THE DEER HUNTERS RELOAD:

Lessons for Democrats (E. J. Dionne Jr., December 31, 2004, Washington Post)

[B]ad years offer useful lessons. Here are a few:

• Relentlessness pays off. President Bush won reelection by ignoring the conventional wisdom that vicious attacks on your opponent don't work and turn off voters. As soon as John Kerry won the Democratic nomination, Bush's campaign went on the attack and never stopped. It worked. [...]

• Cultural hypocrisy should be exposed. I cannot understand why liberals who regularly criticize the excesses of the economic market let conservatives get away with being the advocates of "traditional values."

When television networks and Hollywood exploit sex to make money, why aren't liberals asking why the free market so revered by the right wing promotes values the very same right wing claims to despise? The coarsening of the culture that traditionalist conservatives denounce is abetted by the very media concentration that economic conservatives defend. Why are liberals so tongue-tied in exposing this contradiction?

CAGED FURY:

Martha Stewart Loses Decorating Contest (Fox News, December 31, 2004)

Martha Stewart, who built a billion-dollar media empire based on her holiday and home decorating tips, was unable to lead her team to victory in a prison decoration contest, a magazine reported.

Stewart and a team of fellow inmates at a federal prison camp in Alderson, W.Va., crafted paper cranes to be hung from the ceiling, People magazine reported in an article posted on its Web site Wednesday.

They lost out to a competing team that built a nativity scene showing "pictures of snow-covered hills and sleds and clouds on the wall," the magazine quoted an inmate as saying.

Each team was given $25 worth of glitter, ribbons, construction paper and glue to build a display based on the theme "Peace on Earth," the magazine said.

CAN'T MEASURE A 21ST CENTURY ECONOMY BY 20TH CENTURY STANDARDS:

Late Shoppers Help Online Retailers Sell More (Griff Witte, December 31, 2004, Washington Post)

Online retailers sold $14.8 billion worth of goods and services between Nov. 1 and Dec. 26, a 29 percent increase over the comparable period in 2003, according to statistics released this week by ComScore Networks, which tracks online spending. The increase was particularly pronounced in the week before Christmas, when online sales hit $1.22 billion, 53 percent higher than the corresponding week last year.

"We expected a solid season," said ComScore senior vice president Daniel E. Hess. "But the results for the final two weeks are far beyond our expectations." [...]

The late strength of online sales mirrored the trend for retailers overall this holiday season. Sales in November were disappointing, spawning fears that Christmas 2004 would be less than joyous for merchants. But the procrastinators showed up with a vengeance in late December and managed to provide most retailers with strong results and needed momentum heading into the new year.

Although online sales make up only a single-digit percentage of the retail business, they have a powerful effect on consumer choices, with many people researching prices and selection on the Web before they hit the stores. Hess said 90 million people a week visited at least one retail Web site in the lead-up to Christmas.

With shortages reported for some popular items such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod, many consumers racing against the clock -- and against other shoppers -- opted this year for a hybrid retail experience that involved both highways and high-tech. At Best Buy, for example, the company's customers made frequent use of a feature that allowed them to reserve a particular item online, and then get in the car and pick it up at a local store.

Sears offered much the same service. "When the holidays were getting close, it became an important option for those not wanting to leave anything to chance," Sears spokeswoman Rochelle Mangold said.

The popularity of gift cards this year also contributed to high rates of online shopping, since they could be ordered anytime and show up in the recipient's e-mail inbox within seconds.

REALISTS NEED NOT APPLY:

A state of chaos: George Bush has purged the last of his father's senior advisers, handing over control to his neocon allies (Sidney Blumenthal, December 30, 2004, The Guardian)

[B]ush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgement dumped Brent Scowcroft, his father's closest associate and friend, as chairman of the foreign intelligence advisory board. The elder Bush's national security adviser was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration. [...]

Bush has long resented his father's alter ego. Scowcroft privately rebuked him for his Iraq follies more than a year ago - an incident that has not previously been reported. Bush "did not receive it well", said a friend of Scowcroft.

In A World Transformed, the elder Bush's 1998 memoir, co-authored with Scowcroft, they explained why Baghdad was not seized in the first Gulf war: "Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

HEARD ABOUT THE Y2K05 BUG?:

The legacy of Y2K (Michael Socolow, December 31, 2004, Boston G;lobe)

From the distance of five years, the Y2K bug now appears a manifestation of our anxieties about our dependence on technology. We didn't know then -- and most of us still do not know -- anything about the systems that keep ATMs working, airplanes flying, and traffic lights flashing. Once these communications systems threatened us with failure we were forced to acknowledge our faith in incomprehensibly complex technologies.

That kind of questioning evaporated once our systems proved reliable. Our machines served us well, and our faith was restored. Y2K reaffirmed our confidence in the technologies of everyday life.

From today's perspective the Y2K fears seem humorous. Yet to dismiss the moment as meaningless is to miss its wider import. There is one significant, yet far less well-known legacy of the Y2K scare. In the late 1990s, as computer programming companies were hired to check literally billions of lines of computer code, they faced an impossible task. How could such large volumes of code be checked in a cost-efficient and timely manner? How could a work force be put together for such a technically skilled yet labor-intensive (and tedious) job?

The answer to that question is the true legacy of Y2K. That skilled and cheap work force was discovered overseas. Over the previous decade technical schools in India and elsewhere produced a dependable and talented labor pool from which American programmers began to draw. There was a large expansion in the H1-B visa program, as the best and brightest from around the globe assisted us in solving our computer problems.

That work force proved so cost-effective and reliable that technology companies took notice after the millennium turned. To save money they continued to use this work force; the economic downturn in 2001 intensified this outsourcing of computer work. High salaried programming and quality control jobs, previously filled by Americans, moved to other countries.

INFLATED SELF-IMPORTANCE (via brian boys):

Human Hand behind earthquake and Tsunami? It is time for Indian Navy to investigate! (Balaji Reddy, December 29, 2004, India Daily)

Was this an earthquake creation experiment that ran out of control? Many countries are working on methods of creating massive earthquakes as means to defeat the enemy. The technologically advanced countries are working on this project.

If an earthquake and Tsunami can be created artificially and directed to a specific enemy, it can literally create havoc to the enemy. Weather control, controlling tectonic plate movements, electromagnetic wave simulated weaponry are all on the table of many countries.

Many all around the world are puzzled with the fact that Tsunamis never happen in South Asia. Also is perplexing is the fact that Tsunamis traveled 1000 miles at a speed of 500 miles an hour and smashed the coastal lines of South and South east Asia where Tsunamis do not happen.

There are technologies on the research table that is used to create electromagnetic effects to release the gravitational effects which can cause this kind massive earth movements.

Another astonishing feature of this earthquake and Tsunami is the amount by which the Kar Nicobar Islands have displaced. The level of devastation simulates 10 or higher Richter scale earthquake.

Was this a show down by a country to show the region what havoc can be created?

We do not have the answers to this.

MORE:
What's interesting is that there's really no difference between such a lunatic claim and the equally absurd one that "God did this to them," To God, an age-old question (Reuters, 12/31/04)

It is one of the oldest, most profound questions, posed by some of the most learned minds of every faith throughout the course of human history.

It was put eloquently this week by an old woman in a devastated village in southern India’s Tamil Nadu. “Why did you do this to us, God?” she wailed. “What did we do to upset you?”

Perhaps no event in living memory has confronted the world’s great religions with such a basic test of faith as this week’s tsunami, which indiscriminately slaughtered Indonesian Muslims, Indians of all faiths, Thai and Sri Lankan Buddhists and tourists who were Christians and Jews.

In temples, mosques, churches and synagogues across the globe, clerics are being called upon to explain: How could a benevolent God visit such horror on ordinary people?

PEACE IS BREAKING OUT ALL OVER:

Sudanese Government, Southern Rebels Sign Final Peace Accords (VOA News, 31 December 2004)

The Sudanese government and southern rebels have signed peace accords, marking the completion of a deal to end 21 years of civil war.

One of the accords signed Friday is a permanent cease-fire, while the other covers details of how the final peace deal will be implemented.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and South African President Thabo Mbeki attended the ceremony in the Kenyan town of Naivasha, where previous talks have yielded several partial agreements.

Friday's signing fulfills a pledge by the government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army to reach an agreement by the end of 2004.

Officials in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda simultaneously launched the East African Customs Union, which goes into effect Saturday. This program is expected to increase regional and global trade.

Kenyan assistant finance minister, Henry Obwacha, told reporters in Nairobi the tariff agreement among the three countries effectively establishes the area as a trading bloc that will improve the lives of people living there.

"We have pursued economic integration in order to attract investments and stimulate economic activity in our region," he said. "Through the East African Community, we seek to remove barriers to trade, facilitate movement of people, money, and capital."

The Customs Union sets up a single market of more than 90 million people with a combined gross domestic product of around $30 billion.

Top Marxist rebel Ricardo Palmera was extradited to the United States on Friday, becoming the first leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to face U.S. drug and terrorism charges, officials said.

Army commandos with assault rifles and U.S. DEA agents escorted Palmera, wearing handcuffs and a bulletproof jacket, to a U.S. government plane at a military airfield outside Bogota. The plane took off minutes later.

President Alvaro Uribe had given the FARC until Thursday to free 63 hostages or see Palmera, a former FARC negotiator known by the alias Simon Trinidad, stand trial in a U.S. federal court in Washington. The FARC never responded to the ultimatum.

In a rare departure from tradition, the apparent winner of Ukraine's weekend presidential election, pro-reform opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko, has invited the leader of last year's peaceful "Rose Revolution" in Georgia to spend New Year's in Kiev.

Mikhail Saakashvili, who led the massive opposition street protests in Tbilisi that swept long-time Communist leader Eduard Shevardnadze from power, accepted Mr. Yushchenko's invitation. He said he felt it very important to be in Kiev at, what he called," this decisive time in Ukraine's history."

Mr. Saakashvili, who attended college in Kiev, was the first foreign leader to congratulate Mr. Yushchenko on his apparent victory earlier this week. In a televised message broadcast on Ukrainian television, Mr. Saakashvili sent his best wishes in fluent Ukrainian to Mr. Yushchenko and the Ukrainian people for what he called their glorious victory.,/blockquote>
Just the start of what's shaping up to be peace-happy new year.

Comments

---

OR HAVE NO EFFECT?

Experts say response to tsunami could hurt or help US image in SE Asia. (CSMonitor Daily Update, 12/31/04)

SAYANORA:

'04 fourth year to set record for the fewest births (Japan Times, 1/01/05)

About 1.107 million babies were born in Japan in 2004, roughly 17,000 fewer than the previous year and the fourth straight year in which a record low was set, government estimates showed Friday.

According to figures released by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, natural population growth, which is gained by subtracting the number of deaths from births, came to 83,000, the lowest figure since the end of World War II.

The government has already predicted that Japan's population will start to shrink in 2007, and the latest figures prove the nation is indeed on the threshold of contraction.

The ministry's estimates showed that 1.024 million people died during the year, the second-largest number in the postwar era after 1947 and the second consecutive year deaths have exceeded 1 million.

SECULARISM VS FREEDOM:

Liberty Quotes (12/31/04)

"Human freedom involves the capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight."
-- Rollo May (1909-1994)

STOP BUGGING US:

Gay marriage 'rights' (Thomas Sowell, December 31, 2004, Townhall)

Of all the phony arguments for gay marriage, the phoniest is the argument that it is a matter of equal rights. Marriage is not a right extended to individuals by the government. It is a restriction on the rights they already have.

People who are simply living together can make whatever arrangements they want, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual. They can divide up their worldly belongings 50-50 or 90-10 or whatever other way they want. They can make their union temporary or permanent or subject to cancellation at any time.

Marriage is a restriction. If my wife buys an automobile with her own money, under California marriage laws I automatically own half of it, whether or not my name is on the title. Whether that law is good, bad, or indifferent, it is a limitation of our freedom to arrange such things as we ourselves might choose. This is just one of many decisions that marriage laws take out of our hands.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the life of the law is not logic but experience. Marriage laws have evolved through centuries of experience with couples of opposite sexes -- and the children that result from such unions. Society asserts its stake in the decisions made by restricting the couples' options.

Society has no such stake in the outcome of a union between two people of the same sex.

END THE BEGUINE (via Glenn Dryfoos):

Artie Shaw, Star Bandleader of Swing Era, Dies at 94 (Associated Press, December 30, 2004)

Artie Shaw, clarinetist and bandleader whose recording of "Begin the Beguine" epitomized the Big Band era, died today at the age of 94, the manager of his orchestra said.

Shaw had been ill for some time, orchestra manager Will Curtis said, but he did not know the specific cause of death.

At his peak in the 1930s and '40s, Shaw pulled in a five-figure salary per week and ranked with Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller as the bandleaders who made music swing. But he left the music world largely behind in the mid-'50s and spent much of the second half of his life devoted to writing and other pursuits.

We'd only add that the Mother Judd was on Password with him in the '60s and won, until the other star she had to play with tripped her up.

(Artie Shaw and the Mother Judd, February 26, 1963)

MORE:
ARTIE SHAW | 1910-2004: A Jazz Icon and Iconoclast Who Despised His Fame (Claudia Luther, December 31, 2004, LA Times)

Benny Goodman, another clarinetist bandleader of the swing era and a rival, was perhaps more famous, which galled Shaw. But Shaw's innovations, musical depth and swinging style placed him firmly in the pantheon of 20th century big band and jazz musicians.

"He was a real master of the clarinet, virtually incomparable in the beauty of his tone and unique in his flawless control," said composer Gunther Schuller, who has written extensively about jazz.

Highest on many music buffs' lists — and Shaw's own — is the so-called 1949 band, one of his last, which expanded its scope well beyond the big band genre and other popular music that had begun to entrap Shaw with their success. The short-lived band recorded " 'S Wonderful," among other tunes.

By then, however, Shaw was so far ahead of his fans musically that he was forced to fire the musicians in order to hire a band that played the sort of popular songs Shaw hated.

IT'S NOT JUST A SNORING PROBLEM:

White's death should put NFL on alert (RICK TELANDER, December 31, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

Huge football players -- huge humans -- are not healthy.

White died probably from a heart attack triggered by a little-understood disease called sarcoidosis, which, in his case, caused inflammation of his heart and lungs.

But the situation apparently was compounded by White's sleep apnea.

With sleep apnea, caused by relaxed tissue in the throat or neck blocking the air passageway, a person goes without oxygen for extended periods while sleeping, waking up constantly through the night to gasp for air, often putting the cardiovascular system under severe stress.

Older men have sleep apnea more than younger men.

Very heavy men, with very large necks, have it most of all.

And the NFL caters to very heavy men.

And Reggie White was very heavy.

NIMSY:

More complaints of scofflaw teachers (ROSALIND ROSSI, 12/31/04, Chicago Sun-Times)

Complaints about city teachers and other public school employees living illegally outside Chicago tripled during the last school year, fueling a sizable increase in the number of beefs to the Chicago Schools Inspector General, officials said Thursday.

Chicago public school teachers were caught living as far away as Plainfield, Lockport and even in posh Glencoe, according to Inspector General James Sullivan's annual report, released Thursday.

The 38-page report summarizes the biggest volume of investigations in a year since the Chicago Schools Inspector General's Office was created in 1994. [...]

Almost all CPS employees hired after 1996 must live in the city, and this school year, principals were ordered to make sure new hires move into the city within six months of their starting date. Schools CEO Arne Duncan insists the system has been able to recruit more and better qualified teachers, despite the residency requirement.

But Marilyn Stewart, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, contends investigating residency fraud is "a waste of time."

"If you want quality teachers, your ZIP code shouldn't matter,'' Stewart said. "What kind of morale do you have in your building when a disgruntled employee, anyone in your building, can turn you in just because of where you live?''

OPPOSITE!:

Vatican paper raps Sri Lanka on Israeli aid (correction) (CWNews.com, 12/30/04)

The following is a corrected version of a story that appeared on CWNews.com earlier this week, in which a crucial error in translation caused a serious misinterpretation of the news. CWNews apologizes for the error.

Vatican, Dec. 28 (CWNews.com) - The Vatican newspaper has denounced a decision by Sri Lanka to reject emergency aid offered by the Israeli government. Sri Lanka declined the Israeli aid because it would have been furnished by a military team.

Calling for "a radical and dramatic change of perspective" among people "too often preoccupied with making war," L'Osservatore Romano chastised the government of the stricken Asian nation for putting unnecessary restrictions on an Israeli offer to furnish medical help.

FITTING TRIBUTE:

Clemente Jr. sends aid to tsunami victims in tribute of father (Dec. 30, 2004, SportsLine.com wire reports)

Roberto Clemente's son is sending money, clothing and medical supplies to south Asia's tsunami victims.

The aid was originally headed for Nicaragua to honor the anniversary of his late father's ill-fated humanitarian flight 32 years ago.

"My father always said, 'If you have an opportunity to make things better and you don't then you are wasting your time on earth,"' Roberto Clemente Jr. said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press from Puerto Rico on Thursday. [...]

Clemente Jr. was 7 when his father was killed. He said the death still haunts him because he had a premonition of his father's crash and pleaded with him not to get on the plane.

"I carry the guilt to this day of not doing enough to stop him," Clemente Jr. said. "He said, 'Don't worry, I'll see you when I get back."'

Clemente's cargo plane crashed off the coast of Puerto Rico shortly after takeoff apparently because it was too heavy with supplies, his son said. His body was never recovered.

When Clemente Jr. turned 39 this year -- his father was 38 when he died -- he decided it was time to re-enact his father's "flight for humanity" to complete his mission.

He teamed with Project Club Clemente, a New York organization dedicated to the ballplayer's humanitarian projects, and held a dinner dance and food drive to raise money for the flight.

While he was in Puerto Rico finalizing plans, the earthquake and tsunami hit in southern Asia -- on the same day the earthquake rocked Nicaragua in 1972. He said he feels this is an omen.

Clemente Jr. said he is spearheading a campaign with the American Red Cross in Puerto Rico to help the victims of south Asia.

Donations can be made in Clemente's name to: the International Disaster Fund, American Red Cross, P.O. Box 9021067, San Juan, PR 00902.

CERTIFIABLE:

Doubts linger as Gregoire win certified (David Postman, 12/31/04, Seattle Times)

As has been the case since Election Day, much of the attention is focused on King County. Republicans are asking questions about why the county's list of registered voters who cast valid ballots in the election shows about 3,500 fewer people than the total number of votes certified in the race.

SUBTRACT DEFENSE AND THEY'RE RIGHT UP THERE:

U.S. Aid Generous and Stingy: It depends on how the numbers are crunched -- total dollars or a slice of the overall economy. (Sonni Efron, December 31, 2004, LA Times)

A different key measure of international generosity was devised by the Center for Global Development and Foreign Policy magazine. It ranked rich countries' contributions to the poor in terms of contributions through aid, trade, investment, technology, security, technology and the environment. Countries got points for the quality as well as the quantity of their aid and contributions.

On that scale, the U.S. ranked seventh out of 21 nations, behind Canada, Britain, Australia, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Japan, which is one of the world's largest aid donors but collects huge interest payments on its development loans, ranked last.

The scale found that U.S. contributions of pure foreign aid was relatively much lower than other countries'. The U.S. scored higher on immigration and trade. Allowing foreigners and foreign products into the country are considered measures of how much a rich country is willing to help poorer ones.

But the study upended the commonly held view that shortfalls in U.S. government aid for the global poor were made up by private American contributions.

It found that U.S. government foreign aid in 2002 worked out to 13 cents per American a day. Private donations from U.S. citizens amounted to 5 cents per person a day.

But in 16 other countries, governments gave more. And in three other countries — Switzerland, Ireland and Norway — private citizens gave more.

The Norwegian government gave $1.02 per citizen a day while private giving came to 24 cents a day.

Cronin said that U.S. per capita giving would never match that of Norway, a nation of 4.5 million. On the other hand, the United States makes many other contributions that are hard to quantify in dollar terms, he said, including using its military prowess for worldwide peacekeeping operations that benefit others, or airlifting tsunami relief supplies to remote areas and sending in ships that desalinate water.

THAT'S THE TICKET:

In Efforts to Organize Aid, Powell and Governor Bush Will Tour Ravaged Areas (STEVEN R. WEISMAN and DAVID E. SANGER, 12/31/04, NY Times)

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, seeking to raise the American profile in the international relief effort in Asia, will tour devastated parts of the region next week to assess the need for future aid programs along with Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, the White House announced Thursday.

Mr. Powell also moved on Thursday to step up coordination between the United Nations and a core group of countries organized earlier in the week by the Bush administration to speed aid and avoid duplication. The "core group" - consisting of India, Japan and Australia, as well as the United States - was established earlier this week.

The decision to send Mr. Powell and Governor Bush, President Bush's brother, was seen by administration officials as likely to help defuse whatever hurt feelings there might be in Asia that the president was slow to respond, at least compared with how quickly many other nations reacted to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Administration officials also said a diplomatic payoff might also grow out of the current crisis, if disaster relief efforts encourage cooperation in areas of Indonesia and Sri Lanka with long-running separatist insurgencies.

WHERE THE JOBS ARE:

Hospitals Fail Nurse Head Count: Fifteen of 28 institutions checked by the state this year after complaints were filed were found to be violating required nurse-to-patient ratios. (Jia-Rui Chong, December 31, 2004, LA Times)

State regulators discovered that more than half the hospitals they checked were in violation of California's strict nurse-to-patient ratios, a Times analysis of records found.

The inspection reports indicate that hospitals are having the greatest difficulty meeting ratio requirements in specific departments: emergency rooms, medical-surgical wards and telemetry units where heart patients are monitored.

The state looked into allegations of nurse staffing violations at 28 hospitals between last Jan. 1, when a new state law took effect, and the end of October, the most recent records available.

DICTATING TERMS:

Sharon Deputy Calls for Wider Withdrawals From West Bank: Israel should brace for failure in talks with Palestinians, the official says. The government, however, insists that its policy has not changed. (Ken Ellingwood, December 31, 2004, LA Times)

Israeli Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published Thursday that the government should pull settlers and soldiers from additional areas of the West Bank after the partial withdrawal planned for next year. [...]

Israel has "no choice of sitting and doing nothing" after next year's planned withdrawal, Olmert told the Jerusalem Post. "Israel's interest requires a disengagement on a wider scale than what will happen as part of the current disengagement plan."

Olmert said Israel should be prepared for failure in negotiations with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is widely favored to win the election for Palestinian Authority president next month. Abbas, considered a pragmatist, has made it clear that he hopes to revive talks with Israel.

In case of a breakdown in negotiations, Olmert said, "Israel will continue to progress, by carrying out unilateral moves, including the possibility of further withdrawals that are in the interest of the state."

Olmert is a staunch Sharon ally who has advocated withdrawal from the West Bank more pointedly than the prime minister. Olmert, who has previously floated trial balloons to gauge reaction to possible shifts in government policies, spoke publicly of abandoning settlements before Sharon did last year.

ARE CARS REALLY PROGRESS?:

Honk! The quiet progress of Iraq.: Many Iraqi families have been able to afford cars as the government has doubled the salary of its million or so workers. (David R. Francis, 12/30/04, CS Monitor)

You can tell things are changing in Iraq by the traffic. Thousands of families have bought used cars from abroad - clogging city streets and boosting smog. Many Iraqi families have been able to afford the cars - and move from poverty to middle-class respectability - because the government has doubled the salary of its million or so workers.

It's a sign that, despite the daily mayhem caused by the insurgency, Iraq's economy is quietly gearing up from its war-time low in 2003. How quickly it's picking up speed - and whether the momentum is adequate to dampen the insurgency by providing jobs for idle Iraqi men - is hotly contested. What's clear is that oil alone won't turn the tide: Small business and manufacturing need to revive.

Iraq's economy has expanded 40 to 50 percent this year from war-depressed 2003, says Alan Larson, undersecretary for economics in the US State Department. He predicts double-digit growth in 2005.

NEOCONS WITH THE VAPORS:

Superpower no more? (Clifford D. May, December 30, 2004, Townhall)

Is the United States a superpower?

For years, we've assumed this was true. It was an easy assumption to make based on the amount of money we spend on our military and the high-tech weapons we've developed, from stealth bombers to precision missiles to satellites that can read license plates.

But to be a superpower means being able to impose your will, by force of arms when necessary.

(1) Search the history books high and low and you'll find no one who argues that Britain ceased to be a great power when it lost America, or the Soviet Union when it couldn't control Yugoslavia or America when it failed to get the Soviets out of Eastern Europe.

(2) All of the difficulties of fighting an insurgency disappear when it takes power. from a purely military standpoint nmothing would be better than for Zargawi to establish a government. Once they're in the open they're easy targets, as were the Baathists.

HYPERSLUG:

That 'Sluggish' Economy: It's still the strongest in the world. (Opinion Journal, December 30, 2004)

According to the November forecast of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, gross domestic product in the U.S. is expected to increase by 4.4% in 2004. Elsewhere, the OECD predicts growth of 4% for Japan, 2.7% for the U.K., 2.1% for France and 1.2% for Germany. For the 12-country euro zone, the figure is 1.8%. To put matters in historical perspective, the last time Japan, Britain, France and Germany had growth rates at or in excess of 4.4%, the years were 1990, 1994, 1989 and 1991, respectively.

But, some say, America's current economic performance is sluggish compared with its past performance. So let's look at the data again. From 1997 through 2000--the great Clinton go-go years--U.S. growth averaged 4.25%. For Mr. Clinton's first term, the average was 3.3%. For the eight years of the Reagan presidency, it was 3.4%. By what standard, then, can this year's forecasted 4.4% be described as sluggish?

Maybe it can be argued that it's been sluggish in terms of job gains. It is true that in 2004 there were some months when job growth failed to meet expectations, although there were other months when expectations were exceeded.

Here again, however, it's worth putting things in an international perspective. Overall, the U.S. economy has added 2.3 million jobs since the third quarter of 2003, bringing the unemployment rate down to 5.4% from 6% in October 2003. In Germany, the unemployment rate is 10%; in France it's 9.5%. For the 27 countries of the OECD, the average unemployment rate is 6.8%. Only Britain and Japan, among the major economies, have unemployment rates lower than the U.S. [...]

Even more revealing are the figures for long-term (12 months-plus) unemployment, as the nearby table shows. Here again, the U.S. looks good. Put simply, about 90% of Americans who lose their job can expect to find another within a year. Lose your job in Europe, and you face far more daunting odds.

All right, but hasn't the U.S. spent its way out of recession, leading to dangerously high levels of debt? Well, again, no. Household debt may be at an all-time high of nearly $10 trillion. But net household worth is also at an all-time high of $46 trillion.

LIGHT IT:

For the Chinese masses, an increasingly short fuse: China is having more trouble than at any time since the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989 maintaining social order (Joseph Kahn, December 31, 2004, The New York Times)

The encounter, at first, seemed purely pedestrian. A man carrying a bag passed a husband and wife on a sidewalk. The man's bag brushed the woman's pant leg, leaving a trace of mud. Words were exchanged. A scuffle ensued.

Easily forgettable, except that one of the men, Yu Jikui, was a lowly porter. The other, Hu Quanzong, boasted that he was a ranking government official. Hu beat Yu using the porter's own carrying stick, then threatened to have him killed.

For this Yangtze River port city, the script was incendiary. Onlookers spread word that a senior official had abused a helpless porter. By nightfall, tens of thousands of people had swarmed Wanzhou's central square, where they toppled official vehicles, pummeled police officers and torched City Hall.

Minor street quarrel provokes mass riot. China's Communist Party, obsessed with enforcing social stability, has few worse fears. Yet the Wanzhou uprising, which occurred on Oct. 18, is one of nearly a dozen major incidents of spontaneous social unrest in the past three months, many sparked by government corruption, police abuse and the unequal riches accruing to the powerful and well-connected.

"People can see how corrupt the government is while they barely have enough to eat," said Yu, reflecting on the uprising that made him an instant proletarian hero and later forced him into seclusion. "Our society has a short fuse, just waiting for a spark."

THEY EVEN HAVE EQUALLY INEPT OPPOSITION:

Blair says 'No' to plea for G8 emergency summit as the death toll passes 125,000 (GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN, 12/31/04, The Scotsman)

Mr Blair has also faced calls from the Conservatives to cut short his holiday in Egypt to take charge of Britain’s response to the crisis, but Downing Street has insisted that he is in regular contact with Cabinet colleagues who are leading Britain’s actions.

THERE'S CERTAINLY PLENTY OF HIM TO BEND OVER THE RED SOX KNEE AND SPANK:

Yankees Continue Refurbishing With a Luxury Unit: Proving they don't need Dodgers' help, New York, Arizona agree on trade to bring Johnson to Bronx. (Tim Brown, December 31, 2004, LA Times)

According to a baseball official familiar with the negotiations, the Yankees will get Johnson, who has grown impatient with the rebuilding Diamondbacks but would waive his no-trade clause only for the Yankees.

In return, the Diamondbacks will get Vazquez, left-hander Brad Halsey, catcher Dioner Navarro and about $9 million, ostensibly to cover much of Vazquez's salary next season.

The terms are expected to be forwarded to Commissioner Bud Selig as soon as today. Selig must approve the trade because of the cash involved.

The players must undergo and pass physical examinations. As compensation for lifting his no-trade clause, Johnson is expected to negotiate a two-year contract extension worth about $32 million with the Yankees, to be settled in a 72-hour window granted by the commissioner's office. Because of those details, the trade is not expected to be announced until next week. [...]

Along with Johnson, who could cost them $16 million in each of the next three seasons, the Yankees signed free-agent pitchers Carl Pavano (four years, $40 million) and Jaret Wright (three years, $21 million) and traded for relievers Mike Stanton and Felix Rodriguez. They also signed second baseman Tony Womack and are in the bidding for center fielder Carlos Beltran, expected to be the most expensive free agent of the off-season.

Even without Beltran, the Yankee payroll will be well more than $200 million, some of that tied up in Jason Giambi, who is due at least $82 million over the next five seasons, but whose status is unclear after he allegedly admitted steroid use in a federal grand jury hearing. The Yankees' pursuit of free-agent first baseman Tino Martinez would suggest Giambi's immediate future in New York, at least, is in doubt.

JUST LIKE ANY OLD NEIGHBOR:

GOP's Soft Sell Swayed the Amish: Unlikely Voters Cast Lot With Bush (Evelyn Nieves, December 30, 2004, Washington Post)

Yes, the Republicans, true to their vow to leave no vote unwooed, came to Lancaster County hoping to win over the famously reclusive Old Order Amish -- who shun most modern ways -- along with their slightly less-strict brethren, the Mennonites. Democrats laughed at the very idea. The Amish had no use for politics. Were the Republicans that desperate? But the GOP effort, underscored by President Bush's meeting with some Amish families in early July, did the trick.

"Yup, we voted this time," said an elder Old Order Amish man approached at his home-based quilt shop on Route 340. He had a beard that straggled down to his chest and bright blue eyes. His first name, he said, is Amos, but in keeping with the Amish edict against calling attention to oneself, he would not give his last name.

"I didn't vote for the last 30 years," he said, puffing on a pipe. "But Bush seemed to have our Christian principles." [...]

In recent months, reports of child abuse in Amish country have made local papers and national news. The reality show "Amish in the City" has brought a slew of curiosity seekers asking all kinds of questions. (Do you take showers? Read newspapers? Ride buses? Yes, yes and yes.) And the plain people have daily worries as well. "We've been worrying about liquor and beer being sold in the grocery stores," said Sam, a gazebo maker and writer who said he would "get into trouble" if his last name was printed.

"We were down," Sam said, "and when the president visited, it cheered us right up. We got a firsthand look at him, and it really warmed our hearts."

In short, as Sam and half a dozen other Amish men explained (women were hard to find, and harder to talk to), Bush won votes with a time-honored campaign convention: He showed up. On July 9 his campaign bus rolled down Route 340, hoping to fire up the base in Republican Lancaster County. The Amish, watching the spectacle from the road, became part of it.

"We came out," Amos said. "We were about 70 people. One of his security said he wanted to meet us and invited us to meet with him across the road at Lapp's Electric."

"They knew we didn't like publicity," said Amos, smiling at the recollection. "So the president met with us all in an office at Lapp's. He shook everyone's hand -- even the littlest ones in their mother's arms -- and he told us all he hoped we would exercise our right and vote."

Did Bush ask them to vote for him?

"Nope," Amos said. "That's another thing we liked about him."

President Bush met privately with a group of Old Order Amish during his visit to Lancaster County last Friday. He discussed their farms and their hats and his religion.He asked them to vote for him in November.

The Amish told the president that not all members of the church vote but they would pray for him.

Bush had tears in his eyes when he replied. He said the president needs their prayers. He also said that having a strong belief in God is the only way he can do his job.

This story has not been reported before. You might think an observant press follows the president everywhere, especially during a re-election campaign, but no reporter attended this meeting.

Sam Stoltzfus, an Old Order historian and writer who lives in Gordonville, spoke with a number of people present at the session with the president.

He related what happened to the Scribbler, saying the Amish “caught Bush’s heart.’’

The 20-minute meeting with Bush occurred immediately after the president addressed a select audience at Lapp Electric Service in Smoketown Friday afternoon.

An Amish woman who lives on a farm across Witmer Road from Lapp Electric that morning had presented a quilt to the president with a card thanking him for his leadership of the country.

Bush said he would like to talk to the quilter and her family.

So the Secret Service invited the family to meet the president. Friends wanted to come along, and the entire assembly eventually numbered about 60. They were evenly divided between adults and children of all ages.

The group walked together across the road to Lapp Electric.

Stoltzfus reports: “It took a while to get them through the metal detectors as these were farmers and shop men, with vice grips, pocket knives, and nuts and bolts in their pockets. Some ladies had baby gear. All pockets had to be emptied.’’

When the Amish were “found not to be a serious threat to national security,’’ they were allowed inside the office area of Lapp Electric and waited about 30 minutes for the president to appear.

“Babies got restless. Children squirmed,’’ Stoltzfus reports. “Suddenly the president and five Secret Service men stepped into the room. One housewife said, ‘Are you George Bush?’’’

The president replied in the affirmative and shook hands all around, asking the names of all. He especially thanked the “quilt frau,’’ who operates her own business selling quilts and crafts.

“He seemed relaxed and just like an old neighbor,’’ says Stoltzfus.

"OUT"ING THE DEMOCRATS (via GraniteProf):

On Nov. 2, GOP Got More Bang For Its Billion, Analysis Shows (Thomas B. Edsall and James V. Grimaldi, December 30, 2004, Washington Post)

In the most expensive presidential contest in the nation's history, John F. Kerry and his Democratic supporters nearly matched President Bush and the Republicans, who outspent them by just $60 million, $1.14 billion to $1.08 billion.

But despite their fundraising success, Democrats simply did not spend their money as effectively as Bush. That is the conclusion of an extensive examination of campaign fundraising and spending data provided by the Federal Election Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and interviews with officials of the two campaigns and the independent groups allied with them.

In a $2.2 billion election, two relatively small expenditures by Bush and his allies stand out for their impact: the $546,000 ad buy by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Bush campaign's $3.25 million contract with the firm TargetPoint Consulting. The first portrayed Kerry in unrelentingly negative terms, permanently damaging him, while the second produced dramatic innovations in direct mail and voter technology, enabling Bush to identify and target potential voters with pinpoint precision.

Those tactical successes were part of the overall advantage the Bush campaign maintained over Kerry in terms of planning, decision making and strategy. The Kerry campaign, in addition to being outspent at key times, was outorganized and outthought, as Democratic professionals grudgingly admit.

WHAT'S LEFT TO UNDERMINE?:

Bush 'Undermining UN with Aid Coalition' (Jamie Lyons, 12/30/04, The Scotsman)

United States President George Bush was tonight accused of trying to undermine the United Nations by setting up a rival coalition to coordinate relief following the Asian tsunami disaster.

The president has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world’s response.

But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN.

“I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got and the one that needs building up,” she said.

ALL THE ROOM IS TO THE RIGHT:

Why the Democrats Keep Losing (Joshua Muravchik, January 2005, Commentary)

The era of Democratic dominance in the 20th century was shaped by the muscular presidency of Franklin Roosevelt—activist at home as well as abroad. FDR’s New Deal defined a domestic liberalism that consisted of government intervention in the economy to provide jobs and social insurance. Its constituency was blue-collar, and its exemplars, after Roosevelt, were Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson.

This tradition was ruptured in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when the movement against the Vietnam war redefined liberalism around the issues of peace, race, and freedom of “lifestyle,” and on behalf of a new constituency of college students and graduates. The new liberalism was effective in defeating the old liberalism in the battle for control of the Democratic party, but it proved pitifully weak against the Republicans.

In the 30 to 40 years following this transformation, only two Democrats captured the White House. The first was Carter in 1976 and the second was Clinton. Both were governors from the South who were taken for conservatives and who labored to reinforce that impression. Carter, as one of his long-time associates explained at the time, liked to “campaign conservative and govern liberal.” It was a formula that could work for one election with any given electorate. He used it to become governor of Georgia, then forsook reelection to run for the presidency. For this it also proved successful, but when he sought reelection, his true colors having been revealed, he was roundly trounced by the upstart Reagan.

Clinton’s was a more complicated story. He campaigned in 1992 as a “New Democrat,” code for “not a liberal.” Once in office, he too shifted abruptly to the Left, but, perhaps to his good fortune, retribution came down on him faster than on Carter. In the mid-term elections of 1994, the Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich touting his “contract with America,” won a stunning sweep, impelling the agile Clinton to execute a sharp turn back to the center. Announcing that “the age of big government is over,” he signed conservative legislation on welfare reform and the “defense of marriage, and spoke out for stronger anti-crime measures,” V-chips on televisions, school uniforms, and restrictions on teen smoking. In short, he made himself the champion of what were then called “family values,” more or less the same issues that in the 2004 exit polls acquired the label “moral values.”

Liberals, like one-time Kennedy aide Richard N. Goodwin, protested that “the venerable principles of the party . . . have been abandoned.” But few Democratic politicians were willing to argue with Clinton’s success. “We’re all New Democrats now,” declared the then House minority leader Richard Gephardt.

One lingering illustration of the change was the bipartisan support for the war against terrorism following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Not only did most Democrats support the Republican President in using force to oust Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, but Senate Democrats voted to authorize the more controversial war in Iraq by 29 to 21. By comparison, when Bush’s father had sought authorization for war in 1990 in the face of Iraq’s outright aggression against Kuwait, only ten Democratic Senators had voted “yea” to 45 “nays.” (In the House, Democrats opposed the recent war by a ratio of three to two; they had opposed the first Gulf war by more than two to one.)

But no sooner had the presidential sweepstakes opened than the Democrats’ newfound hawkishness started to fade. Howard Dean, an obscure Vermont governor, leaped to the head of the pack by positioning himself as the party’s antiwar candidate. Conversely, contenders like Gephardt and Senator Joseph Lieberman, who supported the war on terror and in Iraq, soon saw their campaigns founder. Only Kerry managed to withstand the Dean momentum and eventually subdue it. He tilted his message toward the antiwar camp by voting in the Senate against an $87-billion appropriation of funds for the occupation and reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, and, much to the relief of the party establishment, succeeded in besting Dean in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

Kerry, however, was a peculiar standard-bearer for Democratic centrism. He was from Massachusetts, the only state that had voted for George McGovern in 1972, and analyses of congressional voting records, whether by non-partisan sources like National Journal or by liberal groups like Americans for Democratic Action, showed him to be one of the Senate’s most liberal members. As Newsweek’s correspondent described it, Kerry was “a little hurt that Dean had run as the ‘movement’ candidate against” him, since he “still saw himself as the reform-minded antiwar protester who had . . . tossed away his ribbons.”

The reference was to a 1971 demonstration sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), a radical group of which Kerry was the most prominent leader. In 1970 and again in 1971, he had traveled to Paris to meet with representatives of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, and he had returned as an ardent advocate of their official “eight-point peace plan.” While working hand in hand with the Communists, he accused American forces of war crimes “committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”

The publicity Kerry garnered as an antiwar spokesman was his springboard to public office. He served first in local and state government, but on winning election to the Senate in 1984 he declared that his “passion” remained the “issue of war and peace.” As his first major foreign-policy cause, he championed the “nuclear freeze.” He sought cancellation of numerous American weapons systems, both nuclear and conventional, railing against what he called “the military-industrial corporate welfare complex.” He criticized the U.S. intervention in Grenada as “a bully’s show of force,” and made himself one of the two most implacable Senate critics of aid to anti-Communist guerrillas in Nicaragua.

This dovishness lasted throughout the cold war but did not end with it. When Saddam Hussein swallowed up Kuwait in 1990, Kerry was one of the Democrats voting no on the use of force against him. And in 1995, he was one of 29 Senators to oppose lifting the embargo on Bosnian Muslims facing ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Serbs.

A record like this would have been too much baggage to carry in a presidential race even in normal times, much less with the nation at war. But Kerry held a trump card of sorts—his four months of perilous service captaining a Swift Boat in Vietnam—and he played it artfully. First, he arranged for the respected historian Douglas Brinkley to publish a 500-page book at the start of the election year based on Kerry’s own war-time diaries, chronicling those intense days in vivid detail. Then, he made his service in the Navy the theme of the Democratic convention: the dais appeared designed to evoke a nautical setting, the stage was jammed with officers, and Kerry introduced himself with a salute and the corny declaration, “I’m reporting for duty.”

The stratagem seemed to be working perfectly. Unfortunately for Kerry, it also roiled a group of veterans still bitter over his antiwar declamations, including a few of his old mates and commanders who had come in for rough treatment in Brinkley’s book. They organized Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, published a book of their own, and produced a string of TV ads impeaching Kerry’s war record and decrying his antiwar activities. In the ads, former POW’s testified that they had endured torture for refusing to make the kind of war-crimes accusations against American forces that Kerry had tossed around so blithely. While some of Kerry’s fellow sailors appeared by his side at campaign stops, a larger number of the Swift Boat crewmen associated themselves with his detractors.

The response from Kerry’s supporters in the press was quick in coming. The New York Times weighed in with a 3,500-word, front-page article debunking the claims of the Swift Boat ads as “riddled with inconsistencies” and revealing, as if this meant anything, that the group had received donations from some individuals who also helped finance Republican causes. Thereafter, Times news stories mentioning the Swift Boat group regularly carried the description, “whose past accusations have frequently been unsubstantiated,” or similar words. But the Times’s indictment cast doubt only on what these veterans said about the battles in which Kerry had won his medals. The more important part of their case focused on his antiwar activities, and on this the paper was notably quiet.

In fact, no doubt fell on the Swift Boat veterans’ charges on this score, whereas it was Kerry himself who misrepresented his record. He had, for example, denied being present at a climactic November 1971 leadership meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which debated whether the group should launch a campaign of assassination of U.S. political leaders. The proposal was voted down, but the very fact that it was seriously considered shows just how far out VVAW was. When FBI files (released under the Freedom of Information Act) revealed that Kerry had indeed been present at the meeting, he changed his story, admitting he may have been there but claiming he had “no personal recollection” of it. The FBI files, however, show Kerry to have been a main protagonist in two days of ferocious debate, culminating in his withdrawal from leadership of the group. This was high drama, a turning point in his career—and impossible to forget.

Nor was this the only untruth that Kerry told about Vietnam. Again and again over 25 years, in news interviews and in one dramatic speech on the Senate floor, he claimed that he had been sent across the Vietnamese border into Cambodia on a secret and illegal mission that was “seared” in his memory. Kerry’s Swift Boat mates called this into question, and it emerged that he had simply made up the story out of whole cloth. The Times passed lightly over this episode, as if the lies or fantasies of a man who might be President were less newsworthy than the “unsubstantiated” statements of his critics.

Despite the Times, the veterans’ broadside was probably the turning point of the campaign. It punctured Kerry’s image as a hero, and it reinforced questions about his suitability to lead the country in wartime. These questions stemmed not only from his past but also from his recent stance, or rather stances, on the Iraq war.

Kerry’s vote against the $87-billion appropriation was hard to square with his prior vote to authorize the war. His explanations only made things worse—like his famous statement that “I actually did vote for the 87 billion before I voted against it,” or his assertion that he had voted to authorize force because he believed it would help avert the use of force. As if this were not confusing enough, Kerry told an interviewer in August that if he had to do it over again, knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he would have supported the war nonetheless; and then he unleashed the campaign slogan that Iraq was “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” To Kerry, Iraq showed that the U.S. should meet a “global test” before using force, but in 1990, after the elder Bush had passed the global test by winning authorization from the UN Security Council, Kerry voted against the use of force anyway—and then in 2004 he said that, despite that vote, he had actually been in favor of the use of force.

The Times’s election postmortem put the best face on it: “Kerry[’s] nuanced statements about Iraq gave the [Republicans] an opening . . . to attack him as a ‘flip-flopper.’” [...]

Asked in a Newsweek poll whether Kerry was too liberal, 48 percent said yes while 45 percent said no. The same poll asked if Bush was too conservative. Thirty-seven percent said yes, 58 percent said no. A Gallup poll, with a question worded somewhat differently, showed a smaller discrepancy but pointed in the same direction.

This difference was crucial. Thirty-four percent of voters described themselves as conservative, and they went for Bush overwhelmingly. Twenty-one percent called themselves liberals, and they overwhelmingly preferred Kerry. As always, moderates were the largest bloc (45 percent), and they tilted modestly toward the Democrat (54 to 45); but that was not enough to overcome the 3-to-2 ratio of conservatives to liberals. Unsurprisingly, four-fifths of the voters who said their family’s financial situation was better now than four years ago favored Bush, and the same proportion of those who said they were worse off favored Kerry. But even this most personal and self-interested of indicators was a less powerful vote-determinant than ideology.

The exit poll yielded many interesting and suggestive correlations. Men preferred Bush by 11 percentage points, while women preferred Kerry by 3, adding up to a “gender gap” of 14 points. This was dwarfed, however, by a 33-point “marriage gap,” with married voters favoring Bush by 15 points while the unmarried favored Kerry by 18. There was also a large church-going gap. Those who said they attended religious services one or more times per week went for Bush 61 to 39; those who attended only occasionally preferred Kerry 53 to 47; and those who never attended gave Kerry a margin of 62 to 36. A majority of Hispanics voted for the Democrat, but a much smaller one than four years earlier. Other minority groups—Asians, blacks, Jews—also backed Kerry, but again gave Bush a little more support than last time.

It was in light of these numbers that Democrats after the election began to ask themselves what to do, and where to look, next. A few voices urged their party rightward. The Times’s Nicholas Kristof cited the model of Tony Blair’s revivification of the British Labor party, adding: “I wish that winning were just a matter of presentation, but it’s not. It involves compromising on principles.” A group of Senators from states that voted for Bush announced the formation of a new organization, Third Way, aimed at pushing the party away from the Left. This was reminiscent of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), created in 1972 following George McGovern’s disastrous loss to Richard Nixon, and of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), established in 1984 following Mondale’s loss to Reagan.

But neither of those earlier groups succeeded in overcoming the weight of opinion among party activists and thinkers. CDM was soundly defeated by party liberals, while the DLC was largely coopted by liberal Democratic politicians who flocked to its “moderate” banner without much changing their stands on issues.

Other voices urged the party leftward. The Times’s Bob Herbert warned that “Some Democrats are casting covetous eyes on voters whose values, in many cases, are frankly repellent.” His colleague Paul Krugman argued in a similar vein that “rather than catering to voters who will never support them, the Democrats . . . need to become equally effective at mobilizing their own base.” And Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager, argued that what has done in the Democrats has been “ignoring their base” by “running to the middle.”

This group is likely to be reinforced by the considerable muscle of organized labor within the party. Once, under the leadership of George Meany and Lane Kirkland, the labor movement provided ballast for Democratic centrists against the party’s Left. But a decade ago the Left triumphed within the labor movement itself, ousting Kirkland from the presidency of the AFL-CIO in favor of John Sweeney, a member of Democratic Socialists of America. Sweeney failed in his pledge to make the movement grow, and today he is being pressed by insurgents who stand even further to the Left.

Still other Democrats called on their party to adopt the language of values and religion, as if these were foreign tongues that could be mastered through effort. E.J. Dionne urged “religious moderates and progressives to insist that social justice and inclusion are ‘moral values’ and that war and peace are ‘life issues.’” The liberal columnist Harold Meyerson said the party should put forward candidates “who can wrap the values of tolerance in the language of faith.” A consortium of liberal church groups released a poll purporting to show that what the largest number of Americans think of as moral issues are the war in Iraq, “greed and materialism,” and “poverty and economic justice.”

All of this seemed to rest on the premise that religious voters or those emphasizing values do not really know their own minds, and it rightly earned a reprimand from Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel: “People aren’t going to hear what we say until they know that we don’t approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment.”

Consider, on the other hand, that lurching Right enabled George H. W. Bush, a notorously weak candidate, to win in '88; got Bob Dole far closer to beating Bill Clinton in '96 than anyone would have dreamed possible; and did not prevent George W. Bush from beating a popular incumbent vice president in a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Whatever else may be true of the two parties, it appears that a Democrat has to run Right and a Republican can not ever be so far Right that it will hurt his prospects.

TRY $60 BILLION A YEAR:

Pentagon Said to Offer Cuts in the Billions (ERIC SCHMITT, 12/30/04, NY Times)

The Pentagon plans to retire one of the Navy's 12 aircraft carriers, buy fewer amphibious landing ships for the Marine Corps and delay the development of a costly Army combat system of high-tech arms as part of $60 billion in proposed cuts over the next six years, Congressional and military officials said Wednesday.

The proposed reductions, the details of which are still being fine-tuned and which would require Congressional approval, result from White House orders to all federal agencies to cut their spending requests for the 2006 fiscal year budgets, which will be submitted to lawmakers early next year.

Since the November elections, the White House has been under growing pressure to offset mounting deficits and at the same time pay for the unexpectedly high costs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which combined now amount to more than $5 billion a month.

The proposed Pentagon cuts, which include sharply reducing the program for the Air Force's F/A-22 fighter and delaying the purchase of a new Navy destroyer, would for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks slow the growth in Pentagon spending, which has risen 41 percent in that period, to about $420 billion this year. Military and Congressional officials said the Pentagon was looking to trim up to $10 billion in the 2006 budget alone.

The budget-cutting is likely to foreshadow additional reductions of weapons designed in the cold war and the revamping of America's arsenal as the Pentagon prepares for its quadrennial review of military weapons and equipment to address current and long-term security threats, including the insurgency in Iraq and a possibly resurgent China.

WHY WOULDN'T YOU BORROW TO FUND SUCH A VITAL REFORM?:

What transition costs? (Robert Novak, December 30, 2004, Townhall)

In the more than 41 years that I have been writing columns, nothing has generated more unfavorable comment from conservatives than my Dec. 6 report on Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham's Social Security plan. He would finance the transition costs for private Social Security accounts by raising payroll taxes. Of all the outraged critics from the Right who contacted me, economist Larry Hunter had the most pungent rebuttal: "There are no transition costs."

If that is so, I asked Hunter, can you write me a one-page explanation to buttress your remarkable claim? Nearly a month later, he gave me three single-spaced typewritten pages plus four colored graphs. Actually, they portray an increase in federal expenditures forced by private accounts -- that is, transition costs. Hunter's point: There would be no long-term net transition costs. Doing nothing will cost much more, beginning as early as 35 years from now. (Hunter's analysis will be published by the Institute for Policy Innovation.)

That amounts to no real transition costs. The problem with this argument is that we are talking about red ink far into the future when nearly everybody now debating the issue will be dead.

WAITING FOR THE MARSHALL PLAN:

Disparity of Change: China's Northeast, once the nation's proud industrial belt, has lagged behind other areas in seizing on market reforms and is suffering high unemployment. (Don Lee, December 30, 2004, LA Times)

The contrasting picture on Corruption Street illustrates the challenges Beijing faces as it pushes to revitalize the once-proud industrial belt, crack down on bribery and fraud in government and regain the trust of people living in a region with the highest unemployment rate in China. [...]

"In the Northeast, the big problem is that we don't have a lot of private economy in manufacturing and high-end service businesses such as finance and accounting," said Song Donglin, deputy director of the economics school at Jilin University in Changchun, a center of China's auto manufacturing.

Lack of access to financial services discourages outside investment, he added, and makes it difficult for laid-off workers to find jobs or start businesses.

"If the Northeast cannot develop," he said, "it will impose very negative influences to the sustainable development of China's economy."

DEMOGRAPHICS AND DEFLATION:

Sales of Existing Homes Surge to a Record High: The year-over-year increase in November is 13.2%, with the median price rising 10.4%. (Roger Vincent, December 30, 2004, LA Times)

Sales of previously owned homes in the U.S. climbed to a record high in November as low interest rates and a rising economy kept pulling buyers into the market.

Existing-home sales rose 13.2% from a year earlier to a 6.94-million annual rate, the National Assn. of Realtors reported Wednesday. The previous high was 6.92 million in June. Buyers paid more too: The median price rose 10.4% to $188,200.

November sales in the West increased 16.6%, the most of any region. Every region showed gains year over year, although sales in the Northeast slipped 1.3% from October to November. [...]

Several factors are keeping the market bubbling, including low mortgage rates.

"Mortgage interest rates dropped a quarter of a percentage point in late summer and then stabilized," said David Lereah, chief economist for the Washington-based real estate trade group. "Coupled with a growing labor market and a rising economy, this created optimal conditions for the housing sector."

Fixed 30-year mortgage rates averaged 5.72% last week, up from 5.69% the previous week, the Mortgage Bankers Assn. said Wednesday. That helped send mortgage application activity down 1.7%.

Mortgage rates are still relatively low on a historical basis and are at the same level as a year ago. When they finally start a widely predicted rise, the market will slow, said Keitaro Matsuda, senior economist at Union Bank of California, but for now "it seems to be relatively healthy, going strong."

INFLATION IS DEAD, LONG LIVE BONDS!:

Bond market surprises analysts, ends low on high note: The economic recovery was supposed to put the damper on bonds' stellar run. But this year's bond market defied expectations. (RACHEL BECK, 12/30/04, Associated Press)

The bond market wasn't supposed to finish out the year this way. With the dollar slumping, the U.S. economy improving and the Federal Reserve taking action to keep growth in check, the good times were supposed to fizzle.

But that didn't happen. In fact, it turns out the yield on the 10-year Treasury note -- the benchmark for everything from mortgage rates to how much corporations have to pay to borrow money -- might close out 2004 lower than where it started.

Sure, that's higher than the near half-century lows that the yield dropped to more than a year and a half ago, but this market hasn't been performing over the last 12 months like anyone expected.

It's starting to sound a bit like a broken record when you talk about bonds. Over the last year or so, there have been forecasts predicting an imminent retreat leading to prices dropping and yields rising -- they move in opposite directions.

And at points along the way, it has looked like the pullback was beginning. Then the market would switch course.

This seesawing has surprised many market watchers, who believed it was inevitable that yields would surge as more bearish factors loomed over the bond market.

BITTER ENDERS:

Group holds fast to Kerry cause with Beacon Hill vigil (Donovan Slack, December 29, 2004, Boston Globe)

The election is long over. A new year is starting, and even most of the more ardent liberals are moving on. But in Louisburg Square this week, one determined group isn't quite ready to let go. About a half dozen supporters of John Kerry are holding vigil in front of his house, still hoping for a Kerry presidency.

The little knot of demonstrators, calling themselves the Coalition Against Election Fraud, stood shivering in the cold yesterday, hoisting signs and pressing fliers into the hands of bewildered passersby. Taxi drivers, neighbors digging cars out of the snow, and Beacon Hill residents who happened to be strolling by were subjected to earnest pleas to join the cause.

''Who knows? Maybe we'll overturn the election," said Sheila Parks, a vigil organizer.

SEPARATION OF DEMOCRATS AND VOTERS:

Mass. Governor to File Death Penalty Bill (STEVE LeBLANC, December 29, 2004, Associated Press)

Hoping to bring capital punishment to Massachusetts, Gov. Mitt Romney is preparing to file a death penalty bill early next year that he says is so carefully written it will guarantee only the guilty are executed.

Based in part on the findings of a death penalty panel he appointed, the bill would limit capital punishment to the "worst of the worst" crimes including terrorism, the murder of police officers, murder involving torture and the killing of witnesses. It also would use evidence such as DNA testing to protect the innocent.

Romney wants his death penalty bill to be a model for other states.

"The weakness in the death penalty statutes in other states, of course, is the fear that you may execute someone who is innocent. We remove that possibility," Romney said.

Massachusetts is one of a dozen states without capital punishment. The bill fulfills one of the Republican governor's key campaign pledges, but faces a skeptical Democrat-controlled state Legislature.

Recipe of the day (Dallas Morning News, 12/30/04)

Fiesta Pork Tenderloin with Oven-Roasted Vegetables

1 1/2 lb pork tenderloin
2 small baking potatoes, quartered
2 small green and/or red bell peppers, sliced
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 pkg (1.25 oz.) fajita seasoning mix
Garnish with salsa and sour cream

Procedures

PREHEAT oven to 400 degF. Line roasting pan or 15x10-inch jelly-roll pan
with foil.

PLACE tenderloin, potatoes, bell peppers, onion, oil and seasoning mix
in large

BAKE, stirring vegetables halfway through, for 40 to 45 minutes or until
tenderloin reaches an internal temperature of 170 degF and potatoes are
tender. Let stand for 5 minutes before serving. Garnish as desired.

Comments

---

FIVE FOR FIGHTING:

How five newcomers could change Senate: Staunch GOP conservatives shift from the tightly organized House to the prestigious club of 100. (Gail Russell Chaddock, 12/30/04, CS Monitor)

Call them the five horsemen of the Republican Revolution: incoming US Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, John Thune of South Dakota, and David Vitter of Louisiana.

Their arrival in the US Senate next week gives a powerful boost to both fiscal and social conservatives on issues ranging from judicial nominations and abortion rights to tax reform. It also tips the number of former House members in the Senate to 52 percent - the first time it has passed a majority. More than just an additional five GOP votes, they bring a hard-driving style and ideological focus that is at odds with the collegial culture of the Senate.

"The big question is to what extent they will maintain their House attitudes and behavior ... and the uncompromising, disputatious positions that House members are likely to take," says Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

There's already speculation about how this group will interact with Republican colleagues, especially the moderates who often swayed key votes in the last Congress. They could transform the tone of an institution that has been tottering between its clubby past and the more disciplined, partisan style of the US House.

RACE MEN:

The Birth of a 'Latino Race' (Ian Haney López, December 29, 2004, LA Times)

What's behind the Census Bureau seeking suddenly to drop the "other race" option, a fixture of every census since 1910? And why should Latinos see retaining this option as a victory? The answers touch on the latest wrinkles in the politics of race and demography in the United States.

First, some background: Historically, "other race" served as a catchall — a category for those who did not fit easily into the official census races, which today are white, black, Asian, Pacific Islander and Native American. For the bureau, "other race" indicates not a discrete population group but an accounting trick. In tabulating racial populations, the "other race" numbers are simply reallocated to the official categories, and data on the characteristics of this population are not compiled. This made statistical sense so long as those denominated "other" represented a small number and a miscellaneous mixture of racial outliers, not a distinct social group.

But in 1980 the Census Bureau introduced two changes that completely transformed the nature of this category: First, it added to its race question a companion item, inquiring of all Americans whether they were ethnically "Hispanic." Second, it moved to a system of racial self-reporting. Instead of census enumerators assigning racial identities, the bureau asked every person filling out census forms to identify his or her own race.

Suddenly, the "other race" population exploded, increasing tenfold. And 97% of those claiming to be "some other race" also identified themselves as "Hispanic."

Creating a new race category wasn't what the bureau had in mind. In 1990 and 2000, in hopes of reducing the number of Latinos identifying as "other," it tried to convey more clearly that its ethnicity and race questions should be answered independently. But to no avail. Today, about 6% of Americans, or more than 1 in 20, count themselves as "some other race," and the overwhelming majority of them are Latinos. Like it or not, nearly half of the Latino population considers itself a race.

That means, of course, that many Latinos still see themselves as members of the bureau's usual racial categories. According to Brown University professor John Logan's analysis of the census and survey data, Latinos generally divide themselves into three racial camps. There are black Latinos, who identify as Latino ethnically and as black racially. This group, steady at just under 3% of the Latino population since 1980, numbers nearly a million in the United States. Next come white Latinos, who grew from 9 million in 1980 to just shy of 18 million in 2000. This doubling did not, however, keep pace with the growth of the Latino population as a whole. The proportion of Latinos claiming to be white has steadily declined, from 64% in 1980 to just under 50% in 2000.

Then there are those Logan calls "Latino Hispanics," who identify as "Hispanic" on the ethnicity question and as "other" on the race item. This population has steadily gained among all Latinos, from 34% in 1980 to nearly 47% in 2000.

The bureau hasn't said much publicly about this trend, or about why it sought to do away with the "other race" category. It claims to be primarily concerned with the rising number of people opting out of its official categories. But one can't help but ponder deeper implications.

AFTER KIM:

Talk Swirling of North Korean Regime Collapse: Since Kim ordered his portraits removed from buildings in the capital, activists flooded the Net with unsubstantiated rumors of instability. (Barbara Demick, December 29, 2004, LA Times)

"We are seeing a lot of fabricated tales going around lately," said Woo Jung Chang, an editor of the Chosun Monthly, an influential Seoul-based magazine.

"There is a lot of wishful thinking when it comes to predictions of North Korea's collapse," agreed Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

The subject of North Korea's stability is most sensitive in South Korea, where polls show that people are less fearful of a communist invasion than they are of a messy collapse that could send streams of hungry refugees across the border.

The South Korean government is so touchy about the issue that it recently threatened to prosecute an opposition assemblyman who publicly discussed the contingency plan for a North Korean collapse.

The strategy, which dates to the 1960s but has been revised, calls for the establishment of an interim civilian government to fill the vacuum that would be left by the collapse of the Pyongyang government and for emergency refugee shelters to be set up near the demilitarized zone separating the two nations.

"This is a realistic scenario and something we need to plan for and refine in detail…. Instead, we're not even allowed to talk about it," said the assemblyman, Chung Moon Hun.

At least officially, the South Korean government insists that such plans are unnecessary.

"It seems there's almost no possibility North Korea will collapse," President Roh Moo-hyun said in a sharply worded statement this month.

Like his Nobel laureate predecessor, Kim Dae Jung, Roh has pursued a number of projects designed to bolster the North Korean economy. This month, the two Koreas held a ceremony to celebrate the start of production at an industrial park in Kaesong, just north of the DMZ.

But Roh's stance is drawing fire from conservatives who accuse him of propping up a morally and economically bankrupt regime.

Michael Horowitz, a former Reagan administration official who has been one of the most articulate U.S. advocates of toppling Kim, shocked the South Korean media during a recent visit here when he accused Roh of "making love to a corpse."

THE WORLD BILL CLINTON MADE

Aid Grows Amid Remarks About President's Absence (John F. Harris and Robin Wright, Washington Post, 12/29/04)

The Bush administration more than doubled its financial commitment yesterday to provide relief to nations suffering from the Indian Ocean tsunami, amid complaints that the vacationing President Bush has been insensitive to a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions.

THE THIRD PARTY TO ROE V. WADE:

Trucker sued over crash where fetus was killed (KELLYN BROWN, 12/29/04, Bozeman Daily Chronicle)

An Idaho man already accused of negligently rolling his tractor-trailer last year has now been sued by a woman who lost her unborn child in the accident.

Brian Sala, 50, and his employer at the time, trucking company Edwards Brothers Inc., are named as defendants in the lawsuit.

Fatima Zukic was 35 weeks pregnant when Sala tipped his tractor-trailer on U.S. Highway 191 on August 7, 2003. [...]

Soon after the accident, the Gallatin County attorney's office filed misdemeanor charges against Sala, accusing him of negligent endangerment for driving too fast and possessing marijuana.

He is not charged in connection with the death of the unborn child. Under Montana law, a fetus is not considered a human life. It says "a human being is a person who has been born and is alive.

CANDLE IN THE WIND:

1010 WINS EXCLUSIVE: JERRY ORBACH DEAD AT 69 (1010WINS, 12/29/04)

1010 WINS has learned that "Law and Order" star Jerry Orbach has died of prostate cancer at the age of 69. His manager, Robert Malcolm confirmed Orbach's death this morning.

IF THINGS ARE SO BAD WHY ARE THEY GOING SO GOOD?:

The Next Economy (Robert J. Samuelson, December 29, 2004, Washington Post)

We are undergoing a profound economic transformation that is barely recognized. This quiet upheaval does not originate in some breathtaking technology but rather in the fading power of forces that have shaped American prosperity for decades and, in some cases, since World War II. As their influence diminishes, the economy will depend increasingly on new patterns of spending and investment that are still only dimly apparent. It is unclear whether these will deliver superior increases in living standards and personal security. What is clear is that the old economic order is passing. [...]

Here are four decisive changes:

• The economy is bound to lose the stimulus of rising consumer debt. Household debt -- everything from home mortgages to credit cards -- now totals about $10 trillion, or roughly 115 percent of personal disposable income. In 1945, debt was about 20 percent of disposable income. For six decades, consumer debt and spending have risen faster than income. Home mortgages, auto loans and store credit all became more available. In 1940, the homeownership rate was 44 percent; now it's 69 percent. But debt can't permanently rise faster than income, and we're approaching a turning point. As aging baby boomers repay mortgages and save for retirement, debt burdens may drop. The implication: weaker consumer spending.

CATHEDRAL VS. CUBE:

Politics Without God?: Reflections on Europe and America (George Weigel, DEC. 24, 2004, Zenit.org)

At the far western end of the axis that traverses Paris from the Louvre down the Champs Elysées and through the Arc de Triomphe is the Great Arch of La Défense. Designed by a sternly modernist Danish architect, the Great Arch is a colossal open cube: almost 40 stories tall, faced in glass and 2.47 acres of white Carrara marble. Its rooftop terrace offers an unparalleled view of the French capital, past the Tuilleries to the Ile de la Cité, Sante Chapelle, and Notre-Dame.

The arch's three-story high roof also houses the International Foundation for Human Rights. For President François Mitterrand planned the Great Arch as a human rights monument, something suitably gigantic to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Thus, in one guidebook, the Great Arch was dubbed "Fraternity Arch." That same guidebook, like every other one I consulted, emphasized that the entire Cathedral of Notre-Dame would fit comfortably inside the Great Arch.

All of which raised some questions, as I walked along that terrace in 1997. Which culture would better protect human rights and secure the moral foundations of democracy? The culture that built this rational, geometrically precise, but essentially featureless cube? Or the culture that produced the gargoyles and flying buttresses, the asymmetries and holy "unsameness" of Notre-Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals of Europe?

Those questions have come back to me, if in different forms, as I've tried to understand Europe in recent years. How, for example, should one understand the fierce argument in Europe over whether a new constitutional treaty for the European Union should include a reference to the Christian sources of European civilization? Why did so many European intellectuals and political leaders deem any reference to the Christian sources of contemporary Europe civilization a threat to human rights and democracy?

Was there some connection between this internal European debate over Europe's constitution-making and the portrait in the European press of Americans (and especially an American president) as religious fanatics intent on shooting up the world? Was there a further connection between this debate and the fate of Rocco Buttiglione's candidacy for the post of Commissioner of Justice on the European Commission?

Understanding these phenomena requires something more than a conventional political analysis. Nor can political answers explain the reasons behind perhaps the most urgent issue confronting Europe today -- the fact that Western Europe is committing demographic suicide, its far-below-replacement-level birthrates creating enormous pressures on the European welfare state and a demographic vacuum into which Islamic immigrants are flowing in increasing numbers, often becoming radicalized in the process.

My proposal is that Europe is experiencing a crisis of cultural and civilizational morale whose roots are also taking hold in some parts quarters of American society and culture. Understanding and addressing this crisis means confronting the question posed sharply, if unintentionally, by those guidebooks that boast about the alleged superiority of the Great Arch to Notre-Dame: the question of the cube and the cathedral, and their relationship to both the meaning of freedom and the future of democracy. [...]

Probing to the deeper roots of Europe's crisis of civilizational morale is important for understanding Europe today and for discerning whatever promising paths of European renewal there may be. Getting at the roots of "Europe's problem" is also important for understanding a set of problems Americans may face in the not-too-distant future. And that means that both Europeans and Americans must learn to think in new ways about the dynamics of history.

During 13 years of research and teaching in east central Europe, I've been impressed by what might be called the Slavic view of history. You can find it in a great thinker who lived in the borderland between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Vladimir Soloviev, who challenged the fashionable nihilism and materialism of the late 19th century.

You can find it in 19th-century Polish novelists, poets and playwrights, who, breaking with the Jacobin conviction that "revolution" meant a complete rupture with the past, insisted that genuine "revolution" meant the recovery of lost spiritual and moral values. You can find it in such intellectual leaders of the anti-communist resistance in east central Europe as Karol Wojtyla, Václav Havel and Václav Benda, who all argued that "living in the truth" could change what seemed unchangeable in history.

The common thread among these disparate thinkers is the conviction that the deepest currents of "history" are spiritual and cultural, rather than political and economic. "History" is not simply the byproduct of the contest for power in the world -- although power plays an important role in history. And "history" is certainly not the exhaust fumes produced by the means of production, as the Marxists taught.

Rather, "history" is driven by culture -- by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good and noble; by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on.

Poland is one embodiment of this way of thinking, which Poles believe has been vindicated empirically by their own modern history. For 123 years, from 1795 to 1918, the Polish state was erased from Europe. Yet during that century and a quarter the Polish nation survived with such vigor that it could give birth to a new Polish state in 1918. And despite the fact that the revived Polish state was then beset for 50 years by the plagues of Nazism and communism, the Polish nation proved strong enough to give a new birth of freedom to east central Europe in the Revolution of 1989.

How did this happen? Poland survived -- better, Poland prevailed -- because of culture: a culture formed by a distinctive language, by a unique literature, and by an intense Catholic faith (which, an its noblest and deepest expressions, was ecumenical and tolerant, not xenophobic, as so many stereotypes have it). Poles know in their bones that culture is what drives history over the long haul.

This "Slavic view of history" is really a classically Christian way of thinking about history, whose roots can be traced back at least as far as St. Augustine and "The City of God." Yet, it is the Slavs who have been, in our time, the most powerful exponents of this "culture-first" understanding of the dynamics of the world's story. [...]

If democratic institutions and procedures are the expressions of a distinctive way of life based on specific moral commitments, then democratic citizenship must be more than a matter of following the procedures and abiding by the laws and regulations agreed upon by the institutions A democratic citizen is someone who can give an account of his or her commitment to human rights, to the rule of law and equality before the law, to decision-making by the majority and protection of the rights of minorities. Democratic citizenship means being able to tell why one affirms "the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law," to cite the preamble to the European constitution. Who can give such an account?

Here is one of the richest ironies involved in the question of the cube and the cathedral. The original charge against Christians in the Roman empire was that they were "atheists": people who were "a-theos," people who had abandoned the gods of Rome and who were thus a threat to public life and public order. To be a-theos was to stand outside and over-against the political community.

The "Christophobia" of contemporary European high culture turns this indictment inside out and upside down: Christianity cannot be acknowledged as a source of European democracy because the only public space safe for pluralism, tolerance, civility, and democracy is a public space that is thoroughly a-theos.

It is all very strange. For the truth of the matter is that European Christians can likely give a more compelling account of their commitment to democratic values than their fellow Europeans who are a-theos -- who believe that "neutrality toward worldviews" must characterize democratic Europe. A postmodern or neo-Kantian "neutrality toward worldviews" cannot be truly tolerant; it can only be indifferent.

Absent convictions, there is no tolerance; there is only indifference. Absent some compelling notion of the truth that requires us to be tolerant of those who have a different understanding of the truth, there is only skepticism and relativism. And skepticism and relativism are very weak foundations on which to build and sustain a pluralistic democracy, for neither skepticism nor relativism, by their own logic, can "give an account" of why we should be tolerant and civil.

In contrast to this thin account of tolerance -- we should be tolerant because it works better -- there is the argument for tolerance given by Pope John Paul II in his 1989 encyclical letter on Christian mission, "Redemptoris Missio" [The Mission of the Redeemer]. There the Pope taught that "The Church proposes; she imposes nothing." The Catholic Church respects the "other" as an "other" who is also a seeker of truth and goodness; the Church only asks that the believer and the "other" enter into a dialogue that leads to mutual enrichment rather than to a deeper skepticism about the possibility of grasping the truth of things.

The Catholic Church believes it to be the will of God that Christians be tolerant of those who have a different view of God's will, or no view of God's will. Thus Catholics (and other Christians who share this conviction) can "give an account" of their defense of the "other's" freedom, even if the "other," skeptical and relativist, finds it hard to "give an account" of the freedom of the Christian.

WILL THE LAST ONE OUT OF THE TEMPLE OF DARWINISM PLEASE BLOW OUT THE VOTIVE CANDLES (via John Beckwith & David Hill):

Human brain result of 'extraordinarily fast' evolution: Emergence of society may have spurred growth (Alok Jha, December 29, 2004, The Guardian)

The sophistication of the human brain is not simply the result of steady evolution, according to new research. Instead, humans are truly privileged animals with brains that have developed in a type of extraordinarily fast evolution that is unique to the species.

"Simply put, evolution has been working very hard to produce us humans," said Bruce Lahn, an assistant professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

"Our study offers the first genetic evidence that humans occupy a unique position in the tree of life." [...]

"Human evolution is, in fact, a privileged process because it involves a large number of mutations in a large number of genes.

"To accomplish so much in so little evolutionary time - a few tens of millions of years - requires a selective process that is perhaps categorically different from the typical processes of acquiring new biological traits."

As for how all of this happened, the professor suggests that the development of human society may be the reason.

In an increasingly social environment, greater cognitive abilities probably became more of an advantage.

"As humans become more social, differences in intelligence will translate into much greater differences in fitness, because you can manipulate your social structure to your advantage," he said.

WHY NOT JUST HAVE GREG ZAUN WRITE THE ECONOMICS STUFF?:

Japan sends slow-growth signals (Todd Zaun, December 29, 2004, The New York Times)

Although the unemployment rate declined, the reason for the drop was that there were fewer people looking for work, not an increase in the number of jobs. The economy shed 150,000 jobs in November, and some 450,000 people dropped out of the labor market.

The increase in industrial production was the first in three months, but the pace was a bit slower than had been expected. Economists had forecast that production would grow 1.9 percent. [...]

The Japanese economy grew at an annual rate of just 0.2 percent in the third quarter after shrinking 0.6 percent in the second quarter, according to revised growth figures released earlier in the month. The abrupt slowdown from a 6.8 percent annual growth rate in the first quarter of this year came as increases in exports and capital investment slowed.

The sudden deceleration raised concern that Japan would slip back into a recession. [...]

Consumption, which accounts for more than half of the economy, has been weak amid a long slump in income growth, and there are few signs of that changing soon.

Household spending sank 0.9 percent in November from a month earlier as people spent less on food and clothing, according to another government report released on Tuesday. Consumption is unlikely to pick up until incomes begin to rise, and although that is not happening yet, there are signs the labor market is getting tighter. That could push wages higher, if it continues. [...]

Meanwhile, the government said that consumer prices declined 0.2 percent in November from a year earlier, extending a six-year run of deflation in Japan.

PECULIARLY IMPROPER TO OMIT:

Dicta: Establishing Jurisprudence (Dahlia Lithwick, 12-01-2004, The American Lawyer)

The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a pair of cases testing the constitutionality of displays of the Ten Commandments on government property. The Court finally agreed to reconcile conflicting lower rulings-concerning the display of a six-foot monument on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol in one case, and another involving framed copies of the commandments on Kentucky courthouse walls. The two cases have legitimate differences: The Texas display is part of a collection, the Kentucky "collection" sprung up to protect the display. The Texas monument is in a "museum-like" setting. The Kentucky display is on a court wall. The Texas Commandments monument was a gift, and has stood uncontested for decades. But underlying all the details is a profound problem: a tendency to disregard the religious in our religion cases.

Having avoided this issue for decades, the Court must now reexamine the carnage left in the wake of its batty establishment clause jurisprudence-a line of cases effectively holding that it's okay for the state to erect Christmas crèches and such on public property, so long as the ratio of Santas to Sponge Bobs in the manger is roughly equivalent. As a result of this lack of guidance, lower courts have been forced to take the religious display cases to mean it's fine to display the Decalogue, so long as it's lost in a clutch of other "historical" documents. Copies of the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, Christopher Columbus's traveler's checks-all this stuff somehow immunizes a religious display from endorsing or advancing religion; perhaps because all that clutter endorses and advances only headaches.

As a result of this line of inquiry, courts across the land have upheld religious displays using what Justice Anthony Kennedy once dubbed "the jurisprudence of minutiae"-the theory that public land becomes more like a "museum" if you've amassed enough tchotchkes for God. This constitutional compromise only ensures both sides will be offended: Atheists are still affronted that the state is promoting any religious symbols, believers are annoyed that cherished icons are awash in a sea of knickknacks. [...]

What if we could rewind constitutional history and erase the idea that the folks promoting religion in these cases are actually promoting secular historicism or ceremonial deism? (After all, some American law also has roots in the Napoleonic Code, but we’re not clamoring to erect courthouse monuments to Napoleon.) What if we could concede that Chief Justice William Rehnquist was right in his dissent in a public prayer case when he noted the majority opinion “bristles with hostility to all things religious in public life”? The concession would force us to answer the normative question: Is there anything other than hostility to religion available under current jurisprudence? It would force us to determine whether we want meaningful and powerful religious symbols in public spaces, rather than defining the problem away by theorizing those symbols have little or no religious meaning.

Such an acknowledgment would force the Court to go back and tackle the real question animating these religion cases: Does the Constitution truly erect a “wall” between church and state, or is this, as most citizens maintain, a politically correct overcompensation?

Such an acknowledgment would force the Court to go back and tackle the real question animating these religion cases: Does the Constitution truly erect a “wall” between church and state, or is this, as most citizens maintain, a politically correct overcompensation?
Why not just read the Constitution and look at how the Founding generation dealt with religion when they were setting up and running the State?

Given that George Washington invoked God in his Inaugural Address, the first official utterance of the new Republic, and that the first act of the first Congress was to hire chaplains, it seems safe to say the "wall" is a figment of the Left's imagination.

NO VIRTUE IN A SPOTLESS WORLD:

Tsunamis may be unifying event (Daniel Altman, December 29, 2004, International Herald Tribune)

In Sri Lanka, for example, the challenge posed by a natural disaster could conceivably help create common ground between the government and the Tamil rebels who control much of the northern part of the country.

"This has affected a very narrow strip all the way around the coast," said Alessandro Pio, the country director for the Asian Development Bank in Colombo. "It's a disaster that affects both the north and the south, both of the parties in the civil war."

As a result, Pio said, cooperation between the two sides may be logical or even necessary from a logistical standpoint.

The effects of such cooperation could be far-reaching. Five years ago, earthquakes in Greece and Turkey began a political thaw that has arguably culminated in Turkey's candidacy for the European Union.

In Indonesia, the government this week lifted a ban on international aid to Aceh, where separatists have been fighting a guerrilla war for a quarter-century.

"I'm hoping that this will generate a certain feeling of national unity in trying to respond together to this adversity," Pio said of Sri Lanka's tragedy. "That's really one of the pivot factors in terms of the economy taking off on a higher growth path."

In India, despite the fact that the tsunamis were the first for decades, they may become part of an ongoing learning process for dealing with natural catastrophes. In particular, they present an opportunity for the government to show that it is serious about preparing homes, businesses, public buildings and other infrastructure for future disasters.

"In general, the approach to disaster management in India has changed considerably," said G Padmanabhan, an emergency analyst at the United Nations Development Program in Delhi. He said that building laws and regulations had been modified to require disaster-proof construction, but that more officials needed training in enforcement and engineering techniques.

"The government has recently started programs to train people," he said. "I hope in the reconstruction process they will enforce these, so we don't recreate this vulnerability."

WATCHING THEMSELVES GAVOTTE:

In a Clueless Party (Michael Gecan, December 29, 2004, Washington Post)

Thirty-two years ago, in the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago, I believe I witnessed the destruction -- actually, the self-destruction -- of the Democratic Party. I was attending a rally for George McGovern. The place was packed. And the stage held scores of Chicago pols -- red-faced aldermen and county committeemen in dark suits.

There were the usual speeches from the usual Democratic functionaries, but the warm-up act for the candidate was not some tongue-tied Polish pol from the Northwest Side. Onto the stage strode an actor everyone knew -- Warren Beatty. He was a vision -- handsome, tanned, long-haired and dressed almost entirely in black leather. He dramatically discarded his floor-length leather coat, only to reveal leather pants and shirt. The crowd inhaled, gasped and burst into applause. The faces of the pols onstage went white with shock or red with rage.

Beatty is now a married man, with a family, back in California, but the Democratic Party is still the same star-struck, celebrity-driven, immature mess that it was in 1972.

GOOD START:

Director of Analysis Branch at the C.I.A. Is Being Removed (DOUGLAS JEHL, 12/29/04, NY Times)

The head of the Central Intelligence Agency's analytical branch is being forced to step down, former intelligence officials say, opening a major new chapter in a shakeup under Porter J. Goss, the agency's chief.

The official, Jami Miscik, the agency's deputy director for intelligence, told her subordinates on Tuesday afternoon of her plan to step down on Feb. 4. A former intelligence official said that Ms. Miscik was told before Christmas that Mr. Goss wanted to make a change and that "the decision to depart was not hers."

Ms. Miscik has headed analysis at the agency since 2002, a period in which prewar assessments of Iraq and its illicit weapons, which drew heavily on C.I.A. analysis, proved to be mistaken. Even before taking charge of the C.I.A., Mr. Goss, who was a congressman, and his closest associates had been openly critical of the directorate of intelligence, saying it suffered from poor leadership and was devoting too much effort to monitoring day-to-day developments rather than broad trends.

Ms. Miscik's departure is the latest in a series of high-level ousters that have prompted unease within the C.I.A. since Mr. Goss took over as director of central intelligence in September. Of the officials who worked as top deputies to Mr. Goss's predecessor, George J. Tenet, at least a half-dozen have been fired or have retired abruptly, including the agency's No. 2 and No. 3 officials. Much of the top tier of the agency's clandestine service is also gone.

THE RED CITY:

One-third moved out of CHA ghettos (KATE N. GROSSMAN, December 29, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

Five years into the Chicago Housing Authority's 10-year plan to overhaul public housing, one-third of the people that once lived in CHA high-rise ghettos have moved out.

About half the 25,000 units the CHA promised to rehab or rebuild by 2010 are done. And the agency has increased funding to help families meet stiff new work requirements to qualify to live in mixed-income developments.

The agency's "Plan for Transformation," CEO Terry Peterson says, is taking shape.

"Without a doubt there was skepticism" when we started, said Peterson, who has headed the CHA since 2000. "But I said from Day One we would keep our promises."

But even Peterson acknowledges the going hasn't been easy, and that finishing the plan won't be any easier. [...]

"Some of the hardest work is still outstanding, absolutely," said Robin Snyderman, housing director for the Metropolitan Planning Council. "But it's appropriate that the time was taken to do the thorough planning and find the partners. . . . There's a lot of blood, sweat and tears going into this."

And the foundation is there, Snyderman noted. Handsome new town houses and three-flats are sprouting up at nearly every redevelopment site, including some of the most notorious projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green.

And despite fears otherwise, reputable private developers are building these communities, the city is pitching in with new streets and parks, and middle-income families are lining up to rent the units, drawn by good locations, reasonable rents and strict rules.

This week, nine years after planning began, the first families moved into Oakwood Shores, a collection of attractive brick three-flats near 38th and Ellis on the South Side built to replace three CHA sites. The buildings, with decorative stonework and wrought-iron fences, stand on the footprint of several demolished high-rise eyesores.

"This is unbelievable," Wanda Lee said Tuesday as she marveled at the new white carpeting, stove and refrigerator in her apartment. Lee, a former Madden Park resident, and her four children moved in Monday night.

At first, she was skeptical. "I really didn't believe they would build anything," she said.

But now Lee, 28, a single mom on public aid, hopes the move will start a new chapter in her life: "I want to go on to bigger and better things because we have a nice place. It's a new start for me."

MAY AS WELL MAKE THE LEFT'S DEFENSE OF SADDAM OFFICIAL:

Former US attorney general joins Saddam defence team (AFP, 29 December 2004)

Former US attorney general and left-wing activist Ramsey Clark is to join the defence team of Saddam Hussein, a spokesman for the toppled Iraqi president’s lawyers said on Wednesday.

WEIMAR TO WHINEMORE:

A rude ’05 awakening for Germans (Carter Dougherty, December 29, 2004, International Herald Tribune)

Hans Schmidt spends a lot of time these days with a yellow paperback book, full of paper clips and dog-eared pages, that helps him grope his way through Germany's labyrinthine system of unemployment benefits. But at the end of the maze, Schmidt knows he will find a lot less money than he once had.

Schmidt, a computer specialist, was recently laid off from a medium-sized company near Frankfurt. His wife, Sabine, has been unemployed for over a year and will now lose her benefits entirely as Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's groundbreaking changes to the country's unemployment regime kick in on Jan. 1.

The changes will more than halve the take-home pay the Schmidt household once enjoyed from a comfortable €2,350 to about €1,050.

"I find all this an absolutely unfair system now," said Schmidt, who concedes he is concealing his real name because he wants to sue to get his job back. "I paid taxes for years to finance social assistance, and now it's gone."

Multiply this example by several million, add in a hefty dose of frustration and resignation, and that about approximates the mood of the German work force this holiday season, the traditional mulled wine and roasted chestnuts aside. On Jan. 1, 4.5 million unemployed Germans - 10.8 percent of the work force - will be wrenched into a new world of dwindling benefits.

"This is the end of the Germany that I grew up with," said Martin Bongards, an unemployed sociologist and activist in the town of Marburg. "This country I knew no longer exists."

NOW THAT'S A PRAYER:

Why is the Divine waiting to hear from you? (Rabbi David Aaron, 12/29/04, Jewish World Review)

If you pray in order to change G-d's mind, then, please for G-d's sake, don't pray. We don't want to change G-d's mind. And thank G-d we can't change G-d's mind because G-d has made up His mind long time ago. G-d only and always loves us and seeks to give us the greatest good. As Psalmist praised, "His compassion (unconditional love) is upon all His creatures."

Of course, G-d hears our prayers and answers but He is waiting for us to hear our prayers and mean them. Prayer is not passive, it is proactive. Through prayer we must inspire ourselves to take action and make changes within ourselves, our community and the world. When we change ourselves for the good we let G-d's never-changing love for us and His abundant blessings become manifest in our lives.

BLIND RAGE:

Mrs Foley's diary solves the mystery of Hess (Michael Smith, 27/12/2004, Daily Telegraph)

A brief entry in the diary of the wife of a British spy has led to the discovery of the true story behind one of the greatest mysteries of the Second World War - the bizarre 1941 flight to Britain of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess. [...]

[T]he diary has revealed that MI6 was not only heavily involved in the run-up to Hess's flight but even planned "a sting operation" aimed at luring Hess or another prominent German into bogus peace talks with Britain.

The diary belonged to the wife of Frank Foley, the former MI6 head of station in Berlin, who was to become more famous for his work in getting "tens of thousands" of Jews out of Germany.

It was Foley, as the leading German expert in MI6, who was in charge of the year-long debriefing of the deputy führer. This much is known from Foreign Office files released to the National Archives some years ago.

Hess flew to Britain in a Messerschmitt-110 on May 10, 1941, intent on making contact with the Duke of Hamilton, who he believed would help him mediate a peace deal whereby Britain would join Nazi Germany in a war against the Soviet Union. It was a hopeless mission based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the British establishment.

Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime prime minister, was convinced that it had produced an intelligence windfall for Britain.

But Churchill was wrong. The debriefing was a wasted effort. Hess knew astonishingly little and, to make matters worse, Foley swiftly realised he was mad.

NO MATTER HOW YOU GROVEL THEY STILL BEAT YOU:

America, the Great Santa: America`s support for Sunday`s tsunami victims should remind us how twisted the Hate America Left`s view of this country really is. (Ben Johnson, 12/27/04, FrontPage)

Upon hearing the news, America characteristically rushed to help. Yesterday, outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell promised a $15 million aid package and stated this is only a downpayment on America’s goodwill. “We also have to see this not just as a one-time thing,” he said. “Some 20-plus thousand lives have been lost in a few moments, but the lingering effects will be there for years.” He then affirmed America is in the reconstruction effort “for the long haul.”

In addition to this aid package, President Bush has dispatched military planes to the area, sent a 21-person USAID contingent of disaster relief specialists, and offered to send troops stations in Okinawa, Japan, to help Thai victims.

By way of contrast, the 25-member European Union, the world largest trader whose combined economy is larger than that of the United States, will deliver $4 million.

Nonetheless, UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland labeled these efforts “stingy.”

Aside from betraying abhorrent manners, the UN bureaucrat’s comments sounded a common theme of the Left: No matter how much time, money, or resources America commits to a humanitarian effort – and no matter how demonstrably unselfish our motives – greedy capitalist America never lifts a finger to help the downtrodden. Indeed, by our disproportionate consumption of the world’s resources and contributions to environmental degradation, we are the cause of the world’s suffering.

FADE AWAY JUMPER:

Alternative to fading away (MASAMICHI HANABUSA, 12/28/04, The Japan Times)

In the annals of mankind, various nations that rose and fell over centuries are recognized for what they left for posterity. The Romans laid the foundations of Western civilization with Roman Law and built the infrastructure that enabled the spread of Christianity. The world owes the British for the parliamentary system of democracy. The Americans will probably go down in history as the nation that developed the most destructive military power.

Seen on the scale of millennia, the Japanese have developed a unique continuous civilization, absorbing various foreign cultures. But as things stand now, Japan may register in history as a nation that saw a spectacular rise for a while in the 20th century but then faded away with the gradual decline of its population.

There is, however, a very important enterprise for which the Japanese may be recognized centuries from now. The Japanese people could contribute toward the realization of political, economic and cultural equality among the peoples of the world. If future generations of Japanese make a conscious effort to continue the achievements of their forebears, this enterprise may give our people a place on the honor roll of world history.

SON OF THE MOUSE THAT ROARD

Military Judges’ Benchbook For Trial of Enemy Prisoners of War Headquarters (Legal Services, Department of the Army Pamphlet 27–9–1, 4 October 2004)

1–1. Purpose and scope.

A. Purpose. This Military Judges’ Benchbook for Trial of Enemy Prisoners of War (EPWs) [footnote omitted] sets forth certain procedural steps required in the trial by court-martial of persons protected by the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of August 12, 1949 (GC III), including certain civilian personnel protected by the GC III. Under Article 102, GC III, EPWs can be validly sentenced only if they are sentenced under (1) the same court system and (2) the same procedures as members of the armed forces of the Detaining Power (DP) AND if (3) the court follows the provisions of Chapter 3, Penal & Disciplinary Sanctions, GC III. This Benchbook modifies DA Pam 27-9, Military Judges’ Benchbook, to incorporate the provisions of Chapter 3, GC III.

In other words, we would have to treat Iraqi prisoners like Americans, while they can treat American prisoners like Iraqis. How long before we see this point made on the recruiting posters of our enemies?

LET YOUR FINGERS DO THE COUNTERTERRORISM

Hotline Succeeding In Foiling Iraqi Insurgents (Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service, 12/28/04)

Brig. Gen. Jeffrey W. Hammond, the division's assistant commander for support, said the tips hotline received more than 400 calls during the past few months. These enabled the coalition to take prompt action — from freeing several women who had been kidnapped for ransom to identifying and destroying vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices Hammond said "were rigged and ready to explode."

Billboards throughout Baghdad promote the hotline as a way for the Iraqi people to "fight the war in secret" without fear of reprisal, Hammond said. Because of a campaign of intimidation aimed at Iraqis helping to move their country forward, "people were virtually paralyzed to reach out for help," he noted. Now, thanks to the hotline campaign, "people today are picking up the phone and calling us. They are sharing information," the general said.

Hammond said the hotline and its success have "hit a nerve with the insurgents" who regularly vandalize billboards promoting the campaign. But Hammond said the 200 billboards around Iraq are replaced as quickly as they're destroyed. "I'm not going to stop," he said.

THE HORROR... (via Tom Corcoran):

Pinkos Getting Nuttier (Ralph R. Reiland, 12/28/2004, American Spectator)

You'd think today's socialists would be a little more cautious when it comes to preaching about the merits of centralized planning, a bit more wary about putting the state in charge of every nook and cranny of daily life, given the way things have turned out over the past century.

It wasn't just the bad economics, the sight of people queuing up in the Soviet Union each morning to stand in line for hours for bread before the shelves went bare, or the decade-long waits for drab apartments. Worse was the price of pounding every doubter and straggler into line, the slaughter by the bodyguards of collectivism of the millions who failed to proclaim the nonexistent virtue of a failed system, the elimination of millions who failed to buy the idea that a man's mind was nothing compared to the collective wisdom of the state.

The final tally, the grand total of those killed in the Marxist-Leninist war of class genocide against private property, individuality, profit and the market, is variously estimated at between 80 million and 110 million, with as many as 65 million in China, 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on.

It was the world's most full-scale totalitarianism, an ideology that had come to rule a third of mankind, a revolutionary vision of egalitarianism and virtue that turned into, in the words of Martin Malia, professor of history emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who died last month, the "most colossal case of political carnage in history." [...]

Such, however, is not the case, as evidenced by the call for grandiose state intrusion in the most private of matters in the November-December 2004 issue of the Internationalist Socialist Review. The crisis described in America is that of an escalating "class attack" by the bourgeoisie in which "more and more responsibility for children's welfare has been placed on individual families."

UP CHUCK:

A Very Dangerous Democrat: An Encounter with Senator Charles Schumer (ALAN SINGER, CounterPunch)

On Sunday, December 19, 2004, I had a startling exchange with New York Senator Charles Schumer at the Hofstra University graduation. Schumer has a habit of appearing at graduation at the last minute uninvited, speaking to the audience about his experience as a recent college graduate, and then immediately escaping from the podium. I hoped to speak with him on a number of occasions but have never had the opportunity. This year he arrived while faculty were lining up to enter the arena. I approached him and asked, "Are you reconsidering your position on the war in Iraq now that the justifications presented by the Bush administration have all proved to be false?" He immediately became agitated and starting shouting aggressively. I will paraphrase the exchange as best as I can.

At first, Senator Schumer demanded to know what I would do. I replied, "The Bush administration policies have destabilized that entire region of the world. I would work with European allies to find a way to leave immediately."

He accused me of being a "fool"...

THOSE METAPHORS WILL GET YOU IF YOU DON'T WATCH OUT:

Susan Sontag, Writer and Social Critic, Dies at 71 (MARGALIT FOX, 12/28/04, NY Times)

Susan Sontag, the internationally renowned novelist, essayist and critic whose impassioned advocacy of the avant-garde and equally impassioned political pronouncements made her one of the most lionized presences - and one of the most polarizing - in 20th-century letters, died today in New York. She was 71 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, her son, David Rieff, said. Ms. Sontag, who died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, had been ill with cancer intermittently for 30 years, a struggle that informed one of her most famous books, the critical study "Illness as Metaphor" (1978).

MORE:
SUSAN SONTAG AND THE EVIL OF BANALITY (Srdja Trifkovic, 12/30/04, Chronicles)

Susan Sontag died of leukaemia in New York on December 29 at the age of 71. The obituarists described her as "one of America's most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights." (The Financial Times, Dec. 30) Her essays "expanded the universe of subjects it was 'all right' for intellectuals to take seriously," such as drugs, porn, and pop, ensuring that we'd "get used to these as intellectual topics."

All of which is one way of saying that Ms. Sontag has made a solid contribution to the degrading of our cultural and intellectual standards over the past four decades. But unlike some other purveyors of bad ideas, such as Voltaire, who could present them in eloquent prose, Sontag was unable to write a decent sentence. Take this gem for style and contents:

"The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. It is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself" (Partisan Review, winter 1967, p. 57).

A week after the non-whites struck at the cancer's epicenter on September 11, 2001, Ms. Sontag asserted in The New Yorker, that this "monstrous dose of reality" was squarely a consequence of specific American actions, and paid tribute to the courage of those willing to sacrifice their lives in order to kill others: "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

Courage means doing the right thing in the face of fear. Ms. Sontag's standard of "courage," based on an actor's readiness to die in pursuit of his objectives, makes sense only in the universe of an atheistic adorer of the self who cannot face the thought of self-annihilation.

BYE:

Long Live the Free Republic of Gotham: Don't say it can't be done. But first, we need to get over our Abe Lincoln obsession and revisit the Constitution. (Christopher Ketcham, 12/27/04, NY Press)

For anyone watching history and thinking ahead in the wake of November 2, the secession of New York City from the United States of America is no longer a question of ambiguities but practicalities, not a question of why but how. Yet the city's pundits and politicos continue to agonize playfully over the former while avoiding the real issue, which is constitutional, because it brings a tingle to the genitals without requiring anyone getting dirty. What's more narcissistically sexy than being culturally better endowed than an entire nation, but also impotent before the mass?

We can dispense with the hypocrisy of the greedhead megalomaniac New Yorker who thinks himself more enlightened than the average American because he goes to the Met and shits in fancy porcelain to Architectural Digest instead of to TV Guide in the moldy pan of a ranch-house in Phoenix or Cleveland. No, the nationwide balance, growing larger every day, of greedhead megalomaniacs merely apes, in cheaper finery, New York's corporatism, faddism and materialism as formerly enshrined in two glass towers. Before they burned to the ground, the Twin Towers stood over the nation as the symbol of empire; then, as an Alamo stand against the savages. Their fall sent America to Afghanistan and then Iraq in defense of the city on the hill: New York as epitome of American civilization.

And we are. The reason is that we make lots of money, and we do it in blazing-hot pursuit of life, liberty and happiness; though, granted, our government tempers that enthusiasm more generously than elsewhere in the nation (budgeting for health, education, labor, the environment, education and public transit—sharing the wealth). Money—who's making it, who's taking it—has always been and always will be the only argument for American rebellion; it was the predicate for the original New World secession from the English empire in 1775. If taxation without representation was the complaint then, it remains the rub today. Mayor Bloomberg's office claims that New York City sends as much as $11.4 billion more to Congress than it receives in services. The current hacks in the White House opt—among many other indignities—to blow our prodigious revenue on the occupation of Iraq, which as of May 2004 had cost New Yorkers $2.1 billion. The darker burden, of mortal consequence, is the vast terrorist recruitment the war has spawned, with New York—dense, vital—still the most coveted target.

The city's match with the state government in Albany is equally rapine. The New York State legislature for the most part represents the ingrate pawing of upstate cretins while netting an estimated $3.5 billion more annually from hardworking city taxpayers than it returns in spending on city services and infrastructure. Queens Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., who in 2003 floated a secession proposal for the establishment of New York City as the 51st state, claims that independence from the Albany thieves—the first step in secession from the odious United States—would gain the soon-to-be Free Republic of Gotham a billion-dollar annual budget surplus, with vastly reduced business, property and personal income taxes.

TURNING GOLD INTO LEAD

Shopping for War (Bob Herbert, NYTimes, 12/27/04)

You might think that the debacle in Iraq would be enough for the Pentagon, that it would not be in the mood to seek out new routes to unnecessary wars for the United States to fight.

Even when used to introduce errant nonsense, however, we must not allow talk of the "Iraq debacle" to go unchallenged. Thus, our litany of lessons to remember:

The invasion of Iraq was undertaken for good and sufficient reasons, all of which have grown stronger with hindsight.

The invasion itself was spectacularly successful.

The occupation has also been a success thus far.

IDEALISM NEVER LOOKED SO GOOD:

Sins of the Father: DUBYA IS BAD. HIS FATHER WAS WORSE. (Tom Frank, 12.27.04, New Republic)

Even his foreign policy was unprincipled and heedless--at least when the stakes were low. When officers in Panama's army attempted a coup against the country's dictator, Manuel Noriega, Bush, who had openly advocated such a revolt, now couldn't decide whether to intervene or stand aside. In the end, he managed to do neither, ordering American troops in the country (the canal had not yet been transferred to Panamanian sovereignty) to set up a pair of roadblocks but otherwise wringing his hands. After the press criticized him for timidity, Bush had second thoughts and, a few weeks later, invaded the country. He was, increasingly, a silly man in a serious job.

Other world events just made Bush look small. When the Berlin Wall fell, Bush, taken by surprise, reacted with caution, if not exactly reflection: "I don't think any single event is the end of what you might call the Iron Curtain. But clearly, this is a long way from the harsh days of the--the harshest Iron Curtain days--a long way from that."

Indeed, Bush's presidency may have faded into welcome insignificance had Saddam Hussein not invaded Kuwait in August 1990. At the time, Bush had gone through a rough summer. It was mainly because he had chosen to break his campaign pledge of "Read my lips: no new taxes," leading to the New York Post headline, "Read My Lips--I Lied." In 1988, Bush had repeated his tax promise at every campaign stop--getting the crowds to chant it with him--and pummeled Dukakis for refusing to make a similar pledge. (He'd also eliminated Bob Dole from the GOP primaries with the same tactic.) Now the bill was due.

With Saddam, however, Bush proved that, at least in the realm of foreign affairs, he could occasionally act with seriousness and resolve. Because war was the desired end--without one, Iraq could withdraw and remain a threat--Bush laid out demands in a manner designed to prevent Saddam from negotiating his way to a settlement. In the meantime, he assembled a large military coalition blessed by the United Nations. The offensive began in January, and, by February of the following year, Iraq had been driven out of Kuwait. It was an astonishing rout.

But Bush also had to figure out how he wanted to end the war. Marching to Baghdad would splinter the coalition, but leaving Saddam in power meant trouble, too. So Bush chose to encourage a rebellion in the Iraqi military, in the hope that a new Sunni strongman might emerge to replace Saddam. While the fighting raged, Bush suggested in February 1991 that Iraqis "take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." Radio broadcasts later linked to the CIA encouraged Iraqis to overthrow Saddam. Things didn't go as planned, however. Shia and Kurds bravely accepted the invitation to rise up, but Saddam's army officers didn't, turning their guns instead on the rebels.

Faced with the prospect of supporting a Shia rebellion--and the possible creation of a Shia state, which friends such as Saudi Arabia opposed--Bush suddenly found the prospect of Saddam's ouster less appealing. So he changed his mind. Saddam, happy to have a free hand, employed helicopter gunships to kill tens of thousands of Shia and Kurds as American forces in the region stood by. By early April, millions of Kurds were fleeing the massacres and crowding into refugee camps in neighboring Turkey, and Bush was starting to come under fire in Washington. "We went over there for a moral purpose," argued Senator Al Gore at the time, "and now we are insisting that our American forces stand by and watch as helicopter gunships, responding to the orders of Saddam Hussein, open fire on innocent men, women, and children--even firing on hospitals--simply because these people who are being killed responded to our request that they rise up against Saddam Hussein."

Bush, in response to such criticism, said he naturally felt "frustration and a sense of grief for the innocents that are being killed brutally, but we are not there to intervene ... that is not our purpose. It never was our purpose." Even when all twelve members of the European Community (yes, even France was tougher than Bush on this one) argued for placing humanitarian considerations above territorial ones--to create safe enclaves in Iraq, say, for those fleeing Saddam--Bush remained obdurate. "The objectives ... never included the demise and destruction of Saddam personally," Bush explained to reporters. Sorry if there was any misunderstanding.

REAL GRADUALISM vs. IMAGINARY:

A Rare Tsunami, and a Change in Geography: The quake created the Indian Ocean's first wave of its kind in more than a century, and it moved the entire island of Sumatra 100 feet. (Thomas H. Maugh II, December 27, 2004, LA Times)

The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck off Indonesia on Sunday morning moved the entire island of Sumatra about 100 feet to the southwest, pushing up a gigantic mass of water that collapsed into a tsunami and devastated shorelines around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

The quake was the largest since a magnitude 9.2 temblor struck Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1964 and was one of the biggest ever recorded by scientists. It triggered the first tsunami in the Indian Ocean since 1883, civil engineer Costas Synolakis of USC said.

Sunday's temblor, which occurred off Sumatra's northwestern tip in an active geological region, ruptured an estimated 600-mile-long stretch of the Earth beneath the Indian Ocean. The quake caused one side of the fault to slide past the other, much like seismologists expect the San Andreas fault to do when the "Big One" hits California.

BLACKSTONE vs. NAPOLEON:

In China, Turning the Law Into the People's Protector (Philip P. Pan, December 28, 2004, Washington Post)

What happened in the Fuyang case highlights a momentous struggle underway in China between a ruling party that sees the law as an instrument of control and a society that increasingly believes it should be used for something else: a check on the power of government officials and a guardian of individual rights. How this conflict unfolds could transform the country's authoritarian political system.

More than a quarter-century after launching economic reforms while continuing to restrict political freedom, the Chinese Communist Party remains in firm control of the courts. Most judges are party members, appointed by party leaders and required to carry out party orders. But the government's claims of support for legal reform and human rights, and an influx of information about Western legal concepts, have fueled public demands for a more independent judiciary.

China's citizens are asserting their rights and going to court in record numbers. About 4.4 million civil cases were filed in the last year, more than double the total a decade ago. Behind this surge in legal activity is a belief that everyone, even party officials, can be held accountable under the law, a belief promoted by a new generation of lawyers, judges and legal scholars trained after the death of Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong.

The party appears torn by this rising legal consciousness. It recognizes the value of an impartial judicial system to resolve disputes in a country with growing social tensions and an emerging capitalist economy, and it sees the potential of citizen lawsuits to curb corruption and improve governance. But it is also afraid that rule of law and independent courts might threaten its monopoly on power.

GEE, HE ALWAYS SEEMED SO HAPPY AND WELL-ADJUSTED:

Comedian George Carlin Enters Rehab (Reuters, December 28, 2004)

Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero who gained fame with routines about drugs and dirty words, said Monday he was undergoing treatment for excessive use of alcohol and prescription painkillers.

"I'm going into rehab because I use too much wine and Vicodin," Carlin, 67, whose latest book "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?" is a national bestseller, said in a statement. "No one told me I needed this; I recognized the problem and took the step myself."

The announcement came weeks after the veteran stand-up comic caused a stir at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas with a performance that questioned the intellect of people who visit the resort city.

According to media accounts of the incident, Carlin's bit about "moronic" Vegas tourists touched off a bitter, profane exchange with members of the audience, including one woman who shouted "Stop degrading us."

Carlin has acknowledged having battled cocaine addiction in the 1980s but said he quit on his own by tapering off the drug. He also has suffered three heart attacks.

SAVE US FROM OURSELVES....AGAIN...:

Europeans realize they need to humor Bush (John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, December 27, 2004, Minneapolis Star-Tribune)

Paradoxically, the very thing that neoconservatives detest most about European diplomacy -- that Machiavellian willingness to cut deals with anyone -- is now working in Bush's favor. But there is arguably more to this sea change than just a grumpy acceptance of the status quo. From a European perspective, three things are making it easier to warm to the Bush White House.

One is the death of Yasser Arafat. No issue divides Europe and the United States more keenly than the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. For the last few years, Europeans have criticized Bush for failing to put enough pressure on Israel to get out of the occupied territories and for refusing to deal with Arafat. But since Arafat's death, Europeans and Americans have been able to find common ground: supporting Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza, putting pressure on Israel to let the Palestinians hold elections and, covertly, backing Mahmoud Abbas to become the next Palestinian leader.

A second reason is Europe's growing worries about Islamic terrorism. The murder last month of Theo van Gogh, a provocative Dutch filmmaker, at the hands of an Islamic militant has been called Europe's 9/11. Though the two events are obviously not fully comparable, American conservatives, such as Francis Fukuyama and Bernard Lewis, have found a wider audience recently for the idea that radical Islam is inimical to European traditions of tolerance.

The third force is the reappearance, albeit in a milder form, of the threat that kept the transatlantic alliance together for half a century. The Russian bear is growling again. The Ukrainian election -- complete with its KGB-style poisoning of the opposition leader and heavy-handed electoral fraud -- has reminded European diplomats of Vladimir V. Putin's determination to control his "near abroad."

European bankers, who have invested a fortune in Russia, have been spooked by the state-sponsored bankruptcy of Yukos, once hailed as Russia's most Western company. These worries are magnified by the growing influence of the eight new members of the European Union from Central Europe, all of which are instinctively much more anti-Russian (and pro-American). [...]

Many European leaders once swallowed the Michael Moore version of history: that Bush was an ignorant interloper who stole the White House. His thumping reelection, however, shows that he represents a large body of conservative American opinion.

In short, Europeans are getting used to the idea that it is not Bush who is the exception, but the United States itself that is exceptional -- and that if they want to deal with this exceptional superpower they need to humor it rather than rile it.

LIVE THE MANDATUM NOVUM (via Mike Daley):

Asian Disaster Relief Via Evangelical Agency (Scott Ott, Scrappleface)

THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION IS NOT SATIRICAL...

Billions in Aid Needed for Devastated Areas..."

A note to ScrappleFace readers from Scott Ott:

In the wake of the earthquake and tsunami which has struck people around the Bay of Bengal, in addition to your prayers for the victims' families you may be looking for a trustworthy organization through which you can help with disaster relief. Other bloggers have provided links to the Red Cross, UN agencies and Indian government agencies, but if you're interested in giving through an agency that is committed to sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ through effective disaster relief, read on...

I have worked, briefly, side-by-side with crews from Southern Baptist Disaster Relief during a flood in Missouri and after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Southern Baptist Disaster Relief crews are organized, energetic and effective. They bring not only food, water, shelter and cleaning supplies to victims quickly, but they bring the kind of comfort that can only come from a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. They do not discriminate on any basis. Their help is freely available to all, without a litmus test or sermon.

Although I'm no longer a Southern Baptist, this morning I spoke with Terry Henderson, director of disaster relief for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and with an employee of the International Missions Board of the SBC. As of about 10:30 a.m. Eastern they told me that the SBC has people on the ground in the disaster region conducting needs assessment. Their work is complicated by the fact that many Christian missionaries in predominantly-Muslim countries must be discrete in order to avoid arrest and even death.

I encouraged Mr. Henderson to set up a PayPal account to receive donations, however, I'm guessing that a large organization like the SBC is unlikely to do this.

UPDATE: Here's the link where you can make a donation to Disaster Relief using your credit card.

Here's the link to the Disaster Relief website (It's technically part of the SBC's North American Missions Board (NAMB) but its ministry is global).

In the meantime, if you want to give now through an evangelical disaster relief agency, here are two options--one offline and one online:

1) Send a check to Disaster Relief (memo: "Asia Tsunami") to the following address:
Disaster Relief
Southern Baptist Convention
Box 6767
Richmond, VA 23233

100 percent of your tax-deductible contribution will go to the victims of the earthquake and tsunami.

2) If you would rather give by PayPal now, instead of waiting for SBC to get a PayPal link (which, as I said, may not happen), I have prevailed upon the board of missions of the Bible Fellowship Church, the denomination to which I belong, to set up a PayPal link and then forward contributions to SBC Disaster Relief and/or other reliable Christian disaster relief organizations. Bible Fellowship Church Board of Missions will keep none of the money and will send you a receipt for tax purposes.

ROSE IN BLOOM:

Palestinian elections: chance for a model democracy: The Jan. 9 vote wouldn't be possible without hard work and reforms of the past two years. (Timothy Rothermel, 12/27/04, CS Monitor)

For those who have worked over the years helping Palestinians strengthen their public institutions, the fact that the machinery is in place to carry out elections, as well as to provide other services expected of an efficient and democratic government, comes as no surprise. In fact, elections considered free and fair by the international community were carried out by the Palestinian Authority in those 1996 elections, and it remains one of the handful of governments in the region with a democratically chosen head of state. The development of these institutions has come about in spite of occupation, an economy in a downward spiral, and the deaths of almost 4,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis in the past four years.

Insofar as elections are concerned, 67 percent of the Palestinian voting population was registered during a voter-registration drive in spite of East Jerusalem disruptions in September and October. That's a far higher percentage of registered voters than in virtually all countries in the region, none of which are under occupation; higher than in several long established democracies in Europe; and about the same as in the US.

Registration is important and demonstrates, yet again, the capacity of Palestinian institutions and the democratic will of the Palestinian people. Whether Palestinians are actually able to vote come Jan. 9 and later will depend on their unfettered mobility and lack of intimidation in reaching approximately 2,000 polling stations in the West Bank and Gaza that will be available, as well as their ability to conduct political campaigns.

But it was not within the past few weeks that electoral machinery has sprung into life. As part of the Palestinians' own reform process, which was started in June 2002, electoral reform has been high on the Palestinian public agenda...

PREPPING THE BATTLEFIELD:

Jobs forecast sees more 'help wanted' signs across US: According to economists and employment analysts, the job picture will be brighter next year. (Ron Scherer, 12/28/04, CS Monitor)

In Huntsville, Ala., a defense contractor is looking for computer whizzes who can help the company simulate weapons systems. A hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, will be hiring 30 to 40 doctors and another 250 nurses, technicians, and clerks to back up the new MDs. And in San Francisco an online auto insurance company plans to double its 550-person workforce next year and will be looking for claims adjusters and customer-service specialists.

These are just some of the "hot" employment areas where job applicants will find someone to read their résumés. And these companies are far from alone: According to economists and employment analysts, the job picture will be brighter next year. Already, job bulletin boards like craigslist.com are seeing an uptick in postings, with some cities experiencing significant jumps over last year.

Expectations are for the unemployment rate to fall from the current 5.4 percent to as low as 5 percent. More important, the economy could be creating up to 225,000 new jobs each month, more than enough to absorb the 125,000 workers who enter the labor force each month.

"It may be the best year since 2000 in terms of the general job market," predicts Mark Zandi of Economy.com. "There will rising labor force participation and fewer underemployed."

BEST OF '04:

Hookie Awards, Part 2 (DAVID BROOKS, 12/28/04, NY Times)

On Saturday I handed out the first batch of Hookie Awards. These prizes, determined by a rigorously subjective scientific formula, go to some of the important political essays of 2004, and celebrate the legacy of great public intellectuals like Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell and Irving Howe.

So here's the second batch...

MORE (from the Archives):
The Hookie Awards (DAVID BROOKS, 12/25/04, NY Times)

Some people say that the age of the public intellectuals is over, that there are no longer many grand thinkers like Lionel Trilling or Reinhold Niebuhr, writing ambitious essays for the educated reader. It's true that there are fewer philosophes writing about the nature and destiny of man, but there are still hundreds of amazing essays written every year.

In celebration of that fact, and in case you're looking for some mind-expanding holiday reading, I've decided to create the Hookie Awards. Named after the great public intellectual Sidney Hook, they go to the authors of some of the most important essays written in 2004.

I should mention that essays for The New York Times and other newspapers are not eligible for these prizes, and that if you go to the Web site version of this column, at www.nytimes.com, you will find links to the winning essays.

Here is the first batch of Hookie Laureates...

ECONOMICS:

The Neoconomists: The Bush administration's other revolutionaries. (Daniel Altman, May 10, 2004, Slate)

Health Savings Accounts great plan for health care (Terry Savage, January 22, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

Fear of Hell Might Fire Up the Economy (Kevin L. Kliesen and Frank A. Schmid, July 29, 2004, Regional Economist)

The End Of the Age Of Inflation (Robert J. Samuelson, December 2, 2004, Washington Post)

WHY GOLD? (James Surowiecki, 2004-11-22, The New Yorker)

The 50¢-a-Gallon Solution (GREGG EASTERBROOK, 5/25/04, NY Times)

RONALD REAGAN:

The prisoners' conscience (Natan Sharansky, Jerusalem Post, June 6th, 2004)

Ronald Reagan's creative destruction (Spengler, Jun 7, '04, Asia Times)

THE UNKNOWABLE: Ronald Reagan’s amazing, mysterious life. (Edmund Morris, The New Yorker, 6/21/04)

In Solidarity: The Polish people, hungry for justice, preferred "cowboys" over Communists. (LECH WALESA, June 11, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

Freedom's Team: How Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II won the Cold War. (John Fund, June 7, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

The Intellectual Origins of Ronald Reagan's Faith (Paul Kengor, Ph.D., April 30, 2004, Heritage Lecture)

Reaganism: The Gipper's brand of conservatism is unique to America. (JOHN MICKLETHWAIT AND ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE, June 8, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

GEORGE BUSH:

President Bush has already left a big mark on history (David Shribman, Oct 8, 2004, Concord Monitor)

BUSHSPEAK: The President’s vernacular style. (PHILIP GOUREVITCH, 2004-09-06, The New Yorker)

George Bush and the Treacherous Country (Steve Erickson, 2/13/04, LA Weekly)

Bush Brought a Gift for the Pope (Sandro Magister, www.chiesa)

Ideology vs. Practicality - A Hamiltonian GOP? (Adam Yoshida, September 10, 2004, Insight)

A New GOP? (James W. Ceaser and Daniel DiSalvol, Fall 2004, Public Interest)

GEOPOLITICS:

The Fruits of Appeasement (Victor Davis Hanson, Spring 2004, City Journal)

The Muslim Renovatio and U.S. Strategy (Michael Vlahos, 04/27/2004, Tech Central Station)

The coming of Shia Iraq: After 500 years of Sunni rule, Iraq's election will finally hand power to the Shia majority. (Bartle Bull, November 2004, Prospect)

A World Without Power (Niall Ferguson, July/August 2004, Foreign Policy)

The Politics of the Gang (Lee Harris, 03/02/2004, Tech Central Station)

The Media and Medievalism (Robert D. Kaplan, December 2004, Policy Review)

Gulliver’s travails: The U.S. in the post-Cold-War world (John O’Sullivan, October 2004, New Criterion)

America Unlimited: The Radical Sources of the Bush Doctrine (Karl E. Meyer, Spring 2004, World Policy Journal)

Why Is Bermuda Richer Than Venezuela? (Carlos A. Ball, 06/01/2004, Tech Central Station)

Four Surprises in Global Demography (Nicholas Eberstadt, August 20, 2004, AEI Online)

Hating America (Bruce Bawer, Spring 2004, Hudson Review)

DECENT LEFT?:

A Friendly Drink in a Time of War (Paul Berman, Winter 2004, Dissent)

The Cult of Che: Don't applaud The Motorcycle Diaries. (Paul Berman, Sept. 24, 2004, Slate)

A DEMOCRATIC WORLD: Can liberals take foreign policy back from the Republicans? (GEORGE PACKER, 2004-02-09, The New Yorker)

The Case for George W. Bush: i.e., what if he's right? (Tom Junod, Aug 01 '04, Esquire)

The Fire Next Time (Joseph Bottum, Spring 2004, The Public Interest)

The Real Inquisition: Investigating the popular myth. (Thomas F. Madden, 6/18/04, National Review)

The atheist sloth ethic, or why Europeans don't believe in work (Niall Ferguson, 07/08/2004, Daily Telegraph)

The Enemies of Religious Liberty (James Hitchcock, February 2004, First Things)

Our Union’s Jewish State (David Klinghoffer, 3/17/04, The Forward)

The evil that men do (Theodore Dalrymple, 3/20/04, The Spectator)

Bad and bored (Theodore Dalrymple, 9/04/04, The Spectator)

The Future Belongs to the Fecund (James Pinkerton, 09/01/2004, Tech Central Station)

Athens and Jerusalem: Reflections on Hellenism and the Gospel (Dr. John Mark Reynolds, 7/16/04, Orthodoxy Today)

Aquinas for the Democratic Age: a review of Liberty, Wisdom, and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory, by John P. Hittinger (Robert Kraynak, Spring 2004, Claremont Review of Books)

That Other Church: Let's face it: Secularism is a religion. Let's treat it as such. (David Klinghoffer, 12/21/2004, Christianity Today)

One nation under God: The US is powerful and religious; the EU is weak and secular. Mark Steyn wonders whether it is any coincidence (Mark Steyn, 3/15/04, The Spectator)

A democratic & republican religion (Marc M. Arkin, Summer 2004, New Criterion)

Prince Charles: Could the anti-Enlightenment views of King Charles III destroy the "welfare monarchy"? (Tristram Hunt, June 2004, Prospect uk)

The incoming sea of faith: atheism has been discredited by the collapse of communism and the postmodern need for tolerance (Alister McGrath, 9/18/04, The Spectator)

The Trouble with Libertarianism (Edward Feser, 07/20/2004, Tech Central Station)

HOMOSEXUALITY:

If we wanted to be straight, we would be: Attempts to identify a genetic basis for homosexuality refuse to accept that sexual desire is a social construct (Julie Bindel, December 14, 2004, The Guardian)

Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization (Orson Scott Card, February 15, 2004, The Rhinoceros Times)

DARWINISM:

Planet with a Purpose: If Earth is an organism getting ever more complex, doesn't that mean humans might have been made for a reason? (Robert Wright, BeliefNet)

The Malthusian Trap (Benjamin Marks, November 23, 2004, Mises.org)

The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories (Stephen C. Meyer, August 28, 2004, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington)

MISC.:

The Perpetual Adolescent: And the triumph of the youth culture. (Joseph Epstein, 03/15/2004, Weekly Standard)

George S. Schuyler and Black History Month(s) (Nicholas Stix, February 23, 2004, Mich News)

The Middle Ages of reason: It was the medieval world that dragged us into the future, not the reactionary Renaissance (Terry Jones, February 8, 2004, The Observer)

Traducing Solzhenitsyn (Daniel J. Mahoney, August/September 2004, First Things)

The Scientist and the Poet (Paul A. Cantor, Winter 2004, New Atlantis)

Remembering the Warsaw Uprising: Sixty years later, a look back at the longest and bloodiest urban insurgency of the Second World War. (Maciej Siekierski, Fall 2004, Hoover Digest)

In Warsaw, a 'Good War' Wasn't (Anne Applebaum, June 2, 2004, Washington Post)

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN:

Old Songs Generate New Cash for Artists (BEN SISARIO, 12/28/04, NY Times)

The amount paid by SoundExchange, the sole collector and distributor of these royalties, is a fraction of what is made in royalties by composers and publishers from traditional radio, but it has grown significantly in recent years with the rise and expansion of the satellite radio services XM and Sirius.

The main difference with the new royalties, though, is that they are paid not to composers and publishers but to the performers - the singers and musicians in a song - and the copyright holder of the recording, which in most cases is a record label.

SoundExchange, a nonprofit agency in Washington, is authorized by the United States Copyright Office to collect royalties from digital broadcasters and pay them directly to performing artists. Founded in 2000 and initially part of the Recording Industry Association of America, SoundExchange made its first payments in 2001 and, after a slow beginning, has begun to double its annual collections; in 2005 it expects to collect and allocate $35 million.

But the biggest obstacle the agency faces, it says, is getting the word out to artists and registering them for payment. These royalties for new and unfamiliar formats are a category of payment that performing artists in the United States have never had: a performance right.

"This is a brand-new right," said John Simson, the executive director of SoundExchange. "A lot of artists are unaware of it, and we're working against 80 years of a music industry without a performance right." (In Europe and elsewhere around the world, performing artists are paid a royalty for radio play, but because the United States has not paid the fee in the past, it has generally not been reciprocated by other countries.)

In a practice well known to musicians and record companies but obscure to the public at large, traditional radio - or "terrestrial radio," as it is now known in the music industry - pays a royalty only to a song's publishers and composers, not to its performers or the owners of the recording itself. "When a typical Beatles song gets played on traditional radio," Mr. Simson said, "John and Paul get paid royalties, but not George or Ringo."

Musicians and record labels have long complained of this arrangement. In the 1990's, two federal laws established a royalty for performers for Web and satellite radio and digital music services like Muzak, DMX and Music Choice. The Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 established for the first time that the performers of a song and the copyright holder of the recording would be paid a special royalty separate from those paid to songwriters and publishers.

The rate for this royalty, set by the librarian of Congress, is 7 cents per song per 100 listeners, for most digital services. In the abbreviated nine-month accounting period of 2004, SoundExchange (which does not pay the composer or the publisher of a song; those royalties are paid by other agencies) distributed $17.5 million collected from satellite and Web broadcasters, Mr. Simson said.

That number is still tiny compared with the royalties paid from traditional radio - about $350 million a year, according to industry estimates - but it is growing fast.

YOUR DOCTOR ISN'T YOUR SOCIAL WORKER:

A Young Doctor's Hardest Lesson: Keep Your Mouth Shut (KENT SEPKOWITZ, M.D., 12/28/04, NY Times)

[L]ast month, my wife and I bumped into an acquaintance of hers while walking along the street. The person, unbeknownst to my wife, is a patient of mine, someone whom I treat for a chronic infection. After the patient and I shared a moment of mutual panic, we three chatted amicably and moved on.

Except, that evening, my wife kept asking me why I was being so quiet and, well, boring. And I suddenly saw the problem: doctors are waterlogged with secrets, hundreds of them, thousands of them.

Each day brings a new batch: patients' admissions about drug use or sexual indiscretion, a hidden family, a long-held dream, an ancient heartache, undisclosed H.I.V. infection.

Over the years, this begins to add up, the bulge expands, the joints get stiff. Yet the secret - the consequences of our ever-expanding repository of others' secrets - remains, well, secretive. The situation simply is not addressed, not at the start, middle, or the end of a career.

The most difficult aspect of a training doctor's life is not suddenly bearing witness to someone else's pain and death; it is not adjusting to arduous work hours; it is not the imposing amount to be learned and synthesized. These surely are intense, life-transforming endeavors but are still related to other experiences.

No, the biggest shock along the road to becoming a doctor is the startling revelation that you can ask and the patient will tell anything.

PLACEBO LAND:

Rising prescription drug use points to deeper problems: Balancing medication for minor and serious ailments is a challenge amid an aging, heavier populace and aggressive marketing tactics. (Elizabeth Large, December 27, 2004, Baltimore Sun)

When Margaret Herlth wakes up in the morning, 13 prescription drugs and two over-the-counter supplements are as much a part of her routine as a first cup of coffee. That's a lot of pills, but not a highly unusual number for an 80-year-old with serious health problems, including cardiovascular disease and breathing difficulties.

"They do make me feel better if I take them," says Herlth, who lives in southwest Baltimore. "I've been in and out of the hospital so many times. Each time they give me new pills, but they never take any away."

These days, if you're elderly, a medicine cabinet full of prescription drugs is par for the course. But even relatively young, healthy adults may be prescribed medicine as a preemptive strike to lower their cholesterol and blood pressure, to deal with a touch of arthritis, to ward off osteoporosis, to stop the symptoms of seasonal allergies or to fight depression.

Many people add to the list by taking herbal supplements. They also reach for the Advil bottle at the first sign of a headache and chew antacids when they get heartburn.

This month, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported its latest data on prescription drug use. The agency estimates that nearly half of all Americans take at least one prescription drug and one in six takes at least three. Over the last decade, the percentage of people taking one or more prescription medicines has increased from 39% to 44%.

We're a medicated society, of course. But the sheer number of drugs we take suggests that we may be an overmedicated society.

CHOOSING SIDES:

A Devil's Island for Our Times: How can we let this evil persist? (Robert Scheer, December 28, 2004, LA Times)

It is time to invade Cuba and put an end to what has become another Devil's Island in the annals of government-sanctioned torture. The barbaric treatment of political prisoners on the island is made no more palatable by being conducted in the name of an ideology that claims to be liberating the world from its shackles.

...AND LOWER...:

Slump in Oil Likely to Pull Gas Lower: California pump prices hit a 10-month low. Crude futures fall on weak demand and warm weather forecasts. (Elizabeth Douglass, December 28, 2004, LA Times)

California gasoline prices have fallen to their lowest level since February, and steep declines Monday in petroleum futures pointed to cheaper gas ahead.

The statewide average cost of self-serve regular slipped 3.9 cents over seven days to $2.01 a gallon, according to a weekly survey released Monday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Ten straight weeks of price decreases have cut 39 cents off the average cost of gasoline in the state.

Though an increasing number of stations are offering regular at $1.99 a gallon — or lower — the averages for Los Angeles, San Francisco and the state as a whole haven't been under $2 since Feb. 16, EIA figures showed. And the new average is 41.5 cents higher than last year.

Nationwide, the average fell 2.4 cents to $1.791 a gallon, 31.3 cents above year-earlier levels, the EIA said.

Analysts attributed the recent decline to weaker seasonal demand for gasoline as well as growing inventories across the country of oil, gasoline and other fuels.

Two additional factors — a new forecast for warmer weather in the East and word that storms and airport glitches cut holiday demand for gasoline and jet fuel — sparked a dramatic sell-off in oil-related commodities Monday at the New York Mercantile Exchange.

"Everything really got hit hard today," said Eric Bolling, an independent trader on the Nymex. "The trend is down … and there's no reason for it to stop right now."

THE LEFT’S NEXT RALLYING CRY: SAVE THE SUNNIS!

Main Sunni party pulls out of Iraqi election (Michael Howard, The Guardian, December 28th, 2004)

Iraq's largest mainstream Sunni Muslim party pulled out of the election race yesterday, saying the violence plaguing areas north and west of Baghdad made a "free and fair vote" on January 30 impossible.

"We are withdrawing," said Mohsen Abdel Hamid, leader of the Iraqi Islamic party, as he announced the latest setback to plans to stage the country's first credible elections.

"We are not calling for a boycott, but we said we would take part only if certain conditions had been met and they have not," he said.

The moderate Islamist party wanted the poll postponed by up to six months, hoping that huge security problems and a lack of public awareness about the vote in Sunni Arab-dominated areas could be rectified.

The party has emerged as the most moderate political group among the Sunni population. It had a seat on the now defunct governing council and was part of the interim government.[...]

A western diplomat in Baghdad said: "The effective disenfranchisement of the Sunni Arabs could have dire consequences for the political security of Iraq. We can't afford to marginalise the Sunnis even further. It will do nothing to stem the rising tide of factionalism and sectarianism."

The Bush administration is reportedly looking at ways to guarantee Sunni politicians seats in the national assembly, as well as a senior office of state.

But Iraq's interim leaders know any decision to delay or skew the result could alienate leading figures among the Shia majority, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. "We are damned if we go ahead, and damned if we delay," said an Iraqi minister who requested anonymity. He said the government appeared to be "in a state of flux" over the timing.

An aide to the ayatollah said: "[Sistani] does not want a delay in the election. The Iraqi people have been waiting for too long."

He played down concerns that a Sunni boycott would deny the election legitimacy: "If some people decide not to participate then they cannot claim that the elections are illegitimate. We cannot be held hostage by the Ba'athists and the Sunni terrorists."

Assuming there is any truth to this, is it wise for Washington to try and play Founding Father of Iraqi federalism?

PESKY KID BROTHERS

From America's heartland: Europe drops out of the picture (Wayne Merry, International Herald Tribune, December 28th, 2004)

Beyond economics, however, Europe pretty much drops off the radar screen. The European popular obsession with American power and influence has no counterpart in America, even among people with strong interest in international issues. Europe simply stopped being an issue when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union imploded. Europe as the locus of American attention and anxiety during the cold war is entirely a thing of the past. Among students, interest in the cold war ranks with Vietnam and well below the American Civil War.

I suspect most Europeans - with their daily diet of news, views and theories about America - would be surprised how utterly asymmetric is the interest. Americans care very much about the external world, but about the trouble spots (the Middle East, North Korea, Africa), transnational issues (terrorism, nuclear proliferation, AIDS, environment), and countries seen to be of the future (China and India). Europe is not a problem, not global, and of the past. A nice place to visit, but pricey.

Politically, beyond the lonely figure of Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, no European looms large in American eyes. Even President Jacques Chirac of France is seen as a nuisance rather than a force to be reckoned with. There is a realistic understanding - albeit accompanied by annoyance - that Europe will do the minimum in Iraq. There is also a strong sense that it is time for Europe to look after its own defense and to pay its own security bills.

While Americans would prefer a more active European partner in dealing with the challenges of tomorrow, they don't expect it. In part, this reflects a different view of what those challenges may be. Americans share European concerns about global ecology, health and poverty, but worry more about terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons and "rogue states." They would like multilateral solutions, but doubt there will be any real substitute for traditional power.

Americans perceive a Europe that values comfort and safety, but that is also in long-term demographic decline and disengagement from unpleasant realities. War may no longer be part of European life (for which Americans think they merit some of the credit), but in American eyes it is a fantasy to project this reality on the wider world.

One of the psychological fallouts of multilateral trans-nationalism is how it provides a chimera of importance and influence to smaller nations and especially to their politicians and diplomats. Countries like Canada and the Nordics are notorious for dreaming up grand initiatives to cure the world’s ills and setting out to market them at never-ending multilateral meetings. They aren’t all useless or ill-founded, but domestic politics and the conceit that they flow from a more virtuous wellspring than anything the powerful can come up with quickly corrupts them and results in a single-minded focus on process and rhetoric. Their sponsors often end up looking like desperate itinerant salesmen trying to push goods past their stale date.

The traditional European powers now seem to be in the game. One of regular news items of 2004 was Jacques Chirac in some remote and savage land flogging something called “multipolarity” to the point of making a complete ass of himself, as when he described the spread of French as an environmental issue before an undoubtedly puzzled Vietnamese audience. The Germans have rediscovered the joys of wandering the globe to preach for peace, and all of them, including Britain, seemed bound and determined to play a role in the Middle East for what reason nobody knows. That they are being played for useful fools by Iran seems to have escaped them completely.

Europe still has economic clout, and may well for a long time, but trade is trade and it is easy to wildly overestimate its role in geopolitics, as Europe itself found out in 1914. (It is ironic that a continent that has always disdained Americans for their commercial pre-occupations now measures its worth and influence almost entirely by the quality of its gadgets.) Americans would be wise to try and put the sense of betrayal over Iraq behind them and accept that European impotence will continue to spawn chest-thumping, meddlesome behaviours and increasingly defiant assertions of importance. It is a function of decline and is part of both human nature and that famous European modesty we all know and love. Given the challenges that lie ahead with Russia, China, India, Korea, Japan, the Middle East and Latin America, (not to mention the pathologies of Africa), they simply aren’t worth the sweat. They are not really allies anymore, at least not in any substantive sense. Better to see them as a lion sees his cubs–a member of some atavistically-defined family who one can’t stop worrying about but who merits a fearsome swat from time to time.

THANKS OSAMA!:

Censors ease up on Syrian press: New information minister encourages more critical media in a country known for its censored press. (Nicholas Blanford, 12/28/04, CS Monitor)

Syria's press has been regarded as little more than a banal mouthpiece for the state since the 1963 coup by the ruling Baath Party. The state's stranglehold on the media began to loosen in the wake of Bashar al-Assad becoming president in 2000. In 2002, the first privately owned political weekly, Abyad wa Aswad (White and Black), was granted a license and has since become a keen critic of government performance. "The general trend is for change now.... If we want this country to progress, we have to focus on the bad points," says Ayman al-Daquq, who edits the magazine.

Two years ago, satellite dishes became legal, granting Syrians access to television channels from around the world. The number of foreign magazines and newspapers distributed in Syria has almost doubled.

But the pace of change increased from October following a cabinet reshuffle. The new interior minister, Ghazi Kenaan, a former general in military intelligence, voiced what most Syrians thought when he declared the local press "unreadable."

Mr. Dakhlallah, former editor of Al-Baath, the mouthpiece of the Baath Party, began telephoning journalists and urging them to adopt a bolder approach, taking the traditionally cautious Syrian reporters by surprise.

Mr. Haydar of Al-Arabiya says that for the first time he is free to record interviews with people from banned political parties on previously taboo subjects. "They say how they want to abolish the security law, free political prisoners, see the return of exiles, and hold free elections," he says. "I don't feel the tension while working anymore. I can go on air at any moment and talk about anything."

The information minister is supervising the restructuring of some media institutions, combining the organizations that publish the Al-Baath and Al-Thawra dailies. Reporters at Tishreen have been told they can no longer copy articles straight from the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency. Al-Thawra is building a fresh reputation for running hard-hitting stories on social issues.

Ministers, who once avoided the media, are now obliged to talk to the press. Two weeks ago, Mr Kenaan, the interior minister, gave a statement to the press within an hour of a bomb blast that almost killed a Palestinian militant, an unusually swift reaction from a traditionally cautious regime.

The changes are like a jolt of electricity to older reporters who are finding that holding onto their jobs will depend on future performance. "The old school [of reporters] can't understand the change. Now the good are being singled out from the bad," says Mr. al-Daquq, the editor of Abyad wa Aswad.

TANCREDO'S NIGHTMARE:

Gonzales's Journey: From the Stands to the Heights: Migrant Workers' Son Worked Way to Air Force Academy, Harvard, a Top Law Firm -- and Government (Sylvia Moreno, December 28, 2004, Washington Post)

One Saturday afternoon this May, Alberto R. Gonzales addressed the 2004 graduating class of Rice University and talked about growing up in an impoverished household on the north edge of Houston.

His parents, former migrant workers, had only eight years of schooling between them and barely spoke English. The family of 10 lived in a small two-bedroom house with no hot water and no telephone. There was no tradition of education in the family, only of working hard to scrape by.

Gonzales took his first job at 12 to help support the family, and as he carried trays of soft drinks in the upper deck of Rice Stadium on football Saturdays he aspired to a better life. "I would stare over the stadium walls and watch the Rice students stroll back to the colleges, and I wondered what it would be like to be one of you, a Rice student," Gonzales said.

He went on to be one of them and much more. "In many ways, Al embodies the American dream," says President Bush, who often talks about the real-life Horatio Alger aspects of Gonzales's life.

Today, Gonzales is Bush's nominee for attorney general, the nation's top law enforcement officer. He is the first Hispanic named to the post.

The journey reflects a life of extraordinary achievement for this child of migrants. Gonzales is a Rice alumnus; a graduate of Harvard Law School; a former partner in Houston's largest law firm, Vinson & Elkins; a top appointee in Bush's gubernatorial administration in Texas; and, for the past four years, the White House counsel to Bush.

NOW GOVERN:

Hamas gains grassroots edge: Hamas made significant gains against the ruling Fatah party in Thursday's municipal elections. (Ben Lynfield, 12/27/04)

Huddling near a gas heater in the mayor's office of this small town near Bethlehem, Fatah campaign manager Atef Rabaya is still reeling.

"I'm trying to wake up from this shock," he says. "The Imams in the mosques must have persuaded people to sympathize with the Islamists."

The shock that Mr. Rabaya was dealt was the stunning victory by Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, in his town of Obadeiah, in Thursday's municipal elections.

The elections, the first phase of polling that is to eventually include all West Bank and Gaza Strip municipalities, saw Hamas score victories against the ruling Fatah movement, which nevertheless carried a majority of the councils.

When Hamas candidates assume office shortly, it will be the biggest hold on power for a movement that until now has functioned largely as an opposition - and is perhaps best known for its suicide bombings against Israeli targets.

"This is the first time Hamas will take responsibility in the society," says Hafez Barghouthi, editor of the Palestinian Authority (PA) affiliated al-Hayat al-Jadida newspaper. "It is the first time it will have to go beyond criticism of the PA, to work in the field like a party responsible for coordinating daily life, and as a party with a duty to society."

WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED ON:

The new status quo (Michael Barone, December 27, 2004, Townhall)

Looking back on election year 2004, I am struck by how many of the constituencies supporting Democratic candidates oppose, rather than seek, change -- how they are motivated not by ideas about how to change the future, but by something like nostalgia for the past.

Take black Americans, the most heavily Democratic constituency -- 88 percent to 11 percent for John Kerry in the 2004 NEP exit poll. Blacks have been voting for Democratic presidential candidates by similar margins since 1964, when Republican Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act.

That was a big issue, then. And never mind that a higher proportion of Republicans than Democrats voted for the bill in Congress -- Goldwater did oppose it. But the Civil Rights Act has long since become uncontroversial, racial discrimination disapproved and integration of schools, workplaces and public accommodations widely accepted. Yet 40 years later, the image of the Republican Party as unsympathetic to equal rights for blacks seems to persist. Black voters seem still focused on a moment in history 40 years ago.

Or look at the antiwar constituency, an important part of the Democratic coalition in 2004. These voters denounce the war in Iraq in much the same terms, with much the same arguments, that they denounced, or have heard that their elders denounced, the American military effort in Vietnam. We're in a quagmire, committing atrocities, doomed to failure.

Right down to the signs and slogans, antiwar rallies seem a re-enactment of the tie-dyed past. In the waning days of the campaign, John Kerry and John Edwards slyly suggested that George W. Bush would bring back the military draft.

The war in Iraq is different from the war in Vietnam in so many respects that it is hard to know where to start listing the ways. But for some large portion of Democratic voters, it will forever be 1968.

On the economic front as well, Democrats seem to be looking more to the past than the future. The Social Security system as it exists is obviously not sustainable: There will be too few workers supporting too many retirees. It will be in good shape, some Democrats argue, until 2042, so there is no need to worry for it. But people who turn 67 in 2042 were 29-year-old workers and voters in the 2004 election. An argument that concedes that Social Security will be in trouble when they reach retirement age can hardly be expected to appeal to them. But these Democrats see no need to change a system created in 1935.

MEET THE FOCKERS (VIA EVE TUSHNET)

Understanding Terror Networks (Marc Sageman, Foreign Policy Research Institute, 11/1/04)

But after 2001, when the U.S. destroyed the camps and housing and turned off the funding, bin Laden was left with little control. The movement has now degenerated into something like the internet. Spontaneous groups of friends, as in Madrid and Casablanca, who have few links to any central leadership, are generating sometimes very dangerous terrorist operations, notwithstanding their frequent errors and poor training. What tipped the Madrid group to operation was probably the arrest of some of their friends after the Casablanca bombing. Most of them were Moroccans and the Moroccan government asked the Spaniards to arrest several militants. So the group was activated, wanting to do something. Their inspiration—the document “Jihad al-Iraq”— probably was found on the Web. Six of its 42 pages argued that if there were bombings right before Spanish election, it could effect a change of government and the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq, the expulsion of the “far enemy” from a core Arab state. From conception to execution, the operation took about five weeks.

We hear that Al Qaeda plans its attacks for years and years. It may have before 9-11, but not anymore. Operatives in caves simply cannot communicate with people in the field. The network has been fairly well broken by our intelligence services. The network is now self-organized from the bottom up, and is very decentralized. With local initiative and flexibility, it’s very robust. True, two-thirds to three- quarters of the old leaders have been taken out, but that doesn’t mean that we’re home free. The network grows organically, like the Internet. We couldn’t have identified the Madrid culprits, because we wouldn’t have known of them until the first bomb exploded.

So in 2004, Al Qaeda has new leadership. In a way today’s operatives are far more aggressive and senseless than the earlier leaders. The whole network is held together by the vision of creating the Salafi state. A fuzzy, idea-based network really requires an idea-based solution. The war of ideas is very important and this is one we haven’t really started to engage yet.

I should also note that the first and best explication I have seen of the dynamic by which exposure to western culture turns young Muslim men into extremists came in a comment here by M. Ali Choudhury. If I remember correctly, he claimed to have been saved from extremism by soccer, which is at best a matter of opinion.

AN ONLY MILDLY WARRANTED TRIUMPHALISM:

The Year Of Blogging Dangerously (Edward B. Driscoll, Jr., 12/27/04, Tech Central Station)

[F]rom the home office in San Jose, California, allow me to present, via my 1972 IBM Selectric and my jammies, the top ten events that ricocheted through the Blogosphere in 2004. They're presented in order of importance, not chronologically; no doubt, you'd assemble a very different list; but I trust you'll agree with at least some of these choices. [...]

6. The Exit Polls: On Election Tuesday, depending on whom you want to believe, either the networks or the Kerry camp released mid-afternoon polling data to several extremely prominent Websites, including Matt Drudge on the right, and Anna Marie Cox's Wonkette Weblog on the left. The result added even more of a roller coaster quality to an already manic day, leaving Kerry voters temporarily euphoric, and Bush supporters in a state of sullen disillusionment.

THERE'S NO FUTURE IN THE EAST:

Scent of victory for Yushchenko as Ukraine shifts to the West: The 'Orange Revolution' is set to sweep the pro-Western presidential candidate to power (Jeremy Page, 12/27/04, Times of London)

UKRAINE’S opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko, claimed victory early today in a re-run of a presidential election that has polarised the nation and rekindled Cold War-style rivalry between Russia and the West.

Mr Yushchenko told his supporters that Ukraine was turning over a new political page, after partial results projected him winning an easy victory over his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych, the Prime Minister.

Exit polls had predicted a crushing defeat for Mr Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Prime Minister, whose victory in last month’s flawed election was overturned amid opposition protests dubbed the “Orange Revolution”.

“Today, Ukraine is beginning a new political life I am aware of the extent of responsibility and I will be worthy of your trust,” Mr Yushchenko said at his campaign headquarters.

With ballots from just over 40 per cent of precincts counted, Mr Yushchenko was leading by 56.7 per cent to 39.5 per cent, election officials said. After the polls closed, tens of thousands of opposition supporters descended on Independence Square in Kiev, where they protested for two weeks after the previous vote. With fireworks bursting overhead, they celebrated the almost certain victory of their candidate.

In contrast, the streets of Mr Yanukovych’s power base, Donetsk, were largely empty.

“We can now move faster towards Europe. Ukraine will have democracy not just on paper but in reality,” said Volodya Geroseomenko, 32, a railway worker wrapped in an orange pro-Yushchenko cloak and waving an orange flag.

PATIENCE:

Stop Doubting Thomas (Jonathan Turley, December 27, 2004, LA Times)

Over the course of the last decade, Thomas has quietly assembled an impressive power base in Washington, built the old-fashioned way — one appointment at a time. He maintains the highest degree of influence while preserving the lowest possible profile.

He has secured top positions for his clerks and associates throughout the government, from the White House counsel's office to the Justice Department to the United States Sentencing Commission. This cadre also includes an array of academic leaders, like Berkeley law professor (and former Justice official) John Yoo and media figures like talk-show host Laura Ingraham.

On Capitol Hill, Thomas is often seen lunching with congressional leaders, and he makes strategic appearances at conservative conferences. Various federal appellate and district judges (including Democrats) owe their confirmations to Thomas, who interceded with the Senate Republicans on their behalf.

The Washington Post told one story of how he works in behalf of conservative African American lawyers. A lawyer named Brian Jones was being vetted as assistant attorney general for civil rights — a plum job. Jones unexpectedly got a call at a pizzeria shortly before his interview. Thomas was reportedly direct: "Don't take that job." "What job?" Jones asked. "You know the job I'm talking about." Thomas considered it a "black job" and did not want Jones stereotyped, as Thomas had been as civil rights chief and chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. [...]

I disagree with many of his opinions, but Thomas is neither an embarrassment nor a dolt — at least no more so than most of the other justices on the court. He is, however, a patient man — and time is on his side.

THAT 100,000th VICTIM GOES BEYOND THE PALE:

Sovereignty for a New Century: When a country fails to protect its people, other nations must act. (John D. Podesta, December 27, 2004, LA Times)

Since the end of World War II, governments around the world have been given virtual carte blanche to mistreat their citizens without fear of outside interference. Despite numerous well-meaning resolutions on the importance of global human rights and the well-being of individuals, the principle of state sovereignty has been deemed paramount; the United Nations Charter includes a clear prohibition on interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states.

But in today's world, indifference is not an option. The principle of sovereignty must not only guarantee nations the right to be secure within their borders, it also must hold them responsible for safeguarding the security of their citizens.

As we are seeing in Darfur, Sudan — where government-backed militias have driven more than 1 million civilians from their homes over the last 18 months — conflicts within less powerful, often dysfunctional states can turn whole nations into killing fields.

In Cambodia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, millions died and countless others were maimed or raped as the world looked on and did little or nothing. It is true that these outrages did not pose an immediate threat to our national security, but they did diminish our humanity.

This month, a high-level 16-member panel on "threats, challenges and change" organized by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the world to accept its "responsibility to protect." To back up this mission, it called for an expanded Security Council with greater authority to protect people at risk, even the right of armed intervention if necessary. The panel's recommendations are based on a groundbreaking 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, a Canadian initiative that took up Annan's call for new thinking on these issues.

Both reports concluded that in extreme cases, the principle of sovereignty and nonintervention must give way to protection.

This line should be crossed only in cases in which we face massive loss of life, ethnic cleansing or, indeed, genocide. Armed intervention should be considered only when other means have proved ineffective, and the force used should be proportionate to the task.

PRIOR RESTRAINT?:

New GOP Senators May Back Filibuster Limits: Others say a rule change to prevent Democrats from blocking judicial nominees would be at odds with renewed efforts at bipartisanship. (Nick Anderson, December 27, 2004, LA Times)

Sen.-elect John Thune (R-S.D.) said he wanted to put an end to the Democratic tactic of filibustering high-profile judicial nominees — which involves essentially talking the nominations to death without allowing an up or down confirmation vote.

Senate Republican leaders, bolstered by the party's Nov. 2 victories, are weighing a move to deny Democrats the right to filibuster judicial nominees indefinitely in the coming Congress. The issue is especially sensitive since Bush's announcement last week that he would renominate seven people for appellate courts who were stymied by filibusters during the last Congress — and in light of the possibility of upcoming Supreme Court vacancies.

"I'm open to supporting that kind of a rule change where judges are concerned," Thune said. He acknowledged that it would be "somewhat controversial, and everybody would argue, and certainly the minority would argue against that."

Sen.-elect Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), appearing with Thune, said he too would seek to end "apparent obstruction" by Democrats. "I think if it continues, then we have to look at those rules and some of the precedents that exist to move these appointments to the floor and have them debated for confirmation," Isakson said.

But Sen.-elect Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) said a Republican bid for a rule change would poison the atmosphere of the Senate just when Bush was seeking to move a second-term agenda.

"I think it's going to be a bloody fight," Salazar said on the CBS show, "and I would hope that it can be avoided, and I would ask my colleagues to try to avoid that in the U.S. Senate. I think that the best thing to do is for the president to have consultation both with Republicans and with Democrats prior to making the appointments."

FUNNY HOW POLITICS WORKS:

Bush Plan Could Imperil Tax Write-Off for New York (IAN URBINA, 12/27/04, NY Times)

As the Bush administration looks to revamp the tax code, New York officials say they are particularly worried about one idea being considered: eliminating the federal deduction for state and local taxes.

If the president pursues this plan, New York State would lose about $37 billion per year in federal tax deductions, more than almost any other state, according to Internal Revenue Service data. The change would affect about 3.2 million households in New York, three-quarters of which are middle- and low-income, tax records indicate.

"This change would be one of the worst things for New York to came out of Washington in a long time," said Senator Charles E. Schumer. "But if they take this route they can expect a serious fight."

With a 7.7 percent maximum state income tax rate, the second-highest in the country behind California's 9.3 percent, New York would be especially affected because its residents use those taxes to take large federal deductions. About 38 percent of households in New York file for some sort of federal deduction of state and local taxes.

New York City residents, who also pay city income taxes, would be especially hard hit as they could expect an 11 percent increase in the amount they pay the I.R.S., or an increase of about $3.4 billion, said Ronnie Lowenstein, director of the city's Independent Budget Office.

Beyond New York, eliminating the federal deduction for state and local taxes would also affect residents in New Jersey and Connecticut. Among the state and local taxes that could no longer be claimed as a deduction would be property taxes, which are particularly high in the New York City region. [...]

For some, that is just the point. "If you believe, as I do, that the state and local deductions encourage higher spending in states," said Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, "then abolishing the deduction will help bring this spending down and will also cause people to demand lower taxation."

NATURE PROVIDES SOME PERSPECTIVE:

At Least 13,000 Die in Tsunami: Waves Generated by 9.0 Quake Cut a Swath in Southern Asia; Many Are Reported Missing (Shankhadeep Choudhury and Paul Watson, December 27, 2004, LA Times)

A series of towering waves triggered by a massive undersea earthquake killed more than 13,000 people Sunday, wiping out whole villages and hammering resorts across thousands of miles of coastline in South Asia and beyond.

Survivors described walls of water between 10 and 20 feet high toppling buildings and sweeping away victims from Indonesia to the Maldives. Even in Somalia, 3,000 miles from the quake's epicenter, nine deaths from the tsunami were reported.

The catastrophe began when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the world's biggest in 40 years, struck just before 7 a.m. beneath the Indian Ocean 155 miles southeast of Banda Aceh on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

The quake, about 200 times as powerful as the 1994 Northridge temblor, spawned tsunami waves that traveled at high speed through a region that lacks any warning system. Ocean buoys in a tsunami warning network can alert people to a lethal wave's approach hours before it hits, giving them time to move to higher ground.

Possibly the worst-hit country was Sri Lanka, a war-ravaged island off the southern tip of India, where wave after wave of surging tides created rivers of seawater that carried people away along with cars and the rubble of collapsing buildings. More than 6,000 people died there.

In Indonesia, health officials said more than 4,400 people were killed on Sumatra, most of them in the northern province of Aceh, where entire villages were swept away and bodies were lodged in trees. Many of the dead were children, officials said.

Nearly 2,300 were reported killed in India, 600 in Thailand, including tourists, and more than 40 in Malaysia. In the Maldives, more than 30 were dead and two-thirds of the capital, Male, was underwater. A dozen people in Myanmar and at least two in Bangladesh also died. Hundreds of thousands were left homeless.

At least three Americans were among the dead, two in Sri Lanka and one in Thailand, the State Department said.

A CONSERVATIVE FIFTH COLUMN

Blame The New Yorker (Walter Kirn, New York Times, December 26th, 2004)

Now that America's urbane sophisticates have had to acknowledge their status as a fringe group so out of touch with mainstream moral values, tournament bass fishing, Nascar and Christian rock that their electoral and cultural clout is marginally less than that of Casper, Wyo., legions of self-doubting highbrows are asking themselves how this decline into decadence occurred.

Because of what enfeebling bad habit did the proud and potent thinking class that gave us F.D.R. and J.F.K. fade into a cynical, ironic, smirking bunch of spiritual weaklings headed up by Al Franken and Michael Moore? Was the problem attending movies instead of church? Deserting Burger King for Whole Foods Market? No, I've concluded. The blame lies elsewhere. The seduction of America's elites by the vices of humanism and skepticism can only be blamed on the New Yorker cartoon, an agent of corruption more insidious than LSD or the electric guitar.

As we are reminded here frequently, all good humor is conservative. How any modern progressive can take himself seriously after reading these cartoons is beyond comprehension. My all time favorite is from the mid-eighties: A huge fire-breathing dragon is up at a podium addressing an audience of hundreds of identical knights-in-armor, and says: “While there are still profound differences between us, I’m sure we can all agree that just my presence here today marks a major breakthrough.”

Yours?

THE ORANGEMEN WIN:

Yushchenko Leading in Ukranian Exit Polls (The Associated Press, December 26, 2004)

Exit polls projected an easy victory Sunday for opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in a bitter campaign that required an unprecedented three ballots and Supreme Court intervention to pick a new Ukrainian leader.

Elated opposition supporters flooded Kiev's Independence Square, the center of protests after the Nov. 21 election that was beset with fraud allegations and eventually annulled. Music blared from loudspeakers and fireworks lit up the sky. In Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych's home base of Donetsk, the streets were largely empty, with only a few people stumbling home from the bars.

The three exit polls projected Yushchenko winning by at least 15 percentage points, and with ballots from just more than 30 percent of precincts counted he was leading with 57.43 percent to 38.89 percent for Yanukovych, election officials said. Final official results were not expected until Monday.

A dejected-appearing Yanukovych, who had the backing of the outgoing Ukrainian president and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, refused to concede defeat in a newsconference begun before the polls closed.

THE FORTUNATE:

It Seemed Like a Scene From the Bible (Michael Dobbs, December 27, 2004, Washington Post)

WELIGAMA, Sri Lanka, Dec. 26 -- Disaster struck with no warning out of a faultlessly clear blue sky.

I was taking my morning swim around the island that my brother Geoffrey, a businessman, had bought on a whim a decade ago and turned into a tropical paradise 200 yards from one of the world's most beautiful beaches.

I was a quarter way around the island when I heard my brother shouting at me, "Come back! Come back! There's something strange happening with the sea." He was swimming behind me, but closer to the shore.

I couldn't understand what the fuss was about. All seemed peaceful. There was barely a ripple in the sea. My brother's house rests on a rock 60 feet above the level of the sea.

Then I noticed that the water around me was rising, climbing up the rock walls of the island with astonishing speed. The vast circle of golden sand around Weligama Bay was disappearing rapidly, and the water had reached the level of the coastal road, fringed with palm trees.

As I swam to shore, my mind was momentarily befuddled by two conflicting impressions -- the idyllic blue sky and the rapidly rising waters.

In less than a minute, the water level had risen at least 15 feet, but the sea remained calm, with barely a wave in sight.

Within minutes, the beach and the area behind it had become an inland sea that rushed over the road and poured into the flimsy houses on the other side. The speed with which it all happened seemed like a scene from the Bible, a natural phenomenon unlike anything I had experienced.

As the waters rose at an incredible rate, I half expected to catch sight of Noah's Ark.

WHERE'S TORQUEMADA WHEN YOU NEED HIM...:

We are all pagans now (Mary Wakefield, 12/18/04, The Spectator)

The sky was already murky at 4 p.m. when I locked my bike outside Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. Inside, it was even murkier: wood-panelled corridors stretched off into the gloom, men in grey suits were wedged together, smoking Bensons and drinking bitter. No one looked even slightly like an Arch Priest of the Council of British Druid Orders. At 4:10 I found a separate little bar near the back of the pub. As I walked in, a big man with round shoulders and grey hair stared at me and I saw the corner of a magazine poking out from inside his coat. As I watched, the whole cover slowly emerged: a yellowy-purple watercolour of a fairy, and the title: The Witchtower. ‘Steve?’ I said. He nodded.

We bought bitter, found somewhere to sit, and began what turned out to be a three-hour crash course in modern paganism, one of the fastest-growing religions in Britain.

‘It’s time for us pagans to make ourselves heard,’ said Steve. Steve is founder of Pebble (the liaison committee for British paganism) which has given all the various pagan factions — Witches, Druids, Heathens, Voodoo Priestesses, Shamans, Chaos Magicians — an official voice. ‘Look at the 2001 census,’ he said, ‘the results have just been published. We’re the seventh largest religion in the country — there are at least 40,000 of us. It’s time that we were taken seriously.’ What sort of people are pagans? I asked. ‘Ooh, every sort: lawyers, teachers, nurses, pensioners, students. There are lots in the Civil Service,’ said Steve, who works for the Charity Commission. ‘There’s even one writing regularly for the Daily Telegraph.’ Who? Steve chuckled, raised his eyebrows and took a pull on his pint of Pride. Anne Robinson? I thought; Bill Deedes? I asked, ‘What is a pagan these days anyway?’

‘Well,’ said Steve, relaxing, ‘the first thing is that we’re not Satanists and we don’t sacrifice babies.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘The Devil is a Christian concept. We worship the ancient, pre-Christian gods and goddesses. A pagan is defined as a follower of a polytheistic nature-based religion which incorporates beliefs and rituals from ancient traditions.’ As he laid a line of Golden Virginia on to a Rizla, I examined Steve closely for signs of in-leagueness with the Devil. There were rolls of grime under his fingernails and some red scratches on his right hand.

So, can a modern pagan just pick any god to worship? I asked. Egyptian? Roman? African? Are there any rules? Steve put his hands self-consciously under the table, ‘No rules,’ he said. ‘Being a pagan is about being free from institutional rules. And the gods? Once you start seeking they choose you, really. Everyone has their own path...

SACKED:

'Minister of Defense' Reggie White dies at age 43 (AP, 12/26/04)

Reggie White, one of the greatest defensive players in NFL history, died Sunday of a massive heart attack at his home near Huntersville, N.C.
He turned 43 last week.

"Today our beloved husband, father and friend passed away," White's wife, Sara, said in a statement through a family pastor. "His family appreciates your thoughts and prayers as we mourn the loss of Reggie White. We want to thank you in advance for honoring our privacy."

A two-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year, White played a total of 15 years with Philadelphia, Green Bay and Carolina.

Nicknamed the "Minister of Defense," White retired in 2000 as the NFL's all-time leader in sacks with 198.

DIVISION OF RESPONSIBILITIES:

Blair preparing to send troops to Sudan's Darfur region (AFP, 12/26/04)

Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites) has ordered the military to prepare to deploy up to 3,000 soldiers to the conflict-torn Sudanese region of Darfur.

The Independent on Sunday newspaper, without quoting sources, said the deployment would be discussed next month with senior military officials.

"When you decide to make an intervention you have got to be able to move fast," it quoted an unnamed minister as saying.

Any deployment would be undertaken as part of a new European Union rapid reaction force, it said.

RIDING ACADEMY:

Religion and American foreign policy: In the United States, evangelicals are the neo-cons of Christianity, says John Hulsman. With its streak of religious certitude, we should never underestimate the centrality of moralism to the country’s foreign policy. (John C. Hulsman, 21 - 12 - 2004, Open Democracy)

By all standards measuring religious fervour – church-going, beliefs, and the role of religion in one’s everyday life – the US seems to hail from a different planet from that of its European allies. In terms of the advanced industrial societies, the United States is by far the most religious. Nor does this trend show any signs of abating. While polling has Europeans becoming ever less connected to religion in their daily lives, America, if anything, grows more devout. This is particularly true of evangelical Christians, whose numbers are increasing at the fastest rate in the country. It is this group who give secular Europeans the willies. Evangelicals tend to be confident in their faith, express their religious feelings (here is the crux of the matter) freely, and are eager to have you adopt their religious orientation. In terms of Christianity, evangelicals are the neo-cons of the movement.

This is a point Javier Solana, former secretary-general of Nato and European commissioner for foreign affairs acutely commented on earlier this year. Differences regarding religion are a major part of the values divide between America and Europe. This has obvious foreign-policy ramifications. It is little wonder that evangelicals in the Republican base from the first supported neo-conservative impulses in the Bush administration. Both groups have a messianic streak not common to standard conservative thinking. Both, as with Wilsonians in the Democratic party, see moralism as a key component of international relations. And both see the world largely in terms of good and evil, right and wrong. [...]

[U]nderestimate evangelicals and other American utopian movements at your peril. For in many ways, Thomas Paine is not that far off. Certainly in the latter days of 1918, at Normandy, and during the cold war, American exceptionalism was a vital factor in motivating Washington to do what would have seemed hopelessly naïve to harder-eyed realists. In 1918, why should America intervene in a European war? In the dark days of 1940-41, why should it support the UK economically and with material when such largesse was bound to fall in the hands of a victorious Hitler? In the post-1945 world, why should the US risk nuclear annihilation to buttress our resentful impoverished allies (the UK and France) and our erstwhile enemies (Germany and Italy)?

Yes, in each case I as a realist think it was in America’s interests to behave as we did. But you understand little about the country if you don’t acknowledge that “because it was the right thing to do” was also part of the answer lying behind American foreign-policy initiatives. Europeans may be uncomfortable with moralism (goodness knows I am) and the deep wellsprings of religion such views emanate from in American society. But there is little doubt we have all benefited from the “naïve” optimism that has enabled America to do amazing, beneficial things not just for itself, but also for all mankind.

I WILL NOT BE IGNORED:

President Bush And The Little Girl (PHYLLIS CHESLER & NANCY H. KOBRIN, 12/22/2004, Jewish Press)

[W]hat crucial clues have [Islamic and western analysts] failed to notice about Osama`s tape?

Osama taunted President Bush, tried to shame him -- a typical Arab Islamic technique of punishment, manipulation, and control (Islam is a shame and honor society). Perhaps Osama believed that this would persuade Americans to vote for Senator Kerry and not for the "shamed" President. Osama said: "We never thought the high commander of the U.S. would leave 50,000 of his citizens in both towers to face the horrors by themselves when they most needed him because he thought listening to a child [this was poorly translated from the Arabic as it had to have specified female child] discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than paying attention to planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers which gave us three times the time to execute the operation, thanks be to God."

Again, he was not telling the truth. Nothing could have stopped the planes. But now, he gives himself away, both culturally and autobiographically. Osama is scornful, contemptuous -- heartbroken? -- because President Bush dared to patiently listen to a "little girl" for many minutes when he should have been paying attention to what he, Osama, had just done: Crash two planes into the Twin Towers and another plane into the Pentagon.

Incredibly, Osama seems to be competing with a little girl for President Bush`s attention. Where Osama comes from, girls (and women) simply do not count. Only grown men and boys do. It is an insult that President Bush does not immediately pay attention to Osama. Worse: Perhaps President Bush`s quiet and visible commitment to literacy for girls as well as boys actually enrages Osama. Why do girls need an education anyway?

Or is Osama somehow undone by President Bush`s ability to contain his emotions in order not to frighten the classroom children? In Osama`s world, grown men are allowed to become emotionally "hysterical"; the fact that this may frighten, even traumatize children, does not matter. (Think of the Islamic Arab street and the hysterical quality of the funerals of homicidal suicide bombers, replete with fully armed, masked men and ullulating, veiled women.) Arab Muslim adults do not have to contain their emotions and remain calm; they can act out both privately and publicly, and in front of the children.

In demanding that President Bush pay attention to Osama, is Osama somehow confusing Mr. Bush with his own Yemeni father, Mohammed, who had ten wives and 54 children? Osama was the seventeenth of twenty four sons -- how much positive paternal attention could he have received? (Also, his father died when he was only ten years old).

More important, Osama`s mother, Hamida, was a Syrian whose father gave her to Mohammed bin Laden as part of a business deal. Hamida was known as "Al Abeda" (the slave.) But she was also known for being outspoken and western. (She liked designer pants suits by Chanel). Poor Hamida was also the fourth wife -- an unlucky position since Mohammed bin Laden engaged in the convenient practice of divorcing his fourth wife so he could remarry. (Muslims can only have four legal wives). In addition, Mohammed bin Laden punished Hamida by permanently exiling her to another city. He did so when Osama was not yet two years old.

Osama was brought up by a stepmother, Mohammed`s first wife, Al-Khalifa. Thus Osama not only lost his mother at a very young age, he had to live with her devalued status as a woman, a "slave," a divorced wife, and an admirer of western couture. Osama had to overcome not only the "shame" that all Arab Muslim men unconsciously suffer, namely, being of (devalued) woman born; he also had to overcome the shame of being abandoned by a divorced, "slave" and pro-Western mother.

Are we saying that Osama`s tape can be reduced entirely to autobiographical ravings? Of course we're not. But we cannot afford to neglect this dimension. Focusing precisely on such childhood and cultural variables will be crucial in any attempt to bring democracy and freedom to this barbarous region. The overall status of women, as well as specific practices such as polygamy, female illiteracy, veiling, stonings to death, and Arab honor killings all shape Arab Muslim psychology and national character. It is important that Americans and Israelis understand such Arab and Muslim cultural values in order to understand how these values have affected someone like Osama bin Laden -- and there are more like him where he came from.

ANGLOSPHERIC DOMINANCE IS NO COINCIDENCE:

Common Denominator: Using sophisticated mathematical models, a group of four economists has proven that a country's legal history greatly affects its economy. At least they think they've proven it. How their sweeping theory has roiled the legal academy. (Nicholas Thompson, Jan/Feb 2005, Legal Affairs)

MALAYSIA AND INDONESIA COULDN'T BE CALLED TWINS, but they might be called siblings. The adjacent Southeast Asian nations possess similar natural resources and their citizens speak similar languages and follow similar strains of Islam. But Malaysia's economy is prospering while Indonesia's is floundering. Malaysia's stock market is far more vibrant than its neighbor's, and its average resident is three times richer.

Economists might explain these divergent paths by pointing to the countries' different responses to the Asian financial crisis of the mid-1990s. Sociologists might find a cultural explanation in the close-knit community of Chinese immigrants who are the most powerful force in Malaysia's business community. Historians might point out that Malaysia's struggle for independence was much less bloody than Indonesia's.

Another explanation lies in the countries' legal systems, however. Malaysia was a British colony and its legal system is based on the common law: the set of rules, norms, and procedures that has guided the legal system of England and the British Empire for about nine centuries. Indonesia was a Dutch colony and its legal system derives from French civil law, a set of statutes and principles written under Napoleon in the early 19th century and imposed upon the lands he conquered, including the Netherlands.

According to research published by a group of scholars beginning in 1998, countries that come from a French civil law tradition struggle to create effective financial markets, while countries with a British common law tradition succeed far more frequently. While the scholars conducting the research are economists rather than lawyers, their theory has jolted the legal academy, leading to the creation of a new academic specialty called "law and finance" and turning the authors of the theory into the most cited economists in the world over the past decade. [...]

THE IDEA THAT LEGAL ORIGIN CAN EXPLAIN NATIONAL MARKET DIFFERENCES comes from four economists who are referred to in their field by the acronym LLSV: Rafael La Porta of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes of the Yale School of Management, Andrei Shleifer of Harvard's economics department, and Robert Vishny of the University of Chicago's business school. [...]

LLSV's main tool was regression analysis, a mathematical technique in which many variables are plugged into a program that sorts out which ones are correlated and which ones are not. Using regression analysis, for example, you could plug in the heights, weights, and eye colors of 100 people. The results would show that height and weight are correlated (the taller you are, the more you're likely to weigh) but that weight and eye color are not.

Using this tool, "Law and Finance" showed that common law countries protect both shareholders and creditors better than civil law countries do, and they also tend to be less corrupt. LLSV took dozens of specific financial indicators--ranging from key gauges, like the odds that a company's assets will be confiscated by the state, to smaller measures, like whether shareholders can vote at company meetings--and regressed them all against legal origin. The regressions showed that the measures that indicate high investor and creditor protection or low corruption connect to common law origin, just as height connects to weight. The measures that represent low protection and high corruption connect to civil law origin.

The regression didn't show that common law necessarily makes people richer, but it did represent a crucial link in a chain of logic that could connect legal origin to prosperity. When shareholders have more rights, people are more likely to invest in markets, because they have more protections against dishonest executives. When creditors have more rights, they are more likely to lend money, which spurs markets to grow. And when countries are free from corruption, investors put more money into them. The LLSV scholars weren't the first to recognize that shareholder and creditor rights spur economic growth, or that corruption stunts it, but they were the first to connect these conditions to a country's legal system and to do so using cold, hard numbers. [...]

The most compelling theory they've developed has to do with the power both systems afford their judiciaries. Common law judges are, on balance, far more powerful than their counterparts in civil law countries. Since judges tend to be a country's most reliable check on the other parts of its government, common law countries grant less power to their executives than civil law countries do. And in developing nations, corruption is generally perpetuated from the top.

The difference in the power that the two systems grant their judges is rooted in their respective histories. French civil law derives from the Napoleonic code, published in 1804 by scholars eager to wrest power from the judiciary. Before the country's revolution, France's courts had earned reputations for elitism and corruption. Influenced by popular discontent with much of the judiciary, Napoleon attempted to write a statutory code that was essentially judge-proof. Judges draw their influence from their power to interpret laws. Napoleon's code stripped them of this prerogative; his code favored the writing of a new law over a judge's interpretation of an old one. Consequently, compared to common law countries, civil law countries have weak judiciaries�and long statute books.

Common law was similarly influenced by a violent revolution that pitted the people against the crown. But in the years leading up to England's Glorious Revolution in the late 17th century, the judiciary tended to side with the people and against the Stuarts, who had tried to eliminate an independent judiciary. When the revolution came, the new government gave the judiciary far more power than France did a century later. Courts could interpret laws and even overrule the executive branch.

Legal historians didn't need LLSV to tell them all this. They knew that common and civil law countries differ fundamentally in the roles that judiciaries play. But LLSV was hardly content just to recite the old histories and anecdotes. They went back to their calculators and, in a 2003 paper titled "Judicial Checks and Balances," they demonstrated mathematically that common law countries give judges more independence, which in turn correlates with the sound economic policies they had examined in "Law and Finance."

ONE RING'S NICE, BUT I HAVE TEN FINGERS:

The Architect: Theo Epstein had to bury the fan inside him before he could boldly assemble the team that defied history. But what comes next may be even tougher. (Neil Swidey, December 26, 2004, Boston Globe Magazine)

[T]here is evidence that the fraternity of baseball executives still doesn't quite know what to make of Young Theo. Sure, he is no longer discounted as the untested, stats-obsessed kid with a laptop that he was two years ago, when, at 28, he became the youngest GM in the history of the game. But he has yet to be fully embraced by an establishment still dominated by men who have logged decades sitting on wooden benches in crappy ballparks. He is not like them, not only because of his youth but also because he enjoys a public following and first-name recognition that rival his star players'. Maybe this helps explain why, when the award for Executive of the Year is announced - an honor the GMs bestow on one of their own - Epstein doesn't even garner enough votes to crack the top three.

The ballots break differently when it comes to the Globe Magazine's "Bostonian of the Year" honor. True, baseball is only a game. But it's impossible to name an achievement in the past year that brought as much universal and unifying joy to New England as the long, long overdue Red Sox triumph. Many deserve credit, but one man coolly remade the team, then guided it with boldness and backbone. That Epstein, in just his second year on the job, succeeded where his more seasoned predecessors over eight decades had failed only makes the accomplishment more remarkable.

Outside of the GM fraternity, Epstein gets more attention than he'd like these days, and that's despite his insistence on turning down million-dollar book deals and repeated requests to bring his good looks and local-boy-made-good story to Leno, Conan, and Kimmel. Jed Hoyer, one of Epstein's deputies, marvels at his boss's resolve. "As high as his stature is, if he wanted to, it could be so much higher," Hoyer says. "It would be very easy for him to really cash in." Epstein says he's uncomfortable being singled out for a team effort and unwilling to surrender his privacy. Hoyer offers an additional reason: "Theo knows that baseball is a business that can humble you in a hurry."

Seeing the Red Sox win the series brought Epstein incalculable joy. And relief. "Best feeling I've ever had" is how he puts it. He smiles broadly as he recalls the bus ride the team took from Logan to Fenway the morning after beating St. Louis, how people hopped out of their cars on the highway and stood waving and hugging one another. "It was the first time it really struck us how directly this was going to be shared, by the whole city, the whole region," he says. "It was incredible."

While New England continues to bask in the afterglow, with commuters still accessorizing their Brooks Brothers suits with BoSox caps, Epstein has moved on. In fact, he can't get there fast enough. He's determined to avoid the complacency that can be as much a part of the worldchampionship package as the giant trophy.

Bask too long, and he risks being forced to confront the question hanging unmistakably in the air: What do you do when your wildest professional dream has come true - and you're only 30?

Bask too long, and the man who helped bring historic happiness to Red Sox Nation by assembling this year's lovable, series-grabbing squad might somehow lose the resolve to do what he knows may be necessary if the team is to be more than a one-hit wonder: dismantle this year's lovable, series-grabbing squad.

"There's no room for sentiment," he says.

HOW DO YOU SAY YUKOS IN CHINESE?:

China's Elite Learn to Flaunt It While the New Landless Weep (JOSEPH KAHN, 12/25/04, NY Times)

Chateau Zhang Laffitte is no ordinary imitation. It is the oriental twin of Château Maisons-Laffitte, the French architect François Mansart's 1650 landmark on the Seine. Its symmetrical facade and soaring slate roof were crafted using the historic blueprints, 10,000 photographs and the same white Chantilly stone.

Yet its Chinese proprietor, a Beijing real estate developer named Zhang Yuchen, wanted more. He added a manicured sculpture garden and two wings, copying the palace at Fontainebleau. He even dug a deep, broad moat, though uniformed guards and a spiked fence also defend the castle.

"It cost me $50 million," Mr. Zhang said. "But that's because we made so many improvements compared with the original."

Rising out of the parched winter landscape of suburban Beijing, like a Gallic apparition, the chateau is a quirky extravagance intended to catch the eye of China's new rich. They can rent its rooms and, later, buy homes amid the ponds, equestrian trails and golf course on Mr. Zhang's 1.5-square-mile estate.

It is even more conspicuous to its nearest neighbors, 800 now landless peasants who used to grow wheat on its expansive lawns.

In a generation, China's ascetic, egalitarian society has acquired the trappings and the tensions of America in the age of the robber barons. A rough-and-tumble form of capitalism is eclipsing the remnants of socialism. Those who have made the transition live side by side with those who have not, separated by serrated fences and the Communist Party.

...BARELY NOTICES:

China Expands. Europe Rises. And the United States . . . (FRED KAPLAN, 12/26/04, NY Times)

The European Union, in many respects, is looking more and more like this new tycoon. Its currency, the euro, has risen in value by 35 percent against the dollar in the last three years.

Again, that is not necessarily bad. In theory, a falling dollar makes American exports cheaper, attracting demand that then boosts the dollar; a rising euro crimps European exports, which then lowers the euro; equilibrium is restored. In reality, this process unfolds slowly and shakily: in October, for instance, American exports rose, but American imports soared, too.

A more serious consequence of the dollar's fall is that the euro has become more rewarding for foreign investors, and they are reacting accordingly. In 2001, Middle Eastern oil-producing countries kept 75 percent of their currency reserves in dollars; now the figure is 61 percent, with much of the rest in euros. Chinese and Russian central bankers are also shifting reserves. This trend, at some point, could set off a spiral: the dollar declines, causing further sell-offs, leading to a further decline, and so on.

When the dollar has fallen in the past, the United States was a net creditor and there was no serious rival currency. Neither condition holds true now. As The Economist recently put it, "Never before has the guardian of the world's main reserve currency been its biggest net debtor."

Financiers and diplomats are beginning to ask: How much longer will the dollar remain the world's principal reserve currency? One could also ask, how much longer can the United States remain, as Madeleine Albright put it, "the indispensable country" of world politics?

This year, the United States spent nearly as much on its military as all other countries combined. No other nation possesses, or aspires to, anything like the reach of American armed forces.

Yet, if someday the United States finds that it can no longer count on foreigners to bankroll its deficits, it may also find that it can no longer afford a globe-spanning military.

But two rather simple numbers amply illustrate the inanity of his argument here:

(1) Eurozone growth for 2005 is, probably overoptimistically, projected at 2%, or half that of the U.S.. The same central bank policies that are keeping the euro at artificially high levels are helping stifle Europe's economy.

(2) The U.S. spent $450 billion out of a GDP of $12 trillion on its military this year. Mr. Kennedy made the case that if a nation were: allocating over the long term more than 10 percent of gross national product (GNP) to armaments, that is likely to limit its growth rate.” In other words, if history is our guide, we'd have to triple defense spending and maintain it at that level for a period of years before we risked decline as a result. Recall that during the Cold War, a period during which we likewise expanded our economic lead over the rest of the world, we averaged a spending level of 7% on defense for close to fifty years.

Just as Mr. Kennedy's book was little more than a quarrel with Reaganism and the winning of the Cold War, so too is Mr. Kaplan grining an ax against George Bush and the decision to radically transform the Middle East rather than treat al Qaeda as a criminal matter. The truth is that the War on Terror has been waged, and very nearly won already, without our so much as having to break a national sweat.

TRY, TRY AGAIN:

Big Farms Reap Two Harvests With Subsidies a Bumper Crop: As subsidies increase despite higher incomes for big farms, some say that the subsidy system has never made less sense. (TIMOTHY EGAN, 12/26/04, NY Times)

[A]t a time when big harvests and record farm income should mean that Champagne corks are popping across the prairie, the prosperity has brought with it the kind of nervousness seen in headlines like the one that ran in The Omaha World-Herald in early December: "Income boom has farmers on edge."

For despite the fact that farm income has doubled in two years, federal subsidies have also gone up nearly 40 percent over the same period - projected at $15.7 billion this year, and $130 billion over the last nine years. And that bounty is drawing fire from people who say that at this moment of farm prosperity, the nation's subsidy system has never made less sense.

Even those deeply steeped in the system acknowledge it seems counterintuitive. "I struggle with the same question: how the hell can you have such high government payments if farmers had such a great year?" said Keith Collins, the chief economist for the Agriculture Department.

The answer lies in the quirks of the federal farm subsidy system as well as in the way savvy farmers sell their crops. Mr. Collins said farmers use the peculiar world of agriculture market timing to get both high commodity prices and high subsidies.

"The biggest reason is with record crops, prices have fallen," he said. "And farmers are taking advantage of that."

A farmer can sell his crop early at a high price, say, in a futures contract, and still collect a subsidy check after the harvest from the government if prices are down over all. The money is not tied to what the farmer actually received for his crop. The farmer does not even have to sell the crop to get the check, only prove that the market has dropped below a certain set rate.

"For those who can milk the system, it's been a great year," said Kent Miller, whose German great-grandparents were pioneers near this tiny town. Mr. Miller is a small operator who says he barely made a profit this year on his 3,000 acres of wheat and millet.

Still, while Mr. Miller is a critic of the system, he is not forgoing aid.

HAVE THEY HEARD OF THE INTERNET?:

Stores slash prices further the day after Christmas (ANNE D'INNOCENZIO, December 26, 2004, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

The nation's merchants cut prices even deeper on Sunday, the day after Christmas, in hopes of squeezing more sales out of what's winding up to be an unimpressive holiday season.

After struggling with disappointing holiday sales, retailers were cheered by stronger sales at the nation's malls this past week, but are relying even more on shoppers to do more buying-- and less returning-- in the week after Christmas to meet their sales goals. And with the ever increasing popularity of gift cards, merchants hope customers will quickly use their gift cards, which are recorded as sales only when they are redeemed.

The only few bright spots have been online shopping, with sales at the high end of projections, and luxury stores, which have continued with robust sales from their well-heeled customers, who have benefited from the economy's recovery.

That means merchants are once again finding themselves in the same position as they were last year, relying on the final days before and post-holiday sales to save the season. Last year, a late spending surge gave struggling retailers a better-than-expected holiday season, delivering them solid gains over the year-ago period.

THE MORALITY OF DEMOGRAPHIC CALCULATIONS (via Mike Daley):

Bigotry's harvest (Caroline Glick, 12/24/04, THE JERUSALEM POST)

The moral dimension of the proposed destruction of Israeli communities in Gaza and northern Samaria is one that has received scant attention over the past year since Sharon adopted the Labor Party's plan of retreat and expulsion as his own. Indeed, although it was one of the implicit assumptions of the 1993 Oslo process, the fact that a precondition for a final peace accord with the PLO was that all Jewish residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza would be ethnically cleansed has rarely been mentioned. As for Sharon's withdrawal plan for Gaza and northern Samaria, everyone from US National Security Council Middle East Adviser Elliott Abrams to Labor Party leader Shimon Peres to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak to British Prime Minister Tony Blair have all noted that the plan, if enacted, will provide a precedent for the destruction of all or most of the remaining Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria with their population of some 250,000 Israelis.

THIS WEEK, the public debate shifted its attention for the first time in 11 years to the question of whether it is moral to ethnically cleanse the territories of their Jewish residents and force all Israelis to live within the cease-fire lines from 1949. With the publication of an open letter from Binyamin Regional Council head Pinhas Wallerstein calling for mass civil disobedience against the proposed ethnic cleansing of Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria, the question of the morality of the plan has exploded onto the public stage.

Wallerstein wrote, "The government of Israel has approved the first reading of the immoral law that paves the way for the crime of the displacement of Jews from their homes. The law does not provide those targeted for expulsion with even the minimal human right – to oppose their displacement from their homes. I call for the public to break the expulsion law and to be ready to pay the price of going to jail."

Wallerstein's call, which was adopted by the entire organized leadership of the Israeli communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, caused some dozen members of Knesset to sign a declaration stating that they will oppose the enactment of the law even at the price of losing their parliamentary immunity from prosecution and going to jail.

Gaza residents caused a public outcry when they taped orange Stars of David to their clothes this week. The hue and cry of the politicians on the Right and on the Left said that in using symbols from the Holocaust they were besmirching the memory of the victims of Europe's genocide of its Jews. It would seem that those who decried the residents' symbol have forgotten what a metaphor is. The point was not that Sharon is Adolf Hitler or that Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz is Adolf Eichmann. The point of the protest was that Israel is the first Western state to call for the forced removal of Jews from their homes, simply because they are Jews, since the Holocaust and that there is something morally atrocious about the notion that for peace to come –- to Israel and to those bombing Israel –- it is necessary for entire regions to be rendered Judenrein. And again, as leaders in Israel and throughout the world have stated, the expulsion from Gaza and northern Samaria is simply a preview of coming attractions for what awaits those who live in Judea and the rest of Samaria.

LET NUKES DETER NUCLEAR ASPIRATIONS:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-missiles26dec26.story>
Quiet Demise of the U.S.' Ultimate Weapon Is Bittersweet for Its Keepers: The crews trained to maintain and launch the MX missile reflect on its role as a deterrent. (David Kelly, December 26, 2004, LA Times)

They wait silently beneath these rolling ranchlands, invisible to passing cars, impervious to cattle lumbering overhead but ready to fly in an instant.

A small metal rod protruding from the ground often is the only hint of what's below. Come too close, and a silent alarm triggers an instant response from heavily armed guards.

At stake is the security of America's — and perhaps the world's — ultimate weapon of mass destruction: the MX missile. The 71-foot-high missile, also called the Peacekeeper, can travel halfway around the world before striking within 400 feet of its target.

Since 1986, the weapons have been the quintessentially quiet neighbor in these parts, keeping to themselves but capable of enormous destruction if provoked. Now the hulking rockets that confounded the Soviet Union, prompted street protests in Europe, inspired Hollywood thrillers and terrified millions are fading away.

For the last two years, MX numbers have shrunk from 50 to 13. By next December, none will be left. And their demise has been bittersweet for the crews trained to care for and, if necessary, launch them.

"There is a nostalgia in seeing something so powerful go away," said Capt. Carrie Owen, a missile operator at the Romeo One Launch Control Center located 60 feet below the wind-swept plains of eastern Wyoming. "We are all so proud to be a part of it."

GOOD FOR NATIVISTS, BAD FOR CONSUMERS:

Mexico's Economy Is Vrooming: North America's hottest auto market is now south of the border, thanks to a stable peso, lots of young drivers and pent-up demand. (Marla Dickerson, December 26, 2004, LA Times)

Dressed in a blazing pink jacket with purse to match, car shopper Erika Amador Martinez is the embodiment of Mexico's auto market — sizzling.

The lawyer from Puebla arrived at an auto show here this month to browse among dozens of models. Topping her list is a Ford EcoSport, a sport utility vehicle that she covets for its practicality, not to mention the kicky red paint job.

"I'll pay part in cash and finance the rest," said the 27-year-old, who is tired of cadging rides from her boyfriend. "It's a lot easier to buy a car than it was a few years ago."

Armed with credit and spoiled for choice, consumers like Amador have turned Mexico into North America's hottest auto market. Although sales in the United States and Canada have stalled, Mexico is experiencing double-digit percentage increases in 2004, with buyers projected to purchase a record 1.05 million new vehicles by year's end.

That's more cars and trucks than will have been sold in Australia by the end of this year and in all but a few European countries. Some expect Mexico to overtake Canada in annual vehicle sales by the end of the decade.

The auto boom is indicative of a rebounding economy, lots of young drivers and years of pent-up demand. Banks scorched by Mexico's mid-1990s peso crisis are back and lending billions of dollars to consumers, whose choices rival anything in U.S. showrooms. Lured by free trade agreements and Mexico's sales potential, nearly 40 car brands are fighting for a piece of the market.

Already a major vehicle manufacturer and exporter, with companies such as Ford, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Volkswagen, Honda and Toyota operating plants here, Mexico's growing domestic market could provide an added incentive for automakers to expand production in the country.

HOW ABOUT A PEACETIME BUDGET:

Bush Team Prepares to Swing Budget Ax: The president says he will not raise taxes to keep his promise to cut the deficit. So what will take a hit? Medicare and Medicaid look likely. (Joel Havemann, December 26, 2004, LA Times)

For years, government has been about singling out winners for favored treatment in spending and tax policy. That era is about to end — and the change could be painful.

The budget surpluses of 1998 to 2001 enabled Washington to make funds available for such favored causes as domestic security, medical research and prescription drugs under Medicare. The government also slashed taxes for a variety of groups, including two-earner couples and the wealthy.

But the surpluses have turned into record deficits. President Bush is not about to take back his tax cuts, but in setting spending levels in the budget that he will deliver to Congress in the new year, he will single out a loser — perhaps several — for every winner. [...]

The Office of Management and Budget is measuring progress in Bush's pledge to cut the deficit not in its absolute size but in its size relative to the national economy.

Thus, the budget office says, Bush must cut the deficit from 4.5% of U.S. economic output — its level in fiscal year 2004 as estimated a year ago — to 2.25% in fiscal year 2009.

A quick tour of the government spending landscape shows a terrain inhospitable to budget cutters.

Roughly, federal outlays can be divided into five equal pieces. One slice is Social Security, which has been politically off-limits to budget cutters since 1983. A second contains Medicare and Medicaid, which also have resisted cuts.

The government's other support programs — food stamps, unemployment compensation and others — go in a third piece, as do interest payments on the debt. Interest payments are outside Congress' control, and other support programs are politically as well as technically difficult to adjust.

The other two pieces of the budget are easier to manipulate in the short term. One of them consists of defense and domestic security, where the Bush administration has until recently shown no tendency to skimp.

So most of the pressure to cut spending lands on the final fifth of the budget — the so-called domestic discretionary programs. These consist of a wide variety of projects, such as an abandoned mine reclamation fund and a zero-down mortgage program run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Even eliminating this category of spending would not have balanced the 2004 budget.

"If they don't put entitlements or tax cuts on the table, they'll get nowhere," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a budget watchdog group. "No matter how tight the spending is in the areas they're willing to clamp down on, they're not going to get very far."

This much Bush has made clear over and over again: He will not raise taxes in order to keep his promise to cut the deficit. He has said he has two major tax goals for his second term: making the temporary tax cuts of his first term permanent, and simplifying the tax code.

Bush's tax cuts have contributed to a sharp reduction in revenue as a share of the U.S. economy. In fiscal year 2004, which ended in September, the government took 16.2% of the nation's economic output, its lowest level since 1959.

WHAT WILL LIGHT THE TINDER?:

In Clerics' Iran, Children of the Revolution Seek Escape: Repelled by theocratic rule, some youths turn to drugs or suicide, music or the mountains. (Megan K. Stack, December 26, 2004, LA Times)

Their cheeks were bitten by the threat of snow, but the sisters didn't have anywhere else to go. They'd coated their faces with makeup and painted their eyelashes until they looked too heavy to blink, gaudy faces to offset drab denims and black coats. This afternoon, their spirits hung as low as the brooding clouds over the mountains.

"This country is very dirty," said Mansureh, a pale 23-year-old who answers telephones at a law firm because she wasn't accepted to a university. "Nobody likes the regime, especially the youth. There are so many restrictions, we can't do anything."

It was Friday afternoon, time for prayers in the Islamic Republic, but the sisters and hundreds of other young Iranians trekked into the mountains on the outskirts of Tehran instead. Droves of twentysomethings flooded the rocky paths as if they were headed somewhere in particular — a concert or a rally. But there was nothing at the top; they were simply climbing their way out of the smoggy urban mazes.

The mountains were alive with hormones and directionless potential. Forget black robes and beards; these young Iranians dressed as if they'd just come from a rave, with faded running shoes and aviator glasses shoved high into their hair. They slouched along, glassy-eyed and smoking cigarettes. Many of them looked stoned. Boys and girls held hands. The winter light slanted through the dying trees. The mood was nihilistic.

"I think the government wants the youth to be on drugs so they keep quiet," said Mansureh's sister, a 17-year-old high school student who also gave only her first name, Mona. "They say it's a problem, but they're the ones importing it."

As their government squares off against the West and vague rumors of outside intervention run in the streets, the youth of Tehran move through the months as if dreaming, passing moodily from pop culture to Persian traditions, groping for their place in the world. Conversations with dozens of young adults in Tehran painted an overwhelming picture of a generation lost, disaffected and stained by longing.

THE MODERN WELCOME WAGON

Tempest of rage shakes Sikh temple (The Guardian, December 26th, 2004)

Jagdeesh Singh is a Sikh who believes his religion is grossly misrepresented. Since 11 September 2001, the 34-year-old has been unable to leave his house without someone screaming 'Osama bin Laden' at him. He was once attacked by two men in Coventry who shouted 'Paki Bin Laden' as they hit and kicked him to the ground.

'It is hardly surprising that Sikhs are sensitive about this play,' he said. 'We live every day with racism based on misinformation. You have to balance the desire for freedom of expression with the fact that it could provoke even greater prejudice.'

Singh was referring to the controversial play Behzti (Dishonour), which depicts rape and murder inside a gurdwara, a Sikh temple. The production was cancelled by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre last Monday after a week of peaceful protests by the Sikh community erupted into violence. Bricks were thrown through theatre windows as police struggled to hold back an angry crowd.

A spokeswoman for the theatre said it had a 'commitment to artistic freedom', but also 'a duty of care to its audiences, staff and performers'. The play was pulled, 'purely on safety grounds,' she said. Others were not so sure.

The play's author, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, was reported to be in hiding last week after receiving death threats. Sikh leaders called this weekend for protesters to withdraw any such threats.

The battle became one between freedom of speech and respect for beliefs. But are the two incompatible? Leading figures from the arts world jumped to Bhatti's defence. Actors, writers and directors - including Prunella Scales, Tariq Ali and Jude Kelly - signed a letter published in the Guardian on Thursday expressing their support for the playwright. The statement, which had 700 signatories, said: 'It is a legitimate function of art to provoke debate and sometimes to express controversial ideas. Those who use violent means to silence it must be vigorously opposed.'

Women's groups were also dismayed by the cancellation. They called it a 'challenging play' that dealt with important issues about oppression of women.

For Jagdeesh Singh, however, the battle is being fought on the wrong territory. This is not about suppressing criticism; it is about the type of criticism and how it is portrayed. Singh is not an illiberal stick-in-the-mud; he wants to see more debate about women's rights within Sikhism.

He brings horrific personal experience to that debate. In December 1998 his sister, Surjit Kaur Athwal, went to India with her mother-in-law and never returned. She had told her husband she was going to leave him. Singh believes there is evidence that she was the victim of an honour killing and has been campaigning for justice ever since.

'I want to see issues within the Sikh community, such as honour killings, discussed more than anybody,' he insisted. 'There have been plays welcomed and financially supported by the Sikh community that have looked at alcohol abuse, family breakdown and problems between old and young Sikhs.

'If Bhatti had looked at any of these issues, that would be excellent. But she went for something completely cold. It is a badly conceived, badly organised play that is out of context and could have grave consequences for the perception of Sikhs in Britain.'

Many young Sikhs told The Observer they were outraged by the play and the subsequent press reaction. Jaswant Singh Bhangu, a 25-year-old flight lieutenant from Wolverhampton, is clean-shaven, does not wear a turban and considers himself a moderate Sikh. But he was so upset that he was ready to join the protest last Monday when the play was cancelled.

'I do not think people realise how important the gurdwara is. More than half of all Sikhs go there once or twice a week. There is so much misrepresentation of our religion and we suffer racism.'

It is hard to shake the suspicion that the anti-religious artistic and intellectual communities, bored by the milquetoast responses to anti-Christian efforts like Pis-Christ, are now setting their sights on Islam, Sikhism and other faiths. In the West, most adherents of these faiths are immigrants, and it is easy to see how secular progressives will demand they suffer and shrug off blasphemy as a kind of test of their civic loyalty and adaptability. As we saw in Holland, it is a dangerous, racist game that can only end in community division and social alienation, if not worse.

DON’T TELL HARRY’S FRUIT FLIES, BUT...

Believe it or not, they're all the same species (Robert Matthews, The Telegraph, December 26th, 2004)

It is one of the best-known stories in science: the evolution of mankind from ape-like creatures to modern humans via knuckle-grazing cave-dwellers. Now it has been blown apart by the first comprehensive study of all the fossils, which has revealed that they are probably all variants of Homo sapiens. [...]

Professor Maciej Henneberg, of the University of Adelaide, a world authority on fossil human anatomy, made the discovery after analysing the skull sizes and estimated body weights for all of the 200 identified specimens of human-like fossils known as hominims. These span the entire history of humans, from the emergence of so-called Australopithecines with an upright stance more than four million years ago to neolithic modern humans from around 10,000 years ago.

Prof Henneberg found that the fossils show clear evidence of evolution, with substantial increases in both skull sizes and body-weight. However, he also found that the fossils show no evidence of being anything other than a single species which had grown bigger and smarter over time. According to Prof Henneberg, the much-vaunted differences in fossil size used to identify "new" species all lie within the normal range expected for one species. [...]

Other authorities hailed Prof Henneberg's findings as a much-needed reality check. "Clearly there is a need to be more aware of the possibility of variation - but that is not the inclination today," said Geoffrey Harrison, emeritus professor of biological anthropology at the University of Oxford. "It has been a problem because the discoverers have usually put so much effort into finding the evidence, so they want it to be important".

Professor Chris Stringer, a leading expert on human fossils at the Natural History Museum, London, said even Neanderthals were not significantly different in skull or body size from modern humans. However, he added that they do differ in other details, such as inner ear bones.

He said: "The argument they are a different species is, of course, only a hypothesis, but comparisons of skull shape published recently certainly show they are as different from us as monkeys and apes are different from each other".

According to Prof Henneberg, there are fewer than 30 examples of Neanderthals on which to base any conclusions. What evidence there is, however, is consistent with Neanderthals being from the same species as modern humans.

He added that the never-ending announcements of new species said more about those making the claims than about human evolution. "The problem is there are far more palaeontologists than fossil specimens".

NEOCONOMICS TAKES THE ANGLOSPHERE:

MPs in push to cut top tax rate (Steve Lewis and Samantha Maiden, 24dec04, The Australian)

AN influential group of Coalition MPs is urging the Howard Government to embrace a once-in-a-generation opportunity to overhaul tax and welfare and boost national savings.

Seizing on the Government's sweeping election victory, the Liberal MPs and senators are calling for significant cuts in personal and company taxes and reintroduction of welfare reforms stalled by a hostile Senate.

A group of about 25 backbenchers has begun mapping out a reform agenda that will add to pressure on the Howard Government from business and welfare groups to boost productivity and workplace participation by removing disincentives in the tax and welfare systems.

The MPs argue that the combination of projected budget surpluses of $24billion over the next four years and the Coalition's control of both parliamentary chambers opens the way for a cut in the top marginal rate and new incentives to smooth the path from welfare to work.

Victorian senator Mitch Fifield, a former senior adviser to Peter Costello, said the group's "bottom line" was simple: "We want to cut taxes."

And he argued that lowering the top marginal rate of 47per cent to a rate closer to the company rate of 30per cent was desirable. [...]

"The whole objective from a tax point of view is to encourage workplace participation but also boost national savings," he said.

WHAT CAN A WOODEN HORSE DO TO US?:

Health savings accounts on rise: Tax-free device gains acceptance (Bruce Japsen, December 25, 2004, Chicago Tribune)

Years of double-digit increases have made the cost of health care so overwhelming that the federal government is allowing consumers to set aside tax-free money in health savings accounts--a shelter like those for major expenses such as retirement or a college education.

The accounts, known as HSAs, were created a year ago by the Medicare reform law signed by President Bush. They are expected to proliferate in 2005 as consumers learn more about them and how they can blunt the effects of cost increases projected at more than 10 percent next year. .

Insurers say they have sold a few thousand HSAs this year, largely to individuals and small businesses, but they are expecting a large jump next year as midsize to large employers adopt the concept. By 2006, more than 70 percent of employers are considering offering them, according to a survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting.

The tax-sheltered accounts allow people with high-deductible health insurance plans to set aside money each year for medical care and carry over money not used from one year to the next. They are also portable and follow people from job to job.

Money in the health savings account can be used to pay for doctor visits, drugs, co-payments or other medical services that are not covered until the deductible is met.

Early purchasers of these accounts say they save money because their high-deductible plans typically have lower premiums than traditional managed-care plans.

SETTING THE BAR TOO LOW:

Statesmen for these times (Martin Gilbert, December 26, 2004, The Observer)

People often ask how history will remember our generation of leaders in comparison with Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Many comment that today's leaders look small compared with the giants of the past. This is, I believe, a misconception.

In their day, both Churchill and Roosevelt were frequently criticised, often savagely, by their countrymen, including legislators who had little knowledge of the behind-the-scenes reality of the war.

The passage of time both elevates and reduces reputations. Today there is a cult of Churchill, particularly in the United States, but also far greater scholarly criticism, which regards him, increasingly, as a flawed war leader. The same is true of Roosevelt: his recent biographers are constantly revealing - to their satisfaction, at least - feet of clay.

Although it can easily be argued that George W Bush and Tony Blair face a far lesser challenge than Roosevelt and Churchill did - that the war on terror is not a third world war - they may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill. Their societies are too divided today to deliver a calm judgment, and many of their achievements may be in the future: when Iraq has a stable democracy, with al-Qaeda neutralised, and when Israel and the Palestinian Authority are independent democracies, living side by side in constructive economic cooperation.

If they can move this latter aim, to which Bush and Blair pledged themselves on 12 November, it will be a leadership achievement of historic proportions.

SMARTER THAN MAGGIE AND GEORGE III:

Labour facing a house tax 'grenade' (Gaby Hinsliff, December 26, 2004, The Observer)

Middle-class protests over paying inheritance tax and ever rising levels of stamp duty are a potential political 'hand grenade', Labour's newest election strategist warns today, adding that the government would be 'foolish' to ignore them.

Shaun Woodward, the former Tory MP who defected to Labour, has been brought on to Tony Blair's election team because of his unique insight into Tory advertising guru Maurice Saatchi, with whom he worked closely on the Tories' 1992 campaign.

He has already submitted a detailed analysis to the Prime Minister on the likely plan of attack and is singling out tax as an area where Labour is potentially vulnerable.

Rising house prices in London and the South East mean thousands of families have now risen above the threshold of owning assets worth more than £263,000 - making them liable for the 40 per cent tax on what they leave their children, a levy once associated with the landed gentry.

'Inheritance tax has the ability to resonate with people, particularly in marginal constituencies, and particularly when we consider the numbers of people now [worth] in excess of the threshold,' Woodward told The Observer .

'I am not talking about well-off middle-class people, I'm talking about people in the Eighties who bought their [council] house which today is worth around the limit. We would be very foolish if we as the governing party dismissed it as something which should be addressed.

'I think what you are going to see from the Tories are issues like inheritance tax [and] stamp duty thrown in like hand grenades.'

REPAYMENT IS A MUG'S GAMES:

Economic Rally for Argentines Defies Forecasts (LARRY ROHTER, 12/26/04, NY Times)

When the Argentine economy collapsed in December 2001, doomsday predictions abounded. Unless it adopted orthodox economic policies and quickly cut a deal with its foreign creditors, hyperinflation would surely follow, the peso would become worthless, investment and foreign reserves would vanish and any prospect of growth would be strangled.

But three years after Argentina declared a record debt default of more than $100 billion, the largest in history, the apocalypse has not arrived. Instead, the economy has grown by 8 percent for two consecutive years, exports have zoomed, the currency is stable, investors are gradually returning and unemployment has eased from record highs - all without a debt settlement or the standard measures required by the International Monetary Fund for its approval.

Argentina's recovery has been undeniable, and it has been achieved at least in part by ignoring and even defying economic and political orthodoxy. Rather than moving to immediately satisfy bondholders, private banks and the I.M.F., as other developing countries have done in less severe crises, the Peronist-led government chose to stimulate internal consumption first and told creditors to get in line with everyone else.

"This is a remarkable historical event, one that challenges 25 years of failed policies," said Mark Weisbrot, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research group in Washington. "While other countries are just limping along, Argentina is experiencing very healthy growth with no sign that it is unsustainable, and they've done it without having to make any concessions to get foreign capital inflows."

SUICIDE PACT:

Vote Turkey this Christmas (Norman Stone, 12/18/04, The Spectator)

[T]he average age in Turkey is about 26, and over the past generation the Turks have been learning how to do capitalism. In 1960 the Koreans exported wigs, and had a GDP per head somewhat below Turkey’s. The Turks took rather longer about such progress (politics was a mess), but they are getting there, and there are now world-class Turkish firms, with interests all over the place, which could pay off the national debt tomorrow if the call came. If you take the road from Istanbul to Cappadocia, you pass one huge lorry after another ferrying goods to Germany (they are sometimes to be seen, even in England; nowadays, in Wales, there are Turkish ceramics factories — a phenomenon that we cannot have seen since the 16th century when Ottoman traders dealt in Cornish tin). Now, Turkey is still, overall, quite a poor country, and there are huge differences between the plush parts of Istanbul or Izmir, where you might think you were anywhere in Mediterranean Europe, and S?rnak or Hakkari in the Kurdish south-east, where — drugs traders apart — you might think you were in the Third World, producing nothing but children. But Korea was like that 50 years ago, and what Europe now has on its doorstep is a country not only Korea-like in potential, but with a long, long history, entirely missed by critics, of co-operation with Christianity and with Europe.

This is perhaps the most misunderstood thing of all. The Turks are Muslim, yes, but there is an enormously long tradition of collaboration with Christianity. Louis de Bernières has written a very good novel about this — Birds Without Wings — which takes the history of a Greek-Turkish small town in Mediterranean Anatolia in the period of the first world war. Critics — the Economist’s, for instance — wondered why he had spent ten years between his last novel and this one. I can tell that critic the answer: it is a very very complicated story, and Louis de Bernières has done an enormous amount of homework, from the high politics of the Turkish war of independence to the nature of local cooking and the shape of local superstitions. But the central point is that the local Christians and Muslims got along very well — quite a bit of intermarriage, with much blurring of the edges when it came to religion. There are nowadays in the Greek press articles about how the Anatolian Greeks resented the invasion by mainlanders in 1919: they smashed the balance that generation after generation had established. The end of the Greek presence in Anatolia is a horrible story, and the chief devil in it is Lloyd George, who egged on the mainland Greeks to invade, commit ethnic-cleansing atrocities, polarise things, lose, and preside over the departure of the million or so Anatolian Greeks. In de Bernières’s words, ‘You do not piss off the Turks.’ True, they are not good at all when it comes to public relations — lying does not come naturally to them — and in any saloon bar it can be very tiresome to have to tell people that they did not do an Auschwitz on the Greeks or the Armenians, who have been much better organised with their hard-luck stories. The Armenian diaspora can be especially tiresome, trying to make us believe that they had their very own Holocaust. In 1914 their leader, Boghos Nubar Pasha, was offered a place in the Turkish cabinet. Can you imagine Hitler making Chaim Weizmann the same offer?

The fact was that Christians had been part of the Ottoman empire from the start. Was the initial Ottoman state in the early 14th century a creation of Warriors for the Faith, as its best-known historian in England, Paul Wittek, supposed? No, the first Osman was elected chief by the other three leaders, who were Byzantine cowboys. Did the Ottoman dynasty, Caliphs of all Islam, marcher lords of the horizon, etc., descend from the Prophet? No, they were three-quarters Balkan Christian in origin. A 12th-century Byzantine princess, Anna Comnena, remarked that the population of Anatolia consisted of Greeks, barbarians and what she called mixo-varvaroi, and a famous Arab traveller, Ibn Batuta, tut-tutted about the lax ways of the Turks — wine and women well in evidence. He would tut-tut even more, now. There are Christmas lights and trees all over Ankara, Christmas shopping is the usual European epidemic, and Santa Claus is around, only the celebrations are theoretically for the New Year.

But there is nothing new in this. When Constantinople fell to the Turks, the nephews of the last emperor became governor-general of the Balkans and admiral of the Ottoman fleet, while their first cousin, Zoe, famously married the Tsar (it was not, incidentally, to give Muscovy a title to Byzantium: the aim was to convert the Tsar to Catholicism, Zoe having been brought up by the Pope). In 1453 the Sultan’s first port of call was to the Orthodox Patriarch, Gennadius, and a treaty was drawn up. The two were natural allies, because the Orthodox detested the Latins, who had taken over the Byzantine economy (the Galata Tower, one of Istanbul’s landmarks, was built by the Genoese, not against the Turks, but against the Venetians, who were trying to take over the Black Sea trade). A Grand Logothete remarked famously, ‘Better the Sultan’s turban than the Cardinal’s hat’, and when Othello’s Cyprus fell to the Turks in 1571 the Orthodox peasants cheered them on, as a relief from Latin feudalism. The Turks made the Patriarch a pasha. They remembered their nomadic origins, and a badge of honour was a horsetail on the coach. The Sultan had four, and the Patriarch rode around with three. He became the largest landowner in the empire (this subject is splendidly explored in Stephen Runciman’s best book, The Great Church in Captivity) and the document was drawn up in Greek, addressed to megas authentes, ‘great sovereign’, which was how you addressed the Byzantine emperor. The Turkish ear, incidentally, which has affinities with the Japanese, could not manage this very easily, and turned authentes into effendi, an honorific widely bestowed. There is a very good Greek book on this, Dimitri Kitzikis’s L’empire ottoman. The general line is that the Ottoman empire, when it worked, was a sort of Byzantium with attitude. Quite why it declined is a good question.

But the Ottoman decline was mirrored in Spain, the European country that Turkey most resembles. Spain had a thousand years of Islam, Old Castile is similar to the Anatolian plateau in barrenness, and where Turkey has Kurds and Armenians, Spain has Basques and Catalans. Europeanisation in both countries involved a sort of civil war (Charles Esdaile’s splendid Peninsular War deals with this) because Counter-Reformation Catholicism in Spain laid the same kind of obscurantist burden that the ulema imposed on Turkey — throwing the telescopes from the Galata Tower because it was impious to penetrate God’s secrets, or closing a school of mathematics for gunners on the same grounds. In Spain the civil war came to a head in the 1930s; Turkey headed it off with the Atatürk reforms, which have given her a literate, healthy population and an Islam that is easy to live with, and has produced a political party quite similar to the Christian Democratic ones in Europe. Islamic mayors have also, incidentally, been quite helpful about the restoration of Christian churches, and even saved the Anglican one from deconsecration by the bishop of Gibraltar. It is now full, most Sundays.

Spain has been a considerable success story, and there is no reason for Turkey not to repeat the feat.

THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN:

The secret of long life... go to church (Elizabeth Day 26/12/2004, Daily Telegraph)

Those who made their annual trip to church on Christmas day will have to think again. Research shows that regular churchgoers live longer than non-believers.

A 12-year study tracking mortality rates of more than 550 adults over the age of 65 found that those who attend services at least once a week were 35 per cent more likely to live longer than those who never attended church.

The research also found that going to church boosted an elderly person's immune system and made them less likely to suffer clogged arteries or high blood pressure.

Susan Lutgendorf, psychology professor at the University of Iowa, who carried out the study, said: "There's something involved in the act of religious attendance, whether it's the group interaction, the world view or just the exercise to get out of the house. There's something that seems to be beneficial."

WELCOME TO SHAWSHANK, WHEEZY:

Gay penguins found in aquariums (Japan Times, 12/26/04)

A group of researchers said it has found a number of same-sex pairs of penguins at aquariums and zoos around Japan.

The group, led by Keisuke Ueda, a professor of behavioral ecology at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, attributed the phenomenon to the difficulty of finding partners of the opposite sex because facilities only have an average of 20 birds, with uneven numbers of males and females.

X-RATED GOVERNMENT

Northern Christmas comes with gonorrhea warning (Canadian Press, December 24th, 2004)

With a spike in the number of Yukoners infected with gonorrhea, the territory's Department of Health and Social Services is distributing condoms as Christmas presents with the message, “Wrap it for someone you love.”

Now, there is a governmental promotion of Christmas that really would offend Jews and Muslims. At least, we hope it would.

CAN'T HAVE HURT TO HAVE MR. SLATER PIMPING HIS BIO (via Kevin Whited:

Our TEXAN OF THE YEAR: Karl Rove: The man who is building a Republican majority (WAYNE SLATER, December 24, 2004, The Dallas Morning News)

Editor's note: Today the editorial board names Karl Rove, the chief political adviser to President George W. Bush, as The Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year for 2004. He has the distinction of following in the footsteps of his boss, who was our 2003 choice, and therefore ineligible for consideration this year. After making its decision, the editorial board turned to Dallas Morning News political reporter Wayne Slater, one of the country's leading Rove experts, to analyze for our readers why Karl Rove mattered so much this past year.

The president, that famous giver of nicknames, bestowed a new one after his re-election on Karl Christian Rove: The Architect.

A perfect tribute. It was Mr. Rove – master strategist and political grenadier – who drew up the plan to win George W. Bush a second term in the White House and bird-dogged every detail to victory. He honed the central theme of the presidential campaign. He built the biggest, shiniest, most elaborate voter-identification and turnout machine in history. And in the process, he advanced an audacious goal of making the GOP America's permanent majority party.

In selecting The Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year, the editorial board sought someone of uncommon character who demonstrated both leadership and vision in 2004, who exemplified a trailblazing instinct and ability to navigate adversity. In these, Mr. Rove emerged as one of the most creative and influential political figures of our time. His work for the president helped assure the Bush agenda will affect Americans for the next four years. His desire for a Republican-dominated realignment of government could affect us for decades.

To be sure, candidates win elections, not consultants, and Mr. Bush proved the better candidate in 2004. But even the best candidate needs a savvy adviser, someone to match a leader's strengths with the mood of the moment. Bill Clinton had his James Carville, Woodrow Wilson his Col. House and President McKinley a nimble political guru-in-chief named Marcus Hanna.

Mr. Rove might very well be the best of the bunch. [...]

In making its decision, the editorial board said that his second-to-none tactical skills were not the only thing that earned Mr. Rove Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year status, but an uncommon political vision in which he has cast Mr. Bush's political success as part of something larger: a permanent Republican revolution of U.S. politics.

The blueprint started in Texas in the 1980s, where as a young political acolyte in the camp of Republican Gov. Bill Clements, Mr. Rove wrote a memo anticipating the GOP takeover of the Lone Star State.

He was right. And two decades later, he's taken the thing national.

Although he never graduated from college, Mr. Rove has proven himself an adept student of history. He finds particular meaning in the election in 1896 of William McKinley that launched a fundamental realignment of American politics. With Mr. McKinley began a 30-year run of near-exclusive Republican rule in the White House, ending only with Franklin Roosevelt and another fundamental realignment.

It's a model – an enduring Republican majority lasting decades – that Mr. Rove would like to duplicate in the 21st century.

In Washington, Republicans have indeed become the majority party. The party controls the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. It controls a majority of governorships. And the results of the 2004 race suggest that the ideological center of the nation has moved toward Mr. Bush, who captured 51 percent of the vote. The shift is not wholly of Mr. Rove's making, but it is consistent with his larger design.

(And by the way, over 20 years in Texas, Mr. Rove was instrumental in turning Democrat-dominated Texas into a state where the GOP today holds every statewide office and both Senate seats, as well as dominating the courts and the Legislature. When U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay spearheaded the successful drive to redraw congressional boundaries in Texas, he found a Legislature and state leadership friendly to his purpose – thanks in part to Karl Rove's handiwork.)

A few days after the November election, Mr. Rove appeared on Fox News and was asked whether the outcome had the same kind of potential as the McKinley victory in 1896 to give a governing majority to the Republican Party for decades.

"It does. We'll only tell with time," he said. "It was an election that realigned American politics years afterwards. And I think the same thing will be here."

SO MUCH FOR SILLY STRING (THEORY)

Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told "matter and energy."

Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell's nucleus. Likewise, a century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in physical systems and processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.

This viewpoint invites a new look at venerable questions. The information storage capacity of devices such as hard disk drives has been increasing by leaps and bounds. When will such progress halt? What is the ultimate information capacity of a device that weighs, say, less than a gram and can fit inside a cubic centimeter (roughly the size of a computer chip)? How much information does it take to describe a whole universe? Could that description fit in a computer's memory? Could we, as William Blake memorably penned, "see the world in a grain of sand," or is that idea no more than poetic license?

Remarkably, recent developments in theoretical physics answer some of these questions, and the answers might be important clues to the ultimate theory of reality. By studying the mysterious properties of black holes, physicists have deduced absolute limits on how much information a region of space or a quantity of matter and energy can hold. Related results suggest that our universe, which we perceive to have three spatial dimensions, might instead be "written" on a two-dimensional surface, like a hologram. Our everyday perceptions of the world as three-dimensional would then be either a profound illusion or merely one of two alternative ways of viewing reality. A grain of sand may not encompass our world, but a flat screen might. [...]

The proliferation of variations on the holographic motif makes it clear that the subject has not yet reached the status of physical law. But although the holographic way of thinking is not yet fully understood, it seems to be here to stay. And with it comes a realization that the fundamental belief, prevalent for 50 years, that field theory is the ultimate language of physics must give way. Fields, such as the electromagnetic field, vary continuously from point to point, and they thereby describe an infinity of degrees of freedom. Superstring theory also embraces an infinite number of degrees of freedom. Holography restricts the number of degrees of freedom that can be present inside a bounding surface to a finite number; field theory with its infinity cannot be the final story. Furthermore, even if the infinity is tamed, the mysterious dependence of information on surface area must be somehow accommodated.

Holography may be a guide to a better theory. What is the fundamental theory like? The chain of reasoning involving holography suggests to some, notably Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, that such a final theory must be concerned not with fields, not even with spacetime, but rather with information exchange among physical processes. If so, the vision of information as the stuff the world is made of will have found a worthy embodiment.

DINO SOAR:

WASHINGTON COMEBACK (Robert Novak, 12/25/04, Townhall)

Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, facing a potentially difficult 2006 second term election in the state of Washington, may have mixed reactions to Republican State Sen. Dino Rossi apparently being counted out in the 2004 election for governor.

Democratic State Atty. Gen. Christine Gregoire was an overwhelming favorite for governor, but Rossi was ahead in the recount until court rulings favored the Democrats. The only proven statewide candidate for the Republicans, Rossi would be the GOP's best Senate bet against Cantwell.

Cantwell goes into the 2006 campaign in poor financial shape. According to federal filings, Cantwell's campaign committee on Sept. 30 was $2.5 million in debt with $264,000 cash on hand.

MA ELECTS REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS:

Mapquest.Dem:
What’s the matter with Massachusetts? The Democrats are far too dependent on it. Go Midwest, young man. (Michael Lind, 01.04.05, American Prospect)

Is the Democratic Party becoming the New England party? In 2004, the candidates who dominated the Democratic presidential primaries, beginning with the one in New Hampshire, were Howard Dean of Vermont and John Kerry of Massachusetts. In 2004, as in 1988, the Democrats nominated a liberal Massachusetts politician to run against a conservative member of the Bush family from Texas. And each time, the Texan won a majority of the popular vote as well as the electoral vote. This time, the senator from Massachusetts lost in part because the decision by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court to legalize gay marriage galvanized socially conservative voters across the nation, who turned out to pass 11 state referenda against gay marriage.

Outside of selected cities, the core region of the Democratic Party is New England. The Democratic Party is also the minority party at all levels of government.

These two facts are not unrelated. Throughout American history, national parties too closely identified with New England have repeatedly been marginalized. This has been the fate of the Federalist Party, the Whig Party, and the old Republican Party at its nadir, between the 1930s and the 1960s. And it is the fate that threatens the Democratic Party today -- unless it takes conscious and aggressive steps to constitute itself once again as a regionally diverse coalition of interests that can become a majority party. [...]

Today, outside of big cities with large black and immigrant populations, the Democratic Party is slowly being confined to Greater New England. The political heirs of the Federalists, the Whigs, and the Progressives, today’s Democrats are in danger of following those parties into oblivion.

It would be a mistake for the Democrats to think that they can regain a national majority by changing their policies or their style to appeal to more red-state voters. A new majority cannot be built on bland compromises between blue-state liberalism and red-state conservatism. Nor can northeastern or West Coast politicians successfully reinvent themselves as heartland types.

What is necessary is to recast the Democrats as, in effect, a loose federation of regional parties. All successful majority parties have had regional wings. This is true even in today’s Republican Party, which, though heavily dominated by right-wing southerners, includes socially liberal governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and George Pataki of New York, pragmatic internationalists like Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, and moderate New England senators such as Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chaffee.

Today’s Democratic minority is defined in the public mind by identity-politics groups -- blacks, Latinos, feminists, gays and lesbians -- and economic-interest groups, like unions. A majority Democratic Party would be defined, in contrast, by its regional wings: northeastern Democrats, West Coast Democrats, Great Plains Democrats, midwestern Democrats, and even some southern Democrats. The regional factions would agree on a brief national platform that is chiefly economic. But they would be free to express their regional differences in the areas of values and foreign policy.

At present, the Democratic Party is a socially liberal party that welcomes both economic conservatives and economic liberals. But in a country with a center-right majority on social issues and a center-left majority on economic issues of interest to the broad middle class and working class, this is exactly backward: Defining liberalism in terms of social liberalism is a formula for minority status. According to various polls, the number of self-described liberals in the United States is no more than 18 percent or 20 percent. Public attitudes on race, gay rights, and other subjects have been getting more liberal with each generation, but widespread opposition to unqualified abortion rights and gay marriage shows the limits to this trend. The religious right cannot and should not be courted. But in the foreseeable future, the Democrats have no chance of regaining a majority without the votes of many moderate traditionalists. [...]

The model for a regionally diverse majority coalition of Democrats should be the Lincoln Republicans between the 1860s and the 1930s. Lincoln Republicans were able to build upon their core constituency in Greater New England to construct a national majority that lasted, with a few interruptions, from the end of Reconstruction to the New Deal. They did so by adding many Jacksonian populists in the border South and Midwest to their political base of former Whigs in the Northeast.

There is no equivalent in today’s American politics to the question of slavery in the territories, which united former Whigs and Jacksonian populists in the 1850s.

Meanwhile, though Mr. Lind despises religion, the panoply of conservative Christian issues--abortion, homosexuality, cloning, prayer in schools, etc.--is almost exactly equivalent to the question of slavery. They're moral issues around which you can rally a broad swath of the nation. At least Republicans can. As even Mr. Lind notes, there is no prospect of putting together a majority for the anti-Christian side on social issues.

Where does all that leave Democrats? Exactly where he started the essay--they're a regional party that appeals only to secular elites with a slathering of residual ethnic support thrown in. Even that latter seems unlikely to endure for too long, as blacks can't feel too comfortable in the party of abortion, sexual license, and separationism. The question isn't whether they can appeal beyond the East and West Coasts but how much longer they can hold on even there.

SON OF SIMPSON:

Immigration bill won't come easy in new Congress: Definition of 'reform' highlights conflicts members will face. (Michael Doyle, December 25, 2004, Sacramento Bee)

Everyone considers immigration reform a top priority when Congress reconvenes next month.

But no one agrees what "reform" means.

"I fully understand the politics of immigration reform," President Bush assured reporters this week.

Many lawmakers, including the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, call tougher enforcement the centerpiece of reform. Many others interpret reform as a code word for a guest-worker program that puts illegal immigrants on track toward a green card.

This apparent contradiction could doom legislation. Or perhaps Capitol Hill's long immigration stalemate could be broken by some deft combination of getting tough and giving hope.

"A lot of people have said that could be a good compromise," Mariposa Republican Rep. George Radanovich said. "It depends on who you want to please to get a bill passed."

HOW MUCH IS THAT SPITZER IN THE WINDOW?:

Spitzer, in a Shift, Will Yield Inquiries to U.S. Regulators (PATRICK O'GILFOIL HEALY, 12/25/04, NY Times)

After nearly three years of high-profile prosecutions of investment banks, mutual funds and insurance companies, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York said yesterday that he is ready to cede those investigations to federal regulators.

Mr. Spitzer said he believed the era of state attorneys general crusading against misdeeds on Wall Street was ending. He said he was concerned that 50 different investigations would balkanize regulations, and added that once-lax federal agencies had become more aggressive about rooting out fraud and wrongdoing.

The shift, first reported in The Financial Times, represents a remarkable turnabout for Mr. Spitzer, who has built a reputation as a giant-killer with his investigations of Merrill Lynch, one of the country's largest brokerage firms; Marsh & McLennan, the world's largest insurance broker; and Richard A. Grasso, the former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.

His decision comes just two weeks after he declared his candidacy for governor of New York in 2006, a campaign in which he will need to raise large sums to be competitive. Traditionally, many of those donations in a governor's race come from Wall Street...

RISKY? IT'S A MACHINE:

Huygens Probe Takes Plunge (John Johnson, December 25, 2004, LA Times)

The Frisbee-shaped Huygens probe successfully separated from the Cassini spacecraft Friday and began a risky 2.5-million-mile journey to the surface of Saturn's bizarre, smog-choked moon Titan.

Applause burst out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory shortly after 7:24 p.m., when scientists received word from NASA's Deep Space Network tracking stations in Spain and Goldstone, Calif., that the Huygens probe had cast off after a seven-year piggyback ride on the Cassini spacecraft. All systems were said to have performed flawlessly in the separation.

"Today's release was another successful milestone in the Cassini-Huygens odyssey," said David Southwood of the European Space Agency, which built the Huygens probe. "Now all of our hopes and expectations are focused on getting the first [close-up] data from a new world we've been dreaming of exploring for decades."

That data won't come for another three weeks, during which time the 9-foot-diameter Huygens probe will chase down Titan and then, if everything goes as planned, hurl itself through the thick, nitrogen-methane atmosphere before crashing into a surface that could consist of anything from a sticky chemical sludge to poison oceans.

Titan has beguiled scientists for years because it is unlike any other place in the solar system. The only moon with an atmosphere, Titan is also of interest because it is thought to resemble the early Earth, before plant life formed and began pumping oxygen into the atmosphere.

Too frigid at minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit to grow life itself, Titan is a kind of frozen museum piece of what an early, Earth-like planet might look like.

THE LACK OF ARAFAT MAKES ALL THINGS POSSIBLE:

In Bethlehem, a Soft Stirring of Optimism: As violence between Israelis and Palestinians eases, the city dares hope that it can revive the tourism industry that once sustained it. (Laura King, December 25, 2004, LA Times)

In this Christmas season of hopes and fears, the little town of Bethlehem finds itself suspended somewhere between the two.

With lamplight glowing softly on ancient stones and the musty fragrance of incense penetrating the damp winter chill, Palestinian Christians, foreign dignitaries and a smattering of tourists celebrated midnight Mass on Friday in the basilica built on the spot where tradition says Jesus was born.

The holiday is marked by its usual disorienting Holy Land melange of army roadblocks and candlelight carols, twinkling lights and olive-drab armored vehicles.

But there has been some cause for tentative optimism this year: the dramatic easing of the day-to-day violent conflict with Israel, coupled with greater Palestinian aspirations to democracy in the wake of Yasser Arafat's death.

REGAINING CONTROL OF EDUCATION:

Power center driven by religion to reshape nation (Doug Oplinger and Dennis J. Willard, , Nov. 19, 2004, Akron Beacon Journal)

Founded in 1983 as a legal-aid society for home-schooling parents, [Home School Legal Defense Association] has become much more. It has taken on the appearance of a political party in its own right, with an evangelical Christian mission to shape the American culture and change the face of government, the news media and international affairs.

While many Americans know little or nothing about home schooling and HSLDA, the resources of this new army of northern Virginia played an important role in the moral-values campaign that ushered George W. Bush into a second term and elected conservative Republicans to Congress.

The Home School Legal Defense Association has its own political leadership, its own fund-raising structure, a carefully screened battalion of college students and thousands of volunteers across the country who share a conservative vision of saving America from its sinful ways.

Charitable donations from some of America's wealthiest conservatives and dues from the organization's 81,000 member families are the financial backbone.

HSLDA leaders control a political action committee.

Families who buy memberships for the legal protection also are buying into an organization that takes positions on behalf of states' and individual rights. It works against liberal judges and politicians, homosexual rights and abortion. [...]

Patrick Henry College is the training camp of the home-schooled fundamentalist Christian movement.

The school requires its students to commit nearly half of their junior and senior years to fieldwork for political interests. Because charitable contributions support the four-year-old college, the political involvement pushes the legal limits for a nonprofit organization.

In the school's short history, Patrick Henry students already have worn a path down Route 7 to the nation's capital. Last spring, they claimed seven of the 100 college internships at the White House, the Bush administration confirmed. They also worked with U.S. intelligence agencies and such conservative think tanks as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

Patrick Henry's students permeate all levels of government, writing e-mail alerts to members of Congress on behalf of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum or handling questions from citizens back home for U.S. senators. On weekends, it's not unusual for the Republican National Committee to transport students to distant locations to help with targeted campaigns.

Michael Farris is president of Patrick Henry College and chairman and chief counsel of the Home School Legal Defense Association.

Education Week magazine has named him one of the 100 most important faces in education in the 20th century.

Farris was a leader in Pat Buchanan's 1992 effort to be a viable third-party presidential candidate. The ordained minister and lawyer has argued -- and won -- pivotal cases before the U.S. and state supreme courts regarding religious freedom and individual rights.

"We're the balance'' in higher education, Farris said in an interview with the Akron Beacon Journal. "You won't find people here who are advocating socialism or Marxism. That's not the case in most colleges. You will find people there that are socialists.

"We are unashamedly Christians, trying to train high-level, academically qualified students who have a deep Christian conviction who will go out and do good things for this world,'' Farris said. "You will not find political correctness here in any way, shape or form.''

WHERE'S THE MUSLIM MANZANAR?:

Signs of reconciliation
Hostility between the American public and Islam resides in fiction as much as fact (Mustafa El-Feki, al-Ahram Weekly)

I have just spent several weeks in New York, during which time a single question was on my mind: will the wave of anti- Arab and anti-Muslim hostility persist or recede? The US president has just approved the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, in accordance with which the State Department will be charged with monitoring anti-Semitism around the world and rating countries on their treatment of Jews. I could not help but wonder whether the American mind and heart could ever sufficiently expand to press for the application of that law to other religions and ethnic groups, to Islam and Arabs, targets of a vicious campaign of defamation. The question appears to have been answered by the re-election of the Republican administration for another four years, consolidating the influence of the neo-conservatives on the White House policy and the prospect of more violence in this part of the world in the name of the fight against terrorism and the spread of democracy.

As I contemplated the present situation and its implications for the future during my stay in the US I registered a number of impressions. Above all I would venture to suggest there is no inherent incompatibility between Islam and the US as a state and no real cause for difference between Muslim peoples and Americans. Both have deeply held religious beliefs and cherish their spiritual sensibilities, nothing disturbing in itself. What is disturbing, though, is the gap in mutual confidence and understanding that has developed in the last few years, and the impact this has had on the global political climate and international relations.

It is useful to recall that Americans and Islam sided together against the communist belt that stretched across the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and both fought against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. This fact puts paid to the notion that there are profound or deeply rooted contradictions between Islam and the US. Indeed, one still recalls President Dwight Eisenhower's remarks on the occasion of the inauguration of the Islamic Centre in Washington in 1959 in which he underscored the feelings of mutual affection and the aspiration to closer cooperation between the two peoples.

During my stay in the US I observed that the American people are not obsessed with the question of Islam, but they are keen to learn more about what is being depicted as a new adversary in the media and by some centres of power, especially those we perhaps mistakenly term Christian Zionists.

PHANTOM MENACE:

Groups on Right Say Christmas Is Under Attack (Dana Milbank, December 24, 2004, Washington Post)

Many of the conservative Christian groups that led the fight this year to ban same-sex marriage are sounding an alarm about efforts to block Christmas celebrations.

Representatives of the groups -- including the Alliance Defense Fund, the Thomas More Law Center and Liberty Counsel -- say the two issues, and other pending fights over public display of the Ten Commandments and teaching of evolution, are linked by a belief among religious conservatives that traditional values are under siege in the United States.

"The sentiment is the same for the same-sex marriage battle or for Christmas: It's the pervasive idea among religious people that traditional values are under attack from all different angles," said Erik Stanley, chief counsel for the Liberty Counsel.

Those on the other side of these battles say the Christian groups are wildly exaggerating the threats from a phantom enemy for the purpose of mobilizing evangelicals to contribute funds (some groups are explicitly using the Christmas issue to raise money) or to become politically active.

For the first time in more than 75 years, a Nativity scene is absent from the front of the Balch Elementary School, and some South Norwood residents are unhappy about it.

''My family has pictures of my father as a child being photographed in front of the creche at the Balch School," said Paul Eysie, a lawyer and member of the South Norwood Committee. ''The community has been using that place for over 100 years."

Activists from the close-knit neighborhood about a mile south of downtown Norwood are trying to find a way to bring about a return of the creche, which was banished as a result of a lawsuit filed a year ago by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and four Norwood residents.

THE PERFECTIONISTS:

Pipeline to the President For GOP Conservatives: Give and Take Flows Through Public Liaison Aide (Jim VandeHei, December 24, 2004, Washington Post)

[Tim] Goeglein, a 40-year-old who looks as if he would be carded trying to buy a beer, is deputy director of the Office of Public Liaison, one of four White House political departments run by uberstrategist Karl Rove. Yet Goeglein's role is much more central to how this president operates -- and wins elections -- than the job title suggests, according to several Republicans outside and inside the White House.

It is Goeglein's job to make sure conservatives are happy, in the loop and getting their best ideas before the president and turned into laws. With Goeglein's assistance, Christian conservatives, for instance, were successful in lobbying Bush to push for abstinence-first funding to combat AIDs and speak out against the persecution of Christians in Sudan, according to Charles W. Colson, an evangelical Christian who works closely with Bush and Goeglein.

"My experience has been a lot of times when we have had serious questions and we needed administration backing to get them through . . . if we call Tim, all of a sudden things get through," said Colson, who was a public liaison under President Richard M. Nixon. [...]

John F. Kennedy created the concept of a public liaison, Nixon institutionalized the office and Republicans say Bush has perfected it.

DOESN'T THE STORY SUGGEST YOU CAN RISE ABOVE YOUR HOMELESSNESS?:

Jesse Jackson: Bush Would Have Left Jesus Homeless (Newsmax, 12/24/04)

President Bush has implemented economic policies that resemble those of the Roman Empire, which forced the baby Jesus into homelessness on the night of his birth, former civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson said in a pre-Christmas rant late Thursday.

"In the last [Bush] budget, we cut housing again, and that was Jesus' dilemma."

LEBANON THEN OR LEBANON NOW?:

The Struggle for the Middle East: Iraq, Iran, and democracy. (Reuel Marc Gerecht, 01/03/2005, Weekly Standard)

Though it is impossible to dissect precisely the Sunni Arab mentality that has fueled the insurgency, it's not too hard to see the two most influential mind-sets. One is that of the antidemocratic sectarian, who has used violence as a means of "negotiating" a future political position that a one man, one vote democracy would deny. These Sunni Arabs essentially want to create a pre-1970s Lebanon model in Iraq, where the Sunni community enjoys power, prestige, and wealth beyond what its numbers, accomplishments, and economic capacity warrant. These folks are the "pragmatists" among the Sunni Arab insurgents, since it is just possible to imagine them working out some deal with the Shiites and Kurds. Any workable deal would leave them vastly weaker than they were under Saddam, but this group just might compromise since their attachment to Iraq is sufficiently mundane--family, friends, property--that they would not want to risk losing it completely. Prime Minister Allawi gambled that these "pragmatists" were a decisive majority among the Arab Sunni elite and among the insurgents actually fighting.

The second mind-set is that of the Arab Sunni supremacist. These folks can be either Baathists or religious fundamentalists. They would rather be dead, or live permanently in exile, than accept an Iraqi state where Arab Shiites and Kurds rule. Rhetorically, if not financially, this group receives more support from the Sunni Arab world, which likes to depict these diehards as Iraq's finest patriots. Allawi gambled that the "pragmatists" would sell out the "supremacists."

None of the prime minister's bets has paid off because the lines between the "pragmatists" and the "supremacists" are often blurred, ideologically and familially. Also the itch to try violence as a means to win, not just draw or place, has been greater than what Allawi apparently expected. And once the violence starts, it's hard to stop. An emotional chain reaction sets in that further clouds the difference between "pragmatists" and "supremacists."

Where do we go from here? In all probability, we're stuck with Allawi's "deal" unless the January 30 elections can somehow change the dynamic and tactics. This could happen. A substantial Sunni vote in the January 30 elections would gut the legitimacy the insurgents are vying for inside Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world. The Sunni Arab elite who have either sided with the insurgents or are sitting "neutral" on the sidelines would get a loud wake-up call that they have misjudged the flock. If the Sunni Arabs vote in the elections, or, more important, if they abstain en masse, Allawi may see the light (he no doubt will see it before the CIA does), and start intimidating, not negotiating with, the "pragmatists."

Allawi and the Americans ought to make it perfectly clear that the Shia are coming (after the elections, even the diehard Sunnis may begin to appreciate the writing on the wall) and the Arab Sunni elite has at most a year to join the new Iraq. In the meantime, he and the Americans (and if not he, then the Americans) should talk openly and regularly about how the new Iraqi army will be overwhelmingly Shiite and Kurdish since the Sunni Arabs have given them no choice. We have to ratchet up the pressure on the Arab Sunni community, especially on its elite, while prominent Iraqi Shiites--real ones, not the Allawi, ex-Baathist look-alikes--appeal to the Sunnis behind the scenes to join the new nation. The Sunni Arabs have to know--they have to feel it in their bones--that they are on the verge of losing everything in Iraq. Allawi's grand gambit has done the opposite: It has produced self-confident, smiling faces among men who are actually enjoying the war (often safely ensconced in fine hotels in neighboring Arab states).

In the end, the Sunnis will not win a civil war. Inevitably the Iraqi Shia, diehard nationalists who will not long tolerate Sunni terrorist bombing campaigns in the South, will militarily organize themselves to defeat the Sunnis on their own turf. But their victory would likely be ferocious. Latent Shiite anger over decades of brutal Sunni oppression would probably come to the fore, empowering the most radical and cold-hearted among the Shiites. The democratic experiment and its most influential proponent, the moderate Shiite religious establishment, would both likely collapse amid the violence. The creation of an Iranian-aided Iraqi Hezbollah would become a distinct possibility. If the most radical and dictatorial came to the fore among both Sunni and Shiite Arabs, the Kurds would sensibly conclude that any association with Arab Iraqis was unhealthy. The de facto separation of Kurdistan could become de jure. Jordan and Saudi Arabia, two staunchly Sunni anti-Shiite states, could start throwing weaponry and money at any Sunni group that can shoot. A very ugly outcome.

MISPLACED CONFIDENCE:

Stem Cells and the Reagan Legacy (Gilbert Meilaender, Summer 2004, New Atlantis)

Moments after Ron Reagan had completed his “nonpartisan” speech recommending (though he did not say so) cloning for purposes of embryonic stem cell research, I was channel surfing on my minimal cable package in search of comment on the speech. For my sins I landed on MSNBC, where Campbell Brown was interviewing (on the convention floor) Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado.

Rep. DeGette earnestly assured Campbell and the rest of us that what Ron Reagan had recommended was simply using “spare” embryos that had been produced—but, as it turned out, not needed—for in vitro fertilization procedures. These embryos, destined for destruction anyway, were what Ron Reagan had recommended be used to bring about the cures that Rep. DeGette was confident lay in the future if only we forged ahead with research.

Campbell Brown seemed satisfied; at any rate, she raised no questions about Rep. DeGette’s analysis of and response to the speech. I, however, was amazed, and uncertain which would be the more charitable reaction to Rep. DeGette: Should I assume that she was knowledgeable but duplicitous? Or should I assume that her comments were entirely straightforward, even though utterly mistaken? Probably it is more charitable—and closer to the truth—to conclude that Rep. DeGette simply didn’t know what she was talking about.

Rep. DeGette was probably not alone in failing to understand what Ron Reagan was actually recommending; for, he never used the words that embryonic stem cell research advocates now avoid like the plague. What words? “Cloning.” And “embryo.” Yet, the procedure he described (that would, he implied, within another ten years give each of us our “own personal biological repair kit”) was precisely cloning. One takes an ovum, removes its nucleus and replaces it with the nucleus of the person to be cloned. The resulting product is then stimulated in such a way that it begins the cell division that characterizes the earliest stages of embryonic development of a human being—and then, bingo, we get embryonic stem cells. But, of course, we get them because this procedure results in an embryo, which is destroyed in order to procure those cells.

Clearly, Ron Reagan had been getting some coaching. When stem cell research first became a controverted topic, proponents tended to speak of “therapeutic cloning” (as opposed to “reproductive cloning”), trusting that the positive overtones of “therapeutic” would outweigh public distaste for anything called cloning. When this turned out not to be the case, proponents turned instead to sanitized technical language—speaking of somatic cell nuclear transfer to produce stem cells, but not of cloning or of embryos. That Ron Reagan knows this is deceptive was clear from the rest of his speech. After all, were no embryos involved or destroyed in this process, there would have been no need for him to argue that these “cells” “are not, in and of themselves, human beings.” And were it not a cloning procedure that he was describing and recommending, he could not have stated that it would eliminate the risk of tissue rejection.

Opponents of embryonic stem cell research have regularly noted that its advocates slip back and forth between talking of research carried out with “spare” IVF embryos and research using cloned embryos created solely and explicitly for research. The reason is simple: What researchers really want is what Ron Reagan recommended—cloned embryos for research. But, sensing that the public may be more receptive for now to research using “spare” embryos (doomed to destruction in any case, as we are always told), proponents often prefer to start there, all the while deriding “slippery slope” arguments which suggest and predict that we will not in fact stop there. At any rate, it should be clear that anyone who wants to join the cause that Ron Reagan set forth—and who, unlike Rep. DeGette, understands what he was saying—is supporting research using cloned embryos.

Were we actually to take seriously what Ron Reagan said, we would, I think, be stunned by its hubris, its utter lack of any sense of human limits. (And this speech was delivered, we should recall, at a convention intent on arguing that—with respect to war in Iraq—President Bush lacked the wisdom to sense the limits of what could be done and, instead, placed his trust in technical might alone.) Speaking of “a wide range of fatal and debilitating illnesses: Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, lymphoma, spinal cord injuries and much more,” Ron Reagan opined: “It may be within our power to put an end to this suffering. We only need to try.”

Our inability really to think through such promises was demonstrated almost immediately by a comment made by Andrea Mitchell, serving on a panel moderated—if that can possibly be the right word—by Chris Matthews (MSNBC again). What struck her—and impressed her—was that Ron Reagan had not mentioned Alzheimer’s, the disease that had so recently taken the life of President Reagan. For, she asserted, it was one of the few diseases where embryonic stem cell research had not been helpful (as if it had been helpful with many others). What she should have said, of course, is that researchers doubt that embryonic stem cells will be useful for treating Alzheimer’s and that they have more hope with respect to some (though not all) of the other conditions Ron Reagan had listed, even though research has yet to confirm such hopes. (Nor did she—or Ron Reagan—seem to realize the serious obstacles that stand in the way of using cloning to treat an autoimmune disease such as juvenile diabetes. The immune system that has produced diabetes by destroying the body’s insulin-producing cells is also likely to reject identical cells that have been cloned and reinserted.) But such technical issues do not yet get us to the hopes and fears—pathos mixed with hubris—that generate Ron Reagan’s call for research.

The deeper issue, which begs for analysis and critique, is the commitment to a kind of limitless war on disease. “We only need to try.” Why is it that those so certain that we cannot remake the world and rid it of political ills by applying American power and technical know-how are equally certain of our ability to wage successful war on one disease after another? Why is it that those so impressed with our need to accept moral limits when waging war, and so critical of American hubris, seem tone-deaf to the possibility that moral limits might rightly be placed upon the experiments by which we wage war against illness and suffering?

Evidently, if one knows oneself to be on the side of what is desirable and good, no moral limits need apply.

[H]e was confident in his science, and felt that he could draw a magic circle round her within which no evil might intrude.

TRUST THE PEOPLE:

Democrats Weigh De-emphasizing Abortion as an Issue (ADAM NAGOURNEY, 12/24/04, NY Times)

On abortion, Democrats said they were particularly frustrated that Republicans portrayed them as out of step on the issue during the campaign, noting that polls show a majority of Americans support at least some access to legal abortion.

"All these issues that put us into the extreme and not the mainstream really hurt us with the heartland of the country," said Donna Brazile, a Democratic Party leader who managed Al Gore's campaign in 2000. "Even I have trouble explaining to my family that we are not about killing babies."

Howard Dean, campaigning two weeks ago in Orlando, Fla., to succeed Terry McAuliffe as Democratic national chairman, drew nods of approval from Democratic state party leaders when he urged the party to embrace Democrats who oppose abortion.

"We ought not turn our back on pro-life people, even though the vast majority of people in this party are pro-choice," Dr. Dean said. "I don't have any objection to someone who is pro-life, if they really dedicated to the welfare of children."

"If somebody is willing to stick with us who is pro-life, that means they are the right kind of pro-life person," said Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont. "What I don't want to do is to have a national message that makes it impossible for you to be a conservative, or to be a progressive who can't win."

And Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said Republicans had "been successful at painting the view of the pro-choice movement as abortion on demand - and nothing can be farther from the truth."

Goldwynism (GOLD-wi-niz-em) noun (Wordsmith.org)

A humorous statement or phrase resulting from the use of incongruous
or contradictory words, situations, idioms, etc.

[After Samuel Goldwyn (1879-1974), Polish-born US film producer, known
for such remarks. Born Schmuel Gelbfisz, he changed his name to Samuel
Goldfish after he went to UK, and to Samuel Goldwyn after moving to the US.]

Here are some examples of Goldwynisms:

o Include me out.
o When I want your opinion I will give it to you.
o I'll give you a definite maybe.
o If I could drop dead right now, I would be the happiest man alive.
o Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
o I may not always be right, but I am never wrong.
o In two words im-possible.

INSTEAD OF THE SNOW BLOWER:

The Whovel (Peter Rojas, Dec 24, 2004, Engadget)

TURNING FROM THE DEMON'S TRAIL:

Going All the Way: An atheist "converts" to intelligent design. Why so timid, Mr. Flew? (ANDREW KLAVAN, December 24, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

Joining the Episcopal Church was the culmination of 35 years of thought and reading, periods of atheism, agnosticism, deism, Zen. And while it seems a tremendous act of presumption for me to pit my line of reasoning against that of a famous philosopher like Prof. Flew, I can't help thinking this may be one of those situations in which, as St. Paul wrote, "God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise."

Well, I am decidedly one of God's foolish things, so I'd like to put forward why it seems to me that science and science-based philosophy just miss the point when it comes to these matters--that Prof. Flew, indeed, is missing the point even now.

Perhaps the argument for nonbelief most identified with the professor was what he called "the presumption of atheism." Here, atheism is understood in its negative sense: The atheist doesn't assert that there is no God; he simply doesn't accept that a legitimate and meaningful concept of God exists. For such an atheist, the burden of proof lies, as it does in law, with those who make the positive assertion--that is, for those who believe.

The presumption of atheism seems to me to be at the heart of all scientific reasoning about religion. And as I'm someone who loves and believes in science, it was a major stumbling block for me most of my life. After all, why would anyone believe without proof in that for which there is no evidence in the first place?

It was in my re-reading of the Romantic poets William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge that I felt this stumbling block dissolve. What finally occurred to me--what tipped the scales in favor of baptism--was that the presumption of atheism proceeds without respect for the human experience of God's presence. Thinkers like Prof. Flew dismiss this experience because they make the mistake of applying the scientific method of analysis, of taking things apart, to an inner life that can only be known as a whole.

IT was far in the sameness of the wood;
I was running with joy on the Demon’s trail,
Though I knew what I hunted was no true god.
It was just as the light was beginning to fail
That I suddenly heard—all I needed to hear:
It has lasted me many and many a year.

The sound was behind me instead of before,
A sleepy sound, but mocking half,
As of one who utterly couldn’t care.
The Demon arose from his wallow to laugh,
Brushing the dirt from his eye as he went;
And well I knew what the Demon meant.

I shall not forget how his laugh rang out.
I felt as a fool to have been so caught,
And checked my steps to make pretence
It was something among the leaves I sought
(Though doubtful whether he stayed to see).
Thereafter I sat me against a tree.

NEXT:

US may strike at Ba'athists in Syria (Janine Zacharia, Dec. 24, 2004, THE JERUSALEM POST)

The US is contemplating incursions into Syrian territory in an attempt to kill or capture Iraqi Ba'athists who, it believes, are directing at least part of the attacks against US targets in Iraq, a senior administration official told The Jerusalem Post.

The official said that fresh sanctions are likely to be implemented, but added that the US needs to be more "aggressive" after Tuesday's deadly attack on a US base in Mosul. The comment suggested that the US believes the attack on the mess tent, in which 22 people were killed, may have been coordinated from inside Syrian territory.

"I think the sanctions are one thing. But I think the other thing [the Syrians] have got to start worrying about is whether we would take cross-border military action in hot pursuit or something like that. In other words, nothing like full-scale military hostilities. But when you're being attacked from safe havens across the border – we've been through this a lot of times before – we're just not going to sit there.

"You get a tragedy [like the attack in Mosul] and it reminds people that it is still a very serious problem. If I were Syria, I'd be worried," the senior administration official said.

Another US official said that sentiment reflects a "growing level of frustration" in Washington at Syria's reluctance to detain Ba'athists and others who are organizing attacks from Syrian territory. The official cautioned, however, that whether to take cross-border military action is still a matter of discussion within the administration and that a military incursion is still "premature."

The senior official said US anger increased substantially after a prolonged incursion into Fallujah last month, which revealed "how much of the insurgency is now being directed through Syria."

PUNCHING ABOVE THEIR WEIGHT:

Militants 'wanted Bush re-elected' (December 24, 2004, CNN)

A French journalist held hostage in Iraq for four months says his captors wanted U.S. President George W. Bush re-elected because it would help promote their cause.

Georges Malbrunot, who was released Tuesday along with fellow journalist Christian Chesnot, told CNN the Iraqi militants "need someone tough against them, it's like boxing."

ONE OF US IS GOING TO PRISON, YOU OLD FOOL...:

Meditations on the War … and on Donald Rumsfeld (Nicholas Stix, 22 December 2004, Intellectual Conservative)

Well, it’s official: Don Rumsfeld has been declared the fall guy for the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the War in Iraq. What was that, you ask? “Who made the declaration?” Why, it was those unlikely bedfellows, William Kristol, the New York Times, and Norman Schwarzkopf (Gen., US Army, ret.).

Apparently, everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, has been President Rumsfeld’s fault: He sent insufficient numbers of men to fight the war, he was responsible for the torture at Abu Ghraib, and worst of all, he was insufficiently deferential to the G.I. who asked him at a December 8 public assembly in Kuwait why all U.S. supply vehicles are not armored. What was once seen as refreshing candor is now attacked as “flippancy.”

Don Rumsfeld is a tough guy who doesn’t need me playing sob sister … but I will, anyway. The man certainly has flaws, which include being deaf to any subordinate who has original ideas, and fails to sing along with his choir of admirers; and using an auto-signature machine to sign letters to the families of soldiers killed in action. And yet, as far as I can see, the new campaign to run the Secretary out of Washington on a rail -- how many have there been? I’ve lost track -- has nothing to do with any screw-ups of his.

WHY NOT PERCEPTIONS?:

China hits all-time low on Japan pop charts: Japanese ill-will toward China has hit a historic low that could undermine booming economic ties. It's mutual, though. Thorns include official visits to a Japanese war shrine, Beijing's exploitation of disputed maritime resources, a Chinese submarine intrusion - and both sides' rekindled nationalism and mutual misperceptions. (J Sean Curtin, 12/25/04, Asia Times)

According to the just-released annual Japanese government opinion survey, the number of Japanese people who feel affinity with China has fallen sharply, hitting an all-time low of 37.6%, This represents a dramatic 10.3-percentage-point drop from last year. The results are being seen as yet another indication that despite booming economic ties, Japan-China relations are in trouble. For more than three years Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has pursued a controversial China policy that has put Japanese neo-nationalism ahead of good political relations with Beijing, seriously straining bilateral ties. [...]

Government officials says China's slump in the yearly Japanese Cabinet Office survey reflects the current poor state of Sino-Japanese relations and is the result of recent disputes, such as China's development of natural-gas fields in the East China Sea near Japan's disputed maritime boundary and Koizumi's contentious annual visits to the war-tainted Yasukuni Shrine.

Beijing sees the Yasukuni Shrine as the spiritual symbol of Japan's brutal wartime regime, viewing prime-ministerial patronage as unacceptable in the same way Israel would not tolerate German leaders visiting a Nazi memorial. The Chinese leadership has singled out Koizumi's shrine excursions as the main factor holding back bilateral political ties. Debate over the issue has aroused nationalist passions in both countries. Yasukuni is a memorial to Japan's war dead; 14 Class A war criminals are enshrined there as well.

Government officials also blame China's popularity nosedive on Chinese soccer fans' hostile jeering of the Japanese national team during the China-hosted Asia Cup soccer tournament this year.

PAGING THE ACLU:

A Man's Quest Reverberates Up and Down State: Seeking a yard decoration, John Kolstad ends up a bell maker, helping restore El Camino Real's markers. (Bob Pool, December 24, 2004, LA Times)

Nearly 100 years after they first appeared, the El Camino Real bells are back.

An ambitious campaign to restore the highway markers along the 700 miles of California's "Royal Road" reached Los Angeles this month.

Cast-iron replicas of the mission-style bell that directed motorists in the early 1900s along California's first north-south highway have been installed on poles shaped like shepherd's crooks along the Ventura and Hollywood freeways from Westlake Village to downtown Los Angeles.

Authorities say as many as 650 bells placed at two-mile intervals may eventually mark the storied footpath. Also known as the King's Highway, the route between San Diego and Sonoma was launched in 1769 by Father Junipero Serra.

A former Whittier resident's search for one of the old bells to use as a backyard garden decoration helped trigger the highway markers' renaissance.

Fifty-three-year-old mortgage broker John Kolstad lives in the Bay Area city of Saratoga. But he has never forgotten his curiosity over an original El Camino Real bell that stood near his childhood home.

"When I was young, I lived in Whittier near the corner of Whittier Boulevard and Colima Road. I'd always see this old bell on the corner surrounded by new buildings," Kolstad said. "I couldn't figure out why it was there, until one day in the fourth grade I went to the San Gabriel Mission and found one there."

COMING SOON!:

In GOP They Trust: Murrieta is a city of affordable housing and deep conservatism -- a reminder that beyond the coasts, California is trending Republican. (Maria L. La Ganga, December 24, 2004, LA Times)

Here in the stout heart of red California, voters snort with disdain when they hear that President Bush's strong victory caught America's Democrats by surprise. Not a single Murrieta precinct swung Sen. John Kerry's way in the bitterly fought 2004 election; in many parts of town, 70% or more of the electorate cast ballots for Bush — a strong show of red unity in one of America's bluest states.

The same values that drew voters here to Bush in the first place also led many of them to Murrieta, the self-proclaimed gem of the Temecula Valley, where streets are safe, schools are good and housing is more affordable than in many other parts of California.

Churches outnumber bars here some 15 to one, 40% of the residents are of school age, and 71% are white. Murrieta's population has quadrupled since 1990, as thoroughbred ranches and chaparral-covered hills due east of Orange County have given way to subdivisions with names like Pacific Oaks, Sedona, Meadowlane.

"People come here with their families, and they want a conservative lifestyle that they can re-create," said Mayor Pro Tem Kelly Seyrato, who moved here nearly 15 years ago with his wife from Los Angeles County so they could buy a house and start a family. "We were able to recapture the fresh neighborhood of the '60s feel…. It had a lot of promise out here."

Boomtown California is Republican California, and this 13-year-old city of 77,661 could be its capital — bustling with earth-moving equipment and flag men, bristling with signs that promise "Coming Soon!" and "Starting in the $200,000's," Murrieta is all road construction and just-framed subdivisions and a parade route that navigates delicately through the confusion.

Bush lost California resoundingly last month, so it is easy to forget that more people voted for him in this state than in any other in America. With population and political clout clustered in Democratic Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area, it's also easy to overlook the rapid spread of conservative California.

Since 1992, the number of California counties with more registered Republicans than voters of any other party has nearly tripled, from 13 to 37 out of 58. That growth has shaped exurbs such as Murrieta, where "we're red. We're getting redder … [and] the Democrats don't even bother to organize," said Shaun Bowler, professor of political science at UC Riverside.

ONE FLU OVER:

Vaccine Surplus Is Flu Scare's Ill Effect (David Pierson, December 24, 2004, LA Times)

After months of strictly limiting who can get a flu shot, public health officials in California are left with far more available vaccine than they expected and are urging more people to get inoculated before the medicine reaches the end of its shelf life.

Demand for the shots, which just a few months ago was so high that seniors citizens waited in line for hours, has dropped off significantly in recent weeks, prompting fears that private doctors and clinics will stop ordering the vaccine even though many people who got inoculated last year have not this year.

Of the 540,000 doses of vaccine set aside by the federal government for California doctors, physicians have ordered only 370,000. That leaves about 170,000 doses unclaimed, and officials say the vaccine is good only until the end of this flu season. [...]

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 40% to 49% of the 10 million Californians at high risk have received the shot this year. Health officials believe that is about the same figure as last year.

GO FLY A KITE:

Poppins on the Loose: Lock Up Your Children (VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN, 12/24/04, NY Times)

Mary Poppins, in memory, is the ideal nanny. With her cartoony eyelashes, slightly Carnaby style and jauntily splayed feet, she delivers that polemic about sugar, turns chores into pleasure and wins infatuated devotion from her charges. The mother is not threatened by her, the father is not attracted to her and - all in all - the Poppins stint with the Banks family is the most edifying nanny story in a genre that is currently characterized by tales of anxiety and woe.

That's at least how I remember Walt Disney's "Mary Poppins," which had its premiere in 1964 and went on to win five Academy Awards. The reality is somewhat different. If it's been awhile, see for yourself on the Disney Channel, which will televise the remastered version in convenient time for the movie's 40th anniversary, the release of the DVD and a new musical that opened earlier this month in London.

In this trippy, effects-heavy, pro-pollution movie - soot is a source of great amusement - the nanny does indeed represent a blessing for Mr. and Mrs. Banks, but not because she's good at her work (you even get the feeling it's not a career with her), but because she whisks the kids out of their hair and then manipulates the parents into changing their ways. [...]

Mary's first shortcoming as a nanny, in fact, is that she ignores the lady of the house, Mrs. Winifred Banks (Glynis Johns), with whom she never shares a significant scene. She evidently doesn't take Mrs. Banks's political activism seriously. Mrs. Banks is a saucer-eyed, doll-faced "suffragette," copiously satirized, whose opening number is about the silly thrill of feminine civil disobedience. "She was carried off to prison!" she trills, of a friend. "Singing and scattering pamphlets the whole way!"

Though like Mrs. Banks, Mary Poppins wears the bloomers that define her as uppity, nothing she does suggests an opinion on suffrage, and her creed of cheerful duty suggests that she thinks her trouble-making patroness is wasting time.

THE CAT IN THE DEATH LOBBY:

California company sells cloned cat, generating ethics debate (PAUL ELIAS, December 22, 2004, AP)

The first cloned-to-order pet sold in the United States is named Little Nicky, an eight-week-old kitten delivered to a Texas woman saddened by the loss of a cat she had owned for 17 years.

The kitten cost its owner $50,000 and was cloned from a beloved cat, named Nicky, that died last year. Nicky's owner banked the cat's DNA, which was used to create the clone.

"He is identical. His personality is the same," the woman told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

The company, Sausalito-based Genetic Savings and Clone, made her available to speak to reporters only on condition that her name or hometown not be used. The woman said she fears being the target of groups opposed to cloning. [...]

Genetic Savings and Clone has been behind the creation of at least five cats since 2001, including the first one created. It hopes to deliver as many as five more clones to customers who have paid the company's $50,000 fee. By the end of next year, it hopes to have cloned as many as 50 cats.

The company is backed by John Sterling, founder of the University of Phoenix, who has funneled more than $10 million into the company, which has yet to turn a profit.

SOMEBODY BUY THE MAN A WATCH:

Wayne Shorter: 'Happening,' and Meandering, a Burst at a Time (BEN RATLIFF, 12/24/04, NY Times)

THERE'S a classic story about Wayne Shorter in "Footprints," a new biography by Michelle Mercer. It's told by Hal Miller, a jazz historian who sometimes traveled on tour with Weather Report, the band Mr. Shorter played with from 1971 to 1985.

"I remember I asked Wayne for the time," Mr. Miller recounts. "He started talking to me about the cosmos and how time is relative." The band's keyboardist, Joe Zawinul, advised Mr. Miller not to bother asking the saxophonist and composer things like that. "It's 7:06 p.m.," he snapped.

Mr. Shorter, 71, may get oracular in his everyday conversations, but jazz musicians are often this way, to one degree or another. And while there is no better way to find out what's going on in their music than to ask, you have to find the right way in. Talking about music objectively, while not listening to it, is to superimpose one form over another: it pits the literary or critical endeavor against the musical. Asking a creative musician pointed questions about his discography can be dull, and asking him about the implications of an interval that he has written, or a solo he has improvised, can be nearly rude: he didn't make it to talk about it, he made it to play it.

After reading "Footprints," which may be the closest we will come to an autobiography of one of the greatest composers and improvisers in jazz, I contacted Mr. Shorter. I proposed that we listen together to something that he admired, as long as it wasn't his own, as a way into having a conversation about music and, ultimately, about his own work. ("Footprints," a new two-disc retrospective of Mr. Shorter's music, was released by Sony to coincide with Ms. Mercer's biography, which is being published by Tarcher/Penguin.)

Last month, when Mr. Shorter finished a European tour with his quartet, we got together at his home in Aventura, Fla., a thicket of tall condominium towers near the ocean.

Since going back on the road with an acoustic jazz quartet in 2001, Mr. Shorter has built up a consensus of awe seldom encountered in the stylistically splintered world of jazz. He has been playing his own compositions - from his days with the mid-60's Miles Davis Quintet to his pieces from later solo records - and reminding everyone that there is a way of writing tunes for a hardcore jazz group that have a much broader imagination. Many of his melodies, dressed in odd phrase lengths and piquant harmonies, seem to come from a rarefied place outside jazz and seem too fragile to be bruised in a nightclub setting. But they have become part of the current jazz musician's basic vocabulary.

"I've got something good for you," he said, shortly after showing me the view from the living room and pointing out where Whitney Houston and Sophia Loren had apartments. He held up an EMI Classics boxed set of Ralph Vaughan Williams, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.

I had been expecting classical music; some of his recent works have been rearrangements, for orchestra and jazz quartet, of Villa Lobos and Sibelius. I thought he might pick Stravinsky, the bebopper's idol. But this choice made sense, too: the English composer Vaughan Williams, directly or indirectly, influenced many postwar film composers, and if there's one artistic stimulus that Mr. Shorter always seems open to, it is the movies.

Small and cheery, dressed in I'm-not-going-outside-today clothes and bedroom slippers, Mr. Shorter struggled to set up his Krell home-theater pre-amp to play a CD. I was forming a suspicion that he didn't often listen to music. "Hey, man, the Krell: you ever see the movie 'Forbidden Planet'?" he asked. "There was this planet full of people called the Krells. The explorers from Earth didn't see anybody when they arrived. But they all went to sleep one night in their spacecraft, and you hear the first sound of special effects that really came to the fore in movies - this Chrrmmm! Chroooom! And you see the ground that's been depressed by huge footprints. ..."

He first chose the opening of Vaughan Williams's Symphony No. 1: "A Song for All Seas, All Ships" (1910), with orchestra and choir singing lines taken from Walt Whitman. After the fanfare, 20 seconds into the piece, as the strings began to rise dramatically, Mr. Shorter smiled. "Life, that's what he's saying," he said. "It's a metaphor for life."

TOO BAD WE DROPPED THE TARIFFS:

Accustomed to excess, Japan faces a shortage (Todd Zaun and Wayne Arnold The New York Times, December 24, 2004, NY Times)

It has been a very long time since Japan has experienced shortages of anything.

So it was a big surprise last month when Nissan Motors was forced to temporarily idle much of its production because it could not get hold of enough steel. Since then, Suzuki Motor said a lack of steel would force it, too, to shut down assembly lines for a few days this month. Even Toyota Motor said it had had to make adjustments in the kind of steel it buys to ensure supplies remain steady.

The shortfall in steel is unusual in a country that for most of the past decade has been dealing with problems of excess - too many workers, unused plants and more banks than needed - but analysts and executives say it is a problem that could become increasingly common.

Although widespread shortages are not expected, analysts say the supply of steel is likely to remain tight for at least the next six months, a situation that could drive steel prices higher, and in turn, raise costs for carmakers, construction companies and other industries that depend heavily on steel.

So far, shortages have been limited to the high-grade steel used as automotive sheet metal. But strong demand, particularly in China, for everything from ships to office towers to home appliances is driving steel prices broadly higher, with some markets recording 60 percent increases over the past year.

"This is not a problem that can be solved in the short term," said Takeo Fukui, chief executive of Honda Motor. Strong demand in China, India and elsewhere combined with limits on how fast steel production can be raised, he said, means supplies will remain tight for "one, two or maybe several more years."

After years of consolidation in the global steel industry, many producers are operating near peak capacity. In Japan, where the number of large steel manufacturers has dwindled because of mergers, the industrywide capacity utilization rate is now 15 percent higher than the average rate of the past 26 years, according to statistics from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

SMOOTHER THAN WASHINGTON:

26 West Bank towns hold local elections (Greg Myre, December 24, 2004, The New York Times)

The voting was smooth and orderly Thursday as Palestinians in 26 West Bank towns and villages voted in municipal elections, an encouraging development for Palestinians who are holding a presidential ballot in just over two weeks.

The turnout was large, and no major glitches or security problems were reported. The Fatah movement, founded by Yasser Arafat and the dominant force in Palestinian politics for decades, was expected to make the strongest showing. However, it faces a challenge from the Islamic movement Hamas, which is participating in elections for the first time. Arafat died Nov. 11.

"You are deciding on the running of your own municipal affairs in a democratic manner without outside interference and under the shadow of the problems created by the Israeli occupation," Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the favorite in the presidential election, said in a statement.

In Jericho, the largest town to hold an election on Thursday, voters described it as an important step toward greater democracy and political reforms among Palestinians as they seek to establish a state.

"This is the start of our democracy," said Jaffer Saeed, an accountant. "Israel is always claiming to be the only democracy in the Middle East. We want to show we can be a proper democracy."

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? IT'S JUST LIKE THE REST OF AMERICA:

Americans and Religion: Eighty-four percent of Americans identify with a Christian religion (Frank Newport, 12/23/04, GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

The arrival of Christmas and the beginning of a new year provide Gallup an opportunity to review a year's worth of data on Americans and their religion, with a special focus on Christmas. Here are 10 interesting observations: [...]

3. Most Americans -- regardless of religious affiliation -- celebrate Christmas. [...]

4. More than 8 in 10 Americans are Christians.

About 84% of Americans identify with some form of Christianity -- including those who say they are Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, or some other Christian religion. The rest of the American adult population has no religious identification (9%), identifies with a non-Christian religion (5%), or has no answer at all when asked about their religion. [...]

7. Those with no religious preference are likely to be liberal, Democrats, younger, and to live in the West.

The 9% of Americans who say they do not identify with any religion whatsoever tend to be politically liberal, Democrats, independents, younger, living in the West, students, and those who are living with someone without being married. [...]

10. Religion is very important to a majority of Americans.

Religion is very important to about 6 out of 10 Americans, while another quarter say that religion is fairly important in their lives. Only 16% of Americans in 2004 said that religion was not very important to them.

TORA! TORA! TORA! TIME:

KOIZUMI'S PYONGYANG CONUNDRUM: Public wants sanctions -- but at what price? (By KANAKO TAKAHARA, 12/24/04, Japan Times)

A large section of the public responded with predictable fury to recent revelations that a set of remains handed by North Korea to Japanese officials were not, as Pyongyang had claimed, those of abductee Megumi Yokota.

While roughly three out of four respondents to recent opinion polls feel that Japan should slap economic sanctions on Pyongyang, government officials and academics remain unconvinced by the merits of this course of action.

On Friday, the government is expected to disclose various documents, including Yokota's medical records, that Japanese officials analyzed after they were brought over from Pyongyang last month. It will also formally convey to North Korea the results of DNA tests carried out on the remains purported to be those of Yokota.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is stuck between a rock and a hard place: While public pressure is mounting for the government to adopt a stronger posture, the imposition of sanctions could hurt Japan.

WHAT NEXT, A HAIR SHIRT?:

Rumsfeld Makes Surprise Visit to Iraq (ROBERT BURNS, 12/23/04, AP)

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld arrived here before dawn Friday amid tight security at an air base in northern Iraq where an insurgent's attack on a military dining hall killed 14 U.S. troops and eight other people earlier this week.

Hoping to raise holiday spirits and demonstrate compassion for soldiers' sacrifices, Rumsfeld landed in darkness and walked immediately from his plane to a combat surgical hospital where many of the bombing victims were treated.

NOT A RED STATE

Santa ordered disrobed at Hampton 'holiday' dance (Jerry Miller, Manchester Union Leader, 12/23/04)

A student dressed as Santa Claus was told to remove the suit and white beard when he arrived at a Hampton Academy Junior High School dance last Friday.

SAU 21 Superintendent of Schools James Gaylord yesterday said, "This was not appropriate dress for this dance."

Nancy Serpis, chairman of the Hampton School Board, echoed Gaylord, insisting the dance was a "holiday" event and that dressing as Santa Claus was "inappropriate." . . .

Principal Fred Muscara, who declined to be interviewed for this story, is quoted telling a Hampton newspaper: "It was a holiday party. It was not a Christmas party. There is a separation of church and state. We have a lot of students that go to Hampton Academy Junior High that have different religions. We have to be sensitive to that."

THE MARKET CLAWS ITS WAY BACK TO 11,000:

Santa Rally Continues on Strong Durable Goods Data (Fox News, December 23, 2004)

"Right now, there's just no selling going on," said Todd Leone, managing director of equity trading at SG Cowen Securities. "There's a lot of money being put to work before the end of the year, and I think that despite whatever news we get, we'll just continue drifting up."

Stocks rallied through the holiday-shortened week, with investor optimism remaining high. The Dow reached new 3 1/2-year highs for three straight sessions, while the S&P saw its second straight high. The Nasdaq, struggling with disappointing earnings and outlooks from technology firms, failed to break the multiyear high set last Wednesday.

For the week, the Dow rose 1.66 percent, the Nasdaq advanced 1.19 percent, and the S&P 500 gained 1.33 percent.

LET'S GET IT ON:

Bush to Renominate 20 Judges Whom Democrats Have Resisted (DAVID STOUT, 12/23/04, NY Times)

President Bush plans to renominate 20 candidates for federal judgeships who have been unable to win confirmation in the Senate, the White House said today, in a signal that the president is ready for a showdown early next year. [...]

The White House said 16 of the 20 the candidates were nominated more than a year ago and have not had a yes-or-no vote in the Senate.

One of the names Mr. Bush will place in nomination again is that of William H. Pryor Jr., the former Alabama attorney general, for a seat on the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta. Last February, Mr. Bush installed Mr. Pryor on that court by using the presidential power to name judges for temporary terms when Congress is in recess. Under that procedure, Mr. Pryor's judgeship would expire next year, unless he wins Senate confirmation.

Democrats have contended that Mr. Pryor's fervent advocacy of greater Christian influence in government and his opposition to legalized abortion make him an unsuitable judge. But Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican majority leader, has called him "a man of integrity committed to the rule of law."

Another candidate whom Mr. Bush will renominate is Judge Priscilla Richman Owen of the Texas Supreme Court, for a seat on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans. In blocking her thus far, Democrats have said her anti-abortion and pro-business views have colored her decisions. But Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, has called her "a wonderful person, an academic judge" and qualified in every way to be on the federal court.

Still another who will be renominated is Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the California Supreme Court, for a seat on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the tribunal that is often seen as a springboard for the United States Supreme Court.

GODFORSAKEN GOD:

God the Rebel (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)

That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point - and does not break.

In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane.

In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.

And now let the revolutionists of this age choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

THEY DON'T EVEN LET YOU HUNT VERMIN ANYMORE, FOR GOODNESS SAKE:

If someone breaks into your home in the middle of the night you can presume he is not there to read the gas meter. But current British law insists that he have the freedom of the premises. When, last Christmas, thousands of Radio 4's Today listeners called for legislation authorising them to protect their homes by any means necessary, the proposal was immediately denounced as a "ludicrous, brutal, unworkable, blood-stained piece of legislation". Until recently that "unworkable, blood-stained" legislation was the law of the land. There was no need to retreat from your home, or from any room within it. An Englishman's home was his refuge, and, indeed, his castle. But no more. Rather than permitting people to protect themselves, the authorities' response to the recent series of brutal attacks on home-owners has been to advise people to get more locks and, in case of a break-in, retreat to a secure room - presumably the bathroom - to call the police. They are not to keep any weapon for protection or approach the intruder. Someone might get hurt. If that someone is the intruder the resident will be sued by the burglar and vigorously prosecuted by the state. I heartily applaud The Sunday Telegraph's campaign to end this lamentable state of affairs. Happily for us Americans, English common law prevails in the US; our homes are still our castles. Californians, for example, are entitled to use force to protect themselves and their property. Legislation in Oklahoma which allowed the home-owner to use force no matter how slight the threat has reduced burglary by nearly half since it was passed 15 years ago. What British police condemn as "vigilante" behaviour has produced an American burglary rate less than half the English rate. And, while 53 per cent of English burglaries occur when someone is at home, only 13 per cent do in America, where burglars admit to fearing armed home-owners more than the police. Violent crime in the US is at a 30-year low. Whatever became of the Englishman's castle?

HOW CAN SUCH A SIMPLE MAP CONFUSE THEM SO?:

Blair Calls for Conference on Mideast Peace: In visit, British prime minister meets with Sharon and the leader of the PLO. The proposed summit is to focus on Palestinian reforms. (Laura King, December 23, 2004, LA Times)

As expected, Blair proposed holding an international peace conference in London early next year to shore up the new Palestinian government. Sharon, as was also expected, gave his blessing to the proposal but made it clear that Israel had no interest in participating. [...]

At a news conference with Sharon in Jerusalem, Blair echoed the Israeli position that Palestinians had to take sweeping measures to dismantle violent groups before there could be any significant new peace effort. [...]

At the news conference, Sharon made a point of pledging allegiance to a peace plan drafted by the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations. In recent months, that blueprint, or "road map," has taken a back seat to the Israeli leader's plan to dismantle the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.

A PEARL OF NO VALUE:

Where Osama bin Laden went wrong (Vikram Sood, 12/24/04, Asia Times)

By the middle of 2001, the Taliban, along with their friends in al-Qaeda and the powerful Pakistani establishment, had begun to get weary of the unending resistance from the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. That wily commander and Tajik leader, Ahmad Shah Masoud, just would not give up. He continued to do battle from his stronghold in the far north - in Panjshir - where he had taken on the might of the Soviet empire and pushed it back.

Masoud was the last obstacle to establishing Taliban rule in Afghanistan and making that country truly Islamic. He had to go. Months of planning and two assassins eventually succeeded in murdering Ahmed Shah Masoud on September 9, 2001. The country was up for grabs now, with the Taliban as the only real viable force in Afghanistan. They had the backing of Pakistan and the support of al-Qaeda. Strategic depth was a reality for the Pakistanis for a short period on September 9.

From Afghanistan, the Islamists could fan out into the resource rich Central Asian republics from Kazakhstan to Turkmenistan. Why stop there? There was Chechnya beckoning, and the green flag of Islam would fly from Morocco to Pakistan and throughout parts of Europe. [...]

Then September 11 happened. The United States and the world reacted with the utmost fury. The gains from Masoud's assassination for the terrorists dissipated in almost a flash.

HALFWAY THERE:

Settlement in Sight in Sudan (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 12/22/04)

Suffering continues in war-ravaged western Sudan. But to the south, after 21 years of conflict, things are looking up.

The Islamic government in Khartoum may be ready to initial a peace agreement with southern Sudanese rebels on or before a Dec. 31 deadline. There might even be a formal signing ceremony in Washington if all goes well during the next month.

That can come, however, only after the government and the southern-based Sudan People's Liberation Movement work out some pending questions.

Bush administration officials consider the two conflicts linked, exacerbated by government policies, and they say unless the situation in western Sudan changes for the better, the proposal for a Washington ceremony will be off the table.

Progress in Darfur is no less important than it is in the North-South conflict, says Michael Ranneberger, the No. 2 official in the State Department's African affairs bureau.

``The two situations are inextricably related and must be resolved in tandem. There are two tracks, but they must lead to the same place: peace and change in Sudan,'' Ranneberger said in the speech last week.

SINCE WE ALL HAVE SUV'S, AREN'T THE ROADS REALLY OPTIONAL TOO?:

Wired magazine ran an interesting featurette last month about a fellow called Hans Monderman, who’s been a highway engineer in northern Holland for the last three decades. A year or two back, he had an epiphany. As Wired’s Tom McNichol puts it, ‘Build roads that seem dangerous, and they’ll be safer.’

In other words, all the junk on the streets — signs for everything every five yards, yellow lines, pedestrian crossings, stop lights, crash barriers, bike lanes — by giving the illusion of security actually makes driving more dangerous. The town of Christianfield in Denmark embraced the Monderman philosophy, removed all the traffic signs and signals from its most dangerous intersection, and thereby cut the number of serious accidents down to zero. These days, when you tootle towards the junction, there are no instructions from the transport department to tell you what to do; you have to figure it out for yourself, so you approach it cautiously and with an eye on what the other chaps in the vicinity are up to.

I’m no civil engineer, but I am a small-government guy and when I’m asked ‘How small?’ I usually reply that I like to find a road when I get down to the end of my driveway in the morning. My assistant’s husband works for the town road crew and they do an excellent job. But, alas, on the state highways New Hampshire is going in the opposite direction to Mr Monderman. On formerly scenic Interstate 89, the discreet mile markers have been augmented by eye-level markers every fifth of a mile reminding you what road you’re on and that it’s been 0.2 miles since the last reminder. Until this summer, if you were on a bendy road following a river, you’d take the curves carefully lest you plunged over the edge and died in a gasoline fireball at the foot of the ravine. That happened to some poor fellow every 93 years or so, so now they’ve put up metal barriers along the picture-postcard river roads punctuated every couple of hundred yards by ugly-ass shock-absorbers that look like trash cans. So now you don’t have to worry about plunging into the river because the barrier will bounce you back into the road to be sliced in two by the logging truck. The uglification of New Hampshire’s highways is a good example of how, even in a small-government state, the preferred solution to any problem real or imaginary is more government.

Mr Monderman’s thesis feels right to me — that by creating the illusion of security you relieve the citizen of the need to make his own judgments. That’s really the story of September 11.

LET'S PRETEND:

Democratic Leadership Rethinking Abortion (Peter Wallsten and Mary Curtius, December 23, 2004, LA Times)

After long defining itself as an undisputed defender of abortion rights, the Democratic Party is suddenly locked in an internal struggle over whether to redefine its position to appeal to a broader array of voters.

The fight is a central theme of the contest to head the Democratic National Committee, particularly between two leading candidates: former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who supports abortion rights, and former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, an abortion foe who argues that the party cannot rebound from its losses in the November election unless it shows more tolerance on one of society's most emotional conflicts.

Roemer is running with the encouragement of the party's two highest-ranking members of Congress, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and incoming Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Dean, a former presidential candidate, is popular with the party's liberal wing.

If Roemer were to succeed Terry McAuliffe as Democratic chairman in the Feb. 10 vote, the party long viewed as the guardian of abortion rights would suddenly have two antiabortion advocates at its helm. Reid, too, opposes abortion and once voted for a nonbinding resolution opposing Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.

Party leaders say their support for preserving the landmark ruling will not change.

ANOTHER MASTER:

Anonymous:
Bernard Cornwell may be a prolific, best-selling author, but he's still trying to make a name for himself here (Alex Beam, December 23, 2004, The Boston Globe)

There are places where Bernard Cornwell is a household name. His adopted home here on Cape Cod isn't one of them.

The British-born Cornwell has sold 12 million copies of his famous Napoleonic-era Richard Sharpe adventure novels alone. In addition, he has written three other series, five thrillers, and five other novels that defy easy categorization, such as 1999's ''Stonehenge," billed as a ''story of love, rivalry, treachery, and a great, mysterious temple."

Cornwell is a celebrity in his native England and almost as famous in Brazil and Japan. His books have been translated into 17 languages. But -- unlike, say, Stephen King -- he could walk the streets of Boston in complete anonymity. ''I am the least-known best-selling author in Massachusetts," he says. ''It's nice to come back here, where no one knows who you are."

Cornwell's low profile in his adopted home is partly by design. From outward appearances, he lives modestly, in a weather-worn, gray-shingled Cape Cod house partially visible from the road. Upon entering, a visitor realizes that Cornwell in fact owns two homes on lots that are joined by a 49-foot-long covered lap pool. The second dwelling, hidden from the road by a long fence, has guest rooms and his oak-beamed, cathedral-ceilinged, 4,000-volume library and work space.

His under-the-radar silhouette in the United States is not entirely intentional. In 1993, he launched a series of historical novels featuring Yale College dropout Nathaniel Starbuck, set during the Civil War. Asked if that was an attempt to duplicate the success of the Sharpe novels on American soil, Cornwell demurs a moment, and says, ''I suppose it was."

He stopped writing the ''Starbuck Chronicles" series in the mid-1990s and turned his attention back to the Sharpe novels, which were starting to be filmed for British television. That series ran on PBS's ''Masterpiece Theatre" in 1993 and 1995 but did not trigger a surge of US book sales. His first and only New York Times bestseller was ''Sharpe's Havoc," published last year.

N.B. those looking for real hidden treasure should turn to Allan Mallinson's Matthew Hervey series.

HUGE:

A Historic Moment for All Iraqis: Ballots will prove to be more powerful than bullets. (AYAD ALLAWI, December 23, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

The elections next month will be transparent and competitive, supervised across the country by the thousands of brave workers of the Independent Electoral Commission for Iraq, and by international organizations including the U.N. Iraqis will have over 250 different parties and political entities from which to choose--a far cry from the farcical referendum with Saddam as the single candidate who received 100% of the vote. They will be conducted in the open and under public scrutiny, and though these elections and the ones the year after will not by themselves create a democracy, they will be a major landmark event of huge significance. The resulting National Assembly will be one of the most important in our history--responsible for drafting our permanent constitution which will then be put to referendum for approval by the people. In addition, there will be voting for the 18 provincial councils and for the Kurdish Assembly, reflecting the important role of local government in the new democratic Iraq.

For all these reasons, it is not surprising that there has been robust debate about the timing and modalities for these elections. The debate is a positive sign that Iraqis take these elections extremely seriously and understand their significance for the future of our country and indeed the wider region. Just as we and the vast majority of Iraqis are determined that the elections will go forward on time however, there are those--a combination of terrorists and loyalists of the former regime--who will attempt to derail the process with barbaric and cowardly acts of violence, such as the recent horrific bombings in Najaf and Karbala and the brutal murders of brave Iraqi election officials. Though such attacks may escalate in the coming weeks as we approach the elections, they cannot and will not be allowed to achieve their destructive aims. As Iraqis, we will refuse to be divided and cowed into fear by such criminals. We will stand firm.

Ballots will prove far more powerful than bullets in the end, and the will of the peaceful majority of Iraqis will triumph over the terror tactics of a hateful few. To this mission, I and my colleagues from the Interim Government pledge ourselves, and we call upon the governments and citizens of our allies in the international community and our neighbors in the region to do their utmost to support Iraq at this critical juncture. A free and secure Iraq will be a victory for all peace-loving people, and we Iraqis face a historic opportunity that we shall not squander.

HASTEN STALINGRAD:

In Europe, an antitrust setback for Microsoft (Paul Meller, December 23, 2004, The New York Times)

Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker, was dealt a serious legal and logistical setback on Wednesday when a senior European judge ordered the company to immediately comply with a European Commission antitrust ruling that instructed the company to change the way it sells its Windows operating system in Europe.

The order could prove to be a turning point for the software industry, because it forces Microsoft to change its successful strategy of bundling new features into its near-ubiquitous operating system, analysts said.

Judge Bo Vesterdorf, president of the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg, said that Microsoft's application for a suspension of the ruling until the end of the appeals process "is dismissed in its entirety," adding that the company failed to prove that the ruling would cause it irreparable harm, one of three requirements needed in order to suspend a commission ruling. [...]

After a five-year investigation, the commission concluded in March that the company was abusing the dominant position of Windows in order to dominate two related software markets: the market for software that plays music and video, and the market for programs that run servers that link personal computers together.

WE DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER:

Europe's Last Summer (David Fromkin, December 14, 2004, The Globalist)

In 1901 — and in the 13 years that followed — the peoples of Western Europe and the English-speaking Americas were becoming consumers rather than warriors. They looked forward to more: more progress, more prosperity — more peace.

To virtually everybody alive in the vibrant early years of the 20th century, nothing would have seemed further away than war. [...]

For those with a comfortable income, the world in their time was more free than it is today.

According to the historian A. J. P. Taylor, "until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state." You could live anywhere you liked and as you liked. You could go to practically anywhere in the world without anyone's permission.

What Europe was building up toward was not a better world — but a smash-up, the accumulated explosive power that advanced science had developed was concentrated on the goal of mass destruction.

For the most part, you needed no passports — and many had none. The French geographer André Siegfried traveled all around the world with no identification other than his visiting card — not even a business card, but a personal one.

John Maynard Keynes remembered it, with wonder, as an era without exchange controls or customs barriers. You could bring anything you liked into Britain or send anything out.

You could take any amount of currency with you when you traveled, or send (or bring back) any amount of currency — your bank did not report it to the government, as it does today.

And if you decided to invest any amount of money in almost any country abroad, there was nobody whose permission had to be asked, nor was permission needed to withdraw that investment and any profits it may have earned when you wanted to do so.

Even more than today, it was a time of free capital flows and free movements of people and goods.

George Kennan remembers that before the 1914 war, Americans felt a sense of security “such as I suppose no people had ever had since the days of the Roman Empire."

An outstanding current study of the world as of 2000 tells us that there was more globalization before the 1914 war than there is now —"much of the final quarter of the 20th century was spent merely recovering ground lost in the previous 75 years."

Economic and financial intermingling and interdependence were among the powerful trends that made it seem that warfare among the major European powers had become impractical — and, indeed, obsolete.

One could easily feel safe in that world. Americans felt it at least as much if not more than Europeans.

The historian and diplomat George Kennan remembers that before the 1914 war, Americans felt a sense of security "such as I suppose no people had ever had since the days of the Roman Empire."

They felt little need for government. Until 1913, when an appropriate amendment to the Constitution was ratified, the Congress was deemed to lack even the power to enact taxes on income.

MIGHTY CASEY SLAMS ONE:

Bob Casey’s Revenge (William McGurn, January 2005, First Things)

[P]erhaps the best explanation [of John Kerry's loss] was given by a Democrat who called this election more than a decade ago: Bob Casey, the governor of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1995.

I didn’t know Governor Casey personally. But back in 1992, fate put me within a few feet of him inside Madison Square Garden during the Democratic National Convention. That was when Clinton officials refused a place at the podium for the Democratic governor of America’s fifth-largest state while also providing speaking slots for six pro-choice Republican women. To make sure the point was delivered, one of these was a pro-choice woman who had campaigned for Casey’s Republican opponent.

On Election Day 2004, the silencing of Bob Casey thundered through America’s polling booths. In vain, Casey in 1992 had warned his fellow Democrats about allowing the Party to be become “little more than an auxiliary of NARAL.” In his autobiography he put it this way:

Many people discount the power of the so-called “cultural issues”—and especially of the abortion issue. I see it just the other way around. These issues are central to the national resurgence of the Republicans, central to the national implosion of the Democrats, central to the question of whether there will be a third party. The national Democrats may, and probably will, get a temporary bump in the polls—even, perhaps, one more national election victory—from their reactive strategy as the defenders of the elderly and poor who rely on Medicare and Medicaid. But the Democrats’ national decline—or better, their national disintegration—will continue relentlessly and inexorably until they come to grips with these values issues, primarily abortion.

As Democrats emerge from the electoral rubble, must not a few be noticing that Bob Casey has proved to be prophetic?

180 MINUTE BLISS (via Ed Driscoll):

VIDEO: In Depth: Tom Wolfe (Featured Program, A Weekly Look at Selected Book TV Programs, C-SPAN)

LIVE Sunday, December 5 at 12pm author Tom Wolfe will be taking your phone calls and e-mails as our guest on In Depth.

I'M NOT WRONG, YOU'RE INEPT:

Neocons vs. Rumsfeld (Robert Novak, December 23, 2004, Townhall)

In the bowels of the Pentagon, the colleagues and subordinates of Donald Rumsfeld were not upset by Republican senators who were sniping at him. Instead, they complained bitterly about a call for his removal by a private citizen with no political leadership position: William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard. His position was, in effect, a declaration of war by the neoconservatives against the secretary of defense.

The capital's feeding frenzy over Rumsfeld's fate did not begin until Kristol's Dec. 12 op-ed column in The Washington Post. While critical senators did not get to the point of demanding Rumsfeld's removal, Kristol did. He said the troops in Iraq "deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have." A firm declaration by a prominent Republican activist turned journalist who is the clarion of neoconservatism counts for more than equivocation by U.S. senators.

Rumsfeld's civilian colleagues at the Pentagon are furious because they consider Kristol a manipulative political operative, critiquing the war in Iraq after years of promoting it. But his criticism has a broader base. Kristol long has called for big-government conservatism, which on the international sphere involves proactively pursuing democracy around the world. He and the other neocons do not want to be blamed for what has become a very unpopular venture in Iraq. Thus, it is important to get the word out now that the war in Iraq has gone awry because of the way Rumsfeld fought it.

SHOULD CAESAR RULE IN FAMILY LAW?

Shariah law: FAQs (CBC, December 21st, 2004)

In 1991, Ontario was looking for ways to ease the burdens of a backlogged court system. So the province changed its Arbitration Act to allow "faith-based arbitration" - a system where Muslims, Jews, Catholics and members of other faiths could use the guiding principles of their religions to settle family disputes such as divorce, custody and inheritances outside the court system.

It's voluntary - both parties (a husband and wife) have to agree to go through the process. But once they do, the decisions rendered by the tribunal are binding.

The Ontario government has been reviewing its Arbitration Act and on Dec. 20, 2004, it released a report conducted by former attorney general Marion Boyd. Among her 46 recommendations was that:

The Arbitration Act should continue to allow disputes to be arbitrated using religious law, if the safeguards currently prescribed and recommended by this review are observed.

Earlier in the year, the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice said it wanted to set up its own faith-based arbitration panels under the Arbitration Act, based on Shariah law.

The proposal ran into opposition from women's groups, legal organizations and the Muslim Canadian Congress, which all warned that the 1,400-year-old Shariah law does not view women as equal to men.

In her report, Boyd noted that some "participants in the Review fear that the use of arbitration is the beginning of a process whose end goal is a separate political identity for Muslims in Canada, that has not been the experience of other groups who use arbitration."

This story continues to be reported under alarmist “Canada enacts Sharia law” kind of headlines. Would that the matter was that simple. It is obviously offensive and unconstitutional to bless private arbitration for Christians and Jews and prohibit it to Muslims. The choice seems to be either to live with it and bank on judicial review to keep matters under control or abolish it for all faiths.

DOG DAZE:

Repeat after me: Evidence that evolutionary change is not always a smooth process (The Economist, Dec 16th 2004)

ONE of the most acrimonious disputes in biology is between those who believe that evolutionary change is a smooth and gradual process and those who think it happens suddenly—evolution by creeps versus evolution by jerks, as some of the protagonists unkindly put it. The gradualist model tends to be favoured by those who study things that are still alive, while the punctuated-equilibrium model, as the sudden-transition way of looking at the world is known in the trade, finds its support among those who study fossils, and who feel that the evidence from the rocks favours their view.

Now, though, the jerks have some support from two researchers who are studying still-living organisms. John Fondon and Harold Garner work at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre, in Dallas. They have been looking at the genetics of dog breeds. And they have found a mechanism of genetic change that could help to explain punctuated equilibria.

The traditional, creeping-change model of evolution has natural selection working on the genes themselves. Genes carry the blueprints for proteins, the molecules that do most of the hard biochemical work in living creatures. Change the blueprint and you change the protein's function. Most changes will be damaging. But occasionally, by chance, one will be advantageous, and will spread through the population.

Each such advantageous protein change, however, is likely to have only a small effect. So the creeps cannot see how sudden shifts can happen. But the jerks have come up with a possibility—that the pertinent changes are happening not in the genes themselves, but in the bits of DNA that regulate gene expression. These are places near genes at which special proteins that act as gene-switches can attach themselves in order to stimulate or suppress the activity of a gene. Changing the regulatory DNA leaves the proteins derived from a gene unaltered. They therefore continue to work properly. But the amount produced, or the time during development at which they are produced, is different. That could result in large changes in morphology, of the sort that would be obvious in the fossil record in the way that subtle biochemical shifts are not.

BRING BACK THE TYPING MONKEYS:

Christmas Eve of Destruction (MAUREEN DOWD, 12/23/04, NY Times)

In Iraq, as Yogi Berra would say, the future ain't what it used to be. [...]

The White House's Iraqi policy has gone from a total charade to a limited modified hangout. Mr. Bush is conceding the obvious, that the Iraqi security forces aren't perfect, so he doesn't have to concede the truth: that Iraq is now so dire no one knows how or when we can get out.

If this fiasco ever made sense to anybody, it doesn't any more.

Nearly three-quarters of Iraqis say they "strongly intend" to vote in next month's pivotal elections, and a small majority believe the country is headed in the right direction, according to a major new poll of Iraqi attitudes.

The poll of nearly 2,200 people across most of Iraq found a resilient citizenry modestly hopeful that the Jan. 30 elections will improve life. Iraqis said pocketbook issues such as unemployment and health care are more pressing than the bloody insurgency that claims Iraqi and U.S. lives virtually every day.

EVEN THE BOY GENIUS ISN'T THAT SMART:

The plot against Rudy (Rush & Molloy, December 21, 2004, NY Daily News)

Conservatives continue to feast on Rudy Giuliani's misery.

As Rudy begins to distance himself from the ethically challenged, briefly nominated Homeland Security chief wanna-be Bernard Kerik, some right-wing hardliners claim White House strategist Karl Rove devised the Kerik debacle to hurt Giuliani's presidential chances in '08.

"Rove used Rudy and Kerik to tout Bush as the anti-terrorism candidate," says one Republican party player. "But Rudy is too socially liberal for the true-believers. So they let him shoot himself in the foot. Rove knew about Kerik's baggage - and that he could never be confirmed. But he went along with the nomination, betting that the heat would come down on Rudy, which it has." [...]

While some think Giuliani could still be a contender in four years, others believe Rove and Bush have one man in mind for the Oval Office: brother Jeb Bush.

"They're saying, 'We own the party now,'" says one source, "and we're not going to give it away."

IF ONLY PEOPLE WEREN'T IDIOTS:

Mind the Gender Gap: Why Democrats are losing women at an alarming rate. (Anna Greenberg, 12.06.04, American Prospect)

The erosion of support for Democratic candidates among women represents a political transformation from a time when voters, both working class and affluent, voted in ways consistent with their economic interests. Today, despite the economic interests, socially conservative, white, blue-collar women have moved increasingly into the Republican camp, primarily around social and cultural issues that include perceived moral decline, abortion and reproductive health, challenges to women’s traditional roles in society and family, and gay rights. This is not a recent development; it is the culmination of the increasing polarization around cultural issues that began in the 1970s and intensified in the 1990s.

In this election, this trend proved true even among those blue-collar women voters who seemed most likely to vote for Kerry. White, older, blue-collar women are among the most economically insecure in our country, with deep concerns about health-care costs and retirement security. Those and other domestic topics dominated the campaign in the first part of 2004, at least in campaign advertising in the battleground states. During this period (February to April), Kerry led with white older women by an average of 7 points and white, older, non-college women by 2 points. By election day, Kerry lost white older women by 7 points and white, older, non-college women by 18 points. Even more striking, there was a 14-point gap between white, older, non-college women’s identification with the Democratic Party (4-point Democratic disadvantage) and their support for Kerry (18-point disadvantage).

What happened over those months? Kerry lost ground with older, white, blue-collar women when the national discussion moved from health care, retirement, and other domestic priorities to security, the war on terrorism, and the war in Iraq. Starting with a Democratic convention focused on security and military experience, economic issues were largely absent from the national scene. In the absence of a real economic discussion, these voters swung to Bush as he tapped into their social conservatism, their support for his approach to the war on terrorism, and their admiration of his religious faith.

SONGS OF INNOCENCE

N.B. premier gets earful over sex ed (Chris Morris, Canadian Press, December 22nd, 2004)

Hundreds of parents from across New Brunswick have sent Christmas cards to Premier Bernard Lord with an unusual yuletide message: scrap a controversial sex-ed program for young teens.

A group of mothers from the Fredericton area delivered four gaily wrapped gift boxes to the premier's office on Tuesday, filled with roughly 700 cards from parents and individuals who are concerned about the province's new sex education curriculum for grades 6, 7 and 8.

Elizabeth Wilson and Carrie Greene said that in addition to the cards the group collected during a 10-day campaign, more were sent directly to the premier's office and the provincial Education Department.

"We are hoping that he (Lord) will do what's best to protect the innocence of children in New Brunswick," Wilson said. [...]

The sex-ed curriculum, aimed at children between 11 and 13 years of age, deals frankly with such topics as masturbation, oral sex and sexual pleasure.

Many of the parents who are unhappy about the program say it does not sufficiently stress abstinence.

"It relies heavily on condom usage," said Wilson.

"Abstinence should be a stated goal in this curriculum."

New Brunswick isn't the only province where the explicit nature of modern sex education programs has stirred controversy.

Concerns were raised about the adequacy of sex-ed programs in Prince Edward Island schools following the trial of a male high school athlete who was given oral sex by 12-and 13-year-old girls.

The trial revealed the girls were part of a group of middle school students who routinely performed oral sex on high school boys, most of them elite athletes.

Sandra Byers, chair of the psychology department at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton and a sex therapist, said incidents like the child oral-sex ring on the Island should set off alarms in schools and homes.

She said kids in grades 6, 7 and 8