. boycottgasoline.com, among others), e-mails zinging oil companies are flying through the ether, and, yes, someone is both trying to boycott gasoline in California and get a "fuel revolt" proposition on the ballot this fall. With gasoline prices continuing to ratchet up - the weighted national average hit $2.10 a gallon last week - a "gas roots" effort is being pushed with populist zeal.

A DEEP AND ABIDING FAITH

Bible argument spurs boiling-oil charge (Boston Globe, May 21st, 2004)

A woman is accused of pouring boiling oil on her boyfriend's face in an argument over a Bible verse.

Angela S. Morris, 19, was charged with domestic violence assault and jailed on $250,000 bail. Her 31-year-old boyfriend, whose name was not released, was hospitalized with severe burns on his face, neck and chest.

The two were reading the Bible at the boyfriend's apartment May 13 when Morris went to the kitchen to prepare french fries, police said.

Morris told police that they continued to argue and that her boyfriend grabbed her from behind. Police said he then went to his bedroom to lie down. Morris followed and threw the oil on him, police said.

Twenty bucks says it was Exodus 20:14

WHERE ARE THEY?:

New Theory: Universe Created by Intelligent Being (John Roach, March 11, 2004, National Geographic News)

On any given starry night thousands, perhaps millions, of people crane their necks skyward and allow their minds to swirl around two fundamental questions: Are we alone, and why are we here?

According to a lawyer and science enthusiast in Portland, Oregon, not only is the universe full of life, but some of it may be intelligent beyond our wildest imagination. He also says that collectively as intelligent beings we are entwined in our ultimate destiny: to give birth to another universe.

"Intelligent life is, in essence, the reproductive organ of the cosmos," said James Gardner, the lawyer who moonlights as a scientist. He has pulled together his theory—called the selfish biocosm—from the disparate fields of physics, biology, biochemistry, astronomy, and cosmology.

Gardner has published pieces of his theory in several peer-reviewed scientific journals and wraps it together in his recently published book, Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe.

Though Gardner admits the theory is speculative and out-there in the literal and figurative senses, it is grounded enough in serious research to at least tickle the fancy of some of the world's most respected scientists.

Seth Shostak is a senior scientist with the Mountain View, California-based SETI Institute, which is the unofficial hub for researchers on the lookout for extraterrestrial intelligence. He agrees with Gardner's belief that intelligent life is out there.

"It doesn't mean I automatically buy into the entire scenario Gardner is buying into, but I think he is right in suggesting intelligence is not extremely rare," Shostak said. "Of course, I'm in the SETI business, so it's probably not surprising that I believe that."

The selfish biocosm theory begins with the premise that the universe is life friendly. It is not a hostile place full of black holes, uninhabitable planets, and the emptiness that somehow, randomly, allowed intelligent life to evolve on Earth, Gardner says.

MORE:
The Big Lab Experiment: Was our universe created by design? (Jim Holt, May 19, 2004, Slate)

Was our universe created? That is, was it brought into being by an entity with a mind? This is a question I began pondering after my recent inquiry into the end of the universe. (For some reason, cosmic mysteries are best contemplated in pairs.) It is the fundamental issue that separates religious believers, ranging from Deists to Gnostics to Southern Baptists, from nonbelievers. To many atheists, the very idea that our world could have been created by a conscious being seems downright nutty. How could anyone, even a god, "make" a universe?

To get a better understanding of this matter, I thought it might be wise to consult the man who has done more than anyone else to explain how our universe got going. His name is Andrei Linde, and he is a physicist at Stanford University. (He's also an artist and an acrobat, but never mind.) In the early 1980s, the then-thirtysomething Linde came up with a novel theory of the Big Bang that answered three vexing questions: What banged? Why did it bang? And what was going on before it banged? Linde's theory, called "chaotic inflation," explained the shape of space and how galaxies were formed. It also predicted the exact pattern of background radiation from the Big Bang that was observed by the COBE satellite in the 1990s. Linde has been amply honored for his achievement, most recently by being awarded the 2004 Cosmology Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation (along with Alan Guth, another pioneer of the theory of cosmic inflation).

Among the many curious implications of Linde's theory, one stands out for our present purposes: It doesn't take all that much to create a universe. Resources on a cosmic scale are not required. It might even be possible for someone in a not terribly advanced civilization to cook up a new universe in a laboratory. Which leads to an arresting thought: Could that be how our universe came into being?

FIND ME NEMO:

THE SQUID HUNTER: Can Steve O’Shea capture the sea’s most elusive creature? (DAVID GRANN, 2004-05-17, The New Yorker)

On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the record for the fastest sailing voyage around the world, when his boat mysteriously came to a halt. There was no land for hundreds of miles, yet the mast rattled and the hull shuddered, as if the vessel had run aground. Kersauson turned the wheel one way, then the other; still, the gunwales shook inexplicably in the darkness. Kersauson ordered his crew, all of whom were now running up and down the deck, to investigate. Some of the crew took out spotlights and shone them on the water, as the massive trimaran—a three-hulled, hundred-and-ten-foot boat that was the largest racing machine of its kind, and was named Geronimo, for the Apache warrior—pitched in the waves.

Meanwhile, the first mate, Didier Ragot, descended from the deck into the cabin, opened a trapdoor in the floor, and peered through a porthole into the ocean, using a flashlight. He glimpsed something by the rudder. “It was bigger than a human leg,” Ragot recently told me. “It was a tentacle.” He looked again. “It was starting to move,” he recalled.

He beckoned Kersauson, who came down and crouched over the opening. “I think it’s some sort of animal,” Ragot said.

Kersauson took the flashlight, and inspected for himself. “I had never seen anything like it,” he told me. “There were two giant tentacles right beneath us, lashing at the rudder.”

The creature seemed to be wrapping itself around the boat, which rocked violently. The floorboards creaked, and the rudder started to bend. Then, just as the stern seemed ready to snap, everything went still. “As it unhooked itself from the boat, I could see its tentacles,” Ragot recalled. “The whole animal must have been nearly thirty feet long.”

The creature had glistening skin and long arms with suckers, which left impressions on the hull. “It was enormous,” Kersauson recalled. “I’ve been sailing for forty years and I’ve always had an answer for everything—for hurricanes and icebergs. But I didn’t have an answer for this. It was terrifying.”

What they claimed they saw—a claim that many regarded as a tall tale—was a giant squid, an animal that has long occupied a central place in sea lore; it has been said to be larger than a whale and stronger than an elephant, with a beak that can sever steel cables. In a famous scene in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Jules Verne depicts a battle between a submarine and a giant squid that is twenty-five feet long, with eight arms and blue-green eyes—“a terrible monster worthy of all the legends about such creatures.” More recently, Peter Benchley, in his thriller “Beast,” describes a giant squid that “killed without need, as if Nature, in a fit of perverse malevolence, had programmed it to that end.”

Such fictional accounts, coupled with scores of unconfirmed sightings by sailors over the years, have elevated the giant squid into the fabled realm of the fire-breathing dragon and the Loch Ness monster. Though the giant squid is no myth, the species, designated in scientific literature as Architeuthis, is so little understood that it sometimes seems like one. A fully grown giant squid is classified as the largest invertebrate on Earth, with tentacles sometimes as long as a city bus and eyes about the size of human heads. Yet no scientist has ever examined a live specimen—or seen one swimming in the sea. Researchers have studied only carcasses, which have occasionally washed ashore or floated to the surface. (One corpse, found in 1887 in the South Pacific, was said to be nearly sixty feet long.) Other evidence of the giant squid is even more indirect: sucker marks have been spotted on the bodies of sperm whales, as if burned into them; presumably, the two creatures battle each other hundreds of feet beneath the ocean’s surface.

The giant squid has consumed the imaginations of many oceanographers. How could something so big and powerful remain unseen for so long—or be less understood than dinosaurs, which died out millions of years ago? The search for a living specimen has inspired a fevered competition. For decades, teams of scientists have prowled the high seas in the hope of glimpsing one. These “squid squads” have in recent years invested millions of dollars and deployed scores of submarines and underwater cameras, in a struggle to be first.

Steve O’Shea, a marine biologist from New Zealand, is one of the hunters—but his approach is radically different. He is not trying to find a mature giant squid; rather, he is scouring the ocean for a baby, called a paralarva, which he can grow in captivity. A paralarva is often the size of a cricket.

DESIGNER SPECIES:

Darwinian shift: survival of the smallest: Evidence suggests that harvesting the biggest animals may force species to evolve rapidly. (Peter N. Spotts, 5/20/04, CS Monitor)

One of the big puzzles for managers of fisheries involves the plunge in Atlantic cod populations around southern Labrador and Newfoundland's Grand Banks. Between the early 1960s and the early '90s, the number of cod there plummeted by 99.9 percent - one of the worst collapses of extant marine or land animals ever.

The cod that remained were smaller, matured at a younger age, spawned much earlier in their lives, and yielded weaker offspring than did their ancestors. In 1992, the Canadian government closed the fisheries. With the ban, fisheries managers expected the stocks to rebound. Yet today the populations remain at historic lows.

So Esben Olsen, a Norwegian marine ecologist, and a team of researchers decided to find out why. Were factors such as low food supplies or unusual ocean conditions responsible for the population's failure to rebound? Or did the fishing industry, by pulling up the larger fish, channel the populations' evolution toward smaller sizes, earlier maturity, and less reproductive success?

After analyzing nearly three decades' worth of data, the scientists concluded that evolution was indeed at work: Survival of the smallest. Dr. Olsen's team reported its results in the April 29 edition of the journal Nature.

"This shift toward early maturation could slow down the recovery of the population" because the fish can't produce offspring as robustly as the older fish could, Olsen says in a phone interview from his Oslo home.

The team made another key finding. The change showed up in the cod's population statistics before the collapse actually snowballed. He says this approach could be used as an early warning system for evolutionary trouble ahead.

Such a finding implies big changes for the way fisheries managers operate. If they are to take contemporary evolution into account, managers will have to cut back fishing of endangered populations earlier than ever - when the genetic changes are beginning to appear rather than when populations begin to collapse.

Another potential change: a more rigorous process for preserving genetic diversity. That would involve, scientists say, better screening to identify individuals to reintroduce; more detailed, persistent monitoring programs to find out how they're faring; and a focus on the genetic adaptability of distinct populations of a species, rather than on organisms thought to be most representative of a particular species.

Fast-track evolution affects more than fish. Last December, researchers in Alberta who closely tracked family histories within a group of mountain sheep at Ram Mountain reported that over a 30-year period, the rams in the population matured to smaller sizes and sported ever-smaller sets of horns.

The reason: Trophy hunters focused on taking the largest rams with the largest horns. These rams typically were shot before they reached their peak reproductive years. So, with many of those animals gone, the gene pool narrowed to favor the smaller rams.

WORSE:

For Better or for Worse?: President Bush's endorsement of a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage should be welcomed by all Americans who are concerned about equality and preserving democratic decision-making. (Mary Ann Glendon, February 25, 2004, The Wall Street Journal)

If these social experiments go forward, moreover, the rights of children will be impaired. Same-sex marriage will constitute a public, official endorsement of the following extraordinary claims made by the Massachusetts judges in the Goodridge case: that marriage is mainly an arrangement for the benefit of adults; that children do not need both a mother and a father; and that alternative family forms are just as good as a husband and wife raising kids together. It would be tragic if, just when the country is beginning to take stock of the havoc those erroneous ideas have already wrought in the lives of American children, we should now freeze them into constitutional law. That philosophy of marriage, moreover, is what our children and grandchildren will be taught in school. They will be required to discuss marriage in those terms. Ordinary words like husband and wife will be replaced by partner and spouse. In marriage-preparation and sex-education classes, children will have to be taught about homosexual sex. Parents who complain will be branded as homophobes and their children will suffer.

Religious freedom, too, is at stake. As much as one may wish to live and let live, the experience in other countries reveals that once these arrangements become law, there will be no live-and-let-live policy for those who differ. Gay-marriage proponents use the language of openness, tolerance and diversity, yet one foreseeable effect of their success will be to usher in an era of intolerance and discrimination the likes of which we have rarely seen before. Every person and every religion that disagrees will be labeled as bigoted and openly discriminated against. The ax will fall most heavily on religious persons and groups that don't go along. Religious institutions will be hit with lawsuits if they refuse to compromise their principles.

Finally, there is the flagrant disregard shown by judges and local officials for the rights of citizens to have a say in setting the conditions under which we live, work and raise our children. Many Americans — however they feel about same-sex marriage — are rightly alarmed that local officials are defying state law, and that four judges in one state took it upon themselves to make the kind of decision that our Constitution says belongs to us, the people, and to our elected representatives. As one State House wag in Massachusetts put it, "We used to have government of the people, by the people and for the people, now we're getting government by four people!"

PAGING JOHN SMITH

A quick self-Google once a day to guard your reputation (Daniel Dasey, The Sun-Herald, 5/23/04)

It used to be a clandestine act carried out at the computer when no one else was watching, but "self-Googling" - searching for your own name on the internet - has gained social acceptance, with academics and legal experts saying the practice is healthy and fast becoming indispensable.

American researcher Alexander Halavais last month urged all internet users to keep tabs on what was being posted about them on the net, saying it was a 21st-century form of brand management.

The comments sparked an instant fad in the US, with people who consulted search engines surprised to discover they were mentioned on websites ranging from sporting team homepages to business directories.

JAWOHL!

Talking toilet orders men to sit down
(Boston Globe, May 21, 2004)

A German inventor who developed a gadget that berates men if they try to use the toilet standing up has sold more than 1.6 million devices, his business manager said on Tuesday.

German women fed up with a man with a poor aim can turn to the ghost-shaped gadget, which lurks under the toilet rim and, if the seat is lifted, declares in a stern female tone:

"Hello, what are you up to then? Put the seat back down right away, you are definitely not to pee standing up ... you will make a right mess..."

It is heartening to see that, after so many false starts, Germany has finally found a noble sense of national purpose.

NO EXIT

When Alzheimer's Steals the Mind, How Aggressively to Treat the Body?
Gina Kolata, New York Times, May 28th, 2004)

Macie Mull was 82 and had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for more than a decade when she developed pneumonia. Her nursing home rushed her to the hospital where she spent the night, receiving intravenous antibiotics. The next day she was back at the nursing home, more confused than ever.

Now she was choking on her puréed food; eating was becoming impossible. And so, one Sunday afternoon, the administrators of her nursing home in Hickory, N.C., asked Mrs. Mull's daughter what to do: Did she want a feeding tube inserted? At that point, Mrs. Mull muttered only a few random words and could no longer recognize her daughter. The feeding tube would almost certainly prolong her life, but was it worth it?

The question of how aggressive to be in treating late-stage Alzheimer's patients is one of the most wrenching and contentious issues in medicine. For every patient who, like Mrs. Mull, reaches the final stage of the disease, there typically are about five or six family members faced with decisions about whether to authorize medical treatments for patients whose bodies live on though their minds are gone.

New research has found that Alzheimer's patients at the end of their lives often receive everything that medicine has to offer...

Modern man is a problem-solver. He is profoundly upset and dispirited by the notion that his can-do resolve, backed by no end of workshops, scientific research and technology, can not cope with whatever society or nature throws his way. But this heart-wrenching article shows that there are some dramas that don’t have happy endings and that, whatever we do, we make it worse. Neither religion, with its prohibitions against suicide and commands to care for the elderly, nor secular humanism, which tends to define quality of life as simply living as long as one can in the hope of dying in perfect health, can help us much here. With a huge Boomer generation set to retire soon, we are walking eyes wide open into an ethical sewer where we may be forced increasingly to choose between seeing ourselves as either murderers or torturers.

In the old days, wise men used to call pneumonia the old person’s friend. Nineteenth century novels and histories often speak of seniors who went for a walk, took a chill and passed on a few days later. Such blessings will not be for us, for we are of an age where it is bliss to be a child and a humiliating terror to be aged and infirm.

DEMONIC JUSTICE:

Conciliating Hatred (Steven Smith, First Things, June/July 2004)

[I]n the Casey joint opinion [Kennedy] eventually joined O’Connor and Justice David Souter in reaffirming Roe’s “central holding”—with the expressed purpose, or at least the hope, of bringing the nation together on this “intensely divisive controversy.” These Justices portrayed the Court’s role as one of “call[ing] the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.”...

As you will learn to your chagrin if you have the misfortune of being required to teach these cases, the Court’s affirmative action decisions were plainly not about logic—or even about law in any serious sense. They were political compromises calculated to placate the major interested parties, and to avoid the divisiveness that the Court feared would ensue if affirmative action were ended....

The description in the Casey opinion of the Court as “call[ing] the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division” struck some observers as grandiose, bordering on delusional.... Moreover, the leading precedent for this self-portrayal is ominous. In Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), the Supreme Court similarly attempted to call the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division: it attempted to settle the issue of slavery once and for all. Four years later the nation was engaged in a civil war that would wreak death and destruction on a horrifying scale....

[A] favored strategy seems to be emerging: we might call it the “evil-motives strategy.”... If the Justices ... want to invalidate a divisive measure, they can find the stated purpose to be merely a cover for some more nefarious motive—for racial or religious bigotry, or “animus,” or “a bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group” (quoting now from the 1996 decision in Romer v. Evans). In essence, the measure is struck down for being a product of hatred....

In Romer, ... Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion described a black-and-white world in which supporters of the measure were acting simply from “animus,” or from a “bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group.” And last term, in Lawrence v. Texas, Kennedy again wrote for the Court to declare that a Texas law prohibiting homosexual sodomy was like Amendment 2 in being “born of animosity toward the class of persons affected.”...

[T]he Court’s approach not only countenances but indeed mandates a discourse of demonization in which adversaries are required to litigate their differences by asserting and withstanding ascriptions of bigotry, intolerance, hatred, and “animus.” In traditional logic and rhetoric, the so-called ad hominem argument is typically treated as a certifiable fallacy. But if evil motives become the test of constitutionality, then disputants are not merely authorized but indeed required to trade in just that sort of argument. Robert Nagel notes that a good deal of modern constitutional jurisprudence amounts to little more than thinly veiled exercises in name-calling ...

Probably the principal device for reconciling [the ennobling and destructive aspects of our moral aspirations] consists of the venerable admonition to “hate the sin but love the sinner.”...

Tragically, the Supreme Court’s evil-motives jurisprudence attempts to negate that principle, or to foreclose any resort to it. Moral disapproval of conduct, such as homosexual acts, is equated with hostility toward and hatred of persons who engage in that conduct, and even of persons with a proclivity to engage in it, whether they actually do so or not.

This equation is nowhere clearer than in Justice O’Connor’s concurring opinion in Lawrence v. Texas. Moral disapproval of conduct, O’Connor there maintains, amounts to moral disapproval of the class or group with which that conduct is “closely correlated.” And “[m]oral disapproval of this group” is in turn tantamount for legal purposes to “a bare desire to harm the group.”...

Under the weight of these morality-flattening equivalences, any possibility of hating the sin but loving the sinner is crushed. On the contrary, disapproval of what you regard as sin amounts to (and indeed is simply the expression of) hatred of the sinners.

Judging by the last decade of rulings, the personal prejudices of the Court majority seem to be less liberal or conservative than anti-Christian and secular. Smith is right that the Court is "flattening" traditional Christian principles like "hate the sin, love the sinner" -- but the Court may regard that as a feature, not a bug.

A BIGGER SPHERE:

Australian foreign policy should not be based on the Anglosphere concept (Michael Fullilove, 14/5/2004, Online Opinion)

[I] would like to suggest that as a foreign policy tool, the Anglosphere is flawed, for at least three reasons.

First, history tells us that states make decisions primarily on the basis of their national interests. Cultural and historical factors are of secondary importance only. Iraq provides a modern example of this. While the US drew significant support for its actions from Britain and Australia, the countries bringing up the rear were not sorted by civilisation: Anglospheric countries such as Canada and New Zealand failed to fall into line while Spain and Poland marched in lockstep.

In this context, the Second World War example is, in my view, overplayed by advocates of Anglospherism. It is true, of course, that during the war British and American affairs were thoroughly entangled: high policy was relatively well coordinated, and joint committees and combined boards regulated many everyday activities. Nevertheless, significant differences existed on vital issues such as the timing and location of the cross-Channel invasion, the role of China, free trade versus imperial preferences, and the fate of the colonial empires. Moreover, the Anglo-American condominium declined markedly in the aftermath of the war. Owen Harries has reminded us, for example, of the Suez Crisis of 1956, in which the US publicly denounced Britain and France for trying to seize the Canal back from Gamal Abdel Nasser. This was only a decade after the end of the war – and the people who had run the Allied war effort still ran the world!

There are, of course, many other instances of interests trumping civilisational or ideological sentiment, for example the execrable 1939 pact between German fascism and Russian communism and Nixon’s 1972 recognition of Beijing at the expense of Taipei. Another example from within the Anglosphere was Britain’s decision – much to the consternation of Commonwealth politicians who had grown used to a special economic relationship with the mother country – to join the European Economic Community in 1973.

There is no reason to think that Anglospheric ties would have greater salience now – particularly given the changes to the makeup of the populations of countries within its borders. This is the second weakness in this rather dusty argument. The post-war waves of immigration to countries such as the United States, Britain and Australia have diluted their Anglocentric cultures even as they have enlivened cultural ties to other parts of the world. In other words, it may not seem intuitive for a Mexican-American in California or for a Vietnamese-Australian in Cabramatta to gaze towards Whitehall for political succour.

And this foreshadows the final flaw in the Anglospherist thesis: it ignores the gravitational force-field of regionalism. Each of the US, Britain and Australia is located on the edge of a region which is occupying a greater share of the national mind. The US is being pulled southwards towards Mexico; the UK is being pulled eastwards towards Europe; and Australia is being pulled northwards towards Asia and the Pacific. It is entirely appropriate that these countries should put a priority on improving relations with the region in which they are located – and this regional push will properly affect the strength of extra-regional ties.

WHAT, YOU NEVER MISPLACED ANYTHING?:

The return of a rare cello leaves a trail of question marks: The strange tale of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's $3.5 million lost and found Stradivarius. (Daniel B. Wood, 5/20/04, CS Monitor)

With national and international press packed cheek by jowl in the Philharmonic's Choral Hall, sound booms were lowered, lights aimed, and pens poised.

But somehow, despite the best intentions, the Tuesday affair raised as many questions as it answered with this announcement: The Philharmonic's $3.5 million Stradivarius cello, stolen from the principal cellist's home last month, had been found.

The objet du jour was not there - only oversized, full color photos of the vintage 1684 instrument. Perched on giant easels were images of the city's seemingly most-talked-about single crime since the Black Dahlia murder in 1947 - sprawled on a white-clothed operating table in an unnamed location.

A professorial-looking man in blue rubber gloves hovered next to a bulb-lit magnifying glass, examining damage to the instrument as if it were wounds of a human victim on TV-hit "CSI: Crime Scene Investigators."

But those wounds - appearing as a nearly imperceptible crack down the cello's face (perhaps 10 inches long), cracks on the back (not shown), and loosened strings - were only explained as "routine." The instrument would be restored to full value by October, said Robert Cauer, the Philharmonic's string technician.

"I wasn't there to see the injuries happen so I couldn't say," Mr. Cauer told me, rebuffing a query about what they were and how they could be fixed.

Second on the list of question marks was Philharmonic Principal Cellist Peter Stumpf, who had been in personal purgatory since the theft. The musician had arrived home late and weary after performing in Santa Barbara on April 25, and carelessly left the cello on the front steps.

How could an instrument - one of 60 cellos made 320 years ago by master instrumentmaker Antonio Stradivari - be left like a forgotten sack of groceries? Los Angeles Philharmonic Association President Deborah Borda cheerfully reminded reporters this kind of forgetfulness happens all the time. In January, violinist Gidon Kremer forgot his $3 million Guarneri del Gesu instrument on a train. In 1999, Yo-Yo Ma left his own $2.5 million Stradivarius cello in a New York City taxi.

Danny Graves couldn't believe what showed up in the mail.

The Cincinnati Reds closer lost his wallet at the start of a West Coast trip last week, and figured he would never see it again. The wallet contained his credit cards, his driver's license, his Reds identification card to get into ballparks, and about $1,400 in cash.

A man who cleaned the team's bus in San Diego not only returned the wallet and all of its contents, but took extraordinary precautions to make sure it would be safe during shipping.

"The guy kept the cash and exchanged it for traveler's checks so it wouldn't get stolen through the mail," Graves said Tuesday. "It was like $1,400 in cash. He did say, 'I borrowed $26 to overnight it to you.'

"He sent his name, address and phone number. He said, 'All I ask for is could you please sign an autograph for my father.' He's going to get a little more than an autograph."

WHAT PRICE FREEDOM?

EU wants random breath tests (Daily Mail, May 23rd, 2004)

The Home Office is resisting pressure from Europe to bring in random breath tests to catch drink drivers.

Under current British legislation, police can only breath test drivers if they believe they have been drinking alcohol.

But the European Commission wants countries across Europe to introduce random testing to improve road safety.

The Home Office has insisted that random tests were not an efficient way of catching drink-drivers and that it saw no need for them to be introduced.
However, the president of Tispol, the European Traffic Police Network, said the European Commission would attempt to make its recommendation a directive if it is not followed.

Ad Hellemons, who is also Dutch Assistant Commissioner of Police, told BBC Radio Five Live Five: "This is the first time the European Commission has made such a recommendation.

"The vast majority of member states already carry out random breath tests. We can't understand why governments would want to protect drink-drivers.

"The European Commission has made it clear that they expect this recommendation to be followed. If not they will try to make it a directive.

This is a great example of the conflict between continental and Anglo-American notions of freedom. In most of Europe, the well-ordered state is viewed as ultimately benevolent and is measured by its efficiency in solving problems. The citizen is always expected to defer to government, whose job is to provide munificence and order, and whose only potential sins are stupidity and corruption. In Anglo-American countries, the state is a necessary evil that can never be completely benevolent and against which the citizen must be protected by common individual rights that exist quite independently of their efficacy. This is the modern rationale for the presumption of innocence, trial by jury and the rules against self-incrimination. Except for the odd blogger from New Hampshire, most do not believe the police should always be assumed to operate in good faith or that accusation is a reliable determinant of guilt.

Since World War Two, this Anglo-American ethos has been sorely tested by the explosion of bureaucracy, urbanization, social engineering, the welfare state mentality and the complexities of modern technological society. The progressive response, as reflected in the judiciary, is to discover all manner of new, flavour-of-the-month constitutional rights that have turned law enforcement into a kind of chess game ever more remote from the moral underpinnings it is supposed to reflect. This has earned us a huge, expensive legal superstructure and a growing tendency to complicate the most mundane issues (like spam) by seeing them in terms of competing, fundamental rights. There are comparatively few really important rights. We dilute them by constantly inventing new ones.

Conservatives, however, often make the mistake the British Home Office is making here and try to respond by debating the issue on the question of efficiency. That is a very unpromising tact and the reason the British will probably lose this one in the end. Of course untrammeled police powers will make our roads and communities safer–one only has to compare pre and post Soviet Moscow to know that. But, with lobbyists like MADD with their tragic stories and a sensationalist media to cope with, we find it harder and harder to state the simple historical truth, which is that there are larger, more general issues at stake and we sometimes pay a price for freedom in terms of public order and safety.

Only a fanatic would argue our drinking and driving laws should be frozen in time and defined independently of social habits and the speed and concentration of traffic. The conservative response should be to take a hard, pragmatic look at the problem and reject solutions based solely on either state efficiency or inviolable individual rights. We must take care to avoid being hidebound by the past and be realistic about the new challenges of contemporary society. Yet we must not cower before the “if we can save but one life...” crowd or let accusations that we are casual about innocent death silence us on the overarching importance of a free and inefficient society.

THE UNIVERSAL SYSTEM OF A PARTICULAR PEOPLE:

Democracy And Its Global Roots (Amartya Sen, 04 October, 2003 , The New Republic)

There is no mystery in the fact that the immediate prospects of democracy in Iraq, to be ushered in by the American-led alliance, are being viewed with increasing skepticism. The evident ambiguities in the goals of the occupation and the lack of clarity about the process
of democratization make these doubts inescapable. But it would be a serious mistake to translate these uncertainties about the immediate prospects of a democratic Iraq into a larger case for skepticism about the general possibility of--and indeed the need for--having democracy in Iraq, or in any other country that is deprived of it. Nor is there a general ground here for uneasiness about providing global support for the struggle for democracy around the world, which is the most profound challenge of our times. Democracy movements across the globe (in South Africa and Argentina and Indonesia yesterday, in Burma and Zimbabwe and elsewhere today) reflect people's determination to fight for political participation and an effective voice. Apprehensions about current events in Iraq have to be seen in their specific context; there is a big world beyond.

It is important to consider, in the broader arena, two general objections to the advocacy of democracy that have recently gained much ground in international debates and which tend to color
discussions of foreign affairs, particularly in America and Europe. There are, first, doubts about what democracy can achieve in poorer countries. Is democracy not a barrier that obstructs the process of development and deflects attention from the priorities of economic and social change, such as providing adequate food, raising income per head, and carrying out institutional reform? It is also argued that democratic governance can be deeply illiberal and can inflict suffering on those who do not belong to the ruling majority in a democracy. Are vulnerable groups not better served by the protection that authoritarian governance can provide?

The second line of attack concentrates on historical and cultural doubts about advocating democracy for people who do not, allegedly, "know" it. The endorsement of democracy as a general rule for all people, whether by national or international bodies or by human rights activists, is frequently castigated on the ground that it involves an attempted imposition of Western values and Western practices on non-Western societies. The argument goes much beyond acknowledging that democracy is a predominantly Western practice in the contemporary world, as it certainly is. It takes the form of presuming that democracy is an idea of which the roots can be found exclusively in some distinctively Western thought that has flourished uniquely in Europe--and nowhere else--for a very long time. [...]

The broader view of democracy in terms of public reasoning also allows us to understand that the roots of democracy go much beyond the narrowly confined chronicles of some designated practices that are now seen as specifically "democratic institutions." This basic recognition was clear enough to Tocqueville. In 1835, in Democracy in America, he noted that the "great democratic revolution" then taking place could be seen, from one point of view, as "a new thing," but it
could also be seen, from a broader perspective, as part of "the most continuous, ancient, and permanent tendency known to history." Although he confined his historical examples to Europe's past (pointing to the powerful contribution toward democratization made by the admission of common people to the ranks of clergy in "the state of France seven hundred years ago"), Tocqueville's general argument has immensely broader relevance.

The championing of pluralism, diversity, and basic liberties can be found in the history of many societies. The long traditions of encouraging and protecting public debates on political, social, and
cultural matters in, say, India, China, Japan, Korea, Iran, Turkey, the Arab world, and many parts of Africa, demand much fuller recognition in the history of democratic ideas. This global heritage is ground enough to question the frequently reiterated view that democracy is just a Western idea, and that democracy is therefore just a form of Westernization. The recognition of this history has direct relevance in contemporary politics in pointing to the global legacy of protecting and promoting social deliberation and pluralist interactions, which cannot be any less important today than they were in the past when they were championed.

AT THE FEEDER:

"Slate Colored" Dark-eyed Junco
(Junco hyemalis)

ANTI-AMERICANISM FOR FUN AND PROFIT

Fahrenheit 9/11 wins top honour at Cannes
(Associated Press, Globe and Mail, May 21st, 2004)

American filmmaker Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, a scathing indictment of White House actions after the Sept. 11 attacks, won the top prize Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival.

Fahrenheit 9/11 was the first documentary to win Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or since Jacques Cousteau's The Silent World in 1956.

"What have you done? I'm completely overwhelmed by this. Merci," Moore said after getting a standing ovation from the Cannes crowd. [...]

While Fahrenheit 9/11 was well-received by Cannes audiences, many critics felt it was inferior to Moore's Academy Award-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine, which earned him a special prize at Cannes in 2002.

Some critics speculated that if Fahrenheit 9/11 won the top prize, it would be more for the film's politics than its cinematic value.

With Moore's customary blend of humor and horror, Fahrenheit 9/11 accuses the Bush camp of stealing the 2000 election, overlooking terrorism warnings before Sept. 11 and fanning fears of more attacks to secure Americans' support for the Iraq war.

Customary blend of humor and horror? I suppose that is one way of putting it. Mr. Moore proves that, in America, all things really are possible. Including making a killing from openly trashing one's country at a time of war.

The last word on this jerk surely goes to the inestimable Christopher Hitchens (via Andrew Sullivan): "But speaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well, it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities."

I SAY NO

Introducing Israel to Democracy (Dr. Khaled M. Batarfi, Arab News, 5/23/04)

I don’t support the two-state solution. The place is too small and integrated to be sliced into two entities. Instead, I would call for a united, democratic and secular country.

It shouldn’t be Jewish, Muslim or Christian, but a multi-cultural state, where all are given equal rights and responsibility — just like the United States of America.

In fact, I would choose the American Constitution, as is, for the new state, where democracy rules, there’s freedom for everyone, the law is above all, and secularism is sacred. . . .

Just imagine: No more peace negotiations; no more give and take; no more walls and fights. All it takes is for Israel to adopt the American Constitution and we all live happy ever after. Who says: Yes?

Dr. Batarfi's plan would fail because the United States at the founding was, in different way, both more homogenous and more heterogenous than a Israel/Palestinian combination would be. The United States in 1787 was homogenous in its religion. More importantly, the people of the United States, having come through the Revolution and the Articles of Confederacy, thought of themselves as one people, indivisible. In Federalist 2, John Jay says:

It has often given me pleasure to observe that independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, widespreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together; while the most noble rivers in the world, running at convenient distances, present them with highways for the easy communication of friendly aids, and the mutual transportation and exchange of their various commodities.

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people -- a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.

Similar sentiments have hitherto prevailed among all orders and denominations of men among us. To all general purposes we have uniformly been one people each individual citizen everywhere enjoying the same national rights, privileges, and protection. As a nation we have made peace and war; as a nation we have vanquished our common enemies; as a nation we have formed alliances, and made treaties, and entered into various compacts and conve