HOW'S IT GOIN' IN THERE, SMAUG?:

Cornering the dragon (Conn Hallinan, 3/02/05 Foreign Policy in Focus)

A central goal of the confrontationists has been to deploy an anti-ballistic missile shield (ABM) in Asia, which the administration is now in the process of doing. So far it has enlisted Japan and Australia in this effort, and it is wooing India as well. While the rationale for the ABM is alleged to be North Korea, the real target is China's 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

The strategy of ringing China with US military bases is also well underway. Besides its traditional bases in Japan and South Korea, Guam has become, according to Pacific Commander Admiral William Fargo, a "power projection hub", that will play an increasing role in Asia, with "geo-strategic importance". The island already hosts B-52s, fighter planes, nuclear attack submarines, and the high-altitude spy drone, the Global Hawk. Since Guam is a US colony acquired during the Spanish American war, the military does not need permission for the buildup, as it would in Japan or Korea.

The US is also attempting to build bases in Southeast and South Asia. While Indonesian authorities deny the story, the Singapore Times reports that the US is presently negotiating to open a naval base on Sulawesi Island. It is also strengthening military ties to Thailand, Singapore, India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia.

The encirclement has also spread to Central Asia, an important source of oil and gas for China. The US presently has bases in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and military ties with Uzbekistan, which, according to Rumsfeld, are "growing stronger by the month".

Encircle and tighten.

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THE WHOLE FIGHT IS ON THEIR TURF:

Bush's plan for the GOP (Ross K. Baker, 2/28/05, USA Today)

A Republican dominance in 2005 and beyond might well produce more conservative social legislation, a relaxation of regulations on business and environmental rules and more truculent policy toward countries that sponsor terrorism. If he could pull it off, Bush would find himself in the select company of such presidents as Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt — all of whom engineered realignments.

One prong of the Bush strategy is to enact policies that he believes will lure independent voters, even Democrats, to the GOP.

•Social Security restructuring: This is the centerpiece of the administration's effort to create an "ownership society" by establishing private accounts for younger workers. The thinking behind this proposal is that people who see themselves as investors are ripe for conversion to the GOP. William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, said the creation of private accounts would result in "citizens not being grateful to government and therefore thinking more like Republicans than Democrats." Conservative activist Grover Norquist pointed out in a recent interview that the rise in stock ownership since the early 1980s parallels a rise in GOP strength in the electorate.

•Immigration: The president has always been more popular with Latino voters than Republicans ordinarily are, and he believes that this once-solidly Democratic group can be won over. To this end, he has proposed guest-worker status for illegal immigrants and has appointed Hispanics to two Cabinet posts.

The second prong of the strategy aims to undercut groups solidly in the Democratic camp.

•Tort reform: The president already won one battle earlier this month, signing into law legislation that moves a number of class-action lawsuits to federal courts and away from generous state juries. If Bush can get Congress to approve his plan to limit non-economic damages in lawsuits, he would further diminish the financial position of trial lawyers, who consistently back Democrats.

•Unions: The Democrats' other mainstay, the public employee unions, are the target of proposed revisions in civil-service regulations. These modifications by the National Labor Relations Board have thus far been applied only to the Department of Homeland Security. If extended, they would weaken unions' reach into federal agencies, carving into union dues and, as a byproduct, into money for Democrats.

Put simply: Court blacks and Latinos, crush lawyers and Labor.

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HAWKEYE BULLS' EYE:

Gross says he won't run for Iowa governor (Charlotte Eby, 2/28/05, Quad City Times)

Des Moines lawyer Doug Gross said today that he will not seek the Republican nomination for governor next year, ending speculation he would make another run for the job after an unsuccessful attempt in 2002.
.
Gross made the announcement in a letter to former Gov. Terry Branstad, saying an “all-consuming” campaign would take too much time away from his family. He and his wife are the parents of five children. [...]

Gross’ announcement clears the way for two other Republicans, U.S. Rep. Jim Nussle of Manchester and Vander Plaats, who is hoping to do better next year than his third-place showing in the 2002 primary.

Nussle has not made a formal announcement that he will enter the race, but he is widely expected to run.

This should be the start of IA cementing itself into the Red column.

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I DON'T THINK THAT I CAN TAKE IT, 'CAUSE IT TOOK SO LONG TO BAKE IT:

The Times' Turnabout (JAMES TARANTO, February 28, 2005, Best of the Web)

This column last weighed in on the Valerie Plame kerfuffle back in July, when Joe Wilson, having been cast out of the Kerry campaign after a Senate report impeached his credibility, was fulminating that The Wall Street Journal, which was arguing that the special prosecutor's investigation into the "leaking" of his wife's identity as a CIA "operative" should be shut down, was part of a criminal conspiracy.

Since then, the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has subpoenaed several reporters, two of whom, Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time, have refused to testify before a grand jury and are now threatened with jail. Fitzgerald also demanded that Miller and another Times reporter, Philip Shenon, turn over their phone records, but last week a federal judge quashed that request, which prompted a Times editorial Saturday that contained a stunning turnabout:

Meanwhile, an even more basic issue has been raised in recent articles in The Washington Post and elsewhere: the real possibility that the disclosure of Ms. Plame's identity, while an abuse of power, may not have violated any law. Before any reporters are jailed, searching court review is needed to determine whether the facts indeed support a criminal prosecution under existing provisions of the law protecting the identities of covert operatives.

We could have saved them 18 months and a lot of pointless flailing.

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THE GODLESSNESS THAT FAILED:

The Twilight of Atheism: Why this once exciting and 'liberating' philosophy failed to capture the world's imagination. (Alister McGrath, 02/28/2005, Christianity Today)

Atheism was once new, exciting, and liberating, and for those reasons held to be devoid of the vices of the faiths it displaced. With time, it turned out to have just as many frauds, psychopaths, and careerists as religion does. Many have now concluded that these personality types are endemic to all human groups, rather than being the peculiar preserve of religious folks. With Stalin and Madalyn Murray O'Hair, atheism seems to have ended up mimicking the vices of the Spanish Inquisition and the worst televangelists, respectively.

One of the most important criticisms that Sigmund Freud directed against religion was that it encourages unhealthy and dysfunctional outlooks on life. Having dismissed religion as an illusion, Freud went on to argue that it is a negative factor in personal development. At times, Freud's influence has been such that the elimination of a person's religious beliefs has been seen as a precondition for mental health.

Freud is now a fallen idol, the fall having been all the heavier for its postponement. There is now growing awareness of the importance of spirituality in health care, both as a positive factor in relation to well-being and as an issue to which patients have a right. The "Spirituality and Healing in Medicine" conference sponsored by Harvard Medical School in 1998 brought reports that 86 percent of Americans as a whole, 99 percent of family physicians, and 94 percent of hmo professionals believe that prayer, meditation, and other spiritual and religious practices exercise a major positive role within the healing process.

With the breakdown of social cohesion in recent decades, creating a sense of community has become an increasingly important political issue in many Western cultures. The question of how community can be recovered invites a comparison of religious and atheistic approaches.

One of the most obvious indicators of the ongoing importance of religion is the well-documented tendency of immigrant communities to define themselves in religious terms—Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim communities in Great Britain, and in France, Muslims from Algeria and other North African nations.

Christian churches have long been the centers of community life in the West. People want to belong, not just believe. [...]

The atheist dilemma is that Christianity is a moving target, whose trajectory is capable of being redirected without losing its anchor point in the New Testament. And as theologian John Henry Newman pointed out, Christianity must listen to such criticisms from outside its bounds, precisely because listening may be a way of recapturing its vision of the gospel.

Some atheists have argued that the phenomenon of globalization can only advance a secularist agenda, eliminating religion from the public arena. If the world is to have a shared future, it can only be by eliminating what divides its nations and peoples—such as religious beliefs. Yet many have pointed out in response that globalization seems to be resulting in a quite different outcome.

Far from being secularized, the West is experiencing a new interest in religion. Patterns of immigration mean that Islam and Hinduism are now major living presences in the cities of Western Europe and North America. Pentecostalism is a rapidly growing force, strengthened by the arrival of many Asian and African Christians in the West. The future looks nothing like the godless and religionless world so confidently predicted 40 years ago. The atheist agenda, once seen as a positive force for progress, is now seen as disrespectful toward cultural diversity.

Paradoxically, the future of atheism will be determined by its religious rivals. Those atheists looking for a surefire way to increase their appeal need only to hope for harsh, vindictive, and unthinking forms of religion to arise in the West.

In his problematic but fascinating work, The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler argued that history shows that cultures came into being for religious reasons. As they exhausted the potential of that spirituality, religion gave way to atheism, before a phase of religious renewal gave them a new sense of direction. Might atheism have run its course, and now give way to religious renewal? The tides of cultural shift have, for the time being, left atheism beached on the sands of modernity, while Westerners explore a new postmodern interest in the forbidden fruit of spirituality.

It seems not too much to say that the successes and instituttionalization of atheism/rationalism -- especially in the forms of Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism -- exposed it as generally more repellant and repulsive than even the most excessive facets of the Judeo-Christianity it was intended to critique. Atheism is essentially just another iteration of Protestantism and a protest that is less pure than that which it protests is doomed to failure.

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THE TURNING POINT OF WWII WASN'T HITLER SHOOTING HIMSELF, BUT PEARL HARBOR:

After 1/30/05: Just four weeks after the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, it seems increasingly likely that that date will turn out to have been a genuine turning point. (William Kristol, 03/07/2005, Weekly Standard)

HISTORY IS BEST VIEWED IN the rear-view mirror. It's hard to grasp the significance of events as they happen. It's even harder to forecast their meaning when they're only scheduled to happen. And once they occur, it's usually the case that possible historical turning points, tipping points, inflection points, or just points of interest turn out in the cold glare of history to have been of merely passing importance.

But sometimes not. Just four weeks after the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, it seems increasingly likely that that date will turn out to have been a genuine turning point. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, ended an era. September 11, 2001, ended an interregnum. In the new era in which we now live, 1/30/05 could be a key moment--perhaps the key moment so far--in vindicating the Bush Doctrine as the right response to 9/11. And now there is the prospect of further and accelerating progress.

I wonder if this strikes others as nonsensical. After all, by the time of the Wall's fall, and of the Iraqi election, the larger issue had already been determined. For the Cold War it seems easier to argue for any one of a series of earlier turning points: the Carter Administration's aid to the mujahadeen; Ronald Reagan's election; his Westminster Speech, in which he started us referring to the USSR in the past tense, as already failed; the acceptance a new class of missiles by the Europeans; or the announcement of Star Wars.

As far as this final war (WW IV?; the War on Terror?; the War against Islamicism?) is concerned there are likewise at least four points that were more determinative: either 9-11 itself or this speech, which dedicated the Bush presidency to a crusade; this speech, signalling that we would no longer honor the notions of stability and sovereignty where our enemies ruled; this one , which claimed the right to determine what kind of government nearly any state could have; or the re-election of George W. Bush over the Realist John Kerry, who'd run on a policy of disengagement and detente with the undemocratic Islamic world.

Any thoughts?

MORE:
Major arrests show a shift in Iraq: Still, attacks continue, like the one in Hilla Monday that killed more than 100 people, despite detention of top militants. (Jill Carroll, 2/28/05, The Christian Science Monitor)

The arrest of seven key insurgents in the past two weeks, including Saddam Hussein's half-brother and top aides to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, are giving a much-needed morale boost to Iraq's counterinsurgency efforts.

Indeed, some Iraqi officials see the momentum beginning to shift since the Jan. 30 elections. They say Iraqi citizens are providing more tips, and that a series of videotaped confessions by captured insurgents shown on Iraqi TV are helping discredit the rebels. "We are very close to al-Zarqawi, and I believe that there are a few weeks separating us from him," Iraq's interim national security adviser, Mouwafak al-Rubaie told the Associated Press.

Analysts agree that the string of arrests are likely to hurt the insurgency. But the decentralized nature of the uprising makes it difficult to dismantle. A massive car bombing in Hilla, Iraq, Monday underscored the point. The bomb exploded near a line of recruits for the Iraqi security forces in the southern Iraq town, killing more than 100 people, one of the largest death tolls from a car bomb in Iraq.

Seizing Saddam...and Kin (Marni Soupcoff, American Enterprise)

A curious thing has been happening amidst critics’ complaints that the United States is not focusing sufficiently on an exit strategy in Iraq, and that the Iraqis themselves can’t deal with the terrorists attacking them: the bad guys are getting caught. One of the most notable recent achievements was the capture of Saddam Hussein’s half-brother and former adviser Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan al-Tikriti.

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BABY GOT BACK (via AWW):

Lebanon's pro-Syrian PM resigns (CNN, 2/28/05)

The Lebanese government abruptly resigned Monday during a stormy parliamentary debate, prompting a tremendous roar from tens of thousands of anti-government protesters in central Beirut.

The demonstrators, awash in a sea of red, white and green Lebanese flags, had demanded the pro-Syrian government's resignation -- and the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon -- since this month's assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Demonstrators in Beirut's Martyrs Square chanted, "Syria out! Syria out!" after Prime Minister Omar Karami announced his resignation in a speech aired by the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation.

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CATCHING MITT:

The hinge of history (Robert Novak, February 28, 2005, Townhall)

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's stand against embryonic stem cell research not only changes the long-range picture for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. It augments a shift in tactics by social conservatives. They are trying to change the focus from research for fighting disease to an uncontrolled scientific community's quest to clone human beings.

Romney's position previously had been considered mildly pro-stem cell. His wife, Ann, suffers from multiple sclerosis, a disease for which cloning is supposed to promise miraculous cures. But early in February, the governor flatly came out against Harvard University's plans to create human embryos, purportedly for research. He said last Monday that he and his wife "agree that you don't create new life to help cure our issues."

That statement was made by the Massachusetts governor in Spartanburg, S.C., where he was testing early presidential waters. Romney is moving rightward on social policy, declaring himself "pro-life." But to depict what he is saying in strictly political terms is to trivialize an issue of overriding ethical importance. "We stand at the hinge of history," an anti-cloning activist who is a former official at the United Nations, told me.

The historic decision is not, as cloning proponents claim, whether to spend public funds on research to combat a wide variety of illnesses. The broader decision whether to grant science unlimited power is symbolized by the bill pending in Massachusetts to legalize the creation of human embryos. Romney has declared he will veto the bill, bringing upon himself the full wrath of the liberal establishment from Harvard to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

One of the most predictable political dramas of the next three years is Rudy Giuliani's come-to-Jesus moment, when he reveals that his brush with death and ruined marriage have caused him to renew his faith and to realize the value of traditional morality, not least the sanctity of life. He'll oppose embryonic stem cell and abortion for anything but life of the mother.

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FIRST CASUALTY (via David Hill, The Bronx):

Clinton adviser: Pataki is not taken seriously (MARC HUMBERT, February 28, 2005, AP)

A top adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that Republican Gov. George Pataki is increasingly becoming an object of ridicule and that his possible presidential ambitions are "laughable."

"When a conservative magazine pictures you as a monkey on the cover, you've become an object of ridicule _ and that's from his own base," said Howard Wolfson, who in addition to being a top Clinton adviser is also a strategist for the state Democratic Party in New York.

The Feb. 28 issue of the National Review featured a highly critical story on the New York governor. A caricature of Pataki as the bicycle-riding "Curious George" monkey graced the conservative magazine's cover for the story headlined "Spurious George."

While Pataki is sometimes mentioned as a potential contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Wolfson told The Associated Press that notion was not realistic.

"His presidential ambitions are not serious. They're laughable," said the adviser to the former first lady, herself considered a top contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Especially if this is all true, which seems sadly fair, why talk him out of challenging her for the Senate? Beating him would give the illusion that she'd won a tough race and enhance her stature.

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MEANWHILE, IT'S 14% OF AMERICANS OVER 65 (via AWW):

Poor Chileans labor past retirement (Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, February 28, 2005, Boston Globe)

At a time when President Bush has made overhauling Social Security a central objective of his second administration, he and other proponents of privatization have held out Chile, the first in the world to privatize pensions in 1981, as a role model.

By transforming its system, this country of 16 million people fended off a looming pension debt owed its aging population and fueled domestic capital markets, contributing to high growth rates and a halving of poverty in what has become one of the most affluent nations in Latin America. For steadily employed Chileans who consistently channel 10 percent of their salaries into private retirement accounts, as required by law -- and preferably top it up with more, tax-free contributions -- pensions could reach 70 percent of salaries, providing a comfortable standard of living in retirement, according to estimates by the pension fund managers' association.

But what supporters of Chile's model have not advertised is that for poor, seasonal, and itinerant workers, and even for a great part of the middle-class and self-employed, the private system has proved inadequate, largely because those workers are unable to contribute enough to their private accounts. More than 17 percent of Chileans 65 and older keep working because their pensions are inadequate, according to a government-commissioned study.

Based on Chile's experience -- and that of more than 20 countries mostly in Latin America and Eastern Europe that followed its lead by privatizing part or all of their pension systems -- one conclusion from a new World Bank report is that the government will have to play a bigger role in any reformed pension system than proponents of privatization suggest. Private accounts can be one pillar of a Social Security system, but the state will have to provide a safety net.

The story opens with the heartrending sagas of Chileans who can't retire when they're 60...the heart bleeds.

However, the latter points are valid. If folks can't make full contributions we should fill the gap--a little now saves us big later. Andthere'll be a safety net for the truly destitute elderly.

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GROWTH INDUSTRY:

China Confronts Rising Crime in a Fast-track Economy (Heda Bayron, 28 February 2005, VOA News)

China's rapid economic and social changes have created some undesirable consequences, among them a rising incidence of crime. However, Chinese officials are learning that simply imposing harsh penalties will not solve the problem. [...]

China's ministry in charge of internal security says crime is on the rise. Last year, the number of reported crimes rose 7.5 percent to nearly five million, nearly at the same pace as China's economic growth. Theft and robbery made up 80 percent of the cases. Car thefts, in a country that until recently had few private cars, climbed 18 percent.

Experts say the growth is an unwelcome product of the country's rapid economic development.

China's crime rate has been accelerating since the late 1970s, when the country embarked on economic reforms. According to figures from the United Nations, in the early 1980s there were 90 reported crimes per 100,000 people. But by the late 1990s, this had jumped 45 percent to 131 per 100,000.

The change has barely begun.

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THOSE AFRICAN SANCTIONS WORKED RATHER WELL, EH?:

West African Leaders Help to Prepare Togo Vote (Joe Bavier, 28 February 2005, VOA News)

Two West African heads of state have gone to Togo to discuss organizing new elections following the resignation of the military appointed president. The opposition is afraid free and fair elections will not be possible.

President Mamadou Tandja of Niger and his Malian counterpart Amadou Toumani Toure represented the regional bloc ECOWAS on its diplomatic mission in Togo's capital, Lome.

A spokeswoman for the grouping, Adriane Diop, says ECOWAS has been encouraged by the decision Friday of Faure Gnassingbe, the son of the late long ruling leader, to quit the presidency and allow an interim president to take over until polls can be held.

"We see it as a positive decision. And that has triggered the lifting of sanctions from ECOWAS. So we are going to discuss with the Togolese political class to see the way forward," said Ms. Diop. "We will be on the side of Togo as provided by our protocols in order to assist them to have free and fair and transparent elections."

ECOWAS imposed sanctions against Togo last week following Mr. Gnassingbe's installation as president by the military upon the death of his father Gnassingbe Eyadema.

It lifted the sanctions Saturday after Mr. Gnassingbe stepped down, ceding the presidency to the newly elected assembly speaker and constitutionally-mandated interim leader, Abass Bonfoh.

Somewhat lost in our excitement over the rapid reformation of the Middle East is the equally compelling story of Africa gradually pulling its act together.

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CRANK...CRANK...CRANK...:

Israel Says It Has Evidence of Syrian Involvement in Tel Aviv Nightclub Bombing (Larry James, 28 February 2005, VOA News)

Israel says it has evidence Syria was involved in the bombing at a Tel Aviv nightclub on Friday that killed five Israelis and wounded dozens more. It intends to present the evidence to representatives of the international community.

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom is to present the evidence to ambassadors of the European Union and all countries now serving on the U.N. Security Council.

Beirut Protesters Defy Ban on Demonstrations (Edward Yeranian, 28 February 2005, VOA News)

Hours before the Lebanese parliament is to vote on a motion of no confidence in the government, thousands of demonstrators, waving Lebanese flags demonstrated in Beirut's Martyr's Square.

The atmosphere was electric among the thousands of demonstrators who had gathered in Beirut's historic Martyrs Square to demand the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and the resignation of the government. The demonstrations have swelled since the assassination of popular former Prime Minister Hariri, earlier this month. Protesters believe Syria was involved in the murder - a scenerio Syria denies.

Opposition politicians harangued the crowd, many of whom had camped out overnight, to get around a curfew imposed by the government.

Long-time member of parliament and opposition figure Butros Harb told the swarm of demonstrators, waving red and white Lebanese flags, that the Lebanese opposition will continue protesting until Lebanon recovers its freedom.

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OBLIGATORY BA'ATHIST COMPARISON:

Attack on AARP, Like 'Religious War,' Built on Either/Or Fallacy (Ronald Brownstein, February 28, 2005, LA Times)

As synonyms for the word "vile," my thesaurus offers some of the following: offensive, objectionable, odious, repulsive, repellent, repugnant, revolting, disgusting, sickening, loathsome, foul, nasty, contemptible, despicable and noxious.

Any of those words would aptly describe the advertising attack launched last week against AARP, the largest advocacy group for seniors, by the conservative interest group USA Next. But there's one word that unfortunately can't be applied: surprising.

The salvo against AARP crystallizes trends developing both in the debate over Social Security and more broadly in the competition between the parties in Washington. On both fronts, the news isn't good.

USA Next, which envisions itself as the conservative alternative to AARP, previously made its biggest splash by using drug company money to help fund an ad blitz promoting the Medicare prescription drug plan backed by President Bush and the pharmaceutical industry. That led critics to accuse the organization of operating as a front group for the drug makers.

Last week, USA Next announced it would spend $10 million on an ad campaign attacking AARP over its opposition to Bush's proposal to create private investment accounts funded by the Social Security payroll tax. USA Next opened the campaign with an Internet-only ad that uses logic so contorted it verges on parody to accuse AARP of opposing the military and supporting gay marriage.

Charlie Jarvis, USA Next's chairman and a former aide to President Reagan and religious conservative powerhouse James Dobson, promised that was just the start for AARP. "They are the boulder in the middle of the highway to personal savings accounts," Jarvis told the New York Times. "We will be the dynamite that removes them."

In 50 years, historians may study that quote to understand why Washington now feels so much like Beirut.

Imagine for a moment that you are Lebanese and live in Beirut--how infuriating would a statement that stupid be to you? Now imagine you live in Lebanon, NH and Washiongton is beinggoverned by your party--how stupid must it seem? Okay, now imagine you're a liberal Democrat in Los Angeles and it may seem fair.

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THERE'S A REASON WE NEED MORAL STRICTURES AGAINST BESTIALITY (via Rick Turley):

The secret life of moody cows (Jonathan Leake, 2/276/05, Times of London)

Christine Nicol, professor of animal welfare at Bristol University, said even chickens may have to be treated as individuals with needs and problems.

“Remarkable cognitive abilities and cultural innovations have been revealed,” she said. “Our challenge is to teach others that every animal we intend to eat or use is a complex individual, and to adjust our farming culture accordingly.”

Nicol will be presenting her findings to a scientific conference to be held in London next month by Compassion in World Farming, the animal welfare lobby group.

John Webster, professor of animal husbandry at Bristol, has just published a book on the topic, Animal Welfare: Limping Towards Eden. “People have assumed that intelligence is linked to the ability to suffer and that because animals have smaller brains they suffer less than humans. That is a pathetic piece of logic,” he said.

Webster and his colleagues have documented how cows within a herd form smaller friendship groups of between two and four animals with whom they spend most of their time, often grooming and licking each other. They will also dislike other cows and can bear grudges for months or years.

Dairy cow herds can also be intensely sexual.

No one who's ever looked into the limpid pools of a Jersey cow's eyes has failed to be stirred.

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THUS, COMPASSIONATE:

Blacks Courted on Social Security: Private accounts would be more useful because of a life expectancy gap, Republicans say. (Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger, February 28, 2005, LA Times)

The White House and its allies who back overhauling Social Security are launching a highly targeted campaign to convince blacks that President Bush's plan to create private investment accounts would have special benefits for them.

The most provocative element of the GOP message to blacks: Their shorter life expectancy means that Social Security is not a favorable deal for them, a point contested by Bush's critics. The president's plan for private accounts, say Republicans, would particularly benefit blacks by allowing them to build wealth more rapidly and pass a portion of their Social Security contributions to their heirs.

In reaching out to blacks on Bush's top domestic priority, Republicans are courting a traditionally Democratic voting bloc, which could further pressure Democratic lawmakers to back the president's plan.

Some Republican strategists also believe the effort illustrates how Bush can reap political rewards from the Social Security issue even if he fails to win passage of his plan in Congress. These strategists believe that Bush's call for private accounts, and his broader claim to be building an "ownership society," have special appeal for black voters, many of whom live in economically troubled neighborhoods and have not been able to build their own savings.

Divide and conquer.

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GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME, NOT FOR THEE:

Unspoken message of Bush's 'listening tour': The president's words about democracy didn't always have the intended effect on his European audiences. (Howard LaFranchi, 2/28/05, The Christian Science Monitor)

[E]urope - with the breakup of the Balkans still fresh in its memory and the feeling (often repeated to an American visitor) that "the Middle East is closer to us than it is to you" - is more interested in stability than in a revolutionary call to democratic arms.

Danged annoying, that democracy stuff.

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FEELING THE NEED FOR SPEED:

An opportunity in Syria (Rami G. Khouri, February 28, 2005, Boston Globe)

[W]estern diplomatic pressure on Syria over the past two years has aimed to have Syria speed up its withdrawal from Lebanon, stop interfering politically in Lebanese domestic affairs, cooperate more effectively on restoring security inside Iraq, stop its support for Hizbullah and Palestinian ''rejectionist" groups that resist current peace-making terms with Israel, and desist from alleged programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. Syria has offered replies, explanations, denials and professions of innocence to all those allegations, but unconvincingly in the eyes of the United States, France, and most other countries.

Western pressure on Damascus is escalating briskly. The US Congress passed the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act last year, and President Bush imposed only a few of its lighter economic sanctions on Damascus. The heat was intensified in early September when Syria seemed set to extend Lahoud's term. Washington, Paris, Berlin, and others worked closely together to pass UN Security Council Resolution 1559, calling on all ''foreign troops" (i.e., Syrian forces) to leave Lebanon. [...]

Just as the extension of Lahoud's term last September pushed the Lebanese opposition across the threshold of a confrontational red line with Damascus that it had always resisted crossing, the Hariri assassination seems to have triggered a similarly significant new political dynamic -- this time in Lebanese, Western, and UN dealings with Syria, expressed in a salvo of simultaneous diplomatic gestures, statements, and soft threats.

The fascinating new dimension is that events could lead, in the first instance, to an accelerated Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, and faster reform movements inside both Lebanon and Syria. More important, in the second instance, is whether Syrian withdrawal and faster reforms would embolden the United States and friends to continue pressuring Syria and other Middle Eastern states where policy changes are sought, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Egypt.

Western?

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RATHER WATCH TOM (via David Hill, The Bronx)

CBS BIGS PAN DAN (LEONARD GREENE, New York Post)

Not only is Dan Rather running third among viewers — he's running third at CBS, too.

The retiring evening-news anchor has become so irrelevant that even the network's heavyweights have been tuning him out.

"Rather is a superb reporter, and dead honest, but he's not as easy to watch as [ABC's Peter] Jennings or [NBC's Tom] Brokaw," said Mike Wallace, the relentless "60 Minutes" correspondent.

Rather, under fire for a sloppy report on President Bush's National Guard service, will retire March 9 after 24 years in the CBS anchor chair.

Not even the man he replaced, the venerable Walter Cronkite, thinks Rather is a must-see. Cronkite said he often watched recently retired NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, and it seemed viewers felt "that Dan was playing a role of newsman, that he was conscious of this, whereas the other two appeared to be more the third-party reporter."

Cronkite said Rather was known for "showboating."

You have to wonder if even Mr. Rather watches his own broadcast.

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THE SELF-EVIDENT DOESN'T REQUIRE CURIOSITY:

A Dawning Age of Unreason: In 21st-century America, people seem to prefer placing their unquestioning faith in divine mysteries than worshipping at the altar of science. (Will Englund, February 27, 2005, Baltimore Sun)

Reason has been taking a beating recently, and it's not hard to see why. If Americans are flocking to religious faith, to revealed dogma, to creationism, to a place where no one pays any heed to a logic based on if x then y, it's because reason gave us a world that hardly makes sense anymore.

Yes, I know - two centuries ago, America itself was a product of the Age of Enlightenment, and of a belief that people had it within their own power to make a better life for themselves, to throw off the shackles of superstition and build a more perfect union. And it nearly happened. Look what reason - as expressed through social, technological and scientific progress - gave birth to: the First Amendment, the Erie Canal, the cotton gin, the light bulb, the submachine gun, the income tax, the Model T Ford, the exit poll, the Edsel, the New Jersey Turnpike, the polio vaccine, the tonsillectomy, the nose job, death by lethal injection, and call waiting. [...]

The Age of Reason may have reached its glorious acme in the late 19th century. But in some ways it started to go off the rails soon after. Reason said that humans could be bred like peas or hogs to produce a better specimen - a line of thinking that reached its logical conclusion at Auschwitz. Reason said that energy and mass are related - as the residents of Hiroshima were to learn. Reason said that history and economics were decipherable by way of the scientific method; thus Das Kapital , and thus The Gulag Archipelago.

It's one of the more delicious ironies of the 20th century that the Soviets believed they were acting according to scientific principles - it was nonsense, but evangelical Americans, of all people, took them at their word. The phrases "scientific communism" and "godless communism" are so close in the meaning given to them by their respective camps that they are practically synonymous. Scientific was godless. In actual fact, the Bolsheviks had one great feature in common with Christian fundamentalists: adherence to tenets that were a matter of faith and could not be proved wrong by any amount of evidence. This is the philosopher Karl Popper's definition of the difference between religion and science -- science is always open to new facts.

Religion, on the other hand, as the bioethicist Peter Singer points out in The President of Good and Evil, requires its adherents to stifle doubt, not to act on it. Case in point is George W. Bush, says Singer, who goes on to make a pretty convincing case that doubt is not one of the commander-in-chief's major afflictions.

Did the death of communism mean that Americans could dispense with doubt, once and for all? Is America turning its back finally on the Age of Reason? Susan Jacoby, an author who early in her career wrote about the Soviet Union, traces in Freethinkers the battles down through the past 200 years between religiosity and reason in American life, and concludes that religiosity is stronger now than it has ever been before. Maybe that comparison to Romantic poetry wasn't quite on target. Evangelicals preach American exceptionalism, that God has shed a special grace on America and that faith goes hand in hand with prosperity. And then consider Justice Antonin Scalia, who, as Jacoby points out, has said that the "American government derives its ultimate power not from the people but from divinity." Strict constructionism? This isn't about the Constitution's more perfect union, it's about America as the Shining City on the Hill.

With religiosity comes certainty, and with certainty comes a complete lack of curiosity. Jacoby points out that religious belief in some common forms is antithetical to democracy itself. "Those who rely on the perfect hand of the Almighty for political guidance, whether on biomedical research or capital punishment, are really saying that such issues can never be a matter of imperfect human opinion," she writes. Not wanting to know might be the new American ethos.

The genius of the Founding, of course, was that, unlike Rationalism, it rejected the possibility of perfectability. It is based on religious authority that can not be doubted or the whole project goes bung.

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IF THE MOUNTAIN WON'T COME TO W, HE'LL MOVE THE MOUNTAIN:

New openings for Arab democracy: Mubarak's call for elections in Egypt follows moves in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestinian territory. (Nicholas Blanford and Gretchen Peters, 2/28/05, The Christian Science Monitor)

In a surprise announcement Saturday, Egypt's long-ruling president, Hosni Mubarak, ordered constitutional changes that would open the door for the first-ever multiparty presidential elections in the world's most populous Arab country. The move is the latest indication of a cautious democratic shift under way in the Arab world.

Since the beginning of the year, the region has seen national elections in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, landmark municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, and unprecedented mass demonstrations in Lebanon calling for an end to Syrian tutelage. [...]

[A]side from the situation here in Lebanon, where calls for democracy emerged spontaneously after the assassination of a former prime minister earlier this month, most of the recent shifts toward democracy have been top-down initiatives by regimes eager to appease Washington.

In his inauguration speech in January, President Bush said a cornerstone of his foreign policy in his second term would be to promote democracy, particularly in the Arab world. Last year, he unveiled an initiative designed to encourage Arab countries to embrace democracy. But the initiative met with a hostile reaction from most Arab countries who viewed it as interference in their domestic affairs.

Critics say that the elections in Saudi Arabia lack substance due to the limited power of municipal councils and the fact that women are barred from voting. The Saudi government argues that the pace of reform has to be measured carefully because of the deeply conservative nature of the kingdom.

Still, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal suggested over the weekend that women may be allowed to vote in future elections. "The commissioner of elections said after the elections for municipal councils that they went so well and testing the water proved so appealing that the commissioner is going to suggest to the government to have women vote in the next municipal elections," he told BBC television.

Despite Arab criticism of Washington's ambitions for democratizing the Arab world, some analysts say that the tentative reforms would not have happened without US intervention. "It's because of the Americans, let's face it," says Michael Young, a Lebanese political analyst. "These regimes didn't give a damn about the views of their people not so long ago - Mubarak's decision I link directly to Bush's inauguration address. The leaders realize things have to change in terms of the public image."

MORE:
Regional election fever catches up with Emirates (AFP, 2/26/05)

Academics and members of the appointed consultative council in the United Arab Emirates came out in favor of elections in the Persian Gulf state, arguing that it could not stay out of the regional trend toward elected bodies. [...]

[M]ember Mohammad bin Ali al-Nagbi told the same newspaper he would support elections as long as they were decided from within and were not imposed by external pressure. Atiq Daka, a professor of political science at the UAE University, told AFP: "Our country is now the only member of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (PGCC) which has yet to catch up with the political opening up under way in the Arab world. Even countries we thought incapable of political change, such as Saudi Arabia, are now ahead of us."

The PGCC groups the UAE with Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Bahrain and Kuwait have elected parliaments, while Oman has an elected advisory council.

And earlier this month, ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia kicked off unprecedented local polls in which half the members of 178 municipal councils will be elected across the kingdom. Women, however, have been excluded from the three-stage ballot.

"We are certainly ahead (of other countries in the region) at the economic and trade levels. But we should also lead the way on the political front," Daka said.

"How come that we encouraged Iraqis to take part in elections and hosted Iraqi elections on our soil while even officials of sports clubs in our country are appointed?" Daka asked.

Egypt politics: Mubarak takes the hint (THE ECONOMIST INTELLIGENCE UNIT, 2/28/05)

Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, has finally responded to US prompting and to the increasingly agitated demands of his domestic opposition for meaningful democratic reforms. His announcement on February 26th that he wants the constitution changed to allow for the direct election of the president is a potentially revolutionary move. It is only a first step, however, and it is unlikely to prevent Mr Mubarak from securing a fifth term when Egypt’s first contested presidential election takes place in September this year.

Mr Mubarak has resisted calls for radical political reform ever since he assumed power in 1981 following the assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat. He has advanced many reasons for his conservative stance. They have included the claim that economic reform should take precedence and that the experience of Algeria, which underwent a bloody civil war in the 1990s, showed the pitfalls of moving too fast towards political pluralism. It has, however, become harder for him to defend this rigid stance in the face of pressure, both from the US and from the grassroots, for democratic opening across the Middle East. The Palestinian and Iraqi elections and the massive street protests in Lebanon have only added to this pressure.

The US president, George W Bush, in two speeches (in November 2004 and February 2005) used similar phrases to encourage Mr Mubarak to adopt political reforms: "The great and proud nation of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East," he said in the more recent version, in his State of the Union address on February 2nd. The Bush administration has also registered its concern about measures taken by Mr Mubarak’s regime against pro-democracy campaigners. The most prominent of these is Ayman Nour, a member of parliament who was arrested at the end of January, three months after securing approval for the formation of a new political party—Al Ghad—whose platform includes pressing for changes to the system for electing the president. Mr Nour has been stripped of his parliamentary immunity and detained for 45 days pending investigation of allegations that he falsified more than 1,000 signatures presented to support his application to found Al Ghad. Another source of pressure on Mr Mubarak has been a group of protestors calling openly for him to leave, under the banner of "kifaya", an Arabic word for "enough".

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LIKE ALL QUESTIONS IN AMERICA:

The moral and morality of the welfare state (Carlos Alberto Montaner, Firmas Press)

Americans are missing the point of the problem. They think they're involved in a technical discussion over the economic viability of Social Security, whereas the central issue is different and a lot more important: to choose between individual responsibility and economic responsibility.

That is precisely the core of a heated debate being held worldwide over a profound reexamination of relations between society and the state. The retirement system is just one more expression of that impassioned polemic.

Here, succinctly, is the historical background. Beginning in the mid-19th Century, an idea increasingly developed that the state should furnish people with certain basic services: free public education, medical care, unemployment compensation, sick pay and retirement pension. [...]

This vision of the role of the state, of the whole of society and the role of the individual underwent a crisis in the late 20th century. Why? Because of the extremely high costs it implied and because it created a growing inefficiency in the public sector. [...]

Today, it is well known that the road to the welfare state is no longer passable. The few available resources are squandered, frustration endangers the democratic system and opens the door to all kinds of adventurers and demagogues. At the same time, the welfare state fosters among people a harmful attitude of prostrate defenselessness: ``The state, not I, is responsible for my happiness. If I lack something, it's because someone has taken it away from me.''

It is against this cosmic vision that the voices rise seeking a resurgence of individual responsibility and a reduction of the state's perimeter. They expect that a revitalization of civil society and private-sector efforts will achieve the levels of prosperity that the public environment is unable to generate.

The real problem is not where the retirement funds come from but whether we admit or reject the moral premise that every able-bodied person should save to pay for his or her old-age expenses without having to depend on the solidarity of other wage earners. That's the true debate.

That acquired dependency was a feature not a flaw for the Statists who built the systems.

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FULL CIRCLE

Peter Benenson (The Telegraph, February 28th, 2005)

Peter Benenson, who died on Friday aged 83, was the founder of Amnesty International, the organisation set up to bring pressure on governments to release people imprisoned for voicing their political or religious opinions - people for whom Benenson coined the term "prisoners of conscience". The impetus for the founding of Amnesty was a newspaper article Benenson read, when travelling on the London Underground, in November 1960: two Portuguese students had been arrested and sentenced to seven years' in jail for drinking a toast to liberty - the government of Portugal was then in the hands of the dictator Antonio Salazar - in a cafe in Lisbon.

Incensed, Benenson, a barrister who already had experience of human rights work, came up with the idea of a one-year campaign to draw public attention to the plight of the world's political and religious prisoners. With Eric Barker, a Quaker, and the barrister Louis Blom-Cooper, Benenson launched "Appeal for Amnesty 1961", which on May 28 that year appeared on the front page of the Observer newspaper.

Entitled "The Forgotten Prisoners", the piece began: "Open your newspaper - any day of the week - and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government. The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust all over the world could be united into common action, something effective could be done."

In October, as part of the campaign, Benenson published Persecution 1961, a short book which contained the stories of a handful of men and women from varying political and religious outlooks who had suffered imprisonment for expressing their opinions. By the end of that month Amnesty had accumulated 840 case files from 31 countries and the outlook was promising.

Amnesty International, one of the original and most successful transnational NGOs, was a child of a post-war, post-Holocaust morality that wrenched human suffering out of the realm of political ideology and culture. It began with a very concrete and noble concern for imprisoned and mistreated “prisoners of conscience”, but it declined to accord any causal significance to either the nature of the imprisoning regime or the cause of the imprisoned. In perfect accord with the zeitgeist of the immediate postwar decades, it dovetailed nicely with popular movements like world federalism, French existentialism and progressive anti-colonialism. It held that, by definition, all governments were equally suspect and all dissenters equally noble. Its brilliant letter-writing campaigns offered participation in the grand sweep of international politics to one and all, and only the churlish would begrudge the pride and satisfaction of those thousands of ordinary folks who tirelessly penned appeals on behalf of some wretched prisoner half a world away.

But choices must be made, and from the very beginning its “apolitical” stance pulled it in an anti-Western direction, if only because it was much more effective dealing with accessible autocratic thugs than with the far more murderous and closed communist world. Nothing succeeds like success and the squeaky wheel gets the grease, not to mention the financial contributions. It is telling that Mr. Benenson’s inspirational rage was triggered by two Portuguese students in the same year Mao-Tse-Tung was orchestrating the death by starvation of untold millions. Knowing full well that all the letters in the world could not sway a fanatic and dogmatic totalitarian, they aimed at softer targets and, in the process, convinced themselves that these were the epicentre of human depravity. Amnesty didn’t just battle injustice, it came to define it.

Today, Amnesty bears little resemblance to a grassroots movement worrying about individuals. It has been taken over completely by that scourge of modern Western life, the professional activist, who finds individuals rather a bore. As with many other successful NGOs, it now spends most of its time in the much more exciting enchanted kingdom of UN diplomacy--issuing press releases, commissioning studies, hurrying to conferences and passing resolutions to promote the secular apocalypse of abstract, universal “human rights”. Many of these rights have little to do with human freedom and dignity. They also have much more to do with words on paper than with the real lives of human beings. And, perhaps most importantly, they increasingly require coercion to enforce. Let us be thankful that a great humanitarian like Mr. Benenson will not live to see his brainchild become an agent for the imprisonment and oppression of those fighting for true freedom.

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HOW ABOUT JUST ONE LIFETIME SAVINGS ACCOUNT?:

Saving for college? Try a Roth. (Annette Varnier, 2/28/05, The Christian Science Monitor)

When it comes to saving money for college, many parents find themselves in a conundrum: They want to save for their children's education, yet they need to save for retirement at the same time.

While many financial experts advise making retirement saving the first priority, most parents still want to be able to pay at least part of their children's college costs. Thus, they often establish separate accounts: 401(k) plans to fund their own retirement and state-sponsored 529 plans to save for college.

But there's a third option families should consider adding to the savings mix, experts say: a Roth Individual Retirement Account.

"The Roth IRA has a lot of appeal for retirement and can be used for college, too," says Joseph Hurley, founder and chief executive of savingforcollege.com. The website specializes in providing information about 529 plans and other methods of saving for higher education.

"People should generally save for retirement first, because you can't get loans for retirement, and there are a lot of other sources of help available for college, including loans," Mr. Hurley says. In particular, 401(k) plans often come with matching contributions from employers.

But after retirement is covered, it's time to take a closer look at 529 college savings plans and Roth IRAs. Both plans use after-tax dollars for contributions, so you don't get a tax break up front but your earnings grow tax-free. Withdrawals from a 529 plan for education costs are tax-free, but so are withdrawals from a Roth IRA if the owner is over 59-1/2 and has had the account for over five years.

Isn't it long past time to combine all these accounts into one?

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SMALL BEGINNINGS:

'Million Dollar Baby' Dominates Oscars (SHARON WAXMAN and DAVID M. HALBFINGER, 2/28/05, NY Times)

In a year without blockbusters in the biggest Oscar categories, "Million Dollar Baby," an intimate film about an underdog female boxer, captured four top awards Sunday at the 77th Academy Awards: best picture, best director, best actress and best supporting actor.

In a way, it's fortunate Christopher Reeve died before he could see how much his peers despised him.

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COME BACK, PAUL, ALL IS FORGIVEN:

Accounts could help Americans retire rich (Kevin G. Hall, 2/27/05, Knight Ridder Newspapers

One new proposal emerging from the national debate on how to overhaul Social Security could make every American a millionaire at age 65.

Paul O'Neill, President Bush's first treasury secretary and a former chief executive officer of aluminum giant Alcoa, proposes having the government stake every American baby at birth to an investment savings account. By the time the child retires, the account would contain $1 million or more. The idea is drawing attention from an unusual coalition of lawmakers from both parties, liberals as well as conservatives.

How delicious would be the irony if Mr. O'Neill, the only Cabinet member forced out of the Bush Administration, were to help him secure his greatest victory.

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DREAMY:

Markets cheer India's budget (Asia Times. 3/01/05)

India's Finance Minister P Chidambaram Monday unveiled his budget - the government's annual exercise of presenting the books and stating the economic policies to be followed in the coming year - that aimed at combating poverty, significantly changed the tax structure and showed signs that foreign direct investment (FDI) in more sectors might soon be liberalized. [...]

Further liberalizing state-controlled banks, the finance minister proposed a bill to amend the current bank law and indicated that FDI in the pension, mining and trade sectors would be liberalized. Foreign-fund holdings' limit in state-run banks has been raised to 24% from 20%. FDI in private banks, it was announced, would be relaxed to 74% from 49%. [...]

Chidambaram also announced steps to strengthen the capital market. Foreign institutional investors will be permitted to submit appropriate collateral when trading in derivatives on the domestic market. Market regulators will be asked to permit mutual funds to introduce a gold exchange-traded funds scheme to enable any household to buy and sell gold in units for as little as 100 rupees - about $2.

The captains of Indian industry hailed the budget, some even going as far to call it a "dream budget". Tarun Das of the Confederation of Indian Industry, an industry body, said: "We are on a good wicket as far as the economy is concerned and reforms are on track. There are so many positives that it is difficult to find negatives."

A large measure of relief has been provided to middle class income tax payers, with a change in tax brackets. Chidambaram also spelt out wide-ranging changes in the indirect tax regime, bringing down the peak customs duty on non-agriculture products to 15% from the existing 20%.

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WEREN'T WE STANDING ON SOMETHING?:

Can Lost Morality be Restored in Modern Societies? (Gertrude Himmelfarb, Nov/Dec 1995, The American Enterprise Online)

[V]ictorian England went through an Industrial Revolution even more consequential than our current post- industrial tumult—because it involved not just economic and technological transformation, but also an urban revolution, a political revolution, and a social revolution, having the potential to subvert authority, tradition, religion, and morality. Yet the Victorians bore these upheavals without experiencing any moral crisis.

Indeed, the Victorians came out of their modernizing revolution with an accession of morality. An illegitimacy ratio of 7 percent in 1845 fell to 4 percent by the end of the century; in East London, the poorest part of the city, it was even lower. Crime, drunkenness, violence, illiteracy, and vagrancy all declined. The underclass, known to the early Victorians as the “ragged and dangerous classes,” virtually disappeared by the end of the century.

These improvements in the Victorian period contrast dramatically with the deterioration during our own time. In the past three decades alone, illegitimacy and crime in England have increased six fold. The American figures are remarkably similar. Which makes one wonder: What did the Victorians know that we don’t?

In 1839, at a time of social unrest, Thomas Carlyle urged his countrymen to pay less attention to the material standards of the people and more to their “disposition”—the beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and habits that inclined them either to a “wholesome composure, frugality, and prosperity,” or to an “acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking, and gradual ruin.” By the end of the century it was evident that most citizens, even in the poorest classes, had chosen the first path.

Victorian England was shaped not only by the industrial revolution that had started half a century before, but also by a moral reformation launched even earlier. This reformation began in the middle of the eighteenth century with the Wesleyan religious revival, and was reinforced a generation later by Evangelicalism. Wesleyanism was remarkable in several respects. From the beginning, it was as much a movement for moral as for religious reform—as much an ethic as a creed. The ethic had two aspects: the individualistic Puritan ethic of work, thrift, temperance, self-reliance, and self-discipline; and a social ethic of good works and charity. The Wesleyans established societies for the care of abandoned children, destitute governesses, shipwrecked sailors, and penitent prostitutes. They founded schools, hospitals, and orphanages. They led the agitations for prison reform, child labor laws, factory and sanitary regulations, and the abolition of the slave trade. And they did all of this as a religious obligation.

The other remarkable aspect of this religious-cum-moral revival was the fact that it affected all classes of England. After Wesley’s death in 1791, the movement split, with the Methodists leaving the Church of England to form their own dissenting sects, and the Evangelicals remaining within the Church. The Methodists appealed primarily to the working and lower middle classes, the Evangelicals to the middle and upper classes. But whatever their social and theological differences, they shared a common ethic that transcended class lines. (And political lines as well; it was as much the ethic of Chartists and socialists as of liberals and conservatives.)

In the course of the nineteenth century, the religious impulse became attenuated somewhat, especially among the educated. But the moral fervor remained; indeed it intensified, as if to compensate for the loss of religious zeal. The secular ethic expressed itself in George Eliot’s famous dictum: God is “inconceivable,” immortality “unbelievable,” but duty nonetheless “peremptory and absolute.”

It was this ethic—born of religion, and retaining, even in its secularized form, all the authority and passion of religion—that preserved the moral character of England in a period of intense economic and social change. And not only the moral character of the people but also the social habits and institutions that comprise what we now call “civil society”: the family, neighborhoods, churches, self-help groups, local authorities, and a myriad of voluntary societies and philanthropies.

Elie Halévy, the great French historian of Victorian England, wrote seven volumes to account for “the miracle of modern England”—the fact that England was spared the bloody political revolutions that convulsed the continent. Underlying England’s political miracle, however, was something deeper: the miracle of social and moral regeneration.

Morality is not yet a problem,” wrote Nietzsche in 1888. But it would become a problem, he predicted, when the people discovered that without religion there is no morality. The “English flatheads” (his sobriquet for liberals like George Eliot and John Stuart Mill) thought it possible to get rid of the Christian God while retaining Christian morality. They did not realize that “when one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.”

A century later, morality definitely is a problem, perhaps the most serious problem of modernity. And foremost among the reasons for this is Nietzsche’s own explanation: the death of God and morality. In retrospect, one might say that Victorian England was living off the moral capital of religion, and that post-Victorian England, well into the twentieth century, was living off the capital of a secularized morality. Perhaps what we are now witnessing is the moral bankruptcy that comes with the depletion of both the religious and the quasi-religious capital.

This raises a critical question: Is there any prospect of remoralizing a society once it has fallen into moral decadence?

And, if there is any, how far does the society have to fall first?

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THE GENERAL PLAYS CATCH UP:

Pakistan ex-PM heads to U.S. for talks (Anwar Iqbal, 2/25/05, UPI)

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is coming to the United States next week amid reports of new political arrangements in Pakistan.

Sources at her Pakistan People's Party told United Press International Bhutto hopes to meet senior U.S. officials in Washington on the eventual restoration of democracy to her country. [...]

Earlier this month, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher also urged Musharraf to quit the army but said Washington regarded democracy in Pakistan as "more than the (dispute over Musharraf's) uniform" and that it wanted the next elections, scheduled for 2007, to be held in accordance with "international standards" and with "full participation" of all political parties.

On Thursday, Musharraf told reporters in Pakistan his government was negotiating with Bhutto on the future political set-up in the country.

"We need to discourage extremist elements by working with moderate political parties, including (Bhutto's) PPP, especially to have some agreement beyond 2007," he said.

Don't want to be the last Islamic nation to liberalize...

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TRADING THE HEIGHTS FOR HEZBOLLAH

Secret Syrian, Israeli peace talks in Jordan, 'Post' learns (ORLY HALPERN, Feb. 28, 2005, THE JERUSALEM POST)

Syrian, Jordanian and Israeli Foreign Ministry officials held secret peace talks in Jordan last week, an official Jordanian source told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. According to the source, technical committees from Syria and Israel were hosted at the Movenpick Hotel on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea.

Another meeting is planned, but there is no date set for it yet, said the source, who added that the purpose of the meeting was to discuss possibilities for more substantive peace contacts. The Israeli Foreign Ministry had no comment on the meeting. "This is the first time I have heard of this," said Mark Regev, the ministry's spokesman.

Syrian President Bashar Assad last November invited Israel to enter peace negotiations without preconditions.

Better hurry if they're going to get a deal before the regime falls.

MORE:
Syria May Be Bowing to Pressure (SALAH NASRAWI, 2/27/05, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Syria, long blamed for Middle East mayhem, seems to be bowing to U.S.-led international pressure to shed its image as a sponsor of regional instability.

Iraqi authorities say Syria - accused among other things of aiding anti-Israeli extremists and fanning the insurgency in Iraq - handed over Saddam Hussein's feared half brother, Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan. The decision came as an apparent goodwill gesture to ease tensions with the United States, which has demanded Damascus stop aiding Mideast militants and withdraw its 15,000 soldiers from neighboring Lebanon.

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LOW HANGING FRUIT:

Bush Weighs Offers To Iran: U.S. Might Join Effort to Halt Nuclear Program (Robin Wright, February 28, 2005, Washington Post)

The Bush administration is close to a decision to join Europe in offering incentives to Iran -- possibly including eventual membership in the World Trade Organization -- in exchange for Tehran's formal agreement to surrender any plans to develop a nuclear weapon, according to senior U.S. officials.

The day after returning from Europe, President Bush met Friday afternoon with the principal members of his foreign policy team to discuss requests made by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac in particular. More discussions are expected this week, but the White House wants to move quickly to finalize a list of incentives to offer Tehran as part of European talks with Iran, officials said.

The new willingness to engage, even if indirectly, marks a significant change from a position that Iran deserved no rewards for actions it is legally bound to take under terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But Bush's talks last week convinced him that a united front -- in offering carrots now and a stick later if Iran does not comply -- would be more effective, U.S. and European officials say.

"The reason we're comfortable considering this tactically is because strategically, when the president was in Europe, he found them solid on the big issue: that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. Having found them firm on the strategic issue, he's more willing to consider the tactical aspects with the Europeans -- including how do we work with them and what can the Europeans offer that we would be part of it," said a senior State Department official speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive diplomacy.

We may still have to take out the nuclear facilities militarily, but time is on our side, not the mullahs', in Iran. In fact, the President should very publicly try to travel there and pull a Reagan, meeting with dissidents and giving an Iranian version of the Moscow State University Speech:

We are seeing the power of economic freedom spreading around the world — places such as the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan have vaulted into the technological era, barely pausing in the industrial age along the way. Low-tax agricultural policies in the sub-continent mean that in some years India is now a net exporter of food. Perhaps most exciting are the winds of change that are blowing over the People's republic of China, where one-quarter of the world's population is now getting its first taste of economic freedom.

At the same time, the growth of democracy has become one of the most powerful political movements of our age. In Latin America in the 1970's, only a third of the population lived under democratic government. Today over 90 percent does. In the Philippines, in the Republic of Korea, free, contested, democratic elections are the order of the day. Throughout the world, free markets are the model for growth. Democracy is the standard by which governments are measured.

We Americans make no secret of our belief in freedom. In fact, it's something of a national pastime. Every four years the American people choose a new president, and 1988 is one of those years. At one point there were 13 major candidates running in the two major parties, not to mention all the others, including the Socialist and Libertarian candidates — all trying to get my job.

About 1,000 local television stations, 8,500 radio stations, and 1,700 daily newspapers, each one an independent, private enterprise, fiercely independent of the government, report on the candidates, grill them in interviews, and bring them together for debates. In the end, the people vote — they decide who will be the next president.

But freedom doesn't begin or end with elections. Go to any American town, to take just an example, and you'll see dozens of synagogues and mosques — and you'll see families of every conceivable nationality, worshipping together.

Go into any schoolroom, and there you will see children being taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights — among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that no government can justly deny — the guarantees in their Constitution for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.

Go into any courtroom and there will preside an independent judge, beholden to no government power. There every defendant has the right to a trial by a jury of his peers, usually 12 men and women — common citizens, they are the ones, the only ones, who weigh the evidence and decide on guilt or innocence. In that court, the accused is innocent until proven guilty, and the word of a policeman, or any official, has no greater legal standing than the word of the accused.

Go to any university campus, and there you'll find an open, sometimes heated discussion of the problems in American society and what can be done to correct them. Turn on the television, and you'll see the legislature conducting the business of government right there before the camera, debating and voting on the legislation that will become the law of the land. March in any demonstrations, and there are many of them — the people's right of assembly is guaranteed in the Constitution and protected by the police.

But freedom is more even than this: Freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to stick - to dream - to follow your dream, or stick to your conscience, even if you're the only one in a sea of doubters.

Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority of government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.

America is a nation made up of hundreds of nationalities. Our ties to you are more than ones of good feeling; they're ties of kinship. In America, you'll find Russians, Armenians, Ukrainians, peoples from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They come from every part of this vast continent, from every continent, to live in harmony, seeking a place where each cultural heritage is respected, each is valued for its diverse strengths and beauties and the richness it brings to our lives.

Recently, a few individuals and families have been allowed to visit relatives in the West. We can only hope that it won't be long before all are allowed to do so, and Ukrainian-Americans, Baltic-Americans, Armenian-Americans, can freely visit their homelands, just as this Irish-American visits his.

Freedom, it has been said, makes people selfish and materialistic, but Americans are one of the most religious peoples on Earth. Because they know that liberty, just as life itself, is not earned, but a gift from God, they seek to share that gift with the world. "Reason and experience," said George Washington in his farewell address, "both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. And it is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government."

Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive: A system of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith.

I have often said, nations do not distrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. If this globe is to live in peace and prosper, if it is to embrace all the possibilities of the technological revolution, then nations must renounce, once and for all, the right to an expansionist foreign policy. Peace between nations must be an enduring goal — not a tactical stage in a continuing conflict.

I've been told that there's a popular song in your country — perhaps you know it — whose evocative refrain asks the question, "Do the Russians want a war?" In answer it says, "Go ask that silence lingering in the air, above the birch and poplar there; beneath those trees the soldiers lie. Go ask my mother, ask my wife; then you will have to ask no more, 'Do the Russians want a war?'"

But what of your one-time allies? What of those who embraced you on the Elbe? What if we were to ask the watery graves of the Pacific, or the European battlefields where America's fallen were buried far from home? What if we were to ask their mothers, sisters, and sons, do Americans want war? Ask us, too, and you'll find the same answer, the same longing in every heart. People do not make wars, governments do — and no mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology. A people free to choose will always choose peace.

Americans seek always to make friends of old antagonists. After a colonial revolution with Britain we have cemented for all ages the ties of kinship between our nations. After a terrible civil war between North and South, we healed our wounds and found true unity as a nation. We fought two world wars in my lifetime against Germany and one with Japan, but now the Federal Republic of Germany and Japan are two of our closest allies and friends.

Some people point to the trade disputes between us as a sign of strain, but they're the frictions of all families, and the family of free nations is a big and vital and sometimes boisterous one. I can tell you that nothing would please my heart more than in my lifetime to see American and Soviet diplomats grappling with the problem of trade disputes between America and a growing, exuberant, exporting Soviet Union that had opened up to economic freedom and growth.

Is this just a dream? Perhaps. But it is a dream that is our responsibility to have come true.

Your generation is living in one of the most exciting, hopeful times in Soviet history. It is a time when the first breath of freedom stirs the air and the heart beats to the accelerated rhythm of hope, when the accumulated spiritual energies of a long silence yearn to break free.

We do not know what the conclusion of this journey will be, but we're hopeful that the promise of reform will be fulfilled. In this Moscow spring, this May 1988, we may be allowed that hope — that freedom, like the fresh green sapling planted over Tolstoy's grave, will blossom forth at least in the rich fertile soil of your people and culture. We may be allowed to hope that the marvelous sound of a new openness will keep rising through, ringing through, leading to a new world of reconciliation, friendship, and peace.

Thank you all very much and da blagoslovit vas gospod! God bless you.

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THOSE WHO NEVER LEARNED TO SIGH:

Liberalism: Can it survive? (John Leo, 3/07/05, US News)

Modern liberalism, says Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, has emptied the national narrative of its civic resources, putting religion outside the public square and creating a value-neutral "procedural republic." One of the old heroes of liberalism, John Dewey, said in 1897 that the practical problem of modern society is the maintenance of the spiritual values of civilization. Not much room in liberal thought for that now, or for what another liberal icon, Walter Lippmann, called the "public philosophy." The failure to perceive the importance of community has seriously wounded liberalism and undermined its core principles. So has the strong tendency to convert moral and social questions into issues of individual rights, usually constructed and then massaged by judges to place them beyond the reach of majorities and the normal democratic process.

Liberals have been slow to grasp the mainstream reaction to the no-values culture, chalking it up to Karl Rove, sinister fundamentalists, racism, or the stupidity of the American voter. Since November 2, the withering contempt of liberals for ordinary Americans has been astonishing. Voting for Bush gave "quite average Americans a chance to feel superior," said Andrew Hacker, a prominent liberal professor at Queens College. We are seeing the bitterness of elites who wish to lead, confronted by multitudes who do not wish to follow. Liberals might one day conclude that while most Americans value autonomy, they do not want a procedural republic in which patriotism, religion, socialization, and traditional values are politically declared out of bounds. Many Americans notice that liberalism nowadays lacks a vocabulary of right and wrong, declines to discuss virtue except in snickering terms, and seems increasingly hostile to prevailing moral sentiments.

For a stark vision of what cultural liberalism has come to, consider the breakdown of the universities, the fortresses of the 1960s cultural liberals and their progeny. Students are taught that objective judgments are impossible. All knowledge is compromised by issues of power and bias. Therefore, there is no way to come to judgment about anything, since judgment itself rests on quicksand. This principle, however, is suspended when the United States and western culture are discussed, because the West is essentially evil and guilty of endless crimes. Better to declare a vague transnational identity and admiration for the United Nations.

Postmodernism is, of course, just a rehash of the pre-modern demolition of Reason. In its pre-modern form the critique represented little challenge to people of faith -- who just nodded their heads and said, okay faith remains superior to reason after all, But the post-modern version was fatal to those who had ignored the warnings and bought into modern Rationalism whole hog, leaving them no faith to fall back on. In modern liberalism we see people who stand for nothing because there is no solid ground for them to stand on. We are fortunate in Amerivca that our Founding, unlike the French Revolution, represented a rejection of Rationalism

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WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?

Behind the Suit: Politics: He's a doctor, scholar and perhaps Iraq's next leader (Babak Dehghanpisheh, 3/07/05, Newsweek)

Ibrahim Jafari prefers to wear suits. But he could, by Shiite tradition, don the robes and turban of a cleric. His family traces its lineage directly to the Prophet Muhammad. While in exile in London, Jafari, a doctor by training, placed himself under the tutelage of a cleric. His studies earned him the distinguished rank of mujtahid, a person who can make religious rulings. "People know him as a politician," says Adnan Ali al-Kadhimi, one of Jafari's aides. "They don't know the depth of his knowledge about the ideology of Islam." That knowledge—and religious commitment—has some Iraqis worried.

After extensive wrangling, the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite-dominated list with a majority of seats in the National Assembly, nominated Jafari as its candidate for prime minister last week. A political deadlock ended after Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite and former Pentagon favorite, dropped out of the race. The mild-mannered Jafari, 58, didn't seem like an obvious choice. Though he served as a vice president in the interim government, his time in office was unremarkable. Now some secular-minded Iraqis are scrutinizing his background. If Jafari gets Iraq's top job, is he going to be moderate or push a conservative religious agenda? "The [alliance] list is obviously influenced by the clerics," says Ghassan Atiyya, director of the Iraqi Foundation for Development and Democracy. "It's hard to tell where Jafari stands. He's good in his pronouncements and his rhetoric, but you can't get ahold of something concrete in what he's saying."

On a few key issues, Jafari has been saying the right things. He has promised to reach out to Sunnis and include them in the political process. He has vowed to crack down on insurgents. And he has won tacit American support by refusing to set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces. The current prime minister, Ayad Allawi, played up his tough-guy image to get into office. Jafari has used his knack for persuasive dialogue and his affable manner to win over fellow politicians. This approach has worked with ordinary Iraqis, too: a handful of opinion polls last year ranked Jafari as one of the most trusted public figures in the country.

Sistani endorses Jaafari's nomination (Lebanon Daily Star, February 26, 2005)

[I]raq's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, endorsed Ibrahim al-Jaafari's nomination for prime minister. [...]

Iranian-born Sistani's endorsement came after members of the clergy-backed alliance openly questioned its decision Tuesday to nominate 58-year-old Jaafari, who heads the conservative Islamic Dawa Party, as its candidate for prime minister following Jan. 30 elections. "Ayatollah Sistani blessed the decision taken by the alliance about the prime minister post. He respects and supports what the alliance have decided," Jaafari told reporters after meeting with Sistani in the southern Shiite holy city of Najaf.

He said that Iraq's Sunni Arab minority should be brought into the political process and help draft the country's first Constitution. Bringing the Sunni into the political process could help deflate the insurgency.

Sunni Arabs, who make up about 20 percent of the population, dominated Saddam Hussein's Baath party and largely boycotted the elections. They are believed to make up the core of the insurgency.

"Ayatollah Sistani also advised to take into consideration the uniqueness of the Iraqi issue making it impossible not to integrate other sects and to integrate the Sunni people who were not able to participate in the elections," Jaafari quoted Sistani as saying.

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TO THE VECTOR BELONG THE SPOILS:

Suddenly, Critics Pile On Putin: Getting heat from President Bush is one thing, but the swipes from a former Prime Minister and others could be far more damaging (Jason Bush, 2/2505, Business Week)

As he went into Thursday's summit with U.S. President George Bush, Vladimir Putin was no doubt braced for criticism of his increasingly authoritarian ways. Yet the very same day that the Russian President was getting an earful from Bush in Slovakia, another senior politician -- former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov -- was digging the knife into his former boss at home, in what could be the start of powerful new political opposition.

Kasyanov, who headed the Russian government between 2000 and 2004, was sacked in March and replaced with Mikhail Fradkov, a little-known bureaucrat no doubt picked because of his complete subservience to Putin. Kasyanov's blistering attack on Putin's policies finally ended months of silence. At a specially convened press conference in Moscow, Kasyanov pulled no punches, slamming everything from Putin's abolition of regional elections to the persecution of the Yukos oil company, the mishandling of reforms, and Russia's social benefits system.

"EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE." Although Kasyanov refrained from blaming Putin personally, the message was crystal clear. "The general conclusion is that the country is going in the wrong direction. The vector has changed. This vector is wrong and negatively influences the social and economic development of the country," he said.

To resist these negative tendencies, Kasyanov added that democratic forces in Russia should unite in a single party. Perhaps Kasyanov himself was up for the job of leading them? He declined to give a definite answer. But the former Premier did hint at presidential ambitions. "Everything is possible," he said. "What's important is that whoever is President in 2008 will lead Russia in a democratic direction."

Strong words indeed from the man who was the head of the Russian government until just a few months ago. It's probably the most stinging public attack on Putin ever made by a former high-ranking official and yet more evidence that, as Putin's political mistakes add up, his critics are getting bolder.

Kasyanov's comments come just a few weeks after almost identical criticisms were voiced by Andrei Illarionov, presidential economic adviser and another political insider who was demoted after speaking out against Putin. "More and more people [in the Russian elite] are willing to criticize Putin both in public and in private. This is all happening very quickly," says Anders Aslund, director of the Russian & Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., who believes Putin's authority is crumbling fast.

Reform or get out of the way.

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TAKEN:

The Road (Dana Gioia, January 2005, Crisis)

He sometimes felt that he had missed his life
By being far too busy looking for it.
Searching the distance, he often turned to find
That he had passed some milestone unaware,
And someone else was walking next to him,
First friends, then lovers, now children and a wife.
They were good company—generous, kind,
But equally bewildered to be there.

He noticed then that no one chose the way—
All seemed to drift by some collective will.
The path grew easier with each passing day,
Since it was worn and mostly sloped downhill.
The road ahead seemed hazy in the gloom.
Where was it he had meant to go, and with whom?

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SPREADS? WHERE?:

'Like a Virus That Spreads': The Saudi foreign minister on women, nukes and the U.S.
Al-Faisal: 'Women are more sensible voters than men' (Lally Weymouth, 3/07/05, Newsweek)

WEYMOUTH: Should Saudi women be allowed to vote in the next municipal elections?

PRINCE SAUD: Even the commissioner of elections has said that he is going to propose that they vote. So I am assuming that they will vote in the next election, and that is going to be good for the election, because I think women are more sensible voters than men.

Do you agree that women should take a more active part in your society?

I agree wholeheartedly. Things must happen in a gradual way. But I am proud that the Foreign Ministry is doing its part. For the first time, we are going to have women in the Foreign Ministry this year.

How will the recent assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri affect the region?

In the Arab world, people are sick and tired of tragedies like this. And they are expressing their ire and anger.

Is the government of Saudi Arabia winning the battle against Al Qaeda in the kingdom?

I think we are winning the battle for the safety of our people. But the battle is not in Saudi Arabia alone. It is like a virus which spreads, and unless it is faced globally, it will continue to threaten us.

It's more accurate to view democracy as the virus and Islamicism as a failed vaccine.

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A NATION OF SAVERS:

IRA market still growing after 30 years (MEG RICHARDS, February 27, 2005, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

It's been 30 years since Americans opened their first Individual Retirement Accounts, and now the tax-deferred program designed to help workers save and preserve funds for the future has grown into a $3 trillion industry.

The IRA was the product of legislation enacted in 1974 to help fill a gap for workers who did not have access to employer-sponsored retirement plans, and to give people who change jobs a way to roll over their accumulated savings. Today, one of every four retirement dollars is held in an IRA, according to the Investment Company Institute, the trade group for the mutual fund industry. More than 45 million U.S. households-- 40 percent-- own IRAs, and that number is expected to rise as workers take greater responsibility for their retirements amid rising doubts about the future of Social Security.

"If you invest often and early in life, time works on your side, and you can really build up a substantial amount toward your retirement security," said Brian Reid, chief economist with the ICI.

Try explaining that to the Democrats.

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PROBLEM?:

Bush is what he is, and that's the problem (Leonard Pitts Jr., February 27, 2005, Seattle Times)

We are gathered here to ponder Bush Unplugged.

Meaning, this week's story of how Texas Gov. George W. Bush was secretly recorded on tape by a "friend." [...]

Having read that report several times, I find myself wondering: What, if anything, is the story here?

Yes, Bush seems to implicitly acknowledge on the tape that he once used marijuana, but it's hard to regard that as above-the-fold news, given that his age (58) puts him smack in the middle of a generation for whom drug use was once ubiquitous. Not to trivialize the thing, but frankly, it would be bigger news if Bush had not tried pot.

The Times also quotes Bush on the tape praising John Ashcroft, disparaging Sen. John McCain, ruminating over the advantages and drawbacks of allying too closely with the Christian right, and opposing gay marriage. Again, hardly anything for which you'd want to pause the presses.

Which is why I tend to believe the headline here can be found in the spinach connoisseur's statement that heads this column. And in the part of The Times report that says, "The private Mr. Bush sounds remarkably similar in many ways to the public President Bush."

Bush partisans would look at the absence of dissonance between private Bush and public Bush and say it proves his lack of artifice. As Bush himself is fond of saying, you may not agree with him, but you'll always know where he stands.

Bush critics would say that what is proved here is the president's lack of intellectual agility and resistance to change.

It occurs to me that those views are not mutually exclusive.

Partisans would even say what he has critics saying.

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DETERMINATION PRECEDES TERMINATION:

Saddam's half brother captured in Iraq (SAMEER N. YACOUB, February 27, 2005, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Iraqi security forces captured Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, Saddam Hussein's half brother and former adviser who was suspected of financing insurgents after U.S. troops ousted the former dictator, the government said Sunday.

In a statement, the Prime Minister's office said the arrest "shows the determination of the Iraqi government to chase and detain all criminals who carried out massacres and whose hands are stained with the blood of the Iraqi people, then bring them to justice to face the right punishment."

Al-Hassan is No. 36 on the list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis released by U.S. authorities after troops invaded Iraq in March 2003, and one of only 12 remaining at large. He is also suspected of financing insurgents in the post-Saddam era, and Washington had put a $1 million bounty on his head.

The government statement said al-Hassan had "killed and tortured Iraqi people." It also said he had "participated effectively in planning, supervising, and carrying out many terrorist acts in Iraq."

There are reports, though of uncertain reliability, that Mr. Allawi thinks they're close to getting Zarqawi and that catching him would be such a coup that it could secure him the P.M. post in the next government.

MORE:
Iraq Says Zarqawi Aide Captured (Monte Morin, February 25, 2005, LA Times)

The Iraqi government claimed today that its soldiers had captured a key aide to Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of an insurgent network suspected of killing more than 500 people in a wave of car bombings, assassinations and beheadings.

The capture is the latest in a string of raids conducted in Baghdad, Mosul and western Iraq said to net top Zarqawi lieutenants and soldiers. Iraqi and U.S. military authorities claim to have captured or killed more than half a dozen such operatives since January, including the network's top bomb maker and it's website designer.

In a statement today, the government said Iraqi forces had captured Talib Mikhlif Arsan Walman al-Dulaymi, a lieutenant responsible for "arranging safehouses and transportation as well as passing packages and funds to Zarqawi."

The suspected aide, who also goes by the name Abu Qutaybah, was seized in a Feb. 20 raid in Anah, a town about 160 miles northwest of Baghdad, in the western province of Anbar, the government said. The province is dominated by Sunni Muslims, who have led the ongoing insurgency since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

"Abu Qutaybah was responsible for determining who, when and how terrorist network leaders would meet with Zarqawi," the government said. "His extensive contacts and operational ability throughout western Iraq made him a critical figure in the Zarqawi network."

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NEXT ON THE HIT LIST:

Bush's Next Target: Malpractice Lawyers (STEVE LOHR, 2/27/05, NY Times)

This month, the administration won the first round in its fight to curb litigation, as Congress passed legislation to sharply restrict class-action lawsuits against companies. Next up is medical malpractice. In his re-election campaign, Mr. Bush repeatedly decried "junk lawsuits" as the bane of the nation's doctors. The issue was deftly framed, and the subtext was clear: greedy lawyers were attacking the Marcus Welbys of America, good doctors doing their best.

In a speech last month in Illinois, Mr. Bush again called for strict limits on medical malpractice suits, including "a hard cap of $250,000" on what patients could recover for non-economic damages like physical and emotional pain and suffering. Returning to his election-year themes, Mr. Bush said doctors "should be focused on fighting illnesses, not fighting lawsuits."

"We need to fix a broken medical liability system," he said, and he called on Congress to act this year. This month, a medical litigation overhaul bill, mirroring the administration's proposals, was introduced in the Senate by two Republican senators, John Ensign of Nevada and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire.

THE medical liability system, health care analysts agree, is deeply flawed. But they also generally agree that the solution offered by the administration and the Republican Congress - putting a ceiling on damages - addresses only one aspect of the problem.

Medical liability policy, said Dr. William M. Sage, a physician and a law professor at Columbia University, should seek three goals: restraining overall costs, compensating the victims of medical mistakes and providing incentives for doctors and hospitals to reduce medical errors.

"There is a strong consensus among people who have really studied the issue that caps on damages would tend to keep costs down and make liability insurance more affordable for doctors," Dr. Sage said. "And there is a universal consensus that caps would do absolutely nothing to reduce medical errors or to compensate injured patients. If anything, caps on damages would make those problems worse."

Medical malpractice laws vary state by state. But California offers a glimpse of a future preferred by the administration and many Republicans in Congress. In 1975, California passed the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act, which included a cap of $250,000 for damages like pain and suffering in malpractice cases. It did not limit economic damages for things like the cost of continuing care for a person disabled or wages lost because of medical errors. The law also curbed attorneys' fees on a sliding scale that prohibited them from collecting more than 15 percent on award amounts over $600,000, with higher percentages for the amounts below that sum. (In states without limits on fees, contingency payments to malpractice lawyers are typically about one-third of awards.)

Research varies on the likely impact of curbs on awards and fees, but a RAND Corporation study last year concluded that the California law had reduced the net recoveries for plaintiffs by 15 percent and had cut attorneys' fees by far more, an estimated 60 percent. Defendant liabilities, it calculated, were trimmed 30 percent because of the law.

One of the things we'll need as we transition to HSAs, which make patients into consumers again, is better reporting and dissemination of information about medical errors and who's making them, so that people can make informed choices about where to seek care. Making such a reporting system an element of this bill seems sensible.

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IF THE CIA THINKS THEY'LL LAST 15 THEY'RE TOAST:

U.S. can sit back and wat